From the editor.

Every country needs to possess the ability to protect itself against enemies both foreign and domestic, or it will lose its freedom. Necessary protections include not only police and armed forces but also intelligence services.

But the power to protect can be used to impose tyranny as well as to safeguard liberty. In fact, human nature being what it is, governmental agencies authorized to use deadly force or to snoop will inevitably become oppressive--unless those powers are constrained by a system of law that protects the governed from the government.

"If men were angels, no government would be necessary," James Madison, the father of the U.S. Constitution, observed. "If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary." Understanding that men are not angels, the Founding Fathers created a system of government that not only limited governmental powers but divided those powers among the three branches of government and between the federal government and the states. Under the U.S. Constitution, the powers of the federal government are few and specified, and all other powers "are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

The local, state, and federal governments all have important roles to play in protecting the public. The federal government is authorized to provide for the national defense, but law enforcement is supposed to be principally a local responsibility, with the police accountable to the communities they protect and serve. Such an arrangement prevents a central government from using a nationalized police force to consolidate power--along the lines of what has happened in the past in Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia.

To assure the protection of U.S. citizens, intelligence powers have been divided among the different branches and levels of government--from local police intelligence units to congressional investigating committees.

When our nation was attacked on 9/11, it was the local first responders--from the private citizens aboard United Flight 93 to the firemen and police officers who rushed into the burning WTC towers--who provided the most heroic defense on that tragic day. And it was the federal government that failed. As Dennis Behreandt notes in his "Before 9/11" article (page 27), even Arabic school kids in New York City knew something big was coming down, yet the federal intelligence community supposedly didn't have a clue.

Amazingly, the 9/11 tragedy is routinely cited as "justification" for centralizing power in Washington, with local and state police agencies becoming mere administrative subdivisions of the emerging intelligence behemoth in Washington. This despite the fact that federal agents in the field had provided important pieces of the puzzle to their superiors in Washington, and the people in charge ignored them. This consolidation of power in the name of fighting terrorism may someday become far more destructive of our liberties than al-Qaeda ever could. (See "Spy Nation" by William Norman Grigg, page 12.)

Outlandish? Not when you consider the evidence, much of which has been assembled in this magazine. Consider, for example, the "Emerging Police State" article by Thomas R. Eddlem (page 19), which documents that imprisonment without trial and even torture have become open practices under the Bush administration.

Those who think that domestic spying is a necessary sacrifice that must be endured to fight terrorism should ask themselves why our own government has begun treating the American people as the enemy instead of securing our borders to prevent real enemies from getting into the United States in the first place. In reality, Americans do not have to sacrifice liberty for security; they can have both, but achieving that will require a return to the multi-layered, noncentralized, constitutionally sound police and intelligence services we once had.