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LIZ: Hi. GARBUS: Hi.

LIZ: Usually I start these off by asking people

what their name is, and what they do.

But I'm not sure in this case it's necessary.

All right, so, Dad? GARBUS: Yeah?

LIZ: Can you please repeat after me?

Congress shall make no law.

Congress shall make no law.

Isn't working. Memorized in five minutes.

Let's see if you can.

Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech.

PRYOR: Nigger, nigger, nigger. Are there any niggers?

Or of the press.

MAN: Good evening from ABC News headquarters.

Or the right of the people

peaceably to assemble.

CROWD: This is what democracy looks like!

GARBUS: And to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

I'm free

to think and to speak.

My ancestors couldn't. I can.

Can you break a nigger? Is it okay?

CROWD: Go arrest Bush! Go arrest Bush!

MAN [ON PA]: God hates fags!

All I could think of was: shit, piss, fuck, cunt,

cocksucker, motherfucker and tits.

Homosexuality is shameful.

Intifada NYC.

Kiss my ass.

Fire!

The whole concept of:

"Congress shall make no laws abridging free speech,"

is brilliant. I think it's the cornerstone of democracy.

Without it, you don't have a democracy.

The whole idea that you can really have a country

where anybody can think anything,

say anything, create anything.

I think the whole idea of creating a country like that

over 200 years ago...

It's a miracle. It is a miracle.

I'm not the only interpreter and defender

of this miracle.

I'm just the one who happens to be your father.

There are many others before, and will come after me

who've had their lives crushed, destroyed.

They've been jailed, they've lost their jobs.

People who believe that, without free speech,

you don't have a free society.

So this is something that is very sacred.

That didn't-- I wasn't just handed to us.

We have developed this. The founding generation

gave us the structure, and gave us the words

that have stood the test of time.

"Congress shall make no law." And it's so simple.

SLEETH: Well, the First Amendment says:

"Congress shall make no laws

respecting the freedom of speech."

But Congress makes lots of laws

respecting the freedom of speech.

So, uh, we're balancing here.

Battles over free speech go back

to the very beginning of our nation.

It's not that in 1791

the First Amendment was ratified

and since then everyone has enjoyed freedom of speech.

That is certainly not the case.

Now wars are often a moment in our history

when the government feels it necessary

or desirable to limit freedom of speech.

Our country is a battlefield

in the first war of the 21st century.

On September 11, 2001, there was this sort of

psychological break across the country

Everywhere this sort of security blanket

that we've put over our heads disappeared.

When our nation is gripped by fear,

uh, our government often responds

by attacking our fundamental liberties.

POSNER: The greatest danger to civil liberties is another attack.

So that civil libertarians should support

effective security measures that would reduce

the likelihood of an attack. Oh, yeah.

Look, if Washington gets blown up

by a nuclear bomb,

forget about civil liberties, right?

FILM NARRATOR: Sometimes a bomb might explode without any warning.

Then, the first thing

we would know about it would be the flash.

That means duck and cover, fast, wherever you are.

There's no time to look around or wait.

LIZ: When did you first learn about the concept of free speech?

Uh...

Well, I guess one learns about it--

I guess I learned about it, uh, somewhat in college.

I was in college at the time of the McCarthy hearings.

McCARTHY: Next question, Mr. Stripling.

Are you a member of the Communist Party,

or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?

It is against the Constitution to ask--

MAN: Our American way of life is under attack

from without and from within our national boarders.

GARBUS: So at that time,

I saw people trying to exercise free speech,

just being destroyed by McCarthy.

I was not that political.

I remember watching Joseph Welch,

who was a lawyer, who stood up to McCarthy.

I remember that very clearly.

Have you no sense of decency, sir?

At long last?

Have you left no sense of decency?

McCARTHY: Listen, I know this hurts you, Mr. Welch.

But I may say, Mr. Chairman,

as a point of personal privilege--

I'd like to finish this.

Senator, I think it hurts you too, sir.

GARBUS: By the time I got to the Army-- The instance in the Army

where they tried to court-martial me,

for something that I allegedly said,

I think just made me think about free speech a great deal.

It's the first time that,

of course, I was ever a defendant.

I learned, through this and other experiences,

that it's very lonely.

You go into a courtroom as a lawyer,

and you have all these flowery words,

and you talk about the Constitution,

you talk about the Bill of Rights.

You talk about all these things are meaningful.

But the person standing next to you,

is basically focused on being terrified

they're gonna spend X number of years in jail.

It went a large way towards making me more political.

And I also learned if people wanna stop speech,

they will use any number of different reasons

to try and stop it.

So that you'll see prosecutions now all over the place,

because they don't like somebody's political bias.

HUIE: You are, of course, one of the most controversial figures

we've had in the Senate in a long time.

And you have the distinction of having coined

a new word for the dictionary. Namely, McCarthyism.

Now, uh, how do you define McCarthyism, sir?

McCARTHY: Mr. Huie, I didn't-- I didn't coin the phrase.

But putting it the way one columnist did the other day,

he said, "Frankly McCarthyism

means calling a man a communist who is later proven to be one."

HOOVER: Their goal is the overthrow of our government.

There is no doubt as to where

a real communist's loyalty rests.

Their allegiance is to Russia, not the United States.

There was a period from 1947 to the late 1950s

of a very severe closing down

of the avenues of dissent in American society.

NEWSREADER: Twelve top communists in this country are rounded up.

Some people were persecuted, but many others simply

were silenced by the fear

of losing their livelihood, or maybe even being prosecuted.

SCOTT: My father was one of the victims of the McCarthy period.

He was a high school teacher in New York City,

and he was among the first group of eight teachers

to be suspended and then fired.

We used to have arguments in the '80s.

The 1980s about whether or not there would ever be

a need to worry again about academic freedom.

And he would say, "Just wait. Something will happen.

Something will come back.

And I would say, "No, no.

This is never gonna happen again."

And he was right.

The attack on 9/11 opened the ground once again

for the kinds of attacks

on teachers, on the academy,

that one had thought were over with after the 1950s.

