Freedom of Speech

If I could talk like Keith Olbermann can talk, you'd never get me to shut up.

Reprinted in Truthout - November 30, 2006. Even if most of you have heard it already, I hadn't and so I'm copying it here with the hope you won't mind the repetition. His interview with Newt Gingrich and Jonathan Turley (George Washington University) follows.

I'm all for audio online but there's still something special to me about the printed word.

We Fight for Liberty by Having More Liberty and Not Less
By Keith Olbermann
MSNBC Countdown

Thursday 30 November 2006

And finally tonight, as promised, a Special Comment about free speech, failed speakers, and the delusion of grandeur.

"This is a serious long term war," the man at the podium cried, "and it will inevitably lead us to want to know what is said in every suspect place in the country."

Some, in the audience, must have thought they were hearing an arsonist give the keynote address at a convention of firefighters.

This was the annual Loeb First Amendment Dinner in Manchester, New Hampshire - a public cherishing of Freedom of Speech - in the state with the two-fisted motto "Live Free Or Die."

And the arsonist at the microphone, the former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, was insisting that we must attach an "on-off button" to Free Speech.

He offered the time-tested excuse trotted out by our demagogues, since even before the Republic was founded: widespread death, of Americans, in America, possibly at the hands of Americans.

But updated, now, to include terrorists ... using the internet for recruitment ... end result, quote "losing a city."

The Colonial English defended their repression with words like these.

And so did the Slave States.

And so did the policemen who shot strikers.

And so did Lindbergh's America-First crowd.

And so did those who interned Japanese-Americans.

And so did those behind the Red Scare.

And so did Nixon's Plumbers.

The genuine proportion of the threat is always irrelevant.

The fear the threat is exploited to create ... becomes the only reality.

"We will adopt rules of engagement that use every technology we can find," Mr. Gingrich continued about terrorists formerly Communists formerly Hippies formerly Fifth Columnists formerly Anarchists formerly Redcoats.

".... to break up their capacity to use the internet, to break up their capacity to use free speech."

Mr. Gingrich, the British 'broke up our capacity to use free speech' in the 1770's.

The pro-slavery leaders 'broke up our capacity to use free speech' in the 1850's.

The FBI and CIA 'broke up our capacity to use free speech' in the 1960's.

It is in those groups where you would have found your kindred spirits, Mr. Gingrich.

Those who had no faith in freedom, no faith in this country, and, ultimately, no faith even in the strength of their own ideas, to stand up on their own legs, without having the playing-field tilted entirely to their benefit.

"It will lead us to learn," Gingrich continued, "how to close down every website that is dangerous, and it will lead us to a very severe approach to people who advocate the killing of Americans and advocate the use of nuclear and biological weapons."

That we have always had 'a very severe approach' to these people is insufficient for Mr. Gingrich's ends.

He wants to somehow ban the idea.

Even though everyone who has ever protested a movie or a piece of music or a book has learned the same lesson:

Try to suppress it, and you only validate it.

Make it illegal, and you make it the subject of curiosity.

Say it cannot be said - and it will instead be screamed.

---

And on top of the thundering danger in his eagerness to sell out freedom of speech, there is a sadder sound, still - the tinny crash of a garbage can lid on a sidewalk.

Whatever dreams of internet-censorship float like a miasma in Mr. Gingrich's personal swamp, whatever hopes he has of an Iron Firewall, the simple fact is - technically, they won't work.

As of tomorrow they will have been defeated by ... a free computer download.

Mere hours after Gingrich's speech in New Hampshire, the University of Toronto announced it had come up with a program called "Psiphon" to liberate those, in countries in which the internet is regulated ...

Places like China, and Iran, where political ideas are so barren, and political leaders so desperate, that they put up computer firewalls to keep thought and freedom out.

The "Psiphon" device is a relay of sorts that can surreptitiously link a computer user in an imprisoned country to another in a free one.

The Chinese think the wall works, yet the ideas - good ideas, bad ideas, indifferent ideas, pass through anyway.

The same way the Soviet Bloc, was defeated by the images of Western Material Bounty.

If your hopes of thought-control can be defeated, Mr. Gingrich, merely by one computer whiz staying up an extra half hour and devising a new "firewall hop," what is all this apocalyptic hyperbole for?

