To the editor:

In his Aug. 25 letter, Art Hadley accused me of lying and of taking Cindy Sheehan’s words (“This country is not worth dying for.”) out of context. Hadley said Sheehan was referring to Iraq, not America.

Here is the context of Sheehan’s statement (as reported at www.discoverthenetwork.org/Articles/Stewartrally.htm):

“I was raised in a country by a public school system that taught us that America was good, that America was just. America has been killing people, like my sister over here says, since we first stepped on this continent, we have been responsible for death and destruction. I passed on that (male bovine excrement) to my son and my son enlisted. I’m going all over the country telling moms: This country is not worth dying for. If we’re attacked, we would all go out. We’d all take whatever we had. I’d take my rolling pin and I’d beat the attackers over the head with it. But we were not attacked by Iraq. We might not even have been attacked by Osama bin Laden. Sept. 11, 2001, was their Pearl Harbor to get their neo-con agenda through and, if I would have known that before my son was killed, I would have taken him to Canada. I would never have let him go and try and defend this morally repugnant system we have. The people are good, the system is morally repugnant.”

I’ll leave it for readers themselves to decide if Sheehan was referring to America or Iraq when she said, “This country is not worth dying for.”

Kevin Groenhagen,

Lawrence