But in the war on terror, I think what's interesting is,

the attacks on free speech have tended not to come

from the government so much, as from private,

self-proclaimed patriotic organizations,

who try to monitor what's being taught at universities,

or monitor what people are saying.

People are not being thrown in jail for what they say,

but academic freedom is under attack today.

MAN: I want to call the meeting to order.

This special meeting is convened to consider

the recently publicized comments

of Professor Ward Churchill

of the Ethnic Studies Department.

Let me point out that we--

Consider letting the students speak. Please.

Consider letting the students speak.

MAN: If you speak out one more time--

STUDENT: Let the students speak.

Understand you'll start a new era of McCarthyism

if you allow this to happen.

Understand that. Understand that.

This is McCarthyism at its finest.

CHURCHILL: On 9/11 itself, I had been asked to write an op-ed,

try to make sense of this to be posted the next day.

So I had already written on 9/11,

what might the motive have been?

Before the buildings were down,

all three major cable news channels--

I was flipping back and forth between them.

--and they're all saying exactly the same thing:

That this is a senseless act.

How would they know?

WOMAN: Why are they jumping?

CHURCHILL And the second thing that struck me is that they were,

at the time talking about, there might be,

in the World Trade Center itself,

as many as 17,000 people.

They were all, on all three channels,

being continuously pronounced innocent.

So if you attack America, by definition,

there could be no reason for it.

And if you're an American, you are by definition innocent.

Evil has found us. I'm sorry to say.

When President Bush said that last night.

That, uh-- That evil has done this.

That's what it is.

CHURCHILL: Once you've started with the Iraqi children

and the Palestinian situation you can run a string,

as I did, all the way back to the Dutch

playing kickball with the heads of the Wappinger Indians,

okay, in New Amsterdam,

in roughly the location of the World Trade Center.

And it's an unbroken chain.

So I stopped talking about the actual perpetrators

and started talking about the ghosts,

who had experienced a similar,

or comparable fate over the years,

at the hands of

the self-proclaimedly innocent Americans.

Went through the Contra War in Nicaragua,

went back to No Gun Ri,

and the 3.2 million dead in Indochina.

And then a million-and-a-half Filipinos

killed by the Indian fighters fresh off the planes.

That war began in 1898,

which is 8 years after Wounded Knee.

So you can go back from Wounded Knee

all the way back to that little game of kickball.

It's an awful lot.

Awful lot of bodies piled up there.

Ward Churchill's a very polemical writer.

He is a public intellectual.

He was hired by the University of Colorado Boulder,

because he was a public intellectual.

He's written dozens of books. He's very prolific.

And he doesn't censor himself, at all.

He just goes: zhuup!

Chickens coming home to roost, yeah.

I posed a question,

which went pretty much like this.

And I'm paraphrasing, this is not exact quote, but...

If there is a better

or more efficient way

to impose consequences on the little Eichmanns

composing a technocratic core of American empire,

I'd really like to hear it.

CHURCHILL: It was in the dark hole of cybernetic oblivion,

and sat there for three years, until somebody dug it back up.

Now, these are people associated with the political right.

They're organized into groups.

Uh, one of the big ones

is the American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

ACTA decided that it needed a centerpiece

for an ideological purge,

and they decided that this would be

perfect for their purposes.

ACTA did a report called, "How many Ward Churchills?"

And we used him as a type, if you will.

Essentially our question was:

Could we put Ward Churchill in context?

How many Ward Churchills are there?

And we concluded,

he is not alone, he's quite common.

HOROWITZ: About 60,00 professors

teach the kind of doctrines that Ward Churchill is teaching

and don't allow students in their classes--

David Horowitz, I would suppose,

consummated that with his

"101 Worst Professors in the Country."

LIZ: Most dangerous professors. Were they the worst or--?

Dangerous. I wrote about him

in the introduction where I described

how the Churchill affair became a public affair,

because it shows the mentality of other professors.

David Horowitz. He's trying to get state lawmakers

to pass laws protecting conservative students.

He also happens to be the author of Indoctrination:

The Left's War Against Academic Freedom.

As an outsider to the university,

all I can do is be a catalyst.

Every time somebody lists me as a danger professor,

I get dozens of emails by patriots all around the country

accusing me of every single thing.

The temptation when that happens--

And this is where freedom of speech comes in.

is to just be quiet.

I don't like what's happened to our schools

because political ideologues

have gotten control of the curriculum--

I mean, Horowitz doesn't exist in a vacuum.

He speaks for a substantial portion of America.

The O'Reilly Factor is on. Tonight:

Ward Churchill says it again.

After our report on Friday, professor,

all hell is breaking loose across the country.

Ward Churchill, go!

CHURCHILL: My count they ran 40 segments--

MAN: The tenured Tonto.

--focusing on me. Often the lead segment.

Forty-one consecutive nights of his program.

Can he be tried for either treason or sedition?

If the academy can not sustain public confidence,

then regrettably, it will find legislators

who are interested in intervening.

If he wants to stand on the west steps of the Capitol,

say what he wants to say, let him do that,

but not as a professor of the University of Colorado.

So what the university did,

under enormous political pressure,

was to convene a special investigation.

A thorough examination

of Professor Churchill's writings, speeches,

tape recordings, and other works.

Because if they could find that he was guilty

of "research misconduct,"

then they could get rid of him.

Not because of what he said, but because, uh,

the fact that he was professionally disqualified.

What was said was, we're going through every line

he's ever published and every word he's ever publicly spoken,

insofar as it was recorded and we can get our hands on it.

Every word.

Good morning. Morning.

I feel like I just won the Daytona 500 or something.

We are at a historical crossroads

with this kind of decision.

Because you will do irreparable damage to free speech

and academic freedom, if you fire Ward Churchill

based on these trumped up charges.

Today I issue to Professor Churchill

a notice of intent to dismiss--

To dismiss him from his faculty position--

MAN: Bullshit!

At the University of Colorado Boulder.

MAN: Represent the students!

GARBUS: Yes, they fired Churchill

because of his academic misconduct.

They discovered skeletons in his closet.

I think the real reason was because of speeches he made

concerning 9/11.

