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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