Thinkin’bout Stuff

Well.. I spent my lunch time transcribing Newt Gingrich’s speech at the Nackey S. Loeb School of Communications because I believe you should read it for yourself and form your own opinion… I’ll try to resist commenting too much (but will be “bolding” a few areas). I have edited out some of the fillers, like statements of how great it is to be here and asides about his recent tour of Washington, but the rest of the speech is included for your review. Decide for yourself, is Newt Gingrich trying to eliminate your First Amendment rights? My original post on the topic is here.:

Freedom is always under siege. There are people on the planet who hate freedom.

Free people only remain free if they are prepared to defend their freedom against those who would destroy it.

The Star Spangled Banner in the first stanza ends with “Land of the Free and Home of the Brave” because both are intertwined, if you are not brave do not expect to remain free.

A First Amendment dinner is about the struggle every day to reaffirm our freedom in the face of those who would take it away.

It is a peculiarly American thing that the First Amendment to our Constitution explicitly extended rights to the American people rather then to the government.

It’s not a question of power being centered in the government but a question of power being centered in the people; it is not a question of citizens being limited, it’s a question of government being limited.  It’s a remarkably American pattern that has very deep roots in our history. 

He describes three major challenges in applying the First Amendment in the 21^st century. Then elaborates on them:

The process that began in the 1970’s to find a way to regulate free speech is a disaster.  It is fundamentally wrong, and the McCain-Feingold bill was the most severe act of censorship since the Alien and Sedition Acts of the 1790’s. (APPLAUSE)

It is profoundly wrong for the government to say to any citizen what they can say is free speech and if the government has the right to regulate what you give and can say to you “90 days before a campaign you can’t say ‘x’” then they can say to you “120 days before a campaign you can’t say ‘x’” then they can say to you “a year before the campaign you can’t say ‘x’”  because once you cross the threshold of believing that power is centered in the bureaucracy and not in the citizens, there is in the end no logical limit.

This model is, first of all, just wrong. It’s constitutionally wrong, it is wrong in terms of how America works, it’s wrong in terms of where it centers power, but there’s something more fundamental.  It has, by any objective measure, failed.  It hasn’t taken money out of politics, there’s more money today in politics then ever before; it’s just nastier money, hidden money, irresponsible money, negative money, vicious money. 

You have more negative ads and more negative emails and more negative direct mail and more negative phone calls then you ever had before we tried to regulate it.  So both at a practical level, this has been destructive of the American system because it has driven power away from the candidates to all sorts of consultants who make allsorts of money surrounded by all sorts of lawyers who figure out loopholes at a rate 40% faster than the FEC can close them. And it’s an endless game.

All we’ve done is created a huge legal thicket of total irresponsibility. It doesn’t slow down the flow of cash, literally more money was spent this year than any off year in American history, and it was spent for worse ads.  I have never seen more negative, banal and destructive campaigns than 2004 and 2006.

And to reduce America’s decisions to whether false reports about whether a National Guard record in 1970 is more important than Swift Boat Veterans just strikes me as an insane way for a free society to pick a leader in a world where we are the leading country on the planet. And yet that’s what we’ve degenerated to.

So I would propose, first of all, if you want truly free speech and you want the First Amendment to work, go back to the original meaning of “no law”, and say simply: anyone can give any amount to any candidate as long as it is reported on the internet within 24 hours. And then if you decide you don’t like who is supporting that candidate, vote against the candidate. But suddenly you’ll take out 90% of the interest groups, 90% of all these special ads, and you’ll now have candidates responsible for campaigns and candidates with resources that they control and candidates to be held accountable. And it will be a healthier, cleaner, and more honest and dramatically less lawyered system.  And all of those strike me as a good thing.

We have had, since 1963 when the Supreme Court made a fundamental mistake in suggesting that school prayer was unconstitutional, we have had a 43 year lawyer drive secular assault on the American system.  Now you saw part of it this evening, we pledged allegiance to the flag.  A number of you, probably not yet realizing that the 9th Circuit Court has ruled it was unconstitutional, probably actually said the words “One Nation Under God”.  Now, the fact that the 9th Circuit Court would rule that it was unconstitutional to say “One Nation Under God” should not tell you to quit saying it; it  should tell you to support a bill abolishing the 9th Circuit Court and getting a court that has people who understand America (LAUGHTER & APPLAUSE)

And I believe this is fundamental to the future of America.

… We started (our tour) at the National Archives, where we have a document which is political, which says: “We are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”  This is very important on two levels.  First of all, we are the only society in history which has said power comes from God to you personally. Each one of you is sovereign. And then you loan power to the state, which is why our constitution begins “We the People of the United States”. Doesn’t begin “We the Lawyers”, “We the Politicians”, “We the Bureaucrats”, it begins “We the People”.

