June 17, 2009 08:28 am
—
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
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