Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is causing a controversy now by raising an issue whispered a bit over the past few years: whether some free speech will have to be suppressed to battling terrorism:
“We need to get ahead of the curve rather than wait until we actually literally lose a city, which I think could literally happen in the next decade if we’re unfortunate,” Mr. Gingrich said Monday night during a speech in New Hampshire. “We 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.”
Speaking at an award dinner billed as a tribute to crusaders for the First Amendment, Mr. Gingrich, who is considering a run for the White House in 2008, painted an ominous picture of the dangers facing America.
“This is a serious, long-term war,” the former speaker said, according an audio excerpt of his remarks made available yesterday by his office. “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.”
Mr. Gingrich acknowledged that these proposals would trigger “a serious debate about the First Amendment.” He also said international law must be revised to address the exigencies posed by international terrorists.
H’s talking about a “Geneva Convention” to fight international terrorism. In reality, it has long been noted in many publications that terrorists are using the Internet. The problem is going to be great distrust over how this idea — if it ever comes to fruition (and it probably won’t) would be implemented.
What’s more likely, is that Gingrich is going to regret what he said because it will raise all kinds of issues among critics about what he really means. Also, many Republicans who are making it clear that they want their party to get back to smaller government will not welcome a call to get the government involved in free speeech areas unless there is a national emergency. And in one sense, Gingrich is right: if there was another massive terrorist attack and it turned out that directions were given somehow from the Internet or Internet sites played a role in the method of attack, there would be a move to curtail anything that smacked of terrorism on the Internet.
Ed Morrissey, one of the best and most thoughtful conservative bloggers around, has a MUST READ post. Here’s a small part of it:
Gingrich has an odd sense of place for his new campaign crusade. At a dinner that honored people who took risks to maintain our First Amendment freedoms, he basically told them that their work was in vain. To add even more confusion, Gingrich also took the opportunity to bash John McCain for his own attack on political speech with the BCRA — and rightfully so.
….The remedy for bad speech is more speech. The solution to radical mosques is to enforce immigration laws and to tighten visa requirements to keep radicals from entering the US. If people want to advocate for terrorist attacks and the violent overthrow of our elected government, then they have already broken the law, and it requires no sacrifice from Americans to prosecute such people. Free speech and religious freedom did not cause terrorism; in fact, the lack of both causes it. If Gingrich wants to offer the hair of the dog as a solution, then he will find himself very lonely on the campaign trail for the next two years.
Gingrich has always been an unusual politician. He thinks in the long term and is always brimming with a wide variety of ideas — many more than your typical politician. He’s more like an academic playing in the political playground.
But some of his ideas get him in trouble when they’re more closely examined which is partially why the great potential that writers wrote about in the 90s of Gingrich as the conservative leader of the future was never realized.
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Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.