Now, if there is no Creator, then where do your rights come from? What’s the base of your freedom? Why should you be respected? And yet, in our model, we have pretty successfully, for over 200 years, protected the sanctity of your freedom against the state. It’s a very important core model.

It also raises the question of what do you teach in school, because actually, if starting in the 1st grade you simply taught the Declaration of Independence, you’d be faced with this shocking question: What did they mean by the word “Creator”? How could you explain that? You’d have to say: Gosh, they meant God. And how could you explain that?

And that’s why the secular legal assault is so profoundly wrong and so profoundly dangerous. 

So we take you from there to the Washington Monument, which at its very top says “Glory to God” … and if you read Washington’s life, he said over and over the: the survival of the Americans was a miracle. 

We then take you to the Jefferson Memorial, Jefferson often being cited as the president who was the most interested in secularism, remember he wrote the Danbury Baptists and said: We need a wall of separation between Church and state.  What no one will tell you is what he meant by that is this should not be an official state religion.  He clearly did not mean that you could not have God in public because two days after he wrote that letter he went out front of the Whitehouse, got in a carriage, road up the hill to the Capitol, and went to church in the US House which served as a church until the 1860’s. He also loaned the treasury building every Sunday as a church.

And if you go to the Jefferson Memorial he says around the very top of it: “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against all forms of tyranny over the minds of man”.  Now you can ask your secular friends what do you think Jefferson meant by “I have sworn upon the altar of God’, but it’s fairly difficult for them to explain that he meant large purple banana or some other deeply symbolic meaning.  It’s quite clear if you read Jefferson’s writings in total, they meant God.

We then take you to the Lincoln Memorial which has two extraordinary documents…  first of course is the Gettysburg Address, very short, which is where the term “One Nation Under God” comes from.  And the second is the Second Inaugural, in which, in 703 words, Lincoln refers to God 14 times and has two quotes from the Bible.  You read that Second Inaugural and tell me how you can explain an America that is secular and in which God does not exist.

So I would argue that we need a serious effort to communicate to the courts that we have real limits to our willingness to have them impose on us. The Jeffersonians did this, I’ll just give you one brief historical example, the Jeffersonians in 1802 passed the Judicial Reform Act of 1802, they abolished 18 out of 35 federal courts, slightly over half. I don’t think we need anything like that radical an approach, but there is clear precedent for the legislative and executive branch saying to the judicial branch: You have gone too far and this is wrong.  And I would argue that on issues like the right to say “One Nation Under God”, we need to reassert the authority of American history over the authority of secular legalism and that this is a very serious issue about the nature of our rights as a country. (APPLAUSE)

On those two fronts I’ve suggested that we actually expand the First Amendment back to its original meaning. Increase freedom to have God in public space, increase the freedom of political speech.

The third thing I want to talk about very briefly is the genuine danger of terrorism and in particular terrorism using weapons of mass destruction and weapons of mass murder, nuclear and biological weapons.  And 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 weren’t for the scale of the threat. 
 
Let me give you two examples. When the British this summer arrested people who were planning to blow up ten airliners in one day, they arrested a couple who were going to use their six month old baby in order to hide the bomb as baby milk. 
 
Now, if I come to you tonight and say there are people on the planet who hate you, and there are 15-25 year old males who are willing to die as long as they get to kill you, I’ve simply described warrior culture which has been true historically for 6 or 7 thousand years. 
 
But, if I come to you and say there’s a couple that hates you so much that they will kill their six month old baby in order to kill you, I am describing a level of ferocity, and a level of savagery beyond anything we have tried to deal with.
 
And, what is truly frightening in the British experience is they are arresting British citizens, born in Britain, speaking English, who went to British schools, live in British housing, and have good jobs.
 
This is a serious long term war, and it will inevitably lead us to want to know what is said in every suspect place in the country, that will lead us to learn 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.
 
And, my prediction to you 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 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. 
 
This is a serious problem that will lead to a serious debate about the first amendment, but I think that the national security threat of losing an American city to a nuclear weapon, or losing several million Americans to a biological attack is so real that we need to proactively, now, develop the appropriate rules of engagement.
 
And, I further think 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 before it gains so much strength that it is truly horrendous.
 
This is a sober topic, but I think it’s a topic we need a national dialogue about, and we need to get ahead of the curve rather than wait until actually we literally lose a city which I think could literally happen within the next decade if we are unfortunate. So… (APPLAUSE)

My opinion? This is not an attack on the First Amendment, or any part of our Constitution. This is a call for dialogue on addressing the real concern that our enemy is using our freedoms as a tool in their war against our great nation with the ultimate goal of eliminate the very freedoms they are exploiting.
 

