Indeed, when everyone in this town is joined together calling for someone's head, it is a pretty sure sign that we might want to slow down and take a… - John Conyers

Indeed, while there's agreement that sometimes secrecy is necessary, the real problem today is not too little secrecy, but too much secrecy... Furthermore, we are too quick to accept government claims that risk the national security...

We welcome everyone here to the hearing. In the Texas v. Johnson case in 1989, the Supreme Court set forth one of the fundamental principles of our democracy. That is, that if there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable. That was Justice William Brennan.

Well, it’s never been clear to me that, through war, we can bring peace, especially when we’re the invaders. We’re the ones using drones. We’re causing civilian deaths to many people who would otherwise be more friendly to us. We’re creating the terrorists. This is not being lost on most of the people in the country now. Our constituents now want us out of both Afghanistan and Iraq. And what we’re doing now is forming a way to discuss this with our president in an effort to make him more comfortable with doing what most people want him to do and what we thought he was going to do in the first place — namely is to clearly disengage from the military, increase the diplomatic activity, and bring in some help in terms of food supplies, aid, and positive buildup of these countries, and to make as many friends as we can over there, rather than this ninth year of what has now become a debacle in every respect.