Ethan Bronner, deputy foreign editor of the NY Times, has a review in today’s New York Times Book Review on several recent books that share a central theme — i.e., that the War on Terror combined with Attorney General John Ashcroft, as one book put it, ”are responsible for some of the most egregious civil liberties violations in the history of our nation.” Mr. Bronner is much more measured than that statement, and the entire article is well worth reading. Here are a couple of tidbits:

If you believe these changes are eroding the liberties that make this nation great, these books are for you. They will give texture and sharpness to your rage. You can pick from among them based on your level of concern. If you are incensed, go for the Brown essay collection, ”Lost Liberties.” In it, Aryeh Neier says, ”We are at risk of entering another of those dark periods of American history when the country abandons its proud tradition of respect for civil liberties.” And Nancy Chang of the Center for Constitutional Rights says that executive measures taken in the wake of the Patriot Act ”are responsible for some of the most egregious civil liberties violations in the history of our nation.” Given the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus during the Civil War, the Palmer raids in World War I and the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II, both of these statements seem to me hard to defend.
Of course, one legitimate complaint that Ashcroft and many others could lodge against nearly all these books is that they fail to spend any time on the threat to liberty not from Ashcroft but from Al Qaeda. Liberty is meaningless without security, as Viet Dinh, the former assistant attorney general who wrote much of the Patriot Act, has often said. Stuart Taylor Jr., a legal journalist, put it this way in The National Journal in December 2002: ”Should we eschew fishing expeditions through Ryder truck rental records and fertilizer purchases? Not if we want to prevent terrorist mass murders. And I, for one, am a lot less worried about the government snooping through my credit card bills and psychiatric records than about being anthraxed in the subway or killed by a nuclear explosion in my downtown Washington office.” While this strikes me as too far in the other direction, such words are useful to keep in mind while reading of Ashcroft’s sins.