Newt Gingrich tries to scare Americans silent.

Newt Gingrich, the man who gave us NAFTA, now proposes to turn the United States into a police state. In a speech at a banquet convened to honor those who stand up for free speech and the First Amendment, Gingrich, who is mulling a run for the presidency in 2008, said that freedom of speech should be abandoned in order to fight terrorism. "We now should be impaneling people to look seriously at a level of supervision that we would never dream of if it weren't for the scale of the threat," Gingrich said in his speech to the those attending the Nackey S. Loeb First Amendment award dinner on November 27.

Using the familiar technique of trying to scare people into surrendering their liberties, the would-be usurper continued: "Either before we lose a city or, if we are truly stupid, after we lose a city, we will adopt rules of engagement that use every technology we can find to break up their capacity to use the Internet, to break up their capacity to use free speech, and to go after people who want to kill us to stop them from recruiting people."

Gingrich also signaled his approval of British rules allowing the holding of suspects without charge for several weeks and said he thinks there needs to be a Geneva-convention-type agreement defining which people the government can persecute without oversight. "We should propose a Geneva Convention for fighting terrorism, which makes very clear that those who would fight outside the rules of law, those who would use weapons of mass destruction, and those who would target civilians are, in fact, subject to a totally different set of rules that allow us to protect civilization by defeating barbarism before it gains so much strength that it is truly horrendous," he said.