Ashcroft, terrorism and the missing photo-op.

No one ever said that being a power-hungry Christian evangelical attorney general on a zealous mission to stamp out evil would be easy. Even harder is the task of distracting the attention of a press corps that is just now beginning to tepidly challenge the lies your boss offered for invading a foreign country. So last week was another hectic week of congressional appearances, press conferences, television interviews and sound bites for America's chief law enforcement officer. There was one event, however, that John Ashcroft couldn't fit into his busy schedule.

First, let's replay the highlights: The Justice Dept. was exposed early last week by its own inspector general as having abused hundreds of immigrants who were rounded up and thrown in jail after 9/11. Some detainees were given fake phone numbers for lawyers and told they couldn't make a call again for another week after they got a wrong number. Others were slammed against walls by cops just before they were to give videotaped statements. Of the 762 detained, some of whom were held for months, none was ever charged with a crime.

On the day the report was released, the Justice Dept. announced that fugitive Eric Rudolph, suspected of bombing the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, two gay bars in Atlanta and abortion clinics in Alabama, was apprehended in North Carolina. He'd apparently been fed and harbored by people in the area who supported his antigovernment views.

Two days later, Ashcroft was defending himself against the inspector general's report before the House Judiciary Committee, demanding even more power for crackdowns of terrorists.

"The law has several weaknesses which terrorists could exploit, undermining our defenses," he railed about the Patriot Act, pushing for enhanced powers, and sloughing off any criticism about abuses and offering "no apologies."

So what was the missing element of the week? Ashcroft himself didn't hold a press conference touting the apprehension of Rudolph, who was caught purely by accident, when a police officer picked him up rummaging through a dumpster.

It was peculiar because there isn't a camera, a photo-op or a press opportunity that gets by Ashcroft without his hijacking it. You would think that he'd want to brag about Rudolph's capture at a time when he's under attack for going too far in cracking down on terrorists. It would surely be a way for him to change the subject and focus on the supposedly good things the Justice Dept. is doing. It's how he's always operated. Whether it was the apprehension of skinny little John Walker Lindh, or the hyped-up claims about the alleged "dirty bomber" Jose Padilla, Ashcroft always surfaces on television to let us know what a great job he's doing in ferreting out terrorists. For Padilla, he even did a live hook-up from Russia. And Ashcroft quickly pounced upon the capture of the DC sniper suspects, grandstanding about how important it is to make sure they get fried for their crimes.

But Eric Rudolph is different: He is a Christian terrorist. More to the point, Rudolph appears to have been involved with the Christian Identity movement, which preaches ideas about race that?as the Trent Lott imbroglio exposed?still exist in the Republican party and are still played up by Republican politicians. George W. Bush courted that vote when he went to Bob Jones University in 2000, and he surely doesn't want to throw away those voters in the 2004 election.

"I would simply say that we believe that the Caucasian people are the literal descendants of the lost 10 tribes of Israel," Dan Gayman, pastor of the Church of Israel, to which Rudolph once belonged, told the Washington Post, "and [Caucasians] would occupy a place of prominence in the plan of God."

While that might sound over-the-edge even for Ashcroft, don't forget that the attorney general once praised Southern Partisan, a neo-confederate rag.

Said Ashcroft back in 1998: "[Southern Partisan] helps set the record straight? You've got a heritage of doing that, of defending Southern patriots like [Robert E.] Lee, [Stonewall] Jackson and [Jefferson] Davis. Traditionalists must do more. I've got to do more. We've all got to stand up and speak in this respect, or else we'll be taught that these people were giving their lives, subscribing their sacred fortunes and their honor to some perverted agenda."

Unlike the suspects in the other alleged terrorist cases Ashcroft has been out front on, Rudolph has a lot of people in rural North Carolina?a Bush "red" state?who appear to be supporting him. One restaurant owner in the town of Peachtree put up a "Pray for Eric Rudolph" sign. (It's curious that none of these hatemongers have been rounded up in an FBI sweep the way Arab immigrants and Arab-Americans have been for the past two years; if anyone had expressed support for Mohammed Atta shortly after 9/11, they'd be rotting in jail right now, still waiting for a lawyer).

Perhaps Ashcroft?or Karl Rove or others in the White House?just didn't want footage floating around of the attorney general boldly condemning a racist, antiabortion, antigay Christian terrorist the way he condemns Islamic terrorists. (That may be especially true now, when Christian right groups are needling the Bushies for being soft on homosexuals.) Ashcroft did release a strongly worded written statement on Rudolph's arrest, but he didn't attend a press conference about Rudolph or go on CNN. And surely a White House that orchestrates presidential fighter jet landings knows that pictures speak louder than words.

The right-wing punditocracy, meanwhile, has been just as mum about Rudolph and his Christian Identity background, a silence that betrays their own anti-Muslim sentiments. Back when sniper suspects John Allen Mohammed and John Lee Malvo were apprehended, every wingnut from Ann Coulter to Andrew Sullivan couldn't shut up about the suspects being Muslims?and how they proved the Islamic threat. Victor Davis Hanson, on National Review Online, said that Malvo and Mohammed represented "Al Quadism" in this country, and noted that the Beltway killings were "as dangerous as the work of terror cells."

Last week there wasn't a peep from him or anyone at the National Review about the "terror cells" of the Old South and the West, or about "Christianism." Rupert Murdoch's Weekly Standard, meanwhile, ran four stories about the meltdown at the New York Times, which centers on a plagiarist and fabricator who happens to be African-American, offering the right an opportunity to bash affirmative action. But there was nothing much about the capture of Rudolph, a white-supremacist terrorist, let alone a discussion of his motivations or milieu. Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol and his gang were Bush cheerleaders during the invasion of Iraq, telling us we had to overthrow Saddam Hussein in order to fight terrorism. Conquering Baghdad is one thing. Taking on the backwoods of North Carolina and the rest of the South is quite another.

Michelangelo Signorile hosts a national radio show each weekday from noon to 3 p.m. EST on Sirius Satellite Radio, stream 149. He can be reached at [www.signorile.com](http://www.signorile.com).