: re: Israel Jabs Back After U.S. Official Calls Netanyahu a Coward

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Thu, Oct 30, 2014 at 10:06 AM
Subject: re: Israel Jabs Back After U.S. Official Calls Netanyahu a Coward
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

  Ambassador Oren is characteristically diplomatic in disclaiming any knowledge of the dynamic between PM Netanyahu and president Obama. A less circumspect observer would note that Netanyahu has condescended to our president from the first, as if his greater age earned him some deference in matters of policy.

   I would go further. Netanyahu seems furious that he hasn't been able to maneuver Obama into attacking Iran as he feels he maneuvered Bush into attacking Iraq.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/30/world/middleeast/israel-snipes-back-after-us-official-calls-netanyahu-a-coward.html

: re: Peace Prize Laureates Urge Disclosure on U.S. Torture

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Mon, Oct 27, 2014 at 8:08 AM
Subject: re: Peace Prize Laureates Urge Disclosure on U.S. Torture
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

   C.I.A. spokesman Dean Boyd's fears are misplaced. We don't want to put agents, officers and contractors of the C.I.A. who tortured and ordered torture "in danger"; we want to put them in prison. Unlike the hell-holes that his agency ran, U.S. prisons are charged with the safety of those in their custody.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/27/us/politics/peace-prize-laureates-urge-disclosure-on-us-torture.html

: re: the Working Nation

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine
Date: Fri, Oct 24, 2014 at 2:53 PM
Subject: re: the Working Nation
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

      It's impossible to tell whether--on one hand--the author can't do arithmetic or--on the other--he figures that his readers won't. When David Brooks segues from "earnings of workers with bachelor’s degrees have not increased in three decades" to praise for Reagan and Thatcher, I cannot sustain the suspension of disbelief.  Thirty years ago, Thatcher presided at 10 Downing Street as Reagan did at our White House. Preaching that "government is the problem", it was they and their teams who ended the post-war prosperity.  Although a lot of their friends made out like bandits, the American economy has never recovered.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/24/opinion/david-brooks-the-working-nation.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0

: re: Obama Could Reaffirm a Bush-Era Reading of a Treaty on Torture

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Sun, Oct 19, 2014 at 4:39 PM
Subject: re: Obama Could Reaffirm a Bush-Era Reading of a Treaty on Torture
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

   It's test-time on the Potomac. Six years ago, Americans rallied to Barack Obama as he campaigned against torture, assuring us that as a nation of laws, we're better than that.  His failure to prosecute anyone in the interim for acknowledged crimes has been read as a peace-offering to the opposition from a post-partisan president. But now we read that he means to go from decriminalizing torture to arguing for its legality.  It he does, we will know that the CIA has him by the balls and merely makes his lips move while the Agency actually sets national policy from the shadows. 

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/19/us/politics/obama-could-reaffirm-a-bush-era-reading-of-a-treaty-on-torture.html?_r=0

: re: James Comey, F.B.I. Director, Hints at Action as Cellphone Data Is Locked

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Fri, Oct 17, 2014 at 8:34 AM
Subject: re: James Comey, F.B.I. Director, Hints at Action as Cellphone Data Is Locked
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

   " [C]hild pornographers and kidnappers" have been with us for thousands of years. No powers granted to our F.B.I. will wholly rid us of them. But the cure that director James Comey proposes is worse than the disease. The powers he is seeking--in the hands of the British--would have thwarted the American  Revolution and would have seen our Founding Fathers hanged for sedition.

    We are free to debate and reject Comey's vision because ten generations of Americans have--so far--pushed back against ten generations of power-grabs from our own security apparatus. It's the American way.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/17/us/politics/fbi-director-in-policy-speech-calls-dark-devices-hindrance-to-crime-solving.html?_r=0

: re: F.B.I. Director Calls ‘Dark’ Devices a Hindrance to Crime Solving

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 4:36 PM
Subject: re: F.B.I. Director Calls ‘Dark’ Devices a Hindrance to Crime Solving
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

   Director Comey has a problem. Now that the American public know that "the N.S.A. was not just asking companies to hand over data through secret court orders but also gathering information through the “back door” — breaking into their data centers and stealing encryption keys, or gathering data as it flowed in unencrypted form", we're not in any mood to give him more access to our private communications. And the old argument that "if you haven't done anything wrong you have nothing to hide" shouldn't fool anyone. If the British government had had the powers director Comey is asking for, Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, Madison and Paine would have been hanged for sedition.  Our Founding Fathers were very careful to circumscribe government's power to search. We would be foolish--indeed we would betray our own revolution--to retreat from the rights we fought for.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/17/us/politics/fbi-director-in-policy-speech-calls-dark-devices-hindrance-to-crime-solving.html

: re: A British Message to Israel

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Wed, Oct 15, 2014 at 8:12 AM
Subject: re: A British Message to Israel
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

    No one seriously disputes that "[i]t takes two to make peace". But not just any two; it requires that each have stature. Signing a "peace" with a party who can't enforce its provisions is as futile as nailing hummus to the wall. And that which asserts and enforces a monopoly on force is a "State". So let's bend all efforts towards peace. But let's acknowledge that Palestinian statehood is a necessary condition to get there, which cannot be put off to some hazy End of Days.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/15/opinion/a-british-message-to-israel.html

