Gingrich Speech in New HampshireApparently it is causing a firestormNEWT GINGRICH: The third thing I want to talk about very briefly is the genuine danger of terrorism, in particular terrorists using
weapons of mass destruction and weapons of mass murder, nuclear and
biological weapons. And I want to suggest to you that right now we should
be impaneling people to look seriously at a level of supervision that
we would never dream of if it weren't for the scale of threat.
Let me give you two examples. When the British this summer
arrested people who were planning to blow up ten airliners in one day,
they arrested a couple who were going to use their six month old baby
in order to hide the bomb as baby milk.
Now, if I come to you tonight and say that there are people on
the planet who hate you, and they are 15-25 year old males who are
willing to die as long as they get to kill you, I've simply described
the warrior culture which has been true historically for 6 or 7
thousand years.
But, if I come to you and say that there is a couple that hates you
so much that they will kill their six month old baby in order to kill you,I am describing a level of ferocity, and a level of savagery
beyond anything we have tried to deal with.
And, what is truly frightening about the British experience is
they are arresting British citizens, born in Britain, speaking English,
who went to British schools, live in British housing, and have good jobs.
This is a serious long term war, and it will inevitably lead us
to want to know what is said in every suspect place in the country,
that will lead us to learn how to close down every website that
is dangerous, and it will lead us to a very severe approach to people
who advocate the killing of Americans and advocate the use of nuclear
or biological weapons.
And, my prediction to you is that either before we lose a city, or
if we are truly stupid, after we lose a city, we will adopt rules
of engagement that use every technology we can find to break up
their capacity to use the
internet, to break up their capacity to use
free speech, and to go after people who want to kill us to stop them
from recruiting people before they get to reach out and convince
young people to destroy their lives while destroying us.
This is a serious problem that will lead to a serious debate about
the first amendment, but I think that the national security threat
of losing an American city to a nuclear weapon, or losing several
million Americans to a biological attack is so real that we need
to proactively, now, develop the appropriate rules of engagement.
And, I further think that we should propose a Geneva convention
for fighting terrorism which makes very clear that those who would
fight outside the rules of law, those who would use weapons of
mass destruction, and those who would target civilians are in fact
subject to a totally different set of rules that allow us to
protect civilization by defeating barbarism before it gains so much
strength that it is truly horrendous.
This is a sober topic, but I think it is a topic we need a
national dialogue about, and we need to get ahead of the curve rather than
wait until actually we literary lose a city which could literally
happen within the next decade if we are unfortunate. So
(APPLAUSE)
This is a very sober description of the Islamic terrorist threat
we are faced with. We are NOW at war with a culture that wants, not
to take over our land, but to KILL us.
