Slavery Lesson

http://wcbstv.com/local/slavery.slave.labor.2.312697.html

CALDWELL, N.J. (CBS) ―
Two local middle school teachers are in hot water after assigning students a controversial project on slavery that's angered parents.

Over 100 sixth graders at Grover Cleveland Middle School in Caldwell spent several days last week taking part in an assignment where they used terms like "build a plantation" while completing their "Lap of Luxury" social studies project.

The project instructed students to create an advertisement defending the use of slave labor to run a newly built plantation in South Carolina. Students are told to come up with a '"catchy" name for the plantation and give three reasons why slave labor is the "best idea" and to add illustrations.

One student, who is not being identified because of his age, read to CBS 2 what he wrote for the assignment: "Slave labor is the way to go because slaves aren't paid, so all money is profit."
Parents are astonished by the assignment's nature.

"It's really offending," said Tyiesha Hameed, whose child is one of the only eight black students who attends the school. "There's so many other ways and tools to show our kids how to learn and teach them in reference to slavery."

One question parents and officials are asking is whether the 11- and 12-year-olds even understand the lesson which was given to them.

"The students have to use their creative spirits to create justification. That gets the mind pretty worked up, and it embeds some things in their process that will be there for forever," said James Harris, president of the New Jersey NAACP chapter.

Casey Shorter, the school's principal, said he didn't find out about the project until after he spoke with a concerned parent. "Our intent was not to be insensitive. After reviewing the assignment and listening to feedback, from an administrative and teaching perspective, we determined it was insensitive and inappropriate. And we will eliminate it from the curriculum," he said.

Citing privacy issues, Shorter would not say what he's done with Dana Howarth and Beth Rutzler, the two language arts teachers who created the controversial "Lap of Luxury" project. He adds this is actually the second year that the teachers have given the assignment.

Report Says Firm Sought to Cover Up Iraq Shootings

By JOHN M. BRODER
WASHINGTON, Oct. 1 — Employees of Blackwater USA have engaged in nearly 200 shootings in Iraq since 2005, in a vast majority of cases firing their weapons from moving vehicles without stopping to count the dead or assist the wounded, according to a new report from Congress.
In at least two cases, Blackwater paid victims’ family members who complained, and sought to cover up other episodes, the Congressional report said. It said State Department officials approved the payments in the hope of keeping the shootings quiet. In one case last year, the department helped Blackwater spirit an employee out of Iraq less than 36 hours after the employee, while drunk, killed a bodyguard for one of Iraq’s two vice presidents on Christmas Eve.

The report by the Democratic majority staff of a House committee adds weight to complaints from Iraqi officials, American military officers and Blackwater’s competitors that company guards have taken an aggressive, trigger-happy approach to their work and have repeatedly acted with reckless disregard for Iraqi life.

But the report is also harshly critical of the State Department for exercising virtually no restraint or supervision of the private security company’s 861 employees in Iraq. “There is no evidence in the documents that the committee has reviewed that the State Department sought to restrain Blackwater’s actions, raised concerns about the number of shooting episodes involving Blackwater or the company’s high rate of shooting first, or detained Blackwater contractors for investigation,” the report states.

On Sept. 16, Blackwater employees were involved in a shooting in a Baghdad square that left at least eight Iraqis dead, an episode that remains clouded. The shooting set off outrage among Iraqi officials, who branded them “cold-blooded murder” and demanded that the company be removed from the country.

The State Department is conducting three separate investigations of the shooting, and on Monday the F.B.I. said it was sending a team to Baghdad to compile evidence for possible criminal prosecution.

Neither the State Department nor Blackwater would comment on Monday about the 15-page report, but both said their representatives would address it on Tuesday in testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, whose Democratic staff produced the document. Based on 437 internal Blackwater incident reports as well as internal State Department correspondence, the report said Blackwater’s use of force was “frequent and extensive, resulting in significant casualties and property damage.”

Among those scheduled to testify Tuesday are Erik Prince, a press-shy former Navy Seal who founded Blackwater a decade ago, and several top State Department officials.

The committee report places a significant share of the blame for Blackwater’s record in Iraq on the State Department, which has paid Blackwater more than $832 million for security services in Iraq and elsewhere, under a diplomatic security contract it shares with two other companies, DynCorp International and Triple Canopy.

Blackwater has reported more shootings than the other two companies combined, but it also currently has twice as many employees in Iraq as the other two companies combined.

