Hungry Blues

Via Daniel Kreiss in the comments:

Cindy Sheehan to Be Arrested Thursday

by David Swanson

Mon Aug 8th, 2005 at 10:55:39 PDT

(From the diaries -- kos)

Cindy Sheehan phoned me from Texas a few minutes ago to say that she's been informed that beginning Thursday, she and her companions will be considered a threat to national security and will be arrested. Coincidentally, Thursday is the day that Rice and Rumsfeld visit the ranch, and Friday is a fundraiser event for the haves and the have mores. Cindy said that she and others plan to be arrested.

http://www.meetwithcindy.org

Daniel wrote, "I have not been able to confirm this, but for what it is worth, it would not entirely surprise me." What I wrote back to him may have sounded like hyperbole to some:

No, it would not surprise me at all. In fact, I think it is likely. What Cindy Sheehan is doing has too much potential to draw popular support for the government to allow this to go on.

Arresting her as a threat to national security will be true to long standing COINTELPRO tactics that are not unique to this administration but which this administration has immeasurably increased its powers to practice.

But another unconfirmed report from AfterDowningStreet.org suggests my radar is properly calibrated:

Cindy Sheehan called After Downing Street moments ago at 10 p.m. ET to report that the Secret Service is trying to intimidate her and members of Gold Star Families for Peace, Iraq Veterans Against the War, and Veterans for Peace into leaving their protest near President Bush's Crawford, Texas ranch.

This morning Cindy led dozens of protesters as close as they could get to the ranch; they were stopped by local police about five miles away. Cindy and others plan to stay there throughout Bush's five-week August vacation until he agrees to meet with her and other family members of soldiers killed in Iraq and answer their questions about the war.

Throughout the afternoon and evening, however, the Secret Service has been telling protesters that if they stay there they may be hit by Secret Service vehicles. Cindy says, "They've told us this at least ten times. There isn't much room between the side of the road and the fence, and they go zooming by far over the speed limit." Cindy reports the Secret Service already ran a mother and her six year-old off the road. She believes the Secret Service's actions are a clear attempt to coerce her and the other protesters into leaving.

Cindy and others are asking to meet with the Secret Service and local police to ensure the safety of everyone involved. In the meantime, she asks that anyone who can contact the media to alert them to the situation.

If you are able to do this, media contact information can be found here. Please politely let them know what's been happening with the Secret Service, and encourage them to continue covering Cindy's efforts to meet with President Bush.

If this kind of government targeting of people with opposing views is new to you, or you think it is a thing of the past, gone after COINTELPRO was "abolished" in the 1970s, go read about Judi Bari.

Photo from AfterDowningStreet.org.

President Bush Ditches Mother Of Slain Soldier

By Nathan Diebenow

Associate Editor

The Lonestar Iconoclast

CRAWFORD — The mother of a U.S. soldier slain in Iraq was denied a face-to-face meeting with President Bush here Saturday after she walked through a ditch-like path in the August heat to the President’s Prairie Chapel Ranch.

“I didn’t come all this way from California to stand here in a ditch,” said Cindy Sheehan, 48, co-founder of Gold Star Families for Peace, attempting to continue her trek to the ranch.

Even though two of the President’s aides later agreed to deliver her message to him, Sheehan said that she would remain in Crawford for the whole month, if need be, until she is granted a private audience with the commander-in-chief to ask him for what “noble cause” did her son die overseas.

“If he doesn’t come out to talk to me in Crawford, I’ll follow him to D.C., and I’ll camp out on his lawn,” she said, to a round of applause from her supporters. “I’ll go to prison. I don’t want to live in a country where people are treated this way.”

Sheehan’s actions, she said, were sparked by President Bush’s comments like those made last Wednesday in Grapevine to about 1,800 members of the American Legislative Exchange Council: “Our men and women who’ve lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan and in this war on terror have died in a noble cause and a selfless cause.”

“We all know by now that that’s not true, and I want to ask George Bush, ‘Why did my son die? What was the noble cause that he died for?’” said Sheehan. “I don’t want [President Bush] to use my son’s name or my family name to justify any more killing or to exploit my son’s name, my son’s sacrifice, or my son’s honor to justify more killing. As a mother, why would I want one more mother to go through what I’m going through, Iraqi or American?

“And I want to tell him that the only way to honor my son’s sacrifice is to bring the troops home now.”



Her son, Casey Sheehan, 24, of Vacaville, Calif., died in Baghdad, Iraq, on April 4, 2004, when his unit was attacked with rocket-propelled grenades and small arms fire. He was assigned to 1st Battalion, 82nd Field Artillery Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division, Fort Hood, Texas.

(Read the rest.)

View CNN interview with Cindy Sheehan in Crawford, TX [windows media], courtesy of Brad Blog and David Edwards. Interview also includes Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and George Allen (R-VA).

Marsha has an op-ed in today's Honolulu Advertiser:

The biggest impediment to voting is not the Ku Klux Klan or the White Citizens Council or economic sanctions; it is apathy. The two biggest sources of apathy are oppression and privilege. Privilege enables people to vote their pocketbook, and oppressed people feel there is nothing for which to vote.

Today, far too many people do not appreciate or do not know of the struggles that women, African-Americans, Asians, Pacific islanders and other minorities have gone through for the right to vote.

Consider:

• Not until 1920 were women granted the right to vote.
• In 1946, racial barriers were let down for Chinese and Filipinos so that they could vote.
• In 1952, Japanese, Koreans, and Samoans became eligible for citizenship so they, too, could vote.
• And the 1965 Voting Rights Act removed impediments to voting for everyone.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, founder and president of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, said, "The nation is entering a mean-spirited attack on civil rights, and with it comes attempts to undermine or eliminate the Voting Rights Act. When President Bush was asked directly to support reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act, he refused to make a commitment to extend the Voting Rights Act."

If we are to have peace, justice, and prosperity, we must have open and honest dialogue. We must register to vote and thoroughly participate in our democracy.

Across America, too often it is the lower-income people who have the lowest voter registration, and the people of privilege who have the highest. We need to turn that around.

(Read the rest.)

INTRO

One reason I like Heather Baum's Born Again Jim Crow essay is that she makes a clear connection between old Jim Crow practices and right wing corporate control of the voting technology industry. This connection is important for understanding the present and it is important for understanding the past.

