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Let me try this. I think we should not use torture as a government policy. I don’ think there is any doubt that some of the terrorists we captured were tortured (assuming waterboarding is torture). I was even one of those who thought it was perfectly legitimate, and given the reasonable fear we had of further 9/11 attacks it was totally understandable. But now that we have had a chance to look back I think we need an honest debate about it. My problem with torture is that if it is done to our POWs we will lose a great deal of our moral right to denounce it if we have done the same thing. I also think, and many interrogators agree, that there are better, albeit slower, means of getting information. That does not mean that if a US soldier puts a gun to prisoners head and demands information to save his men, he should be found at fault.

My point about the Japanese internment camps is not to condemn those who did it or supported it. It’s to simply point out that in hindsight it was most definitely unconstitutional and should not have been done. The only time a president has a right to suspend habeas corpus with a US citizen in the US, is when he declares martial law. Roosevelt didn’t do that. If he had deported all non us citizen Japanese in the US, it would have been a totally different issue.

I feel the same way about treatment of the American Indians. American Indians were not all spiritual people always acting in self defense, but that doesn’t justify what was done to them after 1876.

I agree with everything else you wrote in your article. I get truly fed up with people finding fault with things we have done in the past simply because based on today’s more pacifist views some people might consider them wrong. I think it is one of the failings of our teaching of history in high school and college.

Anyway, I thank you and your son for your service as well.