A very striking contrast occurred to me watching that interview.

On the one hand, the interplay of law and faith as Ashcroft sees it, particularly his view of a God who does not want men to impose belief on others.

And on the other, Islam: where imposition of belief- by violence, if necessary- is a central component of the religion.

I don't get bothered much by Ashcroft's religion. The religion argument is a straw man.

What bothers me is the following (and please read this post all the way to the end).

Have you heard of a program called Total Information Awareness (TIA)?

TIA is a Pentagon program designed to build a large-scale counter-terrorism database from lots of different sources, including e-mail, electronic and credit card purchases, airline travel, rental cars, telephone calling cards, gun purchases, and medical records.

Now here's what bothers me about Ashcroft:

The administration's interest in e-mail is a wholly unhealthy precedent, especially given this administration's track record on FBI files and IRS snooping.

Every medium by which people communicate can be subject to exploitation by those with illegal intentions.

Nevertheless, this is no reason to hand Big Brother the keys to unlock our e-mail diaries, open our ATM records, read our medical records, or translate our international communications.

OK. Still with me? Do you think I'm being alarmist? Do you think the previous 3 italicized paragraphs are coming from the ACLU, or the the Electronic Privacy Information Center, or the Southeastern Legal Foundation (all of whom have been critical of TIA)?

Do you? You would be wrong.

Those italicized words were written in October 1997 by then-Senator John Ashcroft.

At the time, he was taking issue with the Clinton administration's views on the Internet and proposed regulations and controls.

But today, Attorney General Ashcroft has been curiously quiet on the issue of TIA.

Hey, at the time, he had a point -- TIA would be bad for civil liberties, bad for the Internet and the emerging e-commerce sector and lastly, ineffective in catching terrorists.

Was he wrong then, or wrong now?

As far as TIA helping us "connect the dots": one of our major shortcomings in intelligence pre-9/11 was an over-reliance on technology and an underestimation of the value of human intelligence.

Nope, I'm not impressed with Mr. Ashcroft. I think he is dangerously misguided in his approach to the war on terror at home.

That's why I don't like him. The religion argument is a straw man.

I think his approach to the war here at home is just fine, and I don't have a problem with the TIA program. And I certainly have no problem with someone changing his mind on an issue after 9/11. A lot of minds were changed on a lot of issues as a result of that event.

Attorneys General are always lightning rods for civil libertarians and their more paranoid brethren. It comes with the job. But on the whole, I think he's been quite competent, and done a fantastic job of balancing serious concern for civil liberties with the need for security. Indeed, I've never seen an Attorney General work so hard to address civil libertarian concerns.

But none of that is my issue. I'm tired of the commonplace religious bigotry thrown in his direction, which I've seen on many occasions.

>>"Was he wrong then, or wrong now? "

No reason to think he was wrong either time. First of all, the situation has changed, and secondly, the administration has changed. THIS administration does not have a bad history with FBI files and the IRS. (No telling about the next one, of course.)

But make note of THIS FACT: All that information is already available to law enforcement. The only thing TIA does (in theory, it's yet to be seen if it will actually WORK) is allow each of those databases to be searched as part of a group, instead of individually.

If the FBI wants to see your credit records, your bank will show them. If they want to see your medical records, your doctor will show them. If they want your supermarket to tell them what kind of pasta you buy, your supermarket will tell them. All that information is available to the Feds NOW.

And Ashcroft is not behind the TIA, he's merely been silent about it. This does not make him the bogey man, and you say his religion does not make him the bogey man, so what does?

Not exactly Gary. If the Feds want your credit records, your shopping records, your medical records, or a tap on your phone they can get them. However, this is the really important part, they are not entitled to them de facto, they have to obtain a search warrant in order to get them, which means that they need good reliable information that a crime was commited by you and the records are relevant, a witness, and a judge who looks at everything and decides that there is enough cause to invade your privacy. This is an important part of the protections provided to every citizen by the fourth amendment to the consitution. Allowing J. Random Fed to rummage through any and all personal records would be a substantial violation of both the letter and the spirit of the constitution. And I believe that that is not worth it for any fantazied boost to the war on terror or any imaginary increase in security. And it would definitely not be worth it for the future when those same violations of our basic liberties remain though the threat they were created for is gone and the administration which could be trusted with them would be gone as well. The basic premise of the constitution and the limits on government power it puts in place is that all administrations should be equally suspect, that to give a power to one administration is to give it to all subsequent administrations, and the notion that the current administration would not abuse powers it is given is not a valid reason to give them those powers.

>>"However, this is the really important part, they are not entitled to them de facto, they have to obtain a search warrant in order to get them..."

It would be nice if that were so. It's not. Medical records will usually require a court order before the hospital turns them over, but that depends on the hospital standing up for your rights. Your credit history is an open book, no court order required. Phone taps are a seperate issue, having nothing to do with TIA.