The irrational race hatred that was (and is) used to enforce Jim Crow keeps some people from seeing the purpose of such discriminatory tactics: to keep power in the white hands of a select few. In his book The Making of Black Revolutionaries James Forman, former Executive Secretary of SNCC, recalled the comment of a white southerner in the 1950s:

"Why, in the county where my friend lives, the Negras are nine to one and his father is the sheriff of that county. Do you think if the Negras had the right to vote that they would elect his father as sheriff? We got the power and we intend to keep it." (92)

Decades ago, before companies like Diebold and ES&S controlled the ballot casting and vote tabulation processes in a staggering number of US counties, there were methods like Georgia's "county unit" system, as described by former SNCC worker Joan C. Browning, in "My vote was counted …. At least once."

The county unit system of weighing votes meant that it took more than a hundred Fulton County (Atlanta) votes to equal each Telfair County vote.

James Carmichael and my Telfair County neighbor, Eugene "Gene" Talmadge, contended for the Democratic party’s nomination for governor in 1946. Gene, "The Wild Man of Sugar Creek," was financed by the keep-taxes-and-government-services-low corporations – the railroads, Coca Cola, Georgia Power Company. He campaigned on the single issue of keeping African-Americans disenfranchised.

Carmichael received more popular votes statewide than Eugene Talmadge, but under the "county unit" system, Talmadge won the Democratic primary anyway.

In the General Election that fall, the Talmadge Telfair County Courthouse Crowd certified a consolidated county return showing 1,788 voters. Although Gene Talmadge was the only name printed on ballot for governor, 77 of the 1,788 ballots were tallied as write-in votes for his son, Herman Talmadge for governor. In addition to the official countywide voter turnout of 1,788, though, an extra 48 write-in votes were counted for Herman for governor. The 48 extras came from Helena precinct, where those 48 voters "over voted" for both Talmadges for governor. Both votes were certified.

Atlanta Journal reporter George Goodwin found that the last 34 of Helena precinct’s 103 voters had voted in alphabetical order, beginning at the letter A and continuing through the letter K.

Goodwin couldn’t locate fourteen of those 34 voters. The twenty he did find denied having voted at all.

Six of them had lived in Telfair County but had moved away more than two years before the election. Two were dead, one for four years, one for seven years. A Marine had been out of the county more than a year. One was reported to be a fictitious person.

Of the real Telfair County residents Goodwin found, one said he did not vote, and he did not have a wife although his wife was listed as voting. The wife in another couple said, "We never voted for nobody," and that she had never voted in her life and as far as she knew, she had never been registered to vote.

One name was listed twice. Another said that he had once been erroneously registered under the name on the list and that he had corrected his registration, but "neither me nor my wife voted in the general election," he said. "I remember it was raining that day and the windshield wiper on my car was broken, and neither of us went to the polls."

When the Courthouse Crowd certified the county election returns, they added votes: Cobbville precinct listed 86 persons on the voter list, but reported 186 votes; in Jacksonville, 27 became 127; Temperance’s 24, certified as 124; Milan’s 242 was crudely erased and "4" had written over the "2", making Milan’s certified total 442. Telfair County certified 600 "phantom" votes.

Under the county unit system, it would take more than 65,000 Atlanta votes to merely equal the fraudulent votes in Telfair County.

A combination of a discriminatory system, which counts some votes more than others, and an array of underhanded practices controlled the outcome of the 1946 Georgia election for governor, which should sound familiar: high tech and low tech Republican election fraud tactics were brought out in amazing force in swing states like Ohio and Florida, which each cast enough votes in the Electoral College system to have disproportionate control over the outcome of the 2004 presidential election.

THE VIDEOS

The following three videos from Bev Harrris' organization Black Box Voting provide a nice primer on the basics of what is wrong with allowing Diebold and ES&S to control 80% of the electronic vote count in the US.

(All should realize that optical scan ballot counters are also electronic voting equipment with many of the same vulnerabilities and problems as DREs (aka, touch-screen machines). Unless the paper ballots that we stick into the optical scan machines are the ballot of record and are counted by hand in every precinct, they are no better than Diebold's infamous DREs.)

• Vendors Are Like Family
• Security Through Obscurity Is A Joke
• Address The Issue . . . Don't Shoot The Messenger

FURTHER READING

• Ellen Theisen, The Privatization of United States Elections [pdf]
• EllenTheisen, Voter-Verified Paper Balllots are not enough to fix DRE Problems
• CountTheVote.org, "Shocking" Election Practices Revealed In Georgia (July 18, 2005)

[I originally published this piece by Heather Baum on No Stolen Democracy in January. I republish it here for the 40th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act and because it is still deeply relevant. Heather wrote "Born Again Jim Crow" last fall, when we were between the two 40th anniversary dates, mentioned, below. --BG]

by Heather Baum

Who would have thought that on the 40th anniversary of Freedom Summer and the Voting Rights Act we would be fighting for voting rights for all of America? I'm sure you understand that vote suppression is not without historic precedence. The fight for suffrage is elemental to the peoples history. In our own life times, we know this from the history of Jim Crow. A system we fought a bloody battle to bring to an end in the south. We thought it was dead. But it is not. What has happened during the last three or four election cycles is an attempt to give birth to a "born again" Jim Crow. The obvious goal is to bring it to a new era of technological sophistication and spread it throughout the country...If unchallenged this could lead to a permanent one party rule. In Minnesota, we managed to beat it back...but I believe we cannot let this stand.

Bush can not wage war around the world in the name of democracy and fail to practice it at home. What's coming out about election suppression and fraud goes way past whether it's too late to find enough votes to save Kerry. Postmortems are important, but we have a genuine opportunity to reveal the Karl Rove voter suppression strategy. Now is the time to nail the right wing anti-democracy machine to the wall. Fighting for fair elections is fundamental, not just for the future, but for the present. Bush won no mandate. Yet he has already begun to spend his "political capital" in Faluja...and this will cost millions of lives.

