Why was Barack Obama silent about this “house of horrors”? Maybe because, as I’ve previously reported, he didn’t want it known that as a state senator in Illinois, he had persistently opposed a bill, the Born-Alive Infant Protection Act, which would have provided medical care for babies who survive botched abortions.

He had voted “No” on the bill in March 2001 and “Present” later that same month. Explaining Obama’s vote, WND reports, “in the Illinois Senate, voting ‘Present’ is the equivalent of voting ‘No,’ because a bill must have a majority counting only ‘Yes’ votes to pass” (“Gosnell conviction a setback for Obama,” May 13).

Jill Stanek, an Illinois nurse and pro-life advocate whom I had previously interviewed, testified in 2003 before the Illinois Senate Health and Human Services Committee on the Born-Alive Infant Protection Act. She told of a colleague who “accidentally threw a live aborted baby in the garbage who had been left on the counter of the Soiled Utility Room wrapped in a disposable towel.

“When the associate realized what she had done, she started going through the trash to find the baby, and the baby fell out of the towel and on to the floor.”

As president, Obama has steadfastly supported late-term abortions. But he doesn’t need to worry about the public being reminded of his rejection of the Born-Alive Infant Protection Act. That’s because of the unyielding media attention that’s been concentrated on his Justice Department’s invasions of the Associated Press’ First Amendment freedoms, as well as the Internal Revenue Service’s questioning of citizens’ political groups, focusing, for example, on those with “patriot” and “tea party” in their names. The IRS was also curious to know if any of these groups had publicly opposed specific policies, like Obamacare.

Of what country does Obama think he’s president?

As for Dr. Kermit Gosnell, his case is done. In the May 15 Wall Street Journal, Peter Loftus reports that he has been sentenced “to spend the rest of his life in prison for the murders of babies who were born alive at his Philadelphia abortion clinic, avoiding a potential death penalty in a deal with city prosecutors.”

But the horrifying details of his case have startlingly educated many Americans, including this one, about the extent of other “houses of horror” throughout this nation.

The Washington Times’ Jeanneane Maxon writes: “Gosnell’s clinic is not the only ‘house of horrors’ in our nation. In recent years, 15 states have investigated substandard conditions and providers” (“Why Big Abortion shares Gosnell’s guilt,” May 15).

For one of many examples, Helen Pow reveals in the Daily Mail that “Houston doctor Douglas Karpen is accused by four former employees of delivering live fetuses during third-trimester abortions and killing them by either snipping their spinal cord (the Gosnell method), stabbing a surgical instrument into their heads or ‘twisting their heads off their necks with his own bare hands’” (“Second ‘house of horrors’ abortion clinic where doctor ‘twisted heads off fetus’ necks with his bare hands’ is investigated in Texas,” May 16).

Pow, citing anti-abortion group Life Dynamics’ video interview with one of the doctor’s former employees, writes that in these latter murders, the fetus coming completely out “was still alive because it was still moving and you could see the stomach breathing.”

The Texas Department of State Health Services is investigating.

As for Gosnell’s “house of horrors,” we now know that his “abortion center was inspected only after a federal drug raid in 2010. It was the first time the facility had been inspected in 17 years because state officials ignored complaints and failed to visit Gosnell’s Women’s Medical Society for years” (“Kermit Gosnell Jury Hung on Two Counts, Doesn’t Say Which Ones,” Steven Ertelt, LifeNews.com, May 13).

While some states didn’t need Gosnell to be awakened to the need for strenuous oversight of abortions, what about the many others that do? As WND senior correspondent and author Jerome Corsi insists:

“After the Gosnell conviction, no state health official can rest comfortably that abortion doctors are acting responsibly, unless the state has a history of rigorous health standards applied by abortion clinics operating in the state.”

This includes, he adds, making sure restrictions on late-term abortions are actually being followed.

Because I am among the many pro-life and pro-choice Americans mourning those babies who were assassinated by Dr. Kermit Gosnell, I will end with this:

Notorious late-term abortionist LeRoy Carhart “was awarded the 2009 William K. Rashbaum, M.D., Abortion Provider Award by Physicians for Reproductive Health … NARAL Pro-Choice America (which no longer stands for National Abortion Rights Action League, given that some people might think that name icky) gave him its Hero Award that same year” (“Kermit Gosnell Is Not an Outlier,” Shannen W. Coffin, nationalreview.com, April 12).

