Brownwood to Baghdad to Tulia : As it is !

While Iraq Burns
By Bob Herbert
The New York Times

Monday 27 November 2006

Americans are shopping while Iraq burns.
The competing television news images on the morning after Thanksgiving were of the unspeakable carnage in Sadr City - where more than 200 Iraqi civilians were killed by a series of coordinated car bombs - and the long lines of cars filled with holiday shopping zealots that jammed the highway approaches to American malls that had opened for business at midnight.

A Wal-Mart in Union, N.J., was besieged by customers even before it opened its doors at 5 a.m. on Friday. "All I can tell you," said a Wal-Mart employee, "is that they were fired up and ready to spend money."

There is something terribly wrong with this juxtaposition of gleeful Americans with fistfuls of dollars storming the department store barricades and the slaughter by the thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, including old people, children and babies. The war was started by the U.S., but most Americans feel absolutely no sense of personal responsibility for it.

Representative Charles Rangel recently proposed that the draft be reinstated, suggesting that politicians would be more reluctant to take the country to war if they understood that their constituents might be called up to fight. What struck me was not the uniform opposition to the congressman's proposal - it has long been clear that there is zero sentiment in favor of a draft in the U.S. - but the fact that it never provoked even the briefest discussion of the responsibilities and obligations of ordinary Americans in a time of war.

With no obvious personal stake in the war in Iraq, most Americans are indifferent to its consequences. In an interview last week, Alex Racheotes, a 19-year-old history major at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, said: "I definitely don't know anyone who would want to fight in Iraq. But beyond that, I get the feeling that most people at school don't even think about the war. They're more concerned with what grade they got on yesterday's test."

His thoughts were echoed by other students, including John Cafarelli, a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of New Hampshire, who was asked if he had any friends who would be willing to join the Army. "No, definitely not," he said. "None of my friends even really care about what's going on in Iraq."

This indifference is widespread. It enables most Americans to go about their daily lives completely unconcerned about the atrocities resulting from a war being waged in their name. While shoppers here are scrambling to put the perfect touch to their holidays with the purchase of a giant flat-screen TV or a PlayStation 3, the news out of Baghdad is of a society in the midst of a meltdown.

According to the United Nations, more than 7,000 Iraqi civilians were killed in September and October. Nearly 5,000 of those killings occurred in Baghdad, a staggering figure.

In a demoralizing reprise of life in Afghanistan under Taliban rule, the U.N. reported that in Iraq: "The situation of women has continued to deteriorate. Increasing numbers of women were recorded to be either victims of religious extremists or 'honor killings.' Some non-Muslim women are forced to wear a headscarf and to be accompanied by spouses or male relatives."

Journalists in Iraq are being "assassinated with utmost impunity," the U.N. report said, with 18 murdered in the last two months.

Iraq burns. We shop. The Americans dying in Iraq are barely mentioned in the press anymore. They warrant maybe one sentence in a long roundup article out of Baghdad, or a passing reference - no longer than a few seconds - in a television news account of the latest political ditherings.

Since the vast majority of Americans do not want anything to do with the military or the war, the burden of fighting has fallen on a small cadre of volunteers who are being sent into the war zone again and again. Nearly 3,000 have been killed, and many thousands more have been maimed.

The war has now lasted as long as the American involvement in World War II. But there is no sense of collective sacrifice in this war, no shared burden of responsibility. The soldiers in Iraq are fighting, suffering and dying in a war in which there are no clear objectives and no end in sight, and which a majority of Americans do not support.

They are dying anonymously and pointlessly, while the rest of us are free to buckle ourselves into the family vehicle and head off to the malls and shop.

source: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/112906G.shtml
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More from Bob Herbert:

Justice Goes Into Hiding
By Bob Herbert
New York Times | Opinion

Top law enforcement officials in Texas and at the Justice Department in Washington were aware of the hateful treatment of black people caught in a drug sting gone haywire in the small panhandle town of Tulia, but no one bothered to do anything about it.

The fact that a monstrous, racially motivated miscarriage of justice was occurring, that innocent people had been wrongfully accused and that entire families were being ruined did not prompt anyone to intervene.

"Certainly we're concerned in any case about fair justice," said Tom Kelly, a spokesman for the Texas state attorney general, John Cornyn. But he said Mr. Cornyn had not become involved in the events in Tulia because it was his understanding that the Justice Department had been conducting a criminal investigation.

"Attorney General Cornyn does stand ready to assist federal authorities in any way that we can assist them in their ongoing investigation," said Mr. Kelly.

You can file that comment in the empty gesture folder. There is no ongoing criminal investigation. A couple of years ago, the Justice Department, after receiving complaints from the N.A.A.C.P. and others, did open an investigation of Tom Coleman, an undercover narcotics agent who conducted a clownish one-man sting operation that resulted in the arrests in the summer of 1999 of more than 10 percent of Tulia's black population. Bill Clinton was president at the time and the lead investigator was an F.B.I. agent from Amarillo.