: re: Turkish Airstrike Hits Kurds, Complicating Fight Against Islamic State

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Tue, Oct 14, 2014 at 6:20 PM
Subject: re: Turkish Airstrike Hits Kurds, Complicating Fight Against Islamic State
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

   Turkey's president Erdogan seems eager to maneuver president Obama into striking his enemies the way (it is widely believed) that PM Netanyahu tricked president George W. Bush into taking out Saddam Hussein.  But Erdogan is not an ally we can back in good conscience while he makes war on his own citizens.  Whatever the sunk cost in our airbases at Incirlik and Batman, they are liabilities--not assets--if we can't walk away from them when it's time. The Soviet Union is dead. Turkey is not our only ally. Our efforts and resources are better spent on the Kurds who are actually fighting ISIS than on the Turks who are consumed in their own byzantine maneuverings.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/15/world/europe/turkey-airstrike-kurds-isis.html

: re: Turkey Says No Deal Yet on U.S. Use of Bases in ISIS Fight

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Mon, Oct 13, 2014 at 10:45 AM
Subject: re: Turkey Says No Deal Yet on U.S. Use of Bases in ISIS Fight
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

   No explanation has ever been offered to the American public for the number of military bases we keep in foreign nations at vast expense. One tally puts them at 153.   But surely for that outlay, we expect to have a free hand in pursuing our national security.  If--as secretary of State Kerry has made clear--we want to strike at ISIS, should we have to buy into Erdogan's fight with al-Assad? Whatever value our bases at Incirlik and Batman have had in the past, they need to be reweighed. In 2014, we would be better served by an airbase in free Kurdistan than by two encumbered airbases in Erdogan's Turkey.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/14/world/europe/not-so-fast-turkey-says-on-us-use-of-air-bases.html?_r=0

I.S. = Invasive Species

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Sun, Oct 12, 2014 at 8:55 AM
Subject: re: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/opinion/sunday/thomas-l-friedman-is-invasive-species.html
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

   If by "a 50-year-old Iraqi Sunni male from Mosul" Mr. Friedman means an Arab, we should remember that he probably wasn't born there. Mosul was a predominantly Kurdish city until Saddam Hussein forcibly moved populations, shipping Sunni Arabs into Mosul like Beijing shipped Han Chinese into Tibet. That Sunni Arab has human rights, of course. But he has no more credibility than a White American whining about the threat of immigrants to this country.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/opinion/sunday/thomas-l-friedman-is-invasive-species.html

: re: Turkey Seeks Buffer Zone on the Border With Syria

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Fri, Oct 10, 2014 at 8:22 AM
Subject: re: Turkey Seeks Buffer Zone on the Border With Syria
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

    Since we ratified the U.N. charter, we have seen its promise of self-determination of peoples fulfilled  again and again from Vietnam to Israel, from Algerian to Zambia. The Kurds, however, still  wait; they have built a nation that the U.S. still refuses to recognize, partly in deference to our Turkish ally. Now, however, Turkey has endorsed dismembering Syria. The time has come to acknowledge that Syria and Iraq were failed inventions of the colonial powers, and statehood should be defined by a People, not by a sketch on a map.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/10/world/middleeast/turkish-support-of-coalition-fighting-isis-centers-on-border-buffer-zone-.html?_r=0

: re: Finding Clues in Genes of ‘Exceptional Responders’

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Thu, Oct 9, 2014 at 10:07 AM
Subject: re: Finding Clues in Genes of ‘Exceptional Responders’
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

    in 2014, the U.S. FDA still classifies cancers by tissue of origin.  E.g. a thyroid cancer is one disease; a uterine cancer is another. This puts our regulators at odds with the researchers, who know that all the body's cells have the same genes and can be driven berserk by the same molecular defects.  This mismatch has real consequences. Researchers on a drug that blocks e.g. mTOR would have to run two different clinic studies  against "uterine cancer" and "thyroid cancer" even when they are driven by the same mutations and could be expected to respond to the same drugs. Richard Pazdur (head of FDA, oncology) acknowledged this much by 2005. We need to bring our regulatory framework into line with the best modern understanding of the science.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/09/health/in-genes-of-exceptional-responders-clues-to-fighting-disease.html?_r=0

: re: As Egyptians Grasp for Stability, Sisi Fortifies His Presidency

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Wed, Oct 8, 2014 at 7:19 AM
Subject: re: As Egyptians Grasp for Stability, Sisi Fortifies His Presidency
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

    To write that "the only real inconvenience during Mr. Sisi’s consolidation of power had appeared to be Western censure" is to mistake el-Sisi for Egypt. el-Sisi has consolidated his coup by arresting, torturing, executing and gunning political dissidents down in the street.  This paper should blush to give him the applause that even the U.N. General Assembly did not.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/08/world/as-egyptians-grasp-for-stability-sisi-fortifies-his-presidency.html?_r=0

: re: A Practice Goes on Trial: Force-Feeding a Detainee

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Tue, Oct 7, 2014 at 3:11 PM
Subject: re: A Practice Goes on Trial: Force-Feeding a Detainee
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

    More than any man, John Locke shaped the government of the U.S. It should therefore be of more than passing interest that he found a right to die to be a fundamental, inalienable right. It was precisely because a prisoner could opt to die (and because the State has the legitimate power to execute a convict) that internment was--in his analysis--a legitimate power of the State. Force feeding violates this fundamental right, that the prisoner--much less the detainee who has been convicted of nothing--has not given up.