"I further think," you said in Manchester, "We should propose a Geneva convention for fighting terrorism, which makes very clear that those who would fight outside the rules of law, those who would use weapons of mass destruction, and those who would target civilians are in fact subject to a totally different set of rules, that allow us, to protect civilization by defeating barbarism ..."

Well, Mr. Gingrich, what is more 'massively destructive' than trying to get us, to give you our freedom?

And what is someone seeking to hamstring the First Amendment doing, if not "fighting outside the rules of law"?

And what is the suppression of knowledge and freedom, if not "barbarism"?

The explanation, of course, is in one last quote from Mr. Gingrich from New Hampshire ... and another, from last week.

"I want to suggest to you," he said about these internet restrictions, "that we right now should be impaneling people to look seriously at a level of supervision that we would never dream of if it weren't for the scale of the threat."

And who should those "impaneled" people, be?

Funny I should ask, isn't it, Mr. Gingrich?

"I am not 'running' for president," you told a reporter from Fortune Magazine. "I am seeking to create a movement to win the future by offering a series of solutions so compelling that if the American people say I have to be president, it will happen."

---

Newt Gingrich sees, in terrorism, not something to be exterminated, but something to be exploited.

It's his golden opportunity, isn't it?

'Rallying a nation,' you might say, 'to hysteria, to sweep us up into the White House with powers that will make Martial Law seem like anarchy.'

That's from the original version of the movie "The Manchurian Candidate" - the chilling words of Angela Lansbury's character, as she first promises to sell her country to the Chinese and Russians, then reveals she'll double-cross them, and keep all the power herself, waving the flag every time she subjugates another freedom.

Within the frame of our experience as a free and freely argumentative people, it is almost impossible to conceive that there are those among us, who might approach the kind of animal-wildness of fiction like that - those who would willingly transform our beloved country into something false and terrible.

Who among us can look to our own histories, or those of our ancestors who struggled to get here, or who struggled to get freedom after they were forced here, and not tear up when we read Frederick Douglass's words from a century-and-a-half ago: "Freedom must take the day"?

And who among us can look to our collective history, and not see its turning points - like the Civil War, like Watergate, like the Revolution itself - in which the right idea defeated the wrong idea on the battlefield that is the marketplace of ideas?

But apparently there are some of us who cannot see, that the only future for America is one that cherishes the freedoms won in the past, one in which we vanquish bad ideas with better ones, and in which we fight for liberty by having more liberty, not less.

"I am seeking to create a movement to win the future by offering a series of solutions so compelling that if the American people say I have to be president, it will happen."

What a dark place your world must be, Mr. Gingrich, where the way to save America, is to destroy America.

I will awaken every day of my life thankful I am not with you in that dark place.

And I will awaken every day of my life thankful that you are entitled to tell me about it.

And that you are entitled to show me what an evil idea it represents - and what a cynical mind.

And that you are entitled to do all that, thanks to the very freedoms, you seek to suffocate.

---

Go to Original

Gingrich Wants to Restrict Freedom of Speech?
By Keith Olbermann
MSNBC Countdown

Thursday 29 November 2006

Legal expert looks at constitutionality of former House Speaker's comments.

Newt Gingrich called for a reexamination of free speech at the Loeb First Amendment Award Dinner in New Hampshire this week, saying a "different set of rules to prevent terrorism" are necessary.

Gingrich's call to restrict free speech is mainly focused on the Internet.

Keith Olbermann discussed the constitutionality of this with George Washington University law professor and constitutional law expert Jonathan Turley.

This is a transcript from the show.

It's in the quintessential movie about this city, "Chinatown." Morty the Mortician turns to Jack Nicholson's character and says, "Middle of the drought, and the water commissioner drowns. Only in L.A." Tonight, a real-life equivalent. Middle of a dinner honoring the sanctity of the First Amendment, and the former speaker of the House talks about restricting freedom of speech. Only in the Republican Party.

Our fifth story on the COUNTDOWN, it might have been his first attempt to fire up his base for a possible presidential run, or it might have been something more ominous. But Newt Gingrich has actually proposed a different set of rules and invoked the bogeyman of terror.

