Letters to the Editor
MAV in Florida
Published Letters: 287 Editor's Choice: 22
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Interesting article, but I have a nit to pick
[Read the article: In meth we trust]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"transporting illegally manufactured methamphetamine in the crankshaft of their bikes"
A crankshaft is a solid piece of steel, or should be before it breaks. You'd be hard put to transport something in a crankshaft, just as you'd be hard put to transport something inside the head of a sledgehammer. Crankcase, maybe. Even then, having to put stuff in through the oil filler and extract it through the drain plug would seriously limit whatever you could carry in such circumstances. It sounds apocryphal.
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"Spending time with the family"......yeah. Sure....
[Read the article: Can you say "cut and run"?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I notice that six months or so after a politician leaves office "to spend more time with the family," he or she is usually either hitting the lecture circuit, or working full time at a Washington think tank. Sometimes both.
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Courts and Terrorism
[Read the article: Jury finds Padilla guilty on terrorism charges]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If "terrorism should not be fought in the courts," does that mean that Timothy McVeigh and his buddies should have been tried in secret trials on military bases? Should Randy Weaver have been taken away to a secret trial for his crime of making a sawed-off shotgun? OK, that last one was pretty trivial, really. My point is that before we start having closed trials, we really out to think, and think twice, where this will go. After all, Quizno, would you want President Hillary Clinton to authorize secret trails?
Another reason for open trials, of course, is to expose incompetence by law enforcement or by prosecutors. If trails are conducted solely by the government, as a previous poster suggests, would the government ever admit bungling an investigation or an arrest? Ever? Or would it just be marked "Secret!"?
Now I've read that one reason for not charging Mr. Padilla with trying to build a dirty bomb is simply that there wasn't any evbidence of it -- he bragged he was going to doi it, but, he had no explosives and no radioactive materials. Or, as Bill Buckley once eloquently put it in another context, "If he had some ham he could make a sandwich if he had some bread." We know that the claim by the Justice Department that he was going to blow up apartment buildings with natural gas just didn't pan out -- too many utility experts said it can't be done. It may well be that the "dirty bomb" idea also never existed. But now we'll never know.
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Now here's a really politically incorrect thought....
[Read the article: Jury finds Padilla guilty on terrorism charges]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Raising money for Muslim causes is considered assistance to terrorism, and I guess that's fair enough, as those groups aren't exactly noted for strictly categorizing their money by accepted budgeting methods.
But what's the difference between them and the people at the Irish pub who fill the donation jar for Sinn Fein?
This is not just academic -- one of the prosecutors of the USF Professor Sami Al-Arian was a partner in an Irish pub in the Tampa/St. Pete area, a pub where money was supposedly raised for Sinn Fein. OK, I come from good stock of County Clare, so trhat's why I say it's a politically incorrect question. Still, it's a question that bothers me. Any thoughts?
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Peaceful Islam...
[Read the article: Jury finds Padilla guilty on terrorism charges]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Salon never said there are no terrorists.
On the other hand, a few days after 9/11, there was a guy in Washington who had a press conference at which he posed with a number of Islamic guys and declared that "Islam is a religion of peace!" Two of the people in the group turned out to be men who had expressed support for Hamas during demonstrations in front of the White House during the 1990s.
The guy who called this press confererence is a guy named George W. Bush. You may have heard of him.
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Would you like a twist of the facts with that drink of Kool Aid?
[Read the article: P.S., Mr. President: "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]So, if I understand, the Bin Laden report was too vague to act against. So that's why Bush went fishing that afternoon, and spent four more weeks on vacation before flying to Sarasota to read "My Pet Goat" with school kids.
But the fantastic tales of Saddam Hussein using railroad laboratories to make germs to spread over America with drone aircraft were specific enough to mobilize armored divisions and ship them around the globe for an invasion of a prostrate country that was already under a no-fly ban enforced by our fighter aircraft.
As for Clinton, his administration did a nice job of busting the Seattle Space Needle plot, and the LAX plot, and the Hudson tunnels bomb plot. Then a new administration took office, refused to meet with the terorism adviser ("Terrorism is just a Clinton thing....."), cut the counter-terror budget 60% and, well, this is where we came in.
I'm encouraged that more Republicans are honest enough to say this administration has been a bungling failure. That speaks well for all of us as Americans. But there are still plenty of people who are clinging to the conventional wisdom of 2002.
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No, that was John Lindh
[Read the article: Where there's smoke]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I believe that was John Lindh who was shot during the chaos of the rpison riot in Afghanistan and then held in a container, then loaded aboard the USS Saipan. Lindh had the bad luck to run off and join the Taliban back when they were our buddies who were suppressing the opium trade, and then be there when the terrorists sheltered by the Taliban struck.
He might have been OK if Dick Cheney's and Donald Rumsfeld's desire to forget Afghanistan and just immediately attack Iraq had come off -- after all, Iraq had more targets that looked nice in the aerial footage!
Rudy Juliani wanted him executed, ignoring that the death penalty for non-murder offenses was struck in 1977 (Coker v. Georgia).