SNOOPING ON NEIGHBOR

Desperate is a word I never thought I'd use to describe Attorney General
John Ashcroft. But that was before he made the National Neighborhood Watch
program an unofficial arm of the Office of Homeland Security. Has the FBI's
trail gone cold already?

There are plenty of reasons to worry about the attorney general's
neighbor-against-neighbor approach, which harks back to Cold War days and
fear-mongering. Because untrained members of watch programs lack the
expertise to identify terrorists, it probably means they would snoop on
every Arab or Muslim in a given neighborhood. That's racial profiling in
the extreme, guaranteed to encourage ethnic scapegoating. Don't you find it
strange that this same attorney general never asked any of us to keep an
eye on right wing groups after Timothy McVeigh did the unthinkable?

Perhaps this Ashcroft announcement was done mainly for public relations. Ed
McMahon, the former "Tonight Show" sidekick and current Neighborhood Watch
spokesman, said the group's expanded focus was "in the great tradition of
American volunteerism."

This doesn't sound like a campaign to put unarmed neighborhood volunteers
on the trail of potentially dangerous suspects. Instead, it sounds like a
government campaign to make us feel safer. If that's what the
administration is shooting for, it's trampling on an awful lot of our
rights to get there.

In this war, President George W. Bush has even given children a role. To
find out what stories the White House is feeding your kids about what good
citizens are supposed to do to thwart terrorism, go to
www.whitehouse.gov/kids. There you'll meet Lydia, a Philadelphia woman who
foiled a sneak British attack -- we didn't call it terrorism then --
against our country on Dec. 4, 1777. She overheard British military leaders
planning the assault when they were guests in her home. She mentioned this
to nobody, not even her husband. Instead, she crossed British lines to
alert Gen. George Washington's army. Arriving for what it had expected to
be a sneak attack at Valley Forge, the British Army canceled the operation
after finding Washington's men armed and waiting.

One point of this story seems to be that all of us, youngsters included,
have a duty to spy on others for Uncle Sam. Another more disturbing message
seems to be that youngsters need not tell their parents what information
they have gathered to pass on to the government, just like Lydia.

Then there are those government television ads in which drug users are
supposed to equate snorting cocaine with financing terrorism. That's
because some associates of Osama bin Laden get their funding partly through
trafficking in drugs. I don't think those ads are going to convert many
junkies. Besides, it's a hypocritical message. Terrorists finance their
operations through illicit diamond trade too, but I have yet to hear
anybody in the administration urge us to boycott diamonds.

During the Reagan administration, however, some groups called for a diamond
boycott as a way to pressure mineral-rich South Africa to dismantle
apartheid. Donald T. Regan, the White House chief of staff, warned a group
of reporters that sanctions would hurt the United States, because the U.S.
counts on South Africa as a supplier of strategic minerals, such as
manganese, platinum, rhodium, chromium and diamonds.

But the most telling line was this: "Are the women of America prepared to
give up all their jewelry?" he asked.

Not that he took a poll to find out. Probably didn't even ask his wife. Oh,
but he may have consulted his stock portfolio.

Back when we didn't have a CIA, FBI, DEA, Customs and Office of Homeland
Security, folks like Lydia probably were crucial to our ability to weed out
suspicious characters bent on ruining our tea party. But snooping on
genuine terrorists is a dangerous business. That is why we spend billions
of dollars a year on police agencies that are supposed to keep us safe.

Asking neighbors to be vigilant isn't a bad idea in these times unless it
causes us to turn profane eyes on every American or immigrant who happens
to be Muslim or Arab. That would encourage intolerance and poison the
atmosphere; it already has been tainted too much since Sept. 11.