Wednesday letters
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Leadership, Del. Chip Woodrum and God in today’s letters to the editor.
Pick of the day: No due process for collaborators
Re: the recent editorial in The Roanoke Times entitled “Come clean about drone attacks” (Feb. 13):
First, I suggest that the individual who wrote this editorial interview a few dozen family members of the thousands who were killed in the 9/11 attacks and ask them if they feel that American citizens, or otherwise, in foreign countries caught collaborating with terrorists should somehow be granted due process.
Then the writer should visit a Veterans Administration center and talk with some of the vets who have lost legs, arms or both in IED attacks and ask them the same question. For some reason, the words “providing aid and comfort to the enemy” keep coming to mind.
We are at war here. Al-Qaida and the Taliban would like nothing better than to use our criminal justice system against us and to know how we pick and choose targets.
While I agree with many of the editorials in The Times, as a Vietnam vet, this one left me angry and cold.
GENE STUCKEY
ROANOKE
February 27, 2013 - 6:17 AM
Mr. Stuckey, how are we supposed to know a person has been a collaborators unless they’ve been tried which necessarily means they have to be given due process?
It’s the due process that prevents us from being at the level of the terrorists. Example, the people who flew those planes on 9/11 didn’t give those in the World Trade Center due process.
Surely you don’t want us to sink to their level.
I agree with you Scott. I would add that a real review of US foreign policy has been needed for decades but certainly since the first gulf war and definitely since 9-11. As long as the US continues its belligerence and intervention, we can expect terrorists to target us.
I do not think there is any serious question that we can confirm whether someone has been a collaborator without a trial. Due process is often just a one way ticket on a rail road to prison. That is simply the truth. In cases of treason or espionage or collaboration it is for show. Nothing more.
We already “sunk to their level”, long, long ago in fact.
In one letter, Paula Doss writes that conservatives want America to perpetuate “the tried and true method of capitalism.” In another letter, Carmen DeGraff writes, “America needs to turn to God.” I’m getting whiplash trying to decide between these two brilliant alternatives.
So Paula Doss agrees with Tom Taylor’s idiotic notion that we should all “turn to [her own version of] G-d”? I’ll tell her the exact same thing I told Taylor:
Inquisition. Thirty Years War. St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. Google ‘em and find out just what wonderful things can happen under a Christian theocracy.