Photoessay #1510 - Patrick Finnegan

I read the New Yorker. Not always in order. For awhile, I was so behind I was reading issues that were Pre-Monica (that's Moncia Lewinsky who mercifully has been out of the news for quite a while). Four kids will do that to you.

Yesterday, I picked up the May 3, 2010 issue and read this letter to the editor under the title "No Excuse". I know it's long but worth it.

Jane Mayer, in her review of Marc Thiessen’s “Courting Disaster,” offers a fine dissection of that book’s flaws (Books, March 29th). Torture is wrong under any circumstances. As General David H. Petraeus recently remarked (specifically referring to Abu Ghraib and to Guantánamo), such abusive techniques are “nonbiodegradable. . . . The enemy continues to beat you with them like a stick.” He’s right—the pictures from Abu Ghraib and the publicity surrounding Guantánamo, waterboarding, and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” have created far more terrorists than most people understand. For a country that professes to stand for the rule of law and individual rights, we look like the worst kind of hypocrites. Consider a war we fought in the past against a brutal enemy that tortured and killed prisoners, executed civilians, and engaged in a number of atrocities. Several American leaders argued that the only way to prevail was to engage in the same kind of tactics, because that was the only thing that the enemy understood or respected (sound familiar?). But other leaders believed that it was not enough to win; they also had to do it in a way that was consistent with the values of their society and the principles of their cause. That conflict was the Revolutionary War, and the leaders included George Washington and John Adams. If we mean what we say—if we really believe that we’re the good guys, and I hope we do—then this is the time to stand by those principles which our Founding Fathers professed and lived by. That’s what, I hope, makes us the leaders of the free world.

Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan
Dean of the Academic Board
The United States Military Academy at West Point
West Point, N.Y.

I thought this guy is the Dean of The Academic Board at West Point? We must be doing something right. Today I find that this was near the end of his tenure and he left soon after to become president of Longwood University.

I don't know anything else about this man but his words resonated with me.