Minority Report: Close to Reality?

Reviewing Attorney General John Ashcroft’s guidelines for terrorism investigations, civil libertarian Nat Hentoff warns that they "could be part of the new Steven Spielberg-Tom Cruise movie, Minority Report, which envisions the nabbing of ‘pre-criminals.’" In Minority Report, an elite FBI "pre-crime" team, acting on prophecies uttered by a team of psychics called "Pre-Cogs," arrests and summarily punishes people who may someday commit violent crime. President Bush has already announced a policy of "pre-emptive" military strikes against foreign regimes, and the Ashcroft "Guidelines" would allow similar "pre-emptive" actions against Americans who have neither committed nor planned criminal offenses.

Writing in the September 2002 issue of The Progressive, Hentoff observes: "On page three of ‘The Attorney General’s Guidelines on General Crimes, Racketeering Enterprise and Terrorism Enterprise Investigations,’ we are told: ‘A terrorism enterprise investigation may be initiated when facts or circumstances reasonably indicate that two or more persons are engaged in an enterprise for the purpose of … furthering political or social goals wholly or in part through activities that involve force or violence and a federal crime....’"

The tricky parts of this statement, Hentoff notes, are the elastic qualifiers "reasonably" and "wholly or in part." "These insidiously malleable guidelines for terrorism investigations could apply to political action (and the reaction) during demonstrations by environmentalists, anti-globalizationists, animal rights pickets, or union members on strike, as well as pro-lifers trying to talk, and only to talk, to women entering abortion clinics (‘obstruction’ at clinics can be a federal crime)."