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20 Crime L. & Soc. Change 1 (1993)

handle is hein.journals/crmlsc20 and id is 1 raw text is: Crime, Law and Social Change 20:1-12, 1993. © 1993 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. I volunteer to kidnap Oliver North MICHAEL LEVINE Abstract. I Volunteer to Kidnap Ollie North, is an exercise in following our government's some- times criminal, often bizarre and always hypocritical actions in the war on drugs during the Reagan- Bush years to their logical conclusion. The Supreme Court has indicated in its June, 1992 decision in U.S. v Machain, that American law enforcement officers can now enter the sovereign territories of other nations to legally abduct violators of U.S. drug laws. Iran immediately proclaimed that they had the same right for violations of Islamic law. What might happen if kidnapping becomes a recog- nized tool of international law enforcement? What prominent Americans might wake up in South American jails with bags over their heads? Two years ago a maverick group of DEA agents (Drug Enforcement Adminis- tration), feeling enraged, frustrated and betrayed decided to take the law into their own hands. The U.S. government, including high ranking DEA officials, had joined the Mexican government in trying to sweep the bothersome mat- ter of the torture death of Enrique Kiki Camarena - one of their fellow agents murdered by Mexican police working for drug traffickers - under a rug of political and bureaucratic maneuvering, where it would not disturb oil, trade banking and secret political agreements. Even the C.I.A. was implicated in pro- tecting Camarena's murderers, which was no surprise to the DEA agents.1 Working without the knowledge or approval of most of the top DEA bosses, whom they mistrusted, the agents arranged to have Dr. Humberto Alvarez Ma- chain, a Mexican citizen alleged to have participated in Kiki's murder, abduct- ed at gunpoint in Guadalajara Mexico and brought to Los Angeles to stand trial.2 On June 16,1992, the United States Supreme Court ruled the actions of those agents legal. The ruling said in no uncertain terms that U.S. law enforcement authorities could literally and figuratively kidnap violators of American drug law in whatever country they found them and drag them physically and against their will to the U.S. to stand trial. Immediately thereafter the Ayatollahs de- clared that they too could rove the world and kidnap violators of Islamic law and drag them back to Iran to stand trial. Kidnapping has now become an ac- cepted tool of law enforcement throughout the world. Resorting to all sorts of wild extremes to bring drug traffickers to justice is nothing new for the U.S. government. At various times during my career as a DEA agent I was assigned to some pretty unorthodox operations - nothing

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