|
Comment on this article |
Email this Article
|
|
News :: Miscellaneous |
|
The real faces of terror: Ashcroft, the FBI and the U.S. |
Current rating: 0 |
by Bryan G. Pfeifer
Email: bgp (nospam) uwm.edu (unverified!)
Phone: (414) 270-0654 |
18 Apr 2002
|
|
John Ashcroft came to Milwaukee April 10. Why, what are the implications and who's the real terrorists? Commentary |
The real faces of terror: Ashcroft, the FBI and the U.S.
By Bryan G. Pfeifer
“Your magazine also helps set the record straight. You’ve got a heritage of doing that, of defending Southern patriots like [Robert E.] Lee, [Stonewall] Jackson and [Jefferson] Davis. Traditionalists must do more. I've got to do more. We’ve all got to stand up and speak in this respect, or else we'll be taught that these people were giving their lives, subscribing their sacred fortunes and their honor to some perverted agenda.”
-- John Ashcroft promoting the Confederacy in a 1998 interview with Southern Partisan, a South Carolina quarterly
When John Ashcroft came to Milwaukee April 10 he said the Midwest and the United States wasn’t safe from terror. He was right but not for the reasons he gave.
The U.S. Attorney General came to town to make up a previous appearance at Doerfler Elementary School originally scheduled for Sept. 11. George W. Bush Jr. has asked all of his cabinet secretaries to undertake school appearances somewhere in the U.S. ostensibly to encourage children to read. Ashcroft also stopped at the Federal Courthouse in Milwaukee.
Ashcroft used the Doerfler visit to unveil the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force for Wisconsin that is now housed at various FBI offices throughout the state.
Led by the FBI, the task force includes full-time investigators from a dozen federal, state and local agencies. The participating agencies which include the Wisconsin Department of Justice and local police departments, will pay the salaries of investigators. The FBI will pay for equipment, overtime, training and vehicles.
Every FBI field office in the U.S. has a task force in place or is in the planning stages since Sept. 11.
Although the costs for this haven’t been made public, it’s likely to be in the millions (or billions) of taxpayer dollars shifted from social programs despite any concrete evidence that “terrorism” exists in the Midwest. All we have is Ashcroft’s and the FBI’s word.
If “history is best qualified to reward our research” as Malcolm X once said, those of us concerned about civil liberties, constitutional and human rights should be gravely concerned with these developments, especially with the man leading them.
History through the looking glass
When Ashcroft was being courted for Attorney General by Bush Jr., some of the biggest protests against a proposed cabinet member in U.S. history took place. Despite calling Ashcroft “a man of great integrity, a man of great judgment and a man who knows the law,” Bush had to work triple time with his public relations staff to overcome a rare display of unity between liberal, moderate and radical forces that adamantly opposed the homophobic, racist and sexist arch-conservative.
Despite his well-known decades-long far-right record, the corporate media, for the most part, complied with the White House ignoring massive street protests and other strategies and tactics designed to block Ashcroft’s nomination in Congress. Even Sen. Russell Feingold (D-WI) supported his nomination. Little broke through the corporate media regarding the real Ashcroft so the public was left to wonder in dismay why so many opposed him. Since Sept. 11 any critical coverage on the attorney general has all but disappeared.
Who, really, is this man?
Despite Ashcroft’s glowing profile on the U.S. Dept. of Justice website, it doesn’t mention he is pro-death penalty, anti-abortion under any circumstances including rape, anti lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender rights, opposed to school desegregation in his home state of Missouri and prevented Mr. Ronnie White, an African American with more than enough qualifications, from a federal judgeship. In 1999 he accepted an honorary degree from South Carolina’s Bob Jones University, which until last year, banned interracial dating. Students still have to have parental permission.
Ashcroft is also author of the landmark Charitable Choice provision of the 1996 welfare reform law, which made it legal for charities, churches and other faith-based organizations to deliver publicly funded services under contracts and vouchers with the states. The provision allows government-funded religious groups to refuse to hire people of different faiths and to promote their own religious beliefs to the people they are paid to serve.
According to a British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) profile, the former senator famously once boasted of his conservatism, saying there are two things you find in the middle of the road: “a moderate and a dead skunk,” adding he did not want to be either. He is supported by the most far-right individuals, organizations and think tanks including Sen. Orin Hatch (R-Utah), the Christian Coalition and the Bradley and Heritage Foundations.