Very often in free speech what happens is

they use one reason to justify

convicting or arresting somebody,

or prosecuting somebody,

while really the truth is,

it's his free speech that's being punished.

I don't-- I don't feel happy about that case at all.

Uh, or even maybe about my own position in the case,

but when I read the report I found it extremely difficult

to imagine, um...

Imagine saying that he lived up to academic standards.

The academic standards that one needs to live up to

if one is going to have the autonomy

that academic freedom depends on.

Well, if it comes at a price it's not free.

If there's consequences, it's not free.

GARBUS: People come to America

because they're fleeing oppressive regimes.

What draws them here is they think

they're in a free society, in a society

where they can say anything. But when they get here,

what they learn is, if you want to have that right,

you have to fight for it every day.

I'm Debbie Almontaser,

and, um, my family came from Yemen.

I came to the United States at age 3

to upstate Buffalo.

When I arrived it was in the winter.

The next morning I woke up before my parents,

looked out of the window,

and there was white everywhere.

And I started to scream, all over the house,

"Wake up, wake up! There's sugar everywhere!"

And my dad woke up,

and he was just laughing. And he's like,

"It's not sugar, honey." And I'm like,

"No, no it's sugar. This is America.

"This is where you get everything you want,

the place that you can have all your dreams."

I'm one of those firm believers

in that you do things in your life for a certain reason

because they end up

developing you for something that's bigger,

you know, awaiting you in the future.

Kahlil Gibran was an idea that came forward

through our new small schools movement

in developing a dual language program

for students to learn Arabic,

but and also for Arabic students

who may be new to the country to learn English as well.

And we felt this was extremely important,

and so we provided a lot of support

to make that dream a reality.

I guess I met Debbie initially

through inter-faith work after September 11th.

In a very real sense, Debbie is not a political person.

She doesn't have grand political agendas.

She's about simple things like cooperation and respect.

The school was publicly announced

on February 12 of 2007.

The excitement that I felt was like a mother

who's awaiting, you know, her child to be born.

As soon as it was announced publicly, um,

a number of far-right-wing groups

got into overdrive about it.

There were numerous pieces written in the New York Sun.

One of their writers is Daniel Pipes.

PIPES: My initial reaction as expressed in a weblog entry

was, great idea in principle,

but let's be worried about what it might mean in fact.

FEINBERG: Daniel Pipes is a right-wing ideologue

with a think tank based in Philadelphia

who puts forward a consistent

anti-Arab, anti-Muslim perspective

though a number of media outlets that interview him

and give him a space to speak out.

PIPES: Intense Arabic instruction tends to go with an agenda,

a political and religious agenda.

More broadly, I think it's good for everyone,

Muslim and non-Muslim, to acknowledge

that there is a problem having to do with Islam.

MAN: Why is it that in this city, I've had to sue

to get a nativity scene put in the classroom?

Muslims just got off the plane, and they've got an opportunity

to put up their religious symbol.

KLEIN: There's a bunch of people

trying to portray this as a religious school.

It's not. Period. End of discussion.

Our dual-language Chinese school,

in that school they have the same math, the same--

All the other things. That'll be true at Khalil Gibran.

My name is Pamela Hall,

I'm a member of Stop the Madrassa.

Yes, Stop the Madrassa coalition. Heh.

PIPES: A group of people, unbeknownst to me at the time,

put together an organization called Stop the Madrassa,

and they became activists

and they started taking a variety of steps.

Virtually all terrorists today are Muslim.

This is a sad fact.

People will come up with everything they want to,

to try and undermine the credibility of the school.

Quite frankly, the school is what it stands for:

A public school.

This battle for our schools may have begun in Brooklyn,

but it will not stop there.

They viewed this as just one local battle

on a national war that they're in the middle of.

So this was just a local front.

Yeah, they wanna start a radical madrassa

in the New York public school system.

LIZ: How do we know it's a madrassa?

Well, first, because we know who Debbie Almontaser is,

and we know the people behind her.

We know what they say. We know what they think.

They're part of the Islamo-fascist

crusade in this country.

She is someone at the fringes of American political life

with extremist views on the war on terror,

on the president, on a number of other issues.

Is it true that you don't believe 9/11 happened?

Is it true that you don't believe

that Arabs and Muslims were responsible for 9/11?

Is it true that you're gonna be teaching

sharia law at the school?

Is it true that you're gonna be

segregating the boys from the girls

and leading Islamic prayers?

As the old adage goes, you repeat a lie enough

and it either becomes a truth or looks like a truth.

Let's start with the principal.

I read an article where she would not answer the question

if uh, Arabs were, uh, responsible for 9/11.

Oh. She's an apologist and it's clear that's what she is.

ALMONTASER: What you read was the first part of my quote,

and what the left out on these blogs that you're reading

was that I don't recognize them or Arab or Muslim

because they've--

It's so emotional to talk about this, sorry.

They hijacked my identity and my religion for their acts.

ALMONTASER: The one that I would say that,

deeply, deeply hurts me is the one,

"Is it true that you don't believe 9/11 happened?"

I was here on 9/11 in New York City. My son,

a National Guardsman, was activated on 9/11

to go and serve his country at Ground Zero for six months.

So for people to say to me that,

"you don't believe it happened,"

is quite, uh-- You know, just crushing.

And for people to make those judgments

based on the fact

that I'm Arab and Muslim,

um, is just really, really sad.

The area that they were most effective in

was reaching out to their

ideological allies in the media,

who picked up this story and banged the drum about it

consistently from Day 1.

She received an award

from the Council on American-Islamic Relations,

the most prominent Islamist group in the United States.

Members of the Stop the Madrassa coalition, um,

saw this website,

and so they decided to go to every event,

bearing cameras, taking pictures.

The very last event,

which was the Arab Heritage Park Festival,

and AWAAM, which is Arab Women in the Arts and Media,

an organization that provides young women

with youth leadership and empowerment.

And they had a table where they had some T-shirts,

and one of the T-shirts that they had

read on it "Intifada NYC."

