Wait. A. Minute.
How can we have real liberty if we lack safety?
How is a man free to “pursue happiness” — another key phrase to our country’s Founders, if his house may be burned or his family killed?

Safety is a necessary condition to liberty. Not a sufficient condition, of course, but necessary. And we cannot have safety without our criminal code, which means “tough on crime” and docket management. Granted, there must always be a balance between safety and liberty, but they are not always at odds. Without safety, there can be no liberty. Without safety, any liberty we might have is an empty notion of what might have been.

There are a number of issues one might take with this.  For that reason, I decided to blog my response, rather than leave what would only be an overlong comment.

It’s difficult to know where to start with this.  Mark Bennett makes a good start in his own responsive comment. As Mark impliedly notes, there is no metaphysical or logical connection between being free and being safe. Sometimes, as Mark states, we deliberately move beyond a place of safety in pursuit of freedom.

What is not so clearly stated is that no absolute level of safety can ever be achieved.  Even in the most “locked down” of cultures, someone may burn your house, or kill you and your family.  You could even assign a police officer to every home — don’t worry, we’re getting there — and still not be completely safe.  Assuming the officer could protect you from your son, daughter, mother, or father, who’s to protect you from the officer?

The more that the rules or laws of a particular country attempt to lock things down “in the interest of safety,” the less freedom exists.  And, frankly, the pursuit of “safety” in the United States has reached the level of insanity.  Petty officials such as the Presiding Judge of the Fresno County Superior Court routinely ignore the constitutional requirements of the Fourth Amendment because it’s apparently reasonable to expect that anyone entering the courthouse might be armed and dangerous.  We’ve forgotten that the Constitution required probable cause particularized to the individual being searched, not a belief that it was reasonable to think some person entering a courthouse might have a weapon.

It was against the very idea of indiscriminate searches on baseless suspicion — fishing expeditions, you might call them — that our Founders rebelled.  It was this very sort of attempt at making sure all the rules are followed by everyone all the time — and overbroad rules like the “search all persons entering the courthouse” rules we’re increasingly running into now — through the application of arbitrary and indiscriminate searches that our Founders revolted.  Yes, revolted.  As in, “they started a revolution and overthrew the government.”

In spite of a Constitution which requires particularized reasons to subject a citizen to a search, we are routinely subjected to searches while moving from one area to another.  Try to fly without being searched.  Try to enter any government building without being searched.

The government gets away with this for two reasons.

First, on the whole, we are sheep.  We’re not actually citizens, we’re submitizens.  When some new procedure or directive comes down from “on high” requiring us to empty our pockets, strip off our clothing, or otherwise submit to interference in our personal lives from the government, the majority of us don’t even ask why.  We just do it.  Those of us who don’t, suffer the full wrath of the government because the majority of us are submitizens.  Why should the government fear acting as if there were no Constitution, when it knows the submitizens will let them get away with it?

Second, if someone actually does resist and takes the issue to court, the court (which, incidentally, is still the government) simply redefines the term “search.”  Somehow, someway, going through people’s things and making them empty their pockets is not a search.

This is okay, “Y” tells us.  Y?  Because we must have safety before we can have freedom.

But since we can never be safe, I guess what “Y” means is that we can never be free.

It used to be the case in America that we protected freedom of speech, even when the speakers were people whose ideas the majority of us found detestable. Sometimes, people even went to war and died to protect this freedom. We did this not because we valued the specific speech of each person, but because we valued freedom. We did this because we knew that sometimes the majority does what it does because it’s mislead, or temporarily under the sway of a demagogue. And while the content of a particular speaker’s speech may make us angry enough to spit, it would at least make us think; even the most reprehensible of speakers served to remind us why we valued freedom, even if we didn’t value them.

This American brand of tolerance extended — in 1969, at least — to the most vile of people, groups and messages, including the Ku Klux Klan.

Nineteen-sixty-nine. That was the year the United States Supreme Court decided the case of a Klan leader convicted under the Ohio Criminal Syndicalism statute.