When left-wing elements of the MSM hate the messenger, the message will almost always be misinterpreted and twisted to validate their view of the messenger.  Such is the case with Newt Gingrich and his speech at the Nackey S. Loeb School of Communications.

If you read or hear what Keith Olbermann has to say on the subject, you would be lead to believe Gingrich wants to take away your First Amendment rights:

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.

Well, aside from the fact that the Far Left has been attacking the First Amendment for decades, choosing to pick and choose the parts they like while fighting to restrict freedom of religion, and pushing hard to abolish the Second Amendment altogether, Olbermann’s defense of the Constitution is almost heartwarming… if only it were honest.

So.. instead of having others form your opinions of Speaker Gingrich’s message, here’s what all the hub-bub is about (from Newt.Org, where you can also listen to the whole speech):

On those two fronts I’ve suggested that we actually expand the First Amendment back to its original meaning. Increase freedom to have God in public space, increase the freedom of political speech.

The third thing I want to talk about very briefly is the genuine danger of terrorism and in particular terrorism using weapons of mass destruction and weapons of mass murder, nuclear and biological weapons.  And 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 weren’t for the scale of the threat. 
 
Let me give you two examples. When the British this summer arrested people who were planning to blow up ten airliners in one day, they arrested a couple who were going to use their six month old baby in order to hide the bomb as baby milk. 
 
Now, if I come to you tonight and say there are people on the planet who hate you, and there are 15-25 year old males who are willing to die as long as they get to kill you, I’ve simply described warrior culture which has been true historically for 6 or 7 thousand years. 
 
But, if I come to you and say there’s a couple that hates you so much that they will kill their six month old baby in order to kill you, I am describing a level of ferocity, and a level of savagery beyond anything we have tried to deal with.
 
And, what is truly frightening in the British experience is they are arresting British citizens, born in Britain, speaking English, who went to British schools, live in British housing, and have good jobs.
 
This is a serious long term war, and it will inevitably lead us to want to know what is said in every suspect place in the country, that will lead us to learn 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.
 
And, my prediction to you 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 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. 
 
This is a serious problem that will lead to a serious debate about the first amendment, but I think that the national security threat of losing an American city to a nuclear weapon, or losing several million Americans to a biological attack is so real that we need to proactively, now, develop the appropriate rules of engagement.
 
And, I further think 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 before it gains so much strength that it is truly horrendous.
 
This is a sober topic, but I think it’s a topic we need a national dialogue about, and we need to get ahead of the curve rather than wait until actually we literally lose a city which I think could literally happen within the next decade if we are unfortunate. So… (APPLAUSE)

Where is the part where Gingrich wants to destroy freedom of speech, bub?  What is so wrong about encouraging dialogue and debate? Isn’t that what free speech is all about? And yes, that really was applause interrupting him at the Nackey S. Loeb School of Communications.

In reality, this may prove to be an important historical speech. Speaker Gingrich may have initiated a critical debate of the issues facing our country in a war like no other war we have ever fought. We are still behaving as if we are not at war.

This is not about restricting free speech. This is about defining appropriate wartime boundaries for protected speech; ensuring that the enemy can not use our freedoms against us, make our strength their weapon, and ultimately take away the freedoms we treasure through exploitation of those same freedoms. Ironically, the very people who would defend the rights of a terrorist are the ones who will lead us down a path that will eliminate our freedoms.

This is a major war, it may span decades, and yet we are even afraid to call our enemy by name, we are careful to avoid infringing upon their rights, we are fearful that someone’s feelings will be hurt… they have no such restrictions on their behavior.  Does that make us better than they? No. What makes us better is that we fight for freedom and defend the freedom of others … but not to the extent that we enable our enemy to take away those same freedoms.  We can not just foolishly behave as if nothing has changed while our enemy plots to eliminate us. 

Not much comfort in knowing you behaved in a more civilized manner than your enemy as you sit amongst the rubble of a major US city.

Others commenting:

• Captain’s Quarters initially thought Gingrich was out of line, but is now reserving final judgment until he can listen to the entire speech. The controversial part is transcribed above in total .. but listening is better.  Here’s the link again. It is definitely worth your time… please listen and judge for yourself.

Something I’ve been thinking about:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-o5hs2lN6js

The story about six worshippers being burned alive while Iraqi troops stood by and watched bothered me so much I went on a rant in the November 24th posting “The Real Evil”.

The one thing that really struck a nerve was that no one raised a hand in their defense and I questioned whether people who do not act in defense of their neighbors deserve freedom.

