LETTERS.

PINOCHET'S ENEMIES

In his piece about Augusto Pinochet and his "leftist" enemies, Anthony Daniels makes a couple of grievous factual errors ("Of All the Dictators ...," Feb. 7). First of all, he is entirely wrong that "there was not a peep" of protest when the former Ethiopian ruler, Mengistu, went to South Africa for medical treatment. In fact, Human Rights Watch issued a stream of letters and press releases to the South African government and media, and helped to organize local human-rights groups to hold a press conference calling for Mengistu's detention. So Daniels is flat wrong on this point.

Secondly, Daniels appears not to have heard about Human Rights Watch's efforts to have Chad's former dictator, Hissein Habre, indicted for crimes against humanity in Senegal, where he now resides. After many months of work compiling documentation and preparing legal briefs, I'm pleased to say that this effort has borne fruit, and Habre is now under house arrest in Dakar.

Perhaps Mr. Daniels was not including Human Rights Watch in his general screed against human-rights activists on "the Left." If so, he is entirely correct. Human Rights Watch is eager to pursue dictators from right and left in its efforts to bring those guilty of crimes against humanity to justice.

Carroll Bogert Human Rights Watch New York, N.Y.

ANTHONY DANIELS RESPONDS: I should have written "hardly a peep." But only self-importance could have disguised from Ms. Bogert the massive disparity between a few belated letters and press releases in South Africa by her own organization about the crimes of Mengistu and the extreme and prolonged concentration of the Western media on the crimes of Pinochet.

For Human Rights Watch to be as consistent as it claims to be, it must press for the punishment of present as well as ex. dictators. Since dictatorship in large parts of the world is unlikely to be a phenomenon confined to the past, this would be a recipe for perpetual war. Meanwhile, in light of the Pinochet case, no present dictator is likely to stand down.

AT THE GATES 

I had thought that I could no longer be shocked (or disappointed) by Robert H. Bork's utterances on the government's attack on Microsoft. Bork now claims ("Against Microsoft," Feb. 7) that "there are numerous successful instances of predation." If so, it comes as a surprise to anyone who has read his Antitrust Paradox, where his analysis of predation mentioned only two "possible" cases. Yet even there, he qualified such possibilities with statements like, "There was, of course, no evidence cited that this was what happened."

In my own research on all the predation cases brought before appeals courts from 1963 to 1988, I found no evidence that the cases fit any of the numerous theories of predation. Cases most frequently seemed to be brought against large firms simply because they were successful. Suits were based upon the harm to competitors and not the harm done to customers.

Bork claims that "any price decline [for operating systems] is owing to machine and chip manufacturers," not to Microsoft. Yet, take Microsoft's dominance over word-processing and spreadsheet software. Microsoft Word has been the top-selling word-processing program since 1992. Yet the average price of word-processing software has fallen by almost 70 percent, reversing an upward trend. And since Microsoft's Excel displaced Lotus as the top spreadsheet in 1993, prices have dropped 60 percent.

John R. Lott Jr. New Haven, Conn.

ROBERT H. BORK RESPONDS: Mr. Lott may have found no instances of real predation from 1963 to 1988, but I suggest that he look at Landmarks Holding Corp. v. Bermant (1981) and numerous other cases on sham litigation. As my book, The Antitrust Paradox, explained, predation is possible when the predator need not outspend his victim to succeed. That is true both of sham litigation and of Microsoft's tactics. His "shock" and "disappointment" at my utterances would be alleviated by an adequate understanding of the principles involved and the empirical support for them.