Ashcroft Speech at Columbia Met With Cheers and Jeers

When John Ashcroft stepped from behind a curtain and onto the stage of a Columbia University auditorium last night, he was greeted with jeers that drowned out applause.If he was fazed, he didn’t show it. Addressing a crowd of mostly students, he calmly proceeded to defend his record as the nation’s top law enforcement official during President Bush’s first term.“The best part of the Patriot Act is that it protects the liberty of people to make that funny sound in the back of the room,” he said, after someone shouted at him from the audience.Mr. Ashcroft, 63, who now teaches law at Regent University in Virginia, told students that America doesn’t have a “policy of torture,” that the Patriot Act passed after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks “narrowly extended the law,” and that it is “against my religion to impose my religion.” He also said that he trembled with fear when he came to his morning meetings with Mr. Bush, whom he described as a “microauditor.” He talked about decreases in violent crime during his four years as attorney general and how he vigorously prosecuted corporate fraud scandals.During a question-and-answer period, someone asked about a statement he had made to a Senate panel that seemed to suggest that criticism of America’s anti-terrorism policies aids terrorists. “Disagreement is not treason, hasn’t been, and don’t think it will ever be,” Mr. Ashcroft answered. He added, “We should be encouraged to be careful about the accuracy of the statements we make.”He was at times self-deprecating, such as when he remarked how he lost a senate election in 2000 to a dead man, Mel Carnahan, the Missouri governor who died in a plane crash. He even won laughs when he joked, “Old attorney generals never die, they just lose their appeal.” As he said the punch line, someone shouted, “Civil rights!” Mr. Ashcroft quickly retorted: “I haven’t lost mine, and you don’t sound like you’ve lost yours.”Mr. Ashcroft was invited to speak by a campus conservative group, which helped organize security by, in part, recruiting the members of its club who are football players to be ushers. The beefy ushers, wearing black suits, stood quietly by the side walls of the auditorium, ready to grab anybody who attempted to rush the stage. No one did.The appearance of Mr. Ashcroft was less than welcomed by a portion of the Columbia community. Greeting him in Morningside Heights were about 200 protesters, mostly students, lining the sidewalk between 115th and 116th Streets, pressed between wooden police barriers and the facade of a campus building. They carried signs such as, “Is my phone tapped yet?”One of the more senior protesters was the executive director of the NYCLU, Donna Lieberman, who stood on sound equipment boxes and shouted into a bullhorn that Mr. Bush and Mr. Ashcroft “systematically deceived the American people and the entire world about their motives for going to war.”“John Ashcroft should be held accountable. He has done more damage to the American way of life and to democracy than any other individual,” she said.

Ashcroft Speech at Columbia Met With Cheers and Jeers

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