The true reality is voter suppression has been a long term strategy the Right has methodically applied to gain control of all four branches of government. They can not win without it and they have admitted this publicly. It is a dynamic strategy...it includes manipulation of the census count...and allowing gerrymandered redistricting. Among other things it also includes voter intimidation, stolen ballots, manipulation of mail in ballots, sending out mass mailings of unrequested absentee ballots in communities of color, mass distribution of racially sorted provisional ballots, creating 10 hour waits at the poles and finally implementation of a paperless unverifiable electronic voting system, owned by the President's supporters.

How can we know if the election is rigged if there is no paper trail? One of the reasons we won here in Minnesota is that we have a paper ballot system...we can count the votes. So to me it has gone way beyond whether Kerry won or lost. If we let this go unchallenged, not four...but two more years..(the Senate election) will come...and something will have changed...the problems will be worse...more entrenched. And then guess what?...We might have to live with Republicans in charge forever. We need to challenge the Right, fight for the vote, learn how to listen, talk to people and organize when we are doing it ...all at the same time.

The reality is that there is ample evidence not only that a totally hackable electronic voting system has been put in place but also that very massive serious voting irregularities took place on November 2nd. It seems odd to me that when you present this evidence to fair minded Republicans... they want it fixed..now. But when presented to many progressives and liberals they go into a swoon of denial... what is that about?

The Right thinks that if it says something often enough...and loud enough...that makes it true. I call that having smoke blown up your ass. The Bush Administration thinks by saying something...over and over...real loud.. they can "make us think" what they say is true. This is designed to divide the people..."progressive bashing"...used to be called "Red Baiting" in the days of Joe McCarthy...It is an old tried and true method of getting people to look the other way while someone has their hand in your pocket. We have a lot of work to do, and so I think we need to be organizing on all fronts. I choose to fight on the voting rights front, because as my Mothers daughter, and as a veteran of the Southern Freedom Movement, that is what I have done all my life. My mother and grandmothers before me fought for suffrage for all..and so do I.

How do we know that there were not enough votes cast to win, if no investigation is done? If people were wrongly prevented from voting, if legitimate votes were mis-counted or not counted at all...if we hope to ever have another fair election again... we need to know. This is a question that all fair minded people including Progressives, moderate Republicans and Libertarians want the answer to.

August 6 is also the anniversary of the Voting Rights Act. Here's a bit from Representative John Conyers to mark the occasion:

Today is the 40th Anniversary of the landmark Voting Rights Act, which was signed by LBJ on this date in 1965. This was one of the first major pieces of legislation I was involved with as a freshman Member of the House Judiciary Committee. While its importance cannot be understated, there is no doubt that much, much more remains to be done so that all Americans' voting rights are respected. My most recent public comments on the perilous state of voting rights in this nation were captured in a forum hosted by Harpers Magazine that I participated in on July 21. The audio feed can be accessed through the media clips associated with this blog.

A number of op-eds noted the anniversary. I read with particular interest Bob Dole's entry in the Washington Post, entitled "Grand Old Legacy" (registration required). Senator Dole makes an effort to highlight the important role Republicans played in the passage and reauthorization of the Act. While this is true, we should be careful not to sugarcoat matters, as my friend Senator Dole does in my judgment. For example, in 1982, many members of the GOP were our allies in extending the law (including current Judiciary Chairman Sensenbrenner), however my recollection is that Senator Dole and President Reagan required considerable prodding to support and sign this legislation, which is not at all apparent from reading the op-ed.

Senator Dole also notes that "while unlawful discrimination persists in America, shame now attaches to those who engage in it and are exposed. Most Americans believe that racial discrimination is wrong and should be punished. " I'd like to believe that Republicans like Senator Dole really believe this, but if that were the case, wouldn't some Republican have spoken out when Georgia recently passed a law requiring photo ID's to vote, even though we know this will have a discriminatory impact on African Americans? I complained about this more than three months ago, and wrote to the Justice Department asking if they agreed it violated the Voting Rights Act, but as of yet, we have not received a response. Also, where were the courageous Republicans to complain about the recent Mississippi and Texas redistricting cases, where districts were clearly drawn to disenfranchise Blacks, and the political heavies at the Department reportedly overruled career staff in accepting these discriminatory plans? Finally, Senator Dole neglects to mention that he was the lead sponsor of the infamous Dole-Canady bill, introduced and pushed in the mid and late 90's, which would have ended affirmative action as we know it -- even the type of outreach which has worked so sucessfully in our military. So, it will take more than a few words by RNC Chair Ken Mehlman or some rhetoric about the importance of the Voting Rights Act to erase the racist legacy of Nixon's Southern Strategy, Bush Sr.'s Willie Horton ads, and his son's demagoguery at Bob Jones University.

Sixty years ago today the US dropped the nuclear bomb called Little Boy over the central part of Hiroshima, killing at least 66,000 people.

In honor of this year's Hiroshima Day, I am posting this excerpt from my father's Political Autobiography.

By now the McCarthy period was upon us. The CIO was split and the traditional antagonisms on the left had taken a turn toward suicidal meanness. Then real disaster hit in the form of the Korean War. I got drafted, got married and had all my previous assumptions challenged. War was indeed hell. I was constantly one step away from a court martial. A full Colonel once told me that in his twenty five years in the Army he had never seen a man who was less of a soldier than I was. I thanked him and told him that I was only a civilian with a uniform on. I found myself in Japan after several small wounds and a massive case of dysentery that was written up in the Army Medical Journal. It was in Hiroshima that I had a profound religious experience. In the Hiroshima Museum there is a wall, all that is left of a building destroyed by the bomb. On that wall is etched the shadow of human beings which is all that is left of them. It was there that I came to understand that the distinction between just and unjust wars was blurred and that human existence was at great risk and that only a spiritual revolution would be sufficient if humanity was going to survive.

