by Jesse Jackson

About the author: Jesse Jackson is founder of the National Rainbow Coalition, a social justice organization. He has been active in civil rights issues since the 1960s.

We wage a war on terrorism to make America safe, to keep America free. President George W. Bush told the American people that although the terrorist attacks were designed to strike at our core freedoms as a democracy, they would not succeed.

One would think that the administration would be careful not to take away the very liberties that we set out to defend. But Attorney General John Ashcroft appears to march to a different drummer. He has goaded the White House into enacting by executive fiat the greatest encroachment of core American constitutional rights since the Supreme Court disgraced itself by declaring segregation the...