If this doesn't piss ya off, then nothing will

The following was taken from the Advocates for Self-Government's most recent e-newletter.

Top Homeland Security Official: “We Have To Abridge Individual Rights”

“We have to abridge individual rights, change the societal conditions, and act in ways that heretofore were not in accordance with our values and traditions, like giving a police officer or security official the right to search you without a judicial finding of probable cause.”

No, that’s not King George III speaking. Those are the words of U.S. Army Lt. Gen. (Retired) Patrick M. Hughes -- the top intelligence official of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Gen. Hughes made his anti-Fourth Amendment comments eight months before President Bush appointed him to his DHS post, though they were not reported until a few weeks ago when Congressional Quarterly magazine obtained a transcript. He made them during a March 2003 Harvard University forum on “Future Conditions: The Character and Conduct of War, 2010 and 2020.”

“Things are changing, and this change is happening because things can be brought to us that we cannot afford to absorb,” Hughes also said. “We can’t deal with them, so we’re going to reach out and do something ahead of time to preclude them.

“Is that going to change your lives? It already has.”

At the time of his statement, Gen. Hughes was a private consultant whose clients included the CIA, the FBI, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DIA, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, SRI International, Anteon, Boeing, Rand Corp., and others, according to Congressional Quarterly.

In his current position, Hughes heads up DHS’s intelligence analysis efforts and coordinates with the other members of the intelligence community, as well as with such interagency intelligence efforts as the Terrorist Threat Integration Center.

According to Congressional Quarterly, the White House, the Department of Homeland Security and Gen. Hughes have not responded to questions about these remarks.

(Source: Congressional Quarterly, quoted in Reason magazine:
http://www.cq.com/corp/show.do?page=crawford/20041027_homeland )