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Letters to the Editor: The CIA is run by good people who do their best I was surprised to read in Friday's Guest Forum that Barbara Rosen is "90 per cent sure the CIA deliberately helped get the World Trade Center bombed." Every one of the eight "facts" she lists to support her conclusions are either wrong or are taken out of context to create a conspiracy that simply beggars belief. For example, she says that for two hours after the bombing, no fighter aircraft were scrambled which is contrary to standard procedure when a plane deviates from its flight path. First, that is not standard procedure. Second, this implies that someone, somewhere gave the orders for Air Force jets to remain on the ground. Just think about that. Hundreds of people in the chain of command, possibly including the White House, would have had to be involved. Orders would have been written, signed and countersigned and everyone with knowledge would have had to accept their explicit involvement in the deaths of 3,000 Americans. Not only that, but the post 9-11 investigation by Congress and a very professional media - perhaps the most intrusive and thorough America has ever seen - has failed to turn up a single memo or person who knows about this part of the alleged plot. Contrary to what some people choose to believe, the CIA is not staffed or run by monsters who see part of their job as killing Americans. On the contrary, it is a government bureaucracy subject to Congressional oversight and legal constraints and is run by good people who are doing their best to protect this country. James Adams, Ashland Annulling supply and demand should be easy for the city Emboldened by the lessons learned from running the AFN, i.e., Business plans are meant to be rewritten as needed; Business plans mean squat while inter-departmental fund transfers are indefinitely available; Under-performance of 50 percent can be viewed as success (see 1 and 2), the city is ready to officially tackle affordable housing. Noises coming from a recent joint city council and housing committee meeting indicate that the council is willing to pony up the money to create a city position of Affordable Housing. That's the cheap bit. As Housing Committee Chair, and I'll speculate, the guy tapped to fill the impending job, Andy Dungan candidly says, "you've got to have land and � funding before you can get things done." Translation: for a laudable, if quixotic, cause, the city is moving to create a job tasked with promoting population growth, possibly sprawl, cut-rate design and new or creative uses of existing taxes. Now that the city has mastered running a post-bubble, fiber optic broadband business, abrogating the laws of supply and demand should be a walk in Lithia Park for Ashland. John Gaffey, Ashland Guest forum: A letter to Sen. Wyden By William E. Lucas, M.D., Ashland You and Senator Hatch are to be commended for attempting to shed more light on health care reform by means of your proposed legislation to establish a select committee to study the issue by soliciting input from every segment of the public. But why are you trying to reinvent the wheel? There is no question that our chaotic system of health care delivery desperately needs reform. We spend much more (over 14 percent of our GDP) on health care than any other major industrialized country, yet we have some 41 million uninsured citizens, and at least as many significantly underinsured, while all these other countries provide basic health care to all their citizens. Setting aside the moral imperative of providing basic health care, the public health and economic implications of our present non-system demand comprehensive reform. Two years ago the World Health Organization rated the overall quality of health care in the United States 37th out of some 150 nations evaluated. But back to the main point of this letter. Health care reform has been exhaustively studied time and time again over at least the last 80 years in this country. Starting in 1918, when the first legislation to establish universal health care in this country was introduced in congress (and defeated as a "socialistic" German idea, coming from a country we had just fought a war against), and through the Roosevelt and Truman, Johnson, and Nixon administrations, legislation was proposed but bitterly opposed by the health insurance industry and organized medicine (the American Medical Association). The only breakthroughs were Medicaid and Medicare, just as bitterly opposed by the same organizations. The only rational system of comprehensive health care reform is based on a "single payer" model. Please refer to a model piece of legislation, "The American Health Security Act," introduced in congress over a decade ago by the late Senator Paul Wellstone and Representative Jim McDermott, which is based on this model. Even though on at least two occasions both the Congressional Budget Office and the General Accounting Office have analyzed this proposed legislation favorably as providing comprehensive health care at no more, and in the long run less, than we are spending now, the bill has never been debated because of opposition from the vested interests. You know better than I do the enormous sums of money spent by the for profit health insurance industry and the pharmaceutical industry in lobbying against this model of reform. As eloquently stated by Representative McDermott, this is not "socialized" medicine. In fact, the single payer model provides more freedom than now exists for doctors and hospitals to be independent practitioners and providers, and it is the only system on the horizon which could possibly reign in the rapidly escalating cost of pharmaceuticals. Many important national organizations within and outside the medical community have studied and endorsed the single payer model. And as for politicians, most recently Al Gore, in a speech given not long before his decision not to seek the nomination in 2004, had the courage to state that after looking at all the options he believed that a single payer health care system was the only viable alternative. So once again, why waste three more years studying and getting input on an issue that has already had much more than enough study and input? Yours in good health. LINKS: DAILY TIDINGS: Main | News | Sports | Business | Obituaries | Opinion | Columnists | AP News | Subscribe | Archives | Weather | Classifieds | Contact Us | Privacy REVELS: Main | Calendar | Dining | Movies | T.V. OTHER: Road Cams Copyright 2003 Ashland Daily Tidings 541.482.3456. 1661 Siskiyou Blvd., Ashland, OR 97520. Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. - Advertisers -