Congratulations to the American Council of Trustees and Alumni for its report on American academics whose response to the Sept. 11 attacks was insufficiently jingoistic. Confusing the Taliban by adopting some of their own political values — ideological conformity, unquestioning acceptance of state policy — is a stroke of genius.

Since ACTA's self-appointed purview extends to foreign countries, however — its list of professorial "thought criminals" includes at least one Canadian — I am disappointed at my own exclusion. Like one of Canada's opposition parties, I've advocated the use of international law and the UN rather than unilateral military action.

I've sometimes expressed puzzlement as to how aspects of U.S. foreign policy — say, the financing of the Contras' terrorism in Nicaragua — can be reconciled with America's values of democracy and human rights. I may even have suggested that ignorance breeds hatred, a sentiment which earned one professor a place on ACTA's incipient blacklist.

Evidently I have not generated enough clippings in the student press, the apparent primary source for ACTA's team of crack researchers.

Robert Hackett
Communication, Simon Fraser University