Gonzales Going Going Gone

To achieve victory at the cost of eroding civil liberties would not really be a victory. We cannot change the core identity of our Nation and claim success. And our identity has never been in doubt -- we are a free people, dedicated to liberty for the popular and the unpopular, committed to the ideal that the People govern themselves, and determined to have a government that cannot extinguish or suppress the rights that make us Americans.

-- Then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, at the U.S. Air Force Academy, November 20, 2006