Criminal Syndicalism statutes are not entirely dissimilar to the modern use of gang injunctions. Basically, it’s a way of targeting people the police don’t like, or whom they think are doing things they don’t like which may, but often don’t, include crimes. What you do is make it illegal for them to talk to other people and/or associate with other people whom the police also don’t like. By creating criminal syndicalism laws — or using public nuisance injunctions against gangs — the police don’t have to deal with that pesky little thing we call “the Constitution.” They get to arrest people for doing things that they, the police, don’t like, without any irritating limitations like due process of law or probable cause and they can convict people without any miserable need to supply proof beyond a reasonable doubt that they have committed any actual crimes. Essentially, they haul people before a judge and say, “Can we lock this person up?” The judge asks why and the police say, “Well, we think he [or she] might be doing something wrong.” And away they go. (Think I’m kidding? Take a look at how the City of Sanger, California, is using gang injunctions to eliminate any future need for even reasonable cause to search Mexican-Americans at will.)

In Brandenburg v. Ohio 395 U.S. 444 [89 S.Ct. 1827, 23 L.Ed.2d 430] (1969), the KKK leader had telephoned a news station and told them about a rally to be held at a farm in Hamilton County, in Ohio. Subsequent films made by the news station — this was back in the days when there really were such things as news stations, by the way, so we don’t need “scare quotes” here — showed that Brandenburg had said some pretty nasty things. For example, he said,

This is an organizer’s meeting. . .. We’re not a revengent organization, but if our President, our Congress, our Supreme Court, continues to suppress the white, Caucasian race, it’s possible that there might have to be some revengence taken. Brandenburg, supra, 395 U.S. 444, at p. 446.

He also said, “Personally, I believe the nigger should be returned to Africa, the Jew returned to Israel.” (Brandenburg, supra, 395 U.S. 444, at p. 447; for the record, the writer of this blog is a Jew who has never been to Israel, let alone lived there.) Admittedly, pretty horrid stuff. And, while some people in the crowd were seen to be carrying weapons, the speaker was not.

At that time, California — lover of criminal syndicalism acts, gang injunctions and $15 billion dollar credit cards for Terminators of Fiscal Responsibility — had already had a case called Whitney v. People of California 274 U.S. 357 (1927), which had upheld the right of the California legislature to make hanging out with the wrong people illegal. The State, of course, determined who fit the description “wrong people.” Naturally, these were people Californians — particularly the good Republicans who were in power at the time — didn’t like; people, for example, who might criticize the government, such as the political party to which Ms. Whitney belonged. This was particularly important because some people in that political party advocated changing the government and getting rid of the Republicans — and some of them, though not Ms. Whitney, advocated doing this by any means necessary.

Now, you might agree with the California Supreme Court in Whitney when they said,

[T]he freedom of speech which is secured by the Constitution does not confer an absolute right to speak, without responsibility, whatever one may choose, or an unrestricted and unbridled license giving immunity for every possible use of language and preventing the punishment of those who abuse this freedom; and . . . a State in the exercise of its police power may punish those who abuse this freedom . . .. Whitney, supra, 274 U.S. 357, at p. 371.

After all, the political party we’re talking about here wasn’t the Republican Party. And, today in America — just as in California under Republican Governors Stephens, Richardson and Young — only the Republican Party has a right to speak, regardless of the truth, or consequences, of that speech. Everyone else has to “shut the f*ck up” because “there ought to be limits to freedom.”

At any rate, in Brandenburg, the United States Supreme Court pointed out that,

Whitney has been thoroughly discredited by later decisions. These later decisions have fashioned the principle that the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action. As we said in Noto v. United States, 367 U.S. 290, 297 -298 (1961), “the mere abstract teaching . . . of the moral propriety or even moral necessity for a resort to force and violence, is not the same as preparing a group for violent action and steeling it to such action.” (Brandenburg, supra, 395 U.S. 444, at pp. 447-448, citations and footnotes omitted.)

Thus, the Supreme Court in Brandenburg reversed the conviction of this KKK leader who had said nasty things and called people bad names. The Court held that,

[W]e are here confronted with a statute which, by its own words and as applied, purports to punish mere advocacy and to forbid, on pain of criminal punishment, assembly with others merely to advocate the described type of action. Such a statute falls within the condemnation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments. The contrary teaching of Whitney v. California, supra, cannot be supported, and that decision is therefore overruled. Brandenburg, supra, 395 U.S. 444, at p. 449, footnote omitted.

