Another reading
Reading “Between the Lines” one finds Department of Defense (DOD) officials Paul Wolfowitz and Abram Shulsky described as “a chief architect of foreign policy” and one who has “helped to shape public opinion and American policy.” Reading between the lines, one may infer that U.S. foreign policy is made at the DOD, rather than at the State Department, the White House, or the Capitol. If this is true, it prompts the question: What kind of society has the United States become?

A clue: On May 6, 2003, Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz publicly expressed his disapproval of the fact that the Turkish military did not intervene more forcefully and effectively to cause the Turkish parliament to arrive at a different decision about joining the U.S. invasion of Iraq than the one the parliament actually made.

Another clue: Without an act of Congress authorizing it to do so (one which would have been forbidden by the Constitution), the DOD has created a category of persons called enemy combatants who have no rights under U.S. or international law and who may be confined under any conditions deemed appropriate by the DOD, and has assumed for itself the right to decide secretly who is to be placed in that category and to seize and hold those persons incommunicado indefinitely.

What kind of society does such things?

Marvin Miller, AB’44, SB’45, SM’49
Newtown Highlands, Massachusetts