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Breaking: Supreme Court says Gitmo detainees must have access to US courts Update: Scalia: “The Nation will live to regret what the Court has done today.”

All this means is that Gitmo will close and thus the following will take place:

Beginning in the early 1990s and continuing to this day, the Central Intelligence Agency, together with other U.S. government agencies, has utilized an intelligence-gathering program involving the transfer of foreign nationals suspected of involvement in terrorism to detention and interrogation in countries where — in the CIA’s view — federal and international legal safeguards do not apply. Suspects are detained and interrogated either by U.S. personnel at U.S.-run detention facilities outside U.S. sovereign territory or, alternatively, are handed over to the custody of foreign agents for interrogation. In both instances, interrogation methods are employed that do not comport with federal and internationally recognized standards. This program is commonly known as “extraordinary rendition.”

The current policy traces its roots to the administration of former President Bill Clinton. Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, however, what had been a limited program expanded dramatically, with some experts estimating that 150 foreign nationals have been victims of rendition in the last few years alone.

Foreign nationals suspected of terrorism have been transported to detention and interrogation facilities in Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, Diego Garcia, Afghanistan, Guantánamo, and elsewhere.

In the words of former CIA agent Robert Baer: “If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan. If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear — never to see them again — you send them to Egypt.”

No more club Gitmo
 

By NICHOLAS WAPSHOTT
Staff Reporter New York Sun - Article Link

Justice Thomas, in his first public statement about the circumstances leading to his appointment to the Supreme Court, said he became the target of a political smear campaign because of his presumed beliefs about abortion and because, as a conservative African-American, he was thought to have betrayed his roots.

The vehemence of his contention that he was made the victim of false allegations to keep him from joining the court, and the clarity of his statements about the propensity for black Americans to paint themselves, and agree to be painted, as victims, is certain to raise the issue of race in a presidential election contest in which for the first time one of the front-runners, Senator Obama, is an African-American.

Justice Thomas’s remarks also will bring to the fore the complexion of the Supreme Court as a potent election issue. The suggestion by Justice Thomas, an appointee of President George H.W. Bush, that the future of Roe v. Wade was behind opposition to his Supreme Court candidacy confirms that the future direction of the court — and the future of legal abortions — will depend on who is elected in November 2008.

In an extended interview on CBS News’s “60 Minutes,” broadcast last night and tonight, to accompany his memoir, “My Grandfather’s Son,” out today, Justice Thomas explained why he believes he was accused of sexual harassment by a female colleague, Anita Hill. “The issue was abortion,” he said.

He fiercely defended his description of the Senate confirmation hearings, at which Ms. Hill presented her allegations, as “a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves.”

Related piece worth reading LaShawn Barber: Black Conservatives and Black Liberals: What’s the Difference?

More Clarence Thomas:

FYI I will post both the 60 Minutes interview and the Rush interview and add to my sidebar (no commercials) in the next day or so.

A little side note as I found this pic:

Having been the only black kid in a class, I know what this little girl is asking, because a idiot little white boy did ask me!

1) Why is your skin so dark, is it burned?

2) How did your hair get like that?

3) Did you use a vacuum to make it puffy?

*****

By Juan Williams

LET us now praise the Brown decision. Let us now bury the Brown decision.

With yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling ending the use of voluntary schemes to create racial balance among students, it is time to acknowledge that Brown’s time has passed. It is worthy of a send-off with fanfare for setting off the civil rights movement and inspiring social progress for women, gays and the poor. But the decision in Brown v. Board of Education that focused on outlawing segregated schools as unconstitutional is now out of step with American political and social realities.

Desegregation does not speak to dropout rates that hover near 50 percent for black and Hispanic high school students. It does not equip society to address the so-called achievement gap between black and white students that mocks Brown’s promise of equal educational opportunity.

And the fact is, during the last 20 years, with Brown in full force, America’s public schools have been growing more segregated — even as the nation has become more racially diverse. In 2001, the National Center for Education Statistics reported that the average white student attends a school that is 80 percent white, while 70 percent of black students attend schools where nearly two-thirds of students are black and Hispanic.

By the early ’90s, support in the federal courts for the central work of Brown — racial integration of public schools — began to rapidly expire. In a series of cases in Atlanta, Oklahoma City and Kansas City, Mo., frustrated parents, black and white, appealed to federal judges to stop shifting children from school to school like pieces on a game board. The parents wanted better neighborhood schools and a better education for their children, no matter the racial make-up of the school. In their rulings ending court mandates for school integration, the judges, too, spoke of the futility of using schoolchildren to address social ills caused by adults holding fast to patterns of residential segregation by both class and race.

