To the editor:

Recent letters have compared today’s Middle Eastern conflicts with World War II. The sheer difference in scale between the two events makes you wonder why anyone would draw such parallels. But there is a Kansas connection here in the part played by the city of Leavenworth, both then and now, that suggests the comparison rests mainly on political fantasies. I refer to an AP news item of March 1998 by Carl Manning.

In 1945, at various times, 14 German prisoners of war were hanged at the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks in Leavenworth for murdering fellow German soldiers at POW camps for ideological reasons. All of those executed were motivated by an adherence to Nazism no less fanatic than the beliefs of the remaining prisoners in Guantanamo today. The 1998 story concerned a Leavenworth citizen who periodically visits and decorates the graves of those 14 Nazis buried near the site of their execution, not out of sympathy with Nazism, but out of human compassion for these forgotten men who died wretchedly for a wretched cause.

Our state’s political leaders have protested transferring even a few Guantanamo prisoners to the federal penitentiary on the grounds of “security.” I mean, how many murderers, rapists, sadists, child molesters, home-grown terrorists and Neo-Nazis are housed in the prisons in and around Leavenworth already? Aren’t they potentially a threat to security? I doubt that, in the enormous conflict of the 1940s, our representatives, senators and governor said “Not in my back yard” to housing murderous Nazis in Leavenworth.