Retaining Civil Rights in Fighting Terror

Re “Now Portland Comes In for Questioning,” Nov. 30:

I congratulate Portland Police Chief Mark Kroeker on his stand [refusing to interview foreigners on the U.S. Justice Department list] and hope that he has the courage of his convictions against so much criticism.

Recently, two friends, a blond and blue-eyed mother and son, were pulled out of line at an airline counter because they have an Arabic surname. They were taken to a room and bodily searched. Does anything go in our country today? I have the feeling that we are repeating the McCarthy-era hysteria: Is there a terrorist under the bed?

I have just finished reading James D. and Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston’s “Farewell to Manzanar” and recommend it to everyone who believes that to criticize the loss of our civil rights is unpatriotic. Perhaps we have more to fear from within our government than from without.

Diane Ross

Palm Springs

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Re “Bush Defends War Tribunal as Necessary,” Nov. 30: I get it; the Bush administration is applying the “destroy the village to save it” strategy to the justice system.

Sara Thaves

Manhattan Beach

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Bush’s pronouncement that we must not let foreign enemies destroy our liberties omitted the fact that he and Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft would single-handedly destroy them for us.

Marcy Bregman

Valencia

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We’re all afraid of boogeymen in the post-Sept. 11 era; some of us just aren’t afraid of real ones. Jack M. Balkin writes, “The danger we face today . . . is that [government officials] will use a national crisis as an opportunity to make themselves more powerful and less accountable” (“Using Our Fears to Justify a Power Grab,” Commentary, Nov. 29).

We face the sobering reality and abject tragedy of 4,000 lives lost, and Balkin suggests what? That a Taliban-style Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice is coming soon to the United States? His boogeyman is pure fantasy; ours is hiding in a cave somewhere in Afghanistan.

John W. Christian

South Pasadena