"In the previous posting he indicated that Google asked him to contact the various site authors and ask them to remove their links. Why should he have to do this?"

He shouldn't have to do that. It's incompetence on Google's part. The solution to spammy links, is to drop their value to zero, not to generate a penalty for the site that is the target of said spammy links. This is a flaw in how Google has chosen to handle low quality sites and spammy links. The incompetence aspect is that they failed to be creative enough to find a better solution, and fell back to using a hammer approach.