After recent eye surgery, reading and typing has become too difficult for me to continue writing this column by myself. The inability to read effortlessly has been hard, but I won't allow what I hope is a temporary disability to force me into retirement. Next week I will begin writing this column with a co-author, sharing the byline with my son, Nick Hentoff.

As a young man in Boston, I learned early in life never to take reading for granted. I learned this lesson when I was introduced by a friend to his great-grandfather, who was born a slave in the antebellum South, where it was illegal to teach slaves to read. The ancient man, I was told, had spent his long life reading his way through whole libraries.

Small, startlingly thin and as straight as a steel ruler, the former slave sat staring at me until I wondered desperately what I was supposed to say. Then, with his tight bronze face still impassive, he said he knew I had studied Greek at Boston Latin School and asked my views on Homer, wondering what a great pleasure it must have been to read him in the original. Not having found it any sort of pleasure, because Greek had been taught like math at Boston Latin School, I mumbled my memory of exaltation.

Clearly disappointed by my half-hearted answer – and probably annoyed by my questions on early jazz (as if that was the only music he would know anything about) – the ancient man dismissed me with a flick of his hand, as a scholar dismisses a dilettante unworthy of his continued attention. As I've grown older, I like to think I came to understand what reading meant to the ancient man.

For more than 80 years, reading in print has been as natural for me as breathing, and as exciting as flying over a landscape of ideas. Someone reviewing one of the more than 30 books I have written described me as a "voracious reader." I wrote about the genesis of my life-long love of reading in my memoir, "Boston Boy":

"I remember them now as ugly books. All had the same cheap brown binding – an institutional color, like the paint in waiting rooms for jurors. There were no illustrations, and the print seemed to get dimmer with each reading.

"But those were my books, bought at 50 cents a week – plus a coupon from the Hearst daily, the Boston American – out of my after-school and weekend earnings. They were the classics! 'The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin,' 'The Last of the Mohicans,' 'Ivanhoe,' 'Tom Sawyer,' and other hallmarks of a sophisticated library.

"I was addicted to books. Both the reading of them and the physical possession of them. ... Soon the books burst out of my bedroom and took over nearly all the wall space in the front hall of our apartment as well as the living room."

As an author and columnist, I've led a life in which not a moment that could be occupied by writing or reading was wasted. I surrounded myself with the tools of my trade. I subscribed to numerous newspapers, every important magazine of ideas, and several medical journals and law reviews. Decades before pedestrians wandered the streets reading their smartphones, I could be found slowly navigating the streets of Greenwich Village with my eyes glued to the newspaper in my hand.

If I wanted a new book that wasn't yet available for sale, it took only a telephone call to the publisher and it arrived a few days later. I no longer had to rely on newspaper coupons to purchase my books. Every week the mail would bring free review copies of books on jazz, politics, science and history.

In recent years, my wife brags about the vast library she carries effortlessly on her Kindle, but I cherish physical books I can hold – that I delight in writing in, arguing with the authors and rereading as I learn more about the subjects elsewhere.

I'd dig daily into newspapers and magazines until my fingers and clothing were stained with newsprint and ink. A prospector with pen and pocket knife, I'd underline surprises that challenged me, scribble furious notes to myself and then, like a ritual sacrifice, rend articles from the body of the paper to occupy one of the countless research files that filled my office from floor to ceiling.

I don't dig skimming through life.

The process will now be different, but the work of this column will continue.

In last week's column, I described how the national anti-free speech movement poses an imminent threat to freedom of expression in American academia.

Those advocating for the anti-free speech movement attempt to interpret the "language of free speech" to their advantage so that it applies only to them, but not to others. Their analysis often cites Title IX's anti-discrimination provisions and accuses free speech advocates of using "weaponized words" to silence anti-racism protestors, but invariably ignores the long history of court decisions that have repeatedly applied First Amendment protections to offensive speech at public universities.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has had tremendous success with its Stand Up For Speech Litigation Project, which its website describes as "a national effort to eliminate unconstitutional speech codes through targeted First Amendment lawsuits."

The Los Angeles Times described FIRE's work as "the first-ever coordinated legal attack on free speech restrictions in higher education."

While the Supreme Court's decisions interpreting the First Amendment apply only to public universities, it is vital that we also protect the core values of freedom of expression at private colleges. How can this be accomplished?

One solution whose time may have come is for Congress to pass legislation that withholds federal funding and tax exemptions from private universities that fail to adopt freedom of expression standards consistent with the U.S. Constitution.

Another option would be to rely on what Supreme Court Justice William Brennan called "the independent protective force of state law." The high court has held that states may provide greater protections for free speech in their own constitutions, statutes and common law than those found in the U.S. Constitution.

Indeed, a number of state supreme courts have ruled that free speech provisions in their own constitutions have more expansive protections than the U.S. Constitution. In some cases, the state supreme courts have applied those free speech provisions to expressive activity that occurs on private property.

In 1992, California adopted Leonard Law – the only one of its kind in the country – which applied the same free speech protections to high schools and private colleges as those that apply to the community as a whole under the U.S. Constitution. Free speech advocacy groups should consider launching a coordinated national public policy campaign to pass a Leonard Law in each state.

Some state supreme courts, such as Connecticut's, have allowed students and faculty at private universities, like Yale, to use breach of contract lawsuits to enforce promises found in promotional materials, official policies, handbooks and regulations.

For example, Yale's website informs current and prospective students "that when you agree to matriculate, you join a community where 'the provocative, the disturbing, and the unorthodox' must be tolerated."

According to the school's undergraduate regulations, which students are required to comply with as a condition of enrollment, "every member of the University has an obligation to permit free expression," and that "no member has a right to prevent such expression."

The undergraduate regulations also acknowledge that "every official of the university ... has a special obligation to foster free expression and to ensure that it is not obstructed," further warning that "this obligation can and should be enforced by appropriate formal sanctions."

To its credit, Yale reaffirmed its freedom of expression policy earlier this month when it refused student demands to remove professors Erika and Nicholas Christakis from their administrative positions after Erika sent an email defending free speech rights and informing students that they should be able to tolerate offensive Halloween costumes.

But in 2009, Yale College Dean Mary Miller banned the sale of a T-shirt inspired by the school's football rivalry with Harvard after receiving complaints that its design included a homophobic slur attributed to an F. Scott Fitzgerald quotation: "I think of all Harvard men as sissies."

Apparently, Miller felt that the offense brought on by the word "sissy" – an archaic gender-neutral noun synonymous with weakness – superseded the offending students' rights to freedom of expression. Either Miller hadn't read Yale's freedom of expression policy, didn't understand the policy or simply ignored it.

In a recent Wall Street Journal column, L. Gordon Crovitz cited the University of Chicago's adoption of a similar policy on freedom of expression, which was drafted by a committee formed "in light of recent events nationwide that have tested institutional commitments to free and open discourse."

Crovitz explained, "Purdue and the Princeton faculty have voted to adopt the Chicago principles," noting that FIRE "is encouraging other universities to sign up."

In any event, one thing is clear: University administrators, students and free speech advocates must be prepared to aggressively and consistently enforce all available legal and administrative remedies to protect free speech on campus before it's too late, and there is no longer any free speech left to protect.

See Nat Hentoff's WND columns archive, 2008-2015.

Hostility to the exercise of free speech on American college campuses is nothing new. But what happened at Yale University, the University of Missouri and other colleges over the past two weeks is something new and frightening. The suppression of speech in academia has begun to spiral out of control.

Nicholas Christakis is a professor at Yale who lives with his wife in a student residence hall on campus. An internationally renowned physician and sociologist, Dr. Christakis was surrounded by dozens of angry students who showered him with curses and threats. Dr. Christakis' offense? He refused to publicly apologize for his wife's email that defended free speech and urged tolerance of offensive Halloween costumes.

Greg Lukianoff, the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), was on the Yale campus to attend a free-speech symposium and witnessed the incident. In the video Lukianoff posted on FIRE's website, Christakis appears on the verge of being physically assaulted.

"Nicholas addressed the crowd for more than an hour, even after it became clear that nothing short of begging for forgiveness would satisfy them," Lukianoff wrote in the Washington Post. "I've witnessed some intense campus disputes during my 14 years fighting for free speech, but nothing like this."

The next evening – at a William F. Buckley Jr. Program conference on free speech that had been planned months in advance – Greg Lukianoff's speech was interrupted by a student who rushed the podium, shouting, before he was dragged out of the building by campus police. Attendees then braved a gauntlet of angry Yale students who cursed and ridiculed them. The Yale Daily News reported that "several attendees were spat on as they left."

At the University of Missouri, a student photographer freelancing for ESPN was confronted by a mob of angry anti-racism protesters who tried to eject him from the public commons area where they had gathered. After he refused to leave, the students begin a coordinated effort to both psychologically and physically intimidate the reporter into leaving.

The protesters subjected him to intense ridicule, sometimes chanting in unison, as they gradually forced him backwards. They then began to falsely accuse the reporter of the very conduct they themselves were directing against him.

MU's student body vice president later tried to justify the students' self-imposed restrictions on the press during an interview on MSNBC. She suggested that the First Amendment "creates a hostile and unsafe learning environment."

Later that same week, a Christian street preacher, speaking within the campus "free speech circle," was physically assaulted and had his microphone appropriated by an anti-racism protester.

At Amherst College, a student group called Amherst Uprising issued a list of demands to administrators that included individual public apologies for what they claimed was a hostile environment of ethnocentric racism on campus. The list also included a demand for a written statement from administrators acknowledging that students who distribute leaflets defending free-speech rights are subject to disciplinary action for being "racially insensitive," and that any students disciplined for such an offense must "attend extensive training for racial and cultural competency."

At Cornell, a well-meaning white student was forced to issue a public apology after he scheduled his own anti-racism protest without first getting the approval of the Black Student Union. He was accused, in multiple social media posts, of mocking the efforts of the BSU.

One commentator put him on notice that "if you are to be in (sic) ally, you have to acknowledge what you've done to hurt us." Within hours of scheduling the event, the offending student canceled the protest and issued a public apology thanking his critics "for calling me out on my ignorance."

These are not isolated incidents, but represent the organized adoption of mass public shaming tactics. Mass public shaming – traditionally used by autocratic regimes to silence their critics – is a particularly insidious form of censorship. It is designed to chill future speech by humiliating the speaker. Psychological manipulation and intimidation are used to impose forced speech as a means of social control.

Universities in the United States should not tolerate or appease such public shaming techniques. In his March 20, 2015, New York Times op-ed, "China's Tradition of Public Shaming Thrives," author Murong Xuecun writes that "cases of public shaming show us how in the name of some great cause, individual rights, dignity and privacy can all be sacrificed."

President Obama recently offered some advice to students and faculty who feel that the First Amendment creates a hostile and unsafe learning environment.

"You don't have to be fearful of somebody spouting bad ideas." Obama said during an interview last Sunday on ABC News. "Just out-argue them. Beat 'em. Make the case as to why they're wrong. Win over adherents. That's how things work in a democracy."

Next Week: What Yale and other universities must do to protect free speech on campus.

Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a number of congressional investigations, commission reports and think-tank policy papers have examined the state of congressional oversight of the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC). These reports, to one extent or another, have largely been in agreement with the subtitle of a 2006 Center For American Progress report: "Congressional Oversight of Intelligence Is Broken."

None of the reports – many of them lengthy, detailed and prepared by top intelligence policy experts – were as focused as the blunt assessment of the problem in a one-page, three-paragraph Memorandum for the Record (MFR) found in the National Archives' 9/11 Commission files. The MFR memorialized a June 21, 2004, meeting between then-Sen. Chuck Hagel and 9/11 Commission Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton. Hagel, a longtime member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), would later chair the President's Intelligence Advisory Board before serving as President Obama's secretary of defense.

"There is no accountability," Hagel told Hamilton, the MFR reported. "Hagel said that oversight of the intelligence community is a joke."

Three years later, Hamilton testified before the SSCI, explaining that the road to accountability in congressional oversight of the IC was paved with gold.

"All of us have to live by the Golden Rule: That is, he who controls the gold makes the rules," he said.

Hamilton also testified that one of the most important recommendations of the 9/11 Commission – the centralization of the IC appropriation process in the Intelligence Committees – had yet to be implemented.

"The Founders understood the importance of checks and balances on Executive power. That is why they gave the power of the purse to the Congress," he reminded the senators. "The single most important step to strengthen the power of the intelligence committees is to give them the power of the purse."

On March 6, 2008, 14 of the 15 senators on the SSCI signed a joint letter to the majority and minority leaders of the Senate, urging them to follow Hamilton's advice and create a permanent Subcommittee on Intelligence within the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Both chairs of the Senate Appropriations Committee responded with a joint letter opposing the proposed reforms, which were then rejected by the leadership.

The consequences of weak oversight of the IC appropriations process were revealed on Aug. 29, 2013, when the Washington Post published details from Edward Snowden's leak of the IC's $53 billion "black budget" summary for fiscal year 2013. The budget summary revealed a bloated IC budget that had grown massively since Sept. 11, 2001.

"The surge in resources for the agency funded secret prisons, a controversial interrogation program, the deployment of lethal drones and a huge expansion of its counterterrorism center," the Post reported.

Hamilton told the Post that access to budget details resulting from Snowden's leak "will enable an informed public debate on intelligence spending for the first time."

Yet two years after Snowden's disclosures, there is no sign that such an informed debate on intelligence spending is taking place in Congress – or will ever take place, if past appropriations are any indication of what we can expect in the future.

In 2007, the CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence published an article by James S. Van Wagenen titled "A Review of Congressional Oversight: Critics and Defenders." Van Wagenen – a veteran member of the IC who began his career as a staff member for the House Appropriations Committee's Subcommittee on Defense – was the Defense Intelligence Agency Chair at the Joint Military Intelligence College at the time.

"Year in and year out ... the committees authorize and the appropriations committees appropriate the bulk of the budget requested by the DCI," he wrote. "The oversight committees have not been at all reluctant to increase funding for programs and capabilities they perceive to be important."

Van Wagnenen revealed the extent to which the congressional oversight committees had already been co-opted by the IC – as far back as 1997. According to his article, "(t)he top echelons of the IC are replete with former professional staffers of the intelligence committees, and the committees themselves continue to draw staff expertise from the Community."

To illustrate Van Wagnenen's point: George Tenet was appointed director of the CIA in 1997. Two years earlier, he was working in the executive branch as the senior director for intelligence programs at the National Security Council. Before that, he was working in Congress as the staff director of the SSCI.

And so on and so forth.

True accountability in IC oversight will be elusive until Congress is forced to change its culture of revolving-door cronyism. More than 10 years after Hagel's frank assessment, congressional oversight of the IC is still a joke – a bad joke, at the expense of the American people.

My sister Janet Krauss has been teaching literature and poetry to incoming freshman at Fairfield University for 37 years. She also teaches creative writing to Bridgeport high-school students in Fairfield University's Upward Bound program.

As many as 80 students are selected from public high schools with high dropout rates to participate in the Upward Bound program each year. Many of the low-income students in the program come from single-parent homes in gang-infested, drug-ridden, high-crime neighborhoods where the stress of everyday life creates formidable obstacles to academic success.

Janet agrees with me that literature should be taught to kids as life lessons they can use to overcome obstacles encountered in their daily lives. They are taught to use the creative writing process to clarify, gain insight into and cope with their personal problems.

Janet teaches her students that the simple act of writing a poem, in the words of Robert Frost, "ends in a clarification of life – not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion."

Janet's methods necessarily require that students share, in the classroom, their personal problems and feelings in the context of controversial contemporary issues such as racism, immigration, social justice and inequality. This approach has met with great success, as Janet's student evaluations reflect.

"There is a great sense of community in the classroom," one of Janet's students wrote. "She does an excellent job of providing an environment where students can speak freely and manage intellectual discussions."

"This was the only class I ever really looked forward to," another student wrote. "You helped me break out of my shell, and I can't thank you enough for that."

So naturally I thought of Janet when I read an essay on teaching, recently published in the Wall Street Journal, titled "High-School English Without the Politics."

The author of the essay, Helaine L. Smith, is an English teacher at Brearley, an exclusive all-girls private school in New York City. Smith synthesizes the central thesis of her essay in a single paragraph:

"We do not talk about the environment, or racism, or feminism, or our president's failed policies. We talk about literature. We exist, for the 40 minutes each day that I teach English to middle- and high-school students in New York City, in an issue-free zone."

"We will not consider political parallels to today's world," Smith dictates like a latter-day Miss Jean Brodie.

Ironically, among the authors that she teaches in this "issue-free zone" are George Orwell and James Baldwin, who would both have objected to Smith's effort to excise politics from the teaching of literature.

"In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics,'" Orwell wrote in his essay "Politics and the English Language." "All issues are political issues."

In his essay "Why I Write," Orwell exposed the paradox inherent in what he called political quietism, explaining that "the opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude."

By creating an "issue-free zone," Smith has created an artificial construct that obscures rather than enlightens.

James Baldwin, who was a friend of mine, would have been horrified at the idea of his writing being taught to school children in an "issue-free zone." In a 1963 speech that was later published in The Saturday Review as "A Talk to Teachers," Baldwin told a group of New York City public school teachers that it was their duty to teach students the truth about racism, social injustice and inequality.

Smith's formulaic approach to the teaching of literature – which precludes children from discussing contemporary issues or their personal feelings about those issues – seems cold and antiseptic. How can her students be expected to understand the hardships and struggles reflected in the writings of James Baldwin without a frank discussion of contemporary issues like racism and inequality?

Smith's "issue-free zone" does a grave disservice to her students. By banning a vibrant discussion of contemporary issues, she risks the result that injustice, inequality, hardship and struggle – which are often at the root of many great works of literature – will become, to her students, little more than abstractions.

As the national opt-out movement against mandatory standardized testing gathered steam earlier this year, U.S. Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan began to sound retreat. On April 21, the website Chalkbeat.org reported that Duncan – speaking at the Education Writers Association conference in Chicago – said that his department would be forced to intervene if states failed to address the surging number of students opting-out of federally mandated standardized tests.

Later that same month, the website EdSource.org reported that Duncan, speaking before the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, surprised audience members when he "acknowledged serious flaws in the standardized tests that currently drive American schools."

On Oct. 24, President Obama finally surrendered, to my surprise, as he announced on a video posted to Facebook that his administration had gone too far in fostering an over-reliance on standardized testing.

"The administration called for a cap on assessment so that no child would spend more than 2 percent of classroom instruction time taking tests," the New York Times reported.

Back on July 15, I wrote a column on the success of the nationwide opt-out movement titled "Personal Teaching Breaks Through Nationally."

"Over time I have learned that when students are liberated from the effects of being taught as members of a group – say, for a standardized test – they are allowed to shine as individuals," I wrote at the time. "Making teaching personal, and not based on the limits of standardized testing, is the first step to leading students to become active American citizens."

The U.S. Department of Education learned a long time ago – notwithstanding the Obama administration's seven years of amnesia – that a curriculum focused on personalized teaching is the key to success for low-income students.

This past summer marked the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Department of Education's Upward Bound program, launched in 1965 to use innovative, personalized teaching methods to help some of America's poorest kids succeed by graduating from high school and going on to earn a college degree.

Among the eligibility requirements set by the Department of Education for student participation in the program are a demonstrated academic need, a desire to earn a bachelor's degree and coming from a family where neither parent has a bachelor's degree.

A 2014 study by Kaemanje S. Thomas, then a doctoral candidate at Clark Atlanta University, examined the effectiveness of the Upward Bound program. "This research study has shown that the successes of many low-income students are due to the personalization of the Upward Bound program structure," Thomas concluded. "As such, the value of the staffs' relationship cannot be underestimated as it embodies a cultural practice of student centeredness."

Thomas also wrote that the personalized "emphasis of the program structure provides students with a sense of belonging. ... The Upward Bound supportive environment prevents low-income students from dropping out of school and motivates them to attend college."

In Connecticut, 80 students from failing Bridgeport public high schools participate in the Upward Bound program sponsored by Fairfield University, where my sister, Janet Krauss, has taught creative writing and poetry for the past 37 years. Only students from three of Bridgeport's most desperately challenged public schools are eligible to participate in the program. Two of these schools were labeled "dropout factories" in a 2007 Associated Press investigation into nationwide high school dropout rates.

The personalized teaching methods used by Fairfield University's Upward Bound program go well beyond standardized test preparation and include, according to its website, "tutoring, mentoring, academic instruction, academic counseling ... life skills workshops, cultural events, college visits, assistance with the college admissions and financial aid processes, financial literacy, career exploration, leadership development, and a summer residential program."

The Fairfield Upward Bound program requires students – in addition to the regular coursework at their high school – to attend instructional, tutoring and enrichment classes at Fairfield University two to three Saturdays per month. The students also receive regular visits from Upward Bound staff members at the student's high school.

Personalized teaching has long been a feature enjoyed by students in elite private schools – and many wealthy suburban public school districts – which can afford to attract the best teachers and support the low student-teacher ratios essential to a student-centered approach to education.

While running for president in 2008, Sen. Obama gave a speech at a school in Thornton, Colorado, in which he invoked Thomas Jefferson's declaration that "talent and virtue, needed in a free society, should be educated regardless of wealth or birth."

It is now time – in the last year of his presidency and through a renewed partnership with Congress – for Obama to take action and turn his promises into an everyday reality for America's low-income school children across the nation.

(Next week, I'll examine my sister Janet's methods of personalized teaching as she educates Upward Bound students.)

The Cato Institute will host its Second Annual Surveillance Conference this week. The symposium – which will be live-streamed on the Internet and available on the Cato Institute's website for later viewing – promises a gathering of "top scholars, litigators, intelligence officials, activists and technologists working at the intersection of privacy, technology and national security."

I think that the first academic symposium on the legal and policy implications of surveillance technology was held more than 40 years ago at Columbia University and published in 1972 by Columbia's Human Rights Law Review (HRLR). I was asked to write the foreword to the collection of articles from the symposium, published in book form as "Surveillance, Dataveillance and Personal Freedoms: Use and Abuse of Information Technology" (R.E. Burdick, 1973).

Ironically, you can't read this book on the Internet.

"Never before in the history of this country has ... secret surveillance been so pervasive," I wrote in the foreword. "All the more dangerous to the personal freedoms of every citizen is that this degree of surveillance has been made much more omnivorous because of the swift advance in the technology of surveillance."

What I wrote 40 years ago is, unfortunately, as true today as it was in 1973.

The articles in this book predate the investigations in the 1970s by the Rockefeller Commission and the congressional Pike and Church Committees, all of which revealed longstanding surveillance abuses by the U.S. intelligence community. The HRLR symposium articles and the subsequent findings of these congressional investigations were prescient warnings of what Americans should have been expecting in the future from a surveillance state left unchecked by a lack of firm oversight and strict accountability.

Sen. Sam Ervin, a North Carolina Democrat who later served as the chairman of the Senate Watergate Committee, contributed a long article on "The First Amendment: A Living Thought in the Computer Age."

An article by HRLR staff members on "Police Use of Remote Camera Systems for Surveillance of Public Streets" examined the policy and constitutional implications of an experimental, federally funded program in the small town of Mt. Vernon, New York.

HRLR editor Donald R. Davis' article on "Police Surveillance of Political Dissidents" coined the term "dataveillance," and anticipated the type of NSA mass surveillance programs exposed by Edward Snowden in 2013: "The ... manipulation and management of vast quantities of disparate bits of ... presently stored information ... for the purpose of retrieving, collating or evaluating those bits of information relevant to the subject of the record check."

Only those unaware of the NSA's program, codename Project SHAMROCK, would have been shocked by Snowden's revelations about the NSA's mass collection and surveillance – with the cooperation of private telecom companies – of Internet and phone communications to, from and transiting the U.S.

On Aug. 31, 1975, the New York Times published an article by Nicholas M. Horrock headlined "National Security Agency Reported Eavesdropping on Most Private Cables." Horrock reported that during the three decades following World War II, the NSA had collected and surveilled, on a daily basis, copies of most telegrams going to, coming from and transiting the United States, with the active cooperation of three private companies: Western Union, RCA and ITT. Before it was voluntarily shut down in 1975, the NSA was intercepting as many as 150,000 telegrams a month.

Project SHAMROCK was first discovered by L. Britt Snider, a staff lawyer on the Church Committee who later became the CIA's inspector general. Snider memorialized his recollection of a 1975 briefing on the NSA surveillance program years later in an article titled "Unlucky Shamrock." According to Snider, the data were "electronically processed for items of foreign intelligence interest" and then disseminated by the NSA to the FBI, the Secret Service, the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs and the Department of Defense.

Snider recalled that "(w)hile telegrams sent by U.S. citizens to foreign destinations were also present in the tapes NSA received, the briefer said that, as a practical matter, no one ever looked at them."

This is a justification familiar to those who have followed the government's awkward response to Snowden's revelations: that Internet and phone communications by U.S. citizens were swept up, along with the targeted foreign communications, by the NSA's modern mass surveillance programs.

The persistent deployment by the U.S. government of increasingly effective surveillance technology has been a constant in American society for nearly a century. This constant is what Sen. Ervin described in his HRLR article as "the insatiable curiosity of government to know everything about those it governs" and "the ingenuity applied by government officials to find out what they think they must know to achieve their ends."

Which is why it is important for activists not only to focus on current threats to civil liberties, posed by existing surveillance technologies, but also to understand the historical context of those threats while continuing to anticipate the next technological incarnation of the same threats far into the future.

In my last column, I reported on the suffering of Cuba's dissidents and political prisoners, which has only increased since President Obama normalized relations.

The reconciliation between Cuba and the United States was facilitated by Pope Francis and Cardinal Jaime Ortega, the archbishop of Cuba. On Oct. 1, 2014, I wrote a column titled "Pope Francis' Admirable War on Poverty."

It is with regret that I must now write that by abandoning Cuba's political prisoners, Pope Francis bears some responsibility for their increased suffering.

The PanAm Post, an online magazine covering the Americas, reported that prior to the Pope's visit to Cuba, a list of political prisoners was sent to the Vatican by Nelis Rojas de Morales – secretary of the International Coordinator of Former Cuban Political Prisoners. Cuban human rights groups were therefore stunned when Cardinal Ortega, the architect of the pope's visit, denied the very existence of political prisoners in Cuba during two interviews with Spanish language media.

In an interview held in Rome and published on March 30 in the Spanish language Catholic magazine Nueva Vida (New Life), Cardinal Ortega denied that there were any political prisoners in Cuba. Two months later, on June 5, Cardinal Ortega told Spain's Cadena Ser radio that "there are no political prisoners on the island; just common criminals."

"The dissidents, those that are called dissidents, are more present in the foreign press, in south Florida, and in blogs," he said.

Elizardo Sanchez, leader of the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation (CCDHRN), contested Ortega's claim that there were no political prisoners left in Cuba. According to the PanAm Post, the CCDHRN identified at least two dozen prisoners serving long sentences for peaceful political activities, 13 of whom were members of the Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU), Cuba's largest dissident organization.

The Catholic Register reported that Jose Daniel Ferrer – general coordinator of Cuba's Patriotic Union (UNPACU) – "wrote an open letter to Pope Francis Sept. 3 asking him to 'intercede and take up the defense of the rights of the oppressed in Cuba.'"

Damas de Blanco ("Ladies in White") leader Berta Soler told Reuters that she would like to "discuss with the pope the need to stop police violence against those who exercise their freedom to demonstrate in public."

Earlier this summer, she reiterated to the PanAm Post that "the Catholic Church ... should protect and shelter every suffering, defenseless person."

Although the Cuban government released over 3,000 prison inmates prior to the pope's arrival, none of them was a political prisoner. Reuters reported that in August, the month before the pope's visit, Cuban police detained 768 dissidents for peaceful political activity, the highest monthly total in 2015. The arbitrary detentions continued during the pope's visit. Berta Soler was prevented from attending the pope's appearances, while three members of UNPACU were dragged off, detained and have since disappeared after they tried to approach the Pope.

The closest Pope Francis ever came to acknowledging the existence of political prisoners in Cuba was an oblique reference – during his welcoming ceremony in Havana – that he "would like my greeting to embrace especially all those who, for various reasons, I will not be able to meet." The pope's greeting resonated with the impact of a tree falling in an empty forest with no one left to hear it.

Defenders of both Pope Francis and Cardinal Ortega have likened their non-confrontational approach to the Castro regime with the spirit of reconciliation exemplified by the ministry of Jesus Christ. Yet the stubborn denial that there are no political prisoners suffering in Cuba's jails – and equating the defense of human rights with a partisan political agenda – seems a far cry from the ministry of Jesus.

The Bible gives an account of Jesus appearing in "the Temple courts" and advocating on behalf of a woman accused of adultery brought before him by "the teachers of the law and the Pharisees" (New International Version, John 8:1-11). Jesus stood between the woman and the stone throwers and challenged the unjust law that required her to be stoned to death.

Even atheists like me can acknowledge that the historical Jesus became the world's most famous political prisoner through his detention, his public humiliation and his suffering. As Christians, Pope Francis and Cardinal Ortega might well remember – in their future dealings with the Castro regime – that Jesus welcomed the righteous into heaven with the greeting: "I was in prison and you came to visit me ... whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me" (Matthew 25:31-46).

On Dec. 10, 2014, the Cuban government marked the 64th anniversary of international Human Rights Day with sweeping nationwide arrests of pro-democracy dissidents. One week later, on Dec. 17, President Obama announced that the United States and Cuba had agreed to begin the process of normalizing relations.

The agreement, reached after 18 months of negotiations, included plans to reopen the U.S. and Cuban embassies in Havana and Washington, D.C., and a promise by President Obama to advocate for an end to the economic embargo of Cuba. In exchange, Cuba released 53 political prisoners on a list presented by the U.S. negotiators.

The Cuban government's response at each stage in the process of reconciliation has been a steady escalation in the arbitrary harassment, abuse, arrest and detention of Cuba's pro-democracy dissidents.

Human Rights Watch reports that "the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation (CCDHRN) – an independent group the (Cuban) government views as illegal – received over 7,188 reports of arbitrary detentions from January through August 2014, a sharp increase from approximately 2,900 in 2013 and 1,100 in 2010 during the same time period."

Before CCDHRN's blog stopped being updated in June, its monthly arrest reports reflected that Cuban security police had made over 2,000 detentions for peaceful political activity since President Obama announced the normalization of relations in December 2014.

"Detention is often used pre-emptively to prevent individuals from participating in peaceful marches or meetings to discuss politics," Human Rights Watch noted in its 2015 report on Cuba. "Other repressive tactics employed by the government include beatings, public acts of shaming, and the termination of employment."

Yilenni Aguilera Santos is a member of the Damas de Blanco ("Ladies in White") protest movement, a group of wives and family members of former and current political prisoners. On June 22, 2014, she reported suffering a miscarriage following a severe beating by Cuban security police during her detention in Holguin.

On Sept. 27, 2015, the website Diario de Cuba reported that the 21-year-old daughter of Damas de Blanco member Daisy Basulto was arrested, violently stripped, forced to urinate in front of police officers and then held in a cell at a police station in Cotorro, where she was exposed to a toxic chemical that made her ill.

The Cuban government prides itself on the excellence of its free nationwide health-care system. But it maintains an "overcrowded," "unhygienic" prison system, where "unhealthy conditions lead to extensive malnutrition and illness," according to Human Rights Watch. Inmates "who criticize the government, or engage in hunger strikes and other forms of protest, are subjected to extended solitary confinement, beatings, restrictions on family visits, and denial of medical care."

During the Castros' 2003 crackdown on pro-democracy dissidents, 10 independent librarians were among the 75 dissidents sentenced to 20 years or more in prison and forced to serve their terms in isolation cells 3 feet wide by 6 feet long.

Kevin Sullivan, writing in 2004 for the Washington Post, reported that at least 20 of the 75 dissidents "are seriously ill in Cuban prison cells." According to Sullivan, "a picture emerged of inhumane prison conditions and continued harassment of the dissidents' families by Cuban security agents."

The conditions of confinement for political prisoners in Cuba have changed little since 2004. Alexander Roberto Fernandez Rico, one of the 53 prisoners released by Cuba in December, was arrested in April 2012 for shouting anti-Castro slogans while witnessing the police beating of a bus passenger. By the time he was released from prison, following a lengthy hunger strike, he was blind.

The Guardian newspaper reported that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, while attending the official flag raising ceremony at the U.S. Embassy in Havana on Aug. 14, "insisted that Cubans should be reassured that a return to diplomatic relations with Washington would result in the country's leaders being held to account over their human rights record."

Meanwhile, Cuban dissidents were barred from attending the public ceremony at the insistence of Cuban authorities.

On Sept. 30, Carlos Manuel Figueroa Alvarez – who was arrested at a Human Rights Day protest in 2013 and was one of the 53 prisoners released – shouted, "Down with Raul!" as he climbed over the wall of the U.S. Embassy in Havana. His efforts to seek the protection of U.S. authorities were rebuffed as he was forced off the embassy grounds by U.S. security personnel and turned over to Cuba's security police.

His current whereabouts are unknown.

Monk subtitled her book "Your Annotated Guide to the Constitution," but it is actually a swinging adventure story of how Americans came to define themselves as a nation through the struggle to keep the Constitution functioning as the guarantor of our most fundamental liberties.

Without exaggeration, I am convinced that this book should be taught in every classroom and be on every citizen's reading list as an essential reference manual for evaluating candidates in the upcoming 2016 elections.

"My hope in writing this book is to make widely available the knowledge of the Constitution I acquired at Harvard Law School, without oversimplification or ideological bias," Linda Monk told me recently. "My job as an author is not to tell citizens what to think, but to equip them with the information they need to make up their own minds."

"The Words We Live By" makes even the most complex Supreme Court cases understandable to the average reader by integrating expert legal analysis with compelling storytelling and popular culture references. Monk has updated the revised edition with almost 100 new cases that tackle topical issues such as the legal battles over Obamacare, same sex-marriage, campaign finance reform, gun rights, NSA surveillance, abortion and affirmative action. The legal cases are made relevant to the reader through stories about people at the forefront of these issues, among them NSA surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden, George Takei (Mr. Sulu of "Star Trek") and the families of the Newtown shooting victims.

The revised edition of "The Words We Live By" comes not a moment too soon.

The results of the 2015 "State of the First Amendment" survey, produced annually by the Newseum Institute, reflect that too many Americans know too little about the Constitution and its relevance to their everyday lives. The survey asked 1,002 adult Americans the following question: "As you may know, the First Amendment is part of the U.S. Constitution. Can you name any of the specific rights that are guaranteed by the First Amendment?"

The First Amendment to the Constitution – "The First Freedom," as the title to my 1988 book describes it – is part of the basic civics and history curriculum we expect every student to be taught in every school in the United States. It says: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

Yet the Newseum Institute's survey – which has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.2 percentage points – found that only 10 percent of respondents knew the First Amendment guarantees the freedom of the press. Only l9 percent knew that it guarantees freedom of religion, while only 2 percent were able to say it guarantees the right to petition. And 33 percent of the respondents – representing a third of the American public – were unable to name a single right guaranteed by the First Amendment.

The importance of the revised edition of Linda Monk's illuminating book is reflected in the survey's dismal findings. There is a desperate need for a re-examination of the education of American school children – and the American public at large – on the Constitution of the United States and the importance of preserving the liberties guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. "The Words We Live By" is a fine starting point for such an examination into how we can fill this dangerous void in public education and awareness.

During the 2016 election, citizens armed with the knowledge from this exciting book can use it to evaluate candidates at every level of political office – from local town councils to the presidency of the United States – by asking penetrating questions about the candidates' positions on issues that impact our constitutional liberties. Without knowledge of the Constitution – and the struggle to preserve its most fundamental values over the past two centuries – it becomes impossible for citizens to engage politicians in meaningful discussions about the issues that impact their lives and, fundamentally, what it means to be an American.