Coffin contiues: “There’s very little difference between what Carhart does on a regular basis and what Kermit Gosnell (stood) on trial for.”

When is NARAL Pro-Choice America going to demand the return of that Hero Award?

I’m a pro-lifer who agrees with Jerome Corsi: “Now that murder charges have been found to apply to abortion practices in Pennsylvania, no state should assume a health department trying to be politically correct can be assumed in the future to be free of criminal liabilities.”

Including murder.

In a Jan. 1 editorial, the New York Times provided the answer: “The juvenile justice system in the United States is supposed to focus on rehabilitation for young offenders. But for generations, it has largely been a purgatory, failing to protect them or give them the help and counseling they need to become law-abiding adults.

“Children who end up in juvenile courts often do not get due process protections like written complaints presenting the charges against them … or meaningful assistance of counsel” (“Juvenile Court Reform in Tennessee,” New York Times).

This editorial laggardly followed a vital story about Shelby County, Tenn., and the Department of Justice that was buried inside the Dec. 18, 2012, Times. The story should have been on the front page; it had almost been entirely ignored by the media in all its forms:

“The county and the Justice Department signed an extensive agreement to overhaul the county’s juvenile justice system” (“Deal Signed in Tennessee on Justice for Youths,” Kim Severson, New York Times, Dec. 18, 2012).

I was glad to discover that the Justice Department does remember the actual meaning of its name, after its torture rationalizations under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and its agreement with Barack Obama’s personally directed “kill lists.”

This Dec. 17, 2012, agreement contained some “first of its kind” policies, as reported by the Times, that were the result of the Justice Department’s 2009 investigation into Shelby County’s juvenile justice system. Among the frightful distortions of the Constitution the department found:

“Black teenagers were twice as likely as white teenagers to be detained and were sent to adult criminal court for minor infractions far more often than whites.

“Black or white, teenagers locked up by the county attempted suicide at record rates and were sometimes strapped to deep, white restraint chairs and left alone up to five times longer than the law allowed.

“They languished over long weekends without proper hearings, were not read their Miranda rights and received crucial court documents just before hearings, if they received them at all. …”

Tom Perez, an assistant attorney general in the Justice Department, told the Times: “What we saw was an assembly line with very little quality assurance.”

What does his boss, Eric Holder, think?

Meanwhile, President Obama, who lectured on constitutional law at the University of Chicago earlier in his career, has yet to make a comment on the life lessons of these Tennessee teenagers.

So what is changing now in Tennessee because of its agreement with the federal government? Dig this, students and parents around this land of the free:

“Some teenagers whose offenses are not serious are now issued summonses instead of being hauled to detention to await a hearing, and a model in-school program of tutoring, mentoring and counseling has been keeping students who commit minor offenses out of juvenile court altogether.

“Conditions inside the facilities have improved as well, federal investigators said. Three restraint chairs, for example, have been removed, and better suicide prevention protocols are in place.”

Wow! Those kids are beginning to get a small sense of what it is to be an American.

More changes that must still be made in the state of Tennessee include “advising teenagers of their Miranda rights and holding hearings within 48 hours to determine if children should remain in custody.”

I ask readers if your state, like Tennessee, is currently “developing a cadre of public defenders (hardly any of these kids’ families can afford private lawyers) well versed in juvenile court law and providing better medical and mental health treatment for children in detention”?

The Times report briefly cited changes taking place in other states: “Under a new program in New York called the Close To Home initiative … city teenagers who are in large juvenile facilities in other parts of the state will be sent to improved programs in their own neighborhoods.” Then parents won’t have to trek many miles to stay in touch with their kids.

But the Justice Department is still targeting other miscreant states, having sued “Meridian, Miss., and Lauderdale County, saying the school system was running a ‘school-to-prison pipeline’ in which students were jailed for infractions as minor as talking back to teachers or wearing socks that violated school dress codes.

“Some students had been shipped 80 miles to a juvenile detention center without probable cause or legal representation.”

