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.