Note: Nat's son, Nick Hentoff, contributed to this column.

When I was a kid, beginning to learn what it is to be an American, I found a hero in George Mason, a leading Virginia delegate to the 1787 Constitutional Convention. Mason refused to sign on to the Constitution that was passed by the convention. Why?

"There is no Declaration of Rights," he explained.

There was no section in the Constitution protecting citizens' individual rights against an imperious government in this new America – similar to the charges Thomas Jefferson made against King George III's government in our Declaration of Independence in 1776.

George Mason's contagious objections became a major reason that the first 10 amendments, the Bill of Rights, were finally listed and ratified by enough states to be added to the Constitution in 1791.

And we still proudly have them! Or do we? As George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Barack Obama have eroded our guarantees of a self-governing republic, how many Americans are aware they are losing some of the liberties guaranteed in the Bill of Rights? How many Americans even know who George Mason was?

Thomas Jefferson said Mason was "of the first order of greatness" ("George Mason's 'Objections' and the Bill of Rights," Robert A. Rutland, "This Constitution: A Bicentennial Chronicle," American Political Science Association and American Historical Association, 1985).

I know enough about my hero to have no doubt what George Mason's reaction would be to one of the most persistent and unpunished present violators of the Bill of Rights – the FBI!

In the fall of 2008, just before the Bush administration left, then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey changed and expanded the Attorney General's Guidelines for Domestic FBI Operations. The guidelines were made official on Dec. 1, 2008. They remain in force under Obama.

If James Madison and Thomas Jefferson could see this shredding of the Bill of Rights, they might be leading another American Revolution.

When the FBI guidelines were released, I did my part, writing several columns on this disembowelment of our American identity. But Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights and Margaret Ratner Kunstler more clearly exposed the guidelines' contempt for our privacy in "Hell No: Your Right to Dissent in 21st-Century America" (New Press, 2011).

One chapter in particular lists the FBI guidelines, explaining how they throttle the Bill of Rights:

"The Mukasey guidelines, under a section titled 'General Authorities,' dispense with the Privacy Act restrictions on keeping records about United States citizens and permanent residents, flatly stating that all activities authorized by the guidelines are exempt from the Privacy Act."

Here, as demonstrated by Ratner and Kunstler, is the America in which you are now living:

"As surveillance and the gathering of information can be carried out without any criminal predicate and on the completely innocent, these guidelines have effectively granted the FBI the authority to use and retain records on millions of law-abiding Americans."

Where is that allowed in our Constitution?

When I was a kid, I read Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon," a book about Josef Stalin's Russia that turned me into a fiercely unyielding anti-Communist for the rest of my life. During the so-called Great Depression, I remember arguing with Communists in my Boston neighborhood about Stalin keeping an eye on law-abiding Russians.

When I became a reporter years later, specializing in dangers to our civil liberties, I was startled by the extent to which J. Edgar Hoover's FBI had secretly infiltrated so many entirely lawful organizations with informants and instigators of illegal actions, insatiably searching for Communists, fellow travelers and other suspicious "persons of interest."

Hoover is gone, but here I am now with this account by Ratner and Kunstler, learning that "the FBI is 'authorized and encouraged' to identify and recruit informants, even if the activities to be investigated are totally lawful. ... Informants often end up participating in active ways and even suggesting tactics, some of which may be illegal – depending on what the informant's FBI handler suggests."

Watch carefully some unfamiliar organizations you may consider joining. In protecting the rule of law, are they being goaded from the inside to go beyond it?

Next week's column will be visited by Michael German of the American Civil Liberties Union's Legislative Office, where he is policy counsel on national security, immigration and privacy.

Previously, German was an FBI special agent from 1988 to 2004 in domestic terrorism and other investigations who, as the ACLU notes, "also served in undercover operations, successfully helping to prevent several terrorist attacks.

"He resigned in 2004 to make Congress and the public aware of the continuing deficiencies in FBI counterterrorism operations after the implementation of the 9/11 Commission's reforms" ("Intelligence Expert and Former FBI Agent Joins ACLU as National Security Counsel," aclu.org, Oct. 5, 2006).

Bill of Rights champion George Mason would recognize German as a true Bill of Rights comrade.

"I joined the FBI because I wanted to defend this country," German says, "but the oath I took was to defend the Constitution. Working for (the Bush) administration, I felt as though I was participating in a dark chapter in American history."

Ultimately, German joined the ACLU because he knew he must uphold "what this country stands for: We can, and must, be both safe and free" (aclu.org, Oct. 5, 2006).

Michael German merits the Presidential Medal of Freedom – if we ever get a president who insists that the FBI operates within the Constitution.

But instead, today's Attorney's General Guidelines for Domestic FBI Operations turn untold numbers of law-abiding Americans into persons under surveillance.

Is that what the rest of us stand for?

"Why the movement to opt out of Common Core tests is a big deal."

In the piece, education reporter Valerie Strauss cited an online post from Rockville Centre, New York, high school principal Carol Burris, who recently retired to become a full-time advocate for public education. She has been vocal about her opposition to the Common Core standards.

"New York opt-out," Burris wrote, "is reverberating around the nation. The pushback against the Common Core exams caught fans of high-stakes testing off guard, with estimates of New York test refusals now exceeding 200,000."

That news encourages me.

In a previous Answer Sheet post, Strauss cited a project funded by the nonprofit Survival Education Fund Inc., a group that aims "to rally educators to take action on policies that affect the education of young children" ("6 Reasons to reject Common Core K-3 standards – and 6 rules to guide policy," Valerie Strauss, Washington Post, May 2).

One of the objectives of this project, called Defending the Early Years, strives "to help teachers and parents understand why the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are inappropriate for kindergarten through third grade." (This also applies to many other collective standardized tests in our public schools.)

Defending the Early Years argues that "the CCSS for young children were developed by mapping backwards from what is required at high school graduation to the early years. This has led to standards that list discrete skills, facts and knowledge that do not match how young children develop, think or learn (and) require young children to learn facts and skills for which they are not ready."

The standards, in short, "devalue the whole child and the importance of social-emotional development."

Defending the Early Years goes on to say that "many of the skills mandated by the CCSS erroneously assume that all children develop and learn skills at the same rate and in the same way."

Most other standardized testing treats children the same way.

Over time I have learned that when students are liberated from the effects of being taught as members of a group – say, for a standardized test – they are allowed to shine as individuals.

Making teaching personal, and not based on the limits of standardized testing, is the first step to leading students to become active American citizens.

It's important to know where the students come from, their neighborhoods. Teachers need to know their parents and what the students' home lives are like. Are the parents so busy making a living or trying to find a job that they don't have time to be concerned about what's going on in their kids' classrooms?

Teachers need to know what each particular student wants from school – what effect it'll have on his or her life, now and in the future.

But even in schools not affected by the Common Core or other standardized testing, teachers can be so busy that they don't have time to learn fully about their students. They may, for example, even be unaware of unresponsive members of the class with hearing or other physical disabilities.

Among my suggestions for securing more personalized education, the media should look into universities that graduate new teachers. How many of them have learned to teach to the individual student?

Also, when it comes to determining the tenure of teachers in our public schools, students should have a vote in that – however they have been taught. What were their expectations and desires when they started going to public school? To what extent have they been met?

Furthermore, in an increasing number of schools, as I have previously reported, students have been encouraged to conduct discussions and debates on serious local, state and national issues.

This is how they learn to become active, voting citizens. If teachers don't have the capacity or willingness to conduct such debates, give students the time and space to conduct them by themselves. They have shown enthusiasm for this.

Also, students should be given a voice in speaking out against any measures they see as unfair that are pushed by principals, school committees and legislatures. For instance, do the students find some form of discipline unfair or even in violation of their constitutional rights? Have they learned their constitutional rights?

Furthermore, in many low-income areas, police too often have a frequent and intimidating presence in schools, which may be in violation of students' legal rights.

Speaking of essential learning, the decision of so many public schools to not have mandated courses on the history of our Constitution is startling and must be changed! Our students must learn why they are Americans, and so must their teachers, principals and legislative school committees – even their parents must learn this.

Otherwise, will our future generations still be meaningful American citizens? In 2016, how many candidates for political office will be concerned about what it means to be an American – in and out of the classroom?

After all, what is our education system supposed to be all about?

Now 90, I have a number of expected age-related problems. But as long as you can still read my reporting on our presidents tossing aside the separation of powers and other constitutional limitations on the executive branch, why should I retire?

As the late Cardinal John O'Connor once said to me, "Nat, I hope we don't lose you. You're the only Jewish, atheist, civil libertarian, pro-lifer, tireless free speech advocate we have."

So said this Catholic leader of the New York archdiocese.

And from Duke Ellington I learned never to retire from jazz and life. This was when I was in my teens, working at a Boston radio station where I'd also had a weekly jazz program.

Later I was struck at how tired Duke had become while he and his orchestra were playing more than 200 one-nighters a year all over this land.

Presumptuously, I told him: "Duke, you don't have to endure this. You've written classics and can retire on your ASCAP income."

Duke looked at me as if I'd lost all my marbles and roared: "Retire? To what?"

That burned a hole in my consciousness. After all, one of Duke's songs was called "What Am I Here For?"

If I weren't researching vital stories and sending them across this country and beyond, of what use would I be?

Recently, I received a direct answer to Duke's query in a call from Ron Strom, the commentary editor of WND.com, the independent news site. He told me that editors there were worried about my absences, which until the past few months had been very rare. They wanted to know what current, controversial topics I'd eventually be writing about. Readers had also been concerned, presumably about my health.

Added Strom: "You have my best wishes for continued improvement in your health. We look forward to your return to weekly writing. May you continue for many years to come."

I certainly intend to. The more I research and write, the more my physical situation improves because I get so involved in reporting that I forget my health problems.

One story I'd been eager to write about was my enthusiasm for Jeb Bush's presidential candidacy in 2016 – and then what abruptly ended it.

To his great credit, Bush, while governor of Florida, tried hard to prevent the death of Terri Schiavo in 2005.

I had researched and written about that case in my then-regular Village Voice column. As I concluded, hers was "the longest public execution in American history" ("Terri Schiavo: Judicial Murder," The Village Voice, March 22, 2005).

I added: "She is not brain-dead or comatose, and breathes naturally on her own. Although brain-damaged, she is not in a persistent vegetative state, according to an increasing number of radiologists and neurologists."

Her husband and legal guardian, Michael Schiavo, had been intervening for years in order to remove her feeding tube. Her parents and siblings, however, tried to keep her alive.

Federal courts refused to get involved, and the Supreme Court denied emergency calls for help.

The Florida Legislature even passed a law in 2003 protecting Terri Schiavo's right to life. Bush signed it, but the state Supreme Court threw it out two years later, thus ensuring that Michael Schiavo would be allowed to have his wife's feeding tube permanently removed.

It's worth noting, as was reported extensively at the time, that her husband was living with another woman with whom he'd had children.

It's also worth reminding readers, as I did 10 years ago, that "the American Civil Liberties Union, which would be passionately criticizing state court decisions and demanding due process if Terri were a convict on death row, has shamefully served as co-counsel for her husband, Michael Schiavo, in his insistent desire to have her die."

Can you imagine that?

On March 31, 2005, CNN's headline proclaimed: "Terri Schiavo has died."

It further noted: "Terri Schiavo, the 41-year-old brain-damaged woman who became the centerpiece of a national right-to-die battle, died Thursday morning, nearly two weeks after doctors removed the feeding tube that had sustained her for more than a decade."

In response, Bush has said he has no regrets in waging his sustained battle to keep her alive.

Yet, as admirable as his position has been, I am not urging him to become our next president.

Why?

Dig what he told a gathering in Concord, New Hampshire, earlier this year about the Patriot Act: "There's not a shred of evidence that anybody's civil liberties have been violated by it. Not a shred" ("Jeb Bush: 'Not a Shred of Evidence' That Patriot Act Violated Anyone's Civil Liberties," Igor Bobic, huffingtonpost.com, May 21).

What a national disgrace.

The Patriot Act was rushed through Congress so quickly following the Sept. 11 attacks that many legislators didn't even have time to read it. The most anti-constitutional legislation in our history passed easily. In it, Section 215 destroyed the Fourth Amendment's protections against government invasions of our personal privacy.

Recent legislation happily signed by Barack Obama supposedly changes that section – but not essentially! Government intelligence agencies are still spying on us.

Indeed, as the Washington Post reported last week: "The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on Monday ruled that the NSA could resume gathering millions of Americans' phone metadata – call times, dates and durations – to scan for links to foreign terrorists" ("With court approval, NSA resumes bulk collection of phone data," Ellen Nakashima, Washington Post, June 30).

So are there any Constitutionalists you can trust to become president in 2016? What about members of Congress? Do you trust any of the current presidential candidates to fill Supreme Court vacancies?

Will this still be America after next year's elections? Do you still give a damn?

I still do, and that's why I'm not retiring.

That's what I'm here for.

Kansas, I wrote last week, was the first state to enact such a law.

And dig the size of the votes in the Oklahoma Legislature:

"The bill passed the state House of Representatives, 84-2, in February, and the state Senate, 37-4, last week. The law, which will go into effect on Nov. 1, will prohibit dismemberment abortions in Oklahoma."

National Right to Life President Carol Tobias says that by protecting unborn children from being torn limb from limb in the second trimester of abortion, "this law has the power to change how the public views the gruesome reality of abortion in the United States."

But that depends, of course, on how many of We the People are deeply disturbed by this abortion procedure's ISIS-like gruesomeness. They must make their indignation known to state and federal legislators as well as the thus-far inattentive Supreme Court, religious leaders and passionate civil libertarians.

Much credit for changing the American public's views on abortion is due to National Right to Life and its 50 state affiliates and more than 3,000 local chapters. It is the nation's oldest and biggest grass-roots pro-life organization.

Yet as Virginia attorney Scott Lloyd writes in the Winter 2015 edition of The Human Life Review, "Nowhere is the coarsening effect of this procedure more acutely felt than among those in the medical profession. The methodical dismemberment of a human fetus turns out in many ways to be its own punishment, as it is a traumatic event for the people who have taken it upon themselves to perform such a deed, who go on to experience nightmares and regret" ("Banning Dismemberment Abortions: Constitutionality and Politics," March 24, Scott Lloyd, humanlifereview.com).

He adds that "roughly 12 percent of all abortions nationwide are performed after the first trimester (up to 12 weeks after the last menstrual period), and of these, 95 percent are performed using the dismemberment method."

Furthermore, Lloyd argues, "The important question that will be determined in litigation is whether a majority on the Supreme Court believes a ban on dismemberment abortions ... constitutes an undue burden on the right to abortion. ...

"Even supposing a ban on dismemberment abortions did make second-trimester abortions more difficult to obtain, however, it does not necessarily follow that this would make a ban an undue burden, as women would still be free to obtain abortions by any means up to about 14 weeks and by other means until birth or until the point where it has been outlawed by a state – 20 weeks in some, 24 weeks in others. ...

"If it becomes necessary to provide a rational reason for distinguishing between two late-term-abortion procedures (and there is a substantial likelihood that it will come to this), there is an expansive body of literature ... suggesting that there is a special gruesomeness and inhumanity to dismemberment abortions that have a particularly damaging effect on the psychological/spiritual well-being and moral standing of the people who participate in them. ...

"Several different accounts mention the phenomenon of feeling the sensation of tearing, of holding the limbs in the forceps, and of struggling to grasp the head, then crushing it, and often beholding a well-formed face in the process. ..."

Scott Lloyd then goes on to quote extensively from the accounts of Dr. Warren Hern, an abortion physician based in Boulder, Colorado: "There was clear agreement (among clinic staff) that D&E is qualitatively a different procedure, medically and emotionally, than early abortion.

"Many of the respondents (staff at an abortion clinic) reported serious emotional reactions that produced psychological symptoms, sleep disturbances, effects on interpersonal relationships, and moral anguish. ... (Most staff) thought that D&E was more difficult, tedious, risky, and painful than other procedures for everyone involved, and some feared major complications."

This is still civilized America?

Will anyone dare to show videos and other depictions of unborn American human beings with their own DNA undergoing these horrible procedures – and the eyes of those committing these undeniable crimes against humanity – in classrooms around this complicit nation?

Yes, classrooms. This is essential education for future generations.

Meanwhile, if you are interested in a medical illustration of this procedure, it is at available online. Indeed, you ought to send a copy to vehement pro-choice President Barack Obama.

In more than 70 years of fact-finding reporting, I've never been so ashamed and angered that such a horror is being allowed to continue throughout these United States.

Imagine the reaction if it had been proposed at our historic Constitutional Convention, even when huge inequalities were remaining.

In America, we still have marches for justice to support various causes. So where is the march to end the dismemberment of these unborn Americans, whose facial expressions can be seen as they disappear?

An April 8 New York Times front-page story reports that "a bill signed into law by Gov. Sam Brownback, a Republican and longtime abortion opponent, outlaws what it calls 'dismemberment abortion,' defined in part as 'knowingly dismembering a living unborn child' ... (I)t appears to ban or require altercation of the method known as dilation and evacuation, which is used in nearly all abortions after the 12th to 14th week of pregnancy" ("Kansas Limits Abortion Method, Opening a New Line of Attack," Erik Eckholm and Frances Robles, New York Times, April 8).

And a lead editorial a few days later begins in utterly prejudicial and non-factual language: "During the past four years, the state of Kansas has become ground zero in the war to criminalize all abortions, and in the process to remove a woman's ability to control what happens in her own body" ("Kansas Tries to Stamp Out Abortion," New York Times, April 10).

By contrast, here are the facts regarding Kansas becoming the first state to outlaw the dismemberment procedure, as reported by the National Right to Life Committee earlier this year: "In his dissent to the U.S. Supreme Court's 2000 Stenberg v. Carhart decision, Justice (Anthony) Kennedy observed that in D&E dismemberment abortions, 'The fetus, in many cases, dies just as a human adult or child would: It bleeds to death as it is torn limb from limb. The fetus can be alive at the beginning of the dismemberment process and can survive for a time while its limbs are being torn off'" ("Dismemberment Abortion Ban in Kansas Leads 2015 Pro-Life Legislative Agenda," nrlc.org, Jan. 14).

As I have reported previously, in this digital era it is possible to view the fetus, and I have. So it's pertinent to add that when the dismemberment procedure occurs after the first trimester – as NRLC's director of state legislation, Mary Spaulding Balch, emphasizes – and the fetus is torn apart, "the unborn child (already) has a beating heart, brain waves and every organ system in place. Dismemberment abortions occur after the baby has reached these milestones."

That's why the brutal torture of ISIS comes to my mind.

In answering the question, "Is dismemberment too harsh a description?" Justice Kennedy was very specific in his written opinion for Gonzales v. Carhart, a 2007 case in which the Supreme Court upheld a congressional ban on partial-birth abortions (another term for dismemberment abortions). This decision, wrote the Pew Research Center, "prompt(ed) many states to consider passing tougher restrictions on abortion" ("A History of Key Abortion Rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court," Jan. 16, 2013).

Kennedy wrote: "After sufficient dilation, a doctor inserts grasping forceps through the woman's cervix and into the uterus to grab a living fetus. The doctor grips a fetal part with the forceps and pulls it back through the cervix and vagina, continuing to pull even after meeting resistance from the cervix. The friction causes the fetus to tear apart. For example, a leg might be ripped off the fetus as it is pulled through the cervix and out of the woman. ...

"The fetus, in many cases, dies just as a human adult or child would" ("Oklahoma House passes Unborn Child Protection from Dismemberment Abortion Act by a vote of 84-2," Dave Andrusko, nationalrighttolifenews.org, Feb. 27).

Also worth considering is the testimony of Dr. Anthony Levatino, a Las Cruces, New Mexico, obstetrician and gynecologist, before the House Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice on May 23, 2013: "Imagine, if you can, that you are a pro-choice obstetrician/gynecologist, like I once was. Your patient today is 24 weeks pregnant. At 24 weeks from (her) last menstrual period, her uterus is two finger-breadths above the umbilicus. If you could see her baby, which is quite easy on an ultrasound, she would be as long as your hand plus a half from the top of her head to the bottom of her rump, not counting the legs.

"Your patient has been feeling her baby kick for the last month or more, but now she is asleep on an operating room table, and you are there to help her with her problem pregnancy. ...

"The toughest part of a D&E abortion is extracting the baby's head. The head of a baby that age is about the size of a large plum and is now free-floating inside the uterine cavity. You can be pretty sure you have hold of it if the Sopher clamp is spread about as far as your fingers will allow. ... You can then extract the skull pieces. Many times a little face will come out and stare back at you. ... If you refuse to believe that this procedure inflicts severe pain on that unborn child, please think again."

I congratulate Kansas for being the first state to ban this brutal procedure, while Oklahoma just passed its own dismemberment abortion ban as well. Other states are planning to take similar steps, though they face many obstacles.

Now my customary question: Will any of the 2016 presidential or congressional candidates focus on, or even mention, this horrendous procedure?

If more of our citizenry comes to learn about dismemberment abortion, will there be sufficient sustained protest to protect future generations of the unborn from this appalling fate?

Finally, worth considering: "According to the National Abortion Federation Abortion Training Textbook – 'D&E remains the most prevalent method of second-trimester pregnancy termination in the USA, accounting for 96 percent of all second-trimester abortions ... roughly 100,000 unborn babies die each year after the first trimester" ("Frequently Asked Questions: Unborn Child Protection from Dismemberment Abortion Act," nrlc.org).

If this awful procedure were to continue, how would America come to be defined among all other civilized nations?

These are quotations from the long-respected civil rights organization, the National Urban League, as further quoted in the Huffington Post's story "Black America is Just 72 Percent Equal to Whites in Some Areas" (Huffington Post, March 25, 2015).

One example of a subhead in that story: "Black Students' Academic Proficiency Hovers Well Below White Peers."

Also there's the continually racially segregated school systems across the land. For instance, the neighborhood where I live and work in New York City is effectively segregated by race. This is not done by law, but by where whites choose to live.

So, while growing up, young blacks and whites don't get to know one another.

I don't recall hearing racial public school segregation being mentioned by presidential or congressional candidates. Nor is it evident in most predominant media in their various forms.

My own growing up experience was different because of my passion for jazz, which began when I was about 12 years old. Five years later, I had a jazz program on Boston radio station WMEX, where I interviewed and got to know black jazz musicians, some of whom became my friends.

One of them was Charles Mingus, who later became a master bassist and leader. I first knew him as a sideman with a visiting combo to Boston, and we became friends.

It was when reading his 1971 memoir, "Beneath the Underdog," that I viscerally felt the separation I didn't experience between blacks and whites:

"Nat Hentoff," he wrote about our first meeting, "was the first white I could talk with."

So what will the next president do, if anything, if he or she has to suggest nominees for Supreme Court vacancies who could significantly reduce the separation between American blacks and whites? This can also be a consideration in voting for members of Congress, state judges and legislators, mayors, et al.

Otherwise, for how many generations will this racial separation continue?

What also needs pervasive changing are the long prison sentences of huge numbers of Americans, a high percentage of whom are blacks and other minorities.

Many of these lives are then permanently blocked from having meaningful access to the benefits of citizenship.

As I have discovered studying state prison populations, many blacks with such blocked futures were first school dropouts imprisoned for non-violent crimes. In schools where students were measured and graded collectively by standardized tests, these black dropouts felt like they had no reason for being there, because they had been taught they were dumbly incapable of such learning. Or so they thought.

While I continue to be convinced that Obama should be impeached for unilaterally and ceaselessly violating our privacy and other constitutional rights, I must credit him in his current actual attempts to put an end to mass imprisonments for nonviolent crimes.

What can also begin to be meaningfully and permanently likely to erase black inequality is the increased visible and authentic coming together of these Americans – blacks and also whites – who are searching for effective ways to remove Jim Crow as a malignant presence in this nation.

Seeing this insistent coalition in action in politics, education and other core functions of American life could eventually bring us back to a self-governing republic by all of We the People.

Finally, I bring Duke Ellington into the conversation. He's been an influence on me, not only about jazz, since my teens, when he knew I was starting to write on jazz musicians.

"Don't categorize musicians," he told me. "Like – 'old timey Dixieland' or 'cutting-edge modern.' Get to know where the musician came from, how he grew up, his family, what got him into jazz. That's where his music comes from."

My variation on that is a possible society where some of its members wouldn't automatically judge a person by politics, race, gender, et al., but would get to know more of the particular person's background and main interests.

And Charlie Parker, the icon of modern jazz, warned me back then: "Don't go by first impressions, what you first see and hear. Get to know more than that."

We were talking about Bartok, whose music I was excited by.

"First time I heard Bartok," said Bird (as he was called), "he wasn't anything to me. Later, I heard a concerto by him, and I began to write a jazz concerto. I must have been into something else when I first heard him."

And when I was first teaching journalism at New York University Graduate School, I'd start by saying, "Don't go into a story with a pre-set. Like you feel you know who's right and who's wrong by their race or political party. Get the facts."

All of us are human beings entitled to the Constitution's protections. If not, what makes America different from all other nations?

Even the New York Times seemed to accept ISIS' self-description on its March 11 front page: "Islamic State Finds New Frontier in Chaotic Libya."

But Wikipedia, citing a Washington Post article, alerts us to this penetrating truth:

"There's another name for the group that has brutally captured large swaths of Syria and Iraq: 'al-Qaida Separatists in Iraq and Syria' or more simply, QSIS" ("Meet 'QSIS': A new twist in what to call the extremist group rampaging in Iraq and Syria," Adam Taylor, Washington Post, Aug. 26, 2014).

"That new name comes not from the extremists themselves, but from Egypt, where a leading Islamic authority, Dar al-Ifta, has asked people to stop using the term 'Islamic State.'"

Ibrahim Negm, an Islamic expert, explains to Egypt's Middle East News Agency that the name change is important, as it "aims to correct the image of Islam that has been tarnished in the West because of (ISIS') criminal acts, and to exonerate humanity from such crimes that defy natural instincts and spreads hate between people" ("Islamic authority: Extremists no 'Islamic State,'" The Associated Press, Aug. 24, 2014).

So how do the members of ISIS feel when they are not referred to as an "Islamic State"?

Dig this Iraqi mother's account: "They will cut your tongue out even if you call them ISIS – you have to say 'Islamic State'" ("Islamic State crisis: Mother fears for son at Mosul school," bbc.com, Sept. 29, 2014).

Not only was that woman's story cited by Wikipedia, but so was this: "Politicians should stop using its preferred name (ISIS) to help halt the radicalization of British Muslims, leading groups have said" ("ISIS should be called the 'Un-Islamic State': British Muslims call on David Cameron to stop spread of extremist propaganda," Andrew Griffin, The Independent (U.K.), Sept. 14, 2014).

"A group of prominent Muslims has written to David Cameron to ask that he uses a different name for the group, and to lead a national debate on what it should be called."

What do they suggest?

The letter simply says: "We propose that 'Un-Islamic State' (UIS) could be an accurate and fair alternative name to describe this group and its agenda."

The letter was signed by some of the most respected members of Britain's Islamic community, including the president of the Islamic Society of Britain, the Association of British Muslims and the Association of Muslim Lawyers.

Moreover, citing various articles, Wikipedia points out that "the 'Islamic State' is mocked on social media websites such as Twitter and YouTube, with the use of hashtags, mock recruiting ads, fake news articles and YouTube videos."

Surely the New York Times is aware of this negative reaction to ISIS as an "Islamic State," so why does it so glibly identify the group as such in its articles?

Not only does the Times make ISIS the opposite of what it is; Wikipedia cites a column from The Atlantic by an academic who is not offended by referring to ISIS as the Islamic State:

"Muslims who call the Islamic State un-Islamic are typically, as the Princeton scholar Bernard Haykel, the leading expert on the group's theology, told me, 'embarrassed and politically correct, with a cotton-candy view of their own religion' that neglects 'what their religion has historically and legally required.'

"Many denials of the Islamic State's religious nature, he said, are rooted in an 'interfaith-Christian-nonsense tradition'" ("What ISIS Really Wants," Graeme Wood, The Atlantic, March 2015).

That should bring smiles to ISIS leaders.

Contrarily, "Prime Minister Tony Abbott told the U.N. Security Council Australia's response to Islamic State will be 'utterly unflinching'" ("Islamic State: PM Tony Abbott tells U.N. Australia's response to terrorist group will be 'utterly unflinching,'" Michael Vincent, abc.net.au, Sept. 25, 2014).

In his speech to the United Nations, Abbott was blunt when describing the phrase "Islamic State": "To use this term is to dignify a death cult; a death cult that, in declaring itself a caliphate, has declared war on the world."

In any case, its assertion that it's the "Islamic State" gives ISIS, however brutal, a false significance in the Islamic history that it prizes.

While ISIS continues to generate growing, widespread fear as it recruits youngsters of various nations, there are different opinions among American officials regarding its danger to the United States.

Here, Wikipedia cites a New York Times story that further clarifies this:

"Daniel Benjamin, who served as the State Department's top counterterrorism adviser during Mr. Obama's first term, said the public discussion about the ISIS threat has been a 'farce,' with 'members of the Cabinet and top military officers all over the place describing the threat in lurid terms that are not justified'" ("Struggling to Gauge ISIS Threat, Even as U.S. Prepares to Act," Mark Mazzetti, Eric Schmitt and Mark Landler, New York Times, Sept. 10, 2014).

Former Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, however, "said that ISIS poses an 'imminent threat to every interest we have.'"

Because I turn 90 in June, I may well not live to experience how ISIS' momentum and growth will end. But if I were president – as if a pro-life atheist could ever be the president – I would struggle mightily and persistently to get congressional authorization to set up a new alliance to destroy ISIS.

Don't worry, though. I doubt if any presidential candidate would gain office by being that honest with an electorate wary of further military operations in the Middle East.

If any readers disagree with the conclusion I recommend, I'd be very interested in learning how you would proceed against ISIS from here on.

"Last fall, FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) mailed warning letters to more than 300 public colleges and universities that maintain unconstitutional speech codes ... explaining that their institution could be sued if it continued to ignore legal obligations under the First Amendment" ("Students Sue Dixie State U. Over 'Free Speech Zone,' Censorship of Bush, Obama, Che Flyers," thefire.org, March 4).

I continue to be concerned with increasing the protection of free speech – not only in colleges and universities – because I don't want subsequent generations to become fearful of using this fundamental right of all Americans.

FIRE is the only organization ceaselessly working to keep free speech alive on campuses, from which many of our future voters, legislators and teachers will emerge.

Currently, the group is at work on a lawsuit filed by students at Dixie State University in St. George, Utah, which you may never have heard of.

"The lawsuit alleges that Dixie State refused to approve promotional flyers produced by the Young Americans for Liberty (YAL) student group that featured images negatively portraying Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara."

Why?

"Because school policy does not permit students to 'disparage' or 'mock' individuals."

Greg Lukianoff, the president of FIRE, rails against "the university's ridiculous policies, which go so far as to forbid any poster in a residence hall that students or administrators claim creates an 'uncomfortable' environment."

This in the land of the free and the home of the brave?

But, thankfully, with the assistance of FIRE, unyieldingly patriotic students like William Jergins are fighting for free speech at Dixie State. He declares:

"A true education demands that students be able to hear ideas different from their own. That is why respecting free speech on campus is so important and why we are standing up to get rid of Dixie State's speech codes.

"By maintaining these codes, the Dixie State administration limits the ideas we hear, the thoughts we consider – and our learning experiences suffer because of it."

So does the quality of the rest of their citizenship.

Meanwhile, FIRE took "a closer look at the previous year's incidents of college censorship to determine the nation's 10 worst abusers of student and faculty free speech rights" ("FIRE Announces 10 Worst Colleges for Free Speech in 2014," thefire.org, March 2).

Among these notorious defilers of the First Amendment are:

Brandeis University (already cited in previous columns of mine); California State University, Fullerton; Chicago State University; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; University of Iowa; Marquette University; Modesto Junior College (Modesto, California).

There ought to be a special award of shame for a "college that stopped a student from distributing Constitutions on Constitution Day and then punished professors who came to his defense."

That school was the aforementioned Modesto Junior College.

FIRE should not be alone in its invaluable public service of fact-finding and pursuing litigation to bring the First Amendment back to college campuses.

The media, in their various forms, should occasionally take a look at thefire.org and read the group's press releases.

So, too, should those relatively few state and federal legislators familiar with the Constitution.

Now that more colleges and universities that ban free speech are becoming known, what action, if any, should the students' parents – who believe tuition must include First Amendment rights – take?

How many of the 2016 candidates for president are likely to mention the forced disappearance of the First Amendment from college campuses?

I very much hope that FIRE starts to cover the First Amendment at high schools as well as middle and elementary schools and works to protect its existence at these institutions.

Some elementary students can think and read on their own. I know a few.

In the meantime, it's wonderful to see students like those at Dixie State take to the courts to rescue the First Amendment. They're becoming our educators.

"The Obama administration," says Donohue, "does not understand ISIS because it does not understand the mindset of totalitarians. It thinks it is dealing with a conventional sectarian struggle, the kind of uprising that pops up now and then. It is not" ("The Totalitarian Face of ISIS," Bill Donohue, catholicleague.org, Feb. 27).

"It is dealing with an apocalyptic movement that is fueled by a desire to own the past, the present and the future. And like communism, it is not content to lay anchor in one country."

Donohue explains further: "ISIS, following Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, wants to eradicate the collective memory of the people, which is why it goes beyond killing men, women and children: by destroying ancient works of art, and turning over graves, the totalitarians seek to erase the past, thus paving the way for the future."

Donohue refers to a series of historical incidents that many of us may not have known:

"Beginning in 1966, at the outset of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, the Red Guards went on a rampage destroying museums and bulldozing graves. Now ISIS is doing the same thing in Iraq.

"Sledgehammers have been used to behead statues and other artifacts at the Mosul Museum – winged bulls dating to the seventh century B.C. have been smashed – a winged lion has been defaced, and other antiquities have been annihilated.

"Great works of art, extending to the ancient Assyrian Empire, have been ransacked. This happened just a few days after the burning of the Mosul Public Library. In addition, tombs have been destroyed."

So, as ISIS moves on, Donohue underlines:

"Totalitarians assault art and religion precisely because they bind people to their roots, thus creating an obstacle to the new social order. ISIS barbarians want to do more than kill Christian Assyrians and those who are not just like them – they want to kill everything that ties the present to the past."

Donohue concludes: "We need to hear from presidential hopefuls why they think the Obama vision is impaired, and what they plan to do about it."

We need to hear from many others as well. Where are the other civil rights leaders? What about civil liberties organizations? Do the leaders of any religious denominations have ideas on what must be done to end the ghastliness of ISIS?

What is also needed is for teachers to encourage class discussions and debates on "The Totalitarian Face of ISIS." Many students surely know what may be in store for them if ISIS continues to grow – and as more young Americans and Europeans continue to want to join ISIS.

What ISIS has accomplished, for me, is to finally end my long-term, waning interest in Martin Luther King's nonviolent direct action to restore individual liberties.

I continue to greatly admire Dr. King, but nonviolent action cannot cope with the unabated ferocity of ISIS.

But what will arouse us, We The People, to demand terminal action and international alliances for the destruction of ISIS?

Gone are the street protests I remember and sometimes participated in against the war in Vietnam and other authoritarian governmental actions – and inactions.

It's important to return to New York Judge Learned Hand's 1944 warning of how Americans' "spirit of liberty" can become so empty:

"Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it."

His words are penetratingly vital now.

I commend the Catholic League's Bill Donohue for being the Paul Revere of our time as ISIS expands its deadly affiliations and connections, particularly among new generations in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere.

What will awaken and strengthen the spirit of liberty among Americans? In you?

The shock and fear of 9/11 did for a time, but here we are now. Are we in the land of the free and the home of the brave ready to smite ISIS?

Although I have been continually critical of Obama, what drew me to this story was the name of the reporter, Robert Pear, who broke the story at the bottom of page 12 of the Times (a story that should have been on the front page).

