My comments to President Obama about the torture memos 05/14/09

Torture photos 2

President Obama:

Your reversal on the release of the "torture photos" is shocking and a great mistake.

The published reason for your change: that leaders of the armed forces have urged you to because of possible retaliation against US troops is not a valid one.

First, you must know that security forces, of which the army is one, will always resist circulation of the truth about abuses carried out by them.

Second, retaliators do not need more reasons to act against our troops. There are more than enough already, such as the killing of civilians in ill-informed and ill-advised bombing actions. One more will not make a difference, and, as you can see, other countries' armed forces that have committed abuses are not as retaliated against as ours are. Therefore, exposure of such abuses cannot be an important reason for such retaliation.

Third, hiding such abuses prevents their punishment and ensures that they will not effectively be prevented in the future. Abuses must be exposed, debated, and recompensed for legally. The idea that doing so is harmful is a very weak and fatuous one.

Openness and proper prosecution of abuses against people's civil and human rights must be followed.

Sincerely,

A. C. Roosevelt

My comments to President Obama on the US threat to Britain about their release of intel documents in court 06/06/09

Re: US's threats to UK on the release of the intelligence memo on the interrogations of Binyam Mohammed by security officers

Dear President Obama:

I wish to express my strong opposition to your administration's threats against the UK in regard to the release of information about the interrogations of British subject who was accused of being a terrorist. Your administration apparently has told UK that the US will further limit intelligence sharing if the information is released.

As in the other cases in which your administration is trying to prevent the publication of evidence about our military and security agencies' treatment of detainees, concealing what went on will help no one except officers and administrators who misbehaved. Wrongdoing in important maters of national interest cannot be prevented in the future if it is not exposed, discussed, and punished.

Sincerely,

Anna C. Roosevelt

My comments to President Obama on releasing the torture photos and documents 04/17/09

The Obama administration did the right thing to release the torture memos today April 17, 2009.

No abuse of human rights, rule of law, or justice should be concealed, regardless of embarassment and future difficulties in the operation of the agencies and individuals involved.

Abusive techniques are not needed for intelligence or law enforcement. They do more harm to that endeavor than they help, because they elicit false information and create future legal and other difficulties.

It's very important not to listen to the pleas of intelligence officials. There is only one reason they need secrecy about these matters: to conceal culpability and to prevent future use.

The American people need to know about crimes by government officials so that they may be punished and prevented in the future.

My comments to President Obama on Judge Sotomayor 06/06/09

Re: Sotomayor for Supreme Court

I wish to commend your choice of Ms. Sotomayor as a candidate for the Supreme Court.

As you know, the American public has expressed a majority of support for her candidacy. In this, they have disregarded the spurious claims from some politically extreme commentators.

This judge has shown a wonderful combination of intelligence, common sense, clarity, restraint, and honesty in her decisions and comments.

Furthermore, she is just the right seasoning to add to the mix of justices on the court today. She is scrappy, outspoken, determined, fearless, but warm, friendly, a giving colleague, and a non-partisan voter.

I am sure you realize that it is outrageous that the composition of the court in this day and age is dominated by white men from the corporate law world. This, rather than Sotomayor's thoughtful and acidulous comments on the best potential role of ethnic and racial diversity in the justice system, truly is racism. This gender group and ethnic group that represent nothing but the tenacious control of power of the very group that colonized our land should not rule the final legal decisions of our country. It is very wrong.

I hope that you persevere in putting forward this nomination. The American public is for it.

Anna C. Roosevelt

Evanston, IL

My comments to President Obama on the national forests 06/06/09

National forests

Dear President Obama:

I wish to register my opinion in support of your shift of US policy toward roads and access to our national forests.

As you know, these forests represent a tiny fraction of the magnificent stands that greeted the first colonists. As such, the need to be protected with vigilance and energy.

The forests give so much beyond the timber and other economic products generally recognized. They are havens for our wildlife, which is under siege from pollution, overdevelopment, and improper management of introduced species.

But more important, the forests are the local source of most of our rain. More than half of moisture that ends up as rain is held in the body of the forest or captured from the air by the trees when they intersect clouds or winds. When forests are cut, that moisture is lost from the system. Worse, the uncovered land then heats up and dries, and those conditions further desiccate the remaining moisture from other sources. The rain that then falls does not filter into the ground to support vegetation and replenish groundwater but it scours the ground of topsoil and the floods off to foul the waters of our reservoirs and fisheries.