Now it looks like there is a strong potential that the story that sent me down that path was a fabrication picked up by the MSM and printed as fact (from Gina Cobb):

Capt. Jamil Hussein — the source cited in one news report after another for some of the most inflammatory accusations against Shiites in Iraq — such as the claim that six Sunni civilians were set on fire — doesn’t exist. 

I suppose we need to realize that facts and truths are not easy to come by in wars, but we have a right to expect that the media folks reporting on this stuff are checking the facts before reporting them.

Today, I’m thinkin’ about something different.  No politics, just something that really annoyed me yesterday. The NY Giants meltdown versus the Tennessee Titans.

Allowing for all of the understandable reasons for not playing up to expectations (too many starters out, backups without backups having to play more downs and tiring near the end of games… OK, maybe those are the same reason and I can only come up with one), that does not excuse this midseason meltdown. So… as you might expect, I have an opinion or two:

• Burress: What happened? In the first half of the season, you were a role model. You blocked down field, you went out of your way to make great catches to make Manning look good, you were a team player. Did you get bored?  You have given up on plays on at least two occasions that have cost your team in the past two weeks. Do you want to play football and live up to your potential or have you lost interest and are just going through the motions. I get it… I’ve seen folks in the business world go through the same kind of funk. But then, they aren’t getting paid millions to play 16 games a year. How about just giving us 100% for a few more games, then you can take the rest of the year off. At least you own up:

But Manning saw a blitz and tried to throw a fade pattern to Plaxico Burress, whom Coughlin said “pulled off” the play.

“I did,” Burress said. “Maybe I should have just tackled (Jones) and taken the penalty. I made a bad judgment on the ball and it was a bad play on my part.

(more…)

How many of you read this headline and believed Rumsfeld approved the sexual abuses and humiliation in Abu Ghraib prison?

If you bothered to read the article, it alleges he approved the following (Reuters):

… sleep deprivation… making prisoners stand for long periods… playing music at full volume… having to sit in uncomfortably

Sounds a lot like what I went through when my daughter dragged me to a “New Found Glory” concert… not too much different than what most college students experience every week.

So, why is this bad?

The Geneva Convention says prisoners of war should suffer “no physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion” to secure information.

First, it wasn’t a “convention”, they are “conventions”.  But that’s just a minor point of misunderstanding compared to Reuters’ ignorance of the conventions.  From Wikipedia:

The Geneva Conventions (often misstated as the “Geneva Convention“) consist of four treaties formulated in Geneva, Switzerland, that set the standards for international law for humanitarian concerns.

So that we all know what the Geneva Conventions really state, here is the Article on POWs:

Article 4 defines prisoners of war to include:

• 4.1.1 Members of the armed forces of a Party to the conflict and members of militias of such armed forces
• 4.1.2 Members of other militias and members of other volunteer corps, including those of organized resistance movements, provided that they fulfill all of the following conditions:
  • that of being commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates;
  • that of having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance (there are limited exceptions to this among countries who observe the 1977 Protocol I);
  • that of carrying arms openly;
  • that of conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.
• 4.1.3 Members of regular armed forces who profess allegiance to a government or an authority not recognized by the Detaining Power.
• 4.1.4 Civilians who have non-combat support roles with the military and who carry a valid identity card issued by the military they support.
• 4.1.5 Merchant marine and the crews of civil aircraft of the Parties to the conflict, who do not benefit by more favourable treatment under any other provisions of international law.
• 4.1.6 Inhabitants of a non-occupied territory, who on the approach of the enemy spontaneously take up arms to resist the invading forces, without having had time to form themselves into regular armed units, provided they carry arms openly and respect the laws and customs of war.
• 4.3 makes explicit that Article 33 takes precedence for the treatment of medical personnel of the enemy and chaplains of the enemy.

Hmmm…  don’t see anything about treatment of terrorists who burn civilians alive, behead journalists, explode bombs in restaurants, disguise themselves as civilians to carry out attacks…  In fact, these types of acts are war crimes and the people who carry them out are excluded from the protections of the Geneva Conventions.

But… the left-wing media wants you to believe the United States is violating the Geneva Conventions.

Let’s assume for a moment that these people really are POW’s and should be afforded the rights under the Conventions, should this not be reciprocal? And if so, where are all the cries of outrage when US soldiers are abused and mutilated? Who is the leader that is being held accountable?

(Article 17): “No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever. Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted or exposed to unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind.”

Are playing loud music, making people stand for long periods, sleep deprivation, or sitting uncomfortably torture? They may be coercion, but what is the reasoning behind this Article of the Conventions?

