A Response To A Response

To the Editor:

I write to discuss Brian Gibney’s response to several earlier letters, regarding the Iraqi situation. He originally attacked our President for deliberately withholding the location of tunnel entrances from UN inspectors, which he feels were visible to our spy satellites. I responded by saying that “If such entrances were visible to spy satellites, then Russia and China would also have seen them, and reported them to the UN, but they have not.” From these two comments, he concluded that “I do not blame our government for anything” and “I prefer to blame the Russians and Chinese for not providing the information.” My point was, perhaps such entrances are not be visible to spy satellites! As I type this, my TV is showing coalition soldiers shooting open the gates of such a tunnel, whose entrance was inside a building. Since you said there was no “proof” these tunnels exist, Brian, I hope you saw the video, too.

Since Brian also misunderstood the comments made in several other letters, it occurs that there must be some logical explanation for this. In each case, the writer makes a clear statement. Brian then selects a word from the statement, takes it out of context, looks it up in a dictionary (or thesaurus), replaces it with an alternate of his choosing, then uses this new word to question the validity of the original statement. I call this the Gibney Bait-and-Switch technique.

I thought to myself: could Brian really not understand what these writers are saying? Upon re-reading his previous letters, I can only conclude that Brian is a man of exceptional intelligence, well educated, with an excellent grasp of history and the English language. (I suspect he may have been educated in Great Britain.) Nope, it’s not due to lack of intelligence! There’s got to be another agenda here.

Regarding Colin Powell’s beautiful comment that “the only foreign land the US has ever asked for was enough to bury our fallen soldiers.” From that statement, most of us understood he was referring to land given by other nations, in perpetuity, for military cemeteries in Europe and Asia, after the war. Brian mentions we “still have land in other nations being used for our military bases in such places as Cuba, Afghanistan, Kuwait, etc.” Brian is certainly smart enough to know what Powell was referring to, but his agenda is to apply his Gibney Bait-and-Switch technique in an attempt to ridicule and invalidate Colin Powell’s statement. In the words of Ronald Reagan, Brian, “There you go again!”

Frank Viola

320 Great Quarter Road, Newtown                             April 15, 2003