To the editor:

I feel compelled to respond to the April 2 editorial. It relates to important issues that weigh heavily on our minds lately, such as the “war on terrorism” the Patriot Act’s threat to civil liberties and the Iraq war, including the Bush administration’s debunked original and ever-changing current justifications for it.

The editorial served to justify the recent publication of disturbing images of the horrific violence gleefully imposed upon four U.S. civilians in Fallujah, Iraq. While I do not object to the use of the photos, I do object to the Journal-World’s justification for using them, namely to document the war on terrorism.

First of all, nobody yet knows who was responsible for those tragic civilian murders/mutilations. Many suspect it to be Saddam loyalists. If this is true, then it has nothing to do with our “war on terrorism” except the murderers’ use of terror tactics in war. If it was global terrorist infiltrates, still the situation was brought about by our attack on Iraq, which put our citizens in harm’s way and allowed the infiltration.

It’s irresponsible statements like those in the editorial, drawing direct literary links between Iraq and general terrorism threat, that led 70 percent of polled Americans to mistakenly believe that Iraq was behind the 9-11 attacks. We waged war partly because of that calculated misconception: President Bush commonly used/uses such literary links to justify his unprecedented, pre-emptive war. While we’ve come to expect politically motivated “fuzzy facts” from him, we need better from our only newspaper.

Sharon Dewey,

Lawrence