Bad Bunny performed his halftime show entirely in Spanish, except near the end he proclaimed “God bless America,” and then proceeded to rattle off the names of a couple of dozen South and Central American countries, before adding “the United States and Canada, and Puerto Rico.”

This was a wonderfully subversive gesture, because in the Spanish of South and Central America, the word “America” means all of North, Central, and South America. The United States is just one part of the actual America, or the Americas as one would say when speaking in an English that is aware that Yankee imperialism isn’t the only way of looking at the nations of these two continents.

And of course doing the entire Super Bowl halftime show in Spanish was a gob of spit in the face of MAGA, which has always been infuriated by the idea that somewhere someone is finding it slightly easier than it would otherwise be to navigate life in the United States, because an option on a phone tree suggests that para Espanol, oprima dos.

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This is the grave of Charles Hamilton Houston.

Born in 1895 in Washington, D.C., Houston grew up relatively prosperous, especially for Black America in these years. His father, born a slave, was a lawyer in Washington. We think of the Black legal class as critical to civil rights and of course that’s true, but let’s not forget that Black Americans needed lawyers for everything that white Americans needed lawyers for, whether divorce or inheritance or property or taxes or whatever. So there was a robust number of Black lawyers by this time. Even though the family did relatively well, his mother still worked as a seamstress, which was the type of work that Black women could get.

Houston was a real bright kid and started at Amherst College in 1911, only 16 years old. He was the only Black student in his class and he graduated as valedictorian too in 1915. He got a job teaching English at Howard University. But then World War I came. He joined up and was commissioned as a first lieutenant, of course in a segregated unit. He was horrified and angry at the racism that Black troops faced. It’s possible he had not really seen that level of open racism before. Undoubtedly, he was not ignorant about racism in America and undoubtedly he had experienced it himself in some ways, but it was a little different in urbane DC and Amherst than white officers from Alabama bringing their ways of treating Black folks into the Army. In fact, Houston was so disgusted, his conclusion at the end of the war was that the United States was not a nation that Black people should fight and die for. He decided he would follow the law himself to protect Black people from the horrors of white America.

So that’s what Houston did. He returned to the United States in 1919 and enrolled at Harvard Law. He did very well. He was the first Black person named to the Harvard Law Review editorial board. He finished a bachelor of law there in 1922 and then a further law degree the next year. He passed the bar and joined his father’s firm in 1924. The American Bar Association was, of course, lily white. So Houston joined other Black lawyers in founding the National Bar Association in 1925 to represent their interests as Black lawyers in this hopelessly racist country.

In 1929, Houston took a job back at Howard in the law school. He wanted to train the next generation of Black lawyers to fight against American horribleness. He was dean of the law school and trained a lot of people. Among his students? Thurgood Marshall. In fact, he was so committed to using the law to fight against American racism that he finally left Howard in 1935 to become special counsel for the NAACP. There, he worked on many of the major cases of the 1930s and 1940s that began to chip away at Jim Crow. Some of those cases included forcing juries in the South to accept Black members, fighting against attempts to execute Black people dubiously committed of crimes by all-white juries, and of course education cases. There was a long lead-up to Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and Houston played a critical role in them.

Among the key cases he worked was Hollis v. State of Oklahoma, a 1935 capital murder case where a Black man faced an all-white jury and was sentenced to death. They won this case, sort of. Hollis was not killed. But a new trial was ordered and he received a life sentence, dying in prison in 1950. Still, such small victories were important in the larger context. This also laid the groundwork for including Black people on juries, since they were routinely excluded because they weren’t on voter rolls in much of the South, though not all the South. Black voting in the South was around 20%, even during Jim Crow, which is often forgotten.

Another really important case–and this is one that I mention in class–is Missouri ex rel Gaines v. Canada. This was a 1939 case that challenged Plessy v. Ferguson. See, as soon as Plessy was decided, new cases came up. What if instead of separate but equal, there was just something for whites but nothing for Blacks. This was Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Education from 1899, right after Plessy and the Court was fine with that too. I’m not sure why we don’t talk about this more, since it is more telling than Plessy. Anyway, Missouri excluded Black people from the University of Missouri Law School. But it didn’t provide an alternative law school. So the case was that the state violated Plessy. The Court, a very different court in 1939 than 1896, decided in favor of the state’s Black law school aspirants. Houston argued this case before the Court.