The 2014 elections are getting nearer – not just for Congress, but at the state and local level as well. How many candidates of either party will be roused, or say a word, about why so many American teenagers are second-class citizens? Or, more accurately, why they aren’t citizens of this nation at all while imprisoned?

And, as always, I ask the media, including so-called social media, why they aren’t more involved in reporting on these youthful offenders who have been sentenced to be exiled from their Constitution.

Noting this, the nonpartisan Constitution Project’s 577-page April 16 report, “Detainee Treatment,” which I wrote about last week, scrupulously documents the range and depth of this nation’s torture policies, and has a separate substantial chapter covering our current president. “The Obama Administration” exposes the factual torture record of our re-elected leader.

For example, George W. Bush approved “renditions,” which the CIA vigorously implemented. This occurred when terrorism suspects were kidnapped by the CIA – often from the streets of their nations – and sent to countries known for torturing their prisoners.

But the Constitution Project’s report reminds us that renditions have continued under Obama – in utter secrecy, of course. We don’t know who gets snatched and why and for how long. Neither do their families.

Of course, the receiving countries must first assure Obama officials that these suspects won’t be tortured. That’s exactly what Bush’s ultra-loyal Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice used to tell Americans and the rest of the world – without ever following up on the renditions’ ghost prisoners.

As for those CIA secret prisons, the Constitution Project cites a 2011 Nation magazine article in its report:

“Jeremy Scahill wrote that the CIA was interrogating al-Qaida-affiliated prisoners in ‘a secret prison buried in the basement of Somalia’s National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters, where prisoners suspected of being Shabab members or of having links to the group are held. Some of the prisoners have been snatched off the streets of Kenya and rendered by plane to Mogadishu. While the underground prison is officially run by the Somali NSA, U.S. intelligence personnel (the CIA) pay the salaries of intelligence agents and also directly interrogate prisoners.’”

How? By torturing them? Well, if President Obama ever has to testify before an independent American commission on torture, he might refer to this portion of Scahill’s story in the Constitution Project’s report: “Former detainees (in the Somali prison) did not allege that they were beaten or physically tortured, but did describe being held for extended periods without counsel, in squalid conditions.

“Somali intelligence officials and former detainees told Scahill that Americans conducted interrogations at the prison.”

Were these interrogations conducted under the CIA’s version of American rule of law, Mr. President?

“Even more troubling,” reports the Constitution Project, “is the evidence that Afghan detainees have been tortured after U.S. forces turned them over to the Afghan National Directorate of Security (NDS).”

The Constitution Project cites a 2011 report from the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA). According to the report:

“Torture was especially pervasive in Department 124, the NDS’s facility for ‘high-value detainees’ in Kabul. Of 28 former detainees at Department 124, 26 told UNAMA they had been tortured by methods such as ‘beating, suspension, and twisting and wrenching of genitals.’ Seventeen of those 26 had been captured by coalition forces. Five of the 26 were children.”

Hear that, President Obama? And dig this, sir: “According to The Washington Post, Department 124 is across the street from the United States’ military headquarters in Kabul and was built with U.S. funds.”

Torture sites paid for by your and my taxes.

Finally, in July 2011, the U.S. did ban prisoner transfers to the NDS in Kandahar. But, according to the Constitution Project, “there was evidence that the military’s restrictions on transfers were not being applied to transfers by the CIA,” which has a privileged place in Obama’s soul.

Here’s what one person transferred by the CIA told the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, as related by the Constitution Project: “I was severely beaten by cable in the head and neck. I was shackled and they connected the shackles to an electrical current and shocked me until I was unconscious. They also beat me on the back and waist very hard. … Even my tongue is severely damaged from the electric shock.”

This may help you understand why the “liberating” United States is so detested in Afghanistan.

Propelled by the Constitution Project’s “Detainee Treatment” task force, the website ThinkProgress.org recently reported that “pressure is mounting on the Obama administration to allow access to documents pertaining to the CIA’s post 9/11 terror suspect detention program and to order a full accounting of the Bush-era torture program” (“National Security Brief: Pressure Mounts On Obama To Investigate Torture,” thinkprogress.org, April 17).

But access to Bush-era documents isn’t enough. The administration’s continuing torture program, as reported by the Constitution Project, must be included.

