Free Speech

The United States is a democracy in which the First Amendment was written to protect the people’s rights of speech, press, assembly and redress of grievance. If the government is allowed to step in and prohibit or limit any of these rights, democracy then becomes a dictatorship. Telephone taps, secrecy, invasion of privacy and control of the media are just the beginning. History has shown a pattern of the government smothering the rights of its citizens when it believes that national security is jeopardized. Ever since the beginning of the “war on terrorism,” the Bush administration has asserted that the continuing of this unclear and undefined conflict is more important than the basic democratic rights preserved in the Constitution.

In the aftermath of September 11th, the Bush administration rounded up hundreds of Arabs and Muslims and placed them in prisons. (Mears,2) The government claimed they were going after terrorists.