Letters.

Behind Bars

I think that Charles Peters is confused when he refers to "our inefficiencies of the criminal justice system, not just because they are embarrassing, but they mean that too many dangerous criminals get away with it." What nation does he compare us to? The truth is that we convict and imprison more of our citizens than any other nation in the world. If he wants efficiency, the best way to get rid of dangerous criminals is not more prisons, it is sane gun laws. Criminals without guns are far less dangerous. It seems to me that, in a democracy, we should be more "embarrassed" about how many innocent people we send to prison than how many criminals "get away with it."

SANFORD THIER Los Angeles, Calif.

Charles Peters replies:

I agree we imprison too many people for too long, usually easy-to-catch minor dope offenders, but that doesn't change the fact that too many violent criminals get away with it because of sloppy police work and inept or overworked prosecutors.

What About The Facts?

I read with interest and amazement Nicholas Thompson's March article tided "This Ain't Your Momma's CIA"

I must admit that I am completely astounded by what either I draw as journalistic naivete or journalistic deceptiveness on matters of Military or National Intelligence and its internal structure and oversight.

To say that what the CIA did in Kosovo was just "centralize intelligence" is almost laughable. There are many more reports by both media outlets and by private commercial intelligence companies that provide an entire A-Z overview of how our intelligence apparatus worked with and on the Yugoslav democracy movement that is completely contrary to your article.

Additionally, it is total nonsense to believe that this movement was a grassroots campaign to oust Milosevic. Without Kostunica, this so-called democracy movement couldn't get itself elected to dogcatcher in Belgrade. The movement was so fractured that no one could get more than 50 percent of the vote. I find it hard to believe that a journalist like yourself reports on events such as these that are totally baseless in fact. It isn't whether it was the CIA or DIA, NSA, NRO, USAID (and more than likely all five combined), but the fact remains that the United States of America covertly or for that matter overtly overthrew a government.

What you should really be looking at is how the $50 million was spent or let's say how much went in the pockets of this so-called democracy movement and some of its leaders. To say that our intelligence operations must pass legal muster is also absolutely silly. Many covert operations indeed defy international law, just like the bombing of Yugoslavia did.

How about writing a story on why we are going after Milosevic, who by the way is a real bad guy, and not after Arafat, Saddam, and Quadaffi in the same manner. The latter three are responsible for the deaths of Americans and incursions outside their own borders, while Milosevic, indeed a bad guy, never killed Americans and never went outside his borders. Remember this was a civil war. Yeah, I know the old genocide route. Balderdash is exactly what the charge of genocide was! Yep, no mention of this in your article either.

Mr. Thompson in all seriousness, either report facts or get a job on talk radio where facts do not matter with many of the hosts.

LTC. JACK ALLAN, USA (RET.) Hoboken, N.J.

Betrayed?

Your item in the Jan/Feb. "Tilting at Windmills" about the controversy surrounding the assignment of a civil servant to a foreign service slot at our embassy in Peru is, to use your words, "dead wrong" No one has argued that a foreign service officer is inherently more qualified than a civil servant. For you to mischaracterize AFSA's stance, and then use that straw man as proof of the legendary snobbery of the Foreign Service just isn't fair. FSOs who oppose the appointment (and not all do) make two arguments. First, we deserve to have first crack at diplomatic jobs not because we passed an archaic examination, but because we paid our dues working visa lines, uprooting our families every few years, contracting exotic diseases, and getting blown up, all the while advancing American interests.

Is it snobbish or is it reasonable to expect that the very few responsible jobs in attractive posts will go to qualified people who have dedicated their lives to the Foreign Service? It seemed reasonable to the State Department when it agreed with AFSA that such jobs should go to FSOs (if there are qualified applicants--and there were in this case). That is the second objection: The appointment violates the assignments rules negotiated by the bargaining unit of our professional diplomats. This may be the first time The Washington Monthly has come down against collective bargaining. Carried to its logical end, your piece essentially renounces the need for a professional diplomatic corps. If that is your position, fine, make the case, but don't smugly dismiss these genuine concerns.

You argue that an FSO's willingness to undergo hardship 24 hours a day and literally risk his or her life for our country should be discounted in the assignments process. Doesn't this contradict your deep conviction that government service is a worthy calling? Just this sense of vocation is what keeps a lot of us going out in the field, and for you (of all people) to call that into question is demoralizing. As one who subscribes to your magazine because your attitude toward government service is inspiring, I feel personally let down. The crack about Foreign Service snobbery is undeserved, denigrates those who are living what you preach, and perpetuates a false stereotype popularized by espionage potboilers and Hollywood. Please reconsider.

AN FSO IN CENTRAL ASIA Name Withheld on Request

Strained Science

Congress owes thanks to Julie Wakefield for an excellent review on the demise of the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) ("Flunking Science," Dec. 2000) and current discussion about its revival. May it provide food for thought in these putatively bipartisan times.

In the article, former Rep. Walker makes his nth repetition of his old canard that OTA reports were too late to be useful. While a few reports of the many hundreds issued over OTA's lifetime may have been delivered later than one might have liked, most were timely and many were highly useful to congressional decision making.

Walker's statement is particularly disingenuous (to be polite) because when he began issuing that apologia for his behavior in 1995, he was receiving a detailed analysis on the U.S. space program that he requested of my colleagues in OTA. That analysis, universally acclaimed as accurate, insightful, and timely, took less than five months to produce from inception to publication. It is difficult to think of any other organization in the world that could have done this, as well Walker knew and knows.

ANTHONY FAINBERG Bethesda, Md.

Language Control

In your "Tilting at Windmills" column (Jan/Feb. 2001) you used the words "infatuated" and "overheated" to describe child abusers. This is no more accurate than "sexy" describes a rapist. The key emotion of pedophiles, rapists, and wife batterers is not lust, uncontrolled or otherwise. It is a desire for control.

LAURA BILLINGTON Maple Valley, Wash.

Uncommon Ground

For someone who lived abroad during critical formative years, and therefore might be expected to be reasonably aware of differences, Michael Schaffer ("No More Fast Times at Ridgemont High," Jan./Feb. 2001) seems surprisingly naive when he describes the "shared experience" of the pop culture American high school as portrayed in Archie comics and John Hughes' movies. Think about it: just who was being portrayed, and who did in fact share that experience? The answer should be obvious: overwhelmingly white, predominantly middle-class kids. As a white middle-class person who attended such high schools, I would bet that many poor minorities (and probably a fair number of lower-class whites as well) do not identify nearly so closely with these portrayals as Schaffer does. I also suspect that even the public high schools in Irasema Salcido's district do not closely resemble those Hughes-type high schools. Schools in poor districts are notoriously short on supplies, facilities, and all of those nice enriching activities typical of the suburbs.

To his credit, Schaffer does acknowledge that "America's schools regularly fail kids like the ones at Cesar Chavez." But I find his overstatement of the "common ground" high school to be disturbingly egocentric. And he speaks from very short historical perspective. Those American norms that he claims charter schools are breaking away from haven't been around so very long anyway. I prefer to think of the charter school pioneers like Salcido as historians reviving an older and more important American tradition, namely the return of the high school to its most basic function: to educate even poor youths into becoming productive, responsible citizens. If these schools are successful, then those young citizens will surely help unify our country in far more important ways than the dribs and drabs of pop culture.

CANDACE MAY PARIS Clinton, New York