Who’s lawless?
THE fog generated by the Bush administration, the most mendacious in U.S. history, affects even those who try to resist it. In his Dec. 17 column [“McCain Stands His High Ground,”], Tim Rutten criticized the administration for allowing “the routine torture of Al Qaeda terrorists held in secret CIA facilities or prisons run by American allies,” thus unwittingly accepting the administration’s major premise -- that those tortured are, in fact, terrorists. To the contrary, the overwhelming evidence is that American military and intelligence units have swept up hundreds of people almost at random (Khaled el-Masri, for example) and sent them off to secret prisons to find out if they actually are terrorists, a very different and even more lawless practice.
PHILIP M. LOHMAN
Lakewood
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