Former attorney general John Ashcroft took on the Obama administration’s national-security policy today at CPAC, saying “we have the duty, from time to time, to respond [to terrorists] with the mechanisms and capacities of war rather than put our heads in the sand and think that we’re not at war or fail to consider whether we’re at war because we’re so in love with the vocabulary of the civil-justice system.” A “range of opportunities” should be available to the president to deal with terrorists, he added.