The Stop the Madrassa coalition saw this t-shirt on the table,

they took pictures of it,

they went home and they looked up the website

of this organization.

Days later they put together a press release,

which they sent out to the entire country,

basically stating that I am responsible for a T-shirt

that read "Intifada NYC"

and that I have absolutely no right

to be a principal of a school when I am

affiliated with an organization

and a T-shirt that is promoting violence.

ALMONTASER: The reporter's first question to me was,

"I want to know about your affiliation

with this organization."

And my response to him was,

there is really nothing to talk about because,

you know, it has nothing to do with me or the school.

So we move on and he basically,

uh, says to me,

"What I wanted to ask, you know,

"and have a better understanding is about the word intifada.

"Based on the fact that you are well-versed in Arabic,

"I'd love to understand

what the root word is of the word intifada."

My response to him was,

as a reporter, this is something that you should have

already done your homework on,

rather than asking me this question.

And his response was, "Yeah, yeah,

"of course I've done my research but, you know,

"just wanted to have a better understanding of the root word,

its origin."

I started engaging with him in the conversation and saying,

giving him the root word from the Arabic language,

which he would find in a dictionary.

So I told him that was "shaking off."

However, you have to understand that this word has evolved,

and through its evolution has become known as "uprising,"

and it's very well-known for the uprisings

that have taken place in the Middle East

where thousands of people have been killed.

This word today has different meanings for different people.

ALMONTASER: I was on the whole page on the New York Post,

and the headline read: "Principal 'Revolting.'"

On the right side they had pictures of the T-shirts,

and below it, it said: "Principal defending T-shirts."

I felt like someone pulled the carpet from underneath me,

and I was suspended in midair.

If you read the Post story you might conclude

that she was in favor

of violence in Palestine,

and that she supported the girls

who were walking around with those T-shirts,

and therefore was in favor of violence.

So I immediately rush to my office,

e-mailed the press secretary,

"I did not defend the T-shirts.

"My words were taken out of context,

and all of my words were not used in the piece."

I never gave any impression that I condoned violence,

and I never minimized the historical context.

I gave that historical context.

PIPES: Reporters are in the business of

reporting news and making news,

and this reporter thought that he had a story here and he did.

Clearly, she didn't need to answer. She could have said,

"I didn't put out this T-shirt, no comment."

So her first mistake was talking about it.

What do you think New York Intifada--

Intifada means "remove oppression."

It means violent, uh--

Violent assault on Jews, that's what it means.

Yasser Arafat was a terrorist.

The intifada was a terrorist operation

to kill women and children.

That's what it was about. Oh.

There's an unfortunate effect in the Jewish community--

That's the community I know best.

--of a tendency to circle the wagons,

and to declare certain topics,

at least for public discussion, out of bounds.

If your family were all burnt in ovens,

if you were the sole survivor of your family.

My grandparents are survivors.

Really?

Tone down your offensive rhetoric.

And they produced an asshole like you.

Fine.

And they produced an asshole like you.

Can you imagine? You are so re-righteous.

I give it you.

You're a Nazi socialist.

I was called

to see whether or not she had a claim for libel.

And I went through all the papers

and she does not have a claim of libel.

So yes,

everything that they said there is protected.

LIZ: So they can essentially

assassinate somebody's character that way.

Right.

There's no real legal repercussions?

Right.

No legal remedy? Right.

LIZ: And are you-- Is that okay?

GARBUS: Under the law, it's okay.

ALMONTASER: New Visions said to me,

"What happened this week in the Post

"right now has made

"matters for you extremely bad.

"There is no recovery.

The only way we will go forward is with you stepping down."

"I wanna speak to Chancellor Klein."

There's a whole bunch of people who are portraying this

as a religious school. It's not.

Period. End of discussion.

"Get him on the phone, and I wanna speak to him."

And his response to me was,

"He's in Colorado on vacation in the mountains,

"but I was able to get the deputy mayor,

Dennis Walcott to talk to you."

A lot of support to make that dream a reality.

ALMONTASER: And of course,

I started explaining to Dennis what happened.

And he said, "I am so glad to hear

"that you've made the decision,

"and that you're making this sacrifice.

"I am in the process of finding an assistant principal ship

for you in one of our schools."

BLOOMBERG: Uh, well, I know the woman. She's worked for the city

in a variety of capacities, and I appreciate all her service.

"I want your resignation letter by 8:00 in the morning.

"Upon receiving it, we're going to be preparing the mayor

"to announce your resignation on his radio show at 10 a.m.

There is nothing else left to discuss."

BLOOMBERG: Principal resigned today.

MAN: Did she? BLOOMBERG: Yeah.

I think she felt that she had become the focus, uh...

Rather than having the school the focus,

and so today she submitted her resignation,

which is nice of her to do.

LIZ: There's the chilling effect Muslim Americans

feel that they have to watch what they say.

Does that concern you or is that just a necessary--?

Well, look, everybody has to watch what he says, right?

If you're in a situation

where there's some threat to the country,

and then you have people who are the same ethnicity

as the threateners...

Yes, of course they're gonna be careful in what they say,

because they don't wanna be confused with the enemy, right?

BLOOMBERG: She said something a couple days ago.

She got a question, she's not all that media savvy maybe,

and she tried to explain a word rather than just condemn.

She's certainly not a terrorist.

"The president is hereby empowered

"to designate as alien enemies enemies

any citizens or subjects of hostile nations."

"Residing in the United States whose presence he regards

"as dangerous, and make regulations

for their apprehension, restraint, or removal."

There are over 25,000 Frenchmen

in Philadelphia alone, Mr. President.

Necessity is the excuse for every infringement on freedom.

That's what William Pitt, the British prime minister,

said back in the 18th century.

Governments are always claiming that,

especially in times of crisis,

that freedom is an inconvenience,

freedom of speech is dangerous.

POSNER: And in fact, very early, actually before 1800,

when the Federalists were in power,

they passed alien and sedition acts,

which punished, um,

political advocacy in a way that would be regarded

as completely unconstitutional today.

You cannot protect the nation

by attacking the right of every man

to speak freely without fear.

You're trampling on the Constitution.