For years, I have learned more about health care from Robert Pear than from any other journalist.

Here he tells us that precision medicine, also known as personalized or individualized medicine, "gives us one of the greatest opportunities for new breakthroughs that we have ever seen," as Obama declared at a White House event attended by patients' advocates, researchers and bio-technology company executives.

Among the listeners was, yes, a Republican: Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee "and chairman of the Senate Health Committee, who said he intended to work with the president on the issue."

And, for once, Obama made immediate sense: "If we're born with a particular disease or a particular genetic makeup that makes us more vulnerable to something, that's not our destiny, that's not our fate."

Robert Pear shows the way ahead: "Federal officials described the project as a research consortium that would collect information from large numbers of people.

"The data could include medical records, laboratory test results, profiles of patients' genes, and information about their diet, tobacco use, lifestyle and environment."

And dig this quote from Dr. Baselga, chief medical officer at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York:

"We dreamed of this. We can mine the genome of tumors from our patients, identify mutations responsible for the tumors and accelerate improvements in patient care."

Robert Pear lists, among Obama's structural plans, his intent "to seek $10 million for the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates technology used to analyze DNA. Such analysis can identify millions of genetic variants, providing information that would help diagnose or treat some diseases, officials said."

Moreover, he continued, "since the 1980s, researchers have been collecting and storing human tissue and other biological specimens in repositories known as biobanks."

He then brought in Jo Handelsman, associate director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, who emphasized:

"We do not envision this as being a biobank, which would suggest a single repository for all the data or all the samples. There are existing cohorts around the country that have already been started and are rich sources of data. The challenge in this initiative is to link them together and fill in the parts."

Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, "said the initiative was feasible because of the advances in genetics and cell biology, the use of electronic medical records, significant increases in computing power and a sharp decline in the past 15 years in the cost of a laboratory technique known as DNA sequencing. The technique is used to investigate the function of genes and to analyze the full set of a person's genes – the genome."

To this vital point, he added the striking addition that "it cost us $400 million for that first genome. Now a genome can be sequenced for a cost approximating $1,000."

To further increase my excitement at this potential extension of American lifespans, Robert Pear concluded with Nancy A. Brown, the chief executive of the American Heart Association, who noted that "patients with heart disease, like those with cancer, could benefit from precision medicine."

Pear writes that Brown's organization is "compiling a database of genetic information. The data, she said, could help doctors tailor treatments for heart failure of abnormal heart rhythms, or find the right combination of drugs to lower blood pressure."

My personal interest in health care includes, not surprisingly, my becoming 90 next June as I continue to make deadlines while also working on a new book. But this potential for greatly improving and lengthening American lives is also focusing my attention on my grandchildren and their progeny.

This, if it becomes part of real American life, is also for future generations, and so I shall be closely following the reporting of Robert Pear and other journalists on precision individualized medicine.

President Obama's key role in alerting us to this does not, of course, obviate the many reasons he should be impeached – with due process – for continuing high crimes against our Constitution.

But if he is forced to exit, he will have merited gratitude for awakening us to the possibilities of precision individualized medicine.

In an attempt to assure this will happen in our schools, the New York Times recently reported that, last month, "Arizona became the first state to pass a law requiring its high school students to pass the citizenship exam, stipulating that they must answer at least 60 of 100 questions correctly to receive a diploma" ("States Move to Make Citizenship Exams a Classroom Aid," Rick Rojas and Motoko Rich, New York Times, Jan. 27).

This is the citizenship test "that is given to immigrants who want to become United States citizens."

Among the questions: "What do we call the first 10 amendments to the Constitution?"

Another: "What did Susan B. Anthony do?"

Do you know?

Furthermore, added the Times, "other states may follow suit: North Dakota's House of Representatives has passed a comparable bill, and its Senate approved it" last week.

"Legislators in Indiana, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia and seven other states have recently introduced similar initiatives."

But Arizona educator Darcy White, explained the Times, "has reservations" about teaching students why and how they should become authentic Americans.

Reported the Times: "She already loses several days of instruction time to standardized testing."

As White told the reporters, "Every teacher will tell you a test is not a measure of what a kid knows."

In contrast, there are deeper, more lasting ways than tests to engage students in active, lifelong participation in this self-governing republic.

Sixteen-year-old Arizona student Noah Bond told the Times: "I think people are more focused on the test and passing, and not the meaning of it. It boils down to the fact that we need to start teaching to make a change, not just taking a test."

Here is one of my suggestions on how to involve such students who want to make a change:

Let's have classes debate the ways Republicans George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, as well as Democrat Barack Obama, deeply violated the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth and 14th Amendments to the Constitution. (These amendments would be clearly explained beforehand.)

After students have learned that these amendments are at the very core of our Constitution, would they – as, say, future members of Congress – be moved to correct this savage damage done to our identity as Americans?

Consider this 1873 statement from Susan B. Anthony:

"I stand before you tonight under indictment for the alleged crime of having voted at the last presidential election, without having a lawful right to vote. It shall be my work this evening to prove to you that in thus voting, I not only committed no crime, but, instead, simply exercised my citizen's rights, guaranteed to me and all United States citizens by the national Constitution, beyond the power of any state to deny."

What would those students' reactions be to Anthony's conclusions? How many of them know that women in this land of the free and home of the brave were long forbidden to exercise their right to vote and many other privileges of citizenship?

I am curious to know whether students are aware of any current exceptions to Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson's penetrating definition of who we are as Americans, written in the 1943 decision in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette:

"One's right to life, liberty and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections."

I would ask students if this ruling is realistic today.

Are there necessary exceptions you could see violating the court's rule of our government, or is the court's wishful, idealistic thinking to be absolute in all such cases?

Meanwhile, in the course of these student debates, I would ask:

Whom do you intend to vote for in the 2016 elections for president, and why? One of the president's obligations is to recommend replacements for Supreme Court vacancies; from what you know of the past courts and the current one, what would determine your choice for potential court replacements?

Finally, for the time being, I would encourage class discussion of the much-cited Martin Luther King Jr. quote: "I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'"

How can this dream become reality, students, once you are active Americans? For example, what's to be done if we're not all born with the same resources?

King knew. He started a war on poverty and inequality before he was killed.

It takes more than collective tests to really get involved with these questions. What would you students actually do about them?

But how civilized are we now, when, according to extended research by the Center for Constitutional Rights, or CCR:

"Tens of thousands of individuals across the country are detained inside cramped, concrete, windowless cells in a state of near-total solitude for between 22 and 24 hours a day. The cells have a toilet and a shower, and a slot in the door large enough for a guard to slip a food tray through.

"Prisoners in solitary confinement are frequently deprived of telephone calls and contact visits. 'Recreation' involves being taken, often in handcuffs and shackles, to another solitary cell where prisoners can pace alone for an hour before being returned to their cell."

Says Luis Esquivel, a prisoner plaintiff in a CCR lawsuit: "I feel dead. It's been 13 years since I have shaken someone's hand, and I feel I'll forget the feel of human contact."

The Center for Constitutional Rights, to which I have been referring in my column for years, continues: "Researchers have demonstrated that prolonged solitary confinement causes a persistent and heightened state of anxiety and nervousness, headaches, insomnia, lethargy or chronic tiredness, nightmares, heart palpitations, and fear of impending nervous breakdowns.

"Other documented effects include obsessive ruminations, confused thought processes, an oversensitivity to stimuli, irrational anger, social withdrawal, hallucinations, violent fantasies, emotional flatness, mood swings, chronic depression, feelings of overall deterioration, as well as suicidal intention."

Forget about the death penalty for a moment. Is this civilized, legal punishment in these United States?

I will be surprised if a candidate for the presidency or any public office in 2016 brings up the issue of solitary confinement while campaigning.

So, in the meantime, let's look into what the New York state prison system is doing to humanize solitary confinement.

In a 2014 New York Times lead editorial, we learn that corrections officials have at least agreed "to new guidelines for the maximum length prisoners may be placed in solitary."

And dig this for what should be a national standard: "The state will also curb the use of solitary for the most vulnerable groups of inmates.

"Those younger than 18 will receive at least five hours of exercise and other programming outside their cell five days a week, making New York the largest prison system yet to end the most extreme form of isolation for juveniles."

Moreover, "solitary confinement will be presumptively prohibited for pregnant women, and inmates with developmental disabilities will be held there for no more than 30 days."

There have also been changes in the ways New York City jails its people that were truly unexpected. These are worthy of consideration elsewhere in this land of the free and home of the brave:

"In January (2014), jail officials announced that they had stopped sending mentally ill inmates to solitary, where they spent an average of nearly eight weeks. Those inmates are now being diverted to psychiatric treatment in jail."

The Times editorial continues with news that may not surprise you if you've ever given this any thought:

"A study published Feb. 12 (2014) in The American Journal of Public Health found that New York City jail inmates placed in solitary confinement were nearly seven times as likely to harm themselves as those in the general jail population. The effect was most pronounced among juveniles and the severely mentally ill."

No kidding.

The Times' next revelation may shame some of us who believe that the United States, for all its faults, is at least more civilized in its official punishments than other nations:

"This (information on solitary confinement) will come as no surprise to most other advanced nations, where solitary confinement is used sparingly, if at all. A 2011 United Nations report called for the banning of the practice in all but extraordinary circumstances, and even then only for a maximum of 15 days."

At long last, the U.N. is a role model for us!

Furthermore, this may not surprise you: "Prison guards are opposed to the changes, fearing a breakdown in prison order and risk to their own safety."

However, they should be told that "states like Maine and Mississippi have substantially reduced the use of solitary as punishment without an increase in prison violence."

One last thing to keep in mind about solitary confinement: "Ninety-five percent of prisoners," says this Times editorial, which should get a Pulitzer, "eventually return to society, (and) it is crucial that their treatment while in prison give them the best chance possible to succeed on the outside."

So why on earth don't we help secure this return?

Here, Emily Richmond of the Hechinger Report, an education news site, writes, "student-led discussions, small-group work and individual projects dominate" ("Putting students in charge to close the achievement gap," Emily Richmond, The Hechinger Report, Oct. 24, 2014).

As Noah Manteau, a senior at Pittsfield, tells Richmond: "There used to be a lot more of teachers talking at you – it didn't matter if you were ready to move on. When the teacher was done with the topic that was it. This is so much better."

Richmond adds: "Educators, researchers and policymakers at the state and national level are keeping close tabs on Pittsfield, which has become an incubator for a critical experiment in school reform. The goal: a stronger connection between academic learning and the kind of real-world experience that advocates say can translate into postsecondary success."

This kind of goal could turn future generations of Americans into more knowledgeable participants of what our nation began as: a self-governing republic whose Bill of Rights guaranteed each American individual constitutional liberties.

For years, educational reformers have too often just glibly emphasized "critical thinking" as a key goal of education. But students who are mainly talked at by teachers and then graded by collective standardized tests don't get to do much critical thinking in school.

By contrast, here is some of Richmond's report of a class she observed:

"In an 11th-grade English class ... Jenny Wellington's students were gathered in a circle debating Henry David Thoreau's positions on personal responsibility."

One student asked: "Do you think Thoreau really was about 'every man for himself'?"

To this, another student responded: "He lived alone in the woods and didn't want to pay taxes. So yeah!"

"Sitting off to the side," writes Richmond, "Wellington took rapid notes. When she noticed the conversation being dominated by a couple of voices, she politely suggested someone else chime in. Otherwise, she stayed out of the way and let the discussion take shape."

So how, at Pittsfield, are these individual learners being graded?

Richmond answers: "The traditional grading system has been replaced with a matrix of 'competencies,' detailing the skills and knowledge students are expected to master in each class.

"Students are graded on a scale of 1 to 4 – with 2.5 considered 'proficient' – and those numbers are converted into letter grades for their transcripts."

In addition, "teachers meet at regular intervals to review how closely their instruction is aligning with the competencies; they use on an online database to continually track individual student growth.

"Additional online classes allow students to further challenge themselves and earn college credit. ..."

And dig this: "The Extended Learning Opportunities (ELO) program allows students to earn credit for workplace experiences that reinforce their academic studies, such as interning at a dentist's office or the local radio station."

Accordingly, "all of this means students are shouldering more responsibility for their own learning.

"And they are expected to develop the kind of critical thinking skills – not just rote knowledge – required for 'real world' success."

So how is all this working out?

"Pittsfield's superintendent, John Freeman, is among the first to acknowledge that adopting student-centered learning was a bold move. Student performance on statewide assessments has long been uneven, and teachers and administrators know there is still significant work to be done.

"But test scores are just one indicator, and based on multiple other measures, including higher graduation and college-going rates, Freeman feels confident that student-centered learning is moving Pittsfield in the right direction."

Also worth noting is the composition of the town's students: "Pittsfield, a former mill town, has about 4,500 predominantly white students, and the Middle High School serves about 260 residents. Fifty-six percent of them qualify for free or reduced-price meals."

Although these kids are predominantly white, I haven't the slightest doubt that encouraging active individual involvement would be of exceptional, sustained value to predominantly black or Hispanic schools and those other schools with under-served students.

In Pittsfield, Richmond assures us, "student-centered learning is fully in place in the high school, and elements of it are being phased in at the middle-school level. The long-term plan is to eventually add it to the nearby elementary school."

From time to time, I will keep you up to date on those results.

Superintendent Freeman tells Richmond: "People in our community wanted schools to be places where students' passions and interests were recognized, and their deficits and weaknesses addressed."

He adds: "We're thinking not just about what happens within these walls, but preparing them for success at least seven years beyond high school graduation."

And conceivably, I believe, for the rest of their lives.

Laureen Avery of UCLA Center X, an education program that focuses on public schools, tells Richmond:

"I've never seen any school – big or little – pay such close attention to student data."

Not just "data," but continuing real-life evidence of how students learn.

Among voters in 2016, I challenge students, parents, teachers, school board members, state legislators and those in Congress to compare their school systems to what is happening in Pittsfield. What achievements are their school systems making to deepen and individualize students' futures?

I don't know whom I'll vote for president in 2016. But if any candidate convinces me that he or she has believable plans for increasing students' love of learning, I – despite arthritis – will be at the polls early.

An op-ed in last month's Wall Street Journal says:

"Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky famously postulated that the test of a free society is the ability to express opinions in the town square without fear of reprisal."

But dig this: "Most American colleges wouldn't pass that test, according to a new report by ... FIRE" ("Unfree Speech on Campus," Wall Street Journal, Dec. 12).

The op-ed continues: "The foundation reports that 55 percent of the 437 colleges it surveyed (in 2014) maintain 'severely restrictive' policies that 'clearly and substantially prohibit protected speech.' They include 61 private schools and 180 public colleges.

"Incredibly, this represents progress from FIRE's survey seven years ago, when 75 percent of colleges maintained restrictive free speech codes."

If contempt for the First Amendment in much of American higher learning is to continue for another generation or more, what quality of emerging public officials and voters will we have?

But to show the liberation of expressive Americanism that has taken place, the Wall Street Journal emphasizes:

"Perhaps the biggest breakthrough for First Amendment advocates (in 2014) was a Virginia law that bars 'free-speech zones' on public campuses. As FIRE explains, free-speech zones are a common tool that administrators use to restrict demonstrations to remote areas of campus.

"Colorado Mesa University limits free speech to 'the concrete patio adjacent to the west door of the University Center.'"

Can you imagine James Madison's or Patrick Henry's reaction to hearing that?

FIRE's extensive new report, "Spotlight on Speech Codes 2015: The State of Free Speech on Our Nation's Campuses" reveals the health of the First Amendment on campuses in one of the oldest states in the union:

"Virginia also took legislative action to protect students' free speech rights in April 2014, when Gov. Terry McAuliffe signed a bill into law effectively designating outdoor areas on the Commonwealth's public college campuses as public forums.

"Under the law, Virginia's public universities are prohibited from limiting student expression to tiny 'free-speech zones' or subjecting students' expressive activities to unreasonable registration requirements" (thefire.org).

However, "FIRE continues to see an unacceptable number of universities punishing students and faculty members for constitutionally protected speech and expression."

FIRE, which never gives up, then asks the inevitable question:

"What, then, can be done about the problem of censorship on campus? Public pressure is still perhaps the most powerful weapon against campus censorship, so it is critical that students and faculty understand and be willing to stand up for their rights when those rights are threatened.

"At public universities, which are bound by the First Amendment, litigation continues to be another highly successful way to eliminate speech codes."

As I have previously reported, "(in 2014) FIRE launched its Stand Up For Speech Litigation Project, a national effort to eliminate unconstitutional speech codes through targeted First Amendment lawsuits. ...

"Lawsuits will be filed against public colleges maintaining unconstitutional speech codes in each federal circuit."

Then it gets even tougher and more costly for un-American colleges:

"After each victory by ruling or settlement, FIRE will target another school in the same circuit – sending a message that unless public colleges obey the law, they will be sued."

What then follows is worth the attention of anyone to whom the right to free speech is the crucial definition of what defines us as Americans.

As the late Justice William Brennan once told me: "It is from the First Amendment that all our individual liberties flow."

Especially when directed against a censoring government.

Therefore, as FIRE vitally urges: "Publicizing campus censorship in any way possible – whether at a demonstration, in the newspaper or even in court – is the best available response. To paraphrase Justice Louis Brandeis, sunlight really is the best of disinfectants."

FIRE has been involved in protesting cancellations of speakers at a number of colleges – not by the administration, but by organizations of outside boycotters. In a recent Wall Street Journal story, Barry Fisher reports that "during the past academic year, protesters caused the cancellation of commencement addresses by former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice at Rutgers University and International Monetary Fund Director Christine Lagarde at Smith College" ("Free Speech's Shrinking Circle of Friends").

Had I been a student at Rutgers University, I would have welcomed the chance to directly talk to Rice. I'd have asked why she, as part of the Bush administration, assured nations that prisoners would not be tortured after the CIA conducted "renditions," kidnapping suspects from the streets of their countries to be interrogated in countries known for torturing prisoners.

Clearly, we know otherwise.

Meanwhile, I've previously reported on the cancellation of speakers at these schools as well as Brandeis University, where not only author Ayaan Hirsi Ali was canceled for her views, but one of its professors was harassed because of his alleged opinions.

Louis Brandeis was one of the most dedicated defenders of free speech in our history, and had he still been alive, he might have picketed the university named after him.

This continued desecration of the First Amendment reinforces my anger at the high proportion of public schools that no longer have mandated courses on American history. Nor is it likely they have classes on the dramatic history of what it takes to protect the First Amendment and much of the rest of the Constitution.

If this ignorance among many in future generations continues, who will Americans then be? What will their answers be to Duke Ellington's song, "What Am I Here For?"

So again, before you vote, demand of the candidates where they stand on the deterioration of the First Amendment.

And, kids, ask your parents that question.

"Over the past 10 years," Lockhart writes, "she has developed youth circus troupes that consist of Jewish, Christian, Caucasian, Hispanic, African-American and Asian children from throughout the St. Louis area."

And, the Circus Lady "has gone all the way to Israel," where this past summer, she "took members of her tumbling group, the St. Louis Arches.

"There, the Arches joined with Arab and Israeli youth from the Galilee Circus, where they work and learned together, setting aside religious, political and cultural differences."

This Circus Lady is Jessica Hentoff, my daughter. I have written about her and her involvement in Circus Harmony before – my interest as a reporter going far beyond parental pride, which certainly does exist.

"I'm following in your footsteps," she once said to me.

But I haven't traveled an inch near the life-changing effect she has had on the members of her circus troupes.

The mission of the nonprofit Circus Harmony is clear: "Through teaching and performance of circus arts, we help people defy gravity, soar with confidence, and leap over social barriers, all at the same time" (circusharmony.org/about).

As she has explained to me and others: "Children involved in Circus Harmony learn how to defy gravity, becoming part of a creative team, and how to overcome the prejudices society places upon them because of race, religion or socioeconomic standing.

"Our programs teach valuable life skills like perseverance, focus and teamwork. Learning circus with others teaches trust responsibility and cooperation.

"Perhaps the most important experience we give our participants is the opportunity to meet with and interact with children from different socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds than their own.

"Many children live under certain labels imposed on them because they are a certain race or from a particular neighborhood. Our students learn to define themselves as capable community members and creative performing artists. ... The circus has given them confidence and the courage to be themselves."

When Circus Harmony starts a troupe in Ferguson, Missouri, in February (funded in part by a social impact grant from the St. Louis Regional Arts Commission), the Circus Lady intends to have her experienced students take charge of teaching their new associates.

"The kids," she tells the (St. Louis) Riverfront Times, "are more responsive to a lesson taught by a peer, especially an accomplished peer" ("After Performing for Peace in Israel, Circus Harmony Brings Message of Unity to Ferguson," Lindsay Toler, Riverfront Times, Dec. 23).

Here is her initial program for Ferguson: "The series of circus workshops will include children aged 8 to 18 in acrobatics, juggling and balancing arts ... and then engage audiences in their neighborhoods and beyond in something innovative, inspiring and positive. In light of recent events in Ferguson, this will be meaningful for the participants, their audiences and the entire St. Louis community."

And dig this from the Circus Lady's approach to teaching there: "We will monitor students' circus progress through use of our circus log books and personal interviews. We will be able to see if they learn to juggle, do a back handspring or balance a feather in the circus classes."

As for the Circus Lady's background, according to her biography, "Jessica Hentoff has been involved in circus arts since 1973. She has toured with numerous circuses throughout the United States and Canada performing as an aerialist, clown, juggler, bareback-rider, small animal trainer and fire-eater. Jessica has taught circus skills to children and adults of all ages and levels for over 30 years (including deaf children, adolescents with Down syndrome and children with all labels)" (everydaycircus.net).

She was the St. Louis Arts and Education Council's 2009 Arts Innovator of the Year, and she has been a speaker on the topic of social circus at the World Circus Federation/European Circus Association symposium.

Among her grants: The National Endowment for the Arts.

In an interview with the publication St. Louis Jewish Light, Hentoff talked about how the idea of "tikkun olam" within the Jewish religion is connected with circus:

"This is the concept that the world shattered into a million pieces years ago. It is our job, as humans, to repair the world. My theory is that everyone uses their own kind of glue. Some use music or theater or medicine or journalism. I use circus" ("A life in circus," Ellen Futterman, St. Louis Jewish Light, Feb. 6, 2009).

In a 2007 Washington Times story I wrote about the circus's trip to Israel, Jessica Hentoff quoted a member of the Arches as saying "that he doesn't know which kids (he works with) are Arabs and which kids are Jewish. It doesn't matter. We are all circus performers, and we are creating something together, which is inspirational in ways the kids don't even think about" (my article, "Galilee Circus breaks down barriers," Washington Times, Aug. 20, 2007).

Adds the Circus Lady: "Learning to fly helps children believe in themselves. ... It changes people's perceptions of them."

When I'm working on a civil liberties story, or any kind of story, and give my name, the response can be: "Oh, are you the father of the Circus Lady?"

After I wrote that, a member of his administration rebuked me for my rank ignorance.

I responded by saying that he knew that if I were a Cuban in Cuba, I would be in prison.

Later, at the United Nations, I was one of a number of reporters interviewing Che Guevara, the young, dashing Latin American revolutionary who had acquired fans among many American college students.

Sitting by his side that day was a translator; we had been told he could not conduct an interview in English.

I asked him: "Mr. Guevara, can you see at any time in the future when there might be elections by freedom of choice in Cuba?"

Without waiting for the translator, Guevara burst out laughing, saying: "Aqui? In Cuba?"

I kept reporting – often using sources from within Cuba that I cannot, for their sake, name – details about the impact of the dictatorship. For example, kids who heard their parents criticize Fidel were required to inform the authorities.

Currently, Cuba is under the active leadership of Raul Castro, who is not markedly different from his brother.

In the Wall Street Journal last week, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, whose parents fled Cuba to live here in freedom, declares "it has been the policy and law of the U.S. to make clear that re-establishing diplomatic and economic relations with Cuba is possible – but only once the Cuban government stops jailing political opponents, protects free speech, and allows independent political parties to be formed and to participate in free and fair elections" ("A Victory for Oppression," Marco Rubio, the Wall Street Journal, Dec. 17).

"The opportunity for Cuba to normalize relations with the U.S. has always been there, but the Castro regime has never been interested in changing its ways.

"Now, thanks to President Obama's concessions, the regime in Cuba won't have to change."

I can still hear Che Guevara laughing at my question about the future of free elections there. Of course, there'll be changes in the economy, but I continue to have regular access to news from inside Cuba of the Castro brothers' stifling dissent. I am still trying to establish indirect contact and even talk with some of the prisoners I know.

In the Washington Post, Philip Rucker reports on Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul's and Rubio's opposing views on U.S.-Cuba relations, "evidence of a growing GOP rift over foreign affairs that could shape the party's 2016 presidential primaries" ("In Paul-Rubio feud over Cuba, a preview of GOP's 2016 foreign policy debate," Philip Rucker, Washington Post, Dec. 19).

Rucker cites Paul's Dec. 19 op-ed in Time magazine, where the senator wrote: "Communism can't survive the captivating allure of capitalism. Let's overwhelm the Castro regime with iPhones, iPads, American cars and American ingenuity" ("Cuba Isolationists Just Don't Get It," Rand Paul, Time magazine, Dec. 19).

Meanwhile, Rucker highlighted Rubio's criticism of Obama's welcome to the Castros: "It's just another concession to a tyranny by the Obama administration, rather than a defense of every universal and inalienable right that our country was founded on and stands for."

Well, our presidents and members of Congress hardly ever do fully stand for those definitions of who we are, but they are supposed to explain our reason for being.

Speaking of those who defend our "universal and inalienable rights," Brothers to the Rescue is an organization of pilots based in Miami that provides humanitarian aid to Cubans trying to escape their dictatorial homeland.

Jose Basulto, the group's founder, expressed his frustration with the president's new Cuba policy to WSVN, a Miami-Fort Lauderdale news affiliate: "Obama has elected himself as the new king of America, and he feels free to take any type of actions, even if he has to (bypass) the justice system of the Unite States."

His is a sentiment that I have expressed many times.

Added Sylvia Iriondo, a Cuban-American human rights activist: "President Barack Obama's concessions, it's sending the wrong message to the free world and to the world that terrorists can get away with murder."

Responding to the article in the comments section on WSVN's website, Alberto Robles asked a question that I also ask of the president: "How about the thousands of political prisoners in cuban (sic) jails?"

And Miriam De La Pena, the mother of Mario De La Pena, one of four men whose planes were shot down by the Cuban government during a mission for Brothers to the Rescue, exclaimed: "I'd like to say that not only do I feel that I've been slapped in the face by a president, I feel that the justice system of the United States of America today has suffered a big blow."

According to WSVN, she said that "as she fought back tears."

In this country, I was surprised and disappointed that libertarians such as Rand Paul were grateful for Obama's elevation of Cuba. Not only will the Castro brothers remain free of punishment, but now they are globally uplifted.

"I think we should not have tortured," he told the New York Times ("Torture Report Puts Politicians in Quiet Mode," Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Michael Barbaro, Dec. 11).

However, according to the Times story, Paul "questioned whether releasing gruesome details would be 'beneficial or inflammatory.'"

That, sir, is not leadership.

By contrast, in a press release for the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University's School of Law, which continues Justice William Brennan's constitutional legacy, Michael German declares:

"The release of a small portion of the Senate's report on abusive CIA interrogations should only be the first step toward full accountability. The public needs to be fully informed and all involved need to be held responsible to ensure our country never embraces a policy of official cruelty again" ("Senate Report Concludes CIA Torture Brutal, Ineffective," brennancenter.org, Dec. 9).

German, who is a fellow at the Brennan Center, continues: "It is also important to remember that there were those both inside and outside government who opposed the use of torture and cruel treatment from the very beginning on the grounds that it was illegal, immoral, ineffective and would ultimately do great harm to our troops and our nation's security.

"We should honor those who stood against torture when it was most difficult to do so."

I know Mike German, a former undercover FBI agent who became an unyielding defender of the Constitution. Some of us do learn and change.

A more predictable response to the Senate torture report was found on the Dec. 10 Wall Street Journal editorial page: "The report on CIA interrogations is a collection of partisan second-guessing. ... The report is more important for illustrating how fickle Americans are about their security, and so unfair to those who provide it" ("Spooks of the Senate," Wall Street Journal, Dec. 10).

I and many others are being unfair to the torturing CIA? Actually, there are reporters at the Wall Street Journal who are independent of its editorial line and are probably embarrassed by this opinion.

And lo and behold, writing in the New York Daily News is Jon Yoo, who, while at the Justice Department, helped create the "torture memos" that gave George W. Bush and Dick Cheney the artificial authority to "legalize" the United States' practice of torture.

But, he argues that, "given its profoundly partisan tenor and fiercely disputed details, I have significant reason to doubt this report's veracity" ("A torture report for the dustbin," John Yoo, New York Daily News, Dec. 10).

I was once in a panel discussion with Yoo, and I directly accused him, with documentation, of having been a key justifier of torture.

His only response was smiling and saying, "I enjoy reading Nat Hentoff on jazz."

Still unpunished, Yoo now presides as a professor of his version of the Constitution at the University at California and is a frequent commentator elsewhere.

Decidedly realistic feedback to the Senate report came in the lead editorial of the Dec. 10 New York Times: "A Record of Torture and Lies."

The editorial calls the summarized version of the report "a portrait of depravity that is hard to comprehend and even harder to stomach. The report raises again, with renewed power, the question of why no one has ever been held accountable for these seeming crimes – not the top officials who set them in motion, the lower-level officials who committed the torture, or those who covered it up, including by destroying videotapes of the abuse."

The Times then brings us inside the Senate report, quoting from it extensively: "Sleep deprivation involved keeping detainees awake for up to 180 hours, usually standing or in stress positions, at times with their hands shackled above their heads."

The editorial argues: "The litany of brutality, lawlessness and lack of accountability serves as a reminder of what a horrible decision President Obama made at the outset of his administration to close the books on this chapter in our history, even as he repudiated the use of torture."

It's up to you to deal with the troubling end of the editorial: "It's hard to believe that anything will be done now. Republicans, who will soon control the Senate and have the majority on the intelligence panel, denounced the report, acting as though it is the reporting of the torture and not the torture itself that is bad for the country."

Wake up, Rand Paul.

I suggest that schools around the country have students compare the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times editorials on the report. Then they should do their own research on the facts about U.S. torture, already documented by reporters here and abroad, including me, before the Senate report was released.

Otherwise, this new generation and those that follow will eventually still live in an America that tortures and will become used to it.

But if the present generation of We the People were to insist on the impeachment of President Obama, we'd all learn how much torture he has concealed, as I've indicated here previously.

Ultimately, it's the citizens of this land of the free and home of the brave who are responsible for allowing American torture to keep happening.

"If you see something, say something. If it doesn't seem right, it probably isn't."

The message often ends: "Be careful, be safe." And it's attached to a means of communication with the government.

Whatever the informal informer thinks is dangerous is not accompanied by any evidence, of course. So if this careless government spy, let's say, dislikes somebody in the neighborhood for whatever reason, the agent will turn in him or her.

I've been aware of little or no objection to this wide open dimension of government spying from most civil liberties organizations, nor – worse yet, from my perspective – any indignant, spied-upon citizen who doesn't want to become "a person of interest" to the FBI or any other federal intelligence agency.

But, as usual, one ceaselessly vigilant constitutionalist, John Whitehead, founder of the always constitutionally alert Rutherford Institute, has sounded the national alarm. This Paul Revere of our time reported in one of his regular news commentaries:

"For more than a decade now, the DHS (Department of Homeland Security) has plastered its 'See Something, Say Something' campaign on the walls of metro stations, on billboards, on coffee cup sleeves, at the Super Bowl, even on television monitors in the Statue of Liberty.

"Now even colleges, universities and even football teams and sporting arenas are lining up for grants to participate in the program" ("Turning Americans into Snitches for the Police State: 'See Something, Say Something' and Community Policing," Whitehead, rutherford.org, Sept. 22).

This is particularly revealing – and, I hope, shocking to some of you – proof of how conditioned the citizenry of this nation has become to living in an authoritarian society once described chillingly by George Orwell in "1984."

But this is not fiction, as John Whitehead puts it plainly.

If this is new to you, then how does it feel to wake up to this: "This DHS slogan is nothing more than the government's way of indoctrinating 'we the people' into the mindset that we're an extension of the government and, as such, have a patriotic duty to be suspicious of, spy on, and turn in our fellow citizens."

In all honesty, however, I do have to note that the concept of community policing does make sense if members of the community who want to be safer trust that the police they are working with are law-abiding.

However, as of this writing, there are large community protests on the streets of New York City, Ferguson, Missouri, and other cities around the country against lawless and sometimes brutal police.

Indeed, being planned for this weekend is a march on Washington by citizens from a number of cities to protest out-of-control police.

I expect that if Martin Luther King were still alive, he would speak at that march, too. I was backstage on the platform as he said "I have a dream" at his March on Washington in 1963, covering it for a national radio network.

I cannot imagine what has happened to further tear apart police and community relations since then.

For yet another illustration of a "See Something, Say Something" operation in action, John Whitehead tells us that "when a neighbor repeatedly called the police to report that 5-year-old Phoenix Turnbull was keeping a pet red hen (nickname: Carson Petey) in violation of an Atwater, Minnesota, city ordinance against backyard chickens, the police chief got involved.

"In an effort to appease the complaining neighbor and 'protect a nearby elementary school from a chicken on the loose,' the police chief walked onto the Turnbulls' property, decapitated the hen with a shovel, deposited the severed head on the family's front stoop, and left a neighborhood child to report the news that 'the cops killed your chicken!'"

This is a vitally needed government report on terrorism?

Whitehead continues: "At a minimum, the Atwater City Council needs to revisit its ban on backyard chickens, especially at a time when increasing numbers of Americans are attempting, for economic or health reasons, to grow or raise their own organic food, and the police chief needs to scale back on his aggression towards our feathered friends.

"But what about the complaining neighbor" who saw something and said something?

What remains most ominous for me is that there will be no march on Washington – or even a collective peep from Americans somewhere – against a government that encourages its citizens to spy on anybody they choose by utterly unconstitutional means.

Will any of the 2016 presidential candidates even mention the "see something, say something" blight on this nation, which was once a model of self-governing liberty for other yearning human beings across the globe?

I hereby urge Rand Paul to include this utter distortion of our values in his campaign to make us Americans again.

Meanwhile, you'd better be very carefully agreeable with your neighbors. Otherwise, one of them could turn you in as something that doesn't seem right and, most probably, isn't.

Writer and "liberal Democrat" H.A. Goodman explains in a recent column for Huffington Post: "I've never voted for a Republican in my life, but in 2016, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul will be my choice for president (on) issues that affect the long-term survival of this country" ("I'm a Liberal Democrat. I'm Voting for Rand Paul in 2016. Here Is Why," Goodman, Huffington Post, Nov. 17).

Among the present dangers he lists is the Barack Obama-led Democratic Party's "domestic spying (on Americans) that could eventually lead to a police state."

Constitutionalist Rand Paul is a champion of the Fourth Amendment's guarantee of our communications being free from government surveillance.

Explains Goodman: "Rand Paul has shown that he bucks both the Republican and Democratic penchant for succumbing to public opinion, an overreaction to the terror threat, and a gross indifference to an egregious assault on our rights as citizens."

But Paul's insistence on fundamental constitutional principles led to hostility from certain civil liberties groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, when he was directly responsible for the recent failure of the Senate to pass the USA Freedom Act.

As Ronald Bailey reports on Reason.com, this bill would have limited "the NSA's bulk collection of Americans' phone data under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act."

The bill, having never made it to the Senate floor, received 58 votes, two short of those needed for debate.

The bill also would have strengthened the Constitution in other ways, yet one of the votes against it was Paul's.