In the case of the Christmas Eve killing, the report says that an official of the United States Embassy in Iraq suggested paying the slain bodyguard’s family $250,000, but a lower-ranking official said that such a high payment “could cause incidents with people trying to get killed by our guys to financially guarantee their family’s future.” Blackwater ultimately paid the dead man’s family $15,000.

In another fatal shooting cited by the committee, an unidentified State Department official in Baghdad urged Blackwater to pay the victim’s family $5,000. The official wrote, “I hope we can put this unfortunate matter behind us quickly.”

The committee report also cited three other shootings in which Blackwater officials filed misleading reports or otherwise tried to cover up the shootings.

Since mid-2006, Blackwater has been responsible for guarding American diplomats in and around Baghdad, while DynCorp has been responsible for the northern part of the country and Triple Canopy for the south.

State Department officials said last week that Blackwater had run more than 1,800 escort convoys for American diplomats and other senior civilians this year and its employees had discharged their weapons 57 times. Blackwater was involved in 195 instances of gunfire from 2005 until early September, a rate of 1.4 shootings a week, the report says. In 163 of those cases, Blackwater gunmen fired first.

The report also says Blackwater gunmen engaged in offensive operations alongside uniformed American military personnel in violation of their State Department contract, which states that Blackwater guards are to use their weapons only for defensive purposes.

It notes that Blackwater’s contract authorizes its employees to use lethal force only to prevent “imminent and grave danger” to themselves or to the people they are paid to protect. “In practice, however,” the report says, “the vast majority of Blackwater weapons discharges are pre-emptive, with Blackwater forces firing first at a vehicle or suspicious individual prior to receiving any fire.”

The report cites two instances in which Blackwater gunmen engaged in tactical military operations. One was a firefight in Najaf in 2004 during which Blackwater employees set up a machine gun alongside American and Spanish forces. Later that year, a Blackwater helicopter helped an American military squad secure a mosque from which sniper fire had been detected.
Blackwater has dismissed 122 of its employees over the past three years for misuse of weapons, drug or alcohol abuse, lewd conduct or violent behavior, according to the report. It has also terminated workers for insubordination, failure to report incidents or lying about them, and publicly embarrassing the company. One employee was dismissed for showing signs of post-traumatic stress disorder.

The Senate on Monday gave final approval, 92 to 3, to a defense policy bill that included the establishment of an independent commission to investigate private contractors operating in Iraq and Afghanistan. The bill, which must be reconciled with a House version, faces a veto threat because it includes an expansion of federal hate-crimes laws.

Supreme Court Faces an Array of Divisive Cases

By LINDA GREENHOUSE

WASHINGTON, Sept. 30 — The Supreme Court has so many polarizing cases on the docket for its new term that the deep ideological divisions that characterized the last term are all but certain to remain on display after the justices reconvene on Monday.

The conservative majority under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. drove the court to the right in a series of high-profile rulings during the term that ended in June. That performance, as well as a series of books and articles by and about justices, has placed the court in an unusually bright spotlight as the new term opens.

The conservative bloc will not necessarily prevail in every important case. For example, the Bush administration is clearly on the defensive as the court prepares to hear a third-round challenge to policies governing those held as enemy combatants at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

But the conservative justices clearly have the upper hand in the all-important task of shaping the court’s docket, a process that in effect shapes the country’s immediate legal agenda. They demonstrated their power last week in accepting 19 new cases, an unusually large number, including an employer’s appeal in a racial discrimination case that could provide a vehicle for limiting remedies available under one of the country’s oldest civil rights laws.

The question in the latest case involving the Guantánamo detentions is whether Congress properly stripped the federal courts of jurisdiction to hear challenges brought by the detainees. The justices had seemed willing to steer clear of the issue in April, when they declined to hear appeals from two groups of detainees.

But the day after the term ended, they reversed course and agreed to hear the cases, an action without modern precedent. Because the reconsideration required the votes of five justices, instead of the four ordinarily needed to grant a case, the development strongly suggested that a majority of the court retains concerns about the current regime for determining and challenging the detainees’ designation as enemy combatants. The Bush administration lost two earlier rounds at the court, in 2004 and 2006.

Among the new cases the justices granted last week was a challenge to a state law requiring voters to provide photo identification in order to cast a ballot, an issue that has divided legislators and judges along party lines throughout the country. Republicans generally stress the importance of preventing voter fraud, while Democrats view these increasingly popular measures as creating unwarranted barriers to voter access. Although the justices granted the case at the request of the Indiana Democratic Party and the American Civil Liberties Union, the action could well prove to be an example of “watch out what you wish for” if the result is to uphold the statute at issue and to encourage other states to follow Indiana’s lead.

