Correspondence
Correspondence A Two-Front War ASKED A FAIRLY general question— whether nationality, etc., should be employed as criteria in assessing suspected terrorists—some so-called experts gave Heather Mac...
...I know of several individuals of minority descent who have had just that problem...
...Evidently many World War II veterans love Ambrose, and Childers seems embarrassed that this has happened to a noted historian who used his words and ideas without giving him credit...
...Mac Donald says nothing that should change that formula...
...I'll check his citations and if they turn out to be fraudulent, deliberate lies, as was the case in some of his railroad book "contacts," he will catch hell...
...The government interviewed more than 1,000 Americans following the tragedies of September 11 simply because they were of Arab descent...
...Fawned upon by the major publishers, they assign nonfiction books to their pals, aware that the reviewers know absolutely nothing about the subject...
...Well, I was severely chastised by legitimate railroad historians, who shocked me into the realization that I should not be reviewing nonfiction books on subjects about which I had no knowledge...
...If he knew something about McGovern's career in the military, then he should have known the correct name of the branch he was in...
...it's as if Ambrose did not do his research...
...America has long opted for freedom at the cost of being less secure...
...R. ALTA CHARO Professor of Law and Medical Ethics University of Wisconsin Law School Bioethics Advisory Commission, 1996-2001 Madison, WI BLACK HAWK RISING AFTER WHAT SOMALI BANDITS did to U.S...
...My respect for Ambrose fell more than a few notches...
...ADAM NELSON Fairview Park, OH IF THERE TRULY is a war on the police, then it is one they have brought upon themselves...
...GREGORY M. FRANZWA Director, The Patrice Press Tucson, AZ IN HIS AUTHOR'S NOTE in The Wild Blue, Stephen Ambrose writes, "I knew something about his career in the Army Air Forces," in reference to George McGovern...
...The National Institutes of Health's internal, ad hoc advisory committee used that interpretation to develop a policy for federally funded work on cell lines originally derived using private funding...
...31/Jan...
...WILLIAM H. LINK Northridge, CA FRED BARNES'S reporting the plagiarism by Stephen Ambrose and his subsequent tribute to historian Thomas Childers show just how ridiculous politics, in writing about historical facts from another era, is...
...After that, the federal government could pick up the tab...
...This FBI agent did more damage to U.S...
...The true dilemma involves not the number and proportion of stops or arrests, but the reasoning behind them...
...To give Ambrose a pass on breaking the most important of ethical codes in publishing just because he's popular with some veterans merely shows up-and-coming writers that if you steal, it's okay...
...Indeed, the arrest of certain individuals because of suspicious activity, regardless of such an action's effect on the statistics, is not only just, but also necessary and proper...
...The tradeoff between freedom and security is not a new dilemma...
...CHARLES CARLSON Editor, Local Government Law Weekly Hinsdale, IL IN "THE WAR ON THE POLICE," Heather Mac Donald argues that racial profiling does not exist because certain minority groups commit crimes at higher rates...
...if a minority is stopped or arrested because of genuinely suspicious behavior, there is not a problem...
...Special Forces will have the support necessary to finish the job this time...
...14), Wesley J. Smith incorrectly writes that "Clinton's bioethics commission recommended a Clintonian approach: Simply use private money to pay for destruction of the embryos and the extraction of their stem cells...
...This is a dangerous assumption...
...SOPHIE ROBERTS Lehigh, OK...
...And what of Robert Hanssen...
...Sure, if that book is the story of the opening of the American West...
...As someone who has studied allegations of racial profiling in cincinnati, i have heard innumerable allegations of the "bad" kind of racial profiling: African-American drivers pulled over for driving expensive cars, or for being in predominantly white neighborhoods after dark, and Hispanics pulled over for crimes that are overlooked when committed by whites...
...security than all the other spies in our country combined...
...The Patrice Press, a small publisher of nonfiction books on the covered wagon roads to the American West, publishes an even smaller quarterly called folio...
...So, wring our hands as we might that the police are too hampered to keep us safe, we should be cautious about giving them too much freedom...
...Racial profiling is a trivial matter compared to the endemic corruption and incompetence of law enforcement...
...Many years ago James Michener asked me to read a chapter of his forthcoming Centennial...
...troops during the famine relief efforts in 1993, it's time to go back in there and clean that country up once and for all ("Black Hawks Back to Somalia...
...31/Jan...
...Questioning every Arab or Muslim who entered this country after a certain date is quite another...
...Law enforcement doesn't need more apologists...
...The volume of this litigation has increased dramatically in recent years...
...While she provides an excellent critique of why, based on numerous statistics, there are higher crime rates among certain minority groups, this overlooks an important aspect of the racial profiling debate...
