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Dear Senator McCain,
Last night during the YouTube debates I heard you compare those who want to bring the troops home from Iraq to Hitler appeasers during World War II. I must say it is an interesting comparison John. It almost sounds like you are saying those who want to end the war are the same type of people who would enable those who would kill and imprison people from a minority religious group without charges, torture, invade countries who never threatened to attack them, and clamp down on civil liberties.
But that comparison doesn’t seem to apply to those who want to bring the troops home, in fact it sounds more like it applies to you. Yes John, you have enabled a power hungry madman who has invaded a nation which posed no direct threat to the United States and killed hundreds of thousands of people. You have enabled an administration which has locked up people from the Islamic faith without charges and held them in secret prisons where no one knows exactly what goes on, other than the not so pleasant facts that have been leaked to us. Yes John, people are dying in these secret prisons, people are being tortured, and who knows what else is going on because no international human rights organizations are allowed to monitor the situation and tell us what is happening.
When I was in ninth grade I spent a couple weeks in Germany . While I was there I visited the concentration camps, and I saw numerous torture devices with my own eyes. There were two words I heard after visiting that camp that will always stick with me. Never again.
Never again can we allow a government to invade other countries which pose them no threat, never again can we allow the government to round up members of a particular religious group and send them off to secret prisons with no oversight from international monitors, never again can we allow torture, never again can we allow governments to crack down on civil liberties, never again can we sit back quietly when we see the leader of a nation acting as a tyrant.
Yet that is exactly what you have allowed Mr. McCain. And you have the nerve to compare those who want to end the slaughter to Nazi appeasers.
It is sad John because I believe that deep down you know you are wrong. I believe that because I heard your response to Mitt Romney’s remarks on waterboarding, and I must say you put forth one of the most impassioned criticisms of torture I have ever heard from a political candidate. Your remarks on waterboarding were right on the money, and I wanted to embrace them. Unfortunately though I could not embrace your words because I know that you have helped enable this administration to perform acts of torture. You backed down and voted for the Military Commissions Act, and you have voted consistently to allow this administration to violate our Constitutional rights and continue the slaughter of innocent Iraqis and American soldiers.
I hate making Nazi comparisions John, because I know it is deeply painful for many to hear comparisions with such a reprehensible regime. I get no pleasure out of comparing the actions of this administration to the actions of those who ran Nazi Germany, and I certainly don't want to bring any more pain to those who lost family or friends in the Holocaust. But then I remember the words "Never Again" and I know that I must speak out before things go any further. If there is one thing that is worse than seeing people having to deal with the pain when they are reminded of past atrocities, it is having to see people suffer through new atrocities. We have not reached the point of Nazi Germany yet, but we are headed in an extremely dangerous direction and those who forget the past are bound to repeat it.
Unlike you though John I will never try to claim that those who are trying to stop bloodshed are Nazi appeasers, and I sure as hell will never enable those who torture and slaughter hundreds of thousands. If you want to see what today's Nazi appeaser looks like go look in the mirror, but don't you dare try to accuse those who want an end to this illegal war of being like those who enabled Hitler.
Sincerely, A Citizen
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