In an effort to find positive things to say about Jesse Helms' tenure in the Senate, one of the things often mentioned is his fierce opposition to communism. Those of us who lived through the Cold War were schooled in the many faults and oppressive practices of Soviet communism that Jesse Helms so loathed.

The Soviet government engaged in wiretapping and eavesdropping on personal conversations without a warrant, the arrest and detention of persons in a Gulag of secret prisons with no trial and no habeas corpus, the repeated interrogation and torture of detainees and the illegal invasion of two sovereign nations, Afghanistan and Czechoslovakia. All of this was done in the name of national security. Also in the Soviet Union, there was a news organization, Pravda, that uncritically repeated information fed to it by the Party.

It is ironic that Jesse Helms would be a leader in the conservative movement that at the time of his death had led the federal government in legalizing many of those same Soviet communist practices in various "Patriot" Acts, executive orders and most recently a surveillance act that legalizes some wiretapping without warrant to "protect the American people" ("Senate gives immunity to telecom firms," news story, July 10).

Joe Burton

Raleigh