Thank You Debo Adegbile.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver Velez.
Thank you for your service to the cause of justice and civil rights for Americans.
Thank you for the courage of your convictions and for simply doing what a good lawyer for the defense is charged to do.
I am deeply saddened that on the anniversary of Birmingham Sunday, one of the most egregious acts of terror against us, that I had to read of your withdrawal.
Thank you for standing on principle:
"What I have come to focus on is that in life and as a professional, the principles for which you stand are more important than the office that you hold. I'm very proud to have worked to vindicate the principles of the constitution, and I hope to continue to have those opportunities in the future."
I've written about you here before, and know we'll hear more from you in the future.
At a time when we need the Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, to be fully staffed, and working round the clock to investigate and prosecute voting rights repression and racist killings, right wing Republicans (including some cowardly Democrats) have once again shown us their un-hooded faces.
Perhaps one day, in a USA not riddled with racism, or when the Congress is not full of cowards, you will head the DOJ, or perhaps sit on the Supreme Court.
Until that time, I wish you well in your new job in private practice.
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Liberia remains desperately short on everything needed to halt the spread of Ebola, but an epidemiologist is working block by block to fill a crucial need: the support of residents. New York Times: Back to the Slums of His Youth, to Defuse the Ebola Time Bomb.
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Dr. Mosoka Fallah waded in. Details about the girl spilled out of the crowd in a dizzying torrent, gaining urgency with the siren of an approaching ambulance. The girl’s mother had died, almost certainly of Ebola. So had three other relatives. The girl herself was sick. The girl’s aunt, unable to get help, had left her on the sidewalk in despair. Other family members may have been infected. Still others had fled across this city.
Dr. Fallah, 44, calmly instructed leaders of the neighborhood — known as Capitol Hill, previously untouched by Ebola — how to deal with the family and protect their community. He promised to return later that day, and send more help in the morning. His words quelled the crowd, for the moment.
“This is a horrific case,” he said as he walked away. “It could be the start of a big one right here. It’s a ticking time bomb.”
Months into the Ebola outbreak, Liberia remains desperately short on everything needed to halt the rise in deaths and infections — burial teams for the dead, ambulances for the sick, treatment centers for patients, gloves for doctors and nurses. But it is perhaps shortest on something intangible: the trust needed to stop the disease from spreading.
Dr. Fallah, an epidemiologist and immunologist who grew up in Monrovia’s poorest neighborhoods before studying at Harvard, has been crisscrossing the capital in a race to repair that rift. Neighborhood by neighborhood, block by block, shack by shack, he is battling the disease across this crowded capital, seeking the cooperation of residents who are deeply distrustful of the government and its faltering response to the deadliest Ebola epidemic ever recorded.
“If people don’t trust you, they can hide a body, and you’ll never know,” Dr. Fallah said. “And Ebola will keep spreading. They’ve got to trust you, but we don’t have the luxury of time.”
West Point Monrovia, Liberia
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Did Homeland Security Catch a Smuggler or Create One? BusinessWeek: The Uranium Sting.
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The federal agent spotted Patrick Campbell as soon as he walked off the jetway at JFK. A slight 33-year-old African, he wore a business suit and a backpack. It was Aug. 21, 2013. Campbell was exhausted. He’d already spent more than 12 hours in the air, flying from his native Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, to Paris and then New York, and he had a reservation for a flight to Miami later that day. As he passed through immigration, retrieved his suitcase, and cleared customs, a surveillance team followed his every move. On the concourse, agents surrounded him. “Are you Mr. Campbell?” one asked. Then they threw on handcuffs.
Campbell was taken to a small interview room in the airport, where Loni Forgash, a special agent with Homeland Security Investigations, a division of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, freed his hands and asked him why he was headed to Florida. According to Forgash’s report of the interview, Campbell responded that he mined gold, diamonds, chromite, and bauxite, and that he was going to meet a potential investor in Miami. Forgash wasn’t satisfied. “I’m going to bring somebody to help you remember things,” she said.
That somebody was another HSI agent, Sammy Cruzcoriano, a large man with the face of a bulldog. He’d been watching the interview through a one-way mirror. “It’s me, Samuel,” he said. The face was familiar to Campbell; he recognized the agent as the man he’d known as Samuel Calcano, the partner he was supposed to meet in Miami. For the past 15 months, Cruzcoriano had posed as a businessman looking to ship 1,000 tons of uranium to Iran, which has been slapped with strict sanctions for its alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons. Campbell, Cruzcoriano recalled, “just looked at me and hunched down.” It had all been a sting.