How come? The senator emailed various news outlets the next day: "I think NSA reforms are necessary," but "I stood on principle by opposing a bill that (also) included a provision reauthorizing elements of the PATRIOT Act that violate the Bill of Rights."

Reason's Bailey further explains: "Paul specifically objected that the act would extend three provisions of the PATRIOT Act beyond their June 1, 2015, sunset dates to 2017.

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"These include bulk collection of records under Section 215 (even without the limitations on the collection of records that the ACLU and other civil liberties organizations wanted), secret 'lone wolf' surveillance of non-U.S. persons not affiliated with any terrorist organization, and roving wiretaps that allow one authorization to cover multiple devices – say, an unnamed suspect's cell phone, computer and tablet."

That could have been any one of us.

Paul defended his stance: "I have always been steadfast against the PATRIOT Act and will continue to do all I can to prevent an extension."

Angry civil libertarian opponents complained that once the USA Freedom Act was passed, it would have been possible to add amendments that protected the Bill of Rights from the PATRIOT Act.

But Rand Paul, as he always had before, wanted the extinction of the PATRIOT Act as a whole.

That was also my position after the House passed the 342-page PATRIOT Act in October 2001 by 356 votes to 66, the Senate 98 to 1. Few had a chance to read it. As I reported at the time, many House members "did not want to be attacked as 'unpatriotic' by their opponents" in the next election (my column, "War on the Bill of Rights," In These Times, Sept. 5, 2003).

How many public school students are taught that, after the dreadful shock of 9/11, "only one senator, Wisconsin's Russ Feingold, voted against the PATRIOT Act" before George W. Bush signed it into law?

If Rand Paul had been in the Senate then, I am confident that he would have joined Russ Feingold.

I include this startling part of American history – unknown or forgotten by many of us – to show why this year Rand Paul refused to support any extension of the PATRIOT Act, however partially rehabilitated by the USA Freedom Act.

I keep insisting that American history be taught in factual depth in our schools because it's vital for every generation to know how much of our vaunted identity as a self-governing republic can largely slip away – as it also has under President Obama.

For instance, you probably didn't know that at a March 2003 speech at John Carroll University, near Cleveland, Justice Antonin Scalia talked about how "government has room to scale back individual rights during wartime without violating the Constitution" ("Justice bars media from free-speech event," Paul Singer, Associated Press, March 20, 2003).

Scalia told the audience: "Most of the rights that you enjoy go way beyond what the Constitution requires."

Justice Scalia is still on the Supreme Court.

As for Rand Paul's role in preventing the USA Freedom Act from being voted on by the Senate, ACLU legislative counsel Neema Singh Guliani tells Ronald Bailey of Reason:

"I respect that Sen. Paul has been trying to reform the NSA for a long time, but it is disappointing that he voted against moving forward on the bill. It is a huge step back, a huge lost opportunity."

Is it really? Or is it the determination of a presidential candidate to bring the Constitution back to increasingly full life among more and more of us?

If he is our next president, bear in mind that Rand Paul will be nominating Supreme Court replacements when they occur.

Much, of course, will depend on the Congress he has to deal with, but at least he'll stand firmly on his constitutional reasons for being an American.

"Coming off a midterm campaign blitz in 35 states ... Paul, who has set the ambitious goal of raising the Republican share of the African-American vote from 6 percent in 2012 to 33 percent in 2016, met with African-American groups in Ferguson, Missouri (still seething with protests); spoke to the National Urban League convention in July; and regularly meets with small groups of African-Americans to talk up his plans for school choice and justice reform" ("Rand's grand plan," Mike Allen, politico.com, Nov. 9).

Paul tells Politico: "Until the Republican Party becomes more diverse, we are going to struggle."

Moreover, Allen writes, "As Paul traveled the country this year, he also held private sit-downs with rabbis and Jewish leaders in various cities."

Paul explains, "I think we've spent a lot of time in the Jewish community, letting them know that our position is that we are very conscious of and supportive of our special alliance with Israel."

This is in dynamic contrast, of course, with Barack Obama's frigid relationship with Israel, particularly Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

And dig this assessment from Scott Read, who directed Bob Dole's presidential campaign in 1996 and is currently the senior political strategist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce:

"In any two-week period of the last six months," he tells Allen, "Rand Paul did more smart things to grow the party than everyone else combined. Going to Berkeley and barrios and ghettos – he's not afraid to go where no one else wants to go."

Having gotten to know the senator personally somewhat, I'm not as surprised by that amid the silence of many political commentators.

But I never thought he was as skillful an organizer of political campaigns as Allen details in Politico: "He's already built what top GOP operatives consider by far the most extensive operation of any of the party's presidential hopefuls.

"He has his own advance staff housed at RAND PAC, his political action committee, which over the past five years has raised $13.6 million and spent $10.7 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. And he is planning to open a Silicon Valley office to add ties and presumably fundraising heft among the libertarian-minded tech crowd."

Worth noting in the Politico report is that "Paul was endorsed for president (earlier this month) by incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell – a striking turnabout just a few years after McConnell favored Paul's opponent in Kentucky's 2010 Republican senatorial primary."

What especially impressed me was his 13-hour filibuster last year against President Obama's nomination of current CIA director John Brennan (long active in the agency's un-American activities). Paul very approvingly cited the Ninth and 10th Amendments to the Constitution near the start of his soliloquy.

How many Americans are familiar with – or even know – those two guarantees of power to individual states and, thereby, to We the People?

Furthermore, how many members of Congress could pass a pop quiz on those Amendments?

The Ninth Amendment: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

The 10th Amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

Namely us.

Of all the presumed candidates so far for the 2016 presidential election, I think Rand Paul is the most intimately knowledgeable of the Constitution, as he has demonstrated in his public speeches and writings through the years.

Do you stand with Rand? Get this specially designed bumper sticker to spread the word -- at the WND Superstore

But what I have not seen in his presidential campaign so far is an emphasis on something that could gain him considerable ground among Americans of all parties and help significantly restore the Constitution: mandating a course on the history of our Founding Document.

Most public schools, after all, do not have mandatory courses on the history of the Constitution.

I strongly suggested this to the senator in a conversation weeks ago. Most public schools do not teach kids about what it has taken to preserve the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and 14th Amendments from the imperious actions of such presidents as George W. Bush (with Dick Cheney) and Barack Obama.

For years I gave talks at public schools and colleges throughout the land, before arthritis limited my travels, demonstrating how patriotic protesters rescued the essence of our Constitution, which provides our basic identity among nations.

Again and again, students of all backgrounds responded to this unexpected and welcome news with excitement and a clear desire to keep learning more about who we are.

I again urge Rand Paul to demand all schools include the tumultuous history of what it takes to keep the Constitution fully alive and functioning.

Go to it, Rand, and bring back America!

"As we witnessed Tuesday, in election after election, National Right to Life and its network of 50 state affiliates and more than 3,000 local chapters helped provide the margin of victory for pro-life candidates" ("Polling Shows Impact of Abortion Issue in Mid-Term Election," nationalrighttolifenews.org, Nov. 6).

For example, National Right to Life, which describes itself as working "through legislation and education to protect innocent human life from abortion, infanticide, assisted suicide and euthanasia," summarizes the midterms as such: "Despite being vastly overspent by pro-abortion organizations such as Planned Parenthood and EMILY's List, pro-life candidates won ... by significant margins. There were 26 races in which a candidate supported by National Right to Life was running against a candidate supported by the pro-abortion (and pro-Obama) PAC EMILY's List. Nineteen (73 percent) of the National Right to Life candidates won."

Readers who were heretofore unaware should know by this point that I'm a pro-life atheist, and I'll explain how I came to have these views as we go on.

Now dig this, which was largely unreported by the media covering the midterm elections: "National Right to Life's political committees were actively involved in 74 races. In those races, 53 (72 percent) pro-life candidates prevailed, including pro-life Senate candidates in Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Montana, North Carolina, South Dakota and West Virginia."

Connecting abortion with the ending of "innocent human life" describes why pro-lifers throughout America have opposed Obama from even before he was elected president.

When he was a member of the Illinois Senate, Obama voted three times against versions of the Born-Alive Infant Protection Act, which did not pass until 2005. This legislation mandated that if a live baby fully emerged as a result of a failed abortion, its life would be saved.

I am convinced that disobeying that law is tantamount to infanticide, and I have been writing about it in this column and other publications over the past few years. As I reported in the Winter-Spring 2009 issue of Human Life Review about Obama's unyielding support of abortion, including the high percentage of abortions among black women ("President Obama and 'Black Genocide'"), I spoke with a registered nurse who worked in the Labor and Delivery Department at Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn, Illinois, and had involuntarily taken part in a botched abortion.

Some of what she told me about these babies who were abandoned after "'live-birth' abortions" also appeared in a September 2000 House Judiciary Committee report on the proposed Born-Alive Infants Protection Act of 2000 (Report 106-835, gpo.gov). (This bill was passed in 2002.)

One of the babies "was left to die on the counter of the soiled utility room wrapped in a disposable towel. This baby was accidentally thrown in the garbage, and when they later were going through the trash to find the baby, the baby fell out of the towel and on to the floor."

Another nurse "happened to walk into a soiled utility room and saw, lying on the metal counter, a fetus, naked, exposed and breathing, moving its arms and legs."

But what was Obama's reaction to Illinois' Born-Alive Infant Protection Act?

As I reported two years ago, the state senator "opposed what he called the view that 'you have to keep alive even a pre-viable child'" ("Election Day: I'll Not Vote for Pro-Death President," Oct. 3, 2012).

Therefore, "the Born-Alive Infant Protection Act interfered with a woman's reproductive rights."

My reactions even appeared in a column on LifeNews.com: "Liberal Nat Hentoff: I'm Not Voting for the Abortion President" (Steven Ertelt, Oct. 3, 2012).

But it should be noted that I do not vote against all pro-choice candidates, to say the least. I have voted for those with whom I agree on First and Fourth Amendment matters and other constitutional rights. Yet I can't imagine any of them having opposed the Born-Alive Infant Protection Act and gone for infanticide.

So how did I become a pro-lifer, the most controversial position I have ever taken?

Just about all my conclusions about any issue have come from fact-based reporting. On this one, practically everyone I knew was pro-choice, but I became curious when more physicians – not pro-lifers, doctors – became involved in prenatal care. During my research, I read such standard texts as "The Unborn Patient: Prenatal Diagnosis and Treatment," by Michael R. Harrison, Mitchell S. Globus and Roy A. Gilly (W.B. Saunders, a division of Reed Elsevier).

They wrote: "The concept that the fetus is a patient, an individual whose maladies are a proper subject for medical treatment as well as scientific observation, is alarmingly modern.

"Only now are we beginning to consider the fetus seriously, medically, legally and ethically."

But in neither this nor other medical textbooks was God mentioned. And, hey, I even learned each fetus has DNA of its own!

Sadly, Obama has supported all abortions – however late or accidental.

Speaking on Oct. 23 at the 15th anniversary of FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), he warned the only organization as actively devoted to the First Amendment as he is about the damage to free speech caused by college campuses retracting invitations to public speakers.

"If litigation (as FIRE is doing) is one necessary tactic to deal with such speech-limiting policies, the other is simply exposure of the misconduct, with the attendant public shame that follows the exposure.

"What, after all, other than shame, is deserved by Brandeis University for offering and then withdrawing an honorary degree to Ayaan Hirst Ali for her criticism of Islam; by Smith College for withdrawing an invitation to Christine Lagarde, the first woman to head the IMG (International Monetary Fund); by Rutgers, for so embarrassing former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that she declined to appear.

"And just a few weeks ago, George Will's invitation to speak at Scripps College in California was effectively withdrawn after controversy over the invitation."

Before continuing, I must proudly acknowledge that Floyd Abrams has been my personal First Amendment mentor for decades.

He continues with a concern I've written about often here:

"What's going on? It's hard to resist the conclusion that too many of our college students evidently needed high school civics courses since they seem to have no idea what the basic thrust of the First Amendment – and free expression more broadly – is all about."

Abrams continues: "And they are not alone. It shows me how many people – educated people, including scholars – seem to believe that the First Amendment should be interpreted as nothing but an extension and embodiment of their generally liberal political views."

Floyd then speaks to all of us, not just the audience that evening at the FIRE anniversary. What he says is not being taught in the great majority of our public schools as he quoted Justice Robert Jackson:

"The very purpose of a Bill of Rights is to foreclose public authority from assuming a guardianship of the public mind through regulating the press, speech and religion. "

Please focus on what follows and thereby spread this essence of who we are:

"Every person must be his own watchman for truth, because the forefathers did not trust any government to separate the truth from the false for us."

Abrams adds: "That's not uniquely liberal or conservative; it is freedom-protecting, nothing more or less."

The censorship of our free speech by the Bush-Cheney administration, and the even more restrictive Obama government, demonstrates why, as Justice William Brennan once told me, the First Amendment is our quintessential weapon against such freedom-pulverizing governments:

"It is the First Amendment from which all our other liberties flow," by enabling us to protest and organize against an overwhelming government.

As for the current and growing contempt for the First Amendment at so many of our colleges and universities, Floyd Abrams emphasizes:

"One should not really have to say that of all places, campuses should be most protective of the broadest level of freedom of speech. Or that speakers should be permitted to have their say, instead of being booed off the stage as former New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly was at Brown last year. Or it is disgraceful that, as FIRE's findings reveal, such topics as abortion, gay rights and the war on terror were the cause of many disinvitation incidents, and that the amount of disinvitation incidents has risen dramatically over the last 15 years; and that Harvard – you've heard of Harvard, I'm sure – has the most disinvitation incidents.

"What can one say about this other than to quote from the statement of the American Association of University Professors that, in the clearest language, observed that 'on a campus that is free and open, no idea can be banned or forbidden. No viewpoint or message may be deemed so hateful or disturbing, that it may not be expressed.'"

Then Floyd Abrams brings us champion of free expression Oliver Wendell Holmes when, before the Civil War, he was a Harvard undergraduate and a student editor of Harvard Magazine:

"We must," Holmes wrote in 1859, "have every thought brought before us when we are young, and we may as well at once prepare for it."

Floyd summed up by quoting from a book that should be available to every college student: "The Shadow University," by Harvey Silverglate and Alan Charles Kors, leading to their becoming founders of FIRE:

"In a nation whose future depends upon an education in freedom, colleges and universities are teaching the values of self-censorship and self-righteous abuse of power."

As Floyd says: "That was true in 1998, when their book was published and, alas, it seems even more true today."

I ask parents among you readers: To which college campuses will you be sending your sons and daughters?

"It's been over five months since the night a SWAT team broke into the house in which we were staying. ... We were staying with relatives, and my whole family was sleeping in one room. My husband and I, our three daughters and our baby (nicknamed 'Baby Bou Bou') in his crib.

"Dressed like soldiers, they broke down the door. The SWAT officers tossed a flashbang grenade into the room. It landed in Baby Bou Bou's crib, blowing a hole in his face and chest that took months to heal and covering his entire body with scars" ("'It breaks my heart': How a SWAT team upended my baby's life – and got away with it," Phonesavanh, salon.com, Oct. 10).

But the Cato Institute's Tim Lynch, a penetrating expert on civil liberties, assures us that finding a SWAT team in a place as relatively small as Georgia's Habersham County is not an anomaly: "An alarming number of civilian police departments have created paramilitary units, or SWAT teams. They can (also) be found in small town departments these days – even places where there is little violent crime" (Cato's Letter, Fall 2014, Vol. 12, No. 4).

Phonesavanh agonizes over the future: "Doctors tell us that my son will have to have double reconstructive surgeries twice a year, every year, for the next 20 years."

Constitutional lawyer John Whitehead, founder of civil liberties watchdog The Rutherford Institute, argues on this mother's behalf: "Even though the SWAT team was wrong about the person they were after, even though they failed to find any drugs in the home they raided, and even though they may have regretted the fact that Baby Bou Bou got hurt, it will still be the Phonesavanh family who will pay and pay and pay for the endless surgeries every year to reconstruct their son's face as he grows from toddler to boy to teenager to man.

"Already they have racked up more than $900,000 in medical bills. Incredibly, government officials refused to cover the family's medical expenses" ("Shielded From Justice: The High Cost of Living in a Police State," Whitehead, rutherford.org, Oct. 14).

Not all families brutalized by SWAT teams are left to pay the monetary expenses, but, as Whitehead reminds us, there can never be any amount of reparation sufficient to make up for the lives lost or shattered.

Moreover, "for those who do get 'paid back,' at least in monetary terms for their heartache and loss, it's the taxpayers who are footing the bill to the tune of millions of dollars. Incredibly, these cases hardly impact the police department's budget."

Whitehead cites journalist Aviva Shen, who explains in a column for ThinkProgress.org how police departments protect their officers: "Individual officers are rarely held accountable for their abuses, either by the police department or in court. ...

"Because cities insulate police officers and departments from the financial consequences of their actions, police on the street have little incentive to avoid unnecessary force, and their departments may not feel the need to crack down on repeat offenders. And so the bill for taxpayers keeps growing" ("Why Taxpayers Will Get Stuck With the Bill for the Ferguson Lawsuit," Shen, thinkprogress.org, Aug. 31).

Whitehead then refers to a New York University Law Review study by professor Joanna C. Schwartz that found nearly all "of the monies paid in settlements and judgments in police misconduct cases never come out of the officers' own pockets, even when state laws require them to be held liable."

Whitehead further cites a case from the NYU study "in which three Denver police officers chased and then beat a 16-year-old boy, stomping 'on the boy's back while using a fence for leverage, breaking his ribs and causing him to suffer kidney damage and a lacerated liver.' The cost to Denver taxpayers to settle the lawsuit: $855,000. The amount the officers contributed: 0."

Whitehead brings us to Atlanta, not far from where Baby Bou Bou was nearly killed by police: "Kathryn Johnston, 92 years old, was shot and killed during a SWAT team raid that went awry. Attempting to cover their backs, the officers falsely claimed Johnston's home was the site of a cocaine sale and went so far as to plant marijuana in the house to support their claim. The cost to Atlanta taxpayers to settle the lawsuit: $4.9 million. The amount the officers contributed: 0."

Whitehead goes on to cite a Human Rights Watch report on police brutality: "The excessive use of force by police officers ... persists because overwhelming barriers to accountability makes it possible for officers who commit human rights violations to escape due punishment and often to repeat their offenses ...

"Officers with long records of abuse, policies that are overly vague, training that is substandard, and screening that is inadequate all create opportunities for abuse. Perhaps most important, and consistently lacking, is a system of oversight in which supervisors hold their charges accountable for mistreatment and are themselves reviewed and evaluated, in part, by how they deal with subordinate officers who commit human rights violations.

"Those who claim that each high-profile case of abuse by a 'rogue' officer is an aberration are missing the point: problem officers frequently persist because the accountability systems are so seriously flawed" ("Shielded From Justice: Police Brutality and Accountability in the United States," Human Rights Watch, hrw.org).

As a taxpayer, or, more to the point, as a human being, do you feel an urge to do something to ultimately ban the barbarous police treatment of other citizens and human beings across the land?

Whitehead references his recent book, "A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State," when he offers an obvious solution: "If any hope for accountability is to be realized, it must begin, as always, at the local level, with local police departments and governing bodies, where the average citizen can still, with sufficient reinforcements, make his voice heard."

That means you and I must work to prevent future police assaults on more Baby Bou Bous. Let us keep after our mayors, city councils and police commissioners. Remind them to make officers liable for their actions, just as Human Rights Watch admonished.

And we can get after our papers to cover this in their local news sections, just as we can ask our teachers to discuss this in their classrooms with their students. They can help wake us all up.

I keep repeating: Is this still America?

And if not, who on earth are we?

In it, Jennifer Norman, the executive director of pupil services for the Rocky River City Schools in northeast Ohio, declares that the schools' two-teacher model, or co-teaching, now extends district-wide. Writes reporter Barb Galbincea:

"Co-teaching focuses on language arts and math – pairing a learning specialist with a content specialist. That means that while teachers specializing in content are teaching, learning specialists are assessing whether students need extra help.

"Kids in the co-taught classes can run the gamut from those with special needs to gifted students, who may require extra challenges to stay engaged" ("'Co-teaching' gains ground in Rocky River schools to better serve students," Galbincea, The Plain Dealer, Sept. 18).

Norman tells The Plain Dealer: "It's totally needs-based, and it truly is a partnership."

Co-teaching, she adds, also offers "on-the-spot staff development."

The Plain Dealer's Galbincea continues: "The content teacher may learn about better ways to present material so that students understand; the learning specialist can find out more about the subject and what goes on in the classroom."

The Rocky River revelations went on:

"Norman said another benefit of co-teaching is that students of different abilities wind up in the same classroom, promoting a culture of inclusion and acceptance that can carry through high school."

Adds Dianna Foley, Rocky River schools' executive director for communications and technology: "Out in the world, you have to be able to accept and work with people from different backgrounds."

You may have noticed that none of these co-teachers mention collective standardized tests as a determination of students' undivided progress.

From Rocky River schools we then hear from a number of the co-teachers. According to intervention specialist Daniea Beard, "the co-teaching model helps all learners and ... the teaching partners feed off each other. She said the effort has been challenging, but rewarding – including the chance to see students with special needs turn in strong performances in certain parts of the curriculum."

Beard tells The Plain Dealer: "The other 'aha' moment for me is seeing the social gains."

Here is a further dimension of co-teaching there: "Kara Truhan ... and her partner, Nichole Fach, stay after school one day a week – often into the early evening – to plan together."

Through co-teaching, Truhan says, "kids aren't slipping through the cracks. I know we're helping all of the kids."

Moreover, Fach "thinks students enjoy the chance to have two teachers."

What I would very much like to see Rocky River co-teachers focus on, beside language arts and math, is the exciting and very seldom taught history of what it takes to protect our basic identity as a nation – the Constitution – from presidents and Congresses who are too often uninformed of why we are Americans.

I say "exciting" because, as I've often reported here, every single time I've told stories of the turbulent history of what makes us different from all other countries, students – from elementary school-age to graduate-level – get excited. So much about our quintessential personal rights and freedoms is unknown to these individuals, who are from all sorts of backgrounds.

Now is precisely the time to let our young people try and answer Duke Ellington's song, "What Am I Here For?"

Furthermore, John Whitehead, founder of civil liberties watchdog The Rutherford Institute, reminds us why constitutional history is imperative:

"The Constitution has been steadily chipped away at, undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded to such an extent that what we are left with today is but a shadow of the robust document adopted more than two centuries ago" ("An Unbearable and Choking Hell: The Loss of Our Freedoms in the Wake of 9/11," Whitehead, rutherford.org, Sept. 15).

Therefore, there must be additions to our schools' teaching force – not only content specialists in all subjects of various curricula and learning specialists for students who require individual attention and participation. There must also be frequent classroom guests who are veterans of the constant civil wars to enable the Constitution – and the reason for America's existence – to survive.

This expanded teamwork would bring new generations of deeply knowledgeable and combative patriots beyond political party allegiances and into the electorate.

This addition to co-teaching would enliven our classrooms with vigorously educational debates among the students and also among the teachers. This would encourage members of each new generation to get involved in local, state and national governments.

Imagine, for example, if we had such learned student bodies now and President Barack Obama were to appear before one of them. What an education that would be for him and, more importantly, for the next contenders for our presidency!

Members of the media – in all its forms – should also be invited to attend these classes, for they, too, badly need an education in actual Americanism.

"ISIS is now a threat. Let's get on with destroying them" ("Remarks Prepared for Delivery: Sen. Paul Delivers Foreign Policy Address," paul.senate.gov, Sept. 18).

That should have been the first sentence of the speech, because until then he emphasized how chaotic the attempts to disable the expanding murderous regime of ISIS have been and how little we know about the rebels we are assisting:

"The idea that these rebels haven't been armed before is ludicrous on its face. It is also ludicrous to believe that we know where all of the money, arms and ammunition will end up, or who will end up benefiting from these shipments. ...

"We don't know for sure who the groups all are. Even when we think we do, loyalties shift and groups become amorphous, with alleged moderates lining up with jihadists.

"And finally, moderate groups have often sold their weapons or had them seized by the jihadist elements led by ISIS."

Paul's press release continues: "The German ambassador to the U.S. has fully admitted what our State Department tries to hide – that we can't fully control the final destination of these arms."

In this digital age, many Americans of both parties read speedily to cope with the torrent of news, views, debates, et al., and once they feel they grasp the overall message, they may not bother to finish the rest.

For those fast readers, the overall misapprehension of the bulk of Paul's Senate address is that he is an isolationist in crucial foreign affairs – crises in which the U.S. should not intervene.

However, more careful readers of this revealing Senate address by Paul will find otherwise: "It's not that I am against all intervention. I favor striking ISIS. I supported the decision to go to war with Afghanistan after our nation was attacked on 9/11. There are valid reasons for war. And importantly, there are ways to do it and ways not to do it."

Early in his remarks, he explains his concerns with the methods used thus far in this particular intervention: "ISIS has grabbed up U.S., Saudi, Qatari weapons by the truckload, and we are now forced to fight against our own weapons. ... Reports show that the CIA, Saudi Arabia and Jordan have supplied roughly 600 tons of weapons to the militants in Syria in 2013 alone."

He cites sources that show other countries are also sending weaponry to militants in Syria. But how much do we actually know about the nature and alliances of all the rebels in Syria?

Paul says: "Kuwaitis, a Sunni majority country bordering Iraq, have funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to a wide range of opposition forces both in Iraq and Syria, according to reports by the Brookings Institute. ... New York Times reports also detailed ... huge arms and financial transfers from Qatar to the Syrian rebels, beginning as early as 2011.

"No one really knows where all that ended up: Jane's Terrorism Center noted the transfer of Qatari arms to targeted groups has the same practical effect as shipping them to al-Nusra, a violent jihadi force."

There's more. Rand Paul moves on to President Obama's perplexed approach to ISIS:

"Our Founding Fathers understood that the executive branch was the most prone to war, and so with due deliberation they gave the power to declare war to the legislative branch.

"President Obama's new position, though, is that while he requests congressional input, he doesn't necessarily need Congress' approval."

What? Obama has publicly repeated that he has a pen and he can act on his own.

Thankfully, Paul reminds us what the reality is: "Even if Congress votes against it, the president still believes that he reserves the right to involve our soldiers in a war unilaterally."

We know that Rand Paul will follow the Constitution if he's our next president. In last month's address to the Senate, he specifically reminds the rest of Congress: "Article I, Section 8, Clause 11, gives Congress – and Congress alone – the power to declare war. If Congress does not approve the military action, the president must abide by that decision."

Hear that, Mr. Obama?

I keep calling for the due process impeachment of the president for this and the many other reasons I have documented in previous columns. But everyone I ask, including those who agree with me, assure me that it's not going to happen.

Obviously, therefore, while the president now sounds more "militant" against ISIS (without our "putting boots on the ground"), the dismal likelihood is that the hideous reign of ISIS and its increasingly eager progeny will continue until the next president and Congress move decisively – forget the gossamer United Nations – to restore the possibility of human rights prevailing on this planet.

Rand Paul summarizes: "We will fight ISIS, a war I accept as necessary, largely because our own arms and the arms of our allies in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar have enabled our new enemy ISIS. Will we ever learn? ...

"We must protect ourselves from radical Islam, but we should never, ever have armed radical Islam, and we could make it worse by arming it more today!

"We have enabled the enemy we must now confront."

I have frequently demonstrated that of all probable candidates for the presidency, Rand Paul is the most deeply knowledgeable inhabitant of our Constitution.

He is also, potentially, one of the most effective enemies of ISIS.

So it's up to us to decide what will become of America and the rest of the world in the 2016 elections – including who'll eventually be on the Supreme Court and whether our kids will learn how to be Americans according to this thing called the Constitution.

And it's up to Rand Paul to get his messages and warnings across more decisively. A lot of us need to be awakened as to why we are here.

Boston was then the most anti-Semitic city in the country, and in the Jewish ghetto where I grew up, boys knew if they walked alone down those streets at night, they could lose teeth from invading avengers of Christ's death. I even lost some teeth.

Yet Frances Sweeney, in her newspaper and in public meetings, persistently criticized the city's Catholic leadership for its continued silence on this bigotry. Threatened once with excommunication by Cardinal William O'Connell for her attacks, she nonetheless persisted in her criticism.

I was one of those teenage reporters who exposed some of the financiers of that anti-Semitism in her newspaper.

So I now have no hesitation, though still an atheist, in being drawn to a Catholic Church that, according to Pope Francis, "is poor and for the poor."

In his first Apostolic Exhortation, "Evangelii Gaudium" (The Joy of the Gospel), presented last November, Pope Francis wrote: "Our faith in Christ, who became poor, and was always close to the poor and the outcast, is the basis of our concern for the integral development of society's most neglected members. ...

"It means working to eliminate the structural causes of poverty and to promote the integral development of the poor, as well as small daily acts of solidarity in meeting the real needs which we encounter."

Then, a Pope Francis advance: "It presumes the creation of a new mindset which thinks in terms of community and the priority of the life of all over the appropriation of goods by a few. ... This means education, access to health care, and above all, employment, for it is through free, creative, participatory and mutually supportive labor that human beings express and enhance the dignity of their lives."

And dig this: "A just wage enables them to have adequate access to all the other goods which are destined for our common use."

Lest you think Pope Francis was focusing solely on secular changes, he emphasized: "For the Church, the option for the poor is primarily a theological category rather than a cultural, sociological, political or philosophical one.

"God shows the poor 'his first mercy.' This divine preference has consequences for the faith life of all Christians, since we are called to have 'this mind ... which was in Jesus Christ' ...

"Inspired by this, the Church has made an option for the poor which is understood as a 'special form of primacy in the exercise of Christian charity, to which the whole tradition of the Church bears witness' ...

"This is why I want a Church which is poor and for the poor. They have much to teach us. Not only do they share in the sensus fidei (sense of the faith), but in their difficulties they know the suffering Christ. We need to let ourselves be evangelized by them."

Then, a challenge administered by Pope Francis. How many of you – of all backgrounds – agree with this?

Said Francis: "Growth in justice requires more than economic growth, while presupposing such growth: it requires decisions, programs, mechanisms and processes specifically geared to a better distribution of income, the creation of sources of employment and an integral promotion of the poor which goes beyond a simple welfare mentality. ...

"Let us not leave in our wake a swath of destruction and death which will affect our own lives and those of future generations."

To further illuminate some of Pope Francis' global war on poverty, here are some facts about poverty in the United States:

"In 2013, the official poverty rate was 14.5 percent. ... There were 45.3 million people in poverty" (census.gov).

"More than 16 million children in the United States – 22 percent of all children – live in families with incomes below the federal poverty level – $23,550 a year for a family of four. Research shows that, on average, families need an income of about twice that level to cover basic expenses. Using this standard, 45 percent of children live in low-income families.

"Most of these children have parents who work, but low wages and unstable employment leave their families struggling to make ends meet" (National Center for Children in Poverty, nccp.org).

And, as if you didn't know: "Poverty can impede children's ability to learn and contribute to social, emotional and behavior problems.

"Poverty also can contribute to poor health and mental health. Risks are greatest for children who experience poverty when they are young and/or experience deep and persistent poverty.

"Research is clear that poverty is the single greatest threat to children's well-being. But effective public policies – to make work pay for low-income parents and to provide high-quality early care and learning experiences for their children – can make a difference. Investments in the most vulnerable children are also critical" (nccp.org).

During this year's midterm elections, and, of course, the all-encompassing 2016 elections, look and see how many candidates have anything specific and meaningful to propose about our poverty across the board.

I'd also be interested in how many refer to Pope Francis on this crucial subject. One doesn't have to be Catholic to bring this pope into such a vital conversation about our future.

Speaking before the National Press Club in Washington on July 1, Greg Lukianoff, president of FIRE, first focused on speech codes that ban from college campuses such offensive speech as "inconsiderate jokes" and "inappropriately directed laughter" and – believe it or not – passing around copies of the Constitution. Yes, our Constitution!

These speech codes also confine speech deemed to be inappropriate, he added, to "tiny out-of-the-way 'free-speech zones.'"

As I often report, FIRE is the only national organization to expose and battle these codes in the courts and the media, but, as Lukianoff grimly notes:

"Even though speech codes have been successfully challenged in more than two dozen lawsuits over the years ... nearly three-fifths of public universities still maintain speech codes that are unambiguously unconstitutional."

Remember the First Amendment?

Accordingly, as FIRE declares: "FIRE's new Stand Up For Free Speech Project is a national effort to eliminate unconstitutional speech codes through targeted First Amendment lawsuits.

"By imposing a real cost for violating First Amendment rights, the Stand Up For Free Speech Litigation Project intends to reset the incentives that currently push colleges towards censoring student and faculty speech," Lukianoff continued.

Dig this, college presidents and other administrators:

"Lawsuits will be filed against colleges maintaining unconstitutional speech codes in each federal circuit. After each victory by ruling or settlement, FIRE will target another school in the same circuit – sending a message that unless public colleges obey the law, they will be sued."

And, as Lukianoff told the National Press Club in Washington, FIRE is conducting "this massive litigation" with the first-rate allies of the law firm of Davis Wright Tremaine, and attorneys Bob Corn-Revere, Ronald London, and Lisa Zycherman. "Our goal is nothing less than ending the generation-long scandal of college speech codes, once and for all."

I hope that around the country, teachers in public schools and colleges inform students of this campaign – which I call "James Madison Instructs College Presidents on Why We Are Americans" – so students can begin to join this Declaration of Learning Independence in their own schools.

Also, the media, in all its manifestations, need to awaken to this crucial story. A good place to start for their readers, print and digital, is this revelation in Greg Lukianoff's National Press Club appearance:

"We quietly began this project in the fall of 2013, with a lawsuit at Modesto Junior College in California, the college that told a student he could not hand out copies of the U.S. Constitution on Constitution Day.

"Following that astonishing example, we actually found another case, at the University of Hawaii in Hilo, in which two students were again told that they could not approach students to hand out Constitutions.

"The Modesto Junior College lawsuit settled for $50,000. The Hilo case is ongoing."

What did the local media say about these college presidents and administrators? Any comments or actions from the parents of the students there?

On the very morning of that speech by Lukianoff, FIRE filed such lawsuits against Ohio University, Iowa State University and Citrus College in California.

Coming back to colleges censoring students' distribution of the Constitution to make a free-speech point, objecting colleges do not necessarily ban this identification of American identity. Instead, they restrict this inflammatory document to tiny, remote "free-speech zones" on campus.

How do they justify this flagrantly un-American miseducation of their students?

This is what FIRE's Lukianoff tells me: "They believe that pretty much all political speech requires advance approval by administrators and can usually be banned to tiny 'free-speech zones.'"

Or just forbidden. "They are dead wrong, of course," Lukianoff continues, "but they seem to believe that the Supreme Court's allowance for 'reasonable time, place and manner restrictions' allows them to get away with the most absurd abuses of power."

I know that students and some faculty members bring FIRE into such cases, but where are organizations that represent or report on college faculty? And where are free-speech demonstrations by faculty on college campuses?

Only FIRE stays on top of this desecration of the First Amendment. And there has indeed been progress, but now, FIRE declares: "In launching this project, FIRE is trying to produce a dramatic shift in the momentum on campus. The issue will be debated, not just in the courts, but in the minds and homes of many Americans.

"We've demonstrated that a single force can stand up to the culture of censorship on campus."

How many of you are eager to join and help expand that single force so that the First Amendment will live again on the college campuses of America?

However, much remains for FIRE to do to educate students on why and how they are Americans. Earlier this month, that defender of America's most primal identity warned:

"As millions of college students arrive on campus this fall – many for the first time – few of them realize that nearly 59 percent of our nation's colleges maintain policies that clearly and substantially restrict speech protected by the First Amendment.

"Too many students will realize that the rights they took for granted as Americans have been denied to them only after they face charges and disciplinary action for speaking their minds" ("Students Return to Campus Censorship, But Fight Back with FIRE," thefire.org, Sept. 2).