“As long as the debate continues,” the Constitution Project stresses, “so too does the possibility that the United States could again engage in torture.”

And not only by this administration.

But this debate must center on actual, due process accountability for the torturers – not only named CIA torturers, but also those in our military and, of course, those in the executive branch from whom the ultimate directive came.

Accountability must also come to those members of the Bush and Obama administrations who abetted torture through legal means, argues ThinkProgress.org, citing Thomas Pickering’s recent op-ed in the Washington Post: “The Obama administration should declassify all relevant documents as soon as possible and work with Congress to ‘close the loopholes that allowed torture to occur under a pretense of legality.’”

If we don’t have this debate, what are we saying to our future generations – and to our future administrations, whatever they may decide to do without telling us?

That was until I saw this April 16 New York Times front-page headline: “U.S. Practiced Torture After 9/11, Nonpartisan Review Concludes.”

It was referring to the Washington, D.C.-based Constitution Project, a bipartisan legal research organization that has long been one of my primary sources for keeping the Constitution intact. It recently released a deeply researched, footnoted and documented 577-page report entitled “Detainee Treatment,” characterized in an April 17 Times editorial as “Indisputable Torture.”

“It is the fullest independent effort so far to assess the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, in Afghanistan and Iraq and at the CIA’s secret prisons” – and beyond (“Indisputable Torture,” The New York Times, April 17).

I have the full report, and in this series I will demonstrate why – as the Times phrased it for future historians and We The People – “its authoritative conclusion that ‘the United States engaged in the practice of torture’ is impossible to dismiss by a public that needs to know what was committed in the nation’s name.”

Showing how forceful this report is, news analyst Glenn Greenwald, whose commentary I never miss, recently underlined that until now: “The New York Times … steadfastly refused to use the word ‘torture’ to describe what was being done (unless it was done by other countries)” (“U.S. torture ‘indisputable,’ CNN’s humiliation, and Iran sanctions,” Greenwald, guardian.co.uk, April 18).

The most stubborn of those who still refuse to use the word “torture” to describe our treatment of detainees is President Obama, who has yet to issue any response to the Constitution Project’s “Detainee Treatment” report. He remains unyielding in his determination that “nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past” (my column, “President Reagan’s Torture Advice to President Obama,” cato.org, May 20, 2009).

Ronald Reagan insistently pressed for American ratification of the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which he signed on April 18, 1988. He declared it “will clearly express United States opposition to torture, an abhorrent practice unfortunately still prevalent in the world today.”

As I have often reported, and as Reagan emphasized when signing it, the convention establishes a “universal jurisdiction” under which each signer must “prosecute torturers who are found in its territory or … extradite them to other countries for prosecution.”

This “universal jurisdiction” includes officials from each signing nation – all the way to the top – “who authorized torture.”

It starts here with Bush and Cheney.

Yet this is what we find in the Constitution Project’s report, as stated on page 335: In the United States, “there have been no professional sanctions against legal, medical or mental health personnel who participated in or authorized cruel treatment and torture.”

Nor have there been any sanctions against the executive branch.

The report continues: “The criminal laws against torture have not been enforced against any CIA employee (including those working in the agency’s secret prisons), even in cases of homicide and where the public evidence very strongly suggests that interrogators went beyond OLC’s (Office of Legal Counsel’s) and their headquarters’ authorization.”

The Constitution Project goes on to review both our Republican and Democratic administrations’ licenses to commit torture:

“The (U.S.) Uniform Code of Military Justice also retains its clear prohibitions on mistreating prisoners, but the track record of prosecutions in the military is mixed at best, with many serious cases leading to no jail time or no convictions at all.”

Under the heading “Can it Happen Again?” the Constitution Project makes a mistake when it says, “The Obama administration has ended the most inhumane treatment of detainees, though some troubling questions about current policies remain unanswered.”

These questions are more than troubling, which a separate section of the report begins to make clear. I will focus on that next week.

Meanwhile, also judge for yourself whether the Constitution Project report underestimates how much Obama has sabotaged our future in this passage: “It is unclear whether (his administration) has taken sufficient steps to prevent a future administration from resorting to torture or cruel treatment, particularly if terrorists succeed again in conducting horrific crimes against Americans as they did on September 11.”