The modern notion of free speech is surprisingly modern.

The first series of free speech cases

were really in the context of the suppression of speech,

mostly of socialists,

sometimes of anarchists around the time of World War I.

FONER: Thousands of people were rounded up by the government.

ANNOUNCER: The public seemed glad to have any type of radical

brought to trial. FONER: Many aliens deported.

These were not people who were putting bombs around

or sabotaging the military effort.

They were people who were expressing unpopular ideas.

ANNOUNCER: The great socialist and IWW leader,

Eugene Victor Debs.

Jailed in 1918 for sedition

when he opposed U.S. participation in the war.

FONER: And in the Schenck case,

he was distributing socialistic materials.

And again he was arrested under the Espionage Act.

In both cases, the Supreme Court

upheld the conviction of people for saying unpopular things.

Holmes, the Supreme Court justice,

used the famous phrase,

"Free speech doesn't mean the right to cry fire

in a crowded theatre."

Fire!

In other words, that speech then will lead to

disastrous action.

Back in the 1920's in the Schenck case,

the Supreme Court, for the first time,

was looking thoroughly at the whole question

of what kind of speech can be limited?

The free speech we enjoy today

is the result of many struggles in our past

by groups that have been denied freedom of speech.

LIZ: So, Dad, you wrote in your book,

"Growing up, I feared my freedom was a fragile thing.

"And I felt, as my father did,

"that Jews should keep low profiles

and not speak out at all."

Can you talk to us a little bit about that right now?

Okay. Sure, sure.

My father and mother were immigrants from Poland.

They came over in the mid-'20s.

By the time I was born,

they had a candy store in Brooklyn.

We lived above the candy store in Brooklyn.

And when I was 3 years old,

there was a fire upstairs, and my mother died.

She burned.

I don't know the kind of person my father was

before that happened. I was too small.

But apparently, he was crushed by it.

And never got over it for the rest of his life.

My father and his family had lived through

pogroms in Poland.

He had 10 brothers and sisters.

One had come over. The rest had died

in the Holocaust.

He was constantly afraid

that something would happen in this country.

Back in the 1940's,

there was a substantial pro-German movement

that tried to keep us out of war with Germany.

When I was a kid, I knew about the Bund.

And I knew about things they were doing.

And I knew about rallies

in Madison Square Garden

and other places where swastikas were hung up.

TV ANNOUNCER: This was Madison Square Garden in New York City

and not Berlin nor Nuremberg.

So he always felt

that there would be a recurrence of that.

But he made it very clear to me

that the way to survive was to keep your head down,

don't let anybody know what you're doing

and never speak up.

He had no vision of what else he could do.

So he was really locked in the candy store.

I saw the price that my father paid

for not speaking up.

He became defenseless,

and yet, through him,

I learned something about the First Amendment.

Why is freedom of speech so essential to a free society?

Perhaps Daniel Webster put it best

when he remarked

that if he were deprived of all his rights save one

he would preserve the freedom to speak.

For by proclaiming it,

he could regain all the others which he had lost.

The way our Constitution is written

and the way this democracy is supposed to work,

everybody has a right to have their voice heard.

If you're gonna defend free speech,

you have to defend the speech of people who you hate.

TV REPORTER: Nazis in Chicago

have been wanting to march through Skokie, Illinois,

for several years. CROWD: Racist Nazis go to hell!

TV REPORTER: More than half of the people who live in Skokie are Jewish,

and they have resisted.

GARBUS: And the Nazis were to march in the streets of Skokie,

because they knew it would draw a great deal of attention.

And they knew that the Jews of Skokie

would be very, very upset about it.

And the town of Skokie

got an injunction against the Nazis marching.

If necessary, take the lead in a fight

to see that Nazism never raises its head again.

GARBUS: There was a great deal of infighting at the ACLU

as to whether or not the ACLU should take the case.

The ACLU has a substantial Jewish constituency.

And I think it's fair to say

that a large percentage of the Jewish constituency

thought it was the wrong case to take.

I felt that the ACLU should take the case.

What I did, basically--

The case was handled by the Roger Baldwin Foundation.

I had previously been the head of that foundation.

I was clearly interested in the issues.

And I went around the country talking about the Skokie case.

I spoke at synagogues,

I spoke at schools,

in an attempt to talk about the issues

in the way that I spoke about them now.

And it-- I have never spoken

about issues that drew so much hostility.

CROWD [CHANTING]: Racist Nazis, go to hell!

GARBUS: People saying, "Because of you, people wind up in ovens,

the crematoriums."

All kinds of inconceivable threats.

We used to get calls at 2 in the morning.

And it was just a horrendous experience.

It's amazing how many people

think they should kill people who don't agree with them.

And these are people who claim they're defending liberty.

MAN: Death to the Nazis!

Power to the workers!

In this situation, I can understand

how the Jews of Skokie would be upset.

When I told my father about the case,

told him what I was doing, he was horrified.

COLLIN: The moral principle is

is that the Constitution has been upheld

and that freedom is not just a nebulous concept on paper.

But freedom in fact exists

for those who are willing to fight for it.

LIZ: Did you ever feel like you were being used

to an end that was hateful to you?

I'm being used to an end that's hateful to me,

but I'm also being used to an end that's important to me.

Nothing's riding on this,

except the, uh, First Amendment and Constitution,

freedom of the press and maybe the future of the country.

HARPER: The question is,

can you say that homosexuality is wrong in a public school?

TV REPORTER: Protesters say they're speaking out against discrimination

by not speaking at all.

HARPER: It was a school-wide event, the Day of Silence.

And the point of that day was to say

that sexual freedom is great.

And obviously, that's what the school was putting forth.

'Cause there was no, you know,

Day of Marriage or something like that, at all.

Ever.

The story really starts the night before.

I was reading a portion of Scripture

when Paul's talking about the need

for the church leaders not to hide the truth.

'Cause if that gospel, if that truth,

was veiled or hidden,

it was hidden to those who are perishing,

to those who are hurting,

to those who are being damaged by their deviant sexuality.

And those words, I mean, really pierced my heart.