   To detain these men in Guantanamo without charges or trial is criminal. To prolong it even past the will to live itself is abomination.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/07/us/a-practice-goes-on-trial-force-feeding-a-detainee.html?_r=0

: re:Israel Protests a Move to Recognize Palestinian State

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Mon, Oct 6, 2014 at 7:00 PM
Subject: re:Israel Protests a Move to Recognize Palestinian State
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

   It must be hard to be Benjamin Netanyahu. He's not the beloved war-hero (that was his brother) and he's not the respected historian (that was his father). He's the guy who can't even remember that when ben Gurion accepted the UN plan in 1948, Israel accepted the Two State Solution. Or does he propose to tell us that ben Gurion was un-Israeli as he has called the president of the United States un-American? A man who seems to have such a tenuous grasp of its past inspires scant confidence into the future.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/07/world/middleeast/israel-protests-swedens-intention-to-recognize-palestinian-state.html

: re: Mr. Netanyahu’s Strange Course

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Fri, Oct 3, 2014 at 8:42 AM
Subject: re: Mr. Netanyahu’s Strange Course
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

   To ask why Mr. Netanyahu thinks that building ever more housing for Jews on the land of Arab East Jerusalem could be in Israel's interest is to ask the wrong question. Mr. Netanyahu does what's best for Mr. Netanyahu. Pandering to land-grabbing Settlers has been very good to him, boosting him to the Prime Minister's office. It is for the Israeli electorate to do what is best for Israel. And that has nothing to do with expanding settlements, or with Mr. Netanyahu.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/03/opinion/another-israeli-housing-project-threatens-a-peace-deal.html?_r=0

: re: Mr. Obama’s Pacific Monument

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Thu, Oct 2, 2014 at 11:08 AM
Subject: re: Mr. Obama’s Pacific Monument
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

    Expanding our Marine Preserve is not small thing. It will enrich Americans and the World for generations hereafter. But Teddy Roosevelt did much more than establish our National Parks. In busting the Trusts that proposed to deliver all of America into the hands of the wealthy elite, he saved capitalism in America and spared us a Workers Revolution like the one that Shattered Russia.

   President Obama has three more years in office and many opportunities to secure his legacy. He can still be the president who prosecuted torture. He can be the president who finally recognized the Kurds' right to self-determination. He can still be the president who enforced our Fourth Amendment guarantees against an ever more intrusive NSA. But until he takes back power to the people from a new generation of "malefactors of great wealth", he doesn't deserve mention in the same breath with Teddy Roosevelt.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/02/opinion/mr-obamas-pacific-monument.html?ref=opinion

: re: California Law on Sexual Consent Pleases Many but Leaves Some Doubters

 re: California Law on Sexual Consent Pleases Many but Leaves Some Doubters

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Tue, Sep 30, 2014 at 9:14 AM
Subject: re: California Law on Sexual Consent Pleases Many but Leaves Some Doubters
To: "letters@nytimes.com" 

To the Editor:

   What happens between consenting adults requires consent. It seems so clear; who could object? But the plain words misrepresent the complicated reality. What is consent? Who can consent? We posit that minors can't consent, so we have "statutory rape" laws. But we have also the "Romeo and Juliet" exceptions to those laws. One can't give meaningful consent under the influence of alcohol.But how about the influence of pot? Or the influence of the prescription drugs so many college kids take for years at a time for ADHD? Or the influence of the hormones in which they're awash? Worse yet, we have established in law that what is rape in the dorm is rape within a marriage. If my partner and I have wine with dinner, is whatever happens afterward non-consensual? Is it rape?

   "For every complex problem" Mencken warned us "there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong". We should not enact it as law until it is right.

Barry Haskell Levine

: re: Putin Supports Project to ‘Secure’ Russia Internet

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Thu, Oct 2, 2014 at 8:03 AM
Subject: re: Putin Supports Project to ‘Secure’ Russia Internet
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

   NSA over-reach is eroding America's standing in the world. Already, its pattern of privacy violation has revealed us as hypocrites to the world preaching civil liberties that we don't respect ourselves.  Already the NSA has made this the worst place in the developed world to innovate; NSA-mandated backdoors mean that neither your Intellectual Property nor your clients' data are safe. Now, rather than sitting at the crossroads of the world's data, the U.S. will be increasingly marginalized as a fragmented internet tries to secure itself from our spying.

     It has been reported that the U.S. budgets between $10billion and $11billion annually for NSA spying. But the cost to us is much much more than that.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/02/world/europe/russia-vladimir-putin-internet.html?_r=0