By Richard Cohen

Attorney General John Ashcroft does not read newspapers or watch TV news. Instead, he's briefed by aides. It's possible, then, that Ashcroft does not know that many people don't think of him anymore as the comforting head of the Justice Department but instead as the scariest man in government. I see him as the director of the Office of Homeland Insecurity.

Ever since Sept. 11, Ashcroft has functioned as the real-life equivalent of the prefect of police in "Casablanca" -- rounding up "the usual suspects" and, like him, doing so without the usual legal safeguards. Their exact number is not known nor are their names. They exist in an American gulag -- a term I use with purposeful exaggeration. This is serious stuff.

More recently, Ashcroft broadened his powers to the point where much of the legal community snapped awake. In the name of battling terrorism, he authorized the Bureau of Prisons "to monitor mail or communications with attorneys . . . subject to specific procedural safeguards"(emphasis added). And what are those safeguards? Nothing to trouble a judge about. The feds will decide the matter for themselves.

The stated reason for this de facto constitutional amendment (the Sixth Amendment guarantees right to counsel) is that a lawyer may inadvertently or intentionally pass on information from his jailed client to someone on the outside. The Justice Department offers no examples of this happening -- but, look, it could. What would be the problem, then, with going to a judge and asking permission to snoop? The feds don't say.

The point to remember here is that not one of the 1,100 or so detainees has been convicted of anything. In many cases, they have not even been indicted. Mostly foreign-born, they are in dire need of legal representation. But would they talk candidly to a lawyer if they knew the very government that was holding them was listening in? Not in this world.

Ashcroft acted within the spirit of the recently enacted, Orwellian- named USA Patriot Act, which is a broad expansion of the government's police powers. The law was predicated on two assumptions. The first is that it is needed. The second, just as important, is that the government would not abuse its new powers. Ashcroft has just shredded the second assumption.

Keen and loyal readers of this column will remember -- as Ashcroft would if he got home delivery -- that when others were lambasting him for issuing apparently unfounded terrorist alerts, I stood by him. Even back when he was being called racist for the ugly manner in which he blocked Senate confirmation of an African American judge, I defended him. The man was no racist, I judiciously said -- merely a ruthless politician looking to use the death penalty to win reelection. (He lost anyway.)

Now Ashcroft has become the conservative point man for what, you may recall, is a very conservative administration. In the midst of the anthrax scare, the terrorism investigation and, of course, the ongoing search for Chandra Levy, Ashcroft found time to block Oregon's Death With Dignity Act. The law permitted terminally ill patients to take lethal drugs with medical approval.

Since almost anything having to do with the creation or termination of life -- everything but capital punishment, of course -- is linked to the fight against abortion rights, Ashcroft brought the full weight of the federal government down on poor, bucolic Oregon. To hell with states' rights -- not to mention compassion and common sense. Nothing takes precedence over abortion.

But the "emergency" regulation to put Big Brother in the room with a lawyer and his client ought to unite both conservatives and liberals. To get an idea of how this would work, I turned to Bruce Cutler, who three times won acquittals for John Gotti and whose removal as counsel finally got the government a conviction. Cutler, who knows something about defending a perceived public menace, always assumed the feds were listening in and felt constrained as a result.

"Everybody would look up at the ceiling," he said.

With any luck, the current crisis will pass and the prefix "late" will be added to Osama bin Laden's name. Still, things will never revert to what they once were -- we now recognize the continuing terrorism threat. But it's a virtual certainty that the power granted the government on an emergency basis will be tenaciously retained even after the emergency is past.

So we have to be grudging when asked to dilute our constitutional rights or we may, like the Founding Fathers themselves, learn the hard way why they are so precious. The future, I grant you, is scary -- but so are John Ashcroft's methods for dealing with it.