Ashcroft was born in Chicago, Illinois, on May 9, 1942. He was raised in Springfield, Missouri, where he attended public schools until enrolling at Yale University, where he graduated with honors in 1964. He received his J.D. from the University of Chicago in 1967. He began his career of public service in 1973 as Missouri Auditor and was later elected to two terms as the state’s Attorney General.
Ashcroft was elected Governor of Missouri in 1984 and held that post until 1993. In 1991, the non-partisan National Governors Association elected him Chairman.
He was elected to the Senate in 1994. During his time in the Senate, Ashcroft was a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and Chairman of the Constitution Subcommittee.
Prior to entering public service, Ashcroft taught business law at Southwest Missouri State University in Springfield. He authored the book Lessons from a Father to His Son, a tribute to his father, and co-authored multiple editions of two college law textbooks with his wife, Janet.
Ashcroft took up a seat in the Senate in 1995, and briefly considered running for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000, with backing from religious conservatives, states the BBC profile. He ran for Senate re-election, but lost his seat to a dead man: Mel Carnahan, whose widow Jean stepped in as the Democrat candidate when her husband died in a plane crash after the ballot papers had already been printed.
Because of this, the road was clear for him to become Bush’s nomination for attorney-general.
Ashcroft style terrorism hits Midwest, U.S.
Ashcroft, Bush Jr. and the right-wing elements in the White House and Pentagon had already begun dismantling social programs, building up the military-industrial complex and pushing other draconian plans before Sept. 11. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon gave these forces the nationalist impetus and patriotism cover they needed to push forward with measures they had before only dreamed of both domestically and internationally.
Drunk on his own perceived power, Ashcroft has happily led the domestic charge of dismantling decades of hard-fought progressive rights won in struggle under the guise of “fighting terrorism.”
In a few short months, the results have been like a mass of Israeli tanks gone mad in a Palestinian refugee camp.
A class action lawsuit filed in federal court April 17 by the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), charges that over 1,200 Middle Eastern men have been subjected to unreasonable and excessively harsh conditions while incarcerated in federal, state and local jails and prisons according to a recent Associated Press report.
The suit asks a judge to issue an order protecting the detainees’ due process rights and to appoint a monitor to oversee their treatment. It was the first charging abuse to be filed on behalf of the detainees. Some are still behind bars. Several lawsuits have been filed on behalf of detainees elsewhere, including some calling for a ban on secret Immigration and Naturalization Service hearings.
“There's no explanation for why they're being held,” center attorney Barbara Olshansky said.
In some cases, detainees were “placed in tiny, windowless cells for over 23 hours a day,” the suit alleges. “Many class members have suffered physical and verbal abuse by their guards. Some were badly beaten.”
Asif-ur-Rehman Saffi, a native of Pakistan, claims guards subjected him to strip searches including cavity probes and “severe beatings to the point of unconsciousness,” the suit said.
Dozens of similar lawsuits are in the process of being filed.
Various provisions contained in the USA Patriot Act passed by Congress in October, the act itself and more illegal measures backed by the Bush administration since Sept. 11 are also being challenged by CCR, the National Lawyers Guild (NLG), the Partnership for Civil Justice (PCJ) and individual lawyers. The PCJ has also initiated an Emergency Campaign to Defend Civil Rights.
Besides the above examples, some of the U.S. govt. practices being challenged include:
*illegal surveillance systems in Washington D.C. and other cities;
*universities handing over Middle Eastern students’ records to the Justice Dept.;
*police departments compiling dossiers on activists, journalists and citizens and non-citizens;
*illegal raids on Middle Eastern and South Asian homes and business in Virginia, Michigan, Illinois and elsewhere; and
*the illegal targeting of “suspects” based on ethnicity, race or national origin
Despite this nakedly racist and wholesale suspension of constitutional rights, Ashcroft is steadfastly promoting the Bush “war on terror” doctrine with new measures such as the FBI task forces he unveiled in Milwaukee.
If the FBI’s history of the mercenary COINTELPRO isn’t enough for the working class and oppressed people of this country to be alarmed, the history and background of
Ashcroft and his criminal partners in corporate boardrooms like Enron, the Pentagon and White House should have us all in the streets.
If this administration has its way, no one will have the right to dissent or speak their mind. Besides this, billions of our tax dollars are being devoured for the “war on terrorism” making the oil, banking and military institutions rich while the minimal social programs we do have are gutted.
Ashcroft is right.
There’s terrorists’ afoot in the Midwest and the U.S.
One of them came to Milwaukee April 10.
-end-
© 2002 Bryan G. Pfeifer. Commentary can be reprinted in part or in full with attribution give to author.
|
See also:
www.civil-rights.net
|