When I came home neither I or the left was the same. It was the time of the toad. There were no labor jobs open for me and I was sorting out my own thoughts. I did participate in electoral politics and the peace and civil rights movements but establishing myself in the role of husband and father took priority. I went to Columbia University School of General Studies and after a couple of years realized that I was too restless for academic life. As the fifties came to a close and the first stirrings of a new left emerged I was involved with CORE and the organizing of the Committee For A Sane Nuclear Policy. After several years of mundane earn a living jobs I went to work for the United Furniture Workers. I was Assistant President and functioned as the "staff intellectual" and as director of organization. I headed the research bureau, edited the newspaper and directed field organizing. I was often in the South and trying to organize integrated unions. The President of the Union Morris Pizer was one of the last of a vanishing breed of Jewish working class intellectuals. He was as comfortable in Carnegie Hall as in the union hall. After a couple of years the business union element pushed Pizer into a kind of corner and complained that I spent too much on organizing the South. Meanwhile SANE had grown and I was asked to become Executive Director of the Greater New York Council. Here we had some success. We lobbied for a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and got it. We established Hiroshima Day by organizing the first large peace march in America. It went from Princeton, New Jersey to the United Nations and 100,000 people assembled under the words from Isaiah "and they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks and neither shall they study war any more."

Yesterday, the St. Petersburg, FL Police Department issued a report concerning the allegations that Officers Mark Williams and Nicholas Lazzari were guilty of "Inefficiency / Conduct Unbecoming an Employee [CUBE]" when they handcuffed five-year-old Ja'eisha Scott at Fairmount Elementary School last March in St. Petersburg. While the resultant change in police and school policy concerning children in kindergarden through third grade is good, the focus on the conduct of the officers avoids the real questions about what is happening inside the Pinellas County Schools.

Police Department investigators found that

Some department violations were committed by the officers involved. For example, Officer Williams did not properly check out on the radio on three different occasions during these events. A more in-depth and thorough investigation should have been conducted prior to taking Ja'Eisha into custody. Officer Lazzari stated in his police report and then verbally to a supervisor that he felt the Baker Act [pdf] would have been appropriate. However, he should have recognized that Ja'Eisha did not qualify as a Baker Act.

Ultimately, the final disposition was the proper one. Ja'Eisha was released to her mother at the scene. She had not been transported from the school grounds at any time. No charges were filed and no referrals were made.

Both charges were sustained against Officer Williams and the charge of inefficiency was sustained against Officer Lazzari, but the Police Department has taken no disciplinary action against them. Rather, the St. Petersburg Police Department has issued a revision of its Juvenile Procedures:

In essence, supervisors will become involved in the disposition of children under the age of eight (8) prior to them being taken into custody. Our Legal Division will also be publishing a Legal Notice to all personnel indicating that in our Circuit Court, children less than eight (8) years of age are generally not prosecuted for crimes. Our Youth Resources Division has been tasked with working with the school system to develop some training for the patrol officer in dealing with small children who are displaying violent or disruptive behavior.

Th police investigation "found no evidence of racism by the officers." I've written extensively about the racism inherent in this story and about Florida's child-hating juvenile policy. However, I'd like to return to another theme of my reporting on Ja'eisha Scott case—the cover-up of the school's role in Ja'eisha's abuse, especially the role of Assistant Principal Nicole Dibenedetto.

When I was writing about this story in April, I noted that there were two conflicting accounts as to whether Ms. Dibenedetto pursued any measures other than calling St. Petersburg Police. An early report said Ms. Dibenedetto attempted to call Pinellas Schools police, but there was a mix up and someone in the school office called the city police instead. A later report stated that "the school called city police again after Pinellas schools police could not come," suggesting that the school did, in fact, call and get through to the school police.

In the Executive Summary of the St. Petersburg Police Memorandum on the allegations concerning "Inefficiency / Conduct Unbecoming an Employee," published in yesterday's SP Times, there is a detailed description of the chain of actions that led to city police coming to Fairmount Elementary School on a call concerning Ja'eisha Scott, the week before the handcuffing that was captured on video.

On March 8, 2005, Ja'Eisha engaged in inappropriate conduct in her classroom. An attempt was made by school staff to contact her mother and grandmother to respond to the school, but neither of them were immediately available to respond. The staff contacted Pinellas County Schools police and attempted to get them to respond as Ja'Eisha was becoming more disruptive. They had no one immediately available to respond, and the St. Petersburg Police Department was contacted to respond. The Communications Center processed the call, but before it was dispatched, a patrol supervisor was contacted, and the supervisor appropriately canceled the call. The school was recontacted and was advised police would not be responding. Historically, the Pinellas County Schools police would handle all calls for service at public elementary schools if the call did not involve drugs, weapons or other similar situations.

Yet in the Executive Summary account of March 14, when Ja'eisha Scott was handcuffed and video taped, there is no explanation of what led to the police dispatch of officers to the school. The account begins with the officers hearing from the dispatcher in their cruisers.

On March 14, 2005, Officers Nicholas Lazzari and Joshua Hanes were dispatched to a "Disorderly Juvenile." The dispatcher said, "It looks like it's a battery on a school official by a 5-year-old." The dispatcher also mentioned "Ja'Eisha Scott" by name while broadcasting the call. Because they were familiar with her, Officers Williams and Westerman rightly responded to assist. The officers arrived at the same time, and while walking toward the office, Officer Williams told Officers Lazzari and Hanes that he had contact with Ja'Eisha in the past involving a similar incident in which she destroyed property and battered a school employee. Officer Lazzari said Officer Williams indicated to him that this child may need to go to jail.

What is Fairmount Elementary School trying to hide? Why are the police colluding in keeping murky the facts of what happened inside the school while Ja'eisha Scott was having her famous tantrum?

The new rules announced yesterday are a positive development:

Under the new rules announced Thursday, dispatchers who take calls involving students in kindergarten through third grade must first ask if Pinellas Schools Police have been contacted. Superintendent Clayton Wilcox has directed principals at the district's elementary schools to do the same.

If school police have been reached, city police will not be sent except in "aggravating, extreme circumstances," according to the policy.

And even in those cases, officers must consult a supervisor before taking a child into custody. The supervisor will consider alternative ways of resolving the conflict, including calling a parent and using de-escalation techniques.

These procedures should help the schools avoid future police handling of children from kindergarden to third grade. But these are bare minimum measures that do not even go so far as to protect children who are in grades 4-8. There is a documented problem with Pinellas County (and the rest of Florida) criminalizing children under 12.

Most essentially, however, the focus on the police and not on the school diverts attention from profound problems concerning racism and anti-child policies in the Pinellas County schools. Without a public commitment to telling the truth about what happened to Ja'eisha Scott—and about what happens to other children, especially what happens to African American children, in Pinellas County schools—there is no real hope for progress.

