Civil liberties groups are none too thrilled by George Bush's choice to head the sprawling homeland security department, Michael Chertoff. The American Civil Liberties Union was "troubled" by Chertoff's public record, which suggested that he saw the "Bill of Rights as an obstacle to national security, rather than a guidebook for how to do security properly".
Concern has focused on Chertoff's role as one of the architects of the Patriot Act, which reduced civil liberties to give greater power to the authorities in the "war against terror". The Washington Post noted that he was even criticised by the US justice department for using rarely-enforced immigration laws to detain hundreds of foreign nationals incommunicado after the September 11 attacks.
But Juliette Kayyem, a counterterrorism expert at Harvard University, told the Guardian that Chertoff was not a particularly partisan figure. Blogger and Fox News contributor Michelle Malkin gave an enthusiastic thumbs-up for Chertoff. Citing a comment piece he wrote for the Wall Street Journal, Malkin calls Chertoff "one of the most trenchant thinkers on the national security/civil liberties debate".