The justices also took up a highly visible death penalty case, a challenge to the particular lethal injection method that is used in most states. While the validity of capital punishment, or even of lethal injection, is not at stake, the case will require the justices to take a position on the current meaning of the Eighth Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. It is far from clear whether a majority of the justices will read the Constitution as mandating one chemical formulation versus another.

The discrimination case the justices granted on Tuesday, which has attracted almost no notice, could nonetheless produce an important shift in the court’s approach to interpreting statutes. The question is whether a law that bars racial discrimination in business dealings, including employment, also prohibits retaliation against those who complain about discrimination.

Ordinarily, the court grants cases only to resolve conflicting interpretations in the lower courts. But in this instance, every federal appeals court to consider the issue has agreed that the statute does apply to retaliation. For the court to grant a case in the absence of a lower-court conflict — as it did in the case decided in June that invalidated voluntary integration plans in two public school systems — is often an indication that the case has been added to the docket as a vehicle for advancing a particular agenda.

The federal law at issue in the new case was originally part of the Reconstruction-era Civil Rights Act of 1866. Known now as Section 1981, it does not mention “retaliation.” Neither do most other anti-discrimination laws. In the past, that has been no barrier to the court in finding that protection against retaliation is inherently part of protection against discrimination.

But support on the court for an approach that goes beyond the margins of the constitutional text has been shrinking. Two years ago, the court ruled by a vote of 5 to 4 that Title IX, a law that bars sex discrimination in schools, also covers retaliation. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote the majority opinion. It is likely that her successor, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., would have been among the dissenters.

Given that the new case, CBOCS West, Inc. v. Humphries, No. 06-1431, does not meet the court’s most important criterion for review, it is likely that a new majority granted it in order to cut off the retaliation claim and perhaps also to issue a broader ruling against finding rights that are not spelled out in statutes.

Here are details of other important cases for the new term.

Detainees

A year ago, in response to the court’s most recent ruling in favor of a Guantánamo detainee, the Republican-controlled Congress passed the Military Commissions Act, providing that “no court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction” to consider a detainee’s petition for a writ of habeas corpus. Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who was then chairman of the Judiciary Committee, voted for the measure, but he has filed a brief telling the justices he believes it is unconstitutional.

The Constitution authorizes Congress to suspend the “privilege” of habeas corpus only at times of “rebellion or invasion.” Under the Supreme Court’s precedents, a suspension at other times may nonetheless be permissible as long as adequate alternate procedures exist for challenging a conviction or sentence. So the question in these cases, Boumediene v. Bush, No. 06-1195, and Al Odah v. United States, No. 06-1196, is whether the justices will deem the limited procedures available to the detainees to be adequate.

Voting Rights

Challengers to Indiana’s two-year-old voter identification law, which requires current government-issued photo ID, call it the “most onerous” such law in the country. Voters lacking the proper identification have 10 days to obtain it in order for their provisional ballots to be counted.

A federal appeals court upheld the law, finding that it would prevent fraud while not keeping many people from the polls. The plaintiffs maintain that the poor and elderly would face a disproportionate burden. The underlying question is how the justices will evaluate the competing interests of preventing fraud and protecting access. The cases are Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, No. 07-21, and Indiana Democratic Party v. Rokita, No. 07-25.

Criminal Law

The lethal injection case, Baze v. Rees, No. 07-5439, challenges the use of the most common three-drug lethal injection “cocktail,” which is conceded to place some inmates at risk of severe pain. The Kentucky Supreme Court concluded that the risk was not “substantial” enough to make the particular combination unconstitutional.

The question for the justices is what standard courts should use in evaluating the evidence from which to draw a conclusion on constitutionality, especially in light of evidence that pain can be avoided through a different combination of drugs and attention to a reliable level of anesthesia.

The court will also hear two more cases that address the question of judicial discretion in federal criminal sentencing. The question in Gall v. United States, No. 06-7949, is the justification a judge must provide in issuing a sentence that differs substantially from the one called for by the federal sentencing guidelines. Kimbrough v. United States, No. 06-6330, addresses judicial discretion to mitigate the harsh sentences required for offenses involving crack cocaine.

Federalism

The Texas courts have refused to accept a directive from President Bush to bypass procedural obstacles and grant a new hearing to a Mexican death-row inmate, following a 2004 World Court decision that the inmate’s rights under an international treaty were violated when he was not given the chance to meet with Mexican officials. The case, Medellín v. Texas, No. 06-984, presents unusual issues of state-federal relations.