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Torture enters the courtroom

For the first time in American history, a federal judge last week authorized the government to admit as evidence in a criminal case in a public courtroom words uttered by the defendant that were obtained under torture. The fruits of torture — which is any cruel or degrading or intentionally painful or disorienting behavior visited upon a person in captivity to induce compliance or to gratify the torturer — are not permitted in any court in the United States, and their inducement is criminal. Here is the backstory. Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a low-level former member of the ...

The state of Black America

Listening to all the rhetoric in the popular media, you would think America is the most unfair, racist nation in the world. You would think that Black Americans are uniformly living in oppression and poverty, with no hope for the future, save the federal government arriving on the scene to their rescue. Sorry, liberals, to trouble you with facts. But indeed there are facts. And the facts tell a far different story than what we are hearing. Let’s start with the most recent annual report of the Census Bureau: Income and Poverty in the United States: 2019. According to this report, ...

Reimagining our police forces: what is it we need?

Bill Bratton has been the police commissioner of three major cities: Boston, Los Angeles and New York. When asked recently about the value of cops, Bratton, 73, said: “They are the glue that literally holds society together. They are an essential element of a successful democracy.” I agree. But we have come to a place now where we need to decide if police are our guardians or our warriors. The latter is defined as “a person engaged or experienced in warfare, a solider.” In 1990, Congress allowed the Department of Defense to pass on surplus military equipment, including ...

To stop critical race theory, fight to control school boards

The battle to win control of school boards from the grip of racial indoctrinators is like Normandy Beach. Everything hangs on the outcome. Lose and a generation is lost. The outcome will determine whether your children learn to see themselves and other people as individuals, instead of merely members of a racial group. Parents of all ethnicities who never dreamed of getting involved in politics need to step up now. Parents are already outraged by the indoctrination their kids are getting in school. White kids are shamed as racists and oppressors. Black kids are taught to think of ...

Destroying Black babies and families with federal dollars

If there is one reason why problems associated with race in America persist, it is because we pretend to address problems caused by one sin by exchanging them with other sins. President Joe Biden has just issued a proclamation recognizing 100 years since the race massacre that occurred in the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921. Greenwood was a wealthy Black neighborhood, a center of Black business, known as Black Wall Street, that was ravaged in two days of rioting by white racists. It resulted in the death of hundreds and the loss of property of thousands. It is indeed ...

Fraudsters go where the COVID money is

Last June, eight guys in Brooklyn put their heads together, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, and came up with a scheme to steal strangers’ identities and take what didn’t belong to them. Just a couple months before that — in the earliest days of the COVID-19 scare — Congress passed a $2.2 trillion bill called the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act. The money was supposed to go to the millions of isolated Americans who had their paychecks interrupted during the pandemic. The mooks in Brooklyn had other plans. This gang of eight, ranging in age from ...