Clear and present danger
When announcing to the nation that the United States and the coalition of the willing had launched an attack in Iraq on March 19, 2003, in the war on terrorism, President George W. Bush said 'Earlier today, I ordered America's armed forces to strike military and security targets in Iraq. ... This situation presents a clear and present danger to the stability of the Persian Gulf and the safety of people everywhere. The international community gave Saddam one last chance to resume cooperation with the weapons inspectors. Saddam has failed to seize the chance. ... And so we had to act and act now."[1]
The phrase clear and present danger was popularized in Tom Clancy's fiction, "Clear and Present Danger".
In his 1998 "Freedom of Expression, Dissenting Historians, and the Holocaust Revisionists", David Botsford writes regarding what he identifies as the "doctrine of clear and present danger."
The doctrine, he says, was invoked by the Supreme Court on a "number of occasions to limit freedom of speech. The doctrine of 'clear and present danger' stems from the period after World War I which saw some 1,900 federal prosecutions for peaceful speech, mostly for statements considered subversive because they encouraged resistance to the draft or otherwise opposed the war effort. Among the notable cases of that era was the prosecution and imprisonment of the leader of the American Socialist Party, Eugene V. Debs, which was upheld by the Supreme Court. The restrictive force of the doctrine was broadened in 1951 during the prosecution of 11 top US Communist Party leaders, when the Supreme Court ruled that if the climate is right for an evil to occur, the government may imprison people whose advocacy could create that evil at a future point. If the Supreme Court had adhered to this view, which it subsequently abandoned, the government would have had a powerful tool to crack down on all manner of speech that particular officials might find offensive."
"Freedom of speech is ultimately the greatest protection against the kinds of crimes that took place in Rwanda and in the former Yugoslavia, and against the crimes that Julius Streicher was able to incite in Nazi Germany."
Source (according to footnote): Index on Censorship, vol. 27, no. 1, January/February 1998, pp. 57, 59.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., wrote in Schenck v. United States, 1919:
"The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic. ... The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent."[2]
In his June 25, 2002 "Phantoms of Government Provided Security", David Sadler (for Congress) wrote: "The National Security State has become a national security threat to the free people of the United States of America and represents a clear and present danger to the US Constitution. ... We were defeating many of these attempts at weakening our liberty and sovereignty prior to 9-11, but 9-11 provided the Hegelian opportunity to those who profit from war and national debt. The issuance of totally unconstitutional executive orders and the passage of unconstitutional laws for alleged security purposes increased dramatically after, in direct responce to, 9-11." [3]
One commentary regarding Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47 (1919); Frohwerk in United States, 249 U.S. 204 (1919); and Debs v. United States, 249 U.S. 211 (1919) states: "These are decisions, with Holmes writing for a unanimous court, that upheld criminal convictions of various socialists for antiwar polemics that today clearly would qualify for First Amendment protection. Nevertheless, by employing the clear-and-present-danger test and by declining to suspend it even '[w]hen a nation is at war', Schenck, 249 U.S. at 52, Holmes can be read to evince an appreciation of the value of political criticism. By insisting that First Amendment protection remains 'a question of proximity and degree,' not a matter of the innate tendency of the idea, Holmes implemented an approach that was, in theory at least, more protective of controversial speakers than the bad tendency test that previously had dominated First Amendment interpretation." [4]
