John Ashcroft, Prophet of Doom

You wouldn'T think of a slightly kooky ideologue who was exposed in the media for covering up naked statues?and hiding from calico cats, which he reportedly believes are a sign of the devil?as a great p.r. huckster. You'd certainly not think of a former senator who lost his election to a dead man as a savvy media manipulator. But in fact, while Attorney General John Ashcroft might be pretty dismal when it comes to his own personal p.r., he's been quite brilliant at using the media to seduce the public into allowing the Bush administration to curtail civil liberties in the name of the war on terrorism, as polls seem to show support for his antiterrorism measures.

Perhaps Ashcroft's Christian fundamentalism works for him in this regard. There's something about religious passion that endears a public that is so frightened it wants to believe. While stone-faced, secular-appearing Dick Cheney is the muscle brought in to bludgeon nonbelievers who have the temerity to question the administration, Ashcroft is the ardent prophet who keeps the believers believing. And the voracious 24/7 media pack makes it all easy: When Ashcroft announced a few weeks ago that his plan for scary new FBI surveillance of the Internet was giving FBI agents no more power than the average "teenager" now has surfing the Web, there was a blip of mild suspicion, some anger on a few editorial pages?even a few tough questions from the tv morning show set. But then word came of a new terror warning and the media pack dropped everything, elbowing one another out of the way to get the latest non-story, cranking out further sensational headlines and soundbites.

It seems that the Bushies don't just use their announcements of new measures and their warnings of supposed new terror attacks as ways to deflect from the government's failings; they also use them to shut down discussion about the administration's power grabs. And last week it appeared as if the Prophet of Doom was once again brought in to achieve both those goals.

"I am pleased to announce today a significant step forward in the war on terrorism," a solemn but proud Ashcroft said in a live television hook-up from Moscow. He interrupted a state-sponsored trip to announce that "we have captured a known terrorist," specifically Jose Padilla, aka Abdullah al Muhajir, aka the Dirty Bomber. It was a grand statement that would certainly deflect attention from the FBI's and CIA's bungling, and would also help Ashcroft get public and congressional support for his most draconian present and future proposals. If opening lines define a statement's purpose, this was a revealing one indeed: Ashcroft didn't begin by saying he was pleased to announce we may have thwarted a possible attack. No, he was happy to tell us that "a significant step" had been achieved in "the war on terrorism," a war that was declared by his boss, George W. Bush, and the success of which is being challenged by members of Congress.

It was also curious that Ashcroft had to tell us about the Padilla detainment himself, all the way from Moscow no less: In the first few days following the "Bush Knew" headlines last month?induced by the revelations that the FBI and CIA didn't, as the mantra goes, "connect the dots"?Ashcroft was nowhere to be found in the U.S., let alone in Russia. Dick Cheney and even Laura Bush?traveling in far-off Romania?were trotted out to hurl charges of disloyalty at those treasonous critics ("the most cynical among the most partisan," as the partisan White House flack Ari Fleischer cynically said last week). But Ashcroft, the cabinet member who presides directly over the FBI and CIA, was kept far, far away from the cameras. Prophets, after all, must remain sacred and blameless if they're to be effective. Having Ashcroft on the defensive would only tarnish him; better to haul out tough Big Daddy Cheney for that.

Always devoutly on the offensive, the sober Ashcroft surfaced a few weeks later to announce new measures allowing FBI agents to go undercover into mosques, spy on people in Internet chat rooms and fingerprint Muslims and Arabs entering the country, all in the name of protecting us from the evildoers. (Now that he's announced the detainment of Padilla, a former gang member who is Puerto Rican, one wonders if Ashcroft will soon announce that they'll be snooping on all gang members?and Puerto Ricans.)

Prophets have been most effective at instilling fear with fire and brimstone decrees. And today, "fire" and "brimstone" have been updated to "nuclear" and "radioactive." In his statements last week in Moscow, Ashcroft spewed the dreaded, frightening buzzwords over and over again: "radiological" and "radioactive." With melodramatic flair, he announced that "we have disrupted an unfolding terrorist plot to attack the United States by exploding a radioactive 'dirty bomb,'" which Ashcroft warned could "cause mass death and injury."

But it turns out that, like other prophets used in the service of promoting a larger power structure, Ashcroft's zeal can't always be controlled by his sponsors. (I'm thinking, with regard to media-age prophets, of the increasingly unhinged anchorman Howard Beale, played by Peter Finch in Network, whose anticorporate, antiestablishment proselytizing to the masses brought huge ratings to the network, which encouraged his rantings?until he told people to shut the television off.) A day after Ashcroft's Moscow announcement, the administration was downplaying the gravity of the Padilla detainment. "I don't think there was actually a plot beyond some fairly loose talk and [Padilla's] coming in here obviously to plan further deeds," Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz said. The following day USA Today reported that Ashcroft was being slapped around in the White House for overplaying the entire affair. Critics, meanwhile, rightly pointed out that it was hyperbolic to claim that a dirty bomb, dangerous as it would be to people in the direct vicinity, would cause "mass death."

This is not the first time that Ashcroft has blown events completely out of proportion, seemingly to deflect attention. In addition to dramatically spearheading several terror warnings that came to naught, you may recall that our busy Attorney General was doing a media blitz back in January announcing the fate of skinny little John Walker Lindh, the so-called "American Taliban," who'd been in custody for weeks but whom Ashcroft had suddenly decided to turn into public enemy number one in the war on terrorism.

That was actually the first tipoff of how the administration would come to cynically use events surrounding the terrorist attacks to get the media spotlight off the issues it is fearful about. Only weeks before Ashcroft's Walker Lindh announcements, it was rightly a federal prosecutor in the locality where the arrest took place (Boston) who announced the government's prosecution plans for Richard "shoebomber" Reid. And so it should have been with Walker Lindh. But by mid-January the luster surrounding the Bushies' Afghanistan military action was starting to fade, as the Enron story broke out bigtime. Between Enron and the increasing criticism over the failure to capture Osama bin Laden or Mullah Omar, the administration needed a diversion. Enter the Prophet of Doom, who held a press conference and sat on the Today show, making as if Walker Lindh, a stupid kid from Marin County, was an equal plotter with bin Laden and would be tried as such, stealing the media attention.

So now, here he is again, interrupting his trip to breathlessly promote the capture of a former Chicago gang member who hadn't even gotten near any radioactive materials?"loose talk" as Wolfowitz said?making as if we were on the precipice of a nuclear catastrophe. Maybe soon he'll tell us that the calico cats were behind it all.

Michelangelo Signorile can be reached at [www.signorile.com](http://www.signorile.com).