Houston’s position was to constantly challenge Plessy. The idea was that you could have your separate schools if you really wanted them, but it was going to cost you in a ton of headaches and legal fees and we are going to make it so troublesome for you that you should just integrate your schools. Probably that never would have worked, but in the 1930s and 1940s, you held on to what positions you could and the courts were slowly chipping away at Jim Crow in these years so there was reason to hope. He went to South Carolina with a camera to film the differences between white and Black schools for judges to actually see this. It was easy to dismiss the real differences if you didn’t have to see it. It was much harder if you did. This is of course a key strategy of, well, everything today since we have all have little movie cameras on our phones (the fact that we use these for fucking selfies is another sign of how degraded society has become, but that’s for another post). Houston also did brave work to challenge racist housing covenants, doing tons of work to lay the groundwork to get these thrown out as unconstitutional, which eventually succeeded.

Houston should have been around for Brown. But he had a massive heart attack in 1950 and died. He was only 54 years old. A tragic loss. He would have played such a key role in the repeal of the entire Jim Crow legal structures over the next twenty years. Imagine what he would have seen had he lived to 1970. Of course, what he would have seen is northern whites freaking out over sending their kids to schools with them. After all, don’t our children deserve the best schools? And who am I to do anything to stop de facto segregation anyway? It’s my kid we are talking about! Christ.

Charles Hamilton Houston is buried in Lincoln Memorial Cemetery, Suitland, Maryland.

If you would like this series to visit some of the other key lawyers of the civil rights movement, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. William Hastie is in the same cemetery as Houston. William Bryant is in Brentwood, Maryland. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.

The post Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,080 appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

One of the best podcasts on earth is Heavyweight, where a guy named Jonathan helps people solve incredibly personal, difficult lifelong problems. He does it with a staff of researchers, a tenacious need to help others, and ample time to truly get to the bottom of an answer. There are so many great episodes it's hard to pick one, so if you've never heard it before, I'd say start from the beginning and enjoy one a day until you're all caught up. They're poignant but also funny and light-hearted, and ultimately satisfying when the team solves a thorny issue.

The most recent episode is completely different and made me think for the first time that a podcast episode should be considered for a Pulitzer award in journalism someday.

Minneapolis | Heavyweight

In part one, Jonathan and his wife, Emily, check in. In part two, the story of a family forced into hiding after an ICE shooting.

Pushkin Industries

The first part paints a picture of how Minneapolis sounds and feels from the perspective of Jonathan's wife. I'm guessing she started recording audio on her phone whenever a bunch of black SUVs crossed her path over several weeks, but hearing the sheer terror of people screaming, flash bangs, teargas being deployed on civilians, and the warning whistles to alert neighbors of ICE hit me like no newspaper story ever could.

It's harrowing and horrible and was extremely difficult to listen to.

The back half of the episode covers a family with asylum status in the US, and how a father was shot in his own home by ICE. It includes actual audio of the raid where thugs break a door down and everyone scrambles for their lives before a couple family members are taken away.

The most shocking part of that story is the family fled horrible conditions in Venezuela to live a better life for them and their children in America, and this is what America in Minneapolis has become for those fleeing violence from other countries.

Again, the full episode is hard to listen to, but completely worth your time.

FBI agents in full Studly Wear and Theatrics (SWaT) garb render a Benghazi suspect.

First of all, what’s with the woodland camouflage pattern? The FBI didn’t pick that guy up in a jungle, after all. I’d think that desert tan uniforms would be more useful, if indeed camo of any kind really was necessary.

From the looks of that grey-haired old man who was the object of the exercise, any middle-grade FBI trainee could have handled him alone just fine while wearing Casual Friday khakis and a blue blazer.

In addition to thanking the FBI, however they are attired, we should also call out our gratitude to the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction in the U.S. Code for making it possible to prosecute someone for crimes he committed outside the USA. The Benghazi Mission facility wasn’t even a declared diplomatic premise in a foreign land. Just so long as the USG had leased it, we can enforce our laws against offenses committed there.

Pro tip: remember that fact about the Benghazi property not being a declared diplomatic premise, since it is crucial to the defense of former SecState Hillary Clinton against accusations that she failed to live up to her responsibilities under the Secure Embassy Construction and Counterterrorism Act (SECCA).

The revival of those old accusations is inevitable. Fair or not, using legal means to political ends has been the shared practice in Washington DC since at least Watergate, and we ought to acknowledge it will happen in this case despite how justified those legal means are independent of their political consequences.

Zubayr Al-Bakoush has an ass-kicking coming to him from the countrymen of his victims, but that doesn’t mean that Hillary Clinton will get a free pass.

Here’s what I hope will be a factual corrective to the waves of rumor and nonsense that have eclipsed the events of the 2012 attack on the U.S. Mission in Benghazi.

For instance, when the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff testify to Congress under oath and subject to cross examination that there was no possibility of their providing timely support during the attack on the U.S. Mission, they are believable, even before you factor in the realities of limited resources, time, and distance.

There has never been a timely military response to an attack underway on a U.S. diplomatic mission, and due to those realties there never will be.

