Moral choices

TIM RUTTEN goes through hundreds of words of convoluted, hand-wringing moralizing about our American character and offering an argument untenable and utterly unwise, to put it mildly [“Duty Under Siege,” Nov. 12]. Essentially, he asserts that all human lives are equally valuable; that victims must not stoop to the level of their murderers; that it is better to turn the other cheek because, as Khrushchev once saltily put it, if you go down to wrastle a hog, expect to come up fouled and filthy.

My own argument was taught to me as the son of a young Hebrew teacher-turned-Bolshevik born in 1900, who was raised on the east bank of the Dniester River in Bessarabia and learned his lesson in 1918-1919. It consists of but four Yiddish words: “Nit mir? Nit dir!” Their purport is the bedrock of any possible society anywhere, at any time: “If I am not free (to live, to be, to act), then neither shall you be free (to live, to be, to act).”

Translated, they say succinctly, “Not I? Not you!”

Given the manifest brutality of our species, this is not the first moral law but the foundation of all possible law. The rest, as Rutten clearly shows, is chatter.

JASCHA KESSLER

Los Angeles

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THE only thing that shocks me is Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert calling for an inquiry into the leak about “secret prison camps.” It would seem to me that Washington Post reporter Dana Priest should be whisked away in the dead of night and brought to a “black site,” then tortured to reveal the source of this “egregious disclosure.”

Why do we need an expensive inquiry when it can be accomplished with just a little tortuous persuasion?

WILLIAM ASH

Santa Monica