The focus of efforts to improve elementary and secondary schools shifted to magnet schools, to allowing parents the choice to move their children out of failing schools and, most recently, to vouchers and charter schools. The federal No Child Left Behind plan has many critics, but there’s no denying that it is an effective tool for forcing teachers’ unions and school administrators to take responsibility for educating poor and minority students.

It was an idealistic Supreme Court that in 1954 approved of Brown as a race-conscious policy needed to repair the damage of school segregation and protect every child’s 14th-Amendment right to equal treatment under law. In 1971, Chief Justice Warren Burger, writing for a unanimous court still embracing Brown, said local school officials could make racial integration a priority even if it did not improve educational outcomes because it helped “to prepare students to live in a pluralistic society.”

But today a high court with a conservative majority concludes that any policy based on race — no matter how well intentioned — is a violation of every child’s 14th-Amendment right to be treated as an individual without regard to race. We’ve come full circle.

In 1990, after months of interviews with Justice Thurgood Marshall, who had been the lead lawyer for the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund on the Brown case, I sat in his Supreme Court chambers with a final question. Almost 40 years later, was he satisfied with the outcome of the decision? Outside the courthouse, the failing Washington school system was hypersegregated, with more than 90 percent of its students black and Latino. Schools in the surrounding suburbs, meanwhile, were mostly white and producing some of the top students in the nation.

Had Mr. Marshall, the lawyer, made a mistake by insisting on racial integration instead of improvement in the quality of schools for black children?

His response was that seating black children next to white children in school had never been the point. It had been necessary only because all-white school boards were generously financing schools for white children while leaving black students in overcrowded, decrepit buildings with hand-me-down books and underpaid teachers. He had wanted black children to have the right to attend white schools as a point of leverage over the biased spending patterns of the segregationists who ran schools — both in the 17 states where racially separate schools were required by law and in other states where they were a matter of culture.

If black children had the right to be in schools with white children, Justice Marshall reasoned, then school board officials would have no choice but to equalize spending to protect the interests of their white children.

Racial malice is no longer the primary motive in shaping inferior schools for minority children. Many failing big city schools today are operated by black superintendents and mostly black school boards.

And today the argument that school reform should provide equal opportunity for children, or prepare them to live in a pluralistic society, is spent. The winning argument is that better schools are needed for all children — black, white, brown and every other hue — in order to foster a competitive workforce in a global economy.

Dealing with racism and the bitter fruit of slavery and “separate but equal” legal segregation was at the heart of the court’s brave decision 53 years ago. With Brown officially relegated to the past, the challenge for brave leaders now is to deliver on the promise of a good education for every child.

By Kevin Merida and Michael A. Fletcher
Washington Post Staff Writers

One of the local dealers was Clarence Thomas’s nephew. Until his 30-year prison sentence began in 1999, Mark Elliot Martin, the son of Thomas’s sister, had been part of Pin Point’s drug problem. He had been in and out of trouble, and in and out of jail — at least 12 arrests, according to court records. In 1997, the year Martin was convicted of pointing a pistol at another person, Thomas assumed custody of his nephew’s son, with the nephew’s permission. Mark Elliot Martin Jr. — “Marky,” they called him — was a precocious, curly-haired 6-year-old. The justice promised to give Mark what Thomas’s grandfather had given him at the same age — opportunities to succeed beyond what the boy had in Pin Point.

Thomas’s intervention in this family crisis reflects a side of him not widely known. As arguably the most powerful African American in public life, he labors under expectations that none of his fellow justices face. Even as Thomas goes about his work, perhaps the purest conservative on the high court, it is his racial identity that shadows him. For 16 years, there have been questions: Would he be on the court if he were not black? Would his silence at oral arguments cast doubt on his intellect if he were not black? Would he be the subject of such public scrutiny if he were not a black conservative?

Ever since Thomas replaced Thurgood Marshall in 1991, many have struggled to reconcile who he is today with where he began — as the Jim Crow-era child of deprivation in Pin Point, a boy whose family insulated its shack with newspapers and shared an outhouse with neighbors.

Ketanji Brown Jackson, a former clerk for Justice Stephen G. Breyer, remembers sitting across from Thomas at lunch once with a quizzical expression on her face. Jackson, who is black, said Thomas “spoke the language,” meaning he reminded her of the black men she knew. “But I just sat there the whole time thinking: ‘I don’t understand you. You sound like my parents. You sound like the people I grew up with.’ But the lessons he tended to draw from the experiences of the segregated South seemed to be different than those of everybody I know.”

Read the full story at the Washington Post