The Black Vault - Mr. Ashcroft's Roadshow

ATTORNEY GENERAL John D. Ashcroft is hitting the campaign trail this week -- not on behalf of a candidate but in defense of the USA Patriot Act, the anti-terrorism legislation enacted in the aftermath of 9/11. It speaks volumes about the administration's assessment of public sentiment that Mr. Ashcroft feels the need to go on the road -- and to presidential battleground states such as Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania -- to defend a statute that was, after all, approved overwhelmingly in Congress. The House voted last month to repeal the law's "sneak-and-peak" provision that permits the government to delay notifying suspects that their homes or workplaces have been searched. Communities across the country, and three states, have passed resolutions condemning the law, and they're joined by such surprising allies as the American Conservative Union.

Yet the Patriot Act is neither the dangerously authoritarian threat its critics suggest nor the magic (and painless) bullet Mr. Ashcroft and other cheerleaders would have you believe. It reflects an imperfect compromise between the need to safeguard civil liberties and new challenges posed by domestic terrorism. And it is, appropriately, a temporary measure; over the administration's vociferous objections, some critical provisions expire after 2005. Much of the criticism of the law has been shrill and ill-informed. It doesn't, as former vice president Al Gore suggested in a recent speech, let federal agents troop "into every public library in America and secretly monitor what the rest of us are reading." Such information can be gathered only in cases of national security, and with a warrant. Similarly, despite the Sturm und Drang over sneak-and-peak, such searches with delayed notification have been approved by judges for years.

But if people are worried about how the Justice Department is wielding its authority under the Patriot Act, a big piece of the blame lies with Mr. Ashcroft himself. Muscular congressional oversight of this new law is critical, but the department has until recently balked at answering reasonable questions from lawmakers. At one point last fall, House Judiciary Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.) was so exasperated he was threatening to issue a subpoena to get the information. This is no way to make the public feel better about how the department is handling sweeping new powers.

More important, it strikes us that a great measure of the public's "unease" over the law, as Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) put it, is in fact discomfort -- legitimate discomfort -- over the administration's broader disregard for civil liberties: its insistence that American citizens can be held for months without access to lawyers simply by designating them "enemy combatants"; its sweeping roundup of non-citizens in the days after 9/11; and its unapologetic stance toward the treatment of detainees who had nothing to do with terrorism but were held for months. Technically, these are separate matters from the Patriot Act. In reality, the Patriot Act has become something of a repository in the public mind for wider worries about Mr. Ashcroft's Justice Department. As the attorney general barnstorms the country, he might do a little less preaching to the already converted and a little more listening to the legitimate concerns of the American public.

© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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