What happened to free-speech panic?

After the 9/11 attacks in 2001, members of the American left found one thing they could all agree on: Our First Amendment rights were in peril.

The American Prospect insisted on Sept. 12, when the rubble was still burning and the dead had not yet been retrieved, that 'a number of government agencies and their cheerleaders would be clearly tempted to lock the Bill of Rights away in some basement dustbin of the National Archives.” Two weeks later, novelist Barbara Kingsolver warned, 'Patriotism threatens free speech with death.” She bravely attacked the claim that 'free speech is un-American.” Author Richard Reeves penned an op-ed for the New York Times under the headline 'Patriotism Calls Out the Censor.” Conferences were rapidly convened, vows to fight the crackdown on free speech were issued.

The fact that this response was elicited by no actual crackdown on free speech seemed irrelevant. It was a classic example of 'Fire, ready, aim!”

But in retrospect, I have a bit more sympathy with those self-anointed defenders of free speech. It was, in its way, a thoroughly American, even patriotic reaction.

Fast-forward to another Sept. 11. Failing to anticipate a terrorist attack on the anniversary of 9/11, four Americans, including our ambassador, were murdered in a preplanned and coordinated terrorist assault in Libya. White House officials said they believed it wasn't a terrorist attack but a spontaneous reaction to a video insulting the Muslim Prophet Muhammad. There is a debate as to whether they knew all along that was untrue. There is no real debate that officials learned very early that it was untrue and continued to lie about it - or at least wildly and dishonestly exaggerate the role the video played.

President Barack Obama and his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, hammered the video story. Clinton vowed to the grieving families of the victims that she would get the makers of the video, not the murderers themselves. The White House asked Google if it could censor the video from YouTube. Google partially complied, blocking it in Libya and Egypt. (Later, a U.S. appeals court ordered the film removed entirely.)

Obama spoke to the U.N. about the video, explaining that we can't ban such things because of our Constitution. Still, the director was arrested. A picture of him being hauled off in handcuffs was splashed in newspapers around the world.

All this fueled an earnest debate about the downside of free speech in America. Cable news networks, op-ed pages and public radio lit up with 'expert” commentary about how we must find ways to accommodate the sensibilities of Muslims who don't understand or care about free speech. And much of the crowd that once set about to 'snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze” when George W. Bush was president said nary a word.