Speech Review: John Ashcroft
Ashcroft offers rebuttle to his critics
Ashley Wall
2006-09-22
Enduring obnoxious interruptions, an entire group of liberals leaving the auditorium, and radical protestors crowded outside with signs and megaphones, former Attorney General John Ashcroft gave an impressive speech on America’s fight against terrorism on Tuesday, Sept. 12 at Memorial Hall.
After a few jokes, Ashcroft began his speech with an explanation of why it is important to consider the events that have occurred since Sept. 11. He argued that we must learn from those five years in order to prevent history from repeating itself and to honor those who died. He proceeded with five of his most important observations since Sept. 11.
Ashcroft’s first observation was that freedom and justice are more profoundly served when an assault is prevented than when an attack is avenged or prosecuted. Recalling where he was when he first learned the news of the attacks on Sept. 11, he remembered being on a Justice Department airplane and being asked to call the command center.
“When I learned the news, I was stunned in a way I had never been stunned before and I knew that America was changed and different,” he said. He began to realize that something would have to change in order to prevent such tragedy from happening again.
“If you don’t like the impact of airplanes against civilian populated commercial centers in the United States, you’ve got to change your behavior in order to change the outcome,” he said.
At this point, the speech was interrupted by an audience member who yelled out, “Why did you stop flying on commercial airplanes before 9/11?” implying that Ashcroft had prior knowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks.
“If you believe that I stopped flying on commercial airplanes, you’re the victim of a significant falsehood,” he retorted.
The audience member then told Ashcroft to “Google it.”
“If you believe everything that you read on the internet, you are of all individuals most susceptible to being misled,” he replied.
After a few more interruptions, Ashcroft repeated his assertion that the security priority has to be on prevention. He explained that prosecution is much less complex.
“It’s like having a puzzle and putting all the pieces together and proving what the box top says is really true,” he said. Prevention, on the other hand, is difficult because it is a process of anticipating the future.
“It’s 10,000 puzzles on the floor and you don’t have any box tops because none of the things have happened,” he said. “When it comes to terrorism, an action or design to displace the freedom and liberty of the United States of America, we have to have a priority on prevention. It doesn’t mean we disavow prosecution. Nor have we disavowed prosecution, but our priority has to be on prevention.”
A second observation Ashcroft made was that the role between security and liberty needs to be understood, saying that while some would set them against each other, “Security exists only to guard liberty.” He concluded that if as a result of a security measure you have more freedom than before the security measure was enacted, the security measure should be undertaken. He said he had encouraged justice department employees to “find a way to interrupt the terrorists by doing things differently than we had done before, but doing them in a way that were still consistent with the liberties that are stressed in the constitution of the United States.”
This comment was disrupted by a man who muttered something to the effect of “is it a tradeoff?” and then asked about liberty in the constitution. Ashcroft thought a second and replied, “Well.. um.. have you read the Constitution?”
He then clarified: “You don’t have to read past the first two sentences of the constitution to read about the fact that we do ordain this government for purposes of having domestic tranquility. I do not call airplanes flying into civilian occupied buildings for purposes of effecting political change and result domestic tranquility.”
He continued, going sequentially through the first three articles of the constitution: “[The president] also is endowed with the opportunity and responsibility—I say the duty—to wage war if necessary to protect that domestic tranquility. That’s in Article 2.” He concluded his defense by saying, “If you have to ask, ‘Where in the constitution does it talk about security and liberty?’—everywhere in the constitution it talks about security and liberty!”
Ashcroft then talked more specifically about the Patriot Act.
“When it came time to vote, people knew that they couldn’t vote in good conscience against something that would sustain the liberty and freedom of the people of the United States,” he said. He pointed out that although a lot of commotion was made about its reenactment, in the end it garnered 88 votes in the Senate.
“Let me just say that you can’t get 88 senators to agree that it’s Tuesday today,” he added. “The truth of the matter is the Patriot Act simply gave us tools against terror that we had had against other kinds of criminal activity for quite some time.”
Ashcroft argued that the use of wiretapping had been used for thirteen years in the fight against drug dealing and other types of organized crime. He said this type of intelligence “ought to be available in the fight against those who would seek to take us out two to three thousand at a time.”
Ashcroft began his third observation by talking about the nearly 3000 deaths that occurred on Sept. 11. A girl in the audience shouted, “How many innocent Iraqi civilians have died? 40 to 100,000, I think that you should mention that.”
“I believe it is better to fight the terrorists there than it is to fight the terrorists here,” Ashcroft replied. “I’m prepared in some measure to speak to [the question shouted] because the purpose of the United States and its troops in Iraq is not to destroy Iraqi citizens but to protect them.” Several liberals in the audience laughed.
“You might find that laughable. I do not,” Ashcroft said. He pointed out that Iraqi civilian deaths are mostly caused by other Iraqis.
“This is not a charge to be laid at the feet of Americans who are seeking to provide a context of liberty and religious freedom and opportunity for people in a nation that has been oppressed by those who have killed hundreds of thousands,” he said, referring to Saddam. He mentioned that his son who is in the navy “is spending his life, because it is not in the character of the United States of America to sit on the sidelines while the freedom is in the balance.”
Ashcroft continued with his third point, observing that “If you care about freedom and you take action to defend it, you’re going to be accused of being either too early or too late.” He gave the example that the Bush administration was criticized for fighting too late in Afghanistan and too early in Iraq, and told a story of how he was visiting the World War II memorial in Washington and noticed the stars representing American deaths.
“Four hundred thousand American lives in the defense of freedom because we went too late instead of too early,” he had thought to himself. “At least while I have a son in the military and while I have a heart beating within my breast, if you’re marking down for those who would go too early or too late, if I have to make the decision, mark me down for too early in the defense of freedom.”
In the fourth part of his speech, Ashcroft contended that “America’s fight against terror has been the most restrained and respectful fight regarding civil liberties of any major conflict in the history of the United States.” He compared Bush’s “narrowly tailored” surveillance with the actions of other war-time presidents in American history, giving examples such as George Washington steam-opening mail communication, Woodrow Wilson monitoring all international communications, and FDR’s displacement of 120,000 people with Japanese ancestry in internment camps.
“The truth of the matter is this,” he said, “the president has been more respectful of civil liberties and civil rights in the fight against terrorism than any previous war-time president in the history of the United States, and I am grateful for that.”
The fifth and final observation asks us not to consider the War on Terror in the way that wars have traditionally been considered. Though the past five years could be thought of as a period of peace, according to Ashcroft they could also be thought of as a period of preparation. He gave the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 as an example, saying that there was a period of eight years between that first attack and 9/11.
“Those conditioned to understand war only in old-time conventional terms could be seriously misled,” he said. “We should think very carefully before we come to the conclusion that the war is over.”
Ashcroft concluded his speech by linking the idea of opportunity in America with freedom, stating that the thing that makes us have more, achieve more, and enjoy more than any other country is liberty.
“That’s why security has only one purpose,” he said. “It’s to enrich and enhance liberty, to safeguard it, to promote it, to make it stronger after security measures are imposed than they are before they’re imposed.” He recited the last four lines of “The New Colossus,” the poem on the base of the statue of liberty, to illustrate the power of freedom.
“She didn’t say ‘Give me your National Merit Scholarship winners’,” he said. “She didn’t say ‘if you aren’t a Tarheel or didn’t go to Duke you need not apply’.”
He ended with a tone of optimism: “It is freedom that ennobles us, it is freedom that empowers us, and freedom will make America endure.”