The ABJ makes a compelling case for looking at all levels of the chain of command who decided to use torture techniques.

Eric Holder explained that ”as attorney general, my duty is to examine the facts and follow the law.” He offered the context on Monday as part of selecting John Durham, a veteran federal prosecutor in Connecticut, to look into whether a full criminal investigation should be launched into the brutal treatment of terrorism suspects by CIA employees and contractors. What Holder didn’t emphasize is that prosecutors also have much discretion, especially in these instances, when broader elements of public policy are involved, officials at the lower rungs taking their cues from higher-ups.

The attorney general chose well in tapping Durham, who already has been investigating the CIA’s destruction of interrogation videotapes. Durham is positioned to move quickly.

Make no mistake, he will find appalling behavior. On Monday, the Justice Department released a long-secret report chronicling abuses inside CIA overseas prisons. The new details included interrogators staging mock executions, using a handgun and power drill for intimidation and blowing smoke into prisoners’ faces to make them vomit. The report relays how a CIA interrogator grabbed a prisoner’s neck, squeezing the carotid artery until he began to faint.

The Blade recently editorialized on some of the unfulfilled promises the Obama administration has made in regards to LGBT rights, and encouraging others to hold him accountable for those promises.

EVERYBODY knows that President Obama is under attack by conservatives. What those same critics from the right refuse to acknowledge is that the President has been pursuing pragmatism, not socialism, and that approach has not endeared him to his own base. The 1996 Defense of Marriage Act is one of many examples.

The administration is in the odd position of defending in court the statute that defined marriage as being between one man and one woman, while the President himself is calling for its repeal.

Last Monday, Justice Department attorneys filed more papers seeking the dismissal of a federal suit from California brought by two gay men who are married and challenging the federal marriage law, which prevents gay couples from securing Social Security spousal benefits and filing joint taxes, among other benefits, and from being recognized as married in states that do not have gay marriage.

The Cincinnati Police Chief recently criticized officers who tasered a young woman, but many in the community are still upset about this incident.

The 26-year-old daughter of a Cincinnati councilmember was on her knees, hands in the air, when a Cincinnati police officer fired a Taser at her back, police chief Thomas Streicher said Monday in determining the officer used excessive force.

Streicher has suspended the police powers of the officer, Anthony Plummer, while an internal police investigation is under way into the arrest of Celeste Thomas, the daughter of councilmember Cecil Thomas, a retired Cincinnati police officer.

Police records state that Celeste Thomas was a passenger in a vehicle involved in a hit-skip accident and stopped by police early Sunday morning in Mount Auburn.

Thomas was told to stay inside the vehicle, police said, but disobeyed verbal commands and exited the car, approaching officers.

Critics and supporters of the use of torture techniques debate whether the U.S. has beneifted from it’s use.

An internal CIA report made public Monday says the agency’s heavily criticized interrogation techniques led to the 2003 arrest of a Columbus truck driver who eventually pleaded guilty to providing assistance to al-Qaida.

The 2004 report, released after an order by a federal judge, asserted that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attack, provided CIA interrogators with information that “led to the investigation and prosecution” of Iyman Faris, a native of Pakistan who was living in Columbus.

[…]

But Carrie Davis, staff counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, said, “There have been studies galore showing that these so-called enhanced interrogation techniques — or torture — are ineffective.

“Generally, the problem is there is no way to verify the accuracy of this information and when somebody is being tortured they’re going to say anything. So there is a real question of accuracy.”

ACLU of Ohio Associate Director Gary Daniels talks about the dangers of cameras that collect license plate numbers and the room for abuse that may occur.

Are they cutting-edge tools in the war on crime and terrorism? Big Brother in a box? Or maybe a little of both?

Area police are excited about the possibilities offered by the automated license plate reader, a camera with a scanner mounted in a housing on selected police cruisers. The reader takes pictures of motorists’ license plates while police are on patrol, scans the numbers and instantaneously compares them to a database of plates associated with stolen cars and wanted criminal suspects. An alarm goes off inside the cruiser if the computer finds a match.

[…]

But civil libertarians and privacy rights watchdogs say the readers are a step toward a surveillance society in which everyday activities of law-abiding citizens are catalogued by authorities.

“It’s something we’ve been following,” said Gary Daniels, a spokesman for the Ohio American Civil Liberties Union in Columbus. “We’re quickly getting to the point where Americans are very uncomfortable about infringements on what they see as their right to privacy.”

Bowling Green recently joined several other cities and counties in Ohio by passing protections for LGBT residents against housing and job discrimination.

Changes to Bowling Green’s anti-discrimination laws should have little impact on most residents, but they could make all the difference for some, said John Zan­fardino, a councilman representing the city’s 2nd Ward.

“To me, an ordinance like this is just a step of progress,” he said yesterday. “Whether it results in complaints or successful complaints, I think they’ll be minimal, but I think in Bowling Green there will be fewer examples of people being told, ‘We don’t rent to your kind.’”

After listening to residents’ comments for nearly two hours, city council late Monday night voted 7-0 to expand the list of protected classes in the city’s fair housing ordinance to include sexual orientation, gender expression, gender identity, and marital status, as well as military and veteran status, physical characteristics, and genetic information.