A particularly startling example of the cult of censorship among many college administrators is a Sept. 5 email message to University of California-Berkeley students, faculty and staff from Chancellor Nicholas Dirks.

He began by noting that it is the 50th anniversary of the extraordinary Free Speech Movement by University of California students, which would have gladdened the hearts of James Madison, Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson.

But then listen to how this university's commander in chief defined free speech:

"We can only exercise our right to free speech insofar as we feel safe and respected in doing so, and this in turn requires that people treat each other with civility. ...

"Insofar as we wish to honor the ideal of Free Speech, therefore, we should do so by exercising it graciously. This is true not just of political speech on Sproul Plaza (on campus), but also in our everyday interactions with each other – in the classroom, in the office, and in the lab."

In other words: Be polite, or shut up.

In his new, short, essential book, "Freedom From Speech" (Encounter Books), Greg Lukianoff, president of FIRE, tells, as we have just seen, "how higher education pioneered the idea that some students, professors, or administrators have the 'right not to be offended.'

"This mythical right manifests itself in campus speech codes that ban 'hurtful,' 'inconsiderate,' or 'offensive' speech."

It gets worse. Consider what else Lukianoff says is not allowed on too many campuses these days. You may find the following hard to believe, as I did at first:

"Constitution Day (which is honored yearly on Sept. 17) in 2013 was a particularly bad day for free speech on campus. At Modesto Junior College in California, student and decorated military veteran Robert Van Tuinen was told that he could not hand out copies of the U.S. Constitution to his fellow students.

"On the same day, at California's Citrus College, student Vincenzo Sinapi-Riddle was informed that he could not freely protest the National Security Agency (NSA) and its surveillance program on campus.

"Both (groups of) students were required to restrict their protests to tiny 'free speech zones' and had to get advance administrative permission before conducting them.

"Four months later, another group of students at the University of Hawaii at Hilo were told that they could not distribute copies of the Constitution to their schoolmates. (FIRE, with the help of attorneys from the national law firm Davis Wright Tremaine, filed suit against all three colleges.)"

But just this month, the unintimidated FIRE proclaimed a swinging First Amendment victory in Plymouth, New Hampshire: "Plymouth State University (PSU) has eliminated all of its speech codes, earning the highest 'green light' rating from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). After working with FIRE to ensure its policies comply with the First Amendment, PSU has become the 20th institution nationwide – and the second institution in just two months – to earn FIRE's most favorable rating for free speech on campus" ("Plymouth State University Earns FIRE's Highest Rating for Free Speech," thefire.org, Sept. 12).

PSU's vice president for enrollment management and student affairs tells FIRE: "Students are free to examine, exchange, and debate diverse ideas, both inside and outside of the classroom. We appreciate the diversity of our student backgrounds and have built a community where students are free to learn by engaging in ways that will transform their educational experience."

Despite this liberating news from Plymouth State University, there is so much more to do on many campuses to unchain freedom of speech. That is why FIRE is now engaging a new project that will not only teach American students the answer to Duke Ellington's song, "What Am I Here For?" but also help Americanize primary and secondary schools; local, state and federal legislatures; the presidency; and the courts.

Long ago, the president of Northeastern University in Boston threw me out of the editorship of the school paper for having offended too many people, including members of NU's Board of Trustees.

I have ever since been indebted to him for showing me what I'm here for, starting with one of my first books, "The First Freedom: The Tumultuous History of Free Speech in America."

Next week: A look at FIRE's Stand Up For Speech Litigation Project.

"For the first time in history, the Education Department ... examined school discipline at the pre-K level," discovering that during the 2011-12 school year:

"Black students accounted for 18 percent of the country's pre-K enrollment, but made up 48 percent of preschoolers with multiple out-of-school suspensions.

"Black students were expelled at three times the rate of white students."

Moreover, "black students were more than three times as likely to attend schools where fewer than 60 percent of teachers meet all state certification and licensure requirements" (Steven Hsieh, thenation.com, March 21).

Another grim report about racial disparities comes from Nicholas Kristof, best known for his solo discoveries of human rights abuses in dangerous parts of the globe. He gets to the economic core of this nation's gulf between blacks and whites:

"The net worth of the average black household in the United States is $6,314, compared with $110,500 for the average white household, according to 2011 census data" ("When Whites Just Don't Get It," Kristof, New York Times, Aug. 31).

"The gap has worsened in the last decade, and the United States now has a greater wealth gap by race than South Africa did during apartheid. (Whites in America on average own almost 18 times as much as blacks; in South Africa in 1970, the ratio was about 15 times.)"

Dig this: "The black-white income gap is roughly 40 percent greater today than it was in 1967."

And then this crusher: "Because of the catastrophic experiment in mass incarceration, black men in their 20s without a high school diploma are more likely to be incarcerated today than employed, according to a study from the National Bureau of Economic Research.

"Nearly 70 percent of middle-aged black men who never graduated from high school have been imprisoned."

Kristof goes on, telling a story that epitomizes hazardous black life in this land of the free and home of the brave:

"I was shaken after a well-known black woman told me about looking out her front window and seeing that police officers had her teenage son down on the ground after he had stepped out of their upscale house because they thought he was a prowler."

Her response? "Thank God he didn't run."

How much of this separate, black American experience will become part of the campaigns of 2016 presidential candidates? So far only Rand Paul indicates it may be part of what he has to say.

But as for the others?

I now turn to the pages of a black newspaper, the New York Beacon, of which I haven't missed an issue for years. In a recent edition, Benjamin Chavis Jr. brings Martin Luther King Jr. into the conversation with an excerpt from his final book, published in 1967, "Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?"

Said Dr. King: "The persistence of racism in depth and the dawning awareness that Negro demands will necessitate structural changes in society have generated a new phase of white resistance in the North and South."

In his 1964 March on Washington, King directly told his followers:

"Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive."

To which Benjamin Chavis Jr. now says:

"With all that is going on in Missouri, Florida, Texas, North Carolina, Michigan, Ohio, New York, California, Louisiana, Illinois, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, we must transform our anger over police brutality, poverty and economic inequality into a massive voter turnout. We should be preparing right now in every voting precinct in every congressional district and in every state where we live to have an unprecedented high voter turnout this November. We did it in 2008, we did it in 2012, and we can do it again in 2014" ("From 'Hands Up, Don't Shoot' to 'Hands Up, Vote,'" Chavis, New York Beacon, Aug. 25).

And, of course, in 2016 and beyond.

Chavis continues: "Too often we live in communities where we have the potential margin of victory for local, congressional, statewide and national elections, but we simply do not go to the polls and vote, even though so many of our people died, bled, went to jail and 'suffered' for us to get the right to vote. Having a right to vote is not enough.

"We all must exercise the right to vote not once but in every election. It's extremely important that we do so this year because people expect us to, because Obama's name will not be on the ballot and midterm voting is traditionally lower than in presidential years."

But I must add that it will be even more important for insistent black voters everywhere to underline that whoever is on the 2016 presidential ballot be far less directionless, uninformed and contemptuous of our constitutional liberties than Obama.

Black Americans can indeed be pivotal in making the deep structural changes throughout our society that Martin Luther King Jr. envisioned. If only he had been our first black president.

But "majority-black Ferguson has a virtually all-white power structure: a white mayor; a school board with six white members and one Hispanic, which recently suspended a young black superintendent who then resigned; a City Council with just one black member; and a 6 percent black police force."

And throughout St. Louis County, "with primarily white police forces that rely disproportionately on traffic citation revenue, blacks are pulled over, cited and arrested in numbers far exceeding their population share, according to a recent report from Missouri's attorney general."

"In Ferguson last year, 86 percent of stops, 92 percent of searches and 93 percent of arrests were of black people – despite the fact that police officers were far less likely to find contraband on black drivers (22 percent versus 34 percent of whites). This worsens inequality, as struggling blacks do more to fund local government than relatively affluent whites."

Moreover, overlooked in the concentration on Ferguson, racial divisions and basic inequality remain common across this country.

With President Obama apparently now being awakened to consequences of national militarization of police – although this has been going on for years within his administration – what prospects are there for a further and deep look by Congress and 2016 presidential candidates at the increasing racial power divisions in this land on many fronts even if there comes to be some meaningful change in militarizing our police?

In view of the hollow nature of Obama's "leadership" and the continually fractured civil war in Congress, how much meaningful change is there likely to be in either police militarization in this digital age under national executive power – or in advanced Jim Crow across the land?

In "Under Obama, racial hope but no change" (Politico.com, Aug. 24), Edward-Isaac Dovere writes: "Six years ago, Barack Obama's election was going to usher in a new era of racial understanding."

He then quotes National Urban League President Marc Morial:

"Things got somewhat better because the country felt proud of itself for electing him. But I certainly think they're worse than they were on Jan. 20, 2009. There was a sense that the country had turned a corner. I think today there may be a sense that the progress has been a proverbial step forward and two steps back."

Aside from whether police militarization significantly decreases, Dovere continues, "The economic divide, accentuated by the recession, has only widened the racial divide – the number of African-Americans who lost their own houses during the mortgage crisis, among other factors, appears to have done more to shape where race relations stand than having the first African-American in the White House."

Moreover, "in 1950, the workforce participation among young black men was 65.2 percent. In 2012, it was 35.7 percent.

"That's not helped by many neighborhoods – Ferguson included – remaining either (largely) white or black, with little interaction between them."

And where the sources of power are clearly mostly one-sided.

Also quoted in the Politico column is Tom Perez, labor secretary and former Justice Department head of the Civil Rights Division:

"There are so many communities where you still have persistent patterns of segregation. It leads to a lack of understanding, and that is unfortunate and that can have ill consequences."

Lack of understanding often results from those in power not giving a damn for those without.

How many 2016 presidential candidates are likely to say anything about this extensive racial segregation? During his three (!) terms as New York City's mayor, Michael Bloomberg, who prided in calling himself "the education mayor," never once publicly mentioned the extent to which New York City's public schools are largely racially segregated. I noted that often in my Village Voice column, but not a word from the billionaire mayor to this day.

Moreover, the Rutherford Institute's John Whitehead in "The Final Nail in the Coffin: The Death of Freedom in our Schools" (Aug. 26) underlines again (affecting many but not exclusively black students), "Zero tolerance policies, which punish all offenses severely, no matter how minor (conditioning) young people to steer clear of doing anything that might be considered out of line, whether it's pointing their fingers like a gun, drawing on their desks or chewing their gum too loudly."

And, of course, in the schools, there are "metal detectors, surveillance cameras, militarized police ... random searches, senseless arrests, jail time, the list goes on." We are indeed experiencing a police state – but not entirely. We still have a First Amendment that can be aimed at our government, and we still vote. Also, as Whitehead says, "parents with kids returning to school" should say something and, as Americans, do something!

As Justice William Brennan often told me: "Our framers knew liberty is a fragile thing, so don't give up!"

Obama proudly brags: "I have a pen!" so he can do what he wants by executive order. You also have a pen (or however you vote, not only for the presidency, but for Congress and state and local offices). If you haven't already given up, take this country back from your government and begin to bring it together in real life.

(To be continued).

Constitutional lawyer John Whitehead, founder and president of civil liberties defender The Rutherford Institute, has been reporting often on this aggrandizement of our police:

"This is not just happening in Ferguson, Missouri. As I show in my book 'A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State,' it's happening and will happen anywhere and everywhere else in this country where law enforcement officials are given carte blanche to do what they like, when they like, how they like, with immunity from their superiors, the legislators and the courts. ...

"We've not only brought the military equipment used in Iraq and Afghanistan home to be used against the American people. We've also brought the very spirit of the war home" ("Turning America Into a War Zone, Where 'We the People' Are the Enemy," Whitehead, rutherford.org, Aug. 20).

Also reporting on police militarization is Walter Olson of the Cato Institute (where I am a senior fellow):

"Why armored vehicles in a Midwestern inner suburb? Why would cops wear camouflage gear against a terrain patterned by convenience stores and beauty parlors? Why are the authorities in Ferguson, Missouri, so given to quasi-martial crowd control methods (such as bans on walking on the street) and, per the reporting of Riverfront Times, the firing of tear gas at people in their own yards? ('"This is my property!" he shouted, prompting police to fire a tear gas canister directly at his face.')" ("Police Militarization in Ferguson – and Your Town," Olson, cato.org, Aug. 13).

Olson added: "The dominant visual aspect of the story, however, has been the sight of overpowering police forces confronting unarmed protesters who are seen waving signs or just their hands."

Meanwhile, in a recent op-ed in Time, senator and possible 2016 presidential candidate Rand Paul noted: "There is a systemic problem with today's law enforcement. Not surprisingly, big government has been at the heart of the problem. Washington has incentivized the militarization of local police precincts by using federal dollars to help municipal governments build what are essentially small armies – where police departments compete to acquire military gear that goes far beyond what most ... Americans think of as law enforcement" ("We Must Demilitarize the Police," Paul, time.com, Aug. 14).

Get your copy of reporter Cheryl Chumley's newly released book, "Police State USA: How Orwell's Nightmare is Becoming our Reality" -- published by WND Books

"This is usually done in the name of fighting the war on drugs or terrorism. The Heritage Foundation's Evan Bernick wrote in 2013 that 'the Department of Homeland Security has handed out anti-terrorism grants to cities and towns across the country, enabling them to buy armored vehicles, guns, armor, aircraft and other equipment.'

"Bernick continued, 'federal agencies of all stripes, as well as local police departments in towns with populations less than 14,000, come equipped with SWAT teams and heavy artillery.'"

Furthermore, voters should be aware that, according to George Zornick of The Nation, "most of the candidates likely to contend for the presidency in 2016 have been silent" ("For Many Politicians, Ferguson Isn't Happening," Zornick, thenation.com, Aug. 20).

But Rand Paul has a lot to say, including:

"Americans must never sacrifice their liberty for an illusive and dangerous, or false, security. This has been a cause I have championed for years, and one that is at a near-crisis point in our country."

Reading that, I'm looking at the photograph accompanying Paul's column. A mother and her tiny child in Ferguson are holding signs nearly covered by tear gas: "Stop killing us."

Rand Paul's messages are reaching places that hitherto have not paid much attention to him. For instance, in the Aug. 20 New York Post, columnist Jacob Sullum wrote:

"He is challenging members of his own party to rethink their reflexive support of law enforcement and tough-on-crime policies" ("Rand Paul v. the cop-lovers," Sullum, New York Post, Aug. 20).

Sullum cited this sentence from Paul's op-ed: "There is a legitimate role for the police to keep the peace, but there should be a difference between a police response and a military response."

Sullum continued: "Paul went further, encouraging Republicans (and, I add, all of us) to consider what it feels like to be on the receiving end of excessive police force and excessive criminal punishment."

Again, Sullum quoted this line from Paul: "Given the racial disparities in our criminal justice system, it is impossible for African-Americans not to feel like their government is particularly targeting them. This is part of the anguish we are seeing in the tragic events outside of St. Louis, Missouri."

Sullum wrote: "We're not used to hearing Republicans say that sort of thing. But it happens to be true, and Paul, who in March 2013 introduced a bill that would effectively abolish the federal government's mandatory minimum sentences, is trying to do something about it."

I, for one, hope Rand Paul will be a 2016 candidate for the presidency, and we may have a chance to get our Constitution back.

Life in Ferguson continues here next week.

Arfi refers to what Dieter Graumann, the president of Germany's Central Council of Jews, tells The Guardian's Henley:

"'On the streets, you hear things like "the Jews should be gassed" ... we haven't had that in Germany for decades. Anyone saying those slogans isn't criticizing Israeli politics, it's just pure hatred against Jews.'"

And in the Aug. 5 New York Post, the National Review's penetrating editor, Rich Lowry, reports:

"Some of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world – Paris, Berlin, London – have witnessed demonstrations airing hatreds associated with Europe's darkest crimes" ("Europe's new Jew-hatred is same as the old," Lowry, New York Post, Aug. 5).

He also cites Scotland and Italy, adding: "Even before the Gaza War raised the temperature, the new anti-Semitism was making itself felt. Earlier this year, the Israeli immigration ministry did a survey that showed that two-thirds of France's Jews are considering leaving the country."

And dig this from Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post, citing a story from Israeli news outlet Arutz Sheva:

"In the Netherlands, there has also been an anti-Semitic wave: 'The explosion of anti-Semitism in the Netherlands so far has mainly manifested itself in threats and hate on the Internet. Physical hatred has also been seen on the streets. According to a source which deals with the safety of Jewish citizens, cars in South Amsterdam have been vandalized with swastikas.

"'Many Jewish families have removed their mezuzah – a roll of parchment which makes them identifiable as Jews – from their doorposts, in order to avoid becoming targets of violence. Various Jews have told media that they live in fear'" ("European anti-Semitism surges," Rubin, Washington Post, July 31).

The more I hear and feel the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism, the more I'm transported back to my boyhood during the Great Depression years of the 1930s and 1940s in Boston – then the most anti-Semitic city in this country.

In the Jewish ghetto of Roxbury, I was aware, even before I was able to go out alone, that a Jewish kid on the streets, especially at night, could lose some teeth, as youngsters from other neighborhoods came looking for descendants of Christ-killers.

I lost some teeth myself. And I was very aware of a teenager in a wheelchair, who, as a young Jew, had been struck in the head with a pickaxe. The neighborhood word was that he'd been warned by his mother not to go out alone at night.

As soon as I could read, and found it hard to stop, I learned what top-level Bostonians thought of these Jewish immigrants coming, as my parents had, from such places as Wolkowysk, U.S.S.R. (my father, Simon), and Minsk, U.S.S.R. (my mother, Lena).

As I wrote in my memoir, "Boston Boy" (Paul Dry Books, 1986): "Senator Henry Cabot Lodge had proclaimed, without fear of political reprisal, that these immigrants and their progeny were 'inferior.'

"And Henry Brooks Adams, grandson of John Quincy Adams, had written of the 'furtive Ysaac or Jacob still reeking of the Ghetto ... snarling a weird Yiddish ... The Jew makes me creep.'"

One night, alone on nearby Elm Hill Avenue in the cold, I slipped and fell on the ice and was suddenly surrounded by about eight Irishers, who were 15 and 16 years old:

"You Jewish, kid?" There was no change in the tone. Just a friendly question. Before the execution.

I look up, indignant. "What do you mean, Jewish? I'm Greek. I don't live here. I just finished work." ...

The leader of the Hibernians looks down at me, trying to remember if he's ever seen a Greek.

"He's a Hebe!" one of his companions snorts.

"Kid," the strapping boy stands over me, "say something in Greek."

If I could give Mr. Winslow, teacher of Greek at Boston Latin School (where I was going to school), eternal life, I would do so right now. The Irisher didn't say it had to be modern Greek, so I begin (Homer's) "Odyssey" for him (in the original).

Naturally he says, "That's Greek to me," guffaws, and leaves me on the ground. (from "Boston Boy").

I was ashamed, but glad not to have been mugged.

Since then, although there's still a lot of anti-Semitism in this land, I've seldom run into it face-to-face. But I learned back then, growing up an outsider – as I still largely am – that there's always plentiful anti-Semitism. So I'm not shocked at its survival now not only among Muslims (and not all Muslims, by any means, are anti-Semitic), but among Europeans and Americans of many different backgrounds.

It's like undying racism right here.

Reacting to the Jew hatred in the home of the Holocaust, "Germany's chancellor, Angela Merkel, calls it 'an attack on freedom and tolerance and our democratic state,'" reports Henley.

But, he adds, growing European anti-Semitism is becoming more evident "according to a 2013 study by the Technical University of Berlin. In 14,000 hate-mail letters, emails and faxes sent over 10 years to the Israeli embassy in Berlin and the Central Council of Jews in Germany, professor Monika Shwarz-Friesel found that 60 percent were written by educated, middle-class Germans, including professors, lawyers, priests and university and secondary school students. Most, too, were unafraid to give their names and addresses. ..."

I wonder if that kid visiting the Boston Jewish ghetto who demanded I say something in Greek still hates Jewish Christ-killers?

And how, on the ground, would I answer him if he hasn't changed?

He asks: "Did any CIA agent get indicted for torturing people? No.

"Did any CIA agent get indicted for destroying the videotapes that showed the torture? No.

"Did any CIA agent get indicted for murdering prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq? No."

As I've often reported, the list of the agency's wrongdoings is long, continuous and deeply documented in such books as "Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA" by Tim Weiner and "Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention And Extraordinary Rendition" by Amrit Singh and published by The Open Society Foundations.

And right now, many Americans are waiting for the public release of an extensive, carefully validated four-year report from the Senate Intelligence Committee on the history of CIA torture and its other crimes against our rule of law and the international rule of law.

But I was not surprised to see that the release of this report had been delayed indefinitely. How come? Susan Crabtree of the Washington Examiner explains:

"Senate Democrats engaged in a tug-of-war with the White House over heavy redactions to its long-delayed torture report remain furious that President Obama allowed the CIA to censor the document" ("Democrats steamed that White House let the CIA censor a torture report," Washington Examiner, Aug. 7).

Who asked the most secretive president in our history to exercise that authority?

Crabtree writes: "In a letter dated April 7, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, asked Obama to allow the White House to 'take the lead' in determining what would be redacted from a declassified study it planned to publicly release."

The champion of the Senate's torture report expected sudden candor from Obama of all people? Feinstein got a curve ball.

"We tortured some folks," the president said in an Aug. 1 White House press conference.

But, according to The Guardian, "he believed intelligence officials responsible for torturing detainees were working during a period of extraordinary stress and fear" ("Obama admits CIA 'tortured some folks' but stands by Brennan over spying," Paul Lewis, The Guardian, Aug. 1).

Have pity on the CIA?

Feinstein finally realized that allowing the White House and the CIA to look over the report before it reached the public had caused her to receive "a heavily redacted executive summary of the report."

Furthermore, she "warned that she would need additional time to understand the justification for the obscured passages. Reviewing the redactions could take days, if not weeks" ("Senate's torture report delayed indefinitely," Susan Crabtree, Washington Examiner, Aug. 5).

"Obscured" is a euphemism for censored.

Crabtree also notes significantly that "Republicans on the Intelligence Committee refused to participate in the investigation," which illuminated much of the torture of the George W. Bush-Dick Cheney years.

And, revealingly, before deciding to delay the report indefinitely once the CIA had edited it, Feinstein "indicated the CIA was most sensitive about two categories of information in files related to the interrogation program: 'the true names of non-supervisory CIA personnel and the names of specific countries in which the CIA operated detention sites'" ("U.S. braces for torture report blowback," Josh Gerstein, politico.com, May 15).

Aren't We The People also entitled to know the true names of high-level CIA personnel who tortured at will, as well as the presidents and members of the Judiciary Committee who gave them the authority to do so?

Nonetheless, a number of dogged reporters have been digging into the classified report to tell us some of what's being held back so that we'll know why.

Here's one from Alex Kane of AlterNet: "CIA went beyond legal memo. In 2002, the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel drafted a report authorizing CIA torture, saying that the use of waterboarding, sleep deprivation and stress positions were perfectly legal. It was written by Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo" (who is still a University of California law school professor and frequent writer-lecturer) ...

"But even that memo attempting to legalize torture wasn't enough for the CIA. ... McClatchy reported that the CIA went beyond what it was authorized to do by the Bush administration.

"In a phone interview with AlterNet, (Jason) Leopold (of Al Jazeera America) said this revelation casts a harsh light on the Obama administration's arguments that those who relied on Department of Justice legal advice shouldn't be prosecuted.

"'It literally demolishes any rationale that Obama and (Attorney General Eric) Holder had for not investigating, for not bringing criminal charges, or even launching a criminal inquiry against people who were responsible for implementing this,' said Leopold" ("5 Explosive Revelations Leaked From Senate Report Exposing CIA Torture," Alex Kane, AlterNet, April 15).

How about bringing an impeachment inquiry of Commander in Chief Barack Obama? He was – and is – deeply involved in hiding these crimes against our rule of law and our disintegrating Constitution.

Kane's report in AlterNet ends with this:

"McClatchy's reporters also revealed that the CIA lied about the number of prisoners it had in its custody in black sites around the world. ... In addition, the CIA held 26 people that did not meet the legal standard for detaining someone."

Come on! Only 26? The numbers could run into the thousands. Will we ever find out from these kidnappers and their commanders all the way up?

The New York Times recently reported on Paul's visit to Cincinnati at the National Urban League Conference, in a "demonstration of how Mr. Paul – however improbably – has become the only major figure in his party who seems eager to keep going back to African-Americans to appeal for support even if his approach unsettles some fellow Republicans" ("Rand Paul Stands Out in Courting Black Voters," Jeremy W. Peters, New York Times, July 26).

Indeed, as Peters wrote, "what makes Mr. Paul's approach unique is the broad array of sentencing and voting rights law changes he embraces, positions that often put him at odds with many in his own party."

But so far as I am aware, Paul has yet to focus his campaign on a subject – which I told him in a recent telephone conversation – that he is uniquely qualified to speak on: the dangerous ignorance throughout this nation among students and adults on why they are Americans.

For instance, before he became an active presidential candidate (as I've noted in previous columns), he acknowledged how many Americans appear unaware of the separation of powers at the core of our Constitution, which George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and, above all, President Barack Obama have imperiously tossed aside.

And, as I said to Paul, what's more alarming for our future as a self-governing republic is that so few public schools – from fourth grade to graduate school – have mandated courses in American history, let alone courses in the ever-dramatic story of how our Constitution has been rescued from regal presidents and their Congresses.

Furthermore, I added that when I was still able to travel widely, before arthritis limited me, I was in classrooms around the country, discovering how excited students got as they first heard my stories on why and how we have the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and 14th Amendments – and what it's taken to keep them alive and aggressively functioning.

These students were learning why they are Americans!

As of now, among all the possible candidates for president in both parties, Paul has been the most penetrating reminder of what differentiates us from all other countries. His widely broadcast and briefly recalled 13-hour soliloquy last year in the Senate on our essential personal liberties featured, near the beginning, his emphasis on the Ninth and 10th Amendments to the Constitution, ratified in 1791, which reserved basic rights to the people and the states.

How many Americans, let alone members of Congress or state legislatures, are aware of those two amendments? How many of our students?

In view of the extensive ignorance among Americans of their fundamental identities that reverberate in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, I intend to report from time to time about organizations that are devoted to increasing awareness among students of all backgrounds on what it is to be – and keep being – an American.

I begin with the national "We the People State Programs," which are a yearning of mine come true:

"The Center for Civic Education ('a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization based in California') partners with a network of 50 state civics, government and law programs sponsored by state bar associations and foundations, colleges and universities, and other civic and law nonprofit organizations to promote teaching and learning about the Constitution and Bill of Rights" (www.civiced.org).

In addition, We the People and its partners "hold conferences and organize local and state simulated congressional hearings for elementary and secondary students."

Dig the preparation for the annual culmination of this creation of actively knowledgeable Americans, as described by the Oregon affiliate of We the People:

"Each January, the acclaimed We the People competition brings together high school teams from around the state. Students demonstrate their understanding of constitutional principles and have opportunities to evaluate, take positions and ultimately defend those positions on relevant historical and contemporary issues during a simulated congressional hearing.

"Regional competitions ... precede the state final, which determines the team that will represent Oregon at the national competition in Washington, D.C." (www.classroomlaw.org).

So it is in other member states, leading to the national We The People finals in Washington, which I so wish were nationally televised. Members of our actual Congress, moreover, would benefit from auditing those finals.

Since this all began in 1987, "more than 28 million students and 75,000 educators have participated in the We the People Program" (civiced.org).

Where has most of the media – print and digital – been?

Rand Paul should be talking about this enlivening of the Constitution and also interviewing some of the students. If he were still here, James Madison would be taking many of them out to lunch.

"The problem is that the inevitability of factual, legal and moral error gives us a system that we know must wrongly kill some defendants, a system that fails to deliver the fair, consistent and reliable sentences of death required by the Constitution."

And Justice William Brennan told me more than once: "I can't believe that the leader of the free world is going to keep on executing people. I still believe that eventually we become more civilized. It would be horrible if we didn't."

In addition to the increasing revelations that some prisoners on death row are innocent, there is the increasing shock – and I mean "shock" – of how some states carry out executions with the approval of the courts, including our highest court.

I knew Justice Brennan well, and I have no doubt how he would react to this July 24 press release from the always-carefully documented Washington, D.C.-based Constitution Project:

"Yesterday, Joseph R. Wood III was pronounced dead after a nearly two-hour long execution by the state of Arizona. Media witnesses, some of whom have observed previous executions, reported that Wood gasped for air more than 600 times during the execution.

"The process was so prolonged that Wood's attorneys filed for a stay of execution in the midst of it, which was then rendered moot once Wood was pronounced dead" ("Transparency Needed Before Executions Continue," The Constitution Project, July 24).

I asked if Wood's 600 gasps was a typo and was assured it was not.

Quoted in the release is the former governor of Texas, Mark White, co-chair of The Constitution Project's Death Penalty Committee:

"This was the fourth reported botched execution of the year. And in each one of these cases, the government has concealed vital information concerning the source, safety, and efficacy of the drugs to be used in the execution, refused to reveal information concerning the training and skill of the personnel involved in carrying out the execution, while also using drugs never before used to kill humans. Meanwhile, the courts continue to look the other way."

Keep in mind: "Using drugs never before used to kill humans."

But an execution in Kentucky that I'd previously reported on used a way of killing that many states have adopted: lethal injection.

In "Sanitizing The Death Penalty" (May 7, 2008), I wrote: "The U.S. Supreme Court – by a walloping 7-to-2 majority in Baze v. Rees – declared constitutional Kentucky's method of death penalty by lethal injection – a combination of three toxic chemicals used as a method of execution in 35 states."

And dig this:

"As Justice John Paul Stevens noted disquietly, one of the three terminating chemicals paralyzes the unsedated prisoner, who is conscious but unable to move, breathe or utter his last cry."

I described Chief Justice John Roberts' main opinion as written "with language as bland as if he were ruling on an intellectual property case." In it, he wrote:

"Some risk of pain is inherent in any method of execution – no matter how humane."

Humane? "Unable to move, breathe or utter his last cry"?

Furthermore, Roberts argued: "Simply because an execution method may result in pain, either by accident or as an inescapable consequence of death, does not establish the sort of 'objectively intolerable risk of harm' that qualifies as cruel and unusual (under the Eighth Amendment)."

Coming to a conclusion directly opposite that of the chief justice, Justice Stevens, citing Justice Byron White, said that after 33 years on the court, "I have relied on my own experience in reaching the conclusion that the imposition of the death penalty represents 'the pointless and needless extinction of life with only marginal contributions to any discernible social or public purposes.

"'A penalty with such negligible returns to the state (is) patently excessive and cruel and unusual punishment violative of the Eighth Amendment.'"

Nonetheless, Justice Stevens agreed with the chief justice and voted with the majority.

Yet so long as this nation continues to execute human beings, there is a small but growing movement across party lines to at least bring the Eighth Amendment back to life in these cases.

The Constitution Project has published a well-bound, 165-page, deeply documented report, "Irreversible Error: Recommended Reforms for Preventing and Correcting Errors in the Administration of Capital Punishment." (To obtain a free copy of "Irreversible Error," go to constitutionproject.org.)

I have a copy and am continually learning from it, ranging from such chapters as "Ensuring Effective Counsel" to "State-by-State Execution Procedures."

I expect that across the nation, reporters, assignment editors and other participants in print and digital media will be interested in this report – along with concerned citizens.

Maybe even one or two 2016 presidential candidates will be interested – or am I being overly optimistic?

Defendants in death penalty cases certainly will be profoundly interested.

I was astonished and angered to read last week that the American Civil Liberties Union gathered "a coalition of 45 civil rights, human rights, privacy rights and faith-based organizations (and) sent a letter to President Obama asking for 'a full public accounting of ... practices'" related to the NSA's spying on five leading American Muslims.

Sure, it's a legitimate complaint, so why am I angry? Because instead of requesting this "full public accounting," the ACLU should be organizing with other presumed guardians of our individual constitutional liberties to demand that impeachment proceedings begin against Obama, the most flagrant presidential violator of the Constitution in our history.

This is for the sake of our very identity as Americans.

On Dec. 4, 2013, George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, who has often appeared in this column through the years, testified before the House Judiciary Committee about Obama's constant desecration of the Constitution's separation of powers:

"The problem with what the president is doing is that he is not simply posing a danger to the constitutional system. He's becoming the very danger the Constitution was designed to avoid. That is the concentration of power in any single branch."

Did you reread the Declaration of Independence on July 4? Remember what King George III was doing to so powerfully suppress the colonists that it led to our American Revolution?

During the same congressional hearing last December, Michael Cannon, director of health policy studies for the Cato Institute (where I am a senior fellow), said:

"If the people come to believe that the government is no longer constrained by the laws, then they will conclude that neither are they."

And in the second term of his reign, Obama has publicly delighted in his unassailable command:

"Conceding defeat on a top domestic priority, President Barack Obama blamed a Republican 'year of obstruction' for the demise of sweeping immigration legislation ... and said he would take new steps without Congress to fix as much of the system as he can on his own."

In this White House speech, Obama said: "I'm beginning a new effort to fix as much of our immigration system as I can on my own – without Congress."

An increasingly influential new book, "Impeachable Offenses" by Aaron Klein and Brenda Elliott, further addresses "the probable causes for" Obama's impeachment. I will be partially excerpting passages from it in columns to come.

Meanwhile, I have previously listed many of the "high Crimes" the Constitution requires for impeachment, but I insist on repeating the capper – hardly mentioned anymore in the news – that so outrageously justifies impeachment procedures:

The National Defense Authorization Act , or NDAA, signed by Obama, enables our military to "detain" (Obama's euphemism for "imprison") American citizens right here without trial who "substantially supported" (which is undefined) "associated forces" (also undefined) "engaged in hostilities against the United States."

It takes little effort to imagine how James Madison or Thomas Jefferson would have reacted to a president making such a decision in the new nation they were instrumental in founding.

What would Samuel Adams or Thomas Paine say?

Also worth a look by We the People is Sarah Palin's recent Fox News op-ed, "The case for Obama's impeachment: The Constitution's remedy for a lawless, imperial president."

The former governor of Alaska and the 2008 Republican nominee for vice president is also a commentator on Fox News.

Yes, Fox News, which may cause some readers to grimace in distaste. But Judge Andrew Napolitano is also on Fox News, and he's one of the only commentators on TV whose sole beat is the Constitution, and he guards it with deeply effective knowledge. He supports the impeachment of Barack Obama.

I don't judge any pundits by where they appear. Those who do that with regard to me grow dizzy with seeming opposites. What counts is what each one says and documents.

Among Palin's impeachable indictments of Obama:

"Without notifying Congress as required by law, he set free terrorist prisoners at a time of war when they can return to the battlefield to kill our troops."

And dig this: "In violation of our Constitution, he regularly ignores court orders, changes laws by executive fiat, and refuses to enforce laws he doesn't like, including our immigration laws."

As Palin wrote: "Impeachment is the ultimate check on an out-of-control executive branch. It is serious, not to be used for petty partisan purposes; and it is imperative that it becomes a matter of legitimate discussion before the American people lose all trust in our federal government."

And, I add, before they lose trust in themselves as citizens of a self-governing republic.

I urge all Americans – regardless of party affiliation, faith or absence thereof – to face this challenge to our identity: How is it possible that Barack Obama can evade impeachment proceedings if We the People are meaningfully to remain Americans?

You're voters. It's up to you in 2014 and 2016 to vote for those who will repair what he has done.

Also keep in mind the futures of your children and grandchildren if this deep wound Obama has committed to our Constitution is not punished and remedied.

Its essence – which surprised even me, who has been reporting on this frightening failure of American public education for years:

"Last administered in 2010, the last national civics assessment showed that less than half of eighth-graders understood the purpose of the Bill of Rights, and only 10 percent displayed age-appropriate knowledge of our government's system of checks and balances" – that's the constitutional separation of powers that bars any one of our three branches of government from reigning over the other two, as President Obama has kept doing most voraciously.

