Unfettered Letters

Finding ‘truth’ about torture

In the history of bad ideas, columnist Eugene Robinson’s call for a “truth commission” has to be one of the worst (1/25, Opinion, “Light must be shined on truth about torture”).

The idea that any group picked by a Congress dominated by one party could derive the “truth” about anything is laughable and sets a frightening precedent. Americans know how elastic the truth is in Washington.

This is an attempt to persecute political rivals (unlike Mr. Robinson, not all those calling for such a commission are opposed to prosecuting people from the Bush administration). Now that they are in power, the Democrats want to convince the American public that most of the policies of the Bush years were morally wrong. This is classic banana republic: Take power and vilify and jail your predecessor so you can stay in power forever.

Many Americans supported Bush’s efforts to fight terrorism. Apparently in the new Democratic America, there is no room for that sort of wrong opinion, only the truth according a congressional commission.

President Obama should squelch this movement ASAP and address our pressing problems.

Americans are sick of having their interests take a backseat to the two political parties’ election ambitions.

Mark Davis
Liberty

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.

Can we afford crime act?

Wonder were your money goes? Just passed by the Senate. Passed by the House a year ago. You never heard of it?

The bill is called the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act. It is to investigate civil rights related homicides before 1970. Granted there were some terrible things that happened then. But this bill authorizes $63 million for over 5 years.

I wonder if they think anything will come of it after more then 40 years.

Frank Thompson
DeSoto

No mistake: Iraq war is a crime

The debate over the Bush administration’s uses of prewar intelligence regarding Iraq (6/23, Opinion, “White House didn’t ‘lie’ before Iraq war”).html is a waste of time. The use of intelligence “stovepipes” to feed cherry-picked raw data from the Pentagon straight to Vice President Cheney’s office for use by the White House has been acknowledged by multiple credible sources, including supporters of the war.

More to the point, the United States did not go to war for the reasons stated publicly, as a close examination of policy-planning documents authored by the intellectual architects of the war shows. Economic and geopolitical rationales for military action predominated.

The Iraq war is not a “mistake.” It is a crime, in the proper sense of that term; a war of aggression as defined by the Nuremberg tribunal. Hundreds of thousands have perished due to the realization of the ideals of the same geopolitical doodlers who now wish to engage Iran.

Alan Kent
Kansas City

Faulty prewar intelligence

Sen. Kit Bond’s letter (6/13), blaming the CIA for faulty prewar intelligence displays either ignorance or an attempt to cover up this administration’s deceptions that put us into this disastrous war when they knew that Iraq did not attack us on 9/11. Saudi Arabians and a few members of al-Qaida, who were not from Iraq, were responsible for the attack.

Knight Ridder, the now-defunct company that owned The Star, published an article reporting that the CIA told Vice President Dick Cheney that the information from Cheney’s buddy Ahmad Chalabi and his exile group about the existence of WMDs in Iraq was unverified and unsubstantiated.

Condoleezza Rice’s deputy, Stephen Hadley, also knew about the CIA report but said nothing. And Cheney chose to ignore it, because he wanted this war and knew that Bush wanted revenge on Saddam Hussein for having threatened his father.

Because of these deceptions, thousands of Iraqis and our troops are dead or wounded physically or mentally when none of this needed to have happened if it had not been for the rush to a pre-emptive war.

Madeleine Matthews
Kansas City

Guantanamo Bay series

Thanks to The Star for running the series detailing the abuse of detainees at American prisons since the sad events of 9/11 (June 15-17, A-1). I commend the McClatchy Co. for developing a comprehensive story on this subject.

However, the sad fact is that much of this information has been in the public domain for many years now. Unfortunately this information did not register with the general public before the 2004 election, when our country essentially gave its stamp of approval to these practices by re-electing the man most responsible for these abuses. American history will forever be blighted with this record of torture and the American public’s tacit complicity.