Debate is still ongoing on whether or not EMTs should be part of executions in Ohio.

The Ohio EMS board has no authority over the emergency medical technicians who administer lethal drugs in state executions.

That’s the opinion board lawyer Heather R. Frient made public yesterday during the board’s meeting.

Board members asked Frient to determine whether these technicians were under their jurisdiction. Under state law, intermediate EMTs are not authorized to work with these drugs.

But these technicians are an exception, Frient said.

A federal court judge in Toledo ruled that a local charity’s assets were wrongfully frozen when the U.S. government placed them on a terrorist list without any due process or means to challenge the labeling.

The U.S. government violated the constitutional rights of a local Muslim charity when it froze its financial assets in 2006 and prevented it from adequately defending itself against allegations of ties to terrorism, a federal judge in Toledo has ruled.

Judge James Carr released a 100-page order Tuesday that favored arguments by KindHearts for Charitable Humanitarian Development Inc., which sued the government in October.

The ruling, which attorneys have called unprecedented, agreed with the organization’s assertions that KindHearts was denied due process and subjected to the unlawful seizure of its property.

The ACLU held a press conference today to help inform others on the rights of students in school, particularly when they are using technology such as cell phones and internet.

The ACLU of Ohio has sent letters to school administrators throughout the state as a preemptive strike against harsh punishments and criminal charges against students for non-threatening Internet postings and cell phone use.

Instead, the civil liberties group is urging school officials to consider ways to educate teens about safe and respectful use of new communications technologies and to refrain from issuing discipline when students’ actions are conducted after school and away from classrooms.

“What a student does on his or her own time in the context of speech isn’t something that the school can touch, under the First Amendment,” said Brian Laliberte, a former deputy attorney general and attorney in Columbus.

Foes of equality have filed a lawsuit challenging Cleveland’s recently enacted domestic partner registry.

A conservative legal group is suing the city of Cleveland over its domestic partner registry, claiming it violates the state constitution.

The Alliance Defense Fund said it filed the lawsuit on Wednesday on behalf of taxpayers. The alliance is also asking the court for preliminary and permanent injunctions to shut down the registry.

Cleveland’s domestic partner registry, which began operating in May, provides an official record of same-sex relationships for employers, hospitals and other establishments.

The Times takes a stand on finding better way to address the juvenile justice problems facing our nation.

In the 1990s, states and localities began sending more and more children to juvenile lockups, often for months, while they awaited trial for nonviolent offenses or even noncriminal behavior like being “unruly.” This was a disaster. Children who spend time in detention are far more likely to leave school, suffer alcohol or drug abuse problems or commit violent crimes as adults.

A far better approach — for these young people as well as overburdened government budgets — is to lock up only truly dangerous children and enroll the rest in community-based monitoring programs.

A deeply troubling snapshot of the state of our mental health services for juvenile offenders.

The teenager in the padded smock sat in his solitary confinement cell here in this state’s most secure juvenile prison and screamed obscenities.

The youth, Donald, a 16-year-old, his eyes glassy from lack of sleep and a daily regimen of mood stabilizers, was serving a minimum of six months for breaking and entering. Although he had received diagnoses for psychiatric illnesses, including bipolar disorder, a judge decided that Donald would get better care in the state correctional system than he could get anywhere in his county.

That was two years ago.

ACLU Staff Counsel Carrie Davis discusses some of the problems with neighborhood watch groups and how they can sometimes unintentionally cause others to unfairly be subject to police scrutiny.

Cruise down the tree-lined streets of the Old Oaks neighborhood on a summer evening and know this: Someone is watching you.

It might be Richard Vickers, who records your license plate number in a notebook as he retrieves gun shell casings from the sidewalk while out on his nightly walk. Or it might be Doug Motz, who alerts via text message: “Watch out for the green van lurking in the alley.”

[…]

Carrie Davis, staff council for the American Civil Liberties Union in Ohio, says block watch members who aren’t trained by police should be cautious of overstepping legal boundaries.

“You have a right to observe what’s going on in the street, but that doesn’t give you a right to go peer in your neighbor’s window,” Davis says.

The Dispatch gets it right, until the very end. While RFID chips are a terrifying prospect, a national ID card poses severe challenges to Americans’ privacy rights.

The federal government ought to re-evaluate the identifying technology that is embedded into passports and passport cards and that states are beginning to include in driver’s licenses. As some technology experts have pointed out, radio-frequency identification tags, or RFID, could lead to surreptitious tracking and present the danger of identity theft.

After the terrorist attacks on 9/11, the federal government started issuing passports and passport cards with these tags, which contain a person’s name, nationality, sex, date of birth, place of birth and digitized photograph.

The tags make travel documents more difficult to forge, and they also add convenience: Remote readers at the borders can scan them from several feet away and keep lines moving smoothly. When an RFID reader emits a radio signal, nearby tags automatically transmit their data to the reader.

Frightening statistics showing that Ohio will execute a record number of people this year, and showing no signs of stopping any time in the future.

