>>>>
>>>>We haven't lost any rights. One thing the Patriot act has done it to allow the CIA and FBI and other agencies to work with each other. They are still required to get court orders for wire taps. Liberals just want to yell whenever they think law enforcement is given more power to protect our country. I am not worried about the effects of the patriot act on us, and I view the government with suspicion, because I am one of them. As Ronald Reagan said, "the government is not your friend." However, I don't think this act is necessarily a bad one.
>>>
>>>What about the right to due process? If they can enter your home without a warrant, take you away and plunk you somewhere incommunicado forever without having to charge you with anything, where is due process?
>>>
>>Forever is a long time. I haven't seen anyone denied due process. Maybe the Gitmo bunch, but they aren't US citizens so that's a different can of worms.
>>
>>>Or are you saying that due process was never a right held by the American people, so it hasn't been lost?
>>>
>>Nope, I'm saying everyone gets due process.
>
>So you're saying that all those people who were arrested and put into Guantanamo Bay, who aren't allowed lawyers, who have never been charged with anything, they're getting due process?
>
>Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen arrested in the U.S. and sent to Syria for 'conditioning', and who turns out to be a complete innocent in all this; he got due process?
>
>Maybe the problem is in the definition. How do you define due process?
>
>>
>>>Do you think that court orders for wire taps is an untouchable item? I'd have thought the right to a lawyer and a fair trial would have been untouchable too, but apparently not.
>>
>>I don't understand your statement. Court orders are issued as a check and balance. Law enforcement can't just do whatever they want.

A small, but I think very important thing, Alan...

The specific term - invented in THIS usage by U.S. government people themselves - is "rendition" and not 'conditioning'. The standard definition of the word 'rendition' is "interpretation, rendering, of dramatic role, musical piece, etc." and clearly the term's inventors anticipated that hearers of the term would not attribute torture or endangerment to the word. It would have, in a diplomatic context, an assumed meaning of something done as standard procedure between countries, as in 'Yes, well he was transported to Syria for rendition.'.