Almost daily, the Obama administration is getting more secretive in its contempt for constitutional restrictions on its power. And it isn’t going to prevent future administrations from aping it, even as a few of us keep piercing more of its obfuscations.

Starkly, what we have learned from the Constitution Project is unprecedented in American history. But if the citizenry is not shaken hard out of its apathy, our present and future governments will dissolve more of our fundamental constitutional precedents and continue to develop more cruel treatment of detainees.

How many 2016 presidential candidates from either party will likely refer to the Constitution Project’s report? How many of you will know enough of it to remember it before you cast your vote?

More importantly, how many of your schoolchildren are aware of it now?

It should also be noted that the ruling was largely ignored by the pell-mell media in all of its forms.

As John W. Whitehead of the Charlottesville, Va.-based Rutherford Institute (“Dedicated to the defense of civil liberties and human rights”) put it in the organization’s news release headlining this vital decision: “Fourth Amendment Victory: Citing Bodily Integrity, U.S. Supreme Court Prohibits Police From Forcibly Taking Warrantless Blood Samples From DUI (driving under the influence) Suspects” (rutherford.org, April 18).

Whitehead had also filed an amicus brief before the court on behalf of the defendant in Missouri v. McNeely.

Here’s the case: While driving erratically in October 2010, Tyler McNeely was pulled over by a Missouri state highway patrolman, who arrested him on suspicion of drunk driving and took him to a hospital to undergo a blood test for alcohol content. McNeely didn’t want to subject himself to a blood test, but the officer ignored him and had his blood drawn anyhow. Based on the results of the blood test, McNeely was then charged with driving under the influence.

It’s worth noting that Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing for the majority of the court in upholding McNeely’s refusal to consent, described the forced extraction of a person’s blood as:

“An invasion of bodily integrity (that) implicates an individual’s most personal and deep-rooted expectations of privacy.”

Crucial to the outcome of this case, as Whitehead emphasizes, is “at no point did the officer attempt to obtain a warrant authorizing the extraction.”

As I’ve previously stated, Sotomayor is a valuable addition to our highest court because of her consistent critical thinking. It is quite a contrast from the rigid, self-righteous prejudgments of Justice Samuel Alito. I have her full judgment in this case, and it is illuminating – not only for legal scholars but also for the citizenry at large – to see how she reached her conclusion, which differs from many drunk-driving prosecutions.

The Fourth Amendment forbids “unreasonable searches and seizures,” thereby first requiring a warrant from a judge to establish probable cause for a search. Sotomayor points out that there is “expeditious processing of warrant applications, particularly in contexts like drunk-driving investigations (to quickly get a warrant) where the evidence supporting probable cause is simple.”

“The law now allows a federal magistrate judge to consider ‘information communicated by telephone or other reliable electronic means.’”

But there must be that judge-issued warrant to the probable cause of the search before the extraction of blood – not just the police officer’s suspicions.

Whitehead makes this crucial point concerning Missouri v. McNeely:

“While public safety is of great concern, especially when it comes to serious offenses such as driving under the influence of alcohol, Americans’ constitutional rights cannot be wholly discounted and conveniently discarded.

“This case has far-reaching implications that go beyond one man’s run-in with the police.

“The Supreme Court is to be commended for recognizing that if we allow the government agents broad powers to invade our bodies without consent or court order, the bodily integrity of all persons in the United States will be in serious jeopardy.”

And that’s why Missouri v. McNeely is so important and should’ve been widely covered.

So did you see anything about this case in the media you go to for information on the state of your individual constitutional liberties?

At stake here and in other government evasions of a judicial warrant in search cases is a prosecutor claiming a per se rule, which findlaw.com defines as “a generalized rule applied (by prosecutors) without consideration for specific circumstances.”

In other words, what this comes down to, as Whitehead makes clear, is the Supreme Court “rejected arguments by state officials asking it to establish a per se rule that all cases of drunk driving present ‘exigent circumstances’ allowing police to extract blood from a suspect without a warrant.”

In the amicus brief to the court, Whitehead, citing past Supreme Court rulings, writes: “Consequently, ‘there remains (if it were to continue) the nagging feeling that the removal of blood from within the body of the accused by means of force in routine drunk-driving cases shocks the conscience.’”

