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About The nugget. (Sisters, Or.) 1994-current | View Entire Issue (June 28, 2017)
2 Wednesday, June 28, 2017 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon O P I N I O y p p a H of h t 4 July! The Nugget will be closed Tuesday, July 4 Early Deadline for display advertising, announcements and events calender for the July 5 issue is 3 p.m. on Thursday, June 29 Early Deadline for classified advertising and letters to the editor for the July 5 issue is noon on Friday, June 30. Letters to the Editor… The Nugget welcomes contributions from its readers, which must include the writer’s name, address and phone number. Let- ters to the Editor is an open forum for the community and contains unsolicited opinions not necessarily shared by the Editor. The Nugget reserves the right to edit, omit, respond or ask for a response to letters submitted to the Editor. Letters should be no longer than 300 words. Unpublished items are not acknowledged or returned. The deadline for all letters is noon Monday. To the Editor: After reading the article in the June 21 Nugget about the Coles purchasing the 345- acre Patterson Ranch, I was so happy to see they were not going to cut up the ranch for development, but leave it as-is for hay. Having lived on and worked the 1,000-acre “Old Macedo Ranch” in Danville, California, producing cattle and red oat hay, it breaks my heart to see beautiful ranches cut up and homes there instead. I was happy to find the Forest Service had made our old place part of Mt. Diablo State Park so no building is pos- sible, but a few thousand homes are built right up to our old fenceline. Now when I drive by that beautiful Patterson Ranch, I can smile knowing it will be preserved. Now if only the ranch on the east side of town is so blessed. Sylvia Cara s s s To the Editor: Regarding the story “Spectacular sky show is on the way,” The Nugget, June 21, page 1): People who attempt to venture out along See LETTERS on page 20 Sisters Weather Forecast Courtesy of the National Weather Service, Pendleton, Oregon Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday Monday Sunny Sunny Sunny Sunny Sunny Sunny 75/43 81/46 84/47 82/45 82/46 81/na The Nugget Newspaper, Inc. Website: www.nuggetnews.com 442 E. Main Ave., P.O. Box 698, Sisters, Oregon 97759 Tel: 541-549-9941 | Fax: 541-549-9940 | editor@nuggetnews.com Postmaster: Send address changes to The Nugget Newspaper, P.O. Box 698, Sisters, OR 97759. Third Class Postage Paid at Sisters, Oregon. Publisher - Editor: Kiki Dolson News Editor: Jim Cornelius Production Manager: Leith Easterling Classifieds & Circulation: Teresa Mahnken Advertising: Karen Kassy Graphic Design: Jess Draper Proofreader: Pete Rathbun Accounting: Erin Bordonaro The Nugget is mailed to residents within the Sisters School District; subscriptions are available outside delivery area. Third-class postage: one year, $45; six months (or less), $25. First-class postage: one year, $85; six months, $55. Published Weekly. ©2017 The Nugget Newspaper, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. All advertising which appears in The Nugget is the property of The Nugget and may not be used without explicit permission. The Nugget Newspaper, Inc. assumes no liability or responsibility for information contained in advertisements, articles, stories, lists, calendar etc. within this publication. All submissions to The Nugget Newspaper will be treated as uncondition- ally assigned for publication and copyrighting purposes and subject to The Nugget Newspaper’s unrestricted right to edit and comment editorially, that all rights are currently available, and that the material in no way infringes upon the rights of any person. The publisher assumes no responsibility for return or safety of artwork, photos, or manuscripts. N Robert C. Koehler The corpses pile up like sandbags along the planet’s geopolitical borders. “Perhaps his condition deteriorated and the authori- ties decided it was better to release him in a coma than as a corpse.” So said an expert on North Korea recently, quoted in the New York Times following the death of 22-year-old Otto Warmbier, six days after he had been released in a comatose state from a North Korean prison. He had been sentenced to 15 years of hard labor a year and a half ago because he had taken a propaganda poster off the wall in his hotel. Oh, Lord. The shocking wrongness and horror of this young man’s death — the absurdity of his arrest, the razor slash of his tears — is all over the news. Who couldn’t identify — with him, with his parents? He had been dehumanized. He had a future, but it got pulled away from him by uniformed lunatics, or so the news presents this tragedy: in the context of America and its enemies. And this is the context of the news and the limit, apparently, of the conscious- ness of the U.S. media. The day the young man died, for instance, a 15-year- old lawsuit on behalf of another group of wrongful- arrest victims wound up being dismissed by the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2002, the Center for Constitutional Rights had brought the suit against a number of offi- cials in the George W. Bush administration — including former Attorney General John Ashcroft and, ironi- cally, Robert Mueller, for- mer FBI director who is currently heading up the Trump-Russia investiga- tion — on behalf of several hundred South Asian and Arab non-citizens who were rounded up and jailed after 9/11. “Based solely on their race, religion, ethnicity, and immigration status,” accord- ing to the CCR, “hundreds of men were detained as ‘terrorism suspects’ and held in brutal detention con- ditions for the many months it took the FBI and CIA to clear them of any connection to terrorism. They were then deported... “Our clients were held in a specially created Administrative Maximum Special Housing Unit ... in solitary confinement. They were purposefully deprived of sleep, denied contact with the outside world, beaten and verbally abused, and denied the ability to practice their religion.” That kept us safe. Some years ago the New York Times ran a rare account of one man’s expe- rience as a Gitmo detainee and U.S. torture victim. Lakhdar Boumediene, who in 2001 was living in Bosnia with his wife and daugh- ters and working for the Red Crescent Society of the United Arab Emirates, was accused of being a terrorist and arrested one morning, shortly after the 9/11 attack, when he showed up for work in Sarajevo. He wound up imprisoned at Guantanamo for seven years. In 2009, a federal district judge, after reviewing the U.S. case against Boumediene and four others arrested with him, found them innocent and ordered them released. Regarding his treatment at Gitmo he said: “I was kept awake for many days straight. I was forced to remain in painful positions for hours at a time. These are things I do not want to write about; I want only to forget.” The mostly classified 6,000-page Senate report on this topic, released in 2014, contains almost unbearable data about CIA “enhanced interrogation” methodol- ogy, including “rectal rehy- dration,” threats against the detainees’ children and par- ents, quasi-drowning, mock executions and “revved power drills” held near their heads. And many detain- ees died and many remain imprisoned without cause. Reading about all this in the context of North Korea’s imprisonment and apparent murder of Otto Warmbier doesn’t lessen the hell he went through as a victim of “hostage diplomacy,” but it does, I think, change one’s sense of who the enemy is. © 2017 Tribune Content Agency, LLC Opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer and are not necessarily shared by the Editor or The Nugget Newspaper.