The recent Supreme Court ruling granting habeas corpus rights to these detainees is thankfully placing a roadblock in the way of the Bush administration’s attempts to hide this legacy of torture. Americans should understand that the real reason Bush fears that these detainees are given their day in court is that they will finally be allowed to detail their mistreatment in a court of law, a disgraceful spectacle that will not be easily ignored.

Wendy Lund
Overland Park

Guantanamo detainees

Detainee abuse series

The agenda of the The Star was, as usual, apparent with respect to the expose on detainee abuse from Afghanistan to Gitmo. Borrowing John Kerry’s brush, the author paints a picture of the American soldier as a stupid, angry thug looking for some brown-skinned people to beat as a cathartic release of pentup anger lingering from the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Conversely, the detainees are disingenuously portrayed as innocent victims just minding their own business when indiscriminately detained and beaten by these brutes.

Jared Bartels
Lee’s Summit

Detainee rights

After reading “Bush critical of ruling on detainee rights,” (6/13, National/World)) I wondered how six lawyers could think the way they do.

How could five Supreme Court justices think foreign combatants deserve protection in U.S. civil courts? And how could Barack Obama think this ruling is “an important step toward re-establishing our credibility as a nation committed to the rule of law?”

Has the strict adherence to law now become the end, rather than the means to a better one?

Fifty percent of our Declaration of Independence signers were lawyers. Yet these people steeped in law realized when it was necessary to change their situation rather than strictly follow the laws of England.

The difference between then and now is the absence of a warrior heart. Those in the past used theirs to discern when circumstances required a temporary change in normal behavior so they could act to improve the future, before returning to normal. Those today rarely have the heart to act.

Dennis Batliner
Overland Park

Flawed intelligence led to war

The Star’s analysis on the Iraq report (6/7, Opinion. “A lesson to future administrations”) makes clear that the editors failed to read the actual report.

Readers may be surprised that Democrats concluded the administration’s statements on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were “substantiated by intelligence.”

The same conclusion was found regarding statements on Iraq’s nuclear, chemical, biological weapons and ties to al-Qaida.

And while The Star trivializes the fact, Democrats in the Senate examined the same intelligence as the administration and they, too, characterized Iraq as a growing and dangerous threat.

In 2002, the current Democratic Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman said “there is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years.”

The record is rife with similar statements that speak to the crux of the matter: The intelligence leading up to the war was wrong.

The bottom line is that flawed intelligence, not administration deception, led to policy makers’ statements and decisions.

To prevent repeating these failures, we must put national security over politics and work together to reform our intelligence operations.

We owe this much to the American families whose safety depends on our getting this job right.

U.S. Sen. Kit Bond
Republican, Missouri
Washington, D.C.

Editor’s note: Bond is vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Kline doing his job

This is a response to Robert Lewis (3/16, Letters) regarding Phill Kline’s “criminal waste of assets of the taxpayers of Kansas in his personal vendetta against Planned Parenthood and Paul Morrison.”

I am as fiscally conservative as anyone in the U.S. If laws mean anything, then violations should be investigated and enforced. There are some restrictions against abortions in Kansas. Some abuses of the laws have been verified. Kline did his best to prosecute those abuses in Wichita and checked on Johnson County also. It has not been a waste of money.

A woman filed a harassment complaint against Morrison. To my knowledge that complaint has not been withdrawn. Therefore, once again, Kline is merely doing his job. It is not a “vendetta.” He is not responsible for Morrison’s indiscretion by any means.

Rational people have accepted the fact that Kline is merely doing the jobs to which he was elected or appointed. Abortion is a serious matter. Often have I wondered as to what would have been the fate of pro-abortion people if their own parents had been pro-abortion. This isn’t “whining,” Mr. Lewis. This is just cold fact.

Thomas Loftus
Fairway

Acrobatic investigation

From an article in The Star (March 22, A-1, “McCain, Clinton files also breached”): “(Condoleezza) Rice told reporters in Brazil. ‘And therefore I will stay on top of it and get to the bottom of it.’.”

How’s she going to do that from up there?

Neal A. Johnson
Kansas City