Because so few members of the media have reported on Missouri v. McNeely, it’s doubtful that many American consciences have been shocked to realize how often a driver’s blood is forcibly taken from him or her without consent and without any intervention by a judge-issued warrant.

We don’t know how often this invasion of privacy may still occur, despite the court’s ruling in Missouri v. McNeely.

Were I an assignment editor for one of the media outlets, I would ask reporters to check over a period of time how often police and prosecutors apply Missouri v. McNeely as decided by the Supreme Court to drunk-driving cases. I’d also check on how many judges actually know of this decision.

I first heard of the Supreme Court’s revival of the Fourth Amendment in this case from one of John W. Whitehead’s alerts, and, accordingly, I strongly suggest that any of you who would like to be in continual touch with this nonpareil news analysis pay heed to this invitation:

“Those wishing to stay informed about these ongoing threats to our freedom can sign up for the Rutherford Institute’s free weekly email alerts by visiting www.rutherford.org and clicking the orange ‘Sign Up’ button in the upper-right hand corner.”

Such evaluations could and should ask students what they think being in school is going to mean for their futures. Teachers have their missions. But what are these students’ missions beyond college degrees?

Accordingly, to get teacher evaluations, students ought to reveal more about their own real-life, real-time selves in a preparatory dialogue with the people recording their judgments. These people should ask the students such questions as:

• What do you most want to learn about, and why?

• Have any of your teachers gotten you interested, even excited about subjects or issues you hadn’t previously thought about? If any did, how did they do that?
• How well do your teachers know each of you outside of class?
• What do you care about and do outside of this school?
• What was your life like before you ever came to school?

I would urge the people talking to the students to ask them to read the teacher-challenging advice Education Week Teacher’s teaching coach David Ginsburg offers (“Assess All Students Before Assisting Any Students,” June 4, 2011).

He evaluates teachers at work by “when you can see sooner rather than later what students are struggling with and why they’re struggling with it. It’s only then that you can provide timely, differentiated feedback and remediation.”

What happens in many schools, Ginsburg points out, is that “teachers often miss the chance to do this because they’re assisting a few students at the expense of assessing all students. At the end of typical math lessons, for example, teachers assign practice problems for students to try on their own. … They then promptly help the first student whose hand shoots up. After two, three and sometimes five or more minutes, they finally move on to another student.

“Many students, meanwhile, sit idly as they wait their turn for the teacher’s help. Some call out until the teacher signals or says, ‘One minute.’ Others raise their hands for several minutes, switching arms every so often to avoid fatigue. But eventually the bell rings or kids give up – and often act up.

“And because they never get the help they need with class work, they’re unable to successfully complete homework.”

I ask you, the readers, how many times did you experience this unavailability of teachers when you were students?

Douglas Ginsburg continues: “Teachers prematurely conclude what the class as a whole does or doesn’t understand (and why they don’t understand something) based on what they’ve seen or heard from just a few students.”

Ginsburg is focusing on actual human teachers who interact with human students in the classroom – not the rapidly increasing “online” teaching and learning, where a human teacher may not be in a classroom and where students can be home interacting online with a robot-like digital teacher.

Returning to the in-person situations of many schools, Ginsburg has excellent advice that may seem revolutionary to some “advanced” digital education reformers:

“Assign students to mixed-ability groups, where they work at their own pace but can ask each other for help as necessary. Think of this as ‘Independent and Interdependent Practice’ rather than ‘Independent Practice.’”

What is badly and urgently needed in so many schools is for students to learn critical thinking like Ginsburg’s – something that will be necessary for the rest of their lives.

Meanwhile, there is still an insistence in far too many cities, states and, to some extent, the Department of Education that collective standardized testing of students’ abilities is THE way to evaluate teachers as well as students.

See the following critical thinking of Education Week Teacher’s Susan Graham, in which she describes collective, standardized testing evaluations:

“I understand the necessity, but it is a strange sort of pantomime game where we say: ‘I want to know what you know, but you have to tell me without speaking. No questions from you, no answers from me, no comments from either of us. …’

“What bothers me even more is that we’ve predetermined what the answers should be. It seems we insist that they answer in silence because the only answers we are interested in are the ones we’ve provided. We really don’t seem to be very interested in what they think. Or how they think” (“The Sound of Silence,” edweek.org, Graham, May 30, 2011).