As Justice Douglas noted in his concurring opinion,

While I join the opinion of the Court, I desire to enter a caveat.

                                                   * * *

Whether the war power — the greatest leveler of them all — is adequate to sustain that doctrine is debatable. The dissents in Abrams, Schaefer, and Pierce show how easily “clear and present danger” is manipulated to crush what Brandeis called “[t]he fundamental right of free men to strive for better conditions through new legislation and new institutions” by argument and discourse even in time of war. Though I doubt if the “clear and present danger” test is congenial to the First Amendment in time of a declared war, I am certain it is not reconcilable with the First Amendment in days of peace.

The Court quite properly overrules Whitney v. California, 274 U.S. 357, which involved advocacy of ideas which the majority of the Court deemed unsound and dangerous. Brandenburg, supra, 395 U.S. 444, at pp. 451-452, citation omitted.

Today, however, the Republican Party has discovered a threat worse than the KKK.

F.B.I. officials are urging agents to canvass their communities for information about planned disruptions aimed at the [Republican] convention and other coming [Republican] political events. Eric Lichtblau, “F.B.I. Goes Knocking for Political Troublemakers,” The New York Times (August 16, 2004).

This is particularly important because, as the story notes, some people might demonstrate against the Republican Party at the convention. Imagine. And some of them use the Internet for “everything from violent resistance to [gasp!] Internet fund-raising and [gasp!] recruitment.” John Kerry and John Edwards, for example, are reported to have a website.

As some of the people being contacted by the F.B.I. said,

[T]hey are mystified by the bureau’s interest and felt harassed by questions about their political plans.

“The message I took from it,” said Sarah Bardwell, 21, an intern at a Denver antiwar group who was visited by six investigators a few weeks ago, “was that they were trying to intimidate us into not going to any protests and to let us know that, ‘hey, we’re watching you.’” Lichtblau, supra.

Although some F.B.I. agents complained that this improperly blurred the line between freedom of speech and illegal activity, the office which previously authorized the use of torture against terrorists in some circumstances said that,

Given the limited nature of such public monitoring, any possible “chilling” effect caused by the bulletins would be quite minimal and substantially outweighed by the public interest in maintaining safety and order during large-scale demonstrations. Lichtblau, supra.

While that office has since decided that torture is, after all, wrong to use even against terrorists, they have not backed down on monitoring because they’re only infiltrating seriously harmful groups of elderly school teachers, like Peace Fresno, and visiting the homes of 15-year-old doodlers. And there’s no chilling effect on freedom of speech in that.

With the F.B.I. given more authority after the Sept. 11 attacks to monitor public events, the tensions over the convention protests, coupled with the Justice Department’s own legal analysis of such monitoring, reflect the fine line between protecting national security in an age of terrorism and discouraging political expression. Lichtblau, supra.

September 11. There you have it. This is why we must silence the Democrats. This is why more than two-hundred years of freedom must be sacrificed. This is why the Constitution, upon which this country was founded, must be put into the shredder.

As Bush might say, “It’s emperor-ative, er, imperative. If we don’t destroy our country, the terrorists will!”

You can’t argue with that logic now, can you?

Steve Malm, one of their members, periodically sends me email or stops me in the parking lot — we both attend San Joaquin College of Law — to tell me a little about what’s going on. But, frankly, I don’t know that much about them otherwise. Their activities aren’t exactly my cup of tea. I’d rather be ignored while writing my blog, which at least forces me to think, than ignored while standing on street corners waving signs. (I’m don’t intend this as any kind of negative comment on their work; it’s just not my approach.)

Nevertheless, if stories Steve has emailed me about are true, I am disturbed. (I know, I know: Many of you think I’m disturbed anyway. I’m talking about something else here!) Steve tells me — and the Fresno Bee has reported in more detail — that the Fresno County Sheriff’s Department has been spying on them.

Such a thing, if true, should never happen in the United States.

Some of you may disagree. The Sheriff certainly does. Although he denies that Peace Fresno is under investigation, he states,

For the purpose of detecting or preventing terrorist activities, the Fresno County Sheriff’s Department may visit any place and attend any event that is open to the public, on the same terms and conditions as members of the public generally.