Gingrich was the featured speaker at the annual Nackey S. Loeb First Amendment Award Dinner in Manchester, New Hampshire, Monday night, where he not only argued that campaign finance reform and the separation of church and state should be rethought, because they allegedly hurt the First Amendment, but he also suggested that new rules might be necessary to stop terrorists using freedom of speech to get out their message.

Here is his rationalization:

Newt Gingrich, Former House Speaker: My view is that either before we lose a city, or if we are truly stupid after we lose a city, we will adopt rules of engagement that we use every technology we can find to break up their capacity to use the Internet, to break up their capacity to use free speech, and to go after people who want to kill us, to stop them from recruiting people before they get to reach out and convince young people to destroy their lives while destroying us.

Olbermann: If you're going to destroy freedom of speech, bub, you've already lost all the cities.

To paraphrase Pastor Martin Noemuller's poem about Germany in the ‘30s and ‘40s: First they came for the Fourth Amendment, then they came for habeas corpus, then came for free speech, and there was no one allowed to speak up.

The politics in a moment.

Jonathan Turley, Constitutional Law Experts, George Washington University: Thanks, Keith.

Olbermann: So the conventional wisdom on this is, he's to breathe life into the same scare tactics that worked so well for the president and the vice president until four weeks ago. But could this be more nefarious than just politics? Could any president really gut free speech in the name of counterterrorism?

Turley: They could. I mean, it's bizarre it would occur in a First Amendment speech. God knows what he'd say at a Mother's Day speech.

But, you know, this really could happen. I mean, the fact is that the First Amendment is an abstraction, and when you put up against it the idea of incinerating millions of people, there will be millions of citizens that respond, like some Pavlovian response, and deliver up rights. We've already seen that.

People don't seem to appreciate that you really can't save a Constitution by destroying it.

Olbermann: We asked Mr. Gingrich's office for the full speech. To their credit, they provided most of it to us, late relative to our deadline. But let me read you a little bit more of this that we've just gotten, Jonathan.

"I want to suggest to you that we right now should be impaneling people to look seriously at a level of supervision that we would never dream of, if it were not for the scale of this threat." That's one quote.

"This is a serious, long-term war," Gingrich added, "and it will inevitably lead us to want to know what is said in every suspect place in the country. It will lead us to learn how to close down every Web site that is dangerous."

Jonathan, are there not legal methods already in place to deal with such sites that do not require what Mr. Gingrich has here called "supervision that we would never dream of?"

Turley: Well, there are plenty of powers and authorities that could be used to monitor truly dangerous people. But what you see here, I think, is the insatiable appetite that has developed among certain leaders for controlling American society.

We saw that with John Ashcroft not long after 9/11, when he said the critics were aiding and abetting the terrorists. There is this insatiable appetite that develops when you feed absolute power to people like Gingrich.

And people should not assume that these are just going to be fringe candidates, and this could never happen. Fear does amazing things to people, and it could a sort of self-mutilation in a democracy, where we give up the very things, the very rights that define us, and theoretically, the very things that we are defending.

Olbermann: Also, when you talk about closing down Internet sites, who is the one who's going to decide which those are? I mean, it could be the Daily Kos, it could be Citizens for Legitimate Government, it could be the sports Web site Dead Spin, for all we know, if he doesn't like any one of them in particular.

Turley: Well, what these guys don't understand is that the best defense against bad ideas, like extremism and terrorism, is free speech. That's what we've proven. That's why they don't like us, is that we're remarkably successful as a democracy, because we've shown that really bad ideas don't survive in the marketplace, unless you try to suppress them, unless you try to keep people from speaking. Then it becomes a form of martyrdom. Then you give credence to what they're saying.

Olbermann: Last question, the specific idea about the Internet. There was a story just today out of Toronto that researchers at a Canadian university developed some software that will let users in places like China that have Internet restrictions, the phrase they used were, "hop over government's Internet firewalls." Might it be that the technology will be our best defense against the Newt Gingriches of this country?

Turley: It may be. We may have to rely on our own creativity to overcome the inclinations of people like Newt Gingrich.

Olbermann: George Washington University law professor and constitutional law expert, and, I think it's fair to say, friend of the Constitution, Jonathan Turley. Great thanks, Jon.

Turley: Thanks, Keith.