East Pakistan v. My Lai

Sir: I am surprised at your labeling Yahya Khan a "good soldier" [Aug. 2]. If Yahya Khan is a good soldier, Lieut. Galley and Captain Medina are angels. After all, they are said to be responsible for killing only a couple of hundred civilians, which is nothing compared with the "bravery" of Yahya Khan, who has overall responsibility for slaughtering 200,000 civilians and creating 7,500,000 refugees.

GULAB MIRCHANDANI

Hillside, N.J.

Sir: As a refugee who came from East Pakistan in 1950, 1 know the agony, the suffering, the humiliation one has to go through. People say that the U.S. generally supports the wrong horse. I don't think it is a question of supporting the wrong horse. Rather it is primarily a question of humanity.

1 fail to understand how the U.S. Government can send arms to kill the helpless, innocent people of East Pakistan.

AMITABHA CHATTERJEE

Jackson Heights, N.Y.

Sir: When the Britons kill the Irish to keep their kingdom united, nobody raises a finger; but when we try to wash out the separatists and the secessionists, we are denied even moral support.

ANWAR-UL-HAQ

Sahiwal, West Pakistan

Bravo and Eureka!

Sir: Bravo to the Apollo men! No excitement? Our vision is dulled and obscured by our priority of values. Without the Viet Nam War, there would be enough money for space exploration and the curing of social ills on our planet. For that matter, there may be gold out there!

(MRS.) MARY ANN GILMOUR

Whittier, Calif.

Sir: Let's save money on Apollo 16 and all future space flights. By ensuring that the astronauts are between the ages of twelve and 26 and enrolled in some institute of learning, we should be able to send them all at half fare.

JOHN A. LITTLE

Terre Haute, Ind.

P.O.W. Issue

Sir: I am quoted in your July 26 issue as saying there are " 'just' 1,600 men missing in Indochina." This statement is erroneous and inaccurate.

In the first place the figure of 1,600 has been used by myself and others to indicate the approximate number of American servicemen who are missing in action and are being held as prisoners of war in North Viet Nam, South Viet Nam, Laos and Cambodia.

Secondly, throughout my years of efforts on behalf of these brave men, it has been my constant theme that no amount of "antiwar" or "peace" publicity in this country should be allowed to give credence to the enemy's propaganda that the American people could not possibly care about "just" 1,500 or 1,600 men. I have never spoken of "just" 1,600 men in any other context.

Inaccuracies such as this are inexcusable, not for any repercussions to the individual misquoted, but for the jeopardy in which they place each one of these most important individual Americans and the anguish caused to their families and loved ones.

ROBERT DOLE

U.S. Senator from Kansas

Chairman, Republican National Committee

Washington

>TIME misinterpreted the Senator's remarks on a CBS Reports show. Senator Dole said: "We have to be very candid about it. We don't want to stay there just for the prisoners; we don't want to get out just for the prisoners. They're very important, but they represent less than one-half of 1% of the Americans who've died in South Viet Nam."

Buckley's Top Secret

Sir: Dean Rusk's admission that he may very well have written the memo attributed to him by the National Review is a clear vindication of William Buckley's hoax [Aug. 2].

When the dust finally settled on this scene of confusion and forgery, Buckley's act was one of tragic revelation, not, as you termed it, "an elaborate schoolboy prank." The hoax is no different from or more humorous than the one conducted in Executive Branch offices then or now. MICHAEL SPANGLER

Evanston, Ill.

The Last Analysis

Sir: It is a widespread fallacy among traditional psychotherapists that behaviorists frequently approach the area of thought control [Aug. 2]. Rather, it is the neo-Freudian revisionists like Erich Fromm, et al., who attempt to manipulate patients by moralizing and who, in the last analysis, tell them how they ought to behave.

DAVID T. MURPHY

Philadelphia

Sir: Behavior therapists are correct when they claim that, in many cases, their methods work. So does torture. (THE REV.) DAVID FREDERICK BROWN

San Francisco

Talitha Getty

Sir: You say that only one person attended Talitha Getty's funeral in Rome [July 26]. That is because the real burial service took place July 20 in Wassenaar, a suburb of The Hague, in the presence of her husband, Paul Getty Jr., her father and many others.

E.T. VAN DER VELDE

Rotterdam, The Netherlands

The Tomato and Round Numbers

Sir: As a mathematician, I found your Essay "Of Imaginary Numbers" [Aug. 2] an entertaining plea for restraint. You failed, however, to mention a serious branch of the same problem: twisted statistics. We are constantly being bombarded with an endless stream of significant-sounding statistics. On closer examination, one discovers that the impressive statistic has little or nothing to do with the conclusions presented. The late author Mark Clifton placed the problem in proper perspective when he noted that "100% of all people who were born before the year 1800 who had eaten tomatoes had died."

ROBERT WEINBERG

Chicago

Sir: I wonder if TIME'S division of imaginary numbers could provide me with the latest count on the number of sacred cows in India. The last time I checked, a few years ago, sacred-cow population estimates were readily available--give or take 234 million. They ranged from a high of 500 million in Commonweal, through a New York Times Magazine count of 240 million, to a Manchester Guardian editorial determination of 176 million.

BUD JOHNSON

Milwaukee

>It is safe to say that estimates cited by Reader Johnson average out to 305 million. The D.I.N.'s sacred-cow specialist could be no more precise than that.

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