OUR VIEWS

Same old, same old for Cuba

But that's the recommendation of the White House commission on Cuba that in a high-profile Rose Garden ceremony turned over to President Bush 500 pages ratifying what the president planned to do all along.

To give the White House some credit, it made only the barest pretense that this exercise was anything but a transparent ploy aimed at winning Cuban-American votes in Florida, a state vital to Bush's re-election hopes and of which his brother is governor.

Did we mention that the co-chairman of the commission is Mel Martinez, who resigned as Bush's Housing secretary to run, with White House blessing, for the Senate in Florida?

Cuban-Americans still will be allowed to send money to the island and travel there, just not as often. And American farmers, another key voting bloc, still will be allowed to sell crops to Cuba.

Everybody else, watch out. Much of the $59 million the Bush administration plans to spend during the next two years on increasing Cuban sanctions will pay informants, sting operations and gumshoes to target Americans who travel to Cuba illegally, especially that sinister group, retired schoolteachers who like to visit exotic locations.

Our view is that Americans have a right to travel where they please. Increasingly, that is Congress' view. Both the House and Senate voted last year to lift travel restrictions to the island, and once Bush's electoral needs have been taken care, this week's actions might be the beginning of the end for sanctions.

The $59 million will be taken from other foreign aid accounts — surely we have more pressing foreign policy needs. And $18 million will be spend on military aircraft to broadcast into Cuba — surely the military has more pressing needs. You would think if more propaganda is required it would be to repair the damage to our reputation in the Mideast.

Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., a leader in the move to lift the travel ban, says if it's important for the Cubans to hear American voices, let Americans go there and speak for themselves.

As an example of how Cuba has distorted administration priorities, consider this: Of 120 employees in Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, 21 are assigned to enforcing financial sanctions on Cuba and four to tracking down the finances of al-Qaida.

Over 40 years, the sanctions on Cuba have come to be sustained only by domestic political considerations. Most Americans frankly don't care about Cuba, but the relative few who do care passionately. The true policy of successive administrations, including this one, is this: Wait more or less patiently for Fidel Castro to croak. He is 77.

A robotic house call

The reason was that NASA, still grieving from the Columbia accident, didn't feel that it could fly a fourth shuttle mission to the telescope with sufficient guarantees of safety. If something happened to the shuttle at the international space station, the astronauts could be rescued; at the Hubble, they could not.

Since its launch in 1990, the telescope has made pioneering discoveries in outer space and produced spectacular images from the far reaches of the universe, and the predictable outcry made NASA reconsider.

The National Academy of Sciences is considering ways, including a possible shuttle mission, to service the telescope and greatly extend its life span. The telescope needs new batteries and gyros, and, if the astronomers have their way, some new instrument and camera packages. It is delicate work.

But now another possible way of saving the Hubble has surfaced — sending robots to do it. While the idea has a sci-fi sound to it, NASA is looking at more than two-dozen proposals to send robots into space to do the repair work. Some of the robots, like the Johnson Space Center's Robonaut, almost a look-alike for a "Star Wars" storm trooper, are astonishingly humanoid.

If NASA indeed chooses this option and it succeeds, it will represent a valuable reprieve for the Hubble, by now one of science's most legendary tools, and a breakthrough for the use of robotics to explore space.

Some of the fanciful imaginings in "Star Wars" may not be so long ago and far away anymore.

YOUR VIEWS

Bush, Cheney attacks are laughable

Perhaps it is even more frustrating that Bush and Cheney have successfully convinced a significant portion of the United States electorate that they are more fit to lead the nation during wartime.

It would appear that about half of the American people are failing to read between the lines and see that this administration is only "fit" to lead us into a nightmare of our own making. For some reason, many Americans are blind to the fact that this nightmare of regime change in Iraq, which has led to the deaths of almost 1,000 American lives along with many thousands of Iraqis, billions upon billions of dollars in expenses and a dangerous quagmire that may keep us there for years to come, is somehow a demonstration of fit military leadership.

This unfortunate situation we now exist in, which is due in part to inadequate and sloppy intelligence about weapons of mass destruction coupled with oil-revenue-hungry officials and poor military planning, has not made our nation more secure. We are less secure in part due to the hostility directed toward us because of what is perceived as aggression in Iraq. The arrogant idea that we have the duty to implement our idea of democracy upon a sovereign nation has certainly not panned out the way we would like. We have instead opened the door to what could prove to be another fundamentalist regime that is less than kind in its opinion of Americans.

Cody Lyon

New York, NY 10009

No solution proposed

I believe every U.S. citizen is fully aware of the potential of more terrorist strikes within the United States, but so far neither President Bush with the best brains in the world and unlimited funds at his disposal nor Congress in its oversight role has proposed a solution to remove the cause of terrorism. Whatever the basic cause might be, I am absolutely confident that massive application of military power will ultimately lead to totalitarian governments, not democracies that we tout to the rest of the world.