Thank you for contributing to the future of our forests and the maintenance of all their great services to our country.

Sincerely,

Anna C. Roosevelt

Evanston, IL

My comments to President Obama on military tribunals 06/06/09

Re: Military tribunals

Dear President Obama:

The press is reporting among other things that your administration is considering relying on the military tribunals for prosecuting presumed terrorist prisoners. It is said that this is necessary because the tribunals use less stringent evidence rules and also could better protect classified information relating to those prosecutions.

I wish to register with you the reasons for my strong opposition to the tribunals as vehicles for the prosecutions.

First, the rules of evidence of our court system have been devised over the years to try to best provide for just convictions. The problem with lesser rules is that they lead to false and unfair convictions. Hearsay is a notoriously faulty guide to the facts of crimes. Inteligence information also has serious problems because intelligence systems have to rely on very indirect and incomplete and diffuse information. In wartime, the quality of the information is even worse than in peacetime intelligence operations. Just look back at what has been revealed in FBI files. They were packed with idiotic, inaccurate, very politically and racially biased information.

Weak evidence will not achieve justice and will not protect us from terrorism. It will more likely than our court system lead to false and politically biased convictions.

Second, pleas to protect classified evidence overwhelmingly have been used by the military and intelligence administrations to prevent circulation of documentation that reveals incompetence, criminality, illegality, veniality, and false prosecutorial actions. Just think back: when did you read a declassified or leaked document whose release harmed the country. In all the cases that I know of, the public benefitted from such releases by learning what really happened in a operation or war or presidential act. Do you think, for example, that America would have been harmed by learning that South Vietnamese leader Diem's death was arranged by CIA-paid agents (two generals) in a coup that had the permission of our president? Had it been revealed at the time, I think that the Vietnam war would have had a very different history.

Third, military courts have a very strong bias in terms of social hierarchies. Our US court system also has such a bias, but it is much milder and also is in open contestation. What happens in the military system is that in cases where several individuals have been involved in a crime or misbehavior, low-ranking offenders and offenders of minority status are much more likely to be prosecuted for crimes in lieu of higher-ranking ones. Thus, the My Lai incident, the misrepresentation of Pat Tillman's death, etc. Accordingly, these foreign, long-imprisoned persons, who have been accused of heinous crimes will not get neutral, blind justice. Regardless of their guilt or innocence, they will be sacrified to benefit the reputation of the military, to show that it is effectively conducting the war on terrorism.

It is therefore a conflict of interest for military tribunals to conduct these trials.

Where is your sense of justice in this? Do you want so much to be thought an effective president against terrorism that you will allow such legal travesties?

Have you no trust in the wisdom of our courts and the adversarial system. It is a very great and good system whose faults are in principle correctable through public commentary. Please reconsider your plans in this.

Sincerely,

Anna C. Roosevelt

Evanston, IL

My comments to President Obama on credit card companies 05/13/09

policy email on credit card companies

Thank you for your leadership on the legislation to rein in the credit card companies. In the last two years many of these companies have imposed on customers through their deceptive, cryptic, one-sided contracts, the inadequate notice times they have given for customer-unfriendly changes, their usurous fees, etc. Much of what they have done to extract improper profits would have been illegal under the usury act, which was repealed due to company lobbying. It is also likely that in the last two years or so the companies have acted illegally even under the current rules and regulations about credit and lending, so it will be important to look into what they have done. Many of us have had direct experience with their practices and have lost large sums of money because of them.

The American public will not forget what you have done to right these offenses for the future and redress the illegal ones from the past.

Thank you, a grateful citizen.

My comments to President Obama on corporate bonuses 05/ 13/095/13/09

Bailouts and Corporate salaries and bonuses

Dear President Obama:

The large companies and banks whose greed and irresponsible risk-taking were a signal causal factor in the disastrous world economic crisis are now raking it in through bail-outs, through which they have gained enough cash to give bonuses and salary increases to the executives who's bad decisions led to the crisis.

Their argument for the increases and payouts is that these are needed in order for them to recruit and retain excellent and knowledgable executives.

This absolutely is not true. The people who will not work except for exhorbitant receipts of money are people who only care about their own economic welfare. These are not the best executive talent to lead our corporate economy. These are people whose policies and modus operandi were disatrous for the country and for their own companies. Weh don't need these grasping executives. We need fresh blood above all.

