To the Editor:

In attempting to defend President Bush's record, Ernest A. Howell (Public Commentary, Dec. 10) makes some inaccurate statements that need to be addressed. In the order of the original assertions:

Our "seven and a half years of freedom from additional terrorist attacks" are more by chance than by the Bush Administration's efforts--there were also no jihadist attacks on American soil between the first World Trade Center bombing and the 9/11 attacks. As for preventing such attacks, a bipartisan group led by former Representative Lee Hamilton, former Gov. Thomas Kean of New Jersey (who chaired the 9/11 Commission), and former Senator Warran Rudman gave the a president a "C" for his efforts to prevent nuclear, chemical, and biological terrorism.

Over the course of Mr. Bush's oversight, national employment figures have dipped slightly below the historical average--but more importantly, median income has slid dramatically over the past eight years.

The Bush Doctrine to go after terrorists at home and abroad somehow translated into abandoning the search for Osama bin Laden, the architect of 9/11, and sending our armed forces to invade a country with no connection to those attacks, thereby created a recruiting bonanza for terrorist groups.

As noted by Nobel Prize-winning economist and columnist Paul Krugman and many others, President Bush's tax cuts yielded no improvement in employment but did give us a record-setting deficit.

Our armed forces have suffered. Gen. Peter J. Schoowhich maker, Army chief of staff, testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee that "we have a strategy right now that is outstripping the means to execute it." The Army's vice chief of staff, Gen. Richard A. Cody, told the House Armed Services Committee's readiness panel that "the readiness continues to decline of our next-todeploy forces." Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff stated "I am not comfortable" with the preparedness of Army units in the United States.

Mr. Bush has gifted us with the worst recession since the Great Depression, an erosion of civil liberties and environmental protection that has caused career civil servants to quit the EPA and Justice Department in droves, the torture of detainees that does not yield good intelligence yet puts our own soldiers in danger and has ruined the credibility of the United States worldwide. He turned his attention away from the terrorists who murdered thousands of Americans and concocted false intelligence to justify attacking a nation that was far down our list of security concerns, at a cost of the lives of thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of billions of dollars.

The list goes on: New Orleans, even more Americans are without health care, substituting policy for science and fact in all federal agencies.

"That" is objectivity. Scott Rothstein, Massapequa