We need a president with intellectual and moral capabilities equal to the task of solving terrorism — just one good woman or man to set us on the path toward international peace and prosperity. I believe many Americans are praying that such a leader will arise in this world crisis.

Joe Boyett

Montgomery 36111

Enemy is us

Our congressmen's decisions, during the Carter administration to phase out HUMINT (human intelligence) agents and, during the Clinton administration, to only associate ourselves with "morally acceptable" foreign agents that met our human rights criteria, along with the establishment of "politically correct" walls between our already struggling intelligence agencies, and the accompanying slashes in HUMINT funding were obviously responsible for the failure of our preparedness.

Sadly, our congressmen were either the last to "fathom" the serious consequences of their failure, or more sadly, God forbid, may have known and accepted the tragic shortcomings in favor of support for funding of vote-getting pork barrel projects that would guarantee they become more firmly ensconced on their seats of royalty.

The final report, due out in July, doesn't give our congressmen much time to bribe, coerce and/or threaten individual commission members in an effort to "congressanitize" the final report. Will they be successful? Probably.

It's a matter calling for the utmost congressional priority!

Armond "Si" Simmons

Pell City 35128

Backs Republicans

On jobs? That's an easy one. A war climate creates jobs. The demand side is great,which stimulates the economy, creating jobs that need to be filled — the need for ammunition and supplies must be met, medical, etc. Kerry is helping the Republicans more than defeating them. Would Mr. Bush thank him?

Henry L. McShan

Birmingham 35204

OTHER VIEWS

U.S. must not flinch from facts

The lawyer for a soldier charged in the Iraq prison abuse was explaining a photograph. It showed some Americans standing over a pile of naked Iraqis:

"Intelligence officers came into the facility, pulled two men out of their cells, took them away, brought them back with a third prisoner, ordered the MPs to undress all of them, and then started interrogating them, and had them ... in this position where they're all embracing each other."

"Embracing."

The lawyer's client probably will offer — this should deepen Americans' queasiness — the Nuremberg defense: I was only obeying orders. If the abuse was the result of orders — or of the absence of them — fault must extend up the chain of command.

So, forgive the lawyer's language. But note what it betokens: a flinching from facts. Americans must not flinch from absorbing the photographs of what some Americans did in that prison. And they should not flinch from this fact:

That pornography is, almost inevitably, part of what empire looks like. It does not always look like that, and does not only look like that. But empire is always about domination. Domination for self defense, perhaps. Domination for the good of the dominated, arguably. But domination.

And some persons will be corrupted by dominating. That is why the leaders of empires must be watchful. Very watchful.

Donald Rumsfeld is clearly shattered by the corruption he tardily comprehended. Testifying to Congress last week, he seemed saturated with a sadness that bespeaks his deep decency and his horror at the vast injury done to the nation by elements of the department he administers. He knows that he failed the president. And he knows that his extraordinary record of government service — very few public careers, including presidential ones, can match Rumsfeld's — has been tarnished.

How should he, and we, think about what comes next? Consider an axiom, a principle, two questions and then a second axiom.

The first axiom is: When there is no penalty for failure, failures proliferate.

Leave aside the question of who or what failed before 9/11. But who lost his or her job because the president's 2003 State of the Union address gave currency to a fraud — the story of Iraq attempting to buy uranium in Niger? Or because the primary and only sufficient reason for waging pre-emptive war — weapons of mass destruction — was largely spurious? Or because postwar planning, from failure to anticipate the initial looting to today's insufficient force levels, has been botched? Failures are multiplying because of choices for which no one seems accountable.

The principle is: The response by the nation's government must express horror, shame and contrition proportional to the evil done to others, and the harm done to the nation, by agents of the government.

Americans are almost certainly going to die in violence made worse in Iraq, and not only there, by the substantial aid some Americans, in their torture of Iraqi prisoners, have given to our enemies in this war. And by the appallingly dilatory response to the certain torture and probable murder committed in that prison.

The nation's response must, of course, include swift and public prosecutions. And the destruction of that prison. And punctilious conformity to legal obligations — and, now, to some optional procedures — concerning persons in American custody. But this is not enough.

One question is: Are the nation's efforts in the deepening global war — the world is more menacing than it was a year ago — helped or hindered by Rumsfeld's continuation as the appointed American most conspicuously identified with the conduct of the war? This is not a simple call. But being experienced, he will know how to make the call. Being honorable, he will so do.

He knows his Macbeth and will recognize the framing of the second question: Were he to resign, would discerning people say that nothing in his public life became him like the leaving of it?

This nation has always needed an ethic about the resignation of public officials. Such an ethic cannot be codified. It must grow in controlling power from precedent to precedent, as an unwritten common law, distilled from the behavior of uncommonly honorable men and women who understand the stakes. A nation, especially one doing the business of empire, needs high officials to be highly attentive to what is done in their departments — attentive far down the chain of command, as though their very jobs depended on it.

Finally, the second axiom. It is from Charles de Gaulle: The graveyards are full of indispensable men.

Look Back