Homeland Security (tradition, America, Atheism)

[Pah]

Homeland Intelligence Chief: We Must Abridge Individual Rights

October 31, 2004
http://atheism.about.com/b/a/122853.htm?nl=1

Homeland Intelligence Chief: We Must Abridge Individual Rights
Back in March, 2003, the future top intelligence official of the Homeland Security Department made some disturbing comments about the possible future of civil liberties in America. According to retired U.S. Army Gen. Patrick M. Hughes, the abridgment of individual rights would be necessary to prevent future terrorist attacks.

CQ.com reports:

“What I’m about to say is very arrogant — arrogant to a fault,” said Hughes, a former chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), in previously unreported remarks at a March 2003 Harvard University forum on “Future Conditions: The Character and Conduct of War, 2010 and 2020.”

“Set aside what the mass of people think. Some things are so bad for them that you cannot allow them to have them. One of them is war in the context of terrorism in the United States,” Hughes said, according to a transcript obtained by CQ Homeland Security.

“Therefore, we have to abridge individual rights, change the societal conditions, and act in ways that heretofore were not in accordance with our values and traditions, like giving a police officer or security official the right to search you without a judicial finding of probable cause,” said Hughes.

“Things are changing, and this change is happening because things can be brought to us that we cannot afford to absorb. We can’t deal with them, so we’re going to reach out and do something ahead of time to preclude them. Is that going to change your lives?” Hughes asked rhetorically. “It already has.”

No one in the government is willing to comment on whether Hughes continues to stand by his idea that individual rights need to be curtailed. If he does, Hughes represents a very dangerous threat to the future of America — perhaps as much of a threat as the terrorists themselves.

Sure, the terrorists may want to undermine the American way of life, but how can we not say the same about Huges? A man willing to destroy a thing in order to "save" it cannot be trusted. George W. Bush likes to say that the terrorists hate us because we are free, but how much "better" is a government official who has no concern for those same freedoms?

How is the loss of freedom a defense of freedom?