Mr. Coleman should have been an easy target. A white man who was fond of the word "nigger," he focused his "investigation" entirely on black people and a handful of whites who had relationships with them. He fingered people who were obviously innocent, routinely discarded evidence, scrawled important investigative information on his legs and arms, changed some of his testimony from trial to trial, and stumbled frequently into legal trouble himself.

But George W. Bush was the governor of Texas during Mr. Coleman's Tulia shenanigans. And when Mr. Bush became president and appointed John Ashcroft attorney general, the Justice Department investigation was doomed. Lori Sharpe Day, an adviser to Mr. Ashcroft, informed the president of the American Bar Association last month that "an investigation of events in Tulia was conducted by the Criminal Section and recently closed."

[Late Friday afternoon I got a call from a Justice Department spokesman who said that while the criminal investigation has been closed, the Tulia matter is still under "review" by the Civil Rights Division.]

Mr. Cornyn, meanwhile, is running for a U.S. Senate seat in Texas against a black opponent. One of the items you are not likely to find in his campaign material is the photo of him presenting Tom Coleman with a Texas "Lawman of the Year Award" for 1999.

With state and federal officials unwilling to aid the victims of this fiasco, and with several people serving unconscionably long prison sentences, it has fallen to a small group of dedicated lawyers to try to right some of these grievous wrongs.

One of the members of this cadre, a white lawyer from Amarillo named Jeff Blackburn, who has offered his services pro bono, has managed to get the charges against two defendants dismissed. "This is an injustice that has to be corrected," he said.

The legal challenges, supported by a number of private law firms, are being coordinated by the formidable Elaine Jones, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

"It is rare that we've seen an entire community preyed upon in this way," said Ms. Jones. "But we're in it now and we're going to stay with it. I'm not going to rest until all the convictions are overturned. I just hope no one dies in prison. You know, the hog farmer [Joe Moore, who is in his late 50's and serving a sentence of 90 years] is now in poor health."

The local authorities, including the prosecutor, Terry McEachern, are now keeping remarkably low profiles. The right thing to do would be to throw in the towel, to admit that there was not sufficient evidence to justify these cases.

Tom Coleman's investigation was a nightmarish blend of incompetence and malevolence and no one should have to spend even an hour in jail because of it.

source: http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/08.14E.herbert.justice.htm
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Tulia Update:

Nov. 30, 2006, 1:09AM
Tulia drug agent's conviction upheld

LUBBOCK — An appellate court has rejected an appeal from Tom Coleman, the former undercover drug agent behind the discredited Tulia drug busts who was convicted of aggravated perjury last year.
The 7th Court of Appeals upheld Coleman's conviction Monday.

Coleman, 47, was sentenced to 10 years probation last year after a jury in Lubbock found him guilty of testifying falsely in a 2003 hearing.

Calls to Coleman's attorneys were not returned Wednesday.

Forty-six people, 39 of them black, were arrested in the 1999 sting.

Gov. Rick Perry pardoned 35 of 38 who went to trial or accepted plea agreements to avoid long sentences, and 45 of the 46 arrested shared in a
$6 million settlement of a civil rights lawsuit against the agencies Coleman worked for.

source: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/4368398.html
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Tulia to Brownwood:

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Why, after Tulia, Texas should re-think its Big Government ...
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Why, after Tulia, Texas should re-think its Big Government approach to the ... Brownwood task force agent died in. mid-investigation: 10. ...
www.criminaljusticecoalition.org/files/ userfiles/racial_profiling/aclu_rntf_report_2002.pdf - Similar pages

source: http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=tulia+texas+brownwood&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
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Book Reviews
Southern man
By HOWARD GOLDENTHAL
TULIA: RACE, COCAINE, AND CORRUPTION IN A SMALL TEXAS TOWN by Nate Blakeslee (Public Affairs), 456 pages, $18 paper. Rating: NNNNN

Tulia is a sweaty little speck of a town lost in time somewhere in the Texas Panhandle.

We would never have heard of it had police not rounded up 47 suspects – almost all of them black – on cocaine charges eight years ago. Twenty per cent of the town's adult black population was nabbed.

Trials ensued, and the sentences were staggering. Defendants accused of possessing minute amounts of coke were given insanely long jail terms, including one for 361 years. The story of those arrests and the scandal that followed is chillingly told here by Nate Blakeslee.

At the centre of it all was a narc named Tom Coleman, a card-carrying member of the KKK who was described as a pathological liar and a crook by his previous law enforcement employers. Coleman's past caught up with him and the sherriff of Tulia was forced to arrest him in the middle of the sting operation, but that didn't stop the sheriff from continuing to use him. He was even named officer of the year.