The state of Ohio is lining up death-row inmates for execution at a feverish pace not seen here since capital punishment was reinstated a decade ago.

Having already carried out three executions since June, the state has scheduled at least one lethal injection every month through the end of the year.

That could mean that by year’s end, Ohio will have executed eight men in the final seven months of 2009. The previous high was seven in all of 2004.

President Obama discusses when he envisions the government seriously addressing long-overdue immigration reform.

President Obama said Monday that efforts to change the immigration system would be a major focus for his administration only next year, after other major priorities were accomplished, including passage of a new health care system.

“It’s very important for us to sequence these big initiatives in a way where they don’t all just crash at the same time,” he said, according to The Associated Press.

Mr. Obama, flanked by the leaders of Mexico and Canada, spoke here at a news conference after an annual trilateral summit meeting. Responding to a range of questions on domestic and international issues, he also said the United States was committed to the return of the ousted president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya.

Clevleand’s Hopkins Airport will be one of a few airports to test invasive full body scanners as part of its new security program.

The next time you go through airport security at Hopkins, you might be asked to go through a whole body image scan…that can see beneath your clothes. The machines seem like something out of science fiction.

You go into a little booth and stand still. In another room, a Transportation Security Administration official gets a picture of your body — It’s kind of a cross between an X-ray and a nude photo……revealing any metallic or non-metallic threats.

Use of the machines here is just a test for the next 30-60 days. After that, the TSA will look at how well they worked, and how passengers reacted. They’re also optional–you can still get the traditional pat-down if you’d prefer.

Ohio Democrats have put forth a new set of proposals to reform the state’s election system.

Ohio voters would be able to vote early at more locations — but for a shorter time — and would encounter simpler voter identification requirements under legislation House Democrats plan to introduce Tuesday.

The wide-ranging elections bill is the culmination of months of discussions following the 2008 presidential election, which largely went smoothly but was still marked by partisan bickering. A measure with some of the same provisions introduced by Republican lawmakers at the end of 2008 was vetoed by Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland, who said it was pushed with haste.

In an interview Monday with The Associated Press, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner said early voting would begin 20 days before Election Day and end the weekend prior so local officials have time to prepare. Voters in each county would have the option of choosing from as many as four early voting sites instead of one.

Demonstrators came out to support a pro-choice advocate who was recently attacked by a group of anti-choice protestors outside of an Akron clinic.

The decades-long debate on abortion heated up on the streets of Akron Saturday, with demonstrators for and against setting up camp on separate sides of East Market Street in front of an abortion clinic.

The display is part of a national trend of increasing tension between the two sides since the May 31 slaying of George Tiller, a Kansas physician who performed late-term abortions.

On July 18, the two sides clashed outside the Akron Women’s Medical Group, 839 E. Market St., when Akron resident Charles Wright, an abortion supporter, suffered six broken ribs and a concussion during a skirmish.

A great victory for ensuring that the guilty are sentenced, rather than those who may be innocent.

A death row inmate scheduled for execution in September will get a chance to convince a judge that information discovered after his conviction could have exonerated him.

Romell Broom, 53, was sentenced to death in 1985 for the rape and murder of 14-year-old Tryna Middleton. Tryna, a ninth-grader at Shaw High School in East Cleveland, had been walking home with friends from a Friday night football game when she was abducted at knife point and forced into his car.

The 8th Ohio District Court of Appeals ruled Thursday that 165 pages of records from the East Cleveland Police Department can be presented to the original trial court as possible grounds for a new trial.

The PD takes a stand for equality by supporting the Equal Housing and Employment Act, currently pending before the Ohio House.

After a summer of often dysfunctional budgeteering in Ohio, it’s welcome news that state legislative leaders are focused on doing something this fall that should engage the best of both sides of the aisle: an overdue law banning discrimination on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation in Ohio.

Ohio House Speaker Armond Budish, Democrat of Beachwood, says a floor vote on the bill is a top priority. Recent amendments may have softened earlier objections from Senate President Bill Harris, a Republican from Ashland, Harris’ spokeswoman told Plain Dealer reporter Aaron Marshall.

Such discrimination already is illegal where these two gentlemen work: The Ohio House and Ohio Senate both prohibit bias based on sexual orientation. It’s time to extend that prohibition throughout the state, as 21 other states have done. Many Ohioans will be shocked to learn it’s perfectly legal in most places in Ohio to fire someone based simply on his or her sexual orientation.

ACLU of Ohio Associate Director Gary Daniels discusses the problems that arise when a court interpreter is not competant.

A Spanish-language interpreter for Franklin County Municipal Court was fired last month because he couldn’t interpret legal terms, possibly jeopardizing the constitutional rights of thousands.

[…]

“The fact that it doesn’t happen all the time is of no comfort to the person it did happen to and who is now in jail,” said Daniels. Defendants should understand exactly what is said in court, he added.

They could appeal their cases based on Bustos’ involvement, but they would need proof that the interpreting was inaccurate, said Jack R. Kullman Jr., Franklin County Court of Appeals administrator.

That might not be easy, he said. Court reporters record only what is said in English, and interpreters speak quietly to participants to avoid disturbing the proceedings.