REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Leahy's Rout
Ashcroft wins the "civil liberties" debate.
The stampede you heard out of Washington yesterday was the sound of Senate Democrats and other liberals abandoning their two-week attack on military tribunals and Attorney General John Ashcroft. There may be some mopping up left, but this debate is over. It's one more sign that the obligation to community is reasserting itself as a core value in American politics.
The scene was Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy's long-awaited "oversight" of Mr. Ashcroft. This was supposed to be the culmination of what have been many days of elite liberal assaults on Mr. Ashcroft for supposedly imposing a new fascist night in America. Newspapers and TV networks pretended there was great "bipartisan" angst about all this, especially military tribunals, though the only conservative critics were libertarians they usually ignore.
But a surprising and hopeful thing has happened in the meantime: The American public has resisted the clamor. Poll after poll shows that, by more than two to one, Americans support the use of military commissions to try noncitizen terrorists. This support is no thanks to the Bush Administration, which was initially caught off guard by the criticism, or to Republicans in Congress, who until yesterday offered little public defense.
We attribute it instead to the public's common-sense understanding that wars require a change in rules. For years, rights-talk has been the trump card of American politics. But faced with the genuine terror threat that surfaced on September 11, the political left's rights-above-all rhetoric sounds naive at best, dangerous at worst. Thanks to the public's good sense, American political discourse has a chance to return to a better balance between rights and security, between the legal rights of the individual and the obligations to protect the broader American community.
This all helps explain yesterday's liberal Senate rout. Mr. Ashcroft started out on offense and never let up. We can't recall so complete a political rout since Ollie North ran circles around the Iran-Contra committee.
The most dramatic moment came when Mr. Ashcroft, in his opening remarks, held up a copy of the al Qaeda training manual. It's part of the evidence that prosecutors had to make public in an earlier terror trial. And it describes how terrorists have been instructed to use America's civil-rights protections to their own destructive advantage. (Excerpts are on the Justice Department Web site.)
Terrorists are "directed to take advantage of any contact with the outside world," Mr. Ashcroft said, "to 'communicate with brothers outside prison and exchange information that may be helpful to them in their work.'" No wonder Mr. Ashcroft has wanted the power to listen to the conversations of a mere 16 federal inmates and their attorneys, so investigators know what deadly messages might be passed along.
Mr. Ashcroft also broke with this Administration's usual pattern and carried his argument to his critics. He rightly noted that the over-the-top, hysterical charges of many ("shredding the Constitution") "only aids terrorists--for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America's enemies, and pause to America's friends."
Perhaps because they can also read polls, Democrats came on more softly than expected. Mr. Leahy mostly sparred about historical precedents for tribunals. This gave Republican Orrin Hatch, who finally found his voice on this subject, a chance to report that President Bush has actually taken more civil-rights care with his tribunal order than FDR did in World War II.
Roosevelt secretly told the War Department to start up tribunals, while Mr. Bush has done it publicly through an order as commander in chief. FDR also let the armed forces decide who would be tried by tribunal, while the Bush order says only the President will decide.
As these and other details have emerged about tribunals, grown-up Democrats have begun to speak out in favor. Senator Joe Lieberman now supports them and even New York's Chuck Schumer, usually a hyper-partisan, has offered a qualified endorsement. Zell Miller, the Georgia Democrat, has been the sharpest critic of his own colleagues, noting that, "These nit-pickers need to find another nit to pick. They need to stop protecting the rights of terrorists. This is about national security. This is about life and death."
A genuine debate over civil liberties is a healthy sign of America's democratic vitality. And vigilance is always called for in the face of expanding government power. But the assault on Mr. Ashcroft has been so arch, and so little based on fact, that it has obscured more truth than it's exposed. The Bush-Ashcroft measures are well within America's Constitutional tradition during time of war. Once again the public has figured this out before most of the politicians.
