She Gets It!

John Demjanjuk is an alleged Nazi death camp guard who has lived in Ohio for fifty-eight years. He currently faces deportation to Germany to face 29,000 counts of accessory to murder.

Marian Woodson is a seventy-three year old woman from Columbus, Ohio who, as a child, spent time in a Japanese internment camp in the Philippines at about the same time Demjanjuk is alleged to have conducted mass murder for the Nazis.

Her letter to the editor appeared in the May 4 Columbus Dispatch:

John Demjanjuk likely will be prosecuted under the Nuremberg war-crimes protocols. That group established unequivocally that "I was only following orders" is not a viable defense.

The individual Nazis who made the decisions and gave the orders were tried for crimes against humanity and hanged. Members of the Bush administration made the decisions and gave the orders to engage in torture. President Barack Obama is on the horns of a dilemma: whether or not to prosecute. Should he risk the enormously divisive social and political costs of doing so?

I'm a 73-year-old retiree. I spent my childhood in Camp Holmes, a Japanese internment camp in the Philippines. This issue has had powerful resonance with me ever since I saw the first reports of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Could we, as a country, do the equivalent of "shunning"? Could our allies join us? Could the United Nations issue a statement? Former President George W. Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney are too blinded by their arrogance to recognize that they were an American "axis of evil."

There are too many critical issues that the president has to deal with to waste the time and energy on this.

Obama already made a powerful statement repudiating the actions of the previous administration by ordering the closing of the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

MARIAN J. WOODSON

Columbus

Clearly, Ms. Woodson is someone who gets it.

As serious as the allegations may be that members of the previous administration committed war crimes, she understands the importance of maintaining focus on the issues of the economy, climate change, health care, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Middle East Peace, and Social Security.

Starting a "Who knew what and when?" sideshow would undoubtedly derail the opportunity to implement the changes Americans voted for when they elected Barack Obama to be their president last November.