Published: June 17, 2009 08:28 am      

Letters for June 17, 2009

What happened to freedom in America?

All of my neighbors were afraid that if I could not call 911, I might die at home and it would be several days before they sensed it. So, a few weeks before Memorial Day, I finally got a telephone connected, and I see a connection between the phone and the day.

Because I had two years of high school German, I was temporarily volunteered to the U.S. Army Graves Registration to go from house to house in the little villages and find people who would show us fields of bodies that we had missed. Acres and acres of mutilated, putrefying bodies and body parts of 18-, 19- and 20-year-olds _ in those days, mostly country boys.

Nine out of 10 of my telephone calls now are from people trying to sell me something. I am told that I can call an 800 number and have that stopped. No. I automatically have a right to privacy in my own home. If you don’t want your privacy invaded, you shouldn’t have to make the phone call. You say it’s a small thing to make a fuss about. Little things add up.

The lightweight weapons carrier pulling a small, empty, two-wheel trailer made it down the county lane all right, but on the way back it was weighted down by a stack of about a dozen dead bodies on the trailer. It detonated a land mine that killed one of the two GIs and an old farmer I had gotten to show us another field of those who thought they were fighting and dying to keep this country free.

Herbert A. Faulkner
Roxbury

Waterboarding was labeled torture

It’s no surprise that Tom Sears claims that the nefarious Dick Cheney “is in the right” (The Daily Star, June 9). Sears has given his unequivocal support to every misdeed committed by the Bush regime, including the use of “enhanced interrogation.”

In the aftermath of World War II, an international coalition convened to prosecute Japanese soldiers charged with torture. At the top of the list of techniques was the enhanced interrogation method known as “waterboarding.” Japanese soldiers who waterboarded American prisoners were executed by the U.S. government. The claim that cowards and collaborators in the Democratic Party knew about the Bush regime’s use of torture doesn’t change that fact that U.S. authorities executed our former enemies for the same crime ordered by Messrs Bush and Cheney.

And that begs the question: Does Tom Sears believe that the U.S. owes the Japanese government an apology for wrongfully executing their soldiers?

Walter F. Wouk
Cobleskill