Unfettered Letters

Calling us ‘cowards’

It is very disheartening when the attorney general of the United States, Eric Holder, calls us a nation of cowards (2/19, A-5). Even though he was referring to our conduct in race relations, I would never expect one of our government leaders to call us cowards. To make it even worse, he gave no direction for his desired change in racial relations. He just provided ridicule.

Congress might have been a better starting place for the attorney general to vent his displeasure. There are some racially organized caucuses in Congress that should disband. Any government grouping by race sends a harmful message of separatism.

It should be evident to Mr. Holder that racial change is occurring in this country. However, people live and socialize with those with whom they have things in common, regardless of race. Government cannot and should not try to control socialization.

B.J. Taylor
Overland Park

America’s top cop has an attitude. The attorney general of the United States accused the people of our country of being cowards on matters of race. This is a slap on the face of millions of Americans who worked long, back-breaking hours to elect an African-American as president, who subsequently appointed the attorney general.

How is this man going to keep equilibrium in the legal system? He is obviously biased.

Frank Statesel
Overland Park

Justice Department abuse

Blaming Sen. Kit Bond for the ouster of Todd Graves — while good political soap opera — simply does not ring true in the context of the overall U.S. Attorneys scandal.

Graves was replaced by Bradley Schlozman — a Bush loyalist who had already gutted the Civil Rights Division. Far from being a Bond person, Schlozman was the first “permanent interim U.S. Attorney” appointed by then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales under a provision that avoided Senate confirmation — a provision sneaked into Patriot Act II a month earlier.

Schlozman proceeded to file marginal “voter fraud” cases and prosecute innocent high-profile Democrats. It defies logic to conclude that Graves’ firing and Schlozman’s appointment were not part of the Karl Rove plan to abuse the Justice Department for political purposes.

No doubt Bush Justice used the Bond-Graves feud as a convenient excuse for the Graves firing. But the true reason was much more sinister and threatening to this Republic.

Philip F. Cardarella
Kansas City

Editor’s Note: Cardarella and his wife, Katheryn Shields, were acquitted of federal mortgage-fraud charges initiated by Schlozman.

Attorney general resignation

“Public service is honorable and noble,” stated Alberto Gonzales in his short resignation speech Monday. And by so stating, he indicted himself for providing slavish and secret service only to his partisan controllers, without consideration for his oath to the American public.

We now see a small vignette of how demanded loyalty to any political party or sect, to the exclusion of a federal officer’s ethical duty of evenhandedness to all citizens of the country, violates democratic principles and is destructive in the end.

Lloyd Hellman
Leawood

Attorney general

So, it appears President Bush feels that Alberto Gonzales is doing a heckuva job.

John A. Horner
Independence

Gonzales, U.S. attorneys

I would like to add my name to the growing list of leaders and citizens demanding the resignation of U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

At the very least he has been less than forthright concerning the firings of the eight U.S. attorneys. And even in the absence of legal wrongdoing, his prevarications in public and private greatly compromise what should be an impartial and honest office.

His job is to prosecute citizens of the United States. He need not be perfect to do so, but he does need to be forthright to the American public.

Mike Bannen
Prairie Village

Alberto Gonzales

Apparently in keeping the attorney general, President Bush wants someone as inept as he is.

It has been said, “Birds of a feather flock together.”

R. Huff
Overland Park

Fired U.S. attorneys

The current flap concerning the Justice Department has me flabbergasted.

I know that at 79 my ideas are very old-fashioned, but when did justice become a matter of politics? Isn’t that the way it is in dictatorships?

I thought there was a Constitution that guided us in the ways of justice and fairness to all parties.

Who was it who said that “justice is blind”? We used to portray the statue of Justice as wearing a blindfold. Now we should show her weeping.

Sara Yocum
Kansas City

Assaults on justice

Peter Makori’s excellent and timely column (3/28) headed “Assault on the judiciary troubles eastern Africa” paints a grim picture for the survival of justice in the region because of political interference in the dispensation of justice in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania.

Political interferences in those east African countries may have differed from each other, and may differ from our administration’s firing of eight U.S. attorneys, but all political interference, anywhere, by any means, leads to the same conclusion: Justice is in peril.

The Republicans argue that although explanations of the firings may have been clumsy, those attorneys served at the pleasure of the president, and the firings were nothing more than business as usual. Maybe. But because a large majority of Americans are troubled by the firings, let the facts speak for themselves.

Bring on the subpoenas. Let’s find out if the president’s “pleasure” extends to the prerogative of obstructing justice.

Harold Oppenheim
Kansas City

U.S. attorneys

This is in response to the comment in Voices (3/30) concerning presidents firing U.S. attorneys. President Clinton did his firing at the beginning of his first term, not six years into a scandal-ridden administration with one disaster after another. And I’m tired of hearing how the attorneys “serve at the pleasure of the president.” The president serves at the pleasure of the people, and this person and my friends and many others have never taken any pleasure in this president’s so-called service.

If people think that Gonzales is incompetent, well, he was appointed by an incompetent president.

I hope this current investigation will finally lead to the start of impeachment proceedings against Bush and all his cronies.

Patricia Barry
Kansas City

Fired U.S. attorneys

Charles Krauthammer misses the point regarding Alberto Gonzales (3/25, “Gonzales’ crime? Turning simple act into scandal”).
If a U.S. attorney was fired because he was not investigating a Democratic candidate before an election, then that was a “political” decision of a sort different from whether to allocate prosecutorial resources more to one type of crime than to another.
The issue with the fired attorneys isn’t what type of crime they were pursuing; it was whether they were directing their efforts to benefit Republican officeholders.
The former decisions are “political” in the sense of reflecting government policy, which is legitimate; the latter are “political” in the sense of being partisan, which is not legitimate.
This issue is more a political one (in the sense of proper policy) than a legal one, so it is not sufficient just to say the U.S. attorneys “serve at the pleasure of the president.”
Mr. Krauthammer rightly hammered President Clinton for the end-of-term pardons that he handed out, even though those pardons were legal, and critics of the attorney firings are taking the same approach.
Dave Johnson
Gladstone