When Coleman's dirty background started leaking out, the morally bankrupt district attorney handling the prosecutions covered up for the lawman to keep the convictions coming.

This story reads like a throwback to 1930s Alabama, where a black defendant had no hope of challenging the word of a white person. But this was Texas 1998, and the governor of the state at the time was George W. Bush.

Tulia is a great book about the war on drugs and its ugly racist undertow. It's also one of the best pieces of journalism to come out of the South in a long time.

NOW | NOVEMBER 16 - 22, 2006 | VOL. 26 NO. 11

source: http://www.nowtoronto.com/issues/2006-11-16/books_reviews.php
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Behind Closed Doors
November 03, 2006
by Duncan Pickard
This kind of thing always comes as a surprise. A white sheriff charges 46 Southern blacks with a fictitious crime. The defendants are poorly represented in court, and an all-white jury sentences them to life on questionable evidence. But this is not Scottsboro, Alabama in 1931; it’s Tulia, Texas in 1999.

Tom Coleman, hired by the Tulia sheriff to sniff out drug dealers in the town of 5,000 in the Texas panhandle, single-handedly convinced numerous juries — without drug paraphernalia, weapons, money, eyewitnesses, or photographs as evidence — that one out of every ten of Tulia’s African-Americans had sold him drugs. Sentences ranged from 20 to 341 years in prison.

Some alleged dealers were dragged out of their houses in the middle of the night, clad only in underwear, and met by a barrage of squad cars and newspaper photographers. “Streets cleared of garbage,” read a headline in the Tulia Sentinel after one spree of arrests. One of the defendants, Tonya White, was accused of selling Coleman cocaine at 10:45 a.m. on Oct. 9, 1998. She was convicted even though she had a receipt signed at 9:45 a.m. from a bank in Oklahoma City, about five hours away.

Fortunately, the Governor of Texas eventually pardoned these individuals—most of them African-American—and the arresting officer is being charged with perjury.

The case in Tulia should remind Americans that we are not safe from injustice. There are Tulias across the country, in every state. Prejudice, though not always this obvious, exists all around us.

Take education. Average scores of black 17-year-old high schoolers are comparable to 13-year-old white students in middle school on the National Education Association’s report card, which is a test of reading, science, and math proficiency among American youth. Jonathan Kozol writes in Savage Inequalities about inequality in public education in the early ’90s. He shows that predominantly white suburban schools generally spend double the money per student than their predominantly black urban counterparts.

According to Kozol, Detroit’s MacKenzie High School teaches word processing without word processors; East St. Louis Senior High School’s biology labs have no lab tables or scalpels. Paterson, New Jersey’s high school doesn’t offer international language education, but the next school over, Princeton, teaches Spanish in the third grade.

Lacking education naturally leads to fewer opportunities in the workplace. According to The Cincinnati Enquirer, 80 percent of blacks in the Cincinnati workplace say they “have fewer opportunities for assignments and promotions than whites.” Ninety percent of whites say that’s not so. But the median household income for blacks in Cincinnati in 2000 was under $33,000 annually. On average, whites earned $14,000 more.

Even our air is segregated. According to the Associated Press, African-Americans are 79 percent more likely to live in communities with harmful particles in the atmosphere. These environments lead to documented high incidences of asthma and emphysema in urban populations.

Injustices like these are not always overt. They are often subconscious, the effects of accumulated years of people and government turning a blind eye. The answer does not always lie in broad legislation. The case in Tulia happened despite the Fourteenth Amendment, achievement gaps persist despite Brown v. Board, and poor air quality exists despite contrary efforts by the Clinton administration.

Legislators must appreciate these differences and work proactively to address them by specifically regulating residential air quality, providing more opportunities for poor minorities to educate themselves, and investigating suspicious trends in the judicial system.

This is why efforts like affirmative action can be helpful if applied correctly. For instance, high school dropout rates among black males in Chicago hover around 50 percent. Consequently, 25 percent of working-age black males did not work for 12 straight months in 2002. Five percent of that demographic were in jail, and only one in four were in college.

Such low matriculation rates give little hope for families to graduate children from college. It is also much harder to be the first in a family to attend a university than it is to follow a long line of baccalaureates. That means fewer sons will return to the community to raise another educated family. Affirmative action opens a door by giving more minorities a chance to attend college, which in turn can help improve their communities at home.

But legislation is no panacea. The solution to injustice fundamentally lies in the American psyche. The nation as a whole must become more aware that we are not immune to prejudice, even in the 21st century. Tulia is not an extreme example of segregation, but it is a blatant one. We must be aware that living in the 21st century does not render us immune to injustice.

Duncan Pickard, LA ‘10, has not yet declared a major.

source: http://www.tuftsobserver.org/opinion/20061103/behind_closed_doors.html