Forget the fact that this country belongs to “we, the people” and that we have certain unalienable rights, among which, by constitutional declaration, are freedom of speech and association. Police agents of the government — who are charged with enforcing our laws — should have some reason to suspect criminal activity before investing department resources in any investigation. Sheriff’s deputies cost money. The paperwork they create and file costs money. The storage for their files — even if this is on computer — costs money. The personnel who help maintain and catalog the data cost money. The people who complain about taxes tend to forget this, but that doesn’t change the fact that every investigation has to be paid for by someone. And that someone is we, the taxpayers.

The fact that a group calls itself “Peace Fresno” and periodically waves signs on street corners and calls out to drivers does not seem in and of itself to be a sufficient indicator of criminal activity rising to a level requiring investigation. If it is, then it seems to me that Christian study groups are also appropriate targets. They not only sit around discussing potentially subversive ideas (such as, among others, that there is a higher law than that the sheriff’s department enforces and that people must obey G-d and not men; these people periodically do break laws) and they believe in these ideas so fervently that they not only organize public demonstrations, but coordinate their activities so that they can actually target entire neighborhoods with a door-to-door peddling of their subversive ideas!

Before you get all fired up over that last paragraph: I’m joking. Well, sort of. But I don’t think church groups are appropriate targets for investigation — barring prior evidence or reasonable suspicion of illegal activity — certainly not anymore than Peace Fresno.

If the Sheriff feels the need to “visit any place and attend any event that is open to the public,” then I think he needs to do so “on the same terms and conditions as members of the public generally.” Those terms and conditions do not include spying. I know of not a single group in Fresno — or anywhere, for that matter — which says, “Please feel free to join our meetings and participate in our events, hiding your identity from us and taking notes about us for the purposes of compiling a dossier for the government.” I know whenever I visit any place or attend any event open to the public, I expect that the people I meet there are being honest with me about any revelations they make about themselves. I don’t expect they are clandestinely making notes about the fact that I was there; I don’t expect they are keeping files on what I say or do; and I don’t expect that they are turning these files over to the government for any purpose, let alone because my government does not like what I say or do.

Sure, nothing prevents anyone from doing this. That’s just because most groups don’t have written terms and conditions for visiting them or attending their events! (And, if they did, and these forbid the kinds of activities in which the Sheriff’s undercover agents might engage, would he honor them? Or was even this statement he made to the press on the same level as those made by undercover agents who claim to be independently wealthy when they are not?) The “terms and conditions” that apply to any gathering of people in a free society are largely implicit. As noted above, it’s just not one’s expectation in a free, open and democratic Republic that the people you meet in such places are there to spy on you, to collect and compile information and to turn it over as a permanent record to the government. Such activities are anathema to a free democratic society. They have a potential chilling effect, if nothing else, upon freedom of speech and association.

Spying on their own citizens is one of the cardinal sins the British committed which lead our Founders to foment a revolution against them, and to write a Constitution that restricted the power of the government they then founded.

This is not communist Russia. This is not Iraq. This is not any other police state. This is America.

And undercover police agents spying on non-criminal gatherings of citizens is not part of the Terms and Conditions of our Constitution.

There’s something about this story that makes my skin crawl. That something has been bothering me for some time, but has become increasingly more bothersome with each passing day of occupation by the Ashcroft-Rove-Cheney-Bush coalition.

That something is that the day of a police state on American soil is fast approaching. I guess it’s just been too long — what a great thing this is to be able to say, but also profoundly dismaying that it has had this effect — since United States’ citizens have experienced significant problems with tyranny in our government. But because it has been so long, Americans have come to take freedom for granted. We fail to see that it is hard won and easily lost. (If only I could buy a copy of “The Siege” for every American — and get them to watch it.)

Today a government that many Americans still mistakenly see as benign rules. And it’s busy undermining the freedoms that have made our country strong for more than two-hundred years. Why? “To make us safe from terrorists.” Yet there comes a point where these attempts to make us safe from terrorists expose us to danger from tyrannizers.

Why do we allow this?

