Should the letters that the school students are writing/sending the troops be examined by the faculty before sending?

I was reading an online story where one soldier was highly upset by what some of the kids were saying about their actions. He received letters from Brooklyn middle-school children accusing GIs of destroying mosques and killing civilians in Iraq.

I do think that they should be checked, at least for facts first. Why would the school want to encourage children to send letters full of false accusations to the soldiers?

MTT, I probably should have posted the link that I was reading. here

Perhaps the children should have been made better educated before writing the letters.

But the US army has destroyed mosques and killed civilians in Iraq. The accusations are not false, although maybe one-sided.

"Even thoe [sic] you are risking your life for our country, have you seen how many civilians you or some other soldier killed? ...I know your [sic] trying to save our country and kill the terrorists but you are also destroying holy places like Mosques." is maybe a dumb thing to have sent to a soldier serving in Iraq, but it's a valid point.

I take it, by the irrelevant mention of the writer's being Muslim, the snide 'sic's and remarks about smiley faces, that the newspaper is trying to show this exercise in the worst possible light. If those two sentences were the most outrageous they could come up with, then it's a storm in a teacup. Out of 21 letters "nine of the students made clear their distaste for the president or the war" - isn't that more support for the war than the opinion polls show?

I know it's true but I don't think it should be written in letters to the soldiers. I think we should boost their moral anyway we can.

Were the children even given the reason why mosques were destroyed? Taught about weapondry and how it works? Or were they given the information with the inference that the soldiers are running amok over there slaughting women and children and blowing up mosques for the fun of it? This is what I meant about education.

I agree that it was odd to have kids send such letters to soldiers. They should have gone to the Whitehouse instead.

Of course, once the soldiers were there and thrown into the fight they had to blow up buildings being used by snipers, and civilians are an inevitable casualty of war - particularly of the kind of intensive bombing campaign waged, and of the confused fight against guerillas indistinguishable at times from civilians.

But who decided to send the soldiers to Iraq in the first place? And who decided that Falluja (for instance) was to be flattened? Letters questioning those decisions should go to the higher-ups.

The invasion wasn't "for the fun of it", but it wasn't for the destruction of illegal WMD, either. And if it was for democracy in the Middle East, a murderous bombing campaign was an odd way to attempt that.

The letters were wrongly addressed.

I agree. And that goes back, again, to education. Who told the children about these events, and failed to mention who is responsible for them? The ignorance here isn't the children's fault, the teachers who are teaching the current events are at fault.