Opinion

SPANISH JUDGE’S TORTURED PROBE OF US

THE ISSUE: Whether other countries have a right to judge post-9/11 US interrogation techniques.

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Spanish Magistrate Baltasar Garzon is probing six Bush administration lawyers for their legal advice on interrogation techniques, and President Obama remains silent (“Foreign ‘Torture’ Probe’s Threat to US,” John Bolton, PostOpinion, May 11).

Garzon’s probe and Obama’s silence about real torture taking place in the world speaks volumes.

Hamas routinely tortures and murders its own dissidents, as do governments of other Muslim countries.

Russia murders and jails journalists that it can’t control; China is guilty of massive human-rights abuses, and Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro kill and imprison those who question their governments’ actions. Yet neither Obama nor Garzon mutter one word of protest.

Steve Heitner

Port Jefferson Station

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I have long felt that the left wing is good at blind hatred of the GOP. One need not look any further than the continued misuse of the word “torture” by the enemies of the GOP.

However, let us concede for a moment that waterboarding is torture and that Bush and the boys are guilty of war crimes.

Now, let’s take a walk down memory lane and review the actions of FDR, Harry Truman and Winston Churchill. They all condoned rough treatment of suspected Nazi spies, the murder of POWs on the battlefield and on the high seas and the murder of upwards of 2 million innocent civilians in the cities of Germany and Japan.

Which is worse, pouring water in someone’s nose or the actions described above?

Andrew MacDonald

Fanwood, NJ

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Those foreign probes are no threat to the United States, they’re a threat to George W. Bush and Dick Chenney, along with Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell and the lawyers who tried to justify torture.

John Bolton, like Bush, Cheney and the lawyers, fails to see that when you seek to disregard international law and treaties, you leave yourself wide-open to international sanctions.

Using their legal minds to circumvent international law and treaties on torture, these lawyers so diminished the American values that thousands of Americans had fought and died for, that it will take years to overcome at home and abroad.

Richard Rainey

Ridge

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I don’t know whether Obama is too dense or just too shameless to let an investigation into so-called torture tactics by some Spanish windbag proceed.

If there is any probe to be made, and I believe there’s not, we can handle it.

The election is over. Obama has to get out of his campaign mode.

You won, Obama, so stop running against Bush and the Republican Party. You’re beginning to look more like a speechmaker and less like a leader.

Chris Michaels

Morganville, NJ

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There is something very unsettling about the juxtaposition of opinions from Bolton and Kirsten Powers (“Bam’s Darfur Sins,” PostOpinion, May 11)

Powers seems to revel in the days when America was the world’s problem-solver, while Bolton sets forth a scenario in which we can no longer do so for fear of a lesser government mindlessly prosecuting us for our protective efforts.

It simply cannot be had both ways. America cannot move to intervene in a crisis of criminal proportions under an umbrella of microscopic inspection that hinders the actual intervention itself.

Countries that are militarily and economically unable or unwilling to triage a systemic catastrophe like Darfur have no right to sit in post-apocalyptic judgment of a country like America, just because they don’t like the way we do business.

People should re-read the columns by Bolton and Powers with the thought the United States is here to help, and always has been. But if you think you can woodshed us after we save you, your pleading will forever fall on deaf ears.

Tom Cahill

Manhattan