Americans simply cannot fathom the possibility of our government expressly turning on us. Too many people are of the opinion, “If you have nothing to hide, it shouldn’t matter.” Yet the same mechanisms and procedures we’re allowing to be constructed now can also allow for much greater abuses. What about the possibility of random searches on our streets or randomly stopping citizens to ask for identification or their reason for being out after dark. After all, if you have nothing to hide, it shouldn’t matter. Why not allow the police, on some private tip or — heck, why not? — just a whim, to come into your home and search it for contraband, material the government deems obscene, terrorists or illegal aliens? I mean, if you have nothing to hide, it shouldn’t matter. Why not, instead of having everyone file income tax returns, just permit the government to peruse people’s bank accounts and audit their assets whenever they want? They could then assess taxes that they thought were right and just remove the money from one of your accounts — if they’re benevolent enough about it, they might even let you designate which account they’d normally tap. I mean, after all, if you have nothing to hide, it shouldn’t matter. It’s not like you don’t have to pay your taxes anyway!

Do you think that last example was “over-the-top”? (Perhaps you think they all were. If so, this just shows how little you’ve thought about it. Stuff like that has happened here before. It resulted in a little tiff with the ruling government in America that was called “The Revolutionary War.”) In fact, with information technology, there’s no realistic reason why the government couldn’t build a database to track all your assets, including bank accounts, real and even personal property. The technology already exists. It just hasn’t been deployed yet (so far as I know, at least) on a scale that would allow this level of tracking.

After all, private companies sometimes do it. The March print issue of CSO (“The Resource for Security Executives”) on page 12 even recommends that companies perform background checks, not just on new hires, but on existing employees. And they don’t just recommend this be done once, but that it be a recurring procedure. Julie Hanson, the author, notes that “having their lives investigated can be unsettling for loyal workers.” Why? If they don’t have anything to hide, it shouldn’t matter. At any rate, Ms. Hanson’s approach to dealing with this is that companies “develop a well-written plan about [their] background-check policy for current employees.” In other words, make sure to detail in the policy manual that they can submit to this, or go elsewhere.

Of course, if enough “elsewheres” begin doing this — or if we just remain complacent long enough so that our government can do this — a dossier will exist for everyone and there will be no “elsewhere” left to go. We’re well on the way when we begin fingerprinting every human stupid or desperate enough to fly, anyway.

But I digress.

Flying is something that is increasingly important for our highly mobile society. My wife recently suggested that I fly next week when I go visit her step-father in Las Vegas. But I’m not sure if I want to submit to potential anal probes coming and going to ensure that I’m only someone who objects to the loss of my freedoms and not something worse, like a terrorist.

Well, okay, only some people have to submit to the anal probes. And the likelihood is that we’ll move to electronic strip searches before body cavity searches become routine. After all, these are less time-consuming and stink up less fingers.

Benjamin Franklin is often quoted as having said,

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Today, Americans are more and more inclined to give up essential liberty to obtain the illusion of a little temporary safety. Or perhaps some are not under an illusion that they’re safe, but they just hope they will be.

At any rate, I’m hoping that the ACLU will prevail. The no-fly list mentioned in the story that inspired this blog entry seems to me to be either a deprivation of rights in violation of due process of law or of equal protection. Both of these Fourteenth Amendment rights are, for the time being, still in place — at least until Bush convenes another constitutional convention to officially rewrite the Constitution.

Currently, the Constitution restricts government. Bush, his handlers and his cronies have been hard at work transmogrifying our understanding of it into a document that restricts the citizenry, by getting people to believe they only have the rights expressly spelled out therein over two hundred years ago — before anal probes and American airlines. Since most Americans have never read the Constitution, this is relatively easy. But some of us still remember the Tenth Amendment.

And we’re in no hurry to fly into the arms of certain tyranny to avoid a potential terrorist.

In fact, this is exactly what has happened.

Glen Martin, Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Radford University (Radford, Virginia), has noted,

IN A MEMO not considered important enough to publicize in the mainstream press, Attorney General John Ashcroft recently commanded the Justice Department to resist all requests under the Freedom of Information Act. And President George Bush has ordered the records of recent U.S. presidents sealed from the public.

And we, the American people, have no problem with the idea that this government no longer recognizes that it was created for our benefit. The government of the United States was intended to be a government that “deriv[ed its] just powers from the consent of the governed.” That last phrase is a quote from the Declaration of Independence. Not only that, but the very first sentence of the Declaration of Independence states,

WHEN in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation. (Emphasis added.)

