Subject: re: U.S. Says It Told Qatar Not to Pay a Ransom

         

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine <levinebar@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Aug 26, 2014 at 8:52 AM
Subject: re: U.S. Says It Told Qatar Not to Pay a Ransom
To: "letters@nytimes.com" <letters@nytimes.com>

To the Editor:

   I find no comfort in government assurances "that it told the Qataris not to pay a ransom for [Peter Theo Curtis]".  It smells of the same lawyerly evasions we were fed when we bought Raymond Davis out of a Pakistani jail. Is this one likewise a CIA hit-man, masquerading as a journalist this time, rather than as a diplomat? 

   The world will be a safer place when our government and any potential kidnappers understand the lesson of "Captain Phillips".  Taking an American hostage should get you a bullet in the head, and not a bag of cash.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/26/world/middleeast/us-says-it-told-qatar-not-to-pay-a-ransom.html?_r=0

Subject: re; Before Killing James Foley, ISIS Demanded Ransom From U.S.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Thu, Aug 21, 2014 at 9:03 AM
Subject: re; Before Killing James Foley, ISIS Demanded Ransom From U.S.
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

   With one hand, France continues to sell Mistral-class warships to Russia while Russia murders hundreds of Dutch citizens, and with the other provides (with the Spanish) "the main source of revenue for al-Qaeda. The French have their own elected government; it is not for us to dictate their foreign policy. But our own U.S. statute forbids us to trade with such a State Sponsor of Terrorism.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/21/world/middleeast/isis-pressed-for-ransom-before-killing-james-foley.html

: re: Secret U.S. Memo Made Legal Case to Kill a Citizen

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Sat, Aug 16, 2014 at 7:43 AM
Subject: re: Secret U.S. Memo Made Legal Case to Kill a Citizen
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

   Our republic was founded on the assertion that all citizens are collectively sovereign and none is above the law. No one has seriously challenged this tenet since Richard Nixon let slip "what I'm saying is that when the president does it, that means it's not illegal". By then, America had decisively rejected him and his paranoid theories, hounding him from office.

   But a new theory, no less insidious has grown up in the same niche. Now we are told, the president of the United States can't be prosecuted for what he did in good faith on the advice of his lawyers, and his lawyers can't be prosecuted for what they do in their office. Presto! Even when a crime may be proven, culpability magically vanishes when it's spread over enough lawyers. This is abomination.  President Obama and judge Barron may disagree over the details. But one or both of them need to stand trial for the murders of the al-Awlakis, father and son. And since the president's own Department of Justice can't be trusted to prosecute such a case, it falls to our Congress to impeach. I'm pretty sure murdering a citizen for political speech is a "high crime".

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/world/middleeast/secret-us-memo-made-legal-case-to-kill-a-citizen.html?pagewanted=all

: re:It’s the Loyalty, Stupid

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Wed, Aug 13, 2014 at 7:00 AM
Subject: re:It’s the Loyalty, Stupid
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

    A democracy--although not easy--is simple. An issue arises, the People vote, public servants execute the public will. A republic, by contrast, is not simple. The electorate must choose on election day representatives who--when faced with issues yet unforeseen--we conjecture will act as the People would have wanted. It is for this reason that character and record loom so large in our politics. 

    We have now fifty years of evidence that Hillary can't resist a strong man. Barry Goldwater, Bill Clinton, Hosni Mubarak...whatever the issue, she's been found embracing whatever the alpha male asserted, and him along with it.

   Were everything going along swimmingly and were there no surprises coming down the pike, a bright, hard-working caretaker who already knows all the players might be what America needs. That's not the world we'll face in 2016. And Hillary Clinton is not the leader I'd trust to advance my interests in those unforeseen crises.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/13/opinion/maureen-dowd-its-the-loyalty-stupid.html?_r=0

LETTERS

Imagining a Romney Presidency

Published: November 1, 2012To the Editor:

David Brooks sketches two unsatisfactory scenarios. In one, President Obama is re-elected but is hamstrung by a Republican-dominated House. In the other, Mitt Romney is elected and spends his term fighting with a Democratic-dominated Senate.

But of course, we the people aren’t constrained to pick from Mr. Brooks’s menu. If we were to re-elect President Obama and put Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, we could actually, finally get the change we voted for four years ago.

