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Community Forum: US should focus on security, not defining torture in wartime
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The president and Congress are abdicating their leadership role and No. 1 responsibility to get this country back on tract and prevent a further depression. Their failure can be attributed much more to the arrogance and power of the fanatical minority who have hijacked the Democratic Party, just as the Muslim fanatics have hijacked Islam.

How can you explain Eric Holder's complete reversal of his philosophy and his new interpretation of what constitutes "torture" in questioning our most urgent efforts taken after the worst domestic terrorist lost in our history?

You always do everything possible to win in war, and often that means making mistakes. Again, there's no precedent for this kind of revenge against honest people who were doing their best to prevent future terrorist attacks. The evidence is indisputable that they succeeded. Yet there is more concern about our possible mistreatment of a few terrorist.

How have we lost our perspective? Would it have been better to lose thousands of American lives just for the sake of protecting our future image? When and where has any country at war been done such a thing?

War is hell, and you do everything you can to defend and protect your country. During wartime, your focus is on winning, not some puritanical worry about violating international or domestic laws. America may be a country of laws, but should not be so stupid as to lose our national interest by worrying about our protecting our image with the ACLU and the United Nations instead of our own country.

How counterproductive this is to our future intelligence efforts and our ability to protect America.

Waterboarding three terrorists is not such a dastardly thing as the jihadist liberals want to make it out to be. I'm sure other nations are laughing at such nonsense. Was there an investigation of Clinton's use of waterboarding, torture or wiretapping during his administration?

As debatable and divisive as the war in Vietnam was, did we hold a "truth hearing" to investigate and possibly prosecute wrongful behavior?

These misdirected efforts will only dismantle and demoralize our intelligence personnel and greatly diminish their ability to detect and prevent future harm to America. To continue focusing on what's wrong with America and trying to find the terrorists within our own government, instead of where they really live, is a distraction we cannot afford at this time of crisis.

Three waterboarding incidents and suspicions of wrongdoing are not justification for punishing those who were doing their very best during a time of attack and war. Where is the precedent for such insanity?

Darrell D. Newton
Gainesville

Darwinism, other consensus thinking can devalue human life
We recently noted the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, the father of the theory of evolution. Evolution has become the basic worldview of many in our time and is taught as scientific fact in our schools and colleges.

Darwin supposedly discovered scientific facts proving that species evolve from lower forms to higher forms through differentiation mutation or adaptation. He taught in his book "The Descent of Man" that the black African races of men were the "missing link" between the great apes and the "superior" white European races. He wrote that those black races were destined to be eliminated as natural selection ran its course. He also taught that whoever worked to eliminate those races "does good work."

Do you suppose that Darwin's scientific evidence for this teaching is as valid as for his other theories? Not very politically correct, was he?

Darwin's theory of evolution is a bunch of garbage. For 1,500 years of history, the Ptolemaic science of astronomy taught that the sun and planets revolved around the earth. This "scientific consensus" was so strong that the church finally accepted it. We now know it was wrong.

Today we have a "scientific consensus" on evolution and global warming. We have pseudo environmentalists who preach the sanctity of life of mussels, snails, minnows and wolves, but not of humans. Columnist Joan King, the queen of delusion, has written that one human life does not matter. What if that one life is one of your grandchildren?

How can we believe and teach Darwinism, the religion of claw and fang, genocide and the utter meaninglessness of life without ultimately coming to Jean-Paul Sartre's teaching of absolute hopelessness and despair?

Where in evolutionary theory can we teach our youth of honor, mercy, love, romance, morality, order and faith? What about sacrificial love and giving? Only in the awareness of God's love and grace can we hope to soar to those heights of existence for which we have been created.

Jimmy Echols
Alto