Dear Editor:

The following is a letter to the President of the United States:

Dear Mr. President:

That was a very nice letter you sent to Selma’s Knox Elementary School Principal, Joslyn Reddick. Hopefully, you will offer me the courtesy of a response to this letter.

This critique of your actions/inactions as our president for the past seven months covers two recent issues:

Your decision to allow Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogators, covering their information-gathering from the terrorist detainees at Gitmo is an outrageous disgrace. What you have done in one fell swoop is to damage the morale of the CIA’s operatives and greatly weaken our country’s national security.

As far as I am concerned, what you have done is a cheap, stupidly gross political move, probably designed as a diversion vs. your egregious government health plan. Whose side are you on, Mr. President? Have you forgotten Sept. 11, 2001, when 3,000 innocent citizens were murdered in New York’s Twin Towers, a field in Pennsylvania and the Pentagon?

You, Mr. Holder, and your liberal cronies call water boarding torture? Water boarding happens to be an effective interrogation technique that is non-life threatening and has enabled the CIA to gather critical information from terrorist killers, likely saving countless American lives, as estimated by intelligence experts. Former Vice-President Cheney has explained all of this to millions of viewers on Fox News Cable.

Let me give you my opinion of what torture is, Mr. President. Real torture is when many, many of our citizens who were trapped in the Twin Towers inferno had to decide between two choices just how they were going to die—jump hundreds of feet to their deaths or be burned to death in the raging jet-fuel fires.

Another form of true torture has occurred in the Iraqi and Afghani wars when captured American citizens and military personnel have been subjected to brutal beatings, beheadings and their bodies being dragged through the streets.

Our enemies must be laughing over the fact that any of our future interrogation of captives will be done with a “be nice” policy. Just don’t blame George W. Bush if we get hit again. He kept us safe after 9/11. Our enemies have no interest in the Geneva Convention or our Army Field Manual. They play by their own barbaric rules.

Many of us still remember the Pan Am 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988. The convicted Libyan perpetrator, al-Megrahi, has just been released by the Scottish government out of “compassion” because the killer is alleged to have terminal cancer. He served a measly eight years of a life sentence. Recent reports suggest there was an “oil deal” between British and Libyan leaders to obtain the release.

There were 259 innocent passengers murdered, including 189 Americans. Where is the compassion for the victims? Your tepid response was a suggestion that al-Megrahi should be put under “house arrest.” Later, amid much outcry, you pathetically called the release “highly objectionable.” Libyan thug-leader Gadhafi is coming soon to the United Nations world meeting. Do you plan to give him a big hug like you did Dictator Hugo Chavez?

Gadhafi is an America-hater just like Chavez. When are you going to learn that appeasing our enemies only emboldens them?

Sincerely.

Byrd Looper

Selma