...Correspondence A Two-Front War ASKED A FAIRLY general question— whether nationality, etc., should be employed as criteria in assessing suspected terrorists—some so-called experts gave Heather Mac Donald a glib "no" ("The War on the Police," Dec...
...Adverse media coverage can perhaps be shrugged off, but being a defendant in a civil Rights Act suit places an officer at risk of financial ruin...
...One wonders if a slightly different question, for example whether such criteria should be employed in order to avert an impending attack in the expert's own neighborhood, would have elicited a different response...
...The same is true here...
...it can be argued that the September 11 disaster would never have happened had the FBI and U.S...
...WILLIAM B. FANKBONER La Quinta, CA GUILTY AS CHARGED EVEN BEFORE Fred Barnes exposed the recent Stephen Ambrose xeroxing scandal, I had issues with Ambrose's work as a historian ("Stephen Ambrose, Copycat," Jan...
...How many times has a white person been pulled over for not signaling 100 feet before his turn...
...The use of the word "Forces" is also strange...
...In fact, President Clinton's National Bioethics Advisory commission recommended legislation to authorize federal funding for both the derivation of embryonic stem cells and for subsequent work on the resulting immortalized cell lines...
...It would have been so easy for him to say that he would check out the criticisms and correct any errors in subsequent editions...
...It is necessary for us to return to Somalia and destroy the system that would give an organization like al Qaeda haven...
...if Mac Donald would like to argue that this, too, is justified, i would encourage such valuable discussion...
...intelligence services done their jobs...
...The trouble arises when that same person is arrested simply because of his race...
...I belonged to the Army Air Corps during World War II...
...The same mistake I made...
...One of the things that makes America great and which was a high priority for our Founding Fathers is limitations on the police...
...I believe the U.S...
...I marveled at his research skills...
...Mac Donald writes that it would be nice to hear a call for full cooperation with the terrorist investigation "as the patriotic duty of every Muslim-American...
...He accepted twenty-nine and challenged three...
...Then the military historians got on his case because of tragic errors in his D-Day...
...As Christian Lowe reports, U.S...
...And neither he nor his publisher will care...
...The fame of Stephen Ambrose can be traced to the book review editors of America's daily press...
...Dec...
...The anti-profiling juggernaut," in my opinion, is based on this idea that an entire ethnic group is to be punished for the sins of a few...
...DAVID LEVIN Burlingame, CA SPAWNING TROUBLE IN HIS "CLOSING IN ON CLONING" (Jan...
...And Michener was writing a novel...
...It needs a thorough house cleaning, from the local precinct to the highest levels of the federal bureaucracy...
...Ambrose was quoted in a page-one article in the Wall Street Journal as saying that his critics could say "whatever the hell they wanted to say"—it didn't bother him...
...Much of the Bill of Rights concerns police control, and appropriately so...
...In the May 2001 issue of folio I published a glowing review of Ambrose's new book Nothing Like It in the World, because I enjoyed it so much...
...It was the general counsel to the secretary of health and human services who interpreted the extant federal law as permitting federal funding for work on cell lines that had been derived with private monies...
...The Air Force did not exist during WWII, the period with which The Wild Blue concerns itself...
...My experiences with the police have been frightening precisely because the police are a very powerful authority...
...Such a request would have been absurd...
...One lesson of September 11 is that blind idealism is not the way to respond to real evil, and only irresponsible fools failed to learn that...
...operatives have already been scouting for terrorist camps in Somalia, a state that harbors much hatred against the United States, therefore making it an appealing sanctuary for al Qaeda...
...D. MIDALIA Sydney, Australia EVEN GRANTING that Heather Mac Donald is correct on all the points she makes, i remain unconvinced that we should be overly trusting of the police...
...The average Muslim or Arab American is no more a terrorist than is the average white male...
...Will I ever review another book by Stephen Ambrose...
...The debate should be over the arrest and mistreatment of individuals simply because of their race and nothing else...
...I prevailed on two of them...
...I caught thirty-two errors...
...it seems that an underlying assumption in Mac Donald's work is that the police are a social authority about which we need not be vigilant...
...Why Muslims specifically...
...Shouldn't this be the duty of all Americans...
...When Timothy Mcveigh, who was just as much a terrorist as any of Osama bin Laden's henchmen, killed hundreds in Oklahoma city, there was no similar call to interview white males of a certain age group...
...It is Mac Donald's categorical dismissal of a valid debate that I oppose...
...This short statement reveals Ambrose's lack of knowledge...
...Abuse of police power is the first symptom of despotism...
...To put it briefly, using race as a factor, such as in questioning Arab graduates of flight schools asking to learn how to fly jumbo jets, is one thing...
...MATT BURR Dallas, TX HEATHER MAC DONALD is right on the money, but even more damaging to police morale than adverse publicity related to racial profiling are pressures from the federal courts...
Vol. 7 • January 2002 • No. 19
