Who Is Really the Threat to Peace

Here is the video and a partial transcript of a powerful speech by Keith Olbermann, MSNBC Anchor of “Countdown with Keith Olbermann”. AlterNet: Blogs has a more complete transcript.

We have lived… as people in fear.
And now -- our rights and our freedoms in peril -- we slowly awake to learn that we have been afraid… of the wrong thing.


Therefore, tonight, have we truly become, the inheritors of our American legacy. For, on this first full day that the Military Commissions Act is in force, we now face what our ancestors faced, at other times of exaggerated crisis and melodramatic fear-mongering: A government more dangerous to our liberty, than is the enemy it claims to protect us from.


We have been here before -- and we have been here before led here -- by men better and wiser and nobler than George W. Bush. We have been here when President John Adams insisted that the Alien and Sedition Acts were necessary to save American lives -- only to watch him use those Acts to jail newspaper editors. American newspaper editors, in American jails, for things they wrote, about America. We have been here, when President Woodrow Wilson insisted that the Espionage Act was necessary to save American lives -- only to watch him use that Act to prosecute 2,000 Americans, especially those he disparaged as "Hyphenated Americans," most of whom were guilty only of advocating peace in a time of war.


American public speakers, in American jail for things they said, about America.


And we have been here when President Franklin D. Roosevelt insisted that Executive Order 9-0-6-6 was necessary to save American lives -- only to watch him use that Order to imprison and pauperize 110-thousand Americans… While his man-in-charge… General DeWitt, told Congress: "It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen -- he is still a Japanese."


American citizens, in American camps, for something they neither wrote nor said nor did -- but for the choices they or their ancestors had made, about coming to America.


Each of these actions was undertaken for the most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons. And each, was a betrayal of that for which the President who advocated them, claimed to be fighting.


[...]Sadly -- of course -- the distance of history will recognize that the threat this generation of Americans needed to take seriously… was you. We have a long and painful history of ignoring the prophecy attributed to Benjamin Franklin that "those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." But even within this history, we have not before codified, the poisoning of Habeas Corpus, that wellspring of protection from which all essential liberties flow.