WASHINGTON, Algeria, Dec. 10 (UPI) -- In Stephen Ambrose's stirring "Band of Brothers," the World War II history from training to victory of a parachute infantry company, the first commander of the company is found to be totally unsuited for war.
He is not a coward, but under the pressures of trying to train a company of paratroopers for battle, he is needlessly harsh, a martinet with no purpose, demanding unnecessary drills and meting out unnecessary punishments. Finally the company's non-commissioned officers take it upon themselves, risking their stripes, to tell their commanders that the paratroopers have no confidence in this officer and cannot follow him in battle. Mercifully, the Army listened and the captain was quietly transferred to a training assignment.
This is not an unusual phenomenon in war. Winston Churchill had to fire a goodly list of generals to get the right ones, and Abraham Lincoln couldn't find a Union general smart enough and aggressive enough to take on Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee until Ulysses Grant in the third year of the war.
So perhaps it is with the Bush administration. Some of Bush's Cabinet have hit the ground running: Donald Rumsfeld, not only effectively leading the Defense Department, but giving almost daily briefings that have colorfully and carefully told the American people about the fortunes of the war; Secretary of State Colin Powell and Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge, both combat veterans of Vietnam, exude a sense of presence and leadership that reassures their listeners.
And then we come to Attorney General John Ashcroft, the proponent of the three national terror alerts, each so vague that the average citizen didn't have a clue what to do about them. (The Bush administration now assigns Ridge to deliver these alerts, but he is almost sheepish as he does so.)
Ashcroft ordered the largest roundup up of people in the United States since World War II. He has put 1,200 men behind bars since Sept. 11 and recently acknowledged that only a handful, he won't even say how many, had anything do to with the Sept. 11 attacks.
Ashcroft, too, put together the most sweeping surveillance and wiretapping legislation in three decades; assigned his agents to listen into the discussions of lawyers and their clients and ordered police agencies to interrogate some 5,000 individuals selected because they came to the United States from countries that he says harbor terrorists.
It is Ashcroft, too, who constructed a secretive military tribunal system to try terror suspects even though convictions have already been won in U.S. courts against members of these same groups.
Last week, he went before the Senate Judiciary Committee to "report" on his work, but in fact to deliver an angry challenge to anyone who would question these methods.
"To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists -- for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve," he told the room. Probably unintentionally, much of the rest of his testimony reveals a man too close to the crisis.
"My day begins," he told the senators, "with a review of the threats to Americans and American interests in the previous 24 hours. If ever there were proof of the existence of evil in the world, it is in the pages of these reports. They are a chilling daily chronicle of hatred of America by fanatics who seek to extinguish freedom, enslave women, corrupt education and to kill Americans wherever and whenever they can."
Ashcroft has been consistently unwilling to make these reports public, and if he did he might persuade others of the danger he sees. Veteran intelligence officers know U.S. intelligence agencies have been picking up these threats for decades, leaving them trying desperately to assess the real from rhetoric. The issue is capability, and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks are certainly evidence that these terrorists are capable. But that does not mean that every threat is.
"The terrorist enemy that threatens civilization today is unlike any we have ever known," Ashcroft said. "It slaughters thousands of innocents -- a crime of war and a crime against humanity. It seeks weapons of mass destruction and threatens their use against America. No one should doubt the intent, nor the depth, of its consuming destructive hatred."
But since 1939, the United States has faced similar threats almost non-stop: the Japanese Imperial Army, the Nazi war machine, the Soviet Union and China. The United States has fought two wars in Asia where the slaughter of innocents was blood sport and the enemies were only limited in their weapons by what they could get their hands on.
President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald, and his brother killed by a Palestinian gunman, Sirhan Sirhan. President Ronald Reagan was shot down on his way into a hotel and barely survived. Martin Luther King was shot down giving a speech.
Does Ashcroft really believe that these threats, though terrible, are so new to Americans?
Ashcroft produced a "manual" obtained from al Qaida terrorists (and incidentally made public in a 1998 trial in a New York court) that "tells how to use America's freedom as a weapon against us." The manual, he reports, says how to exploit the free press and the judicial system to "stalk and kill their victims."
"Captured terrorists," he said, "are to anticipate a series of questions from authorities and, in each response, to lie -- to lie about who they are, to lie about what they are doing and to lie about what they know in order for the operation to achieve its objective." It hardly seems likely that this manual teaches anything different then what was taught to Nazi spies, Russian spies, Chinese spies and narco-terrorist groups.
What is striking about Ashcroft's testimony is the extraordinary naiveté of the tone. The Department of Justice has been investigating al Qaida and Osama bin Laden since 1993. Agents and lawyers in the Southern District of New York established again and again that these are desperate men. They managed to win convictions in three separate bombings and an assassination case. They did so without a roundup, without the new wiretap authority, without a tribunal system or without intruding on lawyers representing clients.
Had the FBI and the CIA properly followed up on what they learned in the New York case, they might have prevented the Sept. 11 attacks.
Ashcroft has been running the largest investigation in American history. For more than 90 days, he testified, 4,000 FBI agents, untold other federal agents and local police have concentrated on finding culprits who helped in this attack. To date, not one individual has been charged in the U.S. with hijacking.
But Ashcroft had the time to go to Capitol Hill to suggest that anyone who questioned the effectiveness or fairness of his methods was giving aid and comfort to terrorists.