Debunking is probably a hopeless task, but if you don’t read the whole 2016 Blogger post below, pease do read this key paragraph.

That is the heart of the matter. “No one will mistake this movie for a documentary,” a CIA spokesperson told the Washington Post, but he is quite wrong. Dramatization beats disembodied narrative every time. The public - voters - get their information about current and historical events from entertainment media and will indeed think that they watched events in Benghazi happening before their eyes.

(Originally published on Blogger 22 January, 2016.)

A Review Of A Movie I Haven’t Seen

I have not seen 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi. But, do I really have to see it in order to post something about it? Naw.

Someone who has seen it wrote a very good piece for the military veteran website Task and Purpose refuting the movie’s inaccuracies and distortions. Being a former Marine Security Guard, he gets his information from real life rather than Tom Clancy novels and Call of Duty video games, so he knows whereof he speaks. See As A Former Embassy Guard, Here’s What I Know ‘13 Hours’ Got Wrong. Highly recommended if you plan to see the movie.

Something else I highly recommend is background information on the CIA’s Global Response Staff, the employer of those protection contractors in Benghazi. See this WaPo article from 2012 for a description of the GRS.

Above all else, read the Vox piece on how Michael Bay’s 13 Hours promotes some of the worst Benghazi conspiracy theories. While the movie is a good action flick for teenage boys - which Michael Bay freely admits is what he makes - it ends up feeding fantasies and conspiracy theories. See this quote:

The point is not that this narrative is overly simplistic and wrong — of course it is — but rather that in trying to wedge the real-life story into this box, Bay ends up distorting what happened in ways that could end up misleading millions of American viewers who are still trying to figure out what happened in real-life Benghazi and how to feel about it. It also ends up dovetailing, deliberately or not, with some of the most common and most persistent conspiracy theories about the incident.

That is the heart of the matter. “No one will mistake this movie for a documentary,” a CIA spokesperson told the Washington Post, but he is quite wrong. Dramatization beats disembodied narrative every time. The public - voters - get their information about current and historical events from entertainment media and will indeed think that they watched events in Benghazi happening before their eyes. You could ask Senator Tom Cotton whether or not the movie validated his unfounded beliefs about what happened.

Regarding those most common and persistent conspiracy theories, Vox included links to the main Senate and House investigative reports on the Benghazi incident, which make for good reading on this snowy weekend. The Senate Intelligence Committee report directly contradicts the main dramatic moment in 13 Hours, which is the charge that the protection contractors were ordered by the Benghazi Chief of Base (’Bob’) not to respond to the attack on the Special Mission Facility. Did not happen. See pages 4 and 5 of the report.

The House Armed Services Committee report says the same. Furthermore, it explicitly refutes the movie’s other big dramatic theme, which is the purported withholding of U.S. military air support during the incident. At least one of the protection contractors says air support was available. On the other hand, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the general who commanded U.S. Africa Command, and other general and flag officers and senior civilian defense offqicials have testified that it was not. You may decide for yourself which is the more reliable account.

This conclusive rebuttal of the air assets myth is on page 19 of the House report:

The Department of Defense had no armed drones or manned aircraft prepared for combat readily available and nearby on September 11. Secretary Panetta told the Senate in February 2013 that armed Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), AC-130 ground attack gunships, or other similar planes “were not in the vicinity.” Mr. Reid echoed this to the House Armed Services Committee in May 2013 when he declared “[g]iven the time and distance factors involved, dispatching an armed aircraft to Benghazi was not an option available to us at the time.” As the result of a specific request from the committee, DOD accounted for the location of each of its AC-130 aircraft in the military’s inventory, DOD reported to the committee that no AC-130s were in the region in the days before the Benghazi attack, including for maintenance, crew rest, or merely transiting through the area. However, DOD also reported to the committee that some of these planes were deployed to “southern Europe” on September 14, in order “to support operations in North Africa.” Similarly, the U.S. Air Force F-16 fighters stationed at Aviano, Italy at the time were configured for training flights. None were on combat alert. Furthermore, unlike typical preparations during the Cold War, NATO allies also had no planes on war-fighting status. This meant other nations could not offer combat aircraft to respond on behalf of the United States.

It should not be surprising that no fighters or gunships were available. Tom Clancy aside, the U.S. is not perpetually at war with every country on earth. And that is before you consider the realities of time and space, logistical limits, manpower availability, the need for intelligence preparation, the wisdom of sending flights over a country where there were thousands of loose MANPADS, and other such grown-up things.

But, sadly, none of that outweighs the evidence of video games where airstrikes are always just a mouse click away. The public will not be convinced otherwise after they’ve personally seen ‘Bob’ tell our heroes to stand down.

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

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Anything that deviates from normal is a conspiracy, including when things are precisely normal.