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Opinion
Sgt. Joseph Hickman has spent much of his working life in the military. He considers himself a patriot. Ronald Reagan is his favorite president. He did a year tour of duty at “Gitmo” (Guantanamo Bay, Cuba).
Not a man to shy away from violence, in the course of duty, he led a squad into a cell in Gitmo in response to a possible suicide, and ordered his men to fire at detainees within a distance where the rubber bullets could be lethal. The detainees nicknamed him “Satan.”
He is the last guy you would expect to expose a story of the “war lab” at Gitmo, where prisoners, under the auspices of a secret program, were drugged, beaten, tortured and murdered. However, Sgt. Hickman is also a man of conscious, and he signed an oath to defend the Constitution.
In his book, Sgt. Hickman describes the events surrounding the deaths of four alleged suicides, and the subsequent NCIS investigation.
His book is called “Murder at Camp Delta,” and I checked it out from the Lakeport Library.
Sgt. Hickman, with the help of the law school students at Seton Hall University and documents released due to the Freedom of Information Act, concluded that the investigation was flawed.
In fact, the investigators had not even interviewed the many witnesses involved who could have contradicted the findings of the investigation.
Sgt. Hickman is not a person given to conspiracy theories, but eventually, the facts led inexorably to a government program that went to the “dark side” and violated the Geneva Convention and the Constitution, and that was approved at the highest levels of government.
The illegal program was devised to collect data on how to most efficiently yield intelligence from prisoners, and is reminiscent of the experiments that the Nazis performed on human beings. Detainees were given a medicine which induces short term psychosis, for example.
Obama will not prosecute these crimes because he does not want to set a precedent under which he himself could be prosecuted. Obama knows the insurgents can’t be defeated, so he changed “defeat” to “degrade.” Degrade means that when the insurgency gains momentum, he will simply slaughter as many as he can with air attacks.
We have been in Afghanistan for close to 14 years. The opium output, despite intermittent attempts to eradicate the poppy fields, has doubled since 2000. Ninety percent of the world’s opium comes from Afghanistan. Not only have we left the drug trade to flourish, we have also left thousands of dead and hundreds of thousands of refugees.
I have to conclude, that anyone who does not do everything in their power, within the limits of the law, to stop our senseless slaughter of people in the mid-east, are the moral equivalent of the Germans who remained silent as the Nazis committed their nefarious deeds.
Nelson Strasser lives in Lakeport, Calif.
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- Written by: Nelson Strasser
Hey you! Yeah you! This is your fault!
While you are eating your Cheerios I want you to recognize what you have done. Surprised aren’t you?
What we are experiencing today, this unrest that is tearing at the fabric of society, has little to do with race and everything to do with bigger government.
More government control, more laws, more rules, more ordinances. And when you have more laws, more rules and more ordinances it is left up to law enforcement agencies to enforce those laws, rules and ordinances.
Before the seat belt law you never experienced an interaction with law enforcement over your seat belt. Before car seat legislation, no interaction, before talking on your cell phone was illegal, no interaction, before no smoking ordinances no interaction, before air quality control, no interaction and the list goes on and on and on.
So what happens when the incidence of interaction between law enforcement and we citizens increases exponentially?
The opportunity for something to go wrong increases at the same rate, and a man in Staten Island, New York loses his life because law enforcement was enforcing a city law regarding the sale of a single cigarette, that’s what happens.
Bigger government requires more money to operate. Government has only one source of revenue and that is you so somehow they must take from you what they need to feed bigger government, therefore, they send out the revenue collectors which we know as law enforcement agencies to enforce their revenue generating laws, rules and ordinances.
You reap what you sow.
Bill Wink lives in Hidden Valley Lake, Calif.
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- Written by: Bill Wink
This week I heard about the State of Jefferson and the movement to have counties from northern California and southern Oregon form a 51st state in the USA.
The presentation was part of the Dec. 2 Board of Supervisors meeting.
What a great plan. Of course, the devil will be in the details and there certainly will be lots of them.
However for those of us tired of being governed by the ultra-liberal population centers in the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas it is a goal worth chasing.
Being able to leave California while staying in beautiful Lake County would be priceless, truly a state of utopia. In Jefferson smaller counties that are all but ignored in California would finally have proper representation.
The presentation by Mark Baird was excellent. However I was completely sold on the Jefferson concept by the comments of Victoria Brandon, our local Sierra Club representative.
The satire she used was brilliant. She pointed out that should Lake County leave California we would lose all the advantages of Cap and Trade, carbon taxes and no longer be ruled by the California Air Resources Board. We would lose all of the climate change protection provided by the great state of California. I was sold on the concept.
Should such a small government state ever happen, Jefferson would certainly need some sort of immigration controls or the population would face the risk of soaring out of control.
While it is far from a done deal, it is a very strong grassroots movement that has a chance.
Check it out at www.JeffersonDeclaration.net .
Ed Calkins lives in Kelseyville, Calif.
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On Dec. 2 some Siskiyou County activists came to the Lake County Board of Supervisors meeting to make a well-rehearsed pitch for the creation of a proposed “State of Jefferson.”
Consisting of a dozen or so Northern California counties possibly augmented by a chunk of Southern Oregon, this new state would instantly become the most impoverished in the United States, bankrupt at birth.
Without the infrastructure of a modern economy – no east-west interstate highway or railroad, no deep water port, no significant airport, no major medical center or university (and next to no opportunities for higher education at all), and nothing remotely resembling a metropolitan area, its prospects would be most unlikely to get better anytime soon.
Proponents say the region is underserved by Sacramento despite receiving far more in state services than it pays in taxes.
After secession, the new state would continue to be geographically isolated, sparsely populated and economically disadvantaged, lacking the resources to fund public education, highways, parks, or law enforcement to anything remotely approaching an acceptable standard.
This is progress?
Why would anyone advocate for such a ruinous proposal?
Just look at the beneficiaries, starting with multinational resource extraction corporations. Without the protections provided by California’s strict environmental regulations, the region’s abundant natural resources would be ripe for the plucking.
As an even more significant motivation, rich political prizes – two US Senate seats and three Electoral College votes – would fall to the most reactionary wing of American politics.
Membership in a “State of Jefferson” offers no advantages to the residents of Lake County. So it was dismaying to see members of the Board of Supervisors taking the idea seriously, seizing the opportunity to make wisecracks, playing to the gallery of imported green t-shirted supporters and taking cheap shots at state government.
Rather than wasting time in this irresponsible manner, they should learn to work with our newly elected state representatives to obtain concrete benefits for our community.
Victoria Brandon lives in Lower Lake, Calif.
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- Written by: Victoria Brandon