Big Bad John

The Wall Street Journal

If John Ashcroft inspires even half the fear among al-Qaida that he apparently has in Andy Rooney, we may win this war on terrorism yet.

In an interview on CNN's "Larry King Live" Wednesday night, the CBS humorist turned into a pundit and worried that the U.S. attorney general has put the "fear of God" into reporters, creating a repressive climate where "you're a bad American if you ask a question." And though he didn't worry about President Bush, Rooney said Ashcroft's rules are "how dictatorships get started."

To adapt a famous Dan Rather line, what's the frequency, Andy?

Dictatorships? Reporters afraid to speak ill of the attorney general? John Ashcroft has to be the easiest target in politics. No self-respecting columnist with James Carville on his speed dial hasn't bashed him. Not to single out Rooney, but his otherworldly statements are perfect examples of how the civil-liberties left prefers to mouth hysteria rather than argue on the merits. This week the head of the Council for American-Islamic Relations invoked a Hitlerian metaphor by asking if American Muslims will soon be forced "to wear a star and crescent as a means of identification."

Once you move past the noise, it's hard to see what the fight is about. Take the uproar over this week's announcement of a National Security Entry-Exit Registration System. Beginning this fall, the United States will begin photographing and fingerprinting about 100,000 foreigners who represent an "elevated national security concern." Almost immediately this proposal raised shrieks of an Ashcroft inquisition.

But Ashcroft didn't invent this system. He's implementing a congressional mandate to develop by 2005 a registration and tracking system for all 35 million visitors to the U.S. - a mandate signed by Bill Clinton. In the meantime, Ashcroft wants authorities to concentrate on people who could pose security questions. Even the fingerprint provision is not Ashcroft's: It stems from a 1952 law that remains on the books but has been widely ignored.

We don't pretend that the new system is perfect, or that it won't create inconvenience. Already the American Civil Liberties Union has filed suits in California, Maryland and New Jersey on behalf of five men who say they were bumped off flights after Sept. 11 simply because of their skin color. No one wants to see innocent Americans inconvenienced. But amid a terror cold war in which the enemy lives among us and has targeted civilians, surely it's prudent to weigh being bumped from a flight against the horrific loss of life of September 11.

Most Americans, after all, understand the difference between pulling over an African-American on the New Jersey Turnpike simply because he's black and pulling aside a group of Arab men asking for separate seats and carrying no hand luggage. John Ashcroft did not create that profile. Osama bin Laden did. All Ashcroft wants to do is to allow U.S. security agencies to recognize it too.

Ditto for the new FBI guidelines announced last week. Most of these allow agents to do what Americans already believe they're allowed to do: Surf the Net, enter a mosque, start tracking people who might be terrorists. Yet no sooner had Ashcroft spoken, than critics started talking about J. Edgar Hoover spying on Martin Luther King.

Leaving aside that the Attorney General who authorized the King wiretaps was Bobby Kennedy, liberals want to have it both ways. They want to complain that the FBI and CIA didn't connect the dots before Sept. 11. But they also want to keep the rules and restrictions that ensured that the FBI and CIA will never be allowed to connect those dots.

Ashcroft has been through this before. Last autumn he was raked over the coals for insisting that the Justice Department be allowed to monitor meetings between 16 federal inmates and their attorneys, on the grounds of preventing another attack. At the time his concern was ridiculed. But the critics have had little to say since attorney Lynne Stewart, representing convicted terrorist Sheik Omar, was indicted on charges she conspired to relay messages to his radical followers.

"We are an open country," Ashcroft told reporters Wednesday. "We welcome people from around the world to visit a land which we believe is a blessed land. We will continue to greet our international neighbors with goodwill. Asking some neighbors and visitors to verify their activities while they are here is fully consistent with that outlook."

Most Americans seem to have figured that out, which is why the political hysteria raised about Ashcroft's proposals always seems to fade after a few days. Maybe that's what really bothers Andy Rooney.