John Ashcroft, Prophet of Doom

Perhaps
Ashcroft’s Christian fundamentalism works for him in this regard. There’s
something about religious passion that endears a public that is so frightened
it wants to believe. While stone-faced, secular-appearing Dick Cheney is the
muscle brought in to bludgeon nonbelievers who have the temerity to question
the administration, Ashcroft is the ardent prophet who keeps the believers believing.
And the voracious 24/7 media pack makes it all easy: When Ashcroft announced
a few weeks ago that his plan for scary new FBI surveillance of the Internet
was giving FBI agents no more power than the average "teenager" now
has surfing the Web, there was a blip of mild suspicion, some anger on a few
editorial pages–even a few tough questions from the tv morning show set.
But then word came of a new terror warning and the media pack dropped everything,
elbowing one another out of the way to get the latest non-story, cranking out
further sensational headlines and soundbites.

It seems
that the Bushies don’t just use their announcements of new measures and
their warnings of supposed new terror attacks as ways to deflect from the government’s
failings; they also use them to shut down discussion about the administration’s
power grabs. And last week it appeared as if the Prophet of Doom was once again
brought in to achieve both those goals.

"I
am pleased to announce today a significant step forward in the war on terrorism,"
a solemn but proud Ashcroft said in a live television hook-up from Moscow. He
interrupted a state-sponsored trip to announce that "we have captured a
known terrorist," specifically Jose Padilla, aka Abdullah al Muhajir, aka
the Dirty Bomber. It was a grand statement that would certainly deflect attention
from the FBI’s and CIA’s bungling, and would also help Ashcroft get
public and congressional support for his most draconian present and future proposals.
If opening lines define a statement’s purpose, this was a revealing one
indeed: Ashcroft didn’t begin by saying he was pleased to announce we may
have thwarted a possible attack. No, he was happy to tell us that "a significant
step" had been achieved in "the war on terrorism," a war that
was declared by his boss, George W. Bush, and the success of which is being
challenged by members of Congress.

It was also
curious that Ashcroft had to tell us about the Padilla detainment himself, all
the way from Moscow no less: In the first few days following the "Bush
Knew" headlines last month–induced by the revelations that the FBI
and CIA didn’t, as the mantra goes, "connect the dots"–Ashcroft
was nowhere to be found in the U.S., let alone in Russia. Dick Cheney and even
Laura Bush–traveling in far-off Romania–were trotted out to hurl charges
of disloyalty at those treasonous critics ("the most cynical among the
most partisan," as the partisan White House flack Ari Fleischer cynically
said last week). But Ashcroft, the cabinet member who presides directly over
the FBI and CIA, was kept far, far away from the cameras. Prophets, after all,
must remain sacred and blameless if they’re to be effective. Having Ashcroft
on the defensive would only tarnish him; better to haul out tough Big Daddy
Cheney for that.

Always devoutly
on the offensive, the sober Ashcroft surfaced a few weeks later to announce
new measures allowing FBI agents to go undercover into mosques, spy on people
in Internet chat rooms and fingerprint Muslims and Arabs entering the country,
all in the name of protecting us from the evildoers. (Now that he’s announced
the detainment of Padilla, a former gang member who is Puerto Rican, one wonders
if Ashcroft will soon announce that they’ll be snooping on all gang members–and
Puerto Ricans.)

Prophets
have been most effective at instilling fear with fire and brimstone decrees.
And today, "fire" and "brimstone" have been updated to "nuclear"
and "radioactive." In his statements last week in Moscow, Ashcroft
spewed the dreaded, frightening buzzwords over and over again: "radiological"
and "radioactive." With melodramatic flair, he announced that "we
have disrupted an unfolding terrorist plot to attack the United States by exploding
a radioactive ‘dirty bomb,’" which Ashcroft warned could "cause
mass death and injury."

But it turns
out that, like other prophets used in the service of promoting a larger power
structure, Ashcroft’s zeal can’t always be controlled by his sponsors.
(I’m thinking, with regard to media-age prophets, of the increasingly unhinged
anchorman Howard Beale, played by Peter Finch in Network, whose anticorporate,
antiestablishment proselytizing to the masses brought huge ratings to the network,
which encouraged his rantings–until he told people to shut the television
off.) A day after Ashcroft’s Moscow announcement, the administration was
downplaying the gravity of the Padilla detainment. "I don’t think
there was actually a plot beyond some fairly loose talk and [Padilla’s]
coming in here obviously to plan further deeds," Deputy Secretary of Defense
Paul Wolfowitz said. The following day USA Today reported that Ashcroft
was being slapped around in the White House for overplaying the entire affair.
Critics, meanwhile, rightly pointed out that it was hyperbolic to claim that
a dirty bomb, dangerous as it would be to people in the direct vicinity, would
cause "mass death."

This is
not the first time that Ashcroft has blown events completely out of proportion,
seemingly to deflect attention. In addition to dramatically spearheading
several terror warnings that came to naught, you may recall that our busy Attorney
General was doing a media blitz back in January announcing the fate of skinny
little John Walker Lindh, the so-called "American Taliban," who’d
been in custody for weeks but whom Ashcroft had suddenly decided to turn into
public enemy number one in the war on terrorism.

That was
actually the first tipoff of how the administration would come to cynically
use events surrounding the terrorist attacks to get the media spotlight off
the issues it is fearful about. Only weeks before Ashcroft’s Walker Lindh
announcements, it was rightly a federal prosecutor in the locality where the
arrest took place (Boston) who announced the government’s prosecution plans
for Richard "shoebomber" Reid. And so it should have been with Walker
Lindh. But by mid-January the luster surrounding the Bushies’ Afghanistan
military action was starting to fade, as the Enron story broke out bigtime.
Between Enron and the increasing criticism over the failure to capture Osama
bin Laden or Mullah Omar, the administration needed a diversion. Enter the Prophet
of Doom, who held a press conference and sat on the Today show, making
as if Walker Lindh, a stupid kid from Marin County, was an equal plotter with
bin Laden and would be tried as such, stealing the media attention.

So now,
here he is again, interrupting his trip to breathlessly promote the capture
of a former Chicago gang member who hadn’t even gotten near any radioactive
materials–"loose talk" as Wolfowitz said–making as if we
were on the precipice of a nuclear catastrophe. Maybe soon he’ll tell us
that the calico cats were behind it all.