What I also did not know and saw nothing about anywhere else: "Last year the U.S. Education Department (claiming budget pressures) canceled the American history and civics tests within the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

"This 'gold standard' test had been our single best tool to measure how well our schools teach (American) history and civics." In my reporting, I often called it "Our National Report Card."

But now, Ashley Bateman continues, "rather than working to repair this crucial failing of our schools, we've stopped tracking it."

I've yet to see any presently known candidate for our presidency say a word about any of this.

Here is how appallingly we – including parents ignorant of our history – are failing our public school students, and not only under Obama:

"Until the middle of the 20th century, most American high schools offered three courses in civics and government focusing on current events, civic engagement and democracy ... – topics that are now lumped together, and subjects for which schools are rarely held accountable for teaching well." And most schools don't teach them at all.

Actually, I've long been advocating regular class discussions and debates among students on current events locally, nationally and globally that have been preceded by wide-ranging reading assignments in school on such controversies.

As Ashley Bateman all too correctly warns: "As young people leave school and enter the workforce, their lack of civic awareness often translates into a lack of active social involvement – including in the voting booth."

An especially knowledgeable source of information on the actual effective teaching of civics in our public schools is CIRCLE: The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, located at Tufts University in Massachusetts.

Among its recommendations: "School Governance: Schools should encourage student participation in school governance."

Years ago, I was a guest teacher at a Bronx, New York, high school while the city schools were involved in fierce disputes with the Department of Education on the renewal of the current system-wide contract.

One afternoon, I asked the students at the classroom where I was teaching what changes they'd suggest in the governance of their own school if they had the opportunity.

It had been a reasonably lively classroom until then, but suddenly it exploded with very specific approaches the students would take to address more of their individual needs and frustrations.

Among other CIRCLE proposals: "Service-Learning: Schools should design and implement programs that provide students with the opportunity to apply what they learn through performing community service that is linked to the formal curriculum and classroom instruction."

Students would then learn to be an active part of their community – an experience that obviously would add to their awareness and depth of knowledge as present and future voters where they live. That is civics in action.

CIRCLE also addresses those officials who are policymakers for public schools. They "must ensure that civic learning is included alongside English, math and science as a core subject, emphasized by standards and assessments at the federal, state and local levels."

And don't forget to educate teachers in civics teaching, adds CIRCLE: "Entities that provide pre-service and in-service teacher professional development should expand and approve their offerings in the areas of civic learning."

But, of course, as students learn how to participate as actual American citizens in public schools that are living, formative illustrations of the self-governing republic created by our founders, some will naturally and intensely evolve into future local and state legislators, members of Congress and presidents who know why they are Americans beyond political party affiliations.

Justice William Brennan once earnestly asked me, "How can we get the Bill of Rights into the very lives of students?"

By making it an often-exhilarating part of their learning American history in their very schools. Let's get to it!

But, as happens almost daily in his press releases and analyses, Rutherford Institute founder John Whitehead keeps reminding us of brazen Supreme Court violations of the Constitution during this and past administrations.

In a June 23 commentary, this constitutional lawyer performed a needed public service and hopefully awakened much of the media.

Did you know that "police officers can stop cars based only on 'anonymous' tips"?

Whitehead continues: "In a 5-4 ruling in Navarette v. California (2014), the court declared that police officers can, under the guise of 'reasonable suspicion,' stop cars and question drivers based solely on anonymous tips, no matter how dubious, and whether or not they themselves witnessed any troubling behavior.

"This ruling came on the heels of a ruling by the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in U.S. v. Westhoven that driving too carefully, with a rigid posture, taking a scenic route and having acne are sufficient reasons for a police officer to suspect you of doing something illegal, detain you, search your car and arrest you – even if you've done nothing illegal to warrant the stop in the first place" ("The U.S. Supreme Court Is Marching in Lockstep with the Police State," John Whitehead, rutherford.org, June 23).

This is the land of the free and the home of the brave?

Whitehead goes on to explain another startling contempt of the Constitution, which the great majority of our students are not learning about in school: "Police can break into homes without a warrant, even if it's the wrong home. In an 8-1 ruling in Kentucky v. King (2011), the Supreme Court placed their trust in the discretion of police officers, rather than in the dictates of the Constitution, when they gave police greater leeway to break into homes or apartments without a warrant.

"Despite the fact that the police in question ended up pursuing the wrong suspect, invaded the wrong apartment and violated just about every tenet that stands between us and a police state, the court sanctioned the warrantless raid, leaving Americans with little real protection in the face of all manner of abuses by the police."

Whitehead then makes this very troubling point: "The cases the Supreme Court refuses to hear, allowing lower court judgments to stand, are almost as critical as the ones they rule on. Some of these cases, turned away in recent years alone, have delivered devastating blows to the rights enshrined in the Constitution."

Dig this: "Legally owning a firearm is enough to justify a no-knock raid by police. Justices refused to hear Quinn v. Texas (2014), the case of a Texas man who was shot by police through his closed bedroom door and whose home was subject to a no-knock, SWAT-team style forceful entry and raid based solely on the suspicion that there were legally owned firearms in his household."

Now we come to how the Supreme Court is teaching our public school students on how to define themselves as American citizens:

"Students can be subjected to random lockdowns and mass searches at school" – without, I add, any probable cause that a crime has been committed.

"The court refused to hear Burlison v. Springfield Public Schools (2013), a case involving students at a Missouri public school who were subjected to random lockdowns, mass searches and drug-sniffing dogs by police.

"In so doing, the court let stand an appeals court ruling that the searches and lockdowns were reasonable in order to maintain the safety and security of students at the school."

Get your copy of Cheryl Chumley's newly released book, "Police State USA: How Orwell's Nightmare is Becoming our Reality" -- published by WND Books

When the Supreme Court refused to hear Diane Doe v. Renfrow (1981), another Fourth Amendment case involving school searches that I've written about previously, Justice William Brennan pointed out in his dissent that the police's massive invasion of students' privacy rights omitted concentrating "on particular individuals who might have been engaged in drug activity at school."

Then, in a very extraordinary fury, Brennan exploded: "Schools cannot expect their students to learn the lessons of good citizenship when the school authorities themselves disregard the fundamental principles underpinning our constitutional freedoms" (my column, "Supreme Court Teaches Students They're Outside Constitution," Cato.org, Oct. 16, 2013).

There are more such cases, but I will leave you with this from John Whitehead: "The Supreme Court let stand a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision in Brooks v. City of Seattle (2012), in which police officers who clearly used excessive force when they repeatedly tasered a pregnant woman during a routine traffic stop were granted immunity from prosecution.

"The 9th Circuit actually rationalized its ruling by claiming that the officers couldn't have known beyond a reasonable doubt that their actions – tasering a pregnant woman who was not a threat in any way until she was unconscious – violated the Fourth Amendment."

Doesn't that ruling make you so proud to be an American whose individual liberties are guarded by the Constitution?

It's entirely impossible to believe that Obama, before he leaves office, will bestow the Presidential Medal of Freedom on John Whitehead for revealing the Supreme Court's atrocious record on these cases. This former constitutional lecturer at the University of Chicago hasn't said a word about them.

But in recent years, as a reporter on education, I have found teachers' unions bullishly and contractually protective of their members' jobs, most commonly at the expense of low-income and minority students.

For one example, "The dismissal process for grossly ineffective teachers in California is so complex and costly that it does not work; many districts do not even bother trying" ("A historic victory for America's kids," Campbell Brown, New York Daily News, June 11).

The "historic victory" was in Vergara v. California, a case brought by nine student plaintiffs, decided on June 10 ("Historic Victory for Students in Vergara v. California: Court Strikes Down Five Provisions of the California Education Code as Unconstitutional," studentsmatter.org/victory).

This decision, from Judge Rolf M. Treu of the California Superior Court for the County of Los Angeles, is not final. He had to order a stay pending an appeal – inevitable in this case.

Nonetheless, as news of this potentially huge setback for other states' teachers' unions spreads, many parents of public school students are organizing to bring this life-changing equal-protection reform to their children.

A June 11 New York Daily News editorial put it bluntly:

"It adds up to a glaring equal-opportunity violation that's been ignored for decades – a gaping wound that's been treated like a common rash" ("Justice for students," New York Daily News, June 11).

Said Judge Treu in his ruling: "Evidence has been elicited in this trial of the specific effect of grossly ineffective teachers on students. The evidence is compelling. Indeed, it shocks the conscience. ...

"Plaintiffs have proven ... that the Challenged Statutes impose a real and appreciable impact on students' fundamental right to equality of education and that they impose a disproportionate burden on poor and minority students."

In its summary of the case brought by the student plaintiffs, the Students Matter organization – which was vital in the plaintiffs bringing the case to court – demonstrates how California's current Permanent Employment Statute (other states have similar laws) makes it hard to dismiss a grossly incompetent teacher:

"(It) forces administrators to either grant or deny permanent employment to teachers after an evaluation period of less than 16 months – before new teachers even complete their beginner teacher induction programs and before administrators are able to assess whether a teacher will be effective long-term" (studentsmatter.org).

And dig this: "The process for dismissing a single ineffective teacher involves a borderline infinite number of steps, requires years of documentation, costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and still, rarely ever works.

"Out of 275,000 teachers statewide, 2.2 teachers are dismissed for unsatisfactory performance per year on average, which amounts to 0.0008 percent."

For the record, California's two largest teachers' unions, the California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers, opposed the students.

Furthermore, there are times when a federal grant or a particular state legislature's grant for education disappears because of a sharp decline in the economy, or a reversal of political party leadership in Congress or the state legislature. I've seen this in my coverage of education issues in New York state and elsewhere.

This, invariably, results in cuts in the number of teachers, which means those most recently hired are immediately fired. That includes younger teachers who belong to independent national organizations devoted to equal educational opportunities for low-income and handicapped students.

As I've seen and reported, these dedicated newcomers often are beginning to bring higher expectations and the enjoyment of learning into their classrooms.

So, too, is this happening in California, argues Campbell Brown, founder of Parents' Transparency Project, a public education watchdog organization.

She writes in the Daily News: "California's 'last-in, first-out' law gives top priority in a time of layoffs to ineffective teachers if they have seniority while better teachers with fewer years are sent packing.

"The judge called that a lose-lose situation, supported by logic that was 'unfathomable.'"

She continues:

"The Vergara case reflects just the start of opportunities for action in other states, where many leaders are searching for better ways to evaluate teachers ... in 38 states, the cumbersome teacher dismissal process allows multiple appeals. This is not due process; it is an undue burden on those trying to protect teacher quality."

So, it's now up to parents throughout the nation to follow Vergara's lead "and take matters into their own hands. It is empowering to know the courts can help."

"Empowering," but often too rare for certain kids without labor unions representing them.

How many of you will remember the Vergara case in 2016?

He currently presides at the McVey Innovative Learning Center (ILC), named for former Hilliard City Schools Superintendent Dale McVey.

As I have long believed, Wise argues that schools should no longer take "a one-size-fits-all approach."

And he explains via email, "Four years ago, a group of Hilliard City School educators came together to develop a plan for what (high) schools should look and feel like (here) in the year 2020."

The genesis of the ILC, he says, came from educators' desire "for a design of a high school of the future. One that personalizes education for each student in a way that allows them to pursue their passion."

Last fall, the ILC opened its doors to more than 800 students.

"This next fall," Wise says, "we have had over 1,200 requests to come to the Innovative Learning Center."

Wise, who is a former classroom teacher, describes the diverse adventures in learning at the ILC:

"We have talented music students ... so we offer a sound engineering course. ... Students learn how to make professional recordings while writing and performing their own music.

"For the students interested in the world of television journalism and movie production, we offer courses that allow for creative production."

I'm already fantasizing. At my public high school, Boston Latin School, I would have rushed into a course on reporting – with guest professional journalists – in all forms of communication.

Wise continues: "For the students that are not successful in the typical classroom, we offer a personalized route of taking classes online and preparing an individual plan.

"Students can come here and work in the relaxed atmosphere with their learning coach, at their pace and comfort zone.

"We offered a jump-start on college that provided our students with up to 32 credit hours of college, while they are in high school."

What especially surprised me is the way the ILC builds student confidence by allowing the kids to share their rising skills, which can benefit other learners.

Says Wise: "Students could also come here for authentic learning experiences such as our Career Mentorship program, which allows students to go out and mentor in a field of their choice during their class time."

Moreover, "Students interested in becoming an educator could participate in our Teacher Academy and do student teaching while in high school."

Also, "Students interested in entrepreneurship could participate in our business academy."

He emails quotes from students already immersed in the Independent Learning Center:

"I get to learn as an individual, and the teachers here are willing to work with you in the way that is best for you."

"I enjoy the freedom and ability to be treated as an adult."

"I feel as if there is a higher level of appreciation and respect for education on the parts of students and teachers. There's also more respect for each other. We're there for a common goal and also have a common understanding. We all WANT to be there – and that makes a world of difference."

And you may have noticed that the learning there is not most crucially measured by how these students do on collective standardized tests (and in preparing for those tests), which are still required in so many high schools throughout this land.

Another quote from a student at the McVey Innovative Learning Center: "The best part of being a student at the ILC is gaining a whole new perspective on learning. I found it much more interesting and applicable to my future to learn concepts in an environment that doesn't encourage you to be average. I also loved getting to meet people from three other high schools that I never would have met if it weren't for this class."

And this brings us to how the McVey Innovative Learning Center actually operates. Wise emphasizes, "The ILC is NOT an alternative school. Students come here during their school day ... for 90 minutes of their day; the rest of their day they are back at their home high schools."

Obviously, I cannot speak from any experience in having combined time at a regular high school with daily 90-minute periods at a contrasting, liberating environment, geared to help me discover what I most wanted for my future and how to get there.

Years ago, Duke Ellington wrote a song that has since become a permanent part of me, as it keeps challenging me:

Its title: "What Am I Here For?"

During my six years at Boston Latin School, if I had been also part of an Innovative Learning Center in that city, I would have had a much clearer sense of what – and how – I needed to learn to keep answering that question of why I'm here.

I did develop an unquenchable love of learning during those early years, but little of it from school. Most came from reading – on my own – histories, novels and biographies that raised my expectations of the kind of life I'd want to lead if I knew how.

But if there had been an Innovative Learning Center in town, I might have experienced a much more inspiring road ahead. And I expect that may also be true of the futures of many young Americans, of all sorts of backgrounds, if each gets a personalized, expanding education.

"Each day that you enter your classroom, are you educating students? Or are you teaching at them?

"Do your lessons only improve their academic knowledge? Or do they foster their personal growth?"

And then: "You could shift your perspective to stop teaching at students and begin learning about them."

In a few places around the nation, it's not only ASCD asking and doing something about these questions. Before examining where this is happening, I cannot resist starting with a single teacher who is answering those questions by herself – without the exceptionally knowledgeable and creative ASCD staff.

New York Daily News reporter Megan Monk shows how "a Queens second-grade teacher is cultivating lifelong learners through hands-on activities in her school garden" ("Queens teacher takes learning from the classroom to the garden," Megan Monk, New York Daily News, June 6).

At Public School 146 in Howard Beach, Jodi Tucci got approval from her school to plant "a garden on the property where the children could learn about plants, bugs, ecosystems and clouds in a real-world environment."

She tells the Daily News: "This is the best way for them to get excited and motivated about what they're learning."

That isn't all her kids are learning about. Monk writes: "To supplement what they study in school, Tucci's class takes trips to museums, aquariums and historical sites in Manhattan."

Remember: These are second-grade students.

Tucci discusses her methods with the Daily News: "When they look at the exhibits we visit, the students remember everything I taught them. I link these trips to what we learn in the classroom to make it a real-life experience."

Getting back to the garden, she also uses it "as a space for her pupils to read outdoors."

And dig this: "She allows them to choose their own books based on what they are interested in learning about."

Wow! That's how I got so much of my education, from elementary school on.

For instance, at the public library near my home, the librarian, seeing what I was reading, broke the rule that limited the number of books borrowed per visit at certain ages and gave me whatever volumes I chose.

"Inspired by teachers who taught her to value knowledge," Monk writes, "(Tucci) studied education and anthropology and set out to become a teacher who would influence others to explore the world around them."

And I treasure this credo from Jodi Tucci herself:

"I always wanted learning to make sense and to be motivating and fun. I want children to love learning."

If I still had children of a very young age, I'd strongly consider moving near Public School 146 in Howard Beach, Queens, so they'd get to know and be known individually by Jodi Tucci.

In addition to Tucci and Public School 146, the expansion of children's diverse learning experiences is under way in certain school districts around the country, as we'll see as this series continues.

A leading facilitator of this expansion is the National Center on Time and Learning in Boston (also with a Washington, D.C., office). Its president, Jennifer Davis, explains to Charlie Boss of the Columbus Dispatch:

"There is a need and feeling from teachers that they need more time to build (students') skills and collaborate with their peers" ("Students can get help in person after hours," Charlie Boss, The Columbus Dispatch, Sept. 22, 2013).

"Schools and school districts and families don't want the curriculum to be narrowed. They want to have a broader educational experience."

This is covered further in the summary of an NCTL report ("The Case for Improving and Expanding Time in School") found on the organization's website: "Schools that have broken from the bounds of the conventional calendar and schedule offer promising alternatives to the status quo" ("Why Time Matters," timeandlearning.org).

And according to the executive summary of a different NCTL report ("Time Well Spent"): "Many of the high-performing, expanded-time schools in this report place a premium on providing a broad array of learning opportunities in such areas as the arts, foreign languages, hands-on science, business, community service and leadership" (timeandlearning.org).

Meanwhile, the Center for American Progress references another NCTL report in a recent article on expanded school days. The report cited, among others, Roger Williams Middle School in Providence, Rhode Island. (Williams, an independent religious leader during our early, pre-Revolution years and one of the first anti-slavery abolitionists here, is one of my primary American heroes.)

At this school, "where the majority of students are poor, with many coming from non-English-speaking homes and nearly one-quarter receiving special-education services," there is collaboration "with three community partners to provide students with a robust arts program, which is integrated throughout the school's curriculum, along with a variety of after-school offerings" ("All Hands on Deck: How Expanded Learning Time and Community Partners Can Benefit Students," Tiffany D. Miller, americanprogress.org, May 19).

Were Roger Williams still here, I think he would audit some of those programs.

I became belatedly interested in these liberations of the joyful surprises of learning from Charlie Boss' report in the Columbus Dispatch:

"Hilliard (Ohio) students now have a place where teachers help with homework assignments, college counselors hold office hours, and computers are available – long after the school day ends."

Next week: More on what a memorable adventure it is to go to certain schools in Ohio. Maybe we'll have a next president who'll spend some time there.

He told me: "You have given both liberals and conservatives a real choice."

I would add that Paul is a choice for those Americans who care about the accelerating disintegration of our constitutional individual liberties under George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Barack Obama – liberties that are meant to distinguish us from all other nations.

The results of this 2016 election can cut so deeply into political allegiances. It will bring us again to the brink of losing who we are. Like in 1798, when President John Adams and Congress pushed through the Alien and Sedition Acts, imprisoning critics of Congress and the presidency only seven years after the Bill of Rights was ratified. Saving us, Thomas Jefferson defeated Adams' lunge for a second term.

With Bush, Cheney and Obama having mutilated our Fifth, Sixth, Ninth, 10th and 14th Amendments that guarantee individual rights, We The Diminished People should acknowledge a survival warning I once heard from Justice William Brennan, whom I had gotten to know well:

"Look, pal, we've always known – the framers knew – that liberty is a fragile thing. You can't give up."

Alas, many of us have yet to learn that.

Among those we can assume are running for president, Rand Paul has most insistently not given up. For example, his anger at what he calls "the shredding of the Constitution" is not oratorical, but comes from inside – as when he spoke at the influential Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C., in March:

"If you have a cellphone, you are under surveillance; I believe what you do on your cellphone is none of their damn business."

And in his book, "Government Bullies: How Everyday Americans Are Being Harassed, Abused, And Imprisoned By The Feds" (Center Street, 2012), he referred to what is happening to us at airports, thanks to the Transportation Security Administration:

"The TSA is a grand testament to Islamic terrorists' success – the scene in any airport pre-9/11 versus post-9/11 is now perceived as a major victory by our enemies. We have given up so many of our liberties, all in the name of preventing another tragedy like 9/11 – and that's a tragedy in itself."

And dig this: At the CPAC event in Washington, Paul said, "The Fourth Amendment's equally as important as the Second Amendment, and conservatives cannot forget this."

The Constitution prizes personal privacy as much as it does your right to have a gun for self-defense!

Paul told those at CPAC to "imagine a time when the White House is once again occupied by a friend of liberty. ... I'm talking about electing lovers of liberty."

Ben Jacobs at The Daily Beast wrote: "Paul's speech came as a sharp change from other speakers, who were more focused on the Republican Party and insuring the role of conservatives within the GOP. Rick Santorum thought the GOP needed to appeal to blue collar voters, Ted Cruz thought it needed to nominate more conservatives, and Mike Huckabee thought it needed to appeal to people of faith. But the Kentucky senator wasn't concerned with what the Republican Party needed to do.

"He was concerned about the Constitution" ("Rand Paul Mixes Pink Floyd and the Constitution at CPAC," Ben Jacobs, The Daily Beast, March 7).

And at Paul's now-fabled 13-hour filibuster speech last year, he showed his freedom from dutifully loyal Republican dictates. The website bookwormroom.com listed such tweets celebrating Paul's stand as John Maniscalco's: "Thank you, SenRandPaul for literally standing up for liberty!" ("Rand Paul Defends Constitution – Mounts Filibuster Against Drone Use," bookwormroom.com, March 7, 2013.)

Meanwhile, conservative blog The Mental Recession, citing a story on Business Insider's website, reported: "The entire conservative blogosphere was energized by Rand Paul's defense of the Constitution, Due Process and the American people ... and (John) McCain ridicules them as 'impressionable libertarian kids.'

"Lindsey Graham also chimed in, saying he was 'disappointed' with those (senators) who joined Paul's filibuster" ("Video: Here Is What Is Wrong With Your GOP Today – McCain Tells Rand Paul to 'Calm Down,'" Rusty Weiss, menrec.com, March 7, 2013).

But do McCain and Graham represent the Republican Party that can win the presidency in 2016 and control Congress after November's elections?

More and more of the nation's electorate are changing past allegiances as they search to define themselves more clearly as individual Americans.

In a future column, we'll explore these changes and the reasons for them. Here's one intriguing illustration, in a May 11, 2014, letter to the New York Post from a reader in Metuchen, New Jersey:

"As an American black woman ... I voted for our president the first time. The second time, I did not. The Obamas have made the White House vulgar – Michelle with the trips with her mother and friends, and the president golfing when the country is in distress.

"I do not see color when I vote. Just because he is black does not mean I'm color-blind. I have had people look at me strangely because I will not OK all of his mistakes. I also had a lot to say about George W. Bush, too" (Letters, New York Post, May 11).

I'm not predicting she'll vote for Rand Paul. But who will she vote for? More of us are looking into the nation's future – and ours – seriously as voters.

That's what self-government is supposed to be, isn't it?

I was shocked to learn that Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, a persistent critic of the Obama administration's far overreach of the Constitution's separation of powers, had turned around last fall and supported the CIA's drone plane killing of American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki in 2011. Al-Awlaki was on a "kill list" signed by Obama, wholly outside of constitutional due process.

I had often praised Wyden.

Yes, al-Awlaki was an effective propagandist for terrorism, but he was not murdered in the course of battle. Last week, Rand Paul spoke about this drone assassination when he filibustered the nomination of David Barron to a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston. It was Barron, in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, who wrote two memos legally justifying the killing of al-Awlaki.

Said the libertarian Republican senator and presidential aspirant from Kentucky: "There is no legal precedent for killing American citizens not directly involved in combat ... any nominee who rubber stamps and grants such power to a president is not worthy of being placed one step away from the Supreme Court."

Yet in supporting Paul for president – if he is nominated – I am aware of other positions he has taken that have troubled me and many others.

For instance, he has been accused of objecting to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because it prohibited private owners of restaurants and other such places from refusing to serve black customers.

Actually, Paul has repeatedly claimed that he would not have voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a whole. In 2010, he told the Louisville Courier-Journal: "I do believe in private ownership. But I think there should be absolutely no discrimination in anything that gets any public funding, and that's most of what the Civil Rights Act was about, to my mind."

That same year, Paul told NPR's "All Things Considered": "What I've always said is that I'm opposed to institutional racism, and I would've, had I been alive at the time, I think, had the courage to march with Martin Luther King to overturn institutional racism, and I see no place in our society for institutional racism."

Another charge is that the senator, like his father, Ron Paul, is an isolationist, and were he president, he would not get us involved in any foreign nations' violations of human rights.

However, in Time magazine, Paul wrote:

"Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine is a gross violation of that nation's sovereignty and an affront to the international community ...

"Putin must be punished for violating the Budapest Memorandum, and Russia must learn that the U.S. will isolate it if it insists on acting like a rogue nation.

"This does not and should not require military action ... Economic sanctions and visa bans should be imposed and enforced without delay. I would urge our European allies to leverage their considerable weight with Russia and take the lead on imposing these penalties ... I would reinstitute the missile-defense shields President Obama abandoned in 2009 in Poland and the Czech Republic."

That is not quite "isolation."

Furthermore, at this year's Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C., Paul beat other prospective Republican presidential candidates in CPAC's straw poll.

Al Seltzinger, one of the conference attendees, incisively summarized the case for a Rand Paul vote that day and on Election Day: "I think the way the nation is going today with the government and the president going against the Constitution that we need someone who holds strict to the Constitution and whose voting record is pretty solid when it comes to the Constitution."

As of now, from what I know of all the candidates for the presidency across the political spectrum, that advice for regenerating the Constitution defines Rand Paul.

I grew up during the "Great" Depression in a low-income household in Boston that prized a statue of Franklin Delano Roosevelt at the wheel of the New Deal. We, like the great majority of that neighborhood, always voted on the Democratic line.

But when Wendell Willkie ran against FDR in 1940, I greatly angered members of my family and others in the neighborhood by saying if I were old enough, I'd vote for him. I was 15 and had done some of my own reading on the Constitution and the diverse history of its vulnerability from both political parties. And Roosevelt had too often been an imperial president.

Since then, I do not vote for any office by the party of the contestant.

Next week, I'll explore what Rand Paul's nomination might mean in light of the opening sentence to a recent Gallup report, "Voter Enthusiasm Down Sharply From 2010":

"A majority of U.S. registered voters, 53 percent, say they are less enthusiastic about voting than in previous elections, while 35 percent are more enthusiastic. This 18-percentage-point enthusiasm deficit is larger than what Gallup has measured in prior midterm election years, particularly in 2010, when there was record midterm enthusiasm."

And look what we got then. But Rand Paul would run with the insistence of James Madison to clearly bring back the Constitution.

Sen. Rand Paul's unexpected March 6-7, 2013, 13-hour filibuster speech against the appointment of John Brennan as head of the CIA was widely seen and reported. But, as customarily happens in this digital age, it was out of the media after a few days.

Few of our kids, watching Facebook or texting, were aware of it, except in the very rare schools with class discussions and debates on contemporary issues relating crucially to citizenship.

For me, Paul made real a fantasy I'd long held: that someone running for the presidency, as he clearly is, would focus insistently on what it means under our Constitution to be an American – with basic individual rights and liberties no government has the authority to suspend or erase.

During that crisply related filibuster, for example, he told a sizable, but briefly attentive nation:

"Your government was given a few defined powers (by the Constitution), enumerated powers. ... But your liberties are many. … When you read the Ninth and 10th Amendment(s), it says that those rights not explicitly given to government are left to the states and the people. They're yours, not to be disparaged."

Hearing that, I wondered how many Americans know what is in the Ninth and 10th Amendments. Do you?

Then Paul pounced: "They say that the United States is the battlefield (against terrorism) now. ... This battlefield being here at home means you don't get due process at home. ...

"The question is, if the government's to decide who are sympathizers (with terrorists) and people who are politicians with no checks and balances are to decide who is a sympathizer, is there a danger really that people who have political dissent could be included in this?"

Edward Snowden's leaks on how relentlessly the government is spying on us have already answered that question.

I had already commented on the 13-hour filibuster ("Rand Paul: Teacher of the year" March 20, 2013), in which I urged teachers to bring Paul's illumination of the dangers to individual Americanism into their classrooms. As far as I know, that hasn't happened.

Paul's filibuster speech also referred caustically to how the media is treating "bipartisanship" in Congress: "They see us not getting along on taxes and spending, but they fail to understand that on something very important, on whether an individual has a right not to be restrained indefinitely, there is quite a bit of partisanship, usually in the wrong direction."

Like Congress passing and Obama signing the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which empowers the military to indefinitely imprison American citizens without a trial for "supporting" (not defined) terrorism.

Where did Congress find the authority for endless "restraining" in the Constitution? As for the president, he has made it clear that he has a pen, and having been re-elected, he is the Constitution.

A further sign of Paul's libertarianism appeared on the front page of the New York Times a few weeks ago: "Paul Diverges From His Party Over Voter ID." Speaking in Memphis, "a mostly black and Democratic city," he spoke of the increasing difficulty in voting with stricter regulations in at least 30 states.

"The bigger issue, actually," he said in the Times, "is whether you get to vote if you have a felony conviction. There's 180,000 people in Kentucky who can't vote. And I don't know the racial breakdown, but it's probably more black than white because they're convicted felons. And I'm for getting their right to vote back, which is a much bigger deal than showing your driver's license" ("Paul Diverges From His Party Over Voter ID," Jeremy W. Peters, New York Times, May 9).

And with a growing presence of government drone planes in the skies right here at home, Paul said as plainly as possible at the start of his filibuster: "I will speak as long as it takes, but until the alarm is sounded from coast to coast that our Constitution is important, that your rights to trial by jury are precious, that no American should be killed by a drone on American soil without first being charged with a crime, without first being found to be guilty by a court."

How many other presidential candidates of either party will be stressing that during their campaigns?

And dig this: In 2011, Paul was one of 12 senators who voted against "three key provisions of the Patriot Act" that covered "roving wiretaps, 'lone wolf' terrorism suspects and the government's ability to seize 'any tangible items' in the course of surveillance" ("Senate passes short-term extension of Patriot Act provisions," Felicia Sonmez, www.thewashingtonpost.com, Feb. 15, 2011).

There'll be more next week on why I'll be voting for Rand Paul if he is nominated – unless another presidential candidate exceeds his insistent devotion to the Constitution.

A transitional reason for that vote: On March 7, 2014, Paul spoke at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, and at a rousing point in his speech, he said:

"You may think I'm talking about electing Republicans. I'm not. I'm talking about electing lovers of liberty. It isn't good enough to pick the lesser of two evils. We must elect men and women of principle, and conviction and action, who will lead us back to greatness."

These may have been just words, but I believe I have shown so far that this guy has not forgotten what it is to be an authentically active, Bill of Rights-acknowledging American.

We sure need that kind of president in the White House.

Historians will also marvel at why none of the agents – including those at the highest levels of our government – were punished for violating U.S. and international law.

They may also marvel that the one person who came close to actually bringing this vicious cabal to justice was Dianne Feinstein, the previously uncritical chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. She pledged from the Senate floor that the CIA's "un-American, brutal program of detention and interrogation will never again be considered or permitted."

Moreover, with regard to her committee's prolonged research of the CIA's crimes, Feinstein accused the agency "of secretly removing documents, searching computers used by the committee and attempting to intimidate congressional investigators (of the CIA) by requesting an FBI inquiry of their conduct" – adding more unconstitutional conduct to her charges ("Feinstein: CIA searched Intelligence Committee computers," Greg Miller, Ed O'Keefe and Adam Goldman, Washington Post, March 11).

Coming from this wholly unexpected source, Feinstein's fiery March 11 floor speech on the CIA began to foment bipartisan outrage and inspired longtime Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Patrick Leahy, to announce, "I cannot think of any speech by any member of either party as important as the one the senator from California just gave."

Leahy, a primary protector of the Constitution, released a statement, which read in part: "This is not just about getting to the truth of the CIA's shameful use of torture. This is also about the core founding principle of the separation of powers, and the future of this institution and its oversight role.

"The Senate is bigger than any one senator. Senators come and go, but the Senate endures. The members of the Senate must stand up in defense of this institution, the Constitution and the values upon which this nation was founded" ("Statement of Senator Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., Chairman, Senate Judiciary Committee, on CIA Interference with Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Investigation," March 11).

And what was Obama's response? His lapdog White House spokesman, Jay Carney, said: "The president has great confidence in (CIA Director) John Brennan and confidence in our intelligence community and in professionals at the CIA."

Professionals? In the kidnapping, waterboarding and drone targeting of American citizens?

Or do you prefer Patrick Leahy's message to the Senate: "Now let's stand up for this country."

Surprisingly, Republican Lindsey Graham, hardly known as a civil libertarian in the Senate, appeared to be troubled by Feinstein's and Leahy's warnings: "Heads will roll. If what they're saying is true about the CIA, this is Richard Nixon stuff. This is dangerous to a democracy, heads should roll, people should go to jail, if it's true.

"The legislative branch should declare war on the CIA – if it's true" ("Dianne Feinstein's CIA charge scrambles Senate," Burgess Everett and Manu Raju, politico.com, March 11).

Sen. Graham, keep demanding the release of the completely declassified Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA; you'll be shaken to your roots by what the CIA has done in your name and ours – and you may be driven to know more about what is still being done.

What I find unexpected and disappointing in the reactions to Feinstein's unsparing unraveling of the CIA is the criticism by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, a hero of mine. He described Feinstein as "an elected official (who) does not care at all that the rights of millions of ordinary citizens are violated by our spies" ("Snowden: Feinstein a Hypocrite for Blasting CIA Spying," Matthew Cole, nbcnews.com, March 11).

The senator, however, is stirring at least some of Congress and other Americans to bring the CIA into our rule of law, with possible consequences to its continued existence.

How can such deeply entrenched CIA criminality be "reformed"?

Snowden, of course, was not defending the CIA. He was reacting to the previously non-civil libertarian Feinstein, who – as The Hill reported last summer – characterized his huge disclosure of the government's mass surveillance of Americans as "an act of treason" ("Sen. Feinstein calls Snowden's NSA leaks an 'act of treason,'" Jeremy Herb and Justin Sink, thehill.com, June 10, 2013).

Snowden remains a hero of mine, but I wish he had thought of the courage it took Feinstein to so utterly transform herself. She went from being an influential supporter of Obama's rejection of the constitutional separation of powers to now exposing the CIA as so deeply, cruelly unconstitutional.

Virginia Sloan, my old friend, is president of the Washington, D.C.-based Constitution Project, an invaluable and bipartisan law watchdog, whose research should be read and discussed in all our schools. Of Feinstein's accomplishments up to this point, she said:

"The American people deserve a full accounting of what was done in our name. The CIA's institutional legitimacy depends on this increased transparency. So does our system of constitutional checks and balances" ("TCP: Senate Outrage at CIA Intrusion a 'Defining Moment,'" constitutionproject.org, March 11).

Because this is "a truly defining moment," she added, "for President Obama's legacy on torture," he should not only ensure the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on the CIA; he should also "declassify the (CIA's) rendition, detention and interrogation program itself."

That's not going to happen, Virginia. Obama remains Obama. But the next president and Congress can begin to do that – and, with due process, they can also bring to court these CIA criminals and their protectors at the top of the legislative and executive branches.

Possible Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul would be perfect; I believe the Kentucky senator could begin to clear our past and future from what We the People have permitted in our name by the execrable CIA.

