An end to torture.

• Author: Doggett, Lloyd
• Position: LETTERS - Letter to the editor

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The Washington Monthly should be commended for its collection of antitorture essays published shortly before our unsuccessful efforts to override President Bush's veto of a ban on waterboarding and other inhumane practices ("No Torture, No Exceptions," January-March 2008). As General David Petraeus, our commander in Iraq, wrote to his troops last year: "Beyond the basic fact that such actions are illegal, history shows that they also are frequently neither useful nor necessary." I say follow our generals, not the Cheney ideologues, not the apologists.

Representative Lloyd Doggett

(D-Texas)

U.S. House of Representatives

Washington, D.C.

If the next president does not immediately and unequivocally reaffirm this country s adherence to the Geneva Conventions, without exceptions, we will have elected the wrong person.

Ann Bjork

Seattle, Wash.

There are two important words missing from your collection of articles: law enforcement. If you have laws but lack the will to enforce them, they are just words. I find all this handwringing by people who have not, as far as I know, suggested that we should impeach and arrest as war criminals the president and the vice...