BARRY HASKELL LEVINE
Lafayette, Calif., Oct. 30, 2012

LETTERS

When the U.S. Kills an American Citizen

Published: October 12, 2011To the Editor:

Anwar al-Awlaki was an American citizen, with constitutional guarantees of due process of law. Indeed, if our courts were empowered to strip any of us of citizenship, all our “rights” would be merely boons granted at the courts’ pleasure. Unless he walked into a United States courthouse or embassy to renounce his citizenship, American law permits only one scenario in which he would not be entitled to a full trial (whether in person or in absentia).

Our law provides that we can infer that one has renounced American citizenship by “serving in the armed forces of a foreign state if such armed forces are engaged in hostilities against the United States.”

Name that state and show that Mr. Awlaki served in armed forces, and you have a case for denying him a trial. Until then, he’s a murder victim.

BARRY HASKELL LEVINE
Lafayette, Calif., Oct. 12, 2011

LETTERS

A Military Trial for the 9/11 Detainees

Published: April 5, 2011

To the Editor:

In some alternative reality, the trial of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in a federal court might have been “the defining event of my time as attorney general” for Eric H. Holder Jr. In the current political reality, that has been precluded by Congressional grandstanding.

All is not yet lost. Mr. Holder can still do much to restore our standing in the community of nations by prosecuting torturers, and he can restore civil rights here in this country by repudiating 10 years of expanded use of national security letters, the secret government subpoenas for records or data.

Mr. Holder has a difficult job, in which the ever-changing “art of the possible” (that is to say, politics) intersects with the eternal demands of justice. It’s not yet time to admit defeat.

BARRY HASKELL LEVINE
Lafayette, Calif., April 5, 2011

LETTERS

Reviews of the President’s Big Night

Published: September 7, 2012

To the Editor:

David Brooks’s summation that “the next president has to do three big things, which are in tension with one another: increase growth, reduce debt and increase social equity” would have been as apt in 1932 as it is in 2012.

Those of us out here in the “reality-based community” who insist on learning from our history recognize that the way to achieve these things is through Keynesian deficit spending in the crisis years and repaying that debt in the good times.

Since the power to tax and the power to spend don’t belong to our executive, the way to get there — now, as then — is to elect not only a Democratic president, but a Democratic Congress as well.

BARRY HASKELL LEVINE
Lafayette, Calif., Sept. 7, 2012

LETTER

The F.D.A.’s Mission

Published: December 12, 2013

Connect With Us on Twitter

For Op-Ed, follow@nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow@andyrNYT.

To the Editor:

Re “F.D.A. Restricts Antibiotics Use for Livestock” (front page, Dec. 12):

The mission of the Food and Drug Administration has grown over time. When it was established in 1906, its mission was only to certify safety. In 1962, that was expanded to safety and efficacy. Now the concern is broadened again, to preserve the usefulness of our antibiotics against the relentless evolution of resistance in pathogens. But throughout, the F.D.A. has been a regulatory agency.

As long as the new restrictions are voluntary for the drug makers, they are not regulations; they are a cop-out. This is a retreat from the agency’s mission at a time when it needs to be pressing forward.

BARRY HASKELL LEVINE
Lafayette, Calif., Dec. 12, 2013

LETTERS

What Will It Take to Stop Rape in the Military?

To the Editor:

Re “Joint Chiefs’ Answers on Sex Crimes Dismay Senators” (news article, June 5):

On July 26, 1948, President Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order 9981. From that date forward, the armed forces of the United States were colorblind. Decades ahead of the larger American society, minorities in our armed forces enjoyed the same rights as anyone else in the services.

Any officer unwilling to enforce this policy was invited to resign his commission immediately.

President Obama as commander in chief of our armed forces has it in his power to ensure that rape of our sons and daughters in the services is taken seriously — as a crime and not as a youthful indiscretion. To do so, he would not have to buck public opinion as Truman did; we’re way out ahead of him on this one.

He would merely have to show spine enough to embrace Truman’s precedent. I’m not holding my breath.

BARRY HASKELL LEVINE
Lafayette, Calif., June 5, 2013

LETTERS

The Violent Crackdown in Egypt

To the Editor:

President Obama showed both sense and spine in 2011 when he urged President Hosni Mubarak to step down. The marchers of the Arab Spring clearly carried the Egyptian people’s legitimate aspirations for a representative government. Mr. Mubarak — although a longtime ally of this country — had put himself on the wrong side of history.