And so, just then and there, I got out one of my shirts.

It wasn't anything special. It was just a black Ezekiel shirt.

And I put some masking tape on it.

And took some Sharpie and penned the words I wrote.

You know, "Be ashamed. Our school has embraced

what God has condemned."

And on the back, uh, an excerpt from Romans 1:27

that says, "Homosexuality is shameful."

Just to put the truth out there.

I'll take some crap for a couple days

for the truth to be in this conversation.

The school opened up the conversation.

And it's supposed to be a marketplace for ideas.

So I decided just to put it out there.

And I had no idea that I would be

suspended, threatened with expulsion

and questioned by an armed sheriff.

Um, that's just not what I thought

the day had in store for me.

My teacher saw the shirt and basically said,

"Hey, you can't have that.

"You either need to remove the tape from the shirt

or you can go talk to one of the administrators."

And I asked him why, and he said,

"You know, you just need to either go to the office

or take the tape off."

So the teacher's first thought was,

"This is disrupting the teaching process that I'm engaged in.

I need to remove the T-shirt."

Then she thought about it for a moment

and concluded that, um-- That it, um,

went farther than just disruption,

that it actually violated the rights of others.

Well, it marginalizes me,

especially that type of language,

due to the fact that you're telling me I'm not--

My lifestyle and who I am as a person

is inferior to yours.

And they said, "Look, Chase, you just can't wear this here.

"You can't do that. You can't, heh,

"you know, retain your rights of free speech in this way.

It's offensive."

Since when has speech that is merely offensive

been censored on that basis alone?

When you look at it as a culture,

especially with the gay youth culture,

you look at the suicide rate.

And that really says it all.

When you've got such a high suicide rate

with gay teens in America today,

obviously they are feeling marginalized,

and they are feeling like they're less than.

And little acts like that can add to a bigger hole.

Political correctness is definitely infringing

upon the free speech rights of many individuals

throughout society.

The most impactful moment of that whole day

is when I went to talk with the vice principal.

He called me into his office, and he sat me down.

And he stared across the table and started talking to me.

And about halfway through the conversation,

he looked me in the eyes and said,

"If your faith is offensive,

you have to leave it in the car."

I couldn't believe what I was hearing.

If my faith was offensive...

A-are we in the United States?

Nobody ever complained about Chase's T-shirt. No student.

They haven't been able to introduce any evidence

that indicated that a student was even offended by his shirt.

But nevertheless, the school censored it.

Where does all that hatred start?

It can start from the most basic of areas,

such as a T-shirt.

He was wearing an extremely confrontational,

very ugly T-shirt.

I think schools can regulate that time and place and manner,

to a much great extent than government can the citizenry.

THERIOT: This is the kind of case that the student has to win,

because if not, then free speech is really worth nothing

in-- In America's high schools.

The classic case that established this precedent

is Tinker v. Des Moines,

where Mary Beth Tinker wore an armband

in to school to protest the war in Vietnam.

The court held that she has a right

to express her political views,

and that right is only limited by disruption

of the educational process.

GARBUS: Students have free speech rights.

Free speech rights of students are constantly being

circumscribed.

I mean, these are just kids.

What do they have to contribute to the marketplace

in ideas and opinions?

TV REPORTER: Today a U.S. judge agreed,

ruling that the district's policy against hate speech

is within the law.

To this day, Poway High School

will not allow speech on their campus

that they feel like is offensive to students.

One of the bummers for some people

about protecting free speech and the "marketplace" of ideas

is that-- That people get offended.

And that's the price of liberty.

Um, we-- We don't have the right to not be offended.

For your information, the Supreme Court

has roundly rejected prior restraint.

This is not a First Amendment thing.

Sir, if you don't calm down, I'm gonna have to ask you to leave.

Lady, I got buddies who died face down in the muck

so that you and I could enjoy this family restaurant.

All right, I'm outta here.

Hey, Dude, don't go away, man.

Come on, this affects all of us, man.

JOHNSON: This is a different kind of war.

And there are great stakes in the balance.

GARBUS: In the '60s,

I met Dan Ellsberg during a march against the Vietnam War.

Dan Ellsberg then was a hawk.

He was involved with the American government.

And he believed that what we were doing in Vietnam

was absolutely right.

Dan was running up and down hills

with a machine gun, firing at the Vietnamese.

So when he and I had a discussion

about the Vietnam War or about the peace march,

he really tended to treat me as an idiot, communist,

lefty, whatever.

He absolutely had no respect for the people

who were marching against the war.

He saw it as un-American and unpatriotic.

But it's absolutely clear

that Dan had a great zest for battle.

There were parts of Dan that were very self-destructive.

You wouldn't have had the Pentagon Papers

unless you had somebody

who was willing to put his life at risk.

Pentagon Papers were massive.

It was a study

that had been done at the government's request by Rand.

And the study was to look back at America's history

with Vietnam.

And to some extent,

to try to figure out why we were there.

The key to the situation

remains the cessation of infiltration from the north...

ABRAMS: And it's a little bit odd when you think of it.

That in the middle of a war the Secretary of Defense

has to find out why we're in the war.

And a few people had access to it, not many.

One of them, named Daniel Ellsberg,

who had worked on one of the chapters,

had had an epiphany.

Renewed hostile actions

against United States ships on the high seas

in the Gulf of Tonkin

have today required me

to order the military forces of the United States

to take action in reply.

We did not choose to be the guardians at the gate.

But there is no one else.

GARBUS: The Pentagon Papers shows that

rather than us being dragged into something

that we didn't wanna be dragged into,

we in fact precipitated it,

and we precipitated the Gulf of Tonkin incident.

And then we lied about it.

I felt that as an American citizen,

as a responsible citizen,

I could no longer cooperate in concealing this information

from the American public. REPORTER: I'm sorry?

ELLSBERG: I can no longer cooperate in concealing this information...

GARBUS: And the Pentagon Papers,

which were classified and were top-secret,

were then thought so explosive

that reading them

would cause a stop to the Vietnam war.

So many copies were made

so that if the government would get one copy,

then another copy would be released.

