Ashcroft's anti-rights legacy

FINALLY, there is something to celebrate: John Ashcroft will no longer be US attorney general.

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In his letter of resignation, Ashcroft again demonstrated the Bush administration's propensity for declaring a mission accomplished long before it is. "The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved," he wrote.

Here is what Ashcroft did achieve: He artfully used the criminal attacks by terrorists on Sept. 11 to promote policies that undercut precious American freedoms. He unashamedly questioned the patriotism of those who disagreed. Three months after the attack, he said before a Senate panel: "To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve."

Questioning government is the cornerstone of American democracy. Ashcroft's willingness to depict that as unpatriotic is more offensive than the optional daily prayer meetings this son of a minister introduced to the Justice Department. The inspector general of his own Justice Department questioned the department's detention of hundreds of illegal immigrants with no clear ties to terrorism who were arrested after Sept. 11. And the Supreme Court concluded earlier this year, regarding treatment of detainees and "enemy combatants," that "a state of war is not a blank check for the president."

President Bush's candidate to replace Ashcroft is the White House counsel, Alberto R. Gonzales. If approved, Gonzalez would be the first Hispanic-American attorney general. More crucial to Bush, Gonzalez, a fellow Texan, publicly defended the adminstration's policy of detaining certain terrorism suspects for extended periods without access to lawyers and courts. He also wrote a February 2002 memo in which Bush claimed the right to waive antitorture law and international treaties providing protections to prisoners of war. The position was criticized by human rights groups, which said it helped lead to the type of abuses uncovered in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.

While those prison pictures shocked at the time, they did not lead Americans, generally, to decry the loss of protections for prisoners of war or protest their own loss of civil liberties. That probably explains why protection of civil liberties receded as a major issue in John Kerry's ultimately losing bid for the White House.

During the Democratic primary season, Kerry often roused his audience with the phrase, "Folks, you are John Ashcroft's worst nightmare." During the general election, the call to "end the era of John Ashcroft" remained an applause line for Kerry, and he called for stronger oversight of new police powers granted to the government during the Ashcroft era. But protection of civil liberties did not achieve high status as an issue.

This is partly due to Kerry's vote for the USA Patriot Act, the sweeping antiterrorism legislation championed by Ashcroft. But the larger overlay is the Democrats' continuing fear of looking weak by standing up for civil liberties. In the presidential race 16 years ago, Michael Dukakis was derided by his GOP opponent, George H.W. Bush, as "a card-carrying member of the ACLU." In these post-Sept. 11 days, advocated civil liberties is even more unfashionable. Calling the antiterrorism legislation the "Patriot Act" makes it all the easier to label as unpatriotic those who question the government's right to spy and intrude on citizens.

Sept. 11 obviously changed the dynamic when it comes to protecting the country from attack. But when the blanket defense to every challenge of government intrusion is Sept. 11, that becomes as suspect as the mythical link between Sept. 11 and America's invasion of Iraq.

Reasonable people can disagree about Ashcroft's legacy -- and they do.

"Attorney General John Ashcroft has served our country faithfully during one of our most challenging chapters in history. . . . His courage and leadership are second to none," Republican Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah said yesterday.

"Mr. Ashcroft's legacy has been an open hostility to protecting civil liberties and an outright disdain for those who dare to question his policies. We need to do more than just replace John Ashcroft; we need a wholesale reexamination of Justice Department policies that trample on civil liberties and human rights," said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Reasonable people can also disagree about the appropriate balance between safety for the many and freedom for the individual -- and they do that, too. Hopefully, Ashcroft's successor will understand that there is nothing un-American about such disagreement. It is what makes America worth defending.

Joan Vennochi's e-mail address is vennochi@globe.com.