La doctrine Ashcroft

La doctrine Ashcroft

24 décembre 2002 — L'affaire de l'arrestation de centaine d'immigrants qui se présentaient, à los Angeles, pour régulariser leurs situations dans les règles légales, a provoqué un choc aux USA. Cette affaire a eu lieu la semaine dernière, telle qu'elle est rapporté par l'agence Reuters le 18 décembre :

« Hundreds of Iranian and other Middle East citizens were in southern California jails on Wednesday after coming forward to comply with a new rule to register with immigration authorities only to wind up handcuffed and behind bars.

» Shocked and frustrated Islamic and immigrant groups estimate that more than 500 people have been arrested in Los Angeles, neighboring Orange County and San Diego in the past three days under a new nationwide anti-terrorism program. Some unconfirmed reports put the figure as high as 1,000.

» The arrests sparked a demonstration by hundreds of Iranians outside a Los Angeles immigration office. The protesters carried banners saying “What's next? Concentration camps?” and “What happened to liberty and justice?.”

» A spokesman for the Immigration and Naturalization Service said no numbers of people arrested would be made public. A Justice Department spokesman could not be reached for comment. The head of the southern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union compared the arrests to the internment of Japanese Americans in camps during the Second World War. “I think it is shocking what is happening. It is reminiscent of what happened in the past with the internment of Japanese Americans. We are getting a lot of telephone calls from people. We are hearing that people went down wanting to cooperate and then they were detained,” said Ramona Ripston, the ACLU's executive director. »

Ces arrestations ont provoqué des protestations immédiates, d'abord des groupes concernés et de leurs correspondants aux États-Unis (les Américains d'origine arabe, les Américains musulmans, etc.). Une réunion de la Muslim American convention, les 22 et 23 décembre, a vu des attaques particulièrement virulentes contre ces événements et le Patriot Act, qui est la loi générale anti-terroriste.

Le président du bureau de la convention, Omar Ricci, a estimé que « The Patriot Act is the biggest attack on democracy in America right now ». A l'autre extrême, on trouve cette déclaration emphatique de Bryan Sierra, porte-parole du département de la justice : « the Patriot Act as an incredibly valuable tool in the war on terrorism. »

Derrière le Patriot Act, il y a ce qu'on nomme désormais la “doctrine Ashcroft”, du nom du secrétaire à le justice, qui est finalement une version intérieure, pour les USA, de la doctrine stratégique préemptive adoptée récemment par les USA. Le journaliste et spécialiste des questions juridiques Siobhan Gorman a publié un texte présentant longuement cette “doctrine”, dans le National Journal du 21 décembre. Ci-dessous, nous donnons quelques paragraphes introduisant son exposition détaillée

« In Attorney General John D. Ashcroft's post-9/11 worldview, the United States is a battleground, and nothing less than the fate of the nation hangs in the balance. Prevention has become his mantra. "There are no second chances" in the war on terrorism, Ashcroft recently warned federal prosecutors. "Failure risks the security of our nation and the survival of our freedom."

» Prevention was the perhaps-impossible task assigned to Ashcroft less than 24 hours after terrorists slammed hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. "John, you make sure this does not happen again," President Bush instructed the attorney general. Wanting the Justice Department to, as he put it, "seize this moment in history," Ashcroft immediately commissioned his deputies to draw up battle plans to defend the homeland.

» Before 9/11, it had been nearly 60 years since the United States had been attacked on its own soil, and 135 years since a war had been fought on the U.S. mainland. But suddenly, the United States found itself embroiled in what Viet Dinh, the assistant attorney general who is the chief architect of Ashcroft's aggressive new approach to law enforcement, calls "guerrilla warfare on steroids."

» "It's a different kind of guerrilla war than the one I'm used to," said Dinh, who at age 10 fled with his family from war-torn Vietnam to America. "The objective is different. It's not gaining a foothold on a hill or taking over a hamlet. It's basically to disrupt, destabilize, and ultimately defeat the Western order," he said. "All they need to do is sow fear and instability."

» The heart of the government's aggressive new law enforcement strategy — an approach that might be called the Ashcroft Doctrine — is pre-emption. In contrast to traditional law enforcement, the focus is not on punishing past criminal activity but on getting potential terrorists behind bars-using any available pretext-before they can do harm. The thinking inside the Justice Department is that it's one thing to wait until someone holds up a bank but quite another to wait until a terrorist sets off a dirty bomb three blocks from the White House.

» The Ashcroft Doctrine has four basic tenets: 1) terrorism's potential toll is so enormous that prevention is essential; 2) a powerful government is a prerequisite for real liberty; 3) terrorism is an act of war and therefore should be treated differently from other crimes; and 4) the rules of war trump normal civil-rights protections when the government is pursuing alleged terrorists. »

Les arrestations de la semaine dernière, — qui pourraient paradoxalement plus illustrer la maladresse bureaucratique de l'INS et du département de la justice que leur caractère policier — conduisent également, après les premières réactions accompagnant ces événements, à une très sérieuse remise en cause de cette politique de Ashcroft et de l'administration GW.

La question centrale tourne autour de la situation aujourd'hui aux USA, les mesures exécutées étant des mesures d'urgence d'état de guerre. Les États-Unis sont-ils en guerre ? Le Congrès a éludé la question en votant des pouvoirs de guerre à GW, qui ne sont pas l'acte solennel de la déclaration de guerre ; en même temps que la question, les parlementaires US ont éludé leurs responsabilités, comme l'ont mis en évidence plus d'un millier d'historiens américains qui avaient demandé en septembre que le Congrès se prononce clairement sur la guerre.

Aujourd'hui, les réflexions fondamentales se développent, comme le montre cet extrait de la lettre d'information Lighthouse, du National Journal,

« Second Thoughts on the Ashcroft Doctrine

» The post-9/11 policies of the Bush Justice Department may make John Ashcroft the most precedent-setting attorney general in decades. This point was illustrated (yet again!) by the mass arrests in Los Angeles last week of otherwise law-abiding Iranians who agree more with the Statue of Liberty's promise than with the bureaucrats at the Immigration and Naturalization Service. (In fact, many were nabbed after agree to register with the INS.)

» Supporters of Ashcroft argue that immigration crack downs and "pre-emptive" law enforcement are necessary because drastic measures are needed during wartime. But not everyone agrees with the premises of the Ashcroft Doctrine, as it has come to be known.

» "We are not at war," Robert Higgs, Independent Institute research fellow and editor of The Independent Review recently told the National Journal. "If the Congress wanted us to be at war, it is free to declare war on somebody. The executive branch has no authority to take it upon itself to act as if we are at war."

» Besides, doesn't the prospect of war force policymakers to rethink the steps that have lead to hostilities? "The attorney general keeps arguing ... that the objective of terrorists is to bring about disorder in our society. I think that's bogus," Higgs said. "The objective of terrorists is to take revenge for the actions of the U.S. government in the Middle East." Bush's

advisers, he said, "don't want to address that, because it calls into question American foreign policy."

» Questioning domestic war policies, however, is clearly becoming more common — even from within the party of Bush and Ashcroft. Rep. Bob Barr (R-GA), Rep. Dick Armey (R-Texas), conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, and New York Times columnist William Safire, among others, have been increasingly vocal critics of the Ashcroft Doctrine. Whether their arguments can hold off the juggernaut is, of course, another matter. »