The plaintiffs brought the lawsuit in protest of sections of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that were signed into law by President Barack Obama in December 2011. Read this part of Section 1021 of the NDAA and judge for yourself if I am exaggerating the far-ranging unconstitutionality of this law:

The Armed Forces of the United States, at the behest of the president, has the power to indefinitely "detain" without trial "a person" (including any American citizen) "who was a part of or substantially supported al-Qaida, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act or has directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces."

Take note: The word "detain" is Obama's euphemism for "imprison."

John Whitehead's Rutherford Institute filed an amicus brief in a lower court on behalf of the plaintiffs in Hedges v. Obama. The brief explained how the Supreme Court abandoned our First Amendment and other constitutional rights:

"Nobody – including the government arguing in favor of this provision – can define the terms 'belligerent act,' 'substantial support' and 'associated groups' with any precision ...

"Unlike the definition of 'material support' in the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which lists specific forms of prohibited assistance such as giving money, arms, or training to terrorist groups, the broad term 'substantial support' in the NDAA could be read to encompass an enormous range – not only of conduct but of political speech and journalism.

"For example, would a journalist interviewing an al-Qaida member be 'substantially supporting' al-Qaida by giving that terrorist a media voice? What if the journalist were to ask a question or to make a comment that the government deemed sympathetic to the interviewee? The terms of the statute could be read to penalize such press activities with indefinite detention without trial."

In fact, as this Rutherford Institute amicus brief indicated, the term "substantial support" could apply to this journalist: "Could someone protesting the detention of a terrorist held without trial, or even assisting in the legal defense effort of such a detainee, be herself (or himself) detained as providing 'substantial support' to the enemy? The terms of the statute do not answer such questions."

And what are the "associated forces" any of us are forbidden from supporting? Not that "supporting" is defined. There is no definition of it in the NDAA – or of "belligerent."

Now dig this: During the New York district court proceedings that eventually led Hedges v. Obama to the blank wall at the Supreme Court, the judge asked the U.S. attorney representing the government which potential defendants could be subject to indefinite detention on the basis of organizations they supported. The attorney's answer was the official government position:

"I can't make specific representations as to particular plaintiffs. I can't give particular people a promise of anything."

Huh? Where in the Constitution can the government deny American citizens any knowledge of specific organizational connections, even in the course of their regular work, that could get them imprisoned indefinitely by the military and the president?

Here, then, is the path of this Chinese-style law to the Supreme Court: On Sept. 12, 2012, responding to Hedges v. Obama – brought by, among other plaintiffs, former New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Christopher Hedges – Judge Katherine Forrest of the Southern District Court of New York ruled that "the Constitution requires specificity – and that specificity is absent from (Section) 1021(b)(2)."

Forrest wrote in her ruling that this part of Section 1021 "impermissibly impinges on guaranteed First Amendment rights and lacks sufficient definitional structure and protections to meet the requirements of due process."

But President Obama, of course, appealed this district court's abolition of indefinite imprisonments without trial and other due process to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, which sided with him in its ruling last summer. The court agreed that these journalists and other plaintiffs had no standing to challenge the indefinite imprisonments, ignoring the reasons already shown in this column and in the briefs to the Supreme Court, which then nonetheless decided the free speech and due process claims were not worthy of its attention.

I return to Judge Forrest, whose initial ruling speaks for all of us, now that we have been abandoned by the Supreme Court:

"The due process rights guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment require that an individual understand what conduct might subject him or her to criminal or civil penalties" that now include "indefinite military detention – potential detention during a war on terrorism that is not expected to end in the foreseeable future, if ever."

I ask you, readers: Whom will you vote for in the 2016 presidential and congressional elections who will return such of our individual constitutional liberties to us as the First and Fifth Amendments?

As James Madison and Thomas Jefferson warned us, it's up to We the People to remain free – of both Barack Obama and the Supreme Court.

Furthermore, the judge demanded that prosecutors give the defense lawyers such "closely guarded classified CIA information" as "'locations, personnel and communications,' interrogation notes and cables between the black sites and headquarters that sought and approved so-called enhanced interrogation techniques."

Rosenberg has covered Gitmo and American torture for years, unlike many members of the media. But other reporters here and abroad, including me, have documented some of this CIA torture from our research.

I urge the media to stay on this story of military Judge Pohl's order to the CIA as the Obama administration tries to bury it – including the renditions by which the CIA brought suspects to be interrogated at places other than the supposedly discontinued black sites. Obama has retained these classified renditions.

What Pohl has ignited should become a historic issue in the 2016 presidential and congressional elections – all the more because, as Rosenberg makes clear, the judge did not "order the government to turn over Office of Legal Counsel memos (from the George W. Bush administration) that both blessed and defined the so-called Torture Program that sent CIA captives to secret interrogations across the world after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks – out of reach of International Committee of the Red Cross delegates."

It was also out of reach of the Constitution and international treaties we signed.

This Guantanamo ferment may be our chance to begin to cleanse what I have previously described as "our worldwide shame of having become a torture nation. As we condemn other nations' crimes against their citizens – Syria, Libya, Zimbabwe, et al. – our government makes it easier for those countries to escape accountability by utterly denying our own complicity in the cruel, inhumane, degrading torture that has given terrorists around the world so valuable a means for recruiting more terrorists" (my column, "Obama bans war criminals, but not our own," Aug. 17, 2011).

But before we go deeper into how to begin cleansing our history of torture, let's focus on military Judge Pohl's Guantanamo case, which has begun to seriously break through Barack Obama's rock-like determination to "look forward, not backward" on what preceded his presidency.

The trial of Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri, the suspect in the 2000 USS Cole bombing near the Yemeni coast, is set to begin at Guantanamo in December.

Common Dreams' Lauren McCauley writes, citing an Associated Press report, that al-Nashiri's defense team "argued during pretrial motions at the Cuban prison that the Guantanamo detainee's time spent in secret CIA prisons – during which he was waterboarded and threatened with a gun and a power drill – has 'tainted' his testimony, and thus the case against him" ("Judge Orders Disclosure of CIA Torture at 'Black Sites,'" Lauren McCauley, commondreams.org, April 22).

Ah, but the United States' rules for military commissions prevent using any classified evidence or testimony obtained by coercion or torture. This elementary due process was barred at Guantanamo – until Pohl said otherwise.

Unimpressed and undeterred by Bush's and, now, Obama's rules, al-Nashiri's defense lawyers insist that revealing what happened to their client at CIA black sites for all those years "could be used to spare him from the death penalty" ("Govt Must Turn Over Info on CIA Prisons to Defense," Deb Riechmann, Associated Press, April 22).

It's utterly clear that our legal system at Guantanamo has continued to avoid any real-life involvement with our rule of law and our cherished "values." However, Andrea Prasow of Human Rights Watch, which continues to illuminate this shame, tells The Guardian that the judge's order "represents a chink in the armor of secrecy that the U.S. government erected around its torture program" ("Guantanamo trial judge orders CIA to account for treatment of detainee," Spencer Ackerman, The Guardian, April 17).

Citing the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on the CIA's torture methods, which is still going to be first reviewed by the agency, Prasow says: "It is only a matter of time before the public will learn the horrific details of officially sanctioned torture, and the pattern of lies designed not only to allow torture to continue, but to immunize torturers from prosecution."

But how much time?

Through my discoveries and those of such ceaseless researchers as The New Yorker's Jane Mayer, I'll have more in future columns on how to get the public to act.

Mayer, whose work I have cited previously, was once told by a former CIA officer involved in these acts of barbarous torture: "When you cross over that line of darkness, it's hard to come back. You lose your soul. You can do your best to justify it, but ... you can't go to that dark a place without it changing you" ("The Black Sites: A Rare Look Inside the CIA's Secret interrogation Program," Jane Mayer, The New Yorker, Aug. 13, 2007).

To what extent has our acceptance of torture changed us, and how will it affect future generations of Americans? We ignore the continuing fact that not one of these American torturers – in "dark sites" and elsewhere – has ever been punished, including those Americans at the highest reaches of our government who have actively not only authorized but encouraged torture.

Once, I was in a debate at Princeton University with John Yoo, who, while working at the Justice Department during the Bush administration, wrote the "torture memos" that gave Bush and Dick Cheney the legal power to torture. I let him have it – giving him the names of torture victims and places where these acts of torture occurred!

He just smiled to the rest of the panel and said, "I enjoy reading Nat Hentoff on jazz."

For years, Yoo, now a law professor at the University of California, has been a media pundit on constitutional issues, serene in his still-unpunished contribution to American history.

What about Bush, Cheney and Obama?

Nor have I previously identified the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education as not only a foremost civil rights and civil liberties leader, but also as an educational leader in truly Americanizing American colleges – an education American students almost never get in their classes.

I have, of course, often cited another such tirelessly liberating educational force, John Whitehead's Rutherford Institute. However, I focus now on the future impact of FIRE being primarily responsible for the first ever U.S. state, Virginia, to bring full college students' First Amendment rights to all outdoor areas of university campuses there instead of tiny "free speech zones."

Nor is FIRE finished helping the Bill of Rights take root in more colleges as it works to guarantee all such students the right to a lawyer when charged with offenses – as it has already successfully accomplished in North Carolina.

Instrumental in the first two victories, as well as the current Virginia campaign, is Joe Cohn, FIRE's legislative and policy director.

To get a full sense of how Cohn operates, here he is on another James Madison-style expedition, this time to my home state of Massachusetts, as he writes legislators Sen. Michael Moore and Rep. Tom Sannicandro in support of a bill to provide "university students facing serious, non-academic disciplinary charges the right to be represented by an attorney."

Here is what Joe Cohn starkly told those legislators about what is happening to students there charged with "theft, harassment, assault, drug and weapons possession, stalking and rape." Until this bill is passed, Cohn said, students "will continue to be forced to represent themselves – alone – against experienced and professionally trained deans, administrators and university attorneys in proceedings that fail to guarantee core components of the rights of due process. ...

"The stakes," he continues, "are very, very high; the result of these hearings dramatically change the course of these students' lives. ... Some institutions may allow a lawyer to attend the hearing, but prohibit them from participating in the proceedings. Others ban attorneys altogether. The universities, on the other hand, are free to send as many attorneys as they wish to prosecute the student."

Yet this is the state where Samuel Adams, the Sons of Liberty, the Boston Tea Party and the Committees of Correspondence continually alerted the 13 colonies under British rule to the bottomless abuses of the colonists' rights, thereby becoming, as Thomas Jefferson was to say, a precipitating cause of the American Revolution!

In his March 28 letter to the Massachusetts legislators, Joe Cohn confronted them with this prickly challenge:

"The law (providing students with the rights to a lawyer) has been in effect in North Carolina since last July. To date, there have been no reports and there is no evidence that providing students with the right to the assistance of lawyers or the advisers of their choice in these hearings has disrupted or prevented any institutions from conducting hearings.

"Simply put, the sky has not fallen, as the bill's opponents loudly predicted."

Nor have the Constitution's First and Fifth Amendment rights continued to fall in that state.

Cohn could not resist this further poke in the ribs of the Massachusetts legislators: "It is simply unreasonable to expect 18-year-old and 19-year-old students acting alone to competently answer serious charges posed by deans and administrators with decades of professional experience acting as judge, jury and executioner for campus crimes.

"FIRE notes that this imbalance is particularly exacerbated for students with disadvantaged backgrounds. While wealthier students who have lawyers or other professionals for parents may confidently face these tribunals, first-generation students or those who rely on substantial financial aid have the added burden of knowing their livelihoods – and often the dreams of their families – are on the line.

"For these students, having legal representation during the few hours of a hearing could make a difference that lasts for decades."

The Massachusetts bill requiring a lawyer is, as of this writing, still pending, and the Virginia lawyer bill has been tabled for the year. But FIRE will not let up on either state.

Meanwhile, around the nation, many parents are paying rising college tuition fees without a thought about whether their sons and daughters will be guaranteed due-process rights, if needed, while they're there.

And hey, you 2016 presidential candidates, what's your position on providing college students with campus-wide free speech and also due process to defend themselves across this sweet land of liberty? Will voters and the media be asking them? How about you?

I will continue to report on how FIRE's national Student Network is more actively than ever connecting with students all over, "making it easier," it tells them, "to look up your school's speech codes and submit a request for FIRE's help – whatever that help might be."

The Sons and Daughters of Liberty have returned in full force.

In other words, student speech will not be limited to the tiny "free speech zones" that, as FIRE documents, restrict student speech in "1 in 6 of America's 400 top colleges" in this land of the free and home of the brave.

This is America? In these places of higher learning?

As Greg Lukianoff, president of FIRE, keeps revealing, these tightly squeezed campus speech zones often result in "banishing student protests, leafleting and other basic expression (political or otherwise) to tiny areas far away from the students the speech is intended to reach" ("Virginia Legislature to Campuses: Down With Free Speech (Zones)!" Greg Lukianoff, www.huffingtonpost.com, April 7).

Of course, FIRE was deeply involved in this historic unleashing of Virginia students' First Amendment rights. But what about the state's private colleges and universities? The pressure will now be on them, too, to allow their students to be fully American by speaking freely on those campuses.

It's important to emphasize that, as FIRE does while it now goes on to give the First Amendment a home on other college campuses, "restricting student speech to tiny 'free speech zones' diminishes the quality of debate and discussion on campus by preventing expression from reaching its target audience" ("Virginia Bans Unconstitutional Campus 'Free Speech Zones,'" www.thefire.org, April 7).

"Often, institutions that maintain these restrictive policies also employ burdensome permitting schemes that require students to obtain administrative permission days or even weeks before being allowed to speak their minds.

"Even worse, many of these policies grant campus administrators unfettered discretion to deny applications based on the viewpoint or content of the speakers' intended message."

Are students on those campuses learning to be active, knowledgeable participants in this self-governing republic?

Virginia's law, which FIRE is determined to extend to other states' schools where it's needed, "prohibits public institutions of higher education from imposing restrictions on the time, place and manner of student speech that occurs in the outdoor areas of the institution's campus and is protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. ..."

However, there are restrictions. Watch for these exceptions, because they're why FIRE always stays on and protects its victories: "the restrictions (i) are reasonable, (ii) are justified without reference to the content of the regulated speech, (iii) are narrowly tailored to serve a significant governmental interest, and (iv) leave open ample alternative channels for communication of the information" (from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, www.schev.edu).

Meanwhile, FIRE will keep an eye on administrators at the University of Virginia, and so will its student members there, to make sure the law remains whole.

In the history of this nation, no other organization has come close to FIRE in working to safeguard the individual constitutional liberties of college students of all backgrounds and beliefs. That's why, almost from its inception, I've been on the Advisory Council of FIRE.

Because I'm aware of all it does, I know FIRE doesn't need my advice, so what I do is spread the word of its record of liberty, which would have made James Madison joyous.

According to FIRE's website, the organization is a "nonprofit educational foundation ... (whose) mission is to defend and sustain individual rights at America's colleges and universities. These rights include freedom of speech, legal equality, due process, religious liberty, and sanctity of conscience – the essential qualities of individual liberty and dignity."

It should also be noted that FIRE represents no political party – just the American people.

In a pamphlet on college speech codes, FIRE says it's "been fighting for student and faculty rights since 1999, and we've been very successful in doing so. Since our founding, FIRE has won over 190 public victories at more than 135 colleges and universities that have a total enrollment of nearly three million students.

"FIRE is directly responsible for changing over 90 unconstitutional or repressive policies affecting more than 1.9 million students" ("Challenging Your College's Speech Code," www.thefire.org).

All along, I've been hoping FIRE would also move the First Amendment into high schools. That is beginning to happen, as I'll report on how this liberation of students and faculties brings the living Bill of Rights into those schools.

And I yearn to live long enough to also see FIRE reach elementary-age students, teaching them how to be authentic Americans.

Next week, with the aid of Joe Cohn, FIRE's legislative and policy director (who testified before both houses of Virginia's General Assembly in support of the state's campus free speech law), I will report on the organization's involvement in another historic U.S. state decision: In 2013, "North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory signed a bill granting public university students in the state facing non-academic disciplinary charges the right to an attorney" ("North Carolina Becomes First State to Guarantee College Students' Right to Attorney," www.thefire.org, Aug. 23, 2013).

Explained FIRE Senior Vice President Robert Shibley: "Students across America are regularly tried in campus courts for serious offenses like theft, harassment, and even rape. Being labeled a felon and kicked out by your college carries serious, life-altering consequences.

"Because the stakes are so high, students should have the benefit of an attorney to ensure the hearing is conducted fairly and by the rules."

So we have two firsts in the nation! Did you know about this law in North Carolina? Did you know the First Amendment is now flying high across many of Virginia's college and university campuses? Where are the media?

In a lead editorial last month, the New York Times revealed what many of us didn't know, that "in 2013, about 30,000 federal prison inmates were released to more than 200 halfway houses around the country. These facilities – where an inmate can serve up to the last year of his or her sentence – are meant to ease the transition back into society by way of employment and housing assistance, drug treatment and other programs that make it less likely an inmate will end up reoffending and returning to prison" ("Halfway Back to Society," March 30).

"Preventing recidivism," the Times editorial argues, "should, of course, be a central goal of any correctional system."

The problem, though, is that "too many halfway houses are understaffed, poorly supervised and generally ill prepared to do that job, and as a result the men and women who pass through them often leave them no better off."

But the attorney general – long dismissed by many critics, including me, as a mere minion of his dictatorial boss – is actively involved in bringing, of all things, human rights to our prison system.

The Times editorial goes on: "On March 24, Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. took a step in the right direction by announcing new requirements for federally financed halfway houses – the most recent example of his aggressive push for reform across the criminal justice system."

Furthermore: "Starting in early 2015, halfway houses must provide more rigorous and standardized cognitive-behavioral treatment for inmates with mental health or substance abuse issues, both of which are rampant in prison populations."

How many congressional and presidential candidates will support this in 2016?

In February, I wrote that "the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law reported on Holder's 'great step forward on restoring voting rights' ... the attorney general 'urged states to restore voting rights to people of past criminal convictions'" once they had "'completed probation, parole and paid all fines'" (my column, "Obama's Attorney General Americanized (in Part)," cato.org, Feb. 19).

And last week, I reported on Holder's "Smart on Crime" initiative, which he elaborated on during his March testimony before the U.S. Sentencing Commission, insisting "that people convicted of certain low-level, nonviolent federal drug crimes will face sentences appropriate to their individual conduct – rather than stringent mandatory minimums, which will now be applied only to the most serious criminals" ("Attorney General Holder Urges Changes in Federal Sentencing Guidelines to Reserve Harshest Penalties for Most Serious Drug Traffickers," justice.gov, March 13).

Happily, he acknowledged that "this approach enjoys significant bipartisan support on Capitol Hill, where a number of leaders, including Sens. Patrick Leahy, Dick Durbin and Mike Lee – along with Reps. Bobby Scott and Raul Labrador – have introduced legislation that would give judges more discretion in determining appropriate sentences for those convicted of certain crimes.

"By reserving the most severe penalties for dangerous and violent drug traffickers, we can better promote public safety, deterrence and rehabilitation while saving billions of dollars and strengthening communities" and cutting down on recidivism.

And now that Holder himself sees the necessary humaneness in preventing formerly incarcerated Americans from becoming permanent outcasts, he is looking ahead: "As my colleagues and I work with Congress to refine and pass this legislation, we are simultaneously moving forward with a range of other reforms."

The no-longer-supine Holder speaks of such programs as "drug treatment initiatives and veterans courts that can serve as alternatives to incarceration in some cases.

"We are working to reduce unnecessary collateral consequences for formerly incarcerated individuals seeking to rejoin their communities. And we are building on innovative, data-driven reinvestment strategies that have in many cases been pioneered at the state level."

Gee, the Justice Department is following Louis Brandeis' advice to pay attention to the individual states for creative innovations to actually bring justice to our prison system.

Holder continued: "In recent years, no fewer than 17 states – supported by the department's Justice Reinvestment Initiative, and led by officials from both parties – have directed significant funding away from prison construction (Wow!) and toward evidence-based programs and services, like supervision and drug treatment, that are proven to reduce recidivism while improving public safety."

And to draw the support of taxpayers increasingly worried about how well their health insurance and pensions will cover them during retirement, Holder cheerily reported that: "Rather than increasing costs, a new report – funded by the Bureau of Justice Assistance – projects that these 17 states will actually save $4.6 billion over a 10-year period."

That's for starters. I hope that the media in all its forms will learn – as I have from Eric Holder – what ceaselessly inventive jazz master Charlie Parker once told me: "Kid, be careful about first impressions and previous impressions. Get to know that person – and yourself – again, and deeper. You might have missed something important!"

Well, I never thought I'd write two columns urging you to look again at the previously mechanical head of the Justice Department – in the shadow of the omnipotent president. But this renewed Eric Holder has shown that he can be his own man – up to this point. There should be more changes from him to come.

As reported in multiple media outlets, the attorney general spoke to the American Bar Association in San Francisco last August. He was adamant about the state of America's prisons:

"It's clear ... that too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long, and for no truly good law enforcement reason. It's clear, at a basic level, that 20th-century criminal justice solutions are not adequate to overcome our 21st-century challenges.

"And it is well past time to implement common-sense changes that will foster safer communities from coast to coast" (justice.gov, Aug. 12, 2013).

According to The Guardian's Dan Roberts and Karen McVeigh, the first of the administration's common-sense reforms would include keeping "minor drug dealers" from serving "mandatory minimum sentences that have previously locked up many for a decade or more" ("Eric Holder unveils new reforms aimed at curbing U.S. prison population," Dan Roberts and Karen McVeigh, The Guardian, Aug. 12, 2013).

Last month, Holder elaborated on this plan in testimony to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, according to Teresa Welsh of U.S. News & World Report.

"The measure," Welsh writes, "would reduce the base offense and sentencing associated with substance quantities involved in drug dealing crimes, reducing the average sentence by 11 months."

So the average sentence is reduced, but not by much. What's the big deal? Well, "the change would impact almost 70 percent of all drug trafficking offenders, as many who are imprisoned for such offenses are nonviolent criminals" ("Should Sentences for Nonviolent Drug Offenders Be Reduced?" Teresa Welsh, U.S. News & World Report, March 13).

Furthermore, small as this first step is, Welsh reports, "the Sentencing Commission estimates that if adopted, the proposal would reduce the Bureau of Prisons inmate population by 6,550."

And dig this:

"The government spends almost $83 billion each year on a prison system that has grown by 700 percent in the last 30 years. U.S. prisons are 40 percent over capacity, and half of all inmates are serving time for drug-related crimes."

Holder calls this a part of his "Smart on Crime" reforms, and he's not alone in wanting to bring justice, of all things, to the boundless "War on Drugs."

Welsh goes on: "This move has found bipartisan support in Congress, with both Democrats and Republicans sponsoring a prison reform bill also favored by the administration."

Anything "favored" by the Obama administration usually gives me no confidence. But what are the chances that Holder's welcome reform gets adopted?

It doesn't look good. Welsh gives you a sense of how rigidly stiff and self-righteous the opposition is: "The National Association of Assistant U.S. Attorneys, a group representing assistant U.S. attorneys employed by the Department of Justice, said the drug sentencing system does not need to be 'fixed.'

"In a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, the group said that 'we are winning the war against crime' because more criminals are serving longer sentences. The association said no changes should be made to current sentencing law until more is known about how it could impact crime rates."

The Sentencing Commission vote on the proposal is due this month. If the "Smart on Crime" reform passes, Welsh writes, it "would take effect in November" as long as Congress does not voice any opposition. We'll see if there is sufficient bipartisan support for Eric Holder to have a somewhat more favorable place in U.S. history.

Maybe the money saved by this initiative will move it along. Brian Resnick of National Journal writes:

"Reducing the prison population by 6,550 would mean, on average, a savings of $169,238,900 a year, per data from the Urban Institute. Money aside, the human-interest case for sentencing reform is easy to make" ("Eric Holder's War on Drug Sentences – a Bright Spot in Obama's Second-Term Legacy?" Brian Resnick, National Journal, March 13).

Resnick then quotes Holder's remarks to the Sentencing Commission:

"This over-reliance on incarceration is not just financially unsustainable; it comes with human and moral costs that are impossible to calculate."

Joining this Democratic attorney general is Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who, according to Resnick, told the Conservative Political Action Conference last month:

"The idea that we lock people up, throw them away, and never give them a chance of redemption is not what America is about. Being able to give someone a second chance is very important."

Resnick adds that "in 2012, Pew found that 84 percent of Americans agreed with the statement, 'Some of the money that we are spending on locking up low-risk, nonviolent inmates should be shifted to strengthening community corrections programs like probation and parole.'"

According to Pew, whose polling I find generally reliable, 77 percent of Republicans also agreed with the statement.

Furthermore: "Sixty-nine percent of Americans agreed with the statement, 'One out of every 100 American adults is in prison. That's too many, and it costs too much.'"

Hillary Clinton is currently polling ahead of other potential 2016 presidential candidates – of either party. What's her position on this?

At the very least, it would appear that Eric Holder has a firm majority of We The People behind him. In his testimony before the Sentencing Commission last month, he made this stinging point: "Today, the United States comprises just 5 percent of the world's population, but it incarcerates almost a quarter of the world's prisoners."

Does that make you feel proud?

To be continued next week, with more on the reawakened Eric Holder.

Like many Americans, regardless of their political party, I was startled at this news.

At the time, Church was the chairman of the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, better known as the Church Committee. He worked hard to spread this frightening news as fully as he could, which I reported in columns and my book, "The War on the Bill of Rights and the Gathering Resistance" (Seven Stories Press, 2003).

This exemplary patriot assured us that "never again will an agency of the government be permitted to conduct a secret war against those citizens it considers threats to the established order."

But he could not predict the coming of a Congress wholly forgetful of the Church Committee and absorbed in internal wars to gain political party ascendancy, not to mention a two-term president who largely exterminated the separation of powers.

However, as I've been reporting, the revelations of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and Democratic. Sen. Dianne Feinstein have partially reawakened Congress.

Meanwhile, Frederick A.O. ("Fritz") Schwarz Jr., who was chief counsel for the Church Committee and is currently the chief counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, challenges us to rescue our fading identity as a self-governing citizenry. In his column, "Why We Need a New Church Committee to Fix Our Broken Intelligence System," from the March 31 issue of the Nation, he writes:

"Now it is time for a new committee to examine our secret government closely again, particularly for its actions in the post-9/11 period.

"This need is underscored by what has become a full-blown crisis, with Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein accusing the CIA of spying on the committee, possibly violating the Constitution's separation-of-powers principles, the Fourth Amendment and other laws."

In a spectacularly unexpected fusion of warring public figures, Feinstein, who had accused Edward Snowden of being a traitor, has now joined with him to expose government secrecy and make us Americans again.

And so will this Church Committee revival.

But how will this new committee actually operate to accomplish this mission? In a March 13 interview with Kevin Gosztola, author of The Dissenter blog, Schwarz explains how extensive this penetration of past government secrecy should be. The Church Committee, he points out, studied the uses of presidential power, from Franklin Roosevelt to Richard Nixon. He tells Gosztola:

"We concluded that each of the six presidents in that period abused their secret powers. We looked at all of the intelligence agencies. We looked at what Congress itself had been doing. And a new investigation should do the same thing."

So We the People should now look deeply into the dark, extra-constitutional, subterranean activities of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

This committee should not engage in prosecutions, Schwarz says, but rather focus on the scope and depth of the culture of secrecy in government. Such exposure would stir our interest in trying to maintain ways to be alert to continuing government duplicity in what Dick Cheney called "the dark side."

For one example, the new committee should study and recommend deeper examination of continuing government super-surveillance technology.

As Schwarz tells Gosztola: "The technology the government now has to surveill is infinitely more powerful than it was in 1975 when we did our land-breaking work."

Furthermore, as Gosztola writes, pursuing this culture of secrecy "reflects a developed understanding that secret government does not just come from secret programs or operations that are kept secret, but also from the manner in which officials believe they can govern in Washington without having the public know what exactly it is they are doing behind closed doors."

This also requires, I would add, a lot of examination by our media in all its forms to keep digging into how the enveloping, self-aggrandizing power of elected officials leads members of both parties to hide from us what they're doing.

Gosztola continues: "There is an extensive amount of conduct that goes on irrespective of protecting 'national security,' and citizens remain in the dark about what (else) it is that they are conspiring or planning for the nation.

"Limits and mechanisms should obviously be put in place to make it harder for them to commit the kinds of abuses and wrongdoing, which they will work so tirelessly to cover up. But, for any such development to happen, a committee with congressional and institutional backing will have to do the work of studying the issues and proposing remedies."

But, I caution: Don't count on congressional backing. It is already clear that both parties have no meaningful concern that this is still trying to be a self-governing republic. However, there are civil liberties institutions run by citizens who do give a damn about having an open government, and they should get behind this new Church Committee.

And so must you. We can't always depend on other Edward Snowdens to shock us into knowing what our government is hiding from us.

If, by the 2016 elections, the CIA, NSA, et al. is still mysteriously ensconced, don't bother to celebrate Independence Day.

At the bottom of page 12 of the March 14 Times – in what should have been on the front page, garnering Savage another Pulitzer – was this: "U.S., Rebuffing U.N., Maintains Stance That Rights Treaty Does Not Apply Abroad."

This treaty, signed by our Senate in 1992, is the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which, Savage notes, "bans arbitrary killings, torture, unfair trials and imprisonments without judicial review" (New York Times, March 14).

This treaty jumped into the news, thanks to Savage, because, as he states in his opening paragraph: "The Obama administration declared ... that a global Bill of Rights-style treaty imposes no human rights obligations on American military and intelligence forces when they operate abroad."

Speaking in our country's name, the "administration affirmed that stance in a meeting in Geneva of the United Nations Human Rights Committee. ..."

Savage makes clear that Obama's administration has not been the only one to take that position: "The United States first expressed the stance in 1995 after the Clinton administration was criticized for its policy of intercepting Haitian refugees at sea, and the Bush administration later amplified it to defend its treatment of terrorism suspects in overseas prisons."

George W. Bush and Dick Cheney sure did amplify it. Remember the CIA secret prisons, waterboarding and other U.S. "enhanced interrogations" that were as far from human rights as the agency could malignantly manage?

Other reporters and I have documented scores of Obama continuations of Bush-Cheney atrocities abroad. It was hardly surprising, as I wrote back in 2010, that "there were hundreds more photographs of American torture practices in Afghanistan as well as in Iraq that President Obama commanded ... must not be released, despite a previous court order to the contrary. He said they would have a 'chilling effect' on further investigations of abuses of detainees" (my column, "Torture Under Obama," Feb. 17, 2010).

How sensitive of him to consider possible U.S. torturers!

Savage quotes Mary McLeod, Obama's acting legal adviser at the State Department:

"The United States continues to believe that its interpretation – that the covenant applies only to individuals both within its territory and within its jurisdiction – is the most consistent with the covenant's language and negotiating history."

So, in other words, Obama doesn't believe he is violating the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Really? The CIA isn't within the United States' jurisdiction? And when CIA "renditions" captured suspects from the streets of their countries to be tortured in other countries in agreement with the agency, that isn't a wholesale violation of the treaty we signed in 1992?

Moreover, as I keep reporting, U.S. renditions continue, but in secret, so we don't know who – or where –- the victims are.

Meanwhile, Americans and the rest of the world have been hearing from longtime stalwart Obama administration supporter Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who chairs the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. She has called hero "leaker" Edward Snowden a traitor, but has also spoken of the "horrible details of a CIA program that never, never, never should have existed."

As The Guardian recently reported, Feinstein "accused the Central Intelligence Agency of a catalog of cover-ups, intimidation and smears aimed at investigators probing its role in an 'un-American and brutal' program of post-9/11 detention and interrogation" ("Feinstein accuses CIA of 'intimidating' Senate staff over torture report," Dan Roberts and Spencer Ackerman, The Guardian, March 11).

According to Roberts and Ackerman, the senator, "normally an administration loyalist, accused the CIA of potentially violating the U.S. Constitution and of criminal activity in its attempts to obstruct her committee's investigation into the agency's use of torture.

"She described the crisis as a 'defining moment' for political oversight of the U.S. intelligence service."

Moreover, Feinstein "revealed that CIA officials had also been reported to the Department of Justice for alleged violations of the Fourth Amendment and laws preventing them from domestic spying."

This time the agency is accused of spying on the Senate's intelligence committee.

There will surely be more on this startlingly revealing historic civil war within the Obama administration, but the most vital immediate action, as Feinstein says, is for "the White House to declassify" her Senate Intelligence Committee's "major findings" on the CIA, "which the president has the power to order."

As for President Obama's reaction?

"The president has great confidence in (CIA Director) John Brennan and confidence in our intelligence community and in professionals at the CIA," says White House Press Secretary Jay Carney.

But meanwhile, the CIA, buoyed by our president's glowing support of its leader, continues to be its own rule of law within the administration's disintegrating rule of law over us.

In a month or more, how much media coverage, even analysis, will there be of this "defining moment" in the prohibition of our Constitution's separation of powers?

But now the majority of the media, from print to digital, increasingly do not follow that essential advice on crucial issues, except for a small number of reporters.

Last summer, I reported on physicians Fred Burbank and Thomas J. Fogarty, who had written an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal about a tax to pay for Obamacare that was imposed on U.S. manufacturers of medical devices, which, I wrote, "could potentially short-circuit the lives of the elderly. But what medical device inventors have created is not limited to the aged."

What might this mean for you?

There is an answer in a short article that ran last month in the New York Post by Henry I. Miller, a physician, and Robert Wesson, fellow in scientific philosophy and public policy at Stanford's Hoover Institution.

Miller wrote about "how an obscure tax that helps pay for the program is hammering the U.S. medical-device industry, killing jobs and threatening lifesaving advances.

"These devices include some of the genuine miracles of modern medicine: pacemakers, artificial joints, replacement heart valves, arterial stents, scanners and radiotherapy machines" ("The industry Obamacare is killing," Henry I. Miller, New York Post, Feb. 21).

To insert a personal note: Last year, after an examination, my cardiologist urgently instructed me to have surgery to provide a pacemaker for my heart. With further research, I found that my life would be considerably shortened otherwise.

And when I was near 69, 20 years ago, I was told, "Your life is hanging by a thread," and my surgeon went on to perform open-heart surgery.

"You're lucky," he later told me. "Only in recent years did we know how to do what I just did."

Henry I. Miller continued: "Our country has been the global leader in medical devices ... and the industry is not composed of behemoths; 80 percent of its companies have 50 or fewer employees. ...

"After just 13 months, the tax has already cost on the order of 33,000 jobs in the industry itself and more than 100,000 more jobs due to the ripple effects. ... Countless other firms have frozen hiring and stopped matching contributions to retirement plans."

How many Americans, whose lives may depend on discoveries by medical device manufacturers, know this?

According to the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan Washington, D.C.-based think tank that studies tax policy, "the tax, like any excise tax, will increase the cost of the product on which it is levied. This calls into question the logic of the excise tax and its purpose in the Affordable Care Act. If it does in fact raise consumer prices, which seems likely, it contradicts the original purpose of the ACA, which was to lower healthcare prices" ("The ACA Medical Device Tax: Bad Policy in Need of Repeal," Kyle Pomerleau, taxfoundation.org, April 9, 2013).

The organization added that "the tax will adversely affect innovation, employment and competition."

Did you hear that, President Obama?

More specifically, the Advanced Medical Technology Association, or AdvaMed, a group that advocates for the medical device industry, recently took a survey of its members, asking them how the tax was affecting their businesses. The findings, released last month, showed "a significant reduction in jobs, R&D (research and development) and U.S. investment" ("New Survey Reveals Real World Impact of Medical Device Tax," advamed.org, Feb. 18).

Furthermore, in addition to the loss of thousands of jobs, "the report also found that almost one-third of respondents said they had reduced R&D as a result of the tax. Almost 10 percent of respondents said they had relocated manufacturing outside of the U.S. or expanded manufacturing abroad because of the tax."