Maybe I'll put up something about TIA later today. But like Gary said, TIA isn't Ashcroft's baby, nor would it be within his bailiwick to publicly oppose the TIA program if he were opposed to it. He could hate it with every fiber of his being, but as Attorney General it's not his job to opine on these things. About the only appropriate statement he could make about it would be to resign for the stated reason that he no longer supports the Bush administration because of TIA. Anything else would be an abrogation of his duties as AG.

Whatever. Like I said, while I share the civil libertarian concerns here. TIA doesn't frighten me, and none of this is about Ashcroft anyway.

On the other hand, the fact that he's the first AG to openly take the position that the 2nd Amendment really does describe an individual right of citizens almost permanently endeared him to me. It's about freaking time!

It seems to me that we are dealing with more than search warrants, telephone taps, government surveillance of credit records and other indignities to which most of us will not acquiesce without raising serious questions.

At issue is the possibility -- and even the likelihood -- of attacks against the citizens, cities and government of the United States with weapons of mass destruction that can be smuggled into the country and triggered by Islamic fanatics who either are planted or will be seeded among citizens or permanent residents of Arab, Pakistani and related ethnic connections around the country.

These attacks could utilize suitcase-type nuclear weapons, any one of which can destroy a city; release of unexploded but highly radioactive nuclear materials; biological toxins; smaller scale attacks against civilian air transport with shoulder-fired small missiles -- as already occured this year in Kenya. We must assume that the 4th aircraft involved in the 9/11 attack -- the one that the passengers helped crash and destroy in the Pennsylvania countryside -- was orginally headed for the US Capitol or the White House. This means that the seat of our government itself is an almost certain target.

The people of the United States face difficult choices. We are learning that militant Islam fervently wishes to destroy our country and devour us and the rest of the world into their cult of death and submission to universal slavery. We cannot reason with these people. We cannot buy them off. We cannot appease them by selling out other western societies such as Israel. We can only surrender or we can fight them as we have fought other threatening tyrannies.

In any case, Islam is involved in violent struggle with every non-Islamic society with which they come in contact: against the predominant Christian population in the Phillipines; against the non-Islamic islanders in Indonesia; in Pakistan against resident Christians and against India's Hindus; in far western China; in the southern Sudan against numerous black tribes; in Bosnia where an Islamic republic is sprouting among formerly inoffensive Moslems; in Israel on the part of Hamas, Hezbolla and Arafat's gang. Here in the United States, they make serious efforts to spread Islam among African-Americans in the ghettos and prisons. Western civilization truly is in permanent conflict with Islamic civilization.

One approach, the one our government is now pursuing, is to seriously tighten security all across the United States, in American properties abroad, and in places where American citizens frequent. The restrictions enacted into law since September 2001 are a major component of that effort, which attempts to balance our traditional liberties with a vast new watchfulness that renders many of us uncomfortable.

If we go to war against Iraq, as now appears most likely, the United States may attempt a longterm effort to democratize at least part of the Mideast by taking over Iraq and working to restructure their society. Inevitably, this must fail unless Arab society can be secularized. That may prove impossible in Islamic cultures where sharia -- religious law -- is the present societal basis.

Another approach, which the government is pursuing, is to reach out and apprehend or kill the leadership cadres of Al Queda, considered presently the most dangerous of the Islamic terrorist organizations. This approach has only limited utility, because, the targets find refuge in scores of Islamic countries whose citizens either acquiesce in the actions of the terrorists or who fervently wish to emulate them.

If there is another successful large-scale terrorist attack against this country, the civilian and military leadership of the United States may well determine upon a much more serious response.

One possibility would be the round-up, incarceration and possible expulsion of large numbers of Moslems now in this country, including denaturalization of those among them who are citzens. President Franklin Roosevelt put a large number of Japanese-Americans into concentration camps in early 1942, under circumstances which seemed justifiable to most other Americans at that time. It may well happen again, because in war, no defense is unthinkable.

Roosevelt's successor, Harry Truman, facing the grim likelihood of hundreds of thousands of American military personnel getting killed pulling Japanese defenders of their home islands out of caves and other hiding places, opted to change the social psychology of the Japanese leadership in a paid of single actions more terrible than had ever before occured, and so end World War II. That explains in large part why the first two American nuclear weapons readied for military use were dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.

If this example -- albeit a terrible one -- is applied to the Islamic world, I think strong consideration would be given to the destruction of Mecca, the urban heart and soul of their civilization. That act certainly would change the social psychology of the Arab world, probably in a manner not seen since the Mongol invasions of Iran and Iraq in the 12th and 13th centuries, which shattered their civilization for many centuries.

The dangers to the United States and to Western civilization are great. But the raw power of this country is all both limitless and terrible, if we choose to use that power. Islam and the world should take heed.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

>>As far as TIA helping us "connect the dots": one of our major shortcomings in intelligence pre-9/11 was an over-reliance on technology and an underestimation of the value of human intelligence.

Ara,

You bring up one very important Achilles’ heel here. America has ALWAYS been weak on the human intelligence side, especially when compared to our technical intelligence capabilities. James Bamford in “Body of Secrets” anecdotally mentions how our servicemen were caught in the Berlin discotheque in the mid 1980’s.