Related Posts

• St. Petersburg Police Bind Hands And Feet Of 5-Year-Old African-American Girl
• Arresting Children Under 12 In Florida
• Discerning The Social Fabric Of St. Petersburg, Florida (I)
• Discerning The Social Fabric Of St. Petersburg, Florida (II)
• What Is Going On In The Pinellas County Schools??
• Accounts Of Police Involvement In Ja'eisha Scott Case Raise New Questions About Assist. Principal Dibenedetto's Intent
• "I think they were good people . . . [Ja'eisha] didn't act like that over here."
• Criminalizing Children In Florida
• What's Race Got To Do With It?
• They Kept Ja'eisha Cuffed In Their Cruiser For Hours After Her Mom Arrived

Via The Memory Blog:

John Roberts' Senate Statement Posted (but not by the Senate)

The Michigan eLibrary has posted the 67-page Statement of Judge John G. Roberts Jr. to the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary. According to the librarian who posted this document, the Committee says that it doesn't intend to post the statement on the Web. Hats off to the MeL for doing the Committee's work for it and keeping us informed.

Statement of Judge John G. Roberts Jr. to U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary

In addition to the statement that has been excerpted in the press, you will find full records of employment; financial disclosure; organizational memberships; publications; public office, political activities and affiliations; legal career, including a) a description of each case argued before the Supreme Court and b) a description of cases in which, while he was in private practice, his name appeared on various classes of briefs, though he did not deliver oral arguments.

Clearly this document deserves some scrutiny.

[Susan Klopfer has posted the following story from her work on Where Rebels Roost: Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited in the comments. The story is a deeply relevant companion piece to what I wrote in my last post. People like John G. Roberts, John Ashcroft, and Hans A. Von Spakovsky align themselves with the evil represented by the Klansmen in this story and by the powers who never attempted to bring those murderers to justice. --BG]

For over forty years, relatives living in separate parts of the country worked to learn what happened to Birdia Keglar and Adlina Hamlett of Charleston, Mississipp after they were killed in a car accident.

Now that the story of their torture, death and mutilation has been determined, a Michigan congressional representative will soon call for an investigation of the deaths. These words come from Adlena Hamlett's granddaughter:

Adlena McKinley Hamlett was my grandmother. She had picked me to be a civil rights lawyer when I was a young girl – she and my grandfather, both – but my mother was afraid I would be in danger and so I became a professional secretary and then a teacher.

My grandmother came from a family with land, and that was very important to them. After the Civil War, her mother Julia McKinley was given forty acres and a mule when she was freed. I have a quilt that my great – grandmother made. Her family acquired more land over the years and my grandmother was born and raised on their dairy farm near Scobey, Mississippi in 1888, where I am from, too.

Grandmother Adlena was killed when she was 78 years-old outside of Greenwood, Mississippi when she and her close friend Birdia Keglar were forced off the road on their way home from testifying in Jackson about jobs and voting. Months earlier, they testified in support of the Voting Rights Act of 1965; both were hanged in effigy and warned they would be killed if they continued.

I know this because my cousin’s wife told me what he learned from others who knew them and I saw her body in the funeral home in Charleston.

At Fox Funeral Home in Charleston, the manager told us that only one family member could view my grandmother’s body. My brother and I went into the room together and something was very wrong with her head and her arms. Her head seemed too small.My brother had to tell me that she had been decapitated and that her arms were severed from her body. There were knife marks on her face.

There was a horrible expression frozen on her face and one of my aunts started screaming when she saw her, later on. I know that my brother examined her body, but he would not let me touch her. I have never let this go.

Sometimes others tell me to give up the search for answers about my grandmother’s death because it happened too many years ago. But I know that she, like Mrs. Keglar, fought for the right to vote and this is why she died.

One day when I was a young girl she took me with her to the courthouse in Charleston. She asked for a ballot and someone at the courthouse took it away and tore it up. She told me not to worry, because some day this would change and I would be able to vote.

I remember my grandmother Adlena and sometimes I still want to cry.

―Nina Black Zachary, 2005

(from Where Rebels Roost: Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited, 2005)

None of the men were removed from their car that was forced from the road in Sidon, a small town below Greenwood, Mississippi, and a known Klan stronghold.

The women, though, were marched to the edge of the woods where they were tortured, killed and mutilated in the style of the White Knights of the Klu Klux Klan of Mississippi.

There was never an official police report; no one was charged in these deaths. "It was a car accident," their children and grandchildren were told. . .

We already know that civil rights enforcement has sharply declined under George W. Bush. I have written previously about the Bush administration institutionalizations of its anti-civil rights agenda through the Department of Justice: it's changes to the Voting Section in the Civil Rights Division and the DOJ's lawsuits to radically change the grounds of voting rights enforcement. Some of the most recent revelations about Bush's proposed appointment of John G. Roberts to the Supreme Court suggest that Bush is now trying to give Justices Scalia and Thomas a strong ally against voting rights.

Bush's DOJ Tears A Page Out Of Roberts' Anti-Civil Rights Agenda In The Reagan DOJ

In Monday's Washington Post, R. Jeffrey Smith, Amy Goldstein, and Jo Becker brought to light John Roberts' role in the Reagan Justice Department as a special assistant to Attorney General William French Smith.

[Roberts] wrote vigorous defenses, for example, of the administration's version of a voting rights bill, opposed by Congress, which would have narrowed the reach of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. He challenged the US Commission on Civil Rights's arguments in favor of busing and affirmation action. He described a Supreme Court decision broadening the rights of individuals to sue states for civil rights violations as causing "damage" to administration policies, and he urged that legislation be drafted to reverse it. And he wrote a memo arguing that it was constitutionally acceptable for Congress to strip the Supreme Court of its ability to hear broad classes of civil rights cases. (Emphasis added.)

In January, I explained that in

court battles, pre-election 2004, over how provisional ballots would be counted and the legalities of voter challenges at the polls, Bush administration lawyers argued that individual voters may not sue over violations of the voting rights set out in the Help America Vote Act [HAVA]. The DOJ argued, instead, that only the Attorney General has power to bring lawsuits to enforce the provisions of the 2002 law--provisions that include a requirement that states provide "uniform and nondiscriminatory" voting systems, and that they give provisional ballots to those who say they have registered but whose names do not appear on the rolls. In a 1969 US Supreme Court Ruling on enforcement of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Justices said "the achievement of the act's laudable goal would be severely hampered ... if each citizen were required to depend solely on litigation instituted at the discretion of the attorney general."

