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SUMMARY: John Ashcroft's from the government, and he's here to help - at least, that's what he says.

U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft is up and running on a month-long public relations blitz intended to silence the rising chorus calling for changes or outright repeal of the USA Patriot Act, the controversial anti-terrorism law that gives authorities to conduct secret searches, more easily tap phones and check up on what you might be reading at the library. He kicked off his confidence-building tour Wednesday in Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia with some big, fat fibs.

"We have used these tools to prevent terrorists from unleashing more death and destruction on our soil," he said in one speech.

Really? The examples he cited involve a recent arrest in connection with a plot to smuggle a shoulder-fired missile into the county - a case served up to U.S. authorities on a silver platter by Russian intelligence services - and the arrest of a man attempting to go to Afghanistan to fight U.S. troops there. The arrest in the missile case came in a sting operation in which a British man tried to sell a inoperative weapon to an undercover federal agent. It's disingenuous to describe this as a potential attack on U.S. soil, and it's wrong to say that, given the help from Russian authorities, the sting couldn't have been done without the Patriot Act. As for the other example, preventing one person from getting to Afghanistan may or may not be important in the scheme of things over there, but it hardly serves as an example of averting another 9/11.

And speaking of the Sept. 11 attacks, the Associated Press quoted Ashcroft on Wednesday as suggesting the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon might not have happened if law enforcement agencies had the powers conveyed by the Patriot Act. That's not true, either. In fact, a couple of FBI agents had detected and raised suspicions about Saudis taking flight training in the United States. The FBI failed to act on information it had, and nothing in the Patriot Act would have changed that. The Sept. 11 attacks weren't due to an excess of civil liberties but, rather, were the result of suicidal zealots carrying out a plan that was beyond the imagination of most Americans, including most people in law enforcement.

And on a newly created Web site intended to bolster support for the Patriot Act, the Justice Department declares, "Congress enacted the Patriot Act by overwhelming, bipartisan margins." That's technically correct, but deliberately misleading. Congress passed the Patriot Act within days of the Sept. 11 attacks as part of a knee-jerk reaction in a time of great confusion and fear. Since then, many people, including many members of Congress, have expressed second thoughts. The U.S. House of Representatives just last month voted to rescind some of the powers granted in the act. Opposition to the police-state powers included in the Patriot Act is growing, and it spans the political spectrum.

AP quotes Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, saying, "There is a great deal of unease about how these new laws are being used."

We have even greater unease, however, about how they're likely to be used in the future by agents, agencies and administrations that find the act's powers useful for far more than just groping after potential terrorists. Ashcroft's transparent spin-doctoring does nothing to ease those concerns.

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