NSA intercepted a communication sent out of Tripoli by Libya in the Berber language three days before the bombing. Unfortunately, NSA decrypted and translated the message five days AFTER the bombing, too late to save the already dead servicemen. Berber is an obscure language spoken by Berber tribesmen in Morocco and in certain pockets of Libya. Berbers are white Bedouin Arabs living in North Africa across from the straits of Gibraltar.

The reason it took one week is that our National Security Agency had only ONE Berber linguist in the entire agency. It is sad that this agency with ten times the budget of the CIA cannot find more than one Berber linguist. This is the best example I can find where our technical means outstrip our human means. This time our technical means were wasted.

Arnold,

The destruction of Mecca would pit every Muslim in the world against the US, not just the Wahabbi.

Gary, I did not say that I favor the thermonuclear and permanent destruction of Mecca or the destruction of any other Arab city with these weapons. I did say -- and I fully believe -- that their possible use is almost certainly under consideration by the US government.

As for whether destruction of Mecca would pit every Moslem in the world against the United States, I watched the televised responses of millions of Arabs and other Moslems dancing in the streets of their cities following their successful sneak attack on New York and Washington DC on Sep 11, 2001. I have also read the translations of some of their broadcast weekly religious prayers, which bring out large crowds to howl like wolves for the blood of Americans and Jews.

When we were fighting Hitler's Germany, Mussolini's Italy and Tojo's Japan in the 1940s, we paid no attention to what they thought of us. Instead, the United States and its allies did everything possible to destroy them as rapidly as possible.

Have you studied Operation Gomorrah, the destruction of Hamburg by the British Bomber Command and by the United States 8th Air Force in late July and early August 1943? These forces started the first purposeful firestorm in history, burning to a cinder almost the whole of Hamburg and roasting alive more than 50,000 German civilians.

Have you studied the low-level firebombing raids against Tokyo in the spring of 1945, where another large civilian population was purposefully burned to death by the US Army Air Force?

Have you studied the expulsion of about 14 million German civilians from eastern Europe in 1945-1946, accompanied by the outright murder of perhaps a million others, for the mere purpose of rearranging the borders of and ethnic mix of the populations there?

History has a short memory. The only salient fact is that the United States, the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom won the war and made the losers pay a terrible price. The descendants of the losers adapted themselves to a different order of the world and in fact undertook leading roles in that order.

The Moslems of the world largely hate western civilization and are in permanent war with all that our society represents. Their view of the world is two permanently hostile camps, the Deir al Islam, or house of submission, and the Deir al Harb, or house of war. Their permanent fixed notion is that the Deir al Islam shall one day permanently destroy the Deir al Harb -- meaning us. This is as it has been since the vision of Islam engulfed their prophet Mohamed early in the 7th century of our era. Anything they say to the contrary should be regarded as part of their ancient practice of "taqiyya" -- dissimulation -- which they practice on non-Moslems in situations were they are not strong enough to destroy their enemies.

The real problem with the Arabs, Pakistanis and other Moslems is that -- unlike nearly all the other world civilizations -- Islam has never undergone a reformation. Even communism had such a reformation -- perestroika/glasnost -- which blew state socialism apart within just a few years. Instead, we witness a crazed and hateful culture that enslaves women, preaches and practices active and continuous war against all non-Islamic societies, and even encourages poor families to strap Semtex and other high-explosives around the waists of their children for purposes of committing murder-suicide against innnocent civilians. All while a handful of oil- rich autocrats starve their own people for purposes of maintaining their own power. No true peace with this civilization is possible or shall ever be possible unless and until they undergo a 180 degree change in their social psychology. This will never take place as long as the West responds to their continuous outrages with appeasement of the type that Chamberlain and Daladier tried with Adolf Hitler.

I hate nobody, including them. But I want the survival of the United States, of western civilization, and of the freedoms that have taken thousands of years to develop in western Europe and north America. If the price that has to be paid for that survival is the destruction of the largest, ugliest and most violent and hateful mob in human history, then let it be done.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

Arnold, one (perhaps not so) small point: The purpose of the firebomb raids on Tokyo and other Japanese cities was not to "purposefully burn to death" the civilian population.

There was a group of interconnected problems relating to the strategic bombing of Japan. One of them was that much of the smaller work of factories was distributed throughout a neighborhood, so hitting the main plant didn't have as much an effect as it might have. LeMay had to find a way eliminate the industrial capacity of Imperial Japan, and he did.

>>"The Moslems of the world largely hate western civilization and are in permanent war with all that our society represents."

That turns out not to be the case. Most of the worlds Moslems don't care about the US one way or another.They are "The Silent Majority", only the extreme right wing Wahabbi sect is actually at war with the West.

We REALLY don't want the whole Moslem world at war with the US, we really really don't.

Over time as i have been really startled by the degree of disgust by which you view the moslems. They are humans too!

Me? I try to defend traditional Islam from its attackers from all sides.