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 et's
take an up-close-and-personal look at John Ashcroft's supposed crusade
to curtail our civil liberties, which Al Hunt today compares to
A. Mitchell Palmer's campaign to lock up radicals and left-wingers
in 1919-20.
Hunt, in his
bill of particulars, complains that the reason for Ashcroft's "unacceptable
secrecy" in not revealing the list of current detainees is
that he "is on a fishing expedition; if actual details, names
and faces were made public, it might be embarrassing."
So, let's look
at an actual name and details.
According to
the Washington Post, Agus Budiman of Alexandria, Virginia,
was arrested on a minor immigration charge in late October. Budiman
expected to get out in days, because he had merely overstayed his
visa, and was working when he was supposed to be a tourist.
Budiman is
still in jail.
It turns out
that he knew Mohamed Atta in Germany; that Atta's friend Ramzi Binalshibh
— perhaps the missing 20th hijacker — used Budiman's address
on his two (rejected) visa applications; and that he helped a man
named Mohammad Belfas, who may be a bin Laden contact, to obtain
an illegal Virginia driver's license.
Is Hunt outraged
by Budiman's detention? If not, maybe that shows that fishing expeditions
have their purpose.
And what about
all the other nameless hundreds being held by Ashcroft? There are
two categories.
If they are
material witnesses (which means a judge has to be convinced that
they have some connection to a criminal case), their names are kept
confidential because grand-jury proceedings are private.
If, on the
other hand, they are detained for a criminal or immigration violation
— which is the case with the overwhelming majority — they
have the right to counsel. Nothing would stop them from calling
a local newspaper themselves to publicize their plight (or from
having their lawyer or family do it). But probably most don't want
to do it because they are embarrassed.
Why do I have
the sneaking suspicion that if Ashcroft had published a list of
the names from the beginning, Al Hunt would be complaining today
that Ashcroft had smeared innocent Muslim immigrants and created
a "blacklist"?
The most important
thing to remember in all this is that almost all of these detainees
have violated the law, some of them by committing criminal offenses,
the vast majority by violating the immigration laws. And the principal
legal question here is not seriously in debate: Ashcroft has the
power to detain aliens who have violated immigration laws.
The criticism
of Ashcroft that was retailed over and over again during his confirmation
fight was that he couldn't be trusted to enforce the laws. Now,
these very same critics are accusing him, in effect, of enforcing
the laws.
If Hunt is
interested in making a substantive criticism of U.S. immigration
policy, instead of just taking potshots at Ashcroft, he should make
the case for why visa violations should be ignored, or for why U.S.
immigration laws should be loosened in light of the way they are
being enforced by the Justice Department.
Even better
and more fundamentally, he can make the case for a civil rights
revolution to extend all the rights of U.S. citizens to illegal
aliens, so that they can never be detained or deported in this fashion
again.
That would
have the advantage of being an intellectually honest criticism of
Ashcroft. Wonder why Hunt isn't making it.
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