Given his own assessment of our predicament three years ago, Bob Graham ought to be calling today for a monument to be raised to the attorney general he voted not to confirm.
And what happened to all those terrorists Graham talked about? Were they phantoms -- like the weapons of mass destruction that the CIA (under Bob Graham's congressional oversight) mistakenly believed were stockpiled in Iraq?
No, we may not have found WMD in Iraq. But we did find terrorists in the United States.
You may not have seen Dan Rather and CBS News making a major issue of it. It may not have hit the front pages of The New York Times as often as the story of a few U.S. troops abusing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. But the record shows that John Aschroft's Justice Department tracked down, arrested, prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned numerous terrorists that threatened America on American soil.
Six men in Lackawanna, N.Y., pleaded guilty to terrorism-related charges, including "providing material support to the al Qaeda terrorist organization." Another nine men were convicted for taking part in what the Justice Department termed "the Virginia Jihad network." A leader of this group was convicted of "conspiracy to levy war against the United States."
Iyman Faris, an Ohio-based truck driver, scouted the Brooklyn Bridge for a potential al Qaeda hit. Ashcroft's Justice Department caught him, convicted him and put him in jail.
When Bush first nominated Ashcroft, Time magazine derided the choice. Said Time: "The teetotaling son of a famed Pentecostal minister, Ashcroft, a onetime Missouri governor so strict that he refused to dance at his own inaugural ball, is the kind of hard-line conservative who makes liberal toes curl."
Now those liberals better uncurl their toes, get down on their knees, and pray that the next attorney general has the moral courage to ignore them as thoroughly as John Ashcroft did.