Dear Editor,

In a democratic forum in Iowa recently, Presidential candidates asserted that President “Bush talks tough on Homeland Security … and uses the issue largely to advance a right-wing agenda.”

In an attempt to illuminate the issue of Homeland Security, please consider the chilling words of Scott Ritter, a long-time weapons inspector in Iraq who is one of the strongest opponents of President Bush’s policy toward that country. “This is being driven by … a national security vision set forth by the Bush administration of global domination, of American empirical hegemony over the world, unilateral application of power. That’s what’s driving this war.”

Ritter also stated in a March 30 talk in Canada, “I am very concerned that the events of September 11 are going to be seen as doing to America what the burning of Reichstag did to German democracy in the ’30s. The Bush administration is exploiting the fear and ignorance of the American people to launch a frontal assault on the Constitution of the United States of America … Homeland Security, the Patriot Act, the enhancement to the Patriot Act, the fact that we can arrest an American citizen and call him a noncombatant and hold him without legal representation. That doesn’t happen in the United States of America, but it is happening right now. And it’s going to get worse.”

Kathryn Preston

Carbondale