Letter to the Editor: Must not know the facts

By Sun Advocate

Editor:
This letter is to reply to Brenda Conner’s letter “Terrorists Beware” that appeared in the Sun Advocate on June 8, 2004.
I could not believe that any reasonable human being educated with the facts could advocate the injustices our soldiers have committed in the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal. However, since the letter goes on to cite several known fallacies I will assume the author simply isn’t aware of the truth behind the matter.
First, her letter clearly states that the prisoners in Abu Ghraib are terrorists. Yet according to published sections of the Red Cross Report listed May 7, in the Wall Street Journal “between 70 percent and 90 percent of the persons deprived of their liberty in Iraq had been arrested by mistake.” This might sound hard to believe until we consider the fact that there are no laws in Iraq governing who is thrown in jail and who isn’t, there exists no right to a fair trial, no innocence until proven guilty, no probable cause, and that there is virtually nothing aside from someone’s word keeping any one of those prisoners in jail.
Next, Ms. Conner brings up the World Trade Center bombings of 9/11 as if to imply that Iraq were somehow involved in this tragedy. Yet the fact remains that Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are now and always have been enemies due to extreme ideological differences. In a joint White House press conference held on January 31, 2003, President Bush and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair both acknowledged the lack of any direct link between the two men. Leaving the only similarities between Osama and Saddam to be that they are both Arabic, both Muslim and both carry heavy antipathy towards the United States, albeit for vastly different reasons.
To the authors credit however, a report was released by the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Douglas J. Feith, on October 27, 2003 with proof of ties between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden. (This is the only hard evidence that has ever existed as to a direct connection between the two men.)
However, the Department of Defense proved this same report to be erroneous not a month later on November 15 in a public news release. Unfortunately, the discredited story continues to circulate the Internet as fact even today, serving to propagate public belief in the fallacy.
To me it is clear that the author just did not know all the facts. Otherwise how could anyone honestly feel that it is alright to torture the innocent citizens of a war stricken country? Their beliefs might be different than ours, and their customs might be alien to us, however in Carbon County especially we should be able to look around us at all the different cultures that make up our neighborhoods and realize that our country was founded on ethnic differences and our tolerance of the same.
The Iraqi people don’t deserve to be treated like animals by American’s especially when by our own standards they have not been found guilty of any crime; nor should they be considered as less than human simply because our President chose to violate International Law and start a war in their country based not on the terrorist attacks of 9/11 but instead under the pretense of finding WMD’s which didn’t even exist.