Yet, in the United States, increasingly, our government created to protect us does not have the respect to “declare” why it treats us all as potential enemies. Information is refused, hearings are held behind closed doors, the Vice-President does not wish us even to know who helped write the energy-industry-friendly Energy Policy for the United States. (Personally, I don’t know how anyone can have doubts about who it was. Bush and Cheney are both well-known to have made millions in oil — this is true even if you think they did it legally, and there’s doubt about that. And the energy industry is currently paying travel expenses for groups of Republican members of Congress to visit a balmy resort to hear what they want in exchange for more campaign money. Does anyone seriously not know that these same people wrote the policy by which taxpayer monies will be transferred to them?)

So serious have governmental restrictions on the people by whose consent it is supposed to govern become that even the American Library Association has joined the growing number of American cities opposing the Federal government. Revolutionary librarians!

And yet all the chest-thumping by the Bush Administration, and particularly John Ashcroft — all the invading of sovereign nations without valid or true reasons and all the threatening of others with the military might of the United States — has done nothing to increase the security of the United States. Instead, having completely forgotten the shame of the United States in forcing Japanese-Americans into internment camps during World War II, now, as the Craig Cox notes in an Utne Reader exclusive,

The attorney general has taken the passage of the Patriot Act and the Homeland Security Bill as blanket authority to push through policies and procedures that not only erode constitutional and civil rights but also fundamentally alter the character of this country.

Our Founding Fathers waged a war against the British Empire because, as they put it, “when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security.” (Declaration of Independence of the United States of America, emphasis added.)

They then took pains to write a Constitution that restricted the rights of the government — but, today, our government uses that same document to restrict the rights of the people, by stating that any rights not explicitly granted to the people don’t exist. (This is a favorite argument of Justice Scalia of the Supreme Court. For more on this, see my article, “MediaResearch: Who’s Ignorant of What Now?,” on TechStop™. Interestingly, though, Scalia is more-than-ready to grant First Amendment speech rights to corporations, even though the Constitution does not contains such a provision and, in fact, our Founding Fathers were wary of the power of corporations and considered such power an evil. They even went so far as to consider an 11th Amendment that would have restricted corporate power. Scalia’s “strict constructionism” is fine when it goes against human beings, but not when it limits corporations, apparently.) The idea that the Constitution should somehow give the government the right to impair any freedoms of citizens which were not explicated within it turns the Constitution on its head; it has everything backwards. The government gets its powers from us; it does not exist so that we can learn what rights John Ashcroft and the White House may deign to give us.

It’s about time for us to wake up and remind Washington of this. It’s time for us to let the government know that we control it and not the other way around.

It’s time for each of us to stand up — as each new move of the Bush Administration makes it clear that they evince a Design to reduce us under absolute Despotism — and for each of us to say, “You see, the trouble is, I’m actually an American!”

Wow.

Wouldn’t it be better to have the government just implant computer chips into everyone’s skull at birth regardless of where we’re born?

The mystery is why Ashcroft, after resisting the appointment of a special prosecutor for several months, changed his mind. One exciting possibility is that Karl Rove, whom Plame’s husband, former diplomat Joseph Wilson, fingered early on, has emerged as a serious suspect. (Rove was a political consultant on two of Ashcroft’s gubernatorial campaigns and one of his Senate campaigns.) But it’s just as possible that Ashcroft handed the investigation over to a special counsel in order to bury it. — Timothy Noah, “Ashcroft as Br’er Rabbit: Will a special counsel bury the Plame investigation?,” Slate, January 2, 2004.

I’m betting that it’s both.

“The federal government is looking into putting video cameras on commercial flights so people on the ground could monitor pilots and passengers and get an early warning of hijackings or other trouble on board.” — from “FAA testing cameras on planes,” CNN.com, October 4, 2003.

      Did you catch that? President Truman submitted a proposal that had been drafted, not by four people in secrecy in the basement of the White House, but by representatives of the armed forces and had been approved by the Secretaries of War and Navy, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
      What a difference in Administrations! What a difference in attitudes toward government!
 

The speaker is Senator Byrd.