While the New York Times

and the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune

were deciding whether or not to publish the Pentagon Papers,

a copy of the documents were put in my house in Woodstock.

The FBI would occasionally stop by with stuff.

They'd be standing outside in a car parked on the hill,

and also, I believe that we had our phones tapped.

I knew that these were classified documents.

It was no joke.

There was a great deal of concern

on behalf of everybody

as to exactly what they would charge you with.

If it in fact turned out

that there was stuff there that would damage American troops,

which is what we knew the government would claim,

I could have faced the same penalties as Dan,

because I was involved in it.

So I realize I was placing myself in some danger.

Just starting a family.

LIZ: Dad, you had kids at the time, you had us.

Were you concerned about not being there for us?

Uh, I never took those two things

and put them one against the other.

Clearly, if I had not been there for 90-something years,

I would not have been there for my children.

But I think that the act that was done

would form some kind of a bond.

One Saturday evening,

we saw the early edition of the Times

that was going to come out Sunday.

And there was, on the front page, the Pentagon Papers.

I was astonished.

Uh, neither Dan nor I knew

that the Times was gonna publish those papers.

And the reason the Times didn't tell anybody

was they were afraid if anybody knew,

somehow the government would learn and stop it.

REYNOLDS: At this moment we are awaiting a decision

by the Supreme Court of the United States

on one of the most fundamental questions

ever to come before the court.

ABRAMS: The Times' lawyers

told them that they would not represent them

in that matter.

So the Times found themselves, as one writer later put it,

like a vicar found in a house of ill repute at midnight,

without lawyers.

And they asked me, and they asked a professor of mine

from Yale Law School, Alexander Bickel,

who would become chief counsel in the case.

The newspaper editors decided

that the national interest would be served

by publication of the documents,

and that under the First Amendment to the Constitution,

the government had no right to prevent publication.

The government disagreed,

and for the first time in our history as a nation,

went to court to prevent the papers

from publishing the rest of the material

in their possession.

ABRAMS: The hardest moment in the Pentagon Papers case

came when Justice Potter Stewart

turned to Professor Bickel in the argument...

STEWART: Let me give you a hypothetical case.

Let us assume that when the members of the court

go back and open up this sealed record

we find something there

that absolutely convinces us

that its disclosure would result

in the sentencing to death of 100 young men.

What should we do?

That's what we lawyers think of it: killer, killer question.

You know what you wanna say, you know what you have to say,

and they sometimes differ.

Professor Bickel tried to dodge.

He said, "I'm sure you won't find that

when you get back--" "No, no," said Stewart.

"Assume that that's what we find."

And Bickel said again, "Well, I'm sure you--"

"I'm asking you, suppose we find that."

STEWART: You would say

the Constitution requires that it be published,

and that these men die, is that it?

BICKEL: No. I'm afraid I have--

I'm afraid that my inclinations of humanity

overcome the somewhat more abstract devotion

to the First Amendment.

Had he said, in effect, "He has to die for the First Amendment,"

the court would have recoiled.

We would have died in the case,

because it just sounds wrong.

And that's why eventually, I believe,

he was right to give the answer, dangerous as it was,

that he gave.

That was a great First Amendment victory.

We will resume the series on the Vietnam papers

exactly as we had planned before the injunction.

The lies that are embedded in the Pentagon Papers

are lies that do not have hypothetical consequences.

Fifty-five thousand Americans lost their lives

because of those lies by American officials

to the president and to the public.

And by the president to the public.

GARBUS: So I think that the Pentagon Papers should stand

for the extent of government lying.

That's why the First Amendment is so important.

At the end of the day, it's very difficult

to be skeptical of your government.

And it's very difficult to be skeptical

of the extent of which the government will lie,

whether it be to go to an Iraq war

or to justify development of oil fields,

uh, it's very difficult to believe

that the people that we have elected

will act in a way that is so harmful

and they really will not let the American population know.

ANNOUNCER 1: New York City lives on orange alert every day.

The level has never gone down.

New York City police commissioner Ray Kelly

recently shared his bird's-eye view.

REPORTER: You've got millions of people coming into this city

on a daily basis,

so how do you weigh allowing the city to continue

operating, yet at the same time,

protecting these people who are coming here

for this high-profile event?

KELLY: We can't close the city down.

We have to focus on keeping it functioning, but--

Doing everything we reasonably can do to protect it.

ANNOUNCER 2: City hospitals are preparing too

for a possible chemical or biological attack.

BOTH: There are still no specific threats

against next week's convention.

But in a city known to be at the top

of al Qaeda's target list,

officials here are leaving nothing to chance.

LIEBERMAN: A political convention is like nothing else

in American politics.

It's the time when everybody comes out.

It's not just for the Republicans at their convention

to be able to express their views

by nominating their candidate,

it's for all Americans to be able to voice

their opinions about what's going on in our country

and the policies of the day.

And when the policies are controversial,

that's when people take to the streets.

The Republicans are coming!

REPORTER: Security teams are also bracing for thousands of protestors.

CAGAN: And just built and built.

The protesters were coming.

"Be careful." The protestors were coming.

And, "Stay out of Manhattan."

We have enough officers

where if people are breaking the law,

we're going to take action.

OFFICER: I am present at the multiple demonstrations

of civil disobedience.

It is August 31st at the RNC.

I'll be turning this camera off now

and putting it back on upon my will.

I ask your cooperation so that everybody has a safe march.

MAN: Okay, thank you.

We weren't doing anything

more than just walking along the street holding signs.

The last time I looked, that was legal to do.

BENN: Our march lasted about five minutes

before it was stopped by the police.

Suddenly all these bicycle police came in

and other police.

Arrest him...

Arrest him...

Cordon it off all the way down to the bus!

BENN: People in our group were saying, "We're under arrest."

And I was like, "Oh, this is not possible.

We've only just started. It's been five minutes."

OFFICER: Bicycle officers, hold your positions

until relieved by foot cops.

Foot cops fall in in back.

BENN: And they were called in to surround us

with this orange netting which we had never seen before,

like construction site orange plastic netting.