There are large numbers of honest, responsible, intelligent, talented, and experienced businessmen who can now come into their own to lead companies. When there are caps on recompense based on true evaluation of past results, then the grasping ones will fade away and the energetic, public spirited, and honest ones will come into the fore.

Please do not listen to the blandishments of the corporate executives on your staff. They and people like them were among those whose actions and politicies led to this disastrous situation.

My comments to President Obama on corporate bonuses 2/22/09

COPORATE SALARIES AND BONUSES

Many of your supporters feel strongly that the solution to the economic crisis will require stringent control of corporate salaries, bonuses, and perks in companies that benefit from bailouts. A lot of the nation's money has come to be invested in such outlays, and, as in the earlier Crash and Great Depression, they, plus a climate of general corporate irresponsibility and loose regulation, have been a big factor in precipitating the crisis. The fact that tax-payer money is the source of all bailouts means that the government has a responsibility to us to make sure that all possible corporate sources of money for reimbursing the treasury for the bailout are collected. Many of us are facing huge increases in our taxes and fees at the same time as our incomes are shrinking fast. Where is that tax-payer money going to come from? The very rich, who have hugely increased their proportion of the national wealth in recent years must beging to pay their fair share. Many of us are now in serious debt, so aside from simply paying our bills and surviving, we need to reduce our indebtedness. Furthermore, you seem to hope that we will consume more, so that companies that sell things get customers. Just how to you expect us to do that. Most of us must drastically cut back our spending and will have to do so for years to come to get out of hock.

My comments to President Obama on the economic crisis 5/13/09

Re: Disaster for U.S. citizens

Dear President Obama:

Many many Americans like myself who were comfortably in the middle or upper middle class are in great trouble. Large numbers have lost their jobs. I'm sure you know what that means. Suddenly, without jobs, one cannot pay one's bills, resulting in shame and retribution. Those who cannot pay their mortgages lose their houses, but how to pay rental bills with no salary? What is to become of all these people? As you know, job losses have been tremendous.

I don't see how all these bereft people's basic needs will be accomodated without the kind of massive public work programs that my distant cousin Franklin Roosevelt instituted in the last great depression. Many of the responses your administration have made are only a drop in the bucket of what will be needed. They, also, tend to benefit the highest earners, and many measures will not provide solutions immediately.

I am sure you are aware that even those, such as myself with a tenured job in a state educational institution with increased scope due to the crisis, are earning less but having larger bills, due to interest increases on borrowed money. We, too, may have to give up our houses, and the benefits from our future pensions and current health insurance are shrinking. We are putting off healthcare because it costs so much more. We are not buying anything unnecessary.

We do not yet face disaster but those who depended on our business do, since we can no longer spend money in the industries they worked for.

I'm not convinced that your economic advisors who are trying to "stimulate" the economy to persuade citizens to start spending again understand that people whose pensions have been gutted and whose work careers placed at serious risk are unnlikely to spend freely again in their lifetimes. I'm minded of what happened to the spending habits of my mother and grandparents, who went through the great depression. They remained very restrained in the use of money their entire lives.

It's important that you and your administrative people keep in touch with what is happening here on the ground. If you don't, I think it will make your approaches less than effective at a time when great effectiveness is necessary for a solution.

My comment on US bribery abroad 2/22/09

CIA BRIBERY AND SUBORNING OF FOREIGN POLITICIANS AND THE MEDIA

I hope that the US administration truly believes in fostering democratic forms of government worldwide. If that is so, the government needs to revise some long-standing US foreign policies and practices. It has frequently been the practice of the CIA and State Department to spend really huge sums to bribe foreign politicians and newspaper editors and writers in an attempt to determine the outcome of voting in congressional and presidential contests. An obvious problem with this practice is that it totally suborns the demoncratic process in those countries and substitutes what really is neo-colonialist intrusion for a people's democratic decisionmaking in choosing their leaders. But even worse, if successful, it puts in power individuals for whom money is more important than patriotism or statesmanship and it permantly disinforms the public both there and abroad, through the false media coverage. In retrospect, it also has been the case that the US functionaries involved had minimal understanding of and commitment to constitutional government and how to increase democracy on the local political and cultural scene, so their intervention does not even achieve the misconceived short-term goals of the projects, not to speak of fostering democratic rule. Thus, these interventions were not even pragmatically desirable. In fact, they have been disastrous both on the short and long term. It is very important that Mr. Blair and Mr. Panetta act to stop all such wasteful, illegal, undemocratic, harmful, and ineffective policies and practices on the part of US intelligence agencies and other agencies. News reports show that they are actively being pursued in places like Afghanistan. Recently, a CIA functionary was interviewed about how his bribes of local elders were not having the intended effect.

