We hope that you and your family are well and have good health. We wish the same for all families in our country and for those whose health care systems are so much worse than ours. Of course our own could be better as well.

The February 28th edition of the American Medical News, published biweekly by the American Medical Association, included a story about how some of our military physicians are treating people in Iraq and Afghanistan on their free time. Indeed an Afghani child was operated on in Indiana this past month for a heart defect. The operation has the potential to save the child’s life. Most of the care and the transport here were donated. This is a wonderful thing.

Just imagine what we physicians could and would do if the government were not demanding that so much of our nation’s resources go to war and destruction. Most people are basically good and with good leadership and management of our resources could live better. A child who needs heart surgery should not necessarily be news. That care should and could be available in his or her own country.

We realize that we are not the only contributors to the appalling lack of health care in so many countries in this world. Bin Laden for example, is definitely not helping the situation, nor are the suicide bombers and those who instigate their actions. But we from the US are making a bad health problem worse in many ways, and we do not believe that the type of help described in the AMA News, justifies the 80 billion that the president wants to spend on war in Iraq and Afghanistan this year.

You are our representative and we ask that you divert this country from the Bush appeal to selfishness and destruction towards one of sharing and construction.

Sincerely yours, Ellyn Stecker and Peter Smith for the Michiana Peace and Justice Coalition

March 13, 2005

Representative Chris Chocola
100 Suite East Wayne Street
South Bend, IN 46601

Dear Congressman Chocola:

Have you been following the case of Robert McCartney?

Mr. McCartney was a Protestant and resident of Northern Ireland who was stabbed to death during a fight at a Belfast pub January 30. An estimated 72 people witnessed the murder, but every one of them refused to speak to police. It was believed that the killers were members of the Irish Republican Army and that the wall of silence resulted from threats from the IRA.

Last week, amid growing public criticism, the IRA issued an astonishing statement. It said it had made an offer to the McCartney family to shoot the IRA members who were responsible for the murder. The family rejected this offer, saying the truth would come out only in court.

In public statements, the Unionist Party, loyal to Great Britain, said offering murder as a form of justice was appalling, and British Prime Minister Tony Blair declared, "The IRA statement defies any description. . . . It cannot be in any shape or form justified." Mitchell Reiss, President Bush's envoy to Northern Ireland, took the occasion to call for the IRA to disband. He said it was time for the organization's political wing, Sinn Fein, to accept the legitimacy of the rule of law.

I agree with all those sentiments, but I was struck by the irony of hearing them articulated by Mr. Blair and by the personal representative of President Bush. Can these public figures calling for respect for the rule of law and for faith in due process be the same ones who cheered on the unprovoked attack on Iraq, which violated all international legal standards?

Does Mr. Reiss represent the same president-cum-sheriff who warned Saddam Hussein to get out of town by midnight or face the consequences? The same president who authorized rewards of millions of dollars for information leading to the capture of Ba'ath party officials "dead or alive"? The same one who accepted the advice of his personal attorney that the Geneva Convention's prohibition on torture had been rendered "quaint" in the age of international terrorism? The same president who found this opinion so well reasoned and moral that he promoted said attorney to attorney general of the United States?

In the New Testament Book of Matthew, Jesus promises that ?in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.? Need I state the obvious? Before anyone in the Bush administration or Mr. Blair condemns anyone else for barbarity, they need to take a look in the mirror.

In two years, the invasion and occupation of Iraq has taken the lives of nearly 1,700 coalition troops (this past week's U.S. casualties are listed and pictured below) plus tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis. It has cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and there is no end in sight.

You and everyone else who voted for this war need to ask yourselves what the cost would have been of respecting the rule of law and due process, of letting the inspectors do their jobs, of supporting an international criminal court and prosecuting Saddam Hussein and his ilk instead of destroying a country, of believing in the force of law instead of the law of force.

After September 11, President Bush famously declared to the leaders of nations around the world, "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." I say to you as a law maker that if you don't believe in the rule of law and that it applies even to the most powerful nation on earth, then you don't belong in our national legislature.

With great concern,
writing on behalf of the Michiana Peace & Justice Coalition, I am,

Ed Cohen