In the Bush Justice Department's attack on private right of action in voting rights cases, we can see a close alignment with Reagan's overtly racist agenda. Bush's policy record on civil rights issues strongly implies that he chose Roberts because of his substantive involvement in Reaganite reactionary politics.

Bush DOJ Wants To Use The Help America Vote Act To Bypass The Voting Rights Act

The DOJ has not yet had a ruling in its favor on the private right of action in voting rights violations. It must be understood, however, that current implementations of HAVA's provisional balloting were a major avenue for depriving citizens of their right to vote in 2004. As long as provisional balloting exists in its current form, there will be a steady flow of voters who lose their vote to this supposedly "fail-safe" procedure, and there will continue to be more lawsuits in which the DOJ can persist in its arguments against the private right of action in voting rights violations. If John Roberts becomes a Supreme Court Justice, the Court will be further stacked against voting rights.

Last fall's court battles over provisional ballots and private right of action indicate that Republican vote suppression strategies have a double purpose. The first, most obvious purpose, of the thousands of Republican challenges to voters was to keep people of color, low-income people, and students from getting to vote. But it was also the case that when challengers questioned a voter's status, the stop-gap measure was often to hand the voter a provisional ballot. Numerous provisional ballots were never counted for purely bureaucratic reasons, and numerous others were thrown out for having been cast in the wrong precinct. Voters who were unfairly deprived of their votes through provisional balloting must seek recourse under the provisions of HAVA and, therefore, provide the DOJ with new opportunities to argue against private right of action in court—which is the the second, little discussed purpose of Republican voter suppression strategies. Each voter disenfranchised through provisional balloting provides the DOJ with a new opportunity to make an unprecedented reversal through the courts of how voting rights can be protected.

The DOJ And The Voting Rights Act: Anniversary Gifts Don't Always Prove Your Commitment

Meanwhile, the Justice Department has recently been pursuing violations of the Voting Rights Act in cases of discrimination against language minorities.

BOSTON - The federal government filed a lawsuit Friday, as part of what it said is a national initiative in several states, alleging that Boston's election practices discriminate against Hispanic and Asian American voters.

The Department of Justice's suit, which a city attorney called "unsubstantiated," claims Boston violated the federal Voting Rights Act. It was filed in U.S. District Court in Boston.

Boston's growing Hispanic population since 1992 has required the city under federal law to provide all election materials in Spanish. But the lawsuit alleges that the city's elections Web site and notices posted in polling places were only in English. A check Friday night of the Web site, however, showed there is a link to a Spanish language version.

Boston also has failed to recruit and maintain a pool of bilingual poll workers to help Hispanic, Chinese and Vietnamese speaking voters, the suit alleged.

"Despite having had an unequivocal obligation _ for 13 years _ to provide Spanish language information to voters who need it... the city of Boston has consistently fallen well short of the mark," Bradley J. Schlozman, acting assistant attorney general, said in a prepared statement.

I have no doubt such violations have occurred in my own hometown of Boston. I support rigorous enforcement of the law in these cases, but with gross inaction by the DOJ in more pervasive violations of the Voting Rights Act [pdf], the Boston case reads as a PR gimmick. As the nation turns towards fortieth anniversary celebrations of passage of the Voting Rights Act, and as debate concerning reauthorization peppers the news, the recent DOJ legal actions will give the false impression of a commitment to enforcement and contribute towards a false sense of security if some version of Voting Rights Act reauthorization goes through in 2007.

The Bush DOJ's Anti-Voting Rights Agenda

In typical Bush administration fashion, it will not matter what the law says if there is not proper implementation or enforcement. Despite token cases such as the new one in Boston, the Voting Section at the DOJ is still the same one that Jeffrey Toobin described in the New Yorker last fall:

The Attorney General had come forward [in 2002] to launch the Voting Access and Integrity Initiative, whose name refers to the two main traditions in voting-rights law. Voter-access efforts, which have long been associated with Democrats, seek to remove barriers that discourage poor and minority voters; the Voting Rights Act itself is the paradigmatic voter-access policy. The voting-integrity movement, which has traditionally been favored by Republicans, targets fraud in the voting process, from voter registration to voting and ballot counting. Despite the title, Ashcroft's proposal favored the "integrity" side of the ledger, mainly by assigning a federal prosecutor to watch for election crimes in each judicial district. These lawyers, Ashcroft said, would "deter and detect discrimination, prevent electoral corruption, and bring violators to justice."

Federal law gives the Justice Department the flexibility to focus on either voter access or voting integrity under the broad heading of voting rights, but such shifts of emphasis may have a profound impact on how votes are cast and counted. In the abstract, no one questions the goal of eliminating voting fraud, but the idea of involving federal prosecutors in election supervision troubles many civil-rights advocates, because few assistant United States attorneys have much familiarity with the laws protecting voter access.

Toobin goes on to note that current staff attorney for the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division, Hans A. Von Spakovsky, has been emphasizing that "voting integrity will remain a focus for the Justice Department, and that voter access might best be left to volunteers."

In September, 2004, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported [pdf] that:

• "The Voting Section does not have a reliable method to consistently record and document telephone calls received alleging voting irregularities";
• "The Voting Section does not routinely track its election monitoring activities through the Interactive Case Management (ICM) System, the Justice Department's formal process for tracking and managing work activities";
• "The Justice Department, due to its lack of specific information about allegations of voting irregularities, and Justice Department actions taken to address them, is unable to provide the public and Congress with clear information concerning election procedures."

If untold numbers of voting rights violations simply disappear down an Orwellian memory hole, if the DOJ's Voting Section does not consistently promote voter access, if taking cases to court may seriously limit the ability citizens to pursue legitimate complaints, then what what voting rights protections can we hope for right now?

