In a new book, Roger Williams University graduate Mark Fallon draws on his deep experience investigating terrorist operations to present a searing indictment of the interrogation techniques used by President George W. Bush’s administration – and to offer a stark warning to President Trump’s administration about the perils and pitfalls of employing torture. Fallon, a 1978 RWU graduate who studied…, Why Torture is Wrong, Regan Arts published Fallon’s book –, Unjustifiable Means: The Inside Story of How the CIA, Pentagon and US Government Conspired to Torture, – in October. By then, the government had held up publication for 233 days, prompting the American Civil Liberties Union and the Knight First Amendment Institute to write to senators asking them to intervene. While it now has been published, the book includes entire sections that the government has blacked out for reasons Fallon considers suspect. “The book the government doesn’t want you to read…, A Faulty Foundation, The book details how government leaders ignored and overrode the expertise and advice of interrogation professionals and lawyers. “Those in power, it seemed, were hell-bent on the notion that torturing prisoners was the way to do business,” he wrote. “Somehow, the Global War, on, Terror had become the Global War, of, Terror. We had turned into the very adversary we feared.” Now, Fallon is concerned President Trump’s administration will resort to torture. As a candidate in 2016, Trump said, “Torture works. OK, folks? Believe me, it works. And waterboarding is your minor form, but we should go much stronger than waterboarding.” After becoming president, Trump said, “When ISIS is doing things that no one has…
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In an age of Black Lives Matter and videotaped police violence, traditional civil rights remedies are no longer adequate to address problems of inequality and discrimination. But is Big Data really the solution? It might be – at least partially, according to Richard Thompson Ford, George E. Osborne Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. Delivering this year’s Thurgood Marshall Memorial Lecture…, Brown v. Board of Education , is no longer enough. “My claim is not that there are no answers to these problems, far from it,” Ford said. “It’s that the answers are multivalent. Eliminating discrimination is only one part of the puzzle, and in many cases an increasingly small part of the puzzle. This is in part because discrimination – in the way we’ve defined it in our society – is very hard to prove, and in part because the…, Rethinking, Brown, While, Brown, was a cutting-edge solution to the discrimination problems of five decades ago, Ford said, it is insufficient to address many modern challenges – from police violence to employment discrimination to lingering segregation in schools and neighborhoods “Civil rights [remedies] were, in the conventional sense, astoundingly successful in fighting Jim Crow-style discrimination,” Ford explained. But in…, Brown, “we got a lot of policies designed to reproduce the effects of Jim Crow without making any explicit racial classification. We can’t find a racist? We can’t find explicit discrimination?” No remedy. That inadequacy is cast in high relief in recent police violence cases, for example, where efforts to prosecute fall short “because we’re looking for a specific individual to blame for the problem,…, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, ). Meanwhile, liberal judges have diluted the power of, Brown, by allowing discrimination suits predicated on white men being excluded from Mother’s Day door prizes or Ladies’ Nights at bars. Such decisions suggest that “we can’t tell the difference between policies that are benign and malignant, between those that further entrench historical patterns and those that may even reverse them,” Ford said. “, I, suggest that not only, can, we, but we, must, make such value judgments.”, Different Approaches for Different Times, Ford said the institutional, societal and political nature of modern-day discrimination was strongly revealed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Federal response was sluggish and weak, and “the African-American community suffered the disproportionate brunt of the aftermath.” Yet the constructive possibilities of that moment, in many ways, got collapsed into Kanye West’s widely reported…, lots, of evidence,” he argued. “After all, in today’s environment there’s a common [conservative] discourse that liberals just play the race card against anyone with whom they disagree.” In fact, Katrina’s inequities resulted from “the continuing effects of past racism, and in particular economic segregation – the isolation of poor black communities in neighborhoods that were both more vulnerable to…, only, way, and probably shouldn’t even be the, central, way that we think about dealing with problems of social injustice. “ New approaches, he said, could include a regulatory system created with buy-in from law enforcement and other stakeholders rather than simply imposed from above. “We actually need the cooperation of the people that we’re regulating to understand the institutional and cultural forces that are creating these inequalities,” Ford…, Harvard Law Review, and the, Stanford Law Review, and has lectured on these topics internationally. He has published regularly in, Slate, and has written opinion pieces for the, San Jose Mercury News, and the, San Francisco Chronicle, . He is the author of several books, including, The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse, (2 008),, Rights Gone Wrong: How Law Corrupts the Struggle for Equality, (2011), and, Universal Rights Down to Earth, (2011). He is currently working on a book about Grooming Codes. Thurgood Marshall Memorial Lecture is sponsored by the law firm of Hinckley Allen . The event was part of RWU’s year-long series, “ Talking About Race, Gender and Power. ”
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