The wrong meeting
We have three separate branches of government, Executive, Legislative and Judicial. Each branch has equal powers as set forth in the Constitution. Our Founding Fathers clearly did not want any one branch of the government to over reach its powers. There are, of course, protocols set forth in each branch on how to proceed when exercising power.
With recent unrest in the Middle East, the fall of Yemen and the increase in violence throughout the world, many of us in the United States are understandably concerned about the safety of our country. President Obama continues to diminish relations with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In frustration, Speaker of the House, John Boehner invited the Israeli Prime Minister to speak before Congress, which is within his power. The White House was furious that proper protocol was not followed, however, breaches of protocol have become the norm under his administration. The President has said he will not be meeting with the Prime Minister when he is here.
Understandably, President Obama has many commitments to meet with many different people as the Leader of the Free World and may not have time to meet with everyone. This week, however, the President took the time to meet with several Internet YouTube celebrities. Let”s see, meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu our strongest ally in the crumbling Middle East, or, interview with Glozell, whose celebrity had come from filling a bathtub with milk and cereal and then recording herself in the tub while eating the cereal.
Gee, tough call, Mr. President. I kind of wish that Netanyahu had made the cut.
Jaxan Christensen, Upper Lake
American Auschwitz
Sargent Joseph Hickman has spent much of his working life in the military. He considers himself a patriot. Ronald Reagan is his favorite president. He did a year tour of duty at “Gitmo” (Guantanamo Bay, Cuba). Not a man to shy away from violence, in the course of duty, he led a squad into a cell in Gitmo in response to a possible suicide, and ordered his men to fire at detainees within a distance where the rubber bullets could be lethal. The detainees nicknamed him “Satan.”
He is the last guy you would expect to expose a story of the “war lab” at Gitmo, where prisoners, under the auspices of a secret program, were drugged, beaten, tortured, and murdered. However, Sgt. Hickman is also a man of conscious, and he signed an oath to defend the Constitution.
In his book, Sgt. Hickman describes the events surrounding the deaths of four alleged suicides, and the subsequent NCIS investigation. His book is called “Murder at Camp Delta,” and I checked out from the Lakeport Library. Sgt. Hickman, with the help of the Law School students at Seton Hall University, and documents released due to the Freedom of Information Act, concluded that the investigation was flawed. In fact, the investigators had not even interviewed the many witnesses involved who could have contradicted the findings of the investigation.
Sgt. Hickman is not a person given to conspiracy theories, but eventually, the facts led inexorably to a government program that went to the “dark side” and violated the Geneva Convention and the Constitution, and that was approved at the highest levels of government. The illegal program was devised to collect data on how to most efficiently yield intelligence from prisoners, and is reminiscent of the experiments that the Nazis performed on human beings. Detainees were given a medicine which induces short term psychosis, for example.
Obama will not prosecute these crimes because he does not want to set a precedent under which he himself could be prosecuted. Obama knows the insurgents can”t be defeated, so he changed “defeat” to “degrade.” Degrade means that when the insurgency gains momentum, he will simply slaughter as many as he can with air attacks.
We have been in Afghanistan for close to 14 years. The opium output, despite intermittent attempts to eradicate the poppy fields, has doubled since 2000. Ninety percent of the world”s opium comes from Afghanistan. Not only have we left the drug trade to flourish, we have also left thousands of dead and hundreds of thousands of refugees.
I have to conclude, that anyone who does not do everything in their power, within the limits of the law, to stop our senseless slaughter of people in the mid-east, are the moral equivalent of the Germans who remained silent as the Nazis committed their nefarious deeds.
Nelson Strasser, Lakeport
The bank should stay
I concur 100 percent with Nancy Brier”s Letter to the Editor (Save The Bank) in the January 29, 2015 issue of the Record-Bee concerning the impending closure of the Westamerica Bank in Upper Lake, having been a depositor there since moving to Lake County in 1978. Service has always been personal, professional, and first-class. I”ve been looking forward to getting a safe deposit box there once again, as it is the only local bank accessible to me by bicycle. Aside from the essential services provided by this bank, it plays a significant role in the community life in Upper Lake, including the Christmas Parade, Wild West Days, Upper Lake High School”s Homecoming Parade, and Toys For Tots.
I hope the Westamerica Bank officers and our Board of Supervisors will consider the negative impact of bank closure on Upper Lake and find an alternative means of saving money without abandoning this branch.
Steve Harness, Witter Springs