Support Reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act

Despite my pessimism about the current enforceability of the Voting Rights Act, I still urge one and all to ask your Senators and Representatives to to renew and restore the Voting Rights Act. The specific measures of the VRA that are at stake are enforcement provisions that allow for federal oversight of state and local voting functions. It is essential that our legislators know their constituents want the legacy of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to be revived and carried forward into the twenty-first century.

~

Do read the rest of the Washington Post article that I cited above. Roberts' expressed disdain for civil rights protections was multi-faceted, from voting rights, to job discrimination, to busing, to Title IX, to affirmative action. Thanks to Marsha Joyner for sending me the link. Also see today's post from Professor Kim, which links to the Washington Post article about Roberts and to an earlier piece she wrote about a very personal experience she had with a racist in the GOP, the night Reagan was elected President. I hope Kim will collect her memoir pieces into a book one day.

In my Mississippi news roundup the other day, I emphasized the reported comment of former Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers. Jordan Golub, who heads the Royal Confederate Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, recalled a phone conversation he once had with Bowers:

"Bowers said, 'I don't think the KKK is the way to go in the present day,'" Gollub said, explaining that organizations such as the Council of Conservative Citizens may be more successful now.

To understand what the CCC is, you have to know the history of the White Citizens Councils. Susan Klopfer has provided a good, brief history of the two organizations in the comments:

Shortly after the first Citizens Councils or CC (home grown by Robert "Tut" Patterson of Itta Bena) became a reality, the New York Post sent a reporter into the Deep South on a fact-finding mission. Reporter Stan Optowsky spoke plainly in his assessment, calling the Councils “a loose federation [with the] avowed purpose [to] battle the principle and practice of integration, and to crush all – the Negro and white – who dare advocate the colored man’s rights.”

After spending five weeks doing research, the reporter declared the “actual purpose was to elect the ‘right’ candidate; to maintain cheap labor; to eliminate a gnawing business competitor; to protect a shaky job; and to make ‘a few fast bucks.’”

Help in growing Citizens Councils soon came from Patterson’s “neighbor,” Senator James O. Eastland, who wanted to grow an even larger organization for himself. In the summer of 1955, Eastland announced it was “essential that a nation-wide organization be set up” to “mobilize and organize public opinion” throughout the United States in order to combat school desegregation.

The senator said that a “great crusade” would be required to fight the NAACP, CIO, and “all the conscienceless pressure groups who are attempting our destruction.”

And so within a month of Eastland’s statement, the Federation for Constitutional Government (FCG), a short-lived organization, was formed in Memphis. Representatives from twelve Southern states came together with the support of Eastland, Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, former Governor Fielding Wright of Mississippi, U. S. Representative John Bell Williams of Mississippi, and other politicians.

Patterson, Judge Thomas Brady and William J. Simmons were elected to positions on the executive committee. John U. Barr of Louisiana was selected president, and it was Eastland’s intention that the Federation would “coordinate” the work of the Citizens Councils and several other organizations.

Many members of the Citizens Councils did not share this view, however, and in April 1956, sixty-five representatives from Citizens Councils in eleven Southern states secretly met to form their own “overseer,” the Citizens Councils of America. The following October, CCA selected Patterson as secretary.

From 1954 to 1989, Patterson spent his time growing the Citizens Councils through the CCA, as he traveled thousands of miles around the Southeastern states to meet with members and their leaders. As Council numbers grew to over 300,000 members, Eastland helped out, by calling on state governments to fund the movement.

It would be Patterson who with Gordon Lee Baum co-morphed the Councils to their current neo-nazi existence as the CCC or Conservative Citizens Councils in 1985. Baum had been a regional director in the first Citizens Councils.Patterson remains actively involved in CCC, and still writes for the organization’s journal, The Informer.

The Bowers remark speaks to the numbers and the political power of the CCC:

An Intelligence Report from the Southern Poverty Law Center reported that names of CCC members are not public. But after collecting the names of 175 members mentioned in council publications and elsewhere, the Report “was able to document ties to racist groups of 17 of those members — almost 10 percent of the total.” Claiming 15,000 members in 1999, CCC was in the news when Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott landed in hot water after speaking before the group. Lott spoke again in 2005, as various state legislators and judges were scheduled to attend CCC meetings.

Meanwhile, "a significant number of members have been linked to unabashedly racist groups including the Invisible Empire Knights of the Ku Klux Klan; the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan; the National Association for the Advancement of White People; the America First Party; and the neo-Nazi National Alliance. Others have ties to militant ‘Patriot’ organizations such as the extreme-right-wing Populist Party and David Duke.”

Most fascinating, perhaps, in Susan's comment is the passage at the end, recounting her interview last fall with Robert "Tutt" Patterson.

At the age of 84, the senior Mississippian used his thick wooden cane tip to tap out the framed certificates on his wall awarded after World War II and for Indianola’s Citizen of the Year. The mid-morning interview took place at his home office in Itta Bena, where a book on the Reich stood out on his mahogany desktop.

The Patterson home is set on a large lot next to a bayou. “We were able to purchase all of the land down to the water. It’s safer and no one can just move next door,” Patterson pointed out.

The conversation moved to the Pattersons’ children and their individual achievements. One daughter married a Moroccan – “Moroccans are like Europeans, you know. They have kings.”

Are the original Citizens Councils still intact? Patterson said they are still meeting around the Delta. “People would be surprised,” he said with a quick grin.

• Ky. man says '60s suspect sold him guns

Prosecutors told reporters less than an hour after a jury recently convicted Edgar Ray Killen of manslaughter in the trio's killings the only two triggermen in the case, Wayne Roberts and James Jordan, are dead.

But the work of world-renowned forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden and Mississippi state forensic pathologist Dr. Steven Hayne has revealed the possibility of additional gunmen.

• '64 confession kept from Killen jury - Clarion Ledger reporter Jerry Mitchell raises some more questions about the conduct of the prosecution in Mississippi v. Edgar Ray Killen.

Killen's lead counsel, Mitch Moran of Carthage, said he wanted to let the jury know the whole story, and that's why he tried to introduce the 1964 confession of Horace Doyle Barnette, who took part in the trio's killings.

In the 1967 federal conspiracy trial, an FBI agent read Barnette's statement into the record when Barnette refused to testify. But jurors only heard the names of Barnette and James Jordan, who pleaded guilty, in the statement. For the names of the others Barnette identified as being involved, a "blank" was substituted. The trial ended with the convictions of seven, the acquittals of eight and the mistrials of three, including Killen.

