WANTED: ANSWERS

Feds' Code Of Silence Over Raid Serves No One But Themselves

No one has more immediate power over our individual liberties than law
enforcement agencies. With that as a backdrop, it is particularly troubling
that federal law enforcement officials continually stonewall efforts to
make public information public.

This is an ongoing issue familiar to anyone who deals with the Federal
Bureau of Investigation, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the
Immigration and Naturalization Service or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco
and Firearms. Their reluctance to provide information amounts to a
police-state-like code of silence.

The most recent case (at least the most recent one we have been told about)
is in Josephine County, where an unhappy county Sheriff Dave Daniel
confirmed for reporters that a dozen people had been indicted in connection
with a Jan. 27 raid on alleged psilocybin mushroom growing operations.

The sheriff provided the details because although federal officers managed
the raid, they decline to answer questions or even to return phone calls.
That is standard operating procedure for the federal agencies, which create
their own rules for releasing public information, violating the spirit of
public records law if not the letter of the law.

In the case of the mushroom raid, the veil of silence is more ominous,
since the agents oversaw an operation in which 150 officers raided 20 homes
in Josephine County, kicking in doors and scaring the living daylights out
of the guilty and innocent alike. And police now acknowledge that some of
the people whose homes were raided were innocent.

We aren't suggesting there wasn't criminal activity, because there
obviously was. But the federal agencies owe more to local citizens than to
raid and run.

After the raids, no information came from the DEA, no information from the
FBI, no information from the BATF. Phone calls from reporters were ignored,
or federal employees at the agencies said they knew nothing about the
operation.

These federal agents operate with impunity and appear to be accountable to
no one locally. They recite obscure agency rules, which were developed by
the agencies themselves, as their defense for refusing to inform the
public. They don't even fully inform people like Sheriff Daniel, who is
left to explain why federal agents kicked in the doors of local citizens,
seized money (and later initiated RICO seizures against several homes) and
offered no explanation.

This is outrageous behavior better suited to the style of a Third-World
dictator than to the law enforcement agencies of the world's leading
democracy. These are public agencies. The public is their boss. The public
deserves prompt and full answers.