The First Amendment states:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or of the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

People, therefore, are protected to speak out against the government and not face consequences, like losing a job.  Right?  Well, not always.  In current practice, the First Amendment seems to have the following addendum:

The people may speak and picket and petition, but the government has the right to ignore and silence them from time to time as it shall deem proper.

Colonel Morris Davis, who is an assistant director at the Library of Congress in the Congressional Research Service, was recently admonished and released by his boss for “bad judgment” when it came to writing a editorials in the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal.  The Washington Post ran a story over the weekend relaying that yes, in fact, he had been fired, and the ACLU has picked up the case.  There was little mention of any of this happening in the news media today.

Davis was formerly the Chief Prosecutor of Military Commissions at Guantánamo and had seen first hand how the manipulation of the judicial process affects the game of politics so when he retired he began to speak out against the former administration.  This is fairly common; because of potential conflicts of interest, officials and generals often remain quiet on certain issues until they retire.  Just look at the recent replacement of White House Counsel Greg Craig or generals who, in September 2009, finally spoke out against the former Vice President.

Davis was testified on behalf of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, accused of being Bin Laden’s driver, in 2008, but there were no issues when, six months later, he was working in the Congressional Research Service division of the Library of Congress.  However, once he began to criticize the administration, he became a problem.

We do not know the administration’s reasoning for punishing Davis’s exercise of his First Amendment rights, but what we do know is while our First Amendment is under constant fire.  The Constitution tells us that we the people have to be vigilant against overreaching government.  We are mandated to speak out against it when it is wrong!  And if we do nothing to protect our First Amendment from gross violation, Pastor Martin Niemoller’s poem about the Holocaust may come to reflect our history:

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a communist;

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist;

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew;

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak out for me.

Tags: First Amendment, free speech, Guantanamo Bay

This entry was posted on Monday, December 7th, 2009 at 3:32 pm and is filed under Current Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.