If you are a real prisoner of war with information about troop movements or attack plans, this is meant to protect you from having it tortured out of you since you are now “out of the game”. But what if you have information about plans to blow up a church, or a restaurant, or police headquarters?  What if the “war” is over and you are a terrorist or insurgent trying to inflict pain upon a civilian population? Should you protected by the Geneva Conventions?  Hell no!

What about the former US General making these allegations:

Former U.S. Army Brigadier General Janis Karpinski told Spain’s El Pais newspaper she had seen a letter apparently signed by Rumsfeld which allowed civilian contractors to use techniques such as sleep deprivation during interrogation

Karpinski was withdrawn from Iraq in early 2004, shortly after photographs showing American troops abusing detainees at the prison were flashed around the world. She was subsequently removed from active duty and then demoted to the rank of colonel on unrelated charges.

Karpinski insists she knew nothing about the abuse of prisoners until she saw the photos, as interrogation was carried out in a prison wing run by U.S. military intelligence.

So which is it? She saw a letter and knew about the abuse, or she didn’t know about the abuse until she saw photos? Does she have anything to indicate Rumsfeld knew about the abuse even though she, as the responsible General, did not? Is she equating authorization to use techniques such as sleep deprivation with the acts of real abuse that occurred?

Why is she telling this to a Spanish newspaper? Is she not still an officer in the United States Army? Could it be she has an axe to grind?

Karpinski said last week she was ready to testify against Rumsfeld, if a suit filed by civil rights groups in Germany over Abu Ghraib led to a full investigation.

Wikipedia on Karpinski:

… is a United States Army Colonel in the 800th Military Police Brigade. She was demoted from Brigadier General in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse scandal. Karpinski claims that she was made a “scapegoat” in order to protect higher ranking military personnel from the scandal. Karpinski was demoted to Colonel for dereliction of duty, making a material misrepresentation to investigators, failure to obey a lawful order and shoplifting.

She was the commander of three large US- and British-led prisons in Iraq in 2003, eight battalions, and 3400 Army reservists.

In October 2003, allegations of torture in the new Iraqi prisons began to surface. Karpinski insisted that prisoners under her watch were treated “humanely and fairly”.

In an interview with the St. Petersburg Times in December 2003, Karpinski said conditions in the prison were even better than many Iraqi homes, and joked that the prisoners were treated so well that she was “concerned they wouldn’t want to leave”

Sounds like she either lied or had no idea what was happening under her own command.  So we should believe her now because….?

Bottom line, the Geneva Conventions did not consider the type of enemy we are fighting and can not, should not, be applied to the current situation. They place our forces at a significant disadvantage since the other side has no intention of playing by the rules. The rules of engagement have been changed by the enemy, we must adapt or be defeated, not just in our treatment of captured terrorists, but across the board.

Important Update: The AP article I quoted is likely false. It appears that it is part of the propaganda being spread to ensure the perception is an Iraq in total chaos. Many bloggers commenting:

• Wake Up America
• Gina Cobb
• Flopping Aces
• The Anchoress
• Many others who were more skeptical (and perceptive) than I <>

Beheadings. Mutilations. Mass executions. Kid stuff compared to drawing a cartoon of Muhammed. Yep, that’s the real evil in this world.

Let’s face it, whether they be Sunnis or Shiites, some of these people are just freakin’ nuts. (from AP):

Militiamen grabbed six Sunnis as they left Friday worship services, doused them with kerosene and burned them alive as Iraqi soldiers stood by, and seven Sunni mosques came under attack as Shiites took revenge for the slaughter of at least 215 people in the Sadr City slum.

How do you fight evil like this? More importantly, how will Iraq ever rid itself of this type of violent evil when their soldiers stand by and do nothing? Was there no one else who could act in their defense? Did anyone raise a hand in defiance of this brutal, evil act? Or did they stand by and watch in fear that they would be next if they interfered.

The people of Iraq are not free. They may live in a fledgling democracy; they may have the right to choose their own government; they may no longer be living under the iron fist of Saddam, but they are not free and never will be as long as armed militias terrorize this potentially great nation.

Until the people rise up and fight for their freedom, they will not be free. Until they refuse to allow armed thugs get away with unimaginable evil acts of cruelty against innocent people, they will not be free. Until they stand up and put their own lives on the line to defend their neighbors and refuse to live in fear, they will not be free.

Our great nation did not earn it’s freedom hiding in fear. We did not earn our freedom by waiting for someone to come win it for us. We earned it, and have passionately guarded it, through the sacrifice of many a great man and woman.

Will Iraqis ever stand up and fight for their freedom?

If not, maybe they don’t deserve to be free.