Moran explained: "I just felt like the jury had a right to know it all."

Although Killen could have been implicated by Barnette's statement, Moran said the statement shows Billy Wayne Posey, convicted in the 1967 federal trial, played a major role, but wasn't indicted by the state, while Killen played a minor role and was indicted by the state.

When Moran sought to introduce the confession in Killen's trial through the FBI agent's 1967 testimony, prosecutors objected.

When Moran said he'd be happy to fill in all the blanks so jurors could hear the names of all involved, prosecutors still objected.

• Killen jurors outline verdict

Timeline of jurors in the Edgar Ray Killen trial:

June 20: 2:48 p.m.:

Deliberations begin

Mid-afternoon: First vote: — 6 guilty, 6 not guilty of murder

5:32 p.m.: Jurors dismissed before second vote

June 21:

8:32 a.m.: Second vote: 7 guilty, 5 not guilty of murder

Mid-morning: Third vote:— 11-1, guilty of manslaughter

11:10 a.m: Final vote: 12-0, guilty of manslaughter

• Killen juror: Critics wrong about jury's actions - Killen juror goes on the record.

We found Killen guilty of manslaughter because that's what the evidence supported. . . .

We focused on what was presented in the courtroom, not what we'd heard over the last 41 years, and not what we either assumed or wished to be true.

• Will KKK fade into history?

The Mississippi White Knights is the strongest of the state's Klan chapters. Others listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center are: Bayou Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Fulton and Richton (its post office box is in Kiln), Southern White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Lucedale and Robinsonville, and Orion Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Star.

One Mississippi Klan group that didn't make the list because of inactivity is Royal Confederate Knights of the Ku Klux Klan headed by Jordan Gollub of Jackson.

"We haven't had a march since 2001," he said. "We had a march in Biloxi and a march in Carthage. It made you feel good that day, but I don't think it changes the political atmosphere. It doesn't put Bennie Thompson (the state's lone African-American congressman) out of office."

He recalled the last telephone conversation he had with one-time Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers, who headed the largest and most violent Klan organization in the 1960s, the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi.

"Bowers said, 'I don't think the KKK is the way to go in the present day,'" Gollub said, explaining that organizations such as the Council of Conservative Citizens may be more successful now (emphasis added).

David Swanson, co-founder of After Downing Street, explains how Comcast blocked all email containing the url of his organization for about a week, earlier this month.

We didn't know it, but for the past week, anyone using Comcast has been unable to receive any Email with "www.afterdowningstreet.org" in the body of the Email. That has included every Email from me, since that was in my signature at the bottom of every Email I sent. And it included any Email linking people to any information about the upcoming events.

From the flood this evening of Emails saying "Oh, so that's why I haven't heard anything from you guys lately," it seems clear that we would have significantly more events organized by now for the 23rd if not for this block by Comcast.

Disturbingly, Comcast did not notify us of this block. It took us a number of days to nail down Comcast as the cause of the problems, and then more days, working with Comcast's abuse department to identify exactly what was going on. We'd reached that point by Thursday, but Comcast was slow to fix the problem.

During the day on Friday we escalated our threats to flood Comcast's executives with phone calls and cancellations, and we gave them deadlines. Friday evening, Comcast passed the buck to Symantec. Comcast said that Symantec's Bright Mail filter was blocking the Emails, and that Symantec refused to lift the block, because they had supposedly received 46,000 complaints about Emails with our URL in them. Forty-six thousand! Of course, Symantec was working for Comcast, and Comcast could insist that they shape up, or drop them. But Comcast wasn't interested in doing that.

Could we see two or three, or even one, of those 46,000 complaints? No, and Comcast claimed that Symantec wouldn't share them with Comcast either.

By the time Comcast had passed the buck to the company that it was paying to filter its customers Emails, Brad Blog had posted an article about the situation and urged people to complain to Comcast.

http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00001602.htm

Brad quickly added Symantec phone numbers to the story on his website, and we called Symantec's communications department, which fixed the problem in a matter of minutes.

So, why does this matter?

Comcast has a near monopoly on high-speed internet service in much of this country, including much of the Washington, D.C., area. Many members of the media and many people involved in politics rely on it. Three days ago, I almost decided to put a satellite dish on my roof. There's no other way for me to get high-speed internet, unless I use Comcast.

Comcast effectively censors discussion of particular political topics, and impedes the ability of people to associate with each other, with absolutely no compulsion to explain itself. There is no due process. A phrase or web address is tried and convicted in absentia and without the knowledge of those involved.

Now, did Comcast do this because it opposes impeaching the President? I seriously doubt it. Apparently the folks at Symantec did this, and Comcast condoned it. But why?

Well, we have no evidence to suggest that these 46,000 complaints actually exist, but we can be fairly certain that if they do, they were generated by someone politically opposed to our agenda. There's simply no possible way that we've accidentally annoyed 46,000 random people with stray Emails and mistyped addresses. We've only been around for a month and a half, and we haven't spammed anyone. In fact, during the course of trying to resolve the problem, Comcast assured us that they knew we hadn't spammed anyone. And once we'd gotten Symantec's attention, they didn't hesitate to lift the block.

But it had taken serious pressure to find out what the problem was and who to ask for a remedy. We only solved this because we could threaten a flood of negative attention.

This state of affairs means that anyone who wants to stifle public and quasi-private discussion of a topic can quite easily do so by generating numerous spam complaints. The victims of the complaints will not be notified, made aware of the accusations against them, or provided an opportunity to defend themselves. And if the complaints prove bogus, there will be absolutely no penalty for having made them.

And this won't affect only small-time information sources. If the New York Times or CNN attempts to send people Email with a forbidden phrase, it won't reach Comcast customers or customers of any ISP using the same or similar filtering program.

And there is no public list posted anywhere of which phrases are not permitted. This is a Kafkan world. This is censorship as it affects a prisoner who sends out letters and does not know if they will reach the recipient or be destroyed.

What if I had tried to Email someone about a serious health emergency during the past week, but they had been using Comcast and I had been including the address of my website in my Email signature? Is this not a safety issue?

(Read the whole thing.)