CAGAN: This is the first time anybody had ever seen them do this,

and they used it several times during the week.

The police just swept the sidewalk.

WOMAN: I'm asking to get out,

and they won't let me get out!

Why can't I get out? I want to get out.

I want to get out!

CROWD [CHANTING]: We are peaceful, let us disperse!

We are peaceful, let us disperse!

KELLY: Approximately 800 arrests have been made

since RNC-related protests began last Thursday.

O'DONNELL: With the advent of 9/11,

and eventually with the advent of the war

and the opposition to the war being very vocal,

we had to shift our focus.

And certainly on some of those events,

uh, they had to ramp up.

CAGAN: And, of course, they justified all this

in the name of providing security,

that things could get out of hand.

Well, they weren't out of hand.

In fact, people were exercising their First Amendment rights

together and to make their voices heard.

Their free speech rights.

O'DONNELL: The problem is, what do you want the police to do,

wait around until something happens

even if they're on notice, wait till it happens?

I don't think that's what most people want.

LIEBERMAN: And they justified the mass arrests

on their security information.

On their "intel" data.

O'DONNELL: NYPD does have the resources,

they have the intelligence gathering,

they have the leadership.

They have the experience

unparalleled in the country for dealing with demonstrations.

It's one thing to engage in intelligence activity

when you have suspicion of criminal activity.

But when you don't,

then it's fundamentally anti-democratic.

MAN: And this is legal because of the Patriot Act.

The Patriot Act is illegal, unconstitutional

and treasonous!

So right after 9/11, the Patriot Act enacted.

And there were restrictions on civil liberties,

quite mild by historical standards.

But there were some restrictions.

And those have now become controversial.

Well, what the Patriot Act does

is give the government the authority

to get people's private information

and to do so shrouded in secrecy

so that there's no accountability.

And I wanna take this opportunity once again

to thank the Congress for providing us

with the necessary tools that we need

to protect the safety and security

of American citizens.

We think about surveillance as a matter of privacy, generally.

But it's an issue of free speech

when the surveillance is of political activity.

If the government is watching every move you make,

and every move you make

includes protesting the war in Iraq,

protesting military recruiting in the schools,

protesting racial profiling,

and the government doesn't like that,

and they're keeping a dossier on you,

well, you're gonna be afraid to protest.

So he thinks he can take away our right of assembly.

Well, we can't be blamed for what happens now.

GARBUS: Clearly, when they wrote the Constitution,

they didn't think of the new surveillance methods.

They didn't think of the fact that on a satellite

you could look into somebody's backyard.

They didn't think of all these phone-tapping situations.

They couldn't imagine any of this stuff.

HEDEMAN: I've been able to find out

that we have had police infiltrators

in our group, and government infiltrators

to find out what we were doing

and attempt to disrupt what was going on.

It became clear after a while, must have been a policy,

to just sweep people off the streets

and keep it nice and clean for the Republicans

and for the convention.

It is the soldier, not the agitator,

who has given us the freedom to protest.

It is the soldier who salutes the flag,

serves beneath the flag,

whose coffin is draped by the flag,

who gives that protestor the freedom he abuses

to burn that flag. [CROWD CHEERING]

And I don't think it's just a question

of Democrats and Republicans.

I think that certainly, in times of war, terror,

whatever you call it,

protests are going to be the first things to go.

What was the Boston Tea Party if not a political protest?

And since then, every social change movement

has used protests.

CROWD [CHANTING]: We are peaceful, let us disperse!

We are peaceful, let us disperse!

We are peaceful, let us disperse!

LIEBERMAN: What we are learning in the course of these lawsuits

is that everybody who was arrested was fingerprinted.

All those prints were sent on to the federal government.

The problem with the policing guidelines

for all this is that the police department

sees lawful, legitimate protest

as part of a continuum of terrorist activity.

Well, don't they get it?

In a democracy, you have protests, lawful protests,

instead of terrorism.

It's the safety valve for a democracy.

When you're in a war that has been declared on you,

there can be no peace movement.

When forces are committed, you have troops in the field...

...and you go out in the streets

and attempt to block that war effort...

All right, back, back! Get out!

...it has not to do with speech.

It is hard to see how at any point in American history,

whether it's the Civil War, World War I,

the Cold War or the war on terror,

it's hard to see that these infringements

on the right to dissent,

the infringements on basic civil liberties,

actually have any military value whatsoever.

Does anybody think that Germany would have won World War I

if Eugene Debs had been allowed

to speak in the United States?

Or is it really the case that we can't allow people

basic civil liberties-- The right to a trial,

the right to see the evidence against them.

--because otherwise Osama Bin Laden

is gonna take over the world?

GARBUS: So I think if you would add up all the casualties,

I think that you're seeing something

coming across the nation.

During every war,

and during every post-war period,

there are enormous abridgements of speech.

And the government has gotten more sophisticated.

And during the Iraq period,

you of course have all these technological improvements

in how to get at people, privacy, surveillance,

et cetera.

And you have a court system that is gonna permit it.

So this is more dangerous than any of those other times,

because, at the end of the day,

the Supreme Court, the courts,

are finally responsible for protecting free speech.

LIZ: After all these other times, we bounce back.

So why not expect that we would bounce back this time?

Well, I think it's deeper and more pervasive.

Also, you say we bounce back.

We had court systems that help us bounce back.

After World War II,

you soon went into the Warren court.

After World War I,

you soon got into the Roosevelt court.

Now you're gonna have at least 25 or 30 years

of the Roberts court.

Now, Roberts is 54.

Judges generally sit for 25 years, 30 years.

He's been there just a few years.

Alito is in his mid-50's.

He's gonna sit there another 25 or 30 years.

You have Thomas, Scalia and Kennedy,

so even with the new Obama appointees,

you have the nucleus of a court that is going to be

conservative controlled for at least the 25 years.

Nothing like that has ever happened before.

So that's what the court's gonna be.

It's gonna be locked.

LIZ: Was there anything that was very important to you

to teach us about free speech and civil liberties?

That if you don't fight for it every day,

you're gonna lose it.

And don't let the fucking guys win. I mean...