My comment to President Obama on Mega Corporations 5/13/09

Anti-trust

Dear President Obama:

Thank you for your emerging anti-trust policies and the staffing of them.

Since Teddy Roosevelt, my great-grandfather, began the effort to rein in monopolies in the public interest, there have been periods of falling back on that effort, due to political changes in the executive and legislative branches of our government.

As you know, monoplolies are in no-one's interest, even for the companies themselves. Lack of competition leads to moribund, calcified, out-dated, maladaptive corporate structures and it hinders citizens from the ability to choose who they will do business with. Without meaningful choices, people cannot protect themselves from the abusive corporate practices that lead to unhealthy economies. Both the great depression and our current "recession" were produced when too-cosy government officials and irresponsible corporate interests combined to dupe the public and evade regulation.

Your vigilance, however, needs to be acute for wrong thinking and cronyistic actions on the part of your own staff in the executive branch.

The public will long remember your leadership on its behalf. Your policies not only protect citizens but also protect the companies from their own sloth and veniality, which are the root of countywide economic failures that hurt almost everyone.

A grateful citizen

My comment to President Obama on Afghanistan 5/14/09

Afghanistan strategy

Dear President Obama:

Many of us have wondered about the sense of your reasoning in ramping up the war in Afghanistan.

First, are you not aware of the geopolitics of the country? Its geography ensures that no conventional war can be won there. The craggy landscape and the excellent local networking means that outsiders can never dislodge insurgents. Do you wish your presidency to founder in a Vietnam-style debacle?

Second, are you cognizant of the ridiculousness of American policy of war against the Taliban, considering the significant US role in the creation of this insurgency to fight the Soviet invasion there? As with Osama bin Laden, the US funneled untold amounts of money and arms to them through the Pakistani intelligence structure. And given the geopolitics, how do you expect our gormless troops to win against them when the Soviets could not?

Third, obviously this is a war that cannot be won with arms and money funneling by the CIA to corrupt politicians. Neither will result in what is needed: a local democracy on its own terms for its own population. An international, neutral effort needs to be organized to stop the fighting, ensure the population's protection from injury and death from fighting, ensure more democratic functionally on the local scene, and support the right of the population to decide its own fate. Can you not see the obvious similarity between the Afghan government and the South Vietnamese US puppets?

Fourth, remember what went wrong in the past when presidents listened to the military overmuch in framing policy. Military solutions don't work. Even when a "win" is possible, its unraveling is soon ahead because the original problems are not military.

And fifth, the US must take responsibility for its own role in the drug trade in countries like Afghanistan. The US drug-taking population is a huge market for illegal drug-production in other countries, as Secretary Clinton has rightly acknowledged. You must also know that the CIA, which is very active on the war front both in this country and in Pakistan, freely uses the drug trade for its own purposes and frequently has funded its own agent operations with money from drug trading. When war goes on in such countries farmers who survived in legal productions change to drugs, which are easy to produce, light in weight to transport, and valuable for eachunit of weight. There is a direct connection.

If there is one problem that your administration must get the better of during your time as president it is this one.

Comment on NYT article about US role in Honduras' Coup

June 30, 2009

To Helene Copper and Marc Lacey:

Your article today on the issue of the US role in planning the removal of President Zelaya of Honduras was welcome. This isw a topic that ought to have been explored when the Times presented its first coverage of the military coup against him.

However, it would have been more acute and critical minded of you had you researched and presented exerpts of those parts of Honduras' constitution that say when, how, and for what a president can be removed constitutionally.

So, although your article was needed, you, like other Times reporters, left out the main question, which was, "Was calling a non-binding referendum constitutional grounds for his removal?"

Furthermore, your wording is bland and obtuse in regard to the issue of the impropriety of US diplomats discussing with the military how the president could be removed legally. US unidentified sources as represented in your article defend their participation in the pre-coup discussions on the grounds that they were trying to keep things legal and to avoid a removal by military force. But US diplomats had no business even trying to get him removed legally, which is interference with the operation of another country's demogcratic government.

I cannot be the ondly reader who wondered why you did not call a spade a spade. Your discussion wass murky in its reasoning.

Sincerely,

Anna Roosevelt