Clear and present danger
In a Department of Defense press release, President Bill Clinton announced that on December 16, 1998, he had ordered air strikes "against Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs and its military capacity to threaten its neighbors. ... Clinton said he and his national security advisers agreed that Saddam Hussein presented a clear and present danger to the stability of the Persian Gulf and the safety of people everywhere."[1]
CNN.com reported that on September 24, 2001, "Attorney General John Ashcroft appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee and declared that 'terrorism is a clear and present danger to Americans today."[2][3]
Remarks by U.S. Ambassador J. Richard Blankenship, U.S. Ambassador at a Joint Luncheon Meeting, American Men's & Womens's Club, Nassau, Bahamas, October 8, 2002: "As President Bush so clearly said, Saddam Hussein represents a clear and present danger for not just the United States, but for the entire world."[4]
The phrase clear and present danger was popularized in Tom Clancy's 1993 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."[5]
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." [6]
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." [7]
Other Related SourceWatch Resources
- Axis of Evil
- Bush doctrine
- civil liberties
- enemies of freedom
- enemy combatant
- evil empire
- Patriot Act I
- Patriot Act II
- Patriot Act abuses
- preemptive war
- Treating dissent as treason
- Using fear as a political tool
- war on freedom
External Links
- Terry Eastland, How Danger Becomes "Clear and Present", From the October 7, 2002 Dallas Morning News: A brief history of the roots of "clear and present danger.", October 8, 2002.
