Former Speaker of the House and hopeful presidential candidate Newt Gingrich proposed a curb of First Amendment rights while fighting the GWOT, an issue I don’t entirely agree with depending on what exactly he means.

“We need to get ahead of the curve rather than wait until we actually literally lose a city, which I think could literally happen in the next decade if we’re unfortunate,” Mr. Gingrich said Monday night during a speech in New Hampshire. “We now 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 the threat.”

“This is a serious, long-term war,” the former speaker said, according an audio excerpt of his remarks made available yesterday by his office. “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.”

Unfortunately I haven’t seen Gingrich’s comments regarding the headline in the New York Sun calling for restrictions upon First Amendment rights so I don’t exaclty know what Gingrich is proposing. From what is published, I certainly feel he is dead-on in suggesting this nation is not seriously waging the GWOT and doing all we could to defeat the enemy.

I have written numerous times the jihadi use of the Internet to spread their propoganda, training manuals and communication that troubles me most. Al Qaida has seemingly gone from a non-traditional army to a network of dispersed cells throughout the world. The one common bond is how they all communicate and how “diseffected youths” find this material and decide to start their own cell. The Toronto 17 is the perfect example of this new method, learning over the Internet through jihadi sites how to construct bombs and where to strike in Canada.

Gingrich is also spot-on in his analysis of what rights should be afforded to terrorists.

“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,” he said.

We are facing a new reality here, different from the uniformed wars of the past. Gingrich understands that threat, which is why I’m hoping he runs for president regardless of what many see as a checkered past. My vote in 2008 will be based upon the candidate I feel will best fight the GWOT rather than anything else, be it a Republican or a Democrat.

But the press is already reporting Gingrich wants to curb freedom of speech laws, despite having seen any of his comments regarding that particular alleged statement. Gingrich didn’t say he advocated curbing the free speech of Americans, rather he said he wanted to curb the free speech of terrorists and their enablers. Doesn’t this tie into preventing Islamist propoganda from gaining traction?

Gingrich is on the Michael Medved Show right now, and I suspsect he’ll be asked to clarify his remarks. I’ll update this post if he does so.

UPDATE (2:30 p.m. CST): Thus far nothing on that subject matter.