Letter: History shows famous presidents suspended rights

Paul White (last week’s letter writer), where has your education gone?

Obama often refers to himself as wanting to be like Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. Did you know that during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus throughout the nation on Sept. 24, 1862, and the administration made over 13,000 arbitrary arrests?

Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which permitted the military to circumvent the constitutional safeguards of American citizens in the name of national defense.

The order set into motion the evacuation and mass incarceration of 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast, most of who were U.S. citizens or legal permanent resident aliens.

These Japanese Americans, half of whom were children, were incarcerated for up to four years, without due process of law, in remote camps surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards.

How are Bush and Cheney any worse?

Most intelligence in the world said there were nuclear weapons in Iraq. Maybe if Clinton had not decimated the CIA and the FBI during his adulterer presidency there would have had better intelligence.

The Geneva Convention was instituted when we were fighting a “real” army not a bunch of terrorists. Is water boarding worse than what Afghanistan is now doing to our captured prisoner?

I would imagine that maybe Paul White thinks the way this prisoner is being treated is OK since the United States is such a demon. This is pretty much what our present president says every time he goes on tour.

I would much rather have people in charge of my country that like “ME,” an American, rather than everyone else in the world and deems us the “bad people.”

Tags: letters to the editor, opinion