Civilians

The vile acts depicted in a video on the Internet this week - purportedly showing four U.S. Marines urinating on the corpses of three Taliban fighters - require condemnation in the strongest possible terms by U.S. and NATO officials. To do anything other than unequivocally repudiate such conduct would be self-defeating in a war that depends on maintaining the moral high ground against our enemies and the trust of the Afghan people. It would also hand our adversaries a massive propaganda victory.

"The Lakotah had no language for insulting other orders of existence: pest, waste, weed ... " But what about "bugsplat"? That's the word for the cop at UC Davis, walking up and down the line of students sitting with their arms locked, zapping them in the eyes with pepper spray. It's the word for the Tunisian police and bureaucrats who humiliated Mohamed Bouazizi and destroyed his livelihood as a street vendor. It's the word for anyone whose power exceeds his humanity.

Weapons-makers, ideologues and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta are busy whipping up fears in reaction to scheduled reductions in our bloated military budget. Don't be fooled. These cuts will not put our security at risk, though they will cut into profits and executive pay at certain defense-establishment corporations. In this time of debilitating unemployment and financial disaster, our slavish devotion to military spending undercuts our opportunity to rebuild America. Military expenditures have doubled in constant dollars since 2001.

So many of us have waited a long time for the complete withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. Some of us were against the war from the very beginning since we felt it was unjustified. Some of us moved to that conclusion after so many years and American lives lost to this tragedy, in addition to the loss of Iraqi civilians. We are in this recession and economic situation because of two wars and the billions of dollars spent which could have been used in our own country. Now that President Barack Obama has kept his promise to withdraw all troops by the end of year, which is what so many of us have been looking for, there is this very vocal minority who are against leaving.

Andrew A. "Andy" Dantzler, an optical engineer who was program area manager for civilian space at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, died Thursday of cardiac arrest at Johns Hopkins Hospital. The longtime Sykesville resident was 49. The son of a federal government worker and a counselor, Andrew A. Dantzler was born in Bethesda and raised in Rockville, where he graduated in 1980 from Robert E. Peary High School. After earning a bachelor's degree in astronomy and physics in 1984 from the University of Maryland, College Park, he went to work as an optical engineer at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt.

The U.S. Air Force sent two F-16 jet fighters to intercept a civilian plane that had strayed into restricted air space over Washington, D.C., at about 8:30 p.m. Monday. The military planes, based at Andrews Air Force Base, escorted the smaller craft until the pilot landed at Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport. The Federal Aviation Administration was unable to communicate with the pilot, the sole occupant of the Beechcraft 58 aircraft, a small, twin-engine plane.

Tuesday marked the end of the Pentagon's nearly two-decade policy barring openly gay, lesbian, or bisexual people from military service. The death of "Don't ask, don't tell" is a big win for the LGBT rights community, but it may be an even bigger win for the nation's military and the communities that play host to major military installations. That's because the end of this discriminatory policy may go a long way toward dispelling the notion that there is a sharp divide between the culture of the military and that of society at large.

Letter writer Michael Richardson of Perry Hall promises not to buy The Sun as long as Jean Marbella and Dan Rodricks write for the paper ("Tired of unfair attacks on Republicans couched in 9/11 remembrance," Sept. 13). He is mad that Mr. Rodrick's column for the Sept. 11 anniversary ("In anger and pain, little sympathy for the 'deaths of others,'" Sept. 11) showed no decency by connecting the Iraq War with President Bush and Sept. 11. Mr. Richards, in a feeble attempt to exonerate President Bush, says that the Iraq War happened two years after Sept.

It took a lot of courage for Dan Rodricks to write his recent column regarding the civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan on the 10 t h anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks ("In anger and pain, little sympathy for the 'deaths of others.'") His views are shared by many returning veterans from those campaigns who saw first hand the horrible state of so many innocent people. As a veteran of World War II and father of veterans and relative of others who have served in Iraq, I will forever support our troops but have been opposed to the Middle East military policy going back before Desert Storm.

One of the first questions Americans asked each other after Sept. 11 was, "Why do they hate us so much?" For many, it was just a rhetorical question in the wrenching aftermath of our nightmare. Others took a real, if fleeting, interest in understanding the beliefs and attitudes that fueled the attacks. But I think most of us resented that question and had no interest in the answer, convinced there could be no rational explanation for the indiscriminate killing of any civilian population, particularly ours.