As the interview continued, Campbell confessed that he had indeed been negotiating a shipment of uranium to Iran. Searching his belongings, the agents found a USB drive that contained a contract for the deal. Concealed beneath the insoles of a pair of pointy leather shoes in his suitcase, they found two plastic bags filled with a brown claylike substance—soil samples from a potential mine, Campbell said.
The next day, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida issued a press release announcing that Campbell had been caught with “a sample of uranium,” and DHS followed up with a press release of its own. It looked like an impressive catch for the government. The story made the Drudge Report, the New York Times, CBS (CBS), and the Daily Mail, and the BBC dubbed Campbell “uranium shoe man.” The government charged him with brokering goods to Iran, a violation of U.S. trade restrictions. He faced 20 years in prison.
Since Sept. 11, undercover operations launched in the name of national security have become a common tactic in U.S. law enforcement. Of the more than 500 terrorism charges the federal government filed from 2001 to 2011, about 30 percent came from stings. While critics have faulted federal law enforcement for making fake terrorists out of vulnerable young men, government officials argue that stings deter would-be terrorists and round up “lone wolves” who might otherwise fall prey to real terrorist recruiters.
Photograph by Michael Duff/AP Images for Bloomberg Businessweek
Campbell in Freetown in September
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Obviously she wasn't racially profiled. Slate: Cops Briefly Detain Django Unchained Actress Because They Thought She Was a Prostitute.
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Actress Danièle Watts says she was briefly “handcuffed and detained” by cops in Los Angeles because they thought she was a prostitute. Her boyfriend, chef Brian James Lucas, says the cops thought they were a prostitute and John. Both of them wrote and posted pictures of the ordeal on Facebook. Watts, who played Coco in Django Unchained and stars as Martin’s Lawrence’s daughter on Partners, says the cops “accosted me and forced me into handcuffs.”
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Powerful stuff. Color Lines: My Feminism Starts 300 Years Ago.
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“A lot of corporate capitalist feminism begins with the idea that feminism is always starting on the day the person discovered feminism,” Tressie McMillan Cottom said to great laughter from an auditorium comprised mainly of white women this past Saturday. The event: Baffler magazine’s all-day conference, Feminism for What? Equality in the Workplace after Lean In. “[But] my feminism can’t start when you discover it, I need mine to start 300 years ago.” Cottom’s speech like her writing is quick-and-tart wrapped in personable southern charm. Audience disarmed, she then goes on to explain that her feminist talking points are wealth not income, followed closely by economic reparations for African-Americans and dismantling the for profit prison complex. After, Colorlines sat with Cottom, a Panther baby and PhD student in sociology at Emory University to talk about the women and work that inform her feminism. While Cottom shared a class analysis with today’s multi-generational crowd she had been clear: beginning the conversation at Lean In wasn’t so much uninteresting as extraordinarily irrelevant to the black and brown women she works for.
Sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom speaks with an admirer after her panel at Baffler magazine’s all-day conference, ‘Feminism for What? Equality in the Workplace after Lean In’ at John Jay College on Saturday, September 13 in New York City Photo: Carla Murphy/Colorlines
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Demonizing people for providing legal assistance. Talking Points Memo: Obama Withdraws Civil Rights Nominee Debo Adegbile.
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The White House formally withdrew the nomination of Debo Adegbile to run the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, more than six months after the Democratic-led Senate scuttled his confirmation due to legal work he did with the NAACP decades ago.
The move reflects a shift for the White House, which along with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) had promised to continue fighting to confirm Adegbile, praising him as an excellent lawyer with the background to lead the important Justice Department division.
Adegbile fell three votes short of advancing in the Senate back in March, losing the support of Democrats like Sens. Chris Coons (DE) and Bob Casey (PA) due to his legal defense of Mumia Abu Jamal, who in 1981 was convicted of killing a police officer in Philadelphia
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Poetry and song in memory of September 15, 1963.
Langston Hughes
Four little girls
Who went to Sunday School that day
And never came back home at all--
But left instead
Their blood upon the wall
With spattered flesh
And bloodied Sunday dresses
Scorched by dynamite that
China made eons ago
Did not know what China made
Before China was ever Red at all
Would ever redden with their blood
This Birmingham-on-Sunday wall.
Four tiny little girls
Who left their blood upon that wall,
In little graves today await:
The dynamite that might ignite
The ancient fuse of Dragon Kings
Whose tomorrow sings a hymn
The missionaries never taught
In Christian Sunday School
To implement the Golden Rule.
Four little girls
Might be awakened someday soon
By songs upon the breeze
As yet unfelt among
Magnolia trees.
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