With profuse self-congratulations, the Department of Homeland Security observed last week the fifth anniversary of its creation. And while it is truly remarkable that there has not been another major terrorist attack in the United States since Sept. 11, 2001, that is hardly the result of more expansive and authoritarian bureaucracy.
We are not one whit safer because people who couldn’t get work at the post office now rummage and pilfer our belongings at airports — or because the Secret Service runs background checks on schoolchildren before allowing class tours of the White House. The fact that we have not been attacked again almost certainly can be credited to the actions of one much-maligned man: former Attorney General John Ashcroft.
In the wake of 9/11, his reaction was the most reasonable and, evidently, the most effective: Ashcroft rounded up the terrorists in our midst and got them out of our country. Back then, government officials warned Americans that another attack not only was inevitable but probably imminent. No one would have predicted that the next six and a half years would pass in relative calm — and nothing explains that they have except that terrorists are no longer here in sufficient numbers to make concerted efforts.
Within weeks of the 9/11 attacks, Ashcroft’s Justice Department implemented the Special Registration program, a domestic component of the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System enacted by the Clinton administration to track foreign visitors identified as national security concerns — i.e., males from majority-Muslim countries. Thousands of registrants were deported after 9/11 because they were found to be in the country illegally; many others fled the country rather than register. The Pakistani Embassy complained that after Special Registration began, more than 15,000 illegal immigrants fled instead of face deportation. So the attorney general scared criminals into leaving our country? Well, boo-hoo.
It’s important for those who opposed Ashcroft to remember that he generally had the law and the courts on his side. His Absconder Apprehension Initiative targeted more than 300,000 foreign nationals who were in the United States despite having received deportation orders. Many of the controversial practices allowed by the Patriot Act, such as roving wiretaps, had been in place since the 1980s. The use of secret evidence for deportation hearings was authorized by the 1996 anti-terrorism bill signed by President Clinton — and the Supreme Court refused to hear a challenge to its use after the 9/11 attacks.
Certainly, Ashcroft holds views with which staunch civil libertarians can take issue, but we who include ourselves in those ranks must not judge him too harshly. From the beginning — even in the immediate post-9/11 hysteria — Ashcroft instructed his Justice Department to “think outside the box, but not outside the Constitution.” He refused to go along when the White House pressured him to sign off on domestic spying and subsequently resigned as attorney general, perhaps realizing that people who revere the Constitution are not revered in the Bush-Cheney White House. “Some people talk about a balance between freedom and security,” Ashcroft said. “I don’t think there is any value that can be balanced against liberty.”
To give DHS its due: The FBI has thwarted some terror plots in the past five years. But that is the result of good work bygood agents, not the creation of a new bureaucracy. The enduring outcome of creating a Department of Homeland Security was to establish an agency of more than 200,000 people who must go to work every day and justify their jobs. That will mean the never-ending issuance of rules and restrictions — endless limitations on freedom — in the name of “protecting the homeland.”
But silly rules such as making us put our shampoo into little bottles and put those little bottles into little Baggies do nothing to keep us safe. The most effective way to keep Americans safe from terrorists is to keep terrorists out of the United States. To the extent that DHS does that, it serves a purpose — but it cannot claim all, or even much, of the credit.
Before the department was created in 2003, Ashcroft already had done the heavy lifting by getting out of the country thousands of individuals who undoubtedly would have perpetrated more attacks. Doubt that if you wish; disagree with Ashcroft all you want. There’s no arguing with success.
Examiner columnist Melanie Scarborough lives in Alexandria.