And dig this news from the Washington Times: "Senate Democrats (yes, Democrats!), from states like Minnesota and Indiana, have been particularly vocal about their opposition (to the tax), due to the large number of affected manufacturers in their states. ...

"Congress has not found the roughly $30 billion ... needed to repeal the tax over the next 10 years. Lawmakers came close to scrapping the tax during the debate over federal spending and debt reduction in October, but those talks ultimately stalled" ("Obamacare medical device tax led to loss of 33,000 jobs, report says," Tom Howell Jr., Washington Times, Feb. 23).

Does Hillary Clinton have anything to say about the Obamacare tax on medical device manufacturers? Have the potential 2016 Republican presidential candidates said anything? What about the current congressional, state and local candidates around the country?

How many political candidates and current officeholders have heard from constituents who are concerned about the growing absence of discoveries in medical advancements that might, sooner or later, save their very lives?

Please let me know if there has been a single street demonstration calling for a reversal of this ever-larger decline in medical innovations that any of us might one day need.

References to impeaching Obama have nearly expired in the media and, as far as I can tell, among the populace at large. But shouldn't the frightful possibility of needless deaths of Americans of all backgrounds, including our loved ones, move us to protest the source of this life-shortening law?

A March on Washington by truly and deeply united Americans is in order, isn't it? And maybe even a large, integrated, protesting delegation joining the president's next vacation.

Stanford's Henry I. Miller has assured us that "there is strong bipartisan sentiment in Congress for repealing the tax."

So why not conduct face-to-face visits with your representatives in Congress? Bring the kids along. I think they'd be interested in their futures.

"As universal pre-K and the Common Core standards dominate the headlines, we cannot overlook a third subject that deserves top billing: keeping children in school and out of courts" (Feb. 22).

Kaye was writing in response to an op-ed that had run in the Times last month. In it, Robert K. Ross and Kenneth H. Zimmerman, the respective heads of the California Endowment and the United States programs for the Open Society Foundations, wrote: "Large numbers of students are kicked out, typically for nonviolent offenses, and suspensions have become the go-to response for even minor misbehavior, like carrying a plastic water gun to elementary school. ...

"The Civil Rights Project at UCLA found that the number of secondary school students suspended or expelled increased by some 40 percent between 1972-73 and 2009-10. ... A study of nearly 1 million Texas students found that those suspended or expelled for violations at the discretion of school officials were almost three times as likely to be in contact with the juvenile justice system the following year" ("Real Discipline in School," Robert K. Ross and Kenneth H. Zimmerman, New York Times, Feb. 17).

The "pipeline" that takes students from school to prison has become a national cliche. This mass creation of student outcasts is the product of "zero tolerance" policies in schools across this land of the free and home of the brave.

Only one organization, The Rutherford Institute in Charlottesville, Va., headed by constitutional lawyer and defender John Whitehead, has continuously intervened. Whitehead and his team of lawyers have represented in court – at no charge – these victims of zero tolerance. He also reports on these and other cases in his commentary at rutherford.org, which is distributed to hundreds of newspapers. Moreover, these penetrating reports and accounts of different cases also appear online in news websites and in blogs.

He is the Paul Revere of national alerts to preserve the constitutional liberties of current and future generations of self-recognizable Americans.

Here is such a case whose characteristics typically merit Whitehead's expertise (and which he wrote about last year):

At South Eastern Middle School in Fawn Grove, Pa., 10-year-old "fifth-grader Johnny Jones asked his teacher for a pencil during class. Jones walked to the front of the classroom to retrieve the pencil, and during his walk back to his seat, a classmate and friend of Johnny's held his folder like an imaginary gun and 'shot' at Johnny.

"Johnny playfully used his hands to draw the bowstrings on a completely imaginary 'bow' and 'shot' an arrow back.

"Seeing this, another girl in the class reported to the teacher that the boys were shooting at each other. ...

"The teacher ... contacted Johnny's mother, Beverly Jones, alerting her to the 'seriousness' of the violation because the children were using 'firearms' in their horseplay" ("Rutherford Institute Defends 10-Year-Old Suspended for Shooting Imaginary Arrow, Threatened With Expulsion Under Weapons Policy," www.rutherford.org, Dec. 4, 2013).

The district's zero tolerance policy, in addition to prohibiting "weapons," includes any "replica" or "look-alike" weapon.

The school's code of conduct required Principal John Horton to "contact the appropriate police department, complete an incident report to file with the school superintendent and begin the process of mandatory expulsion immediately."

Added Rutherford senior staff attorney Douglas R. McKusick in a Dec. 4, 2013, letter to South Eastern School District Superintendent Rona Kaufmann: "Johnny's rights were trampled without the due consideration. He was immediately threatened with expulsion, and thereafter summarily suspended without adequate justification. ...

"It is our belief that Johnny was deprived of adequate procedural safeguards in the principal's unilateral and misguided application of the zero tolerance policy against him. No actual gun, 'replica' or 'look-alike' was ever presented in any physical form, and Johnny's conduct amounted to nothing more than the kind of horseplay typical of children his age.

"For this reason, we request that you rescind the suspension and immediately remove all reference to it from Johnny's permanent school record."

And what was the eventual outcome, decided in January?

According to Rutherford's bold headline: "Victory." The story went on: "In response to pressure from The Rutherford Institute, school officials have agreed to rescind their suspension of a 10-year-old boy who was penalized under a school zero tolerance policy for shooting an imaginary 'arrow' at a fellow classmate, using nothing more than his hands and his imagination" ("Victory: School Officials to Lift Suspension From 10-Year-Old Who Shot Imaginary Arrow at Pennsylvania Elementary School," www.rutherford.org, Jan. 16).

Hooray! Johnny Jones remains an American! Quite a victory.

But then I read about another student turning into an outcast in Chicago – a child whom Rutherford is defending:

"Criticizing Chicago school officials for being overzealous, misguided and incapable of distinguishing between an impotent toy and a dangerous weapon, The Rutherford Institute has come to the defense of an 11-year-old boy who was suspended from school after he voluntarily turned in a non-firing plastic toy gun that had been forgotten in his jacket pocket.

"Caden Cook, a sixth-grader at Fredrick Funston Elementary School, was suspended for allegedly violating the school's weapons policy against dangerous objects, in addition to being ordered to undergo counseling, and subjected to intimidation tactics, interrogation, and dire threats by school officials – all without his mother being present" ("Zero Tolerance: Chicago School Officials Suspend 11-Year-Old Boy Under 'Dangerous Weapons' Policy for Voluntarily Turning in Non-Firing Toy Gun," www.rutherford.org, Feb. 6).

With The Rutherford Institute's intervention, I don't expect Caden's suspension to last for long, though.

But John Whitehead and his band of attorneys can't be everywhere.

Not surprisingly, most of the national media ignored this shocking ruling.

U.S. District Judge William Martini explained that police officers, who also infiltrated the locations they spied on, were trying "to locate budding terrorist conspiracies" ("Judge: Spying on NJ Muslims by NYPD Was Legal," Tom Hays, AP, Feb. 21).

The lawsuit, Hassan v. City of New York, was brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) on behalf of New Jersey plaintiffs who were targeted by the celebrated former New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly and his NYPD.

According to the CCR, the plaintiffs included "a decorated Iraq War veteran, current and former Rutgers University students, the parent organization of the Muslim Student Associations of Rutgers University (Newark and New Brunswick campuses), a coalition of New Jersey mosques, and the owners and proprietors of a grade school for Muslim girls" (ccrjustice.org).

They were tracked only because they were Muslims, and, of course, the surveillance was done without a warrant. As the CCR's legal director, Baher Azmy, correctly tells us:

"The court's decision gives legal sanction to the targeted discrimination of Muslims anywhere and everywhere in this country, without limitation, for no other reason than their religion" ("Court Gives NYPD Green Light to Conduct Religious Surveillance," ccrjustice.org).

For the future of our republic, this decision, which trashes our Constitution, should be discussed and debated in our schools as its appeal moves through the federal courts – ultimately, I assume, to the Supreme Court. I doubt that many of our young will even know about the case unless the press stays on it, reporting on such educational information from Azmy as:

"The ruling is a modern-day version of the discredited Korematsu decision allowing the wholesale internment of Japanese Americans based solely on their ancestry.

"It is a troubling and dangerous decision."

And all Americans should continue following this story knowing this fact from the CCR:

"After more than a decade in operation, the surveillance program (by New York police) has produced not a single lead on terrorist activity."

While I was a reporter for The Village Voice in New York, I wrote a number of investigative accounts on Commissioner Kelly's enthusiastic justification of this patently unconstitutional extension of the NYPD. I also reported on the constant applause he and the department received from then New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

The mayor also reveled in the cops' mammoth stop-and-frisk operations against mostly blacks and Latinos in New York.

Bloomberg had insisted on being New York City's "education mayor" while the school system foundered. However, with the exception of certain targeted neighborhoods, he remained popular enough that he could have been re-elected had the law allowed it.

And while the former mayor doesn't care (not surprisingly), courses on the Constitution and dramatic accounts of how it has survived are missing in the New York City school system – and in many other cities.

But one media organization that continues to cover the mass removal of citizenship from Muslims is the Associated Press. Its reporters won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of stories factually detailing the extent and depth of the NYPD's surveillance and infiltration.

In his ruling affirming the legality of this Orwellian pursuit of Muslims who could be associated with terrorists, Judge Martini castigated the AP, which "covertly obtained the materials and published them without authorization. Thus the injury, if any existed, is not fairly traceable to the city (of New York)."

The culprits, apparently, were the press and the uncurbed First Amendment.

In its complaint filed on behalf of the plaintiffs, the CCR noted, "the NYPD also closely monitors the activities of Muslim Student Associations at colleges and universities in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Pennsylvania."

Why the other states' Muslim groups?

Simply because their membership is Muslim. The NYPD's "reports include the names of professors, scholars and students without any evidence that they engaged in wrongdoing."

Further discarding their targets' constitutional rights, "undercover NYPD officers sometimes pose as students to attend MSA events. One officer, for example, went on a rafting trip with an MSA and monitored and recorded how often the student participants on the trip prayed, and that they discussed religious topics."

Such revealing information!

I do hope that the justices of the Supreme Court will finally allow television cameras during their oral arguments on this case and others. I have been in the high court's press section for a few of those oral arguments, and it's very informative to witness how the justices – in questioning the attorneys and also answering their questions – reveal their preset conclusions as they try to shape the votes of their colleagues.

If the Supreme Court opens those sessions as they take place, classrooms all over the country should tune in to hear how it was possible for American Muslims to be banished from our Constitution in this century – with so little attention, let alone outrage, from the rest of the country.

Quoted in "Breaking our prison habit" in the Feb. 13 New York Daily News by the invaluably probing news analyst Errol Lewis, Eric Holder declares: "Too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long, and for no truly good law enforcement reason."

How many Americans are what Errol Lewis adds to Eric Holder's judgment of our overflowing cages:

"The number of inmates in federal prisons has soared by a staggering 800 percent since 1980, and federal lockouts are now 40 percent overcapacity. ...

"Individual states are groaning under the burden as well. Nebraska's prisons are at 140 percent of capacity. Oklahoma's have exceeded 99 percent of capacity.

Adds Lewis: "The failed war on drugs has also swelled the prison population. Addicts caught with small amounts of the illegal poison they ingest – 30 grams of cocaine, for example, the equivalent of 30 restaurant sugar packets – can be labeled 'traffickers' and tossed into prison for years."

And in "America on Probation," (New York Times, Jan. 27), Bill Keller, New York Times columnist and former executive editor, made this key accusatory point: "The quest for safe and humane alternatives to lockup faces opposition from prosecutors protecting their leverage, from corrections employee unions protecting jobs and from a private prison industry protecting profits.

"(Private prison operators, who house about 9 percent of prison inmates, have a vested interest in keeping prisons full because they are paid based on occupancy)."

And now comes Eric Holder, not only protesting our epidemic of prisons but also trying to do something about keeping Americans released from prisons from going back after they become free citizens again.

On Feb. 11, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law reported on Holder's "great step forward on restoring voting rights."

On that day, the attorney general "urged states to restore voting rights to people of past criminal convictions." To be covered, the Brennan Center explained, are "those who have completed probation, parole and paid all fines. Many states already go further than this and restore rights upon release from incarceration."

But Myrna Perez, Democracy Program deputy director, reminds us that "Nearly 6 million Americans are barred from voting because of a criminal conviction in their past."

And dig this: "Three states permanently disenfranchise the citizens."

Calling Eric Holder's pledge "a significant step forward for democracy," she makes the important point that "citizens with criminal convictions who are living and working in our communities should have the responsibility and the right to participate in our democracy by voting.

"Congress should act quickly to pass the Democracy Restoration Act, which would restore voting rights and federal elections to those who have served their time." This Congress? Where a majority of both parties are far less concerned with strengthening actual real-time democracy than with dominating the ceaseless civil war in the House and Senate?

Moreover, adds Nicole Austin-Hillery, director of the Brennan Center's Washington office: "With the largest prison population in the world and millions of Americans caught in a system of mass incarceration, ensuring that former offenders can fully regain their core rights as American citizens is a vital means of reducing recidivism, by integrating them back into society."

As I will report in detail later, a new book by Doran Larson presents a collection of essays written by prisoners across America. In "Fourth City: Essays From the Prisons in America" (Michigan State University Press), Larson tells you in his introduction:

"The United States imprisons a greater number and percentage of its own citizens than any other nation on earth; greater than Russia, China, Cuba or Iran."

From his cage, James Castrillo of Maine writes in "Fourth City": "I was blind to the reality that the path I was on leads nowhere, and fast. ... Is this too great an obstacle to overcome? A part of me says, yes, there's no sense in trying; it's too hard, too late. ...

"Another part of me, the strongest part, won't quit. Wants to keep fighting. I think of how badly ... I want to make it in this world, the right way. ... Can I overcome the disappointment that tests my sanity?

"Disappointment is useless in a place like this because it gets you nowhere."

What Eric Holder and others are doing, says Errol Lewis, "adds up to the start of something big: a nation beginning to think outside the cell when it comes to crime and justice."

As always, how big a change depends on you, the citizen voter.

"Texas, the nation's most active death penalty state, generally waits until all appeals are exhausted before carrying out executions" ("Lawyers: Mo. Moving Too Quickly on Executions," the Associated Press, Jan. 31).

But, as I reported last week, citing a New York Times editorial, certain states' disregard of death row inmates' final last-minute appeals is becoming more common. I wrote about Herbert Smulls, who was executed in Missouri on Jan. 29 for the 1991 murder of a jewelry store owner. His lawyers had made appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court for a stay of execution, claiming Smulls' Eighth and 14th Amendment rights had been denied. Their most urgent appeal was sent just before 10 p.m. on the night of Smulls' planned execution.

However, as reported by numerous outlets, Smulls' departure from this planet began at 10:11 p.m. He was pronounced dead at 10:20 p.m.

But, according to the AP, one of Smulls' lawyers, Joseph Luby, "received an email at 10:30 p.m. from the Supreme Court, saying the stay application was denied at 10:24 p.m. – four minutes after Smulls was pronounced dead."

That doubly obliterated Smulls without a hearing.

It may interest you, the reader, to know that "Smulls, who was black, was convicted by an all-white jury."

Additionally, a key element of Smulls' appeals was the nature of the drugs Missouri finally used to kill him. As the AP, the Times and other media have reported, Missouri and certain other states hide the identities of certain execution drugs and the compounding pharmacies supplying them.

For example, the AP noted in its report on Smulls' passing that "two weeks ago, Ohio inmate Dennis McGuire took 26 minutes to die by injection, gasping repeatedly as he lay on a gurney with his mouth opening and closing. And on Jan. 9, Oklahoma inmate Michael Lee Wilson's final words were, 'I feel my whole body burning.'"

It also may interest official executioners in Iran, North Korea, China and other expeditious nations that, according to the AP, the attorneys for Smulls expressed concern "that it was the third straight case in which Missouri has moved ahead with an execution while the case was still in court."

I'd appreciate hearing from anyone in another state who is keeping count of death row inmates being extinguished, while their cases are still on appeal under our once glorified system of justice.

Some state legislators are now working to create investigative procedures into precisely what poisons are ending the lives of these prisoners. I would very much like to hear from them. I'd also like to hear from recently awakened citizens who can inform me whether any candidates in local, state or federal elections are breaking through official silence on these shrouded homicides.

Also, what of the ministers, priests and rabbis living in these states that are speeding up executions? Are any of them speaking up?

I also am increasingly curious about the quality of legal representation throughout the nation and how well attorneys are handling the cases of their clients on death row. How many of these prisoners have lawyers with the know-how and persistence of Herbert Smulls' attorneys?

Moreover – an essential question – how many inmates now waiting on death row in states that hide their execution methods have lawyers with the capacity to be of any real use to them?

This raises a much more wide-ranging question about the present state of American justice.

In a recent issue of The Week, Andrew Cohen reported on "the one area where America really needs more lawyers."

He began: "Mike Engle, a public defender in Nashville, stood up in a local courtroom last month and raised a troubling issue that has national resonance.

"After prosecutors notified a trial judge that they were seeking the death penalty against an indigent defendant named Lorenzo Jenkins, who is accused of murdering three people, Engle asked the judge to assign a private attorney to handle the case on behalf of the defendant" ("This is the one area where America really needs more lawyers," Andrew Cohen, The Week, Jan. 22).

According to the AP, the public defender expressed his concerns to the judge thusly: "Our office, quite frankly, lacks the resources to defend a death penalty case" ("Private attorney weighed in death penalty case," AP, Dec. 14, 2013).

The Week's Cohen continued: "This surely is not what the United States Supreme Court had in mind in 1963 when it first recognized a constitutional right to counsel in Gideon v. Wainwright.

"What the justices did not do in Gideon, and what has haunted the court system ever since, is to require states to enforce the right to counsel through policies and programs (and most of all, funding) that ensures adequate representation in all criminal cases."

And dig this deeply shameful truth about our system of justice: "The result has been catastrophic for millions of Americans who cannot afford their own attorney. There are no precise, recent figures telling us how many indigent defendants need lawyers each year – but in 2007 the figure was at least six million people."

Furthermore, Cohen reported in The Week, "as the Supreme Court has gotten more conservative since Gideon, it has consistently refused to force state legislators to adequately fund defense work or to overturn convictions even where criminal defendants received patently ineffective assistance from overworked public defenders.

"As a matter of law, this must change."

Those of you who are interested in bringing justice to such defendants should remember this when you vote for president in 2016.

He'd hoped that a clear understanding of the Constitution's due process protections for every citizen would reveal how the death-penalty practices of certain states violate the Constitution.

As another Supreme Court justice, Harry Blackmun, chillingly wrote in a dissenting opinion in Callins v. Collins, "From this day forward, I shall no longer tinker with the machinery of death."

Blackmun thereby decided the death penalty was fundamentally unconstitutional.

While some states have ended the death penalty, it still persists in others, and capital punishment remains a federal death sentence.

Indeed, a shocking (and, to me, sickening) lead editorial in the New York Times last week revealed the means certain states use to continue creating death-penalty corpses. These states viciously violate not only the Constitution, but also the most basic American rules of law and our most profound national values.

How many of us know what those are?

Deserving at the very least a Pulitzer, this editorial explained how certain remaining death-penalty states "hide the means by which they kill people" ("Secrecy Behind Executions," New York Times, Jan. 30).

How did this unbounded cruel and unusual punishment come about?

According to the editorial: "Because many drug manufacturers now refuse to supply drugs for use in executions, states are scrambling to replenish their stocks. This often means turning to compounding pharmacies, which exist in a largely unregulated world. ...

"There have been multiple reports of previously untested drug combinations leading to botched executions, which is a polite way of saying the condemned person suffered greatly while being put to death."

Do these states not remember the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of "cruel and unusual punishment"?

I have no idea how many Americans, if any, would react by saying, "So what? They were convicted, weren't they? What's this fuss about? We're a lot better off without them."

But some of you may be ashamed.

In any case, most of the involved juries, prosecutors, judges and members of state executive branches have shown no public concern. Nor have investigative reporters located in these areas shown enough concern. There have been a few exceptions.

But I will continue to follow this story closely to see if there is any reaction to these unpunished atrocities from the media, legislatures (including Congress) and political candidates throughout this land.

Meanwhile, a few judges have remembered the Constitution, with one in Georgia issuing "a last-minute stay of execution to one inmate, reasoning that the state's secrecy law 'makes it impossible' to show that the drug protocol violates the Eighth Amendment."

So how about ruling that Georgia's secrecy law is unconstitutional, because it extinguishes inmates by unknown and possibly criminal means?

And shouldn't certain punishments apply to those high officials who authorized the state secrecy law's use?

Let's look at the actual case of the late Herbert Smulls, who was executed in Bonne Terre, Mo., on Wednesday, Jan. 29, "for the 1991 murder of a jewelry store owner." His attorney had tried desperately to stay Smulls' forthcoming execution by unknown means, citing his Eighth Amendment rights.

But a federal appeals court in Missouri ruled against Smulls' claim that he was "entitled to basic information about the drugs that would be used to put him to death."

As Smulls involuntarily departed, I expect he knew by then he was being deprived of his 14th Amendment guarantee that no American citizen shall be "deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law," nor without "the equal protection of the laws."

How did the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals in Missouri thereby dispose of Herbert Smulls' 14th Amendment rights?

The New York Times editorial tells us that the court "ruled that Mr. Smulls had no constitutional claim against Missouri's practice because he had not demonstrated that 'the risk of severe pain' from the state's intended drug protocol would be substantially greater than a readily available alternative."

The judges on this highest court had seen and rejected the dissenting opinion, which "'places an absurd burden on death row inmates,' who must identify 'a readily available alternative method for their own executions,' even though the state won't let them see the method it plans to use."

Reading that brought me back to my last conversation with Justice Brennan soon after illness led him to retire from the Supreme Court.

"Listen, pal," he said (he often called friends "pal"), "you have to remember liberty is a fragile thing."

That's why he spent his life protecting it.

The Times' editorial climaxed, with which Brennan would have agreed: "In the 21st century, the United States has no business putting people to death by any means. Public support for capital punishment has reached a 40-year low, and virtually all other Western societies have rejected it. It will end here, too, but not until this despicable practice is dragged out into the open for all to see."

But what about the Supreme Court? Weren't there appeals to stay Herbert Smulls' execution? Yes, but the last appeal was not denied by the high court until four minutes after he had been declared officially dead. So he really had no hearing on this final appeal from the Supreme Court.

To be continued.

Here is James Madison in Federalist Paper No. 51: "In order to lay a due foundation for that separate and distinct exercise of the different powers of government, which to a certain extent is admitted on all hands to be essential to the preservation of liberty, it is evident that each department should have a will of its own; and consequently should be so constituted that the members of each should have as little agency as possible in the appointment of the members of the others."

He went even further: "It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part."

But here comes our commander in chief, who customarily tosses the separation of powers into the nearest wastepaper basket. Dig this recent headline from bizpac.com, which summed up Barack Obama's approach to passing legislation in 2014: "'I've got a pen and I've got a phone': Obama says he'll run right over Congress this year" (Michael Dorstewitz, Jan. 15).

Now Obama has been publicly glorifying the extent of his seemingly boundless executive powers, as Justin Snow reported for Metro Weekly:

"With a portrait of George Washington looking down at him, Obama told reporters gathered in the Cabinet Room of the White House" – referring to his all-powerful 'pen and phone' – that he is ready to bypass Congress if necessary to get things done" ("Obama's executive order problem," Justin Snow, Metro Weekly, Jan. 17).

Obama discussed taking "executive actions and administrative actions that move the ball forward in helping to make sure our kids are getting the best education possible and making sure that our businesses are getting the kind of support and help they need to grow and advance to make sure that people are getting the skills that they need to get those jobs that our businesses are creating."

Should any of you ever get the chance to be in Obama's royal presence, make sure to bow properly.

Meanwhile, that declaration reveals what can continue to happen for the rest of his reign unless a due process impeachment procedure soon becomes possible.

How can the impeachment process happen? We The People must be heard resoundingly, because – as James Madison and Thomas Jefferson warned – it's up to us to remain Americans.

Very soon after first taking office, as I've reported previously, President Obama actually prevented trials from being held accusing him of unilaterally using "renditions" – kidnapping alleged terrorists from the streets of their countries to be taken to nations known for torturing suspects. He used the state secrets privilege to close off our system of justice more often than Bush ever did. Since then, Obama has not forbidden renditions. And because renditions are classified, we don't know who has been taken where.

How many reasons are there to impeach Barack Obama? Read the definitive accounting, meticulously documented and footnoted by best-selling authors Aaron Klein and Brenda Elliott: "Impeachable Offenses: The Case for Removing Barack Obama from Office"

And as I often remind you, because most of the media has gone to sleep on this, in 2011, Obama signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012, which, for the first time in our history, permitted the military to arrest and detain U.S. citizens indefinitely – including in this country – for allegedly being "associated" with terrorists, without evidence presented before an American court.

If these reminders of Chinese justice don't add pressing cause for an impeachment investigation, what on earth will?

Jeffrey Kuhner of the Washington Times has written previously about Obama's expansion of power, which makes King George III look rather puny by comparison:

Back in March 2012, "the White House released an executive order, 'National Defense Resources Preparedness.' The document is stunning in its audacity and a flagrant violation of the Constitution. It states that, in case of a war or national emergency, the federal government has the authority to take over almost every aspect of American society. Food, livestock, farming equipment, manufacturing, industry, energy, transportation, hospitals, health care facilities, water resources, defense and construction."

All of this could come under the control of President Obama – or whoever is holding the office.

"The order empowers the president to dispense these vast resources as he sees fit during a national crisis. ...

"The executive branch is arrogating responsibilities precluded by the Constitution without even asking the permission of Congress. The order gives Mr. Obama a blank check to erect a centralized authoritarian state. ..."

"The backdrop to the executive order is the looming showdown with Iran. The administration says the 'window for diplomacy is closing'" ("Obama's power grab," Jeffrey Kuhner, Washington Times, March 22, 2012).

How much of this range of executive power, domestically and internationally, will remain under the next president? How much of it will animate the 2014 congressional campaigns, as well as the next presidential race? How many of us are even aware of these precedents that are being set for this America?

And as vacancies occur on the Supreme Court, who will be the next president to attempt to fill them?

This question haunts me more and more: How many kids in school now (and those to come) have any debatable idea of what's going on with our Constitution? Do they understand how Obama's uses of executive power have changed what used to be America's rule of law and our globally distinctive values?

Have I disturbed your sleep at all?

The 70-year-old Farina, who'd been retired before agreeing to take the job, focuses on individual students, scorning collective standardized tests. She also insists that parents, largely overlooked by previous chancellors and mayors, be active partners with her.

As the New York Times' Ginia Bellafante noted:

"Farina is a progressive educator who speaks movingly about returning joy to the project of teaching children" ("Schools Chancellor Brings Joyful and Fierce Style," Ginia Bellafante, New York Times, Jan. 3).

Farina is against "myopic systems of learning in which real knowledge becomes a casualty of test knowledge, and what she calls 'the gotcha mentality' of the (Michael) Bloomberg years, when teachers and principals were often abandoned instead of being given whatever support they might need to improve."

"Even the worst principals work hard," Farina told Bellafante. "When we support them, then we can hold them accountable."

Remarkably, before the new chancellor had retired, she was a 40-year member of the largest school system in the United States. Farina had been a teacher, principal, superintendent and even deputy chancellor in the Bloomberg administration.

However, she resigned from that position because her principals were being increasingly disrespected by those on top.

As a principal, when those beneath her did not become accountable, Farina could be tough, as Bellafante noted:

"Serving as the principal of Public School 6 on the Upper East Side during the 1990s, she overturned 80 percent of the staff, greatly improving the school's standing."

Farina told Bellafante about a teacher whose work was so bad that she would "wake up during the night thinking about the children who had to deal with this teacher."

Where did Farina come from, this singular prober of children's learning capabilities?

According to the Huffington Post's Joy Resmovits, she "grew up in Brooklyn, the daughter of two Spanish immigrants who spoke that language at home" ("NYC Schools Chancellor Pick Carmen Farina Leaves More Questions Than Answers," Joy Resmovits, huffingtonpost.com, Dec. 30, 2013).

At the mayor's press conference announcing Farina's appointment, "she told a story of a postcard that her father, who she said had a third-grade education and taught her about the importance of education, received in the mail from her school. The postcard asked why Farina never attended class, though she hadn't been absent.

"When her father asked about the postcard, he was told that Farina's teacher couldn't properly pronounce her last name, and Farina didn't respond to the name the teacher made up for her – so she was labeled absent."

At the press conference, Farina said, "She absolutely made me feel invisible."

But years later, as she ascended the New York City school system, Farina became ever more visible. As Resmovits wrote, "In 2001, she was elected to lead Brooklyn's school District 15 – that's where she met de Blasio, who held his first elected office there as a school board member. ...

"Since then, she has been his informal education adviser – always taking his calls when he needed something, de Blasio said. ..."

De Blasio said "he was confident she could help alleviate some of the city's major problems – not the least of which is that only 22 percent (italics mine) of high school graduates were found to be college-ready."

With regard to that 22 percent, former Mayor Bloomberg, who had anointed himself as "the education mayor" while in office, praised himself lavishly for what he had accomplished for the city's students.

Worth keeping in mind as Farina takes charge is that, as the Times' Bellafante pointed out, she "is a fan of 'balanced literacy,' designed chiefly by professor Lucy Calkins of Columbia, an approach rooted in the idea that children build reading skill by reading books that they love and that engage them."

Yes indeed! Much of my lifelong deep pleasure in reading came from books I'd discovered on my own.

But Farina has to deal with more than reading. She's discussed ways "to teach fundamentals in a more traditional way until fourth grade or so, to lay the groundwork for more expansive learning, and then take things in more experimental directions.

"The Ascend network of charter schools, educating some of the poorest children in the city in central Brooklyn, has had great success with that model, borrowing the humanities-driven approach of progressive private schools once children are beyond the earliest elementary grades. By sixth grade, Ascend students are reading 'The Iliad.'"

And dig Farina's classroom keys to guiding students' discoveries while learning, according to the Times:

"Dialogue, debate and excitement in the classroom should obviously be the goals of all educators."

How I wish that were true!

A recent Associated Press report covered Farina's first day as chancellor, following her around a New York middle school. Her down-to-earth personality came across in this exchange:

"The word 'chancellor' kind of gives me the shivers," she said, according to the AP. "So just call me Carmen. 'Cause everybody does" ("New schools chancellor Carmen Farina starts job," The Associated Press, Jan. 2).

The report went on: "As she visited students working on writing in a small group in one classroom, their peers in another group at the other end of the room burst out with answers to their teacher's question."

"You hear the noise in the room?" Farina said to those accompanying her on her visit. "That's good. I only like schools where kids are talking and buzzing – only they're actually learning."

Whatever controversies Mayor de Blasio gets into – and there will be many, because New York can be the most contentious city on the planet – he has committed a public service by appointing Farina.

When I taught at New York University, I asked members of every class to name a teacher they'd had, from kindergarten on, who had changed their lives. Very few hands went up.

In the future, many hands will wave when that question is asked amid hosannas to Carmen Farina.

Those students often failing these tests are lower-income blacks and Hispanics, and students with special needs such as English language difficulties. But many other children fail them, too.

Furthermore, many of these students who keep failing learn in school that they are dumb and drop out to begin dead-end lives.

But now, parents are actually reading about these tests and increasingly organizing against them. For example, as Bob Peterson, the president of the Milwaukee Teachers' Education Association, commented on his blog last fall, "This year both the state and the school district have increased testing for 4-, 5-, 6- and 7-year-old students in the district" ("Parent Opposition to Early Childhood Testing on the Increase," Bob Peterson, "Public Education: This is what democracy looks like," Oct. 1, 2013).

He went on to write about Milwaukee parent Jasmine Alinder, whose daughter was just starting kindergarten. Alinder, the president of Parents for Public Schools of Milwaukee, explained her frustrations in an essay she posted to Facebook, which Peterson quoted extensively from.

Alinder wrote: "MAP (Measure of Academic Progress) testing for 5-year-olds does not test math and reading competency. At best it tests patience and computer literacy, which is more likely an indication of computer access at home.

"At worst it creates a culture of stress and frustration around standardized testing that may scar some of these children for the rest of their school careers" ("A Parent's View: MAP Testing of Five-Year-Old Kindergartners," Jasmine Alinder, Sept. 25, 2013).

I've known older kids taking such tests in higher-income neighborhoods. They get sick to their stomachs taking practice tests in preparation for the actual tests that will be on their permanent records.

What do they really learn from such tests?

But parents are continuing to speak up nationally, as AlterNet reported last October on a school in my city, New York:

"The Castle Bridge Elementary School is a progressive, dual-language K-2 school in the Washington Heights section. ... When parents there learned of a plan to give multiple choice tests to children as young as kindergarten, they decided enough was enough. They refused to let their children be tested" ("What Happens When Parents Stand Up and Say No to Testing?" Elizabeth Hines, AlterNet, Oct. 30, 2013).

Actually, as reported in the New York Daily News, "more than 80 percent of parents opted to have their kids sit out the exam" ("Forget teaching to the test – at this Washington Heights elementary school, parents canceled it!" Rachel Monahan, Oct. 21, 2013).

So the principal canceled the test.

A penetratingly clear, common-sense reason for doing away with collective standardized tests is provided by Neal McCluskey, the associate director of the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom. (I am a senior fellow at Cato.)

In the November/December 2013 Cato Policy Report, which was on the emergence of the Common Core State Standards, McCluskey wrote: "Why is the idea of common standards (and tests) wrong? Simply put, it's because all children are different. They learn different things at different rates during different times.

"They start from different places. They have different interests. The idea that they should all be fed into some sort of lock-step standardized system doesn't fit with the reality of human beings" ("Common Core: The Great Debate," Cato Policy Report, Nov./Dec. 2013).

For many years, until arthritis limited my traveling, I saw these human differentiations – from elementary school through high school – in classrooms around the country. Getting to speak to students outside of their schools, I found some of their homes and neighborhoods were such that they distracted the kids from getting an education. Indeed, I saw individual differences in the children's hearing and vision capabilities that deeply affected how and when they learned.

In addition to McCluskey's views on the various ways children learn how to learn, another beneficial perspective comes from an article sent to me by Nancy Carlsson-Paige, professor emerita of early childhood education at Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass. The article, on the shortcomings of standardized collective testing, was co-authored with Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers.

I am often at odds with the American Federation of Teachers, but as I have reported elsewhere, I do agree with Weingarten's efforts to have public schools become part of an evolving interaction with the surrounding community.

In the article, she and Carlsson-Paige explained: "Young kids learn actively, through hands-on experiences in the real world. They develop skills over time through a process of building ideas. But the process is not always linear and is not quantifiable; expecting young children to know specific facts or skills at specified ages is not compatible with how they learn.

"It emphasizes right and wrong answers instead of the developmental progressions that typify their learning. ...

"They need to figure out how things work, explore, question and have fun" ("Early Learning: This Is Not a Test," Randi Weingarten and Nancy Carlsson-Paige, aft.org, Nov. 17, 2013).

Instead of "having fun" as a goal, I would emphasize enabling young kids to discover the joy of learning. This leads them to exploring the range of their capacities as knowledgeable individuals in our society on how it works.

Again and again I've seen this dramatic discovery happen when I tell kids why we have, for example, a First Amendment and what it has taken for that right to survive so that they can use it.

For another example, I know an 8-year-old who gets high on science classes, and when I bring her Robert Louis Stevenson's "A Child's Garden of Verses," she dives right in as her imagination flares up.

What too many teachers, principals and school boards have yet to learn is that education can be very exciting for students preparing to be active citizens.

Next week: I report on Carmen Farina, the new chancellor of schools of New York City – a possible national model for how children can and do experience the joy of learning.