Since then we have not done as well. By continuing aid, we have legitimized the coup that ousted Mohamed Morsi.

It is never convenient to confess such a mistake. But as long as we underwrite the Egyptian budget and the Egyptian military, the United States has a voice. And that voice must say that Mr. Morsi is the duly elected president of Egypt, that the coup that ousted him is illegitimate and that the dollars won’t flow until legitimate democracy is restored.

BARRY HASKELL LEVINE
Lafayette, Calif., Aug. 15, 2013

Think Twice About Egypt

Published: September 26, 2013

Connect With Us on Twitter

For Op-Ed, follow@nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow@andyrNYT.

To the Editor:

Re “Egyptian Court Shuts Down the Muslim Brotherhood and Seizes Its Assets” (news article, Sept. 24):

Decades after the fact, American citizens are still learning about the role our government played in the coups that toppled Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran and Salvador Allende in Chile. We pray that Egypt’s new junta proves less murderous than the governments of the shah or Augusto Pinochet.

But this much we know already: The junta that we’ve tacitly accepted in Egypt is the most repressive government there in human memory.

Americans should consider with open eyes our own role in creating the horrors of the last century before embarking on any more experiments in regime change around the world.

BARRY HASKELL LEVINE
Lafayette, Calif., Sept. 24, 2013

Lessons From France

Published: March 12, 2012

• 
  

To the Editor:

Re “As Candidates Speak in France, the Meter Is Running” (Memo From Paris, March 8): The French have much to teach us about running a democracy.

Too many Americans have been taught that participation in our government — outside one day of voting each cycle — is limited to giving or soliciting money. But proper democracy requires that all of us engage in discussing the issues of our day.

The moment in the voting booth is only the culmination of that long process. In 2012, political discussion in the United States has been usurped by the corporate noise machine. Real issues (campaign finance reform, prosecuting torture, America’s role as cop of the world) can’t even get into the media.

This is not the America our founding fathers staked their lives on. If the French have a better idea of how to embody our shared revolutionary ideals, we should sneer less and attend more.

BARRY HASKELL LEVINE
Lafayette, Calif., March 8, 2012

: re: The Guns of August

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Thu, Aug 7, 2014 at 10:55 AM
Subject: re: The Guns of August
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

   President Francois Hollande makes carefully outraged noises " How can we remain neutral when a civilian airliner is brought down" he asks. Mr Hollande's government of course is not neutral. Selling warships to Russia while the deaths of 189 Dutch citizens remains unexplained makes him a material supporter of State terror.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/07/opinion/the-guns-of-august.html?_r=0

Subject: re: Sunni Extremists in Iraq Seize 3 Towns From Kurds and Threaten Major Dam

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Mon, Aug 4, 2014 at 4:33 PM
Subject: re: Sunni Extremists in Iraq Seize 3 Towns From Kurds and Threaten Major Dam
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

   For three years, the U.S. government has dithered, terrified of backing the wrong side while the civil war in Syria has claimed 170,000 lives.At one time, 800 distinct factions were enumerated each of whom wanted al-Assad dead for their own reasons.  It is time--not for U.S. boots on the ground--but for us to back what is right against what is monstrous.  As president Truman recognized and armed Israel in 1948, it is time that president Obama recognize and arm Kurdistan.  The Kurds have a right to self-determination as enunciated in the UN charter.  If that irks the Iranians, the Iraqis, the Syrians and the Turks so be it. Their imperial ambitions can't trump a people's right. And the Kurds will host an American airbase every bit as nice as Incirlik if it comes to that. They--unlike their neighbors--actually like us.

Barry

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/04/world/middleeast/iraq.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0

: re: The C.I.A.’s Reckless Breach of Trust

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Fri, Aug 1, 2014 at 8:06 AM
Subject: re: The C.I.A.’s Reckless Breach of Trust
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

    John Brennan is senator Feinstein's own monster. It was she who cut short sen. Wyden's questioning in the confirmation hearing, it was she that leapt to endorse Brennan before we knew what he had done and what he meant to do. If she won't now sacrifice an ox that is known to gore, she will bear its sins. 

   They should both be fired. President Obama can dismiss Brennan at will. The People of California will have to deal with senator Feinstein.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/01/opinion/The-CIAs-Reckless-Breach-of-Trust.html?_r=0