Street Sweepers

We are a nation that has a government — not the other way around. And this makes us special among the nations of the Earth. Our government has no power except that granted it by the people. It is time to check and reverse the growth of government which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed."
--Ronald Reagan, Inaugural address, Jan. 20, 1981

Well, it's 25 years on from Mr. Reagan's address, and the hydra-headed monster that is government grows on. Even the liberal free press gives the Bush administration a free pass.

A New York Times article on the German issuance of an arrest warrant for the "C.I.A. abduction team" that seized Khaled el-Masri in 2003 carries a subhead, "Case of Mistaken Arrest Puts Spotlight on Policy of Secret Transfers." This was was not an arrest, it was an abduction. Mr. Masri was then flown to Afghanistan where he was imprisoned and interrogated for five months before being released without charges.

The C.I.A. does not have the authority to arrest anyone. C.I.A. agents are intelligence officers, not federal enforcement agents.

The C.I.A. can not and should not be imprisoning anybody. This practice of extraordinary rendition is a perverse activity that has nothing to do with U.S. democratic principles. The Bureau of Prisons belongs to the Department of Justice. Nobody in the free world (that would include America) should be imprisoned without a legal court decision.

How has America come to a point that secret prisons and abductions and state secrets preempt our Constitution and legal protections? Does "of, by, and for the people" ring a bell? The key point is not "how did we get here," but rather, "how do we get back on track"? A good start would be the extradition of criminal elements that call themselves "CIA operatives". If you do the crime, you do the time.

Kidnapping and extraordinary renditions are crimes. And it is uniquely ironic that a German court must remind us of that fact.