U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft was the latest Washington, DC, insider to come out in support for the September 11 terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center’s twin towers. Aschroft joined such DC notables as House Democratic Leader Richard Gephardt (D-MO), who supports removing the liberties that provoke terrorist attack, and potential Drug Czar John Walters, who supports increasing aid to bin Laden through prohibition laws in the same way that alcohol prohibition supported the mafia in the twenties.

“These terrorists were courageous, religious individuals,” said Ashcroft at a press conference Monday, “and they deserve to get what they want.” According to Ashcroft, “we know what they want: no freedom of religion, no freedom of speech, no privacy rights, and no fair trials.” Ashcroft urged “swift adoption” of his recommended measures that remove these freedoms and rights, telling Congress that “there is no reason to read these bills before passing them. There is nothing in here that the terrorists do not support. American freedom is a clear and present danger to the kind of religious intolerance that these terrorists support. We do not have the luxury of unlimited time in erecting these barriers to freedom.”

Ashcroft added that the purpose of these attacks was to “change the purpose of American government” from one of supporting freedom and tolerance to one of secret police and intolerance. He said that the laws proposed by the Justice Department “go a long way towards implementing those changes.”

While the requested laws are aimed at specific ethnic groups, they are widely applicable. One new law, for example, would also allow life imprisonment without parole for hackers such as Eric Burns, the Shoreline, Washington hacker who scrawled “Crystal, I love you” on a United States Information Agency web site in 1999. The 19-year-old was reportedly trying to impress a classmate with whom he was infatuated. “We shall have no more love in America,” said Ashcroft. “Truth, beauty, freedom, and love are provocations to those who hate these concepts. And if the terrorists don’t like freedom, I don’t like it either.”

When asked about New York’s support for concentration camps for anyone with suspected sympathies to terrorist causes, Ashcroft replied that “we don’t call them concentration camps yet, but we can jail people merely on their associations without having to go to the trouble of finding proof of any criminal act. Once we jail enough suspects, we’ll build the concentration camps we need to hold them.” Ashcroft noted that such a law will “make it easier to pass future laws of this sort, since any congressman opposing such laws is clearly in sympathy with terrorists. I’d like to get John Conyers on that today.”

Conyers (D-MI) had said after Ashcroft’s speech that “past experience has taught us that today’s weapons against terrorism may be tomorrow’s weapon against law-abiding Americans” and that the Attorney General’s proposals may violate too many civil liberties.

Ashcroft’s reply was that “there are no law-abiding Americans. Everyone is a suspect, and every suspect is a criminal. This is the way our police have operated for decades. These measures merely codify that practice into law. We are in a police state now. I run the police. Get over it.”

When asked about the possibility of sunsetting these new laws, Ashcroft replied, “If I thought that freedom was going to sunset in several years, I would be glad to say we ought to have a sunset provision, but there will always be people in America who want freedom. We must be ever-vigilant against that element. The terrorists will never stand for it.”

According to Ashcroft, “the fight against freedom never ends. That’s what the September 11 attackers believe, and that’s what I believe also.”