By Keith Olbermann Anchor, 'Countdown'
MSNBC - Original Article
Nov 29, 2006
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.
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:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
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.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
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 EXPERT, 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.
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