Already, there is much bristlingly discordant interest in the 2016 elections around the nation. Who in the White House and Congress will shape our future health care, availability of jobs and security against increasingly diverse murderous enemies?

The citizenry should realize that these are the elected officials responsible for assuring students a meaningful, productive public school education. But we must keep in mind that so many teachers do not explain how to deepen our students’ independent critical thinking, nor do they learn who each student actually is.

But now, with the continuous, instantly accessible flood of information on the Web, in print, on blogs, in social media, et al., crucial developments concerning our most basic personal rights and liberties are often covered minutely, if at all.

For example, how many of you are aware of the unanimous March 27 Supreme Court decision in Millbrook v. United States, written by Justice Clarence Thomas? It got lost in the enormous, sustained media coverage of the same-sex marriage arguments that were made before the court that week.

The court’s judgment in Millbrook could start to end the immunity of many law enforcement officials who permit the violations of citizens’ constitutional rights. These violations may include assault and other harsh treatment of people in the custody of government enforcement agents, such as prison guards.

Herewith are the brutal facts of Kim Lee Millbrook’s case as retold by John W. Whitehead, who directs the Charlottesville, Va.-based Rutherford Institute. Whitehead submitted an amicus brief supporting Millbrook before the Supreme Court. (If President Madison were still with us, Whitehead would be receiving the Medal of Freedom.)

Whitehead notes that while Millbrook was “serving a 31-year sentence, reportedly for drug and gun-related charges along with witness intimidation,” he was “transferred to a high-security federal prison in Lewisburg, Pa.” (“Millbrook v. U.S.: Holding the Government Accountable for Misconduct by Law Enforcement Officials,” John W. Whitehead, rutherford.org, April 1)

A few days after his arrival to Lewisburg, Millbrook got into a fight with his cellmate, and they were both put in “a shower area.

“Then, according to Millbrook, three prison guards escorted him to the basement holding-cell area, where one guard choked him until he almost lost consciousness and a second guard made Millbrook perform oral sex on him, while a third guard stood watch by the door. Conveniently, no video cameras were monitoring the basement at the time of the alleged assault.”

Whitehead continues: “A non-lawyer relatively well-versed in navigating the legal system, Millbrook turned to the courts for relief in January 2011, suing the federal government for $1.5 million in damages for negligence, assault and battery and requesting a transfer out of the Lewisburg facility.”

When his case came to federal district court and the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals, it was decidedly not received sympathetically. The courts decided that the prison guards could not – as Millbrook claimed – “be held liable under a provision of the Federal Torts Claim Act (FTCA), which allows individuals to sue federal law enforcement officials for misconduct.”

Here we come to the core of this case and why the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision for Millbrook should have been at the top of the news media around the country. Whitehead cites WNYC reporter Ailsa Chang, who explains why the Supreme Court stood up for Millbrook as an American citizen:

“Under the law, the government allows itself to be sued when a government representative commits a tort. A tort is an act done negligently or intentionally that results in injury to someone.

“However, if the tort was intentional, the law does not allow the lawsuit to proceed – except in cases where the defendant is a law enforcement official.”

What?

“And even in those cases,” she goes on, “the federal government can be liable only if the officer was acting ‘within the scope of his office or employment’” (“High Court Rules U.S. Government Can Be Sued Over Actions of Prison Guards,” Ailsa Chang, npr.org, March 27).

When a prison guard forces a prisoner to commit oral sex on him, is that within the scope of his employment? If not, what else can the guard do without punishment?

The federal district court and the 3rd Circuit, explains Whitehead, dismissed Millbrook’s case on the grounds that “although an egregious wrong may have been committed by a government employee, they cannot be held liable for money damages for their behavior.

“Specifically, the courts reasoned that the FTCA only applies to ‘police officers’ while they are in the process of making an arrest or seizure, or executing a search.”

Because those three prison guards were doing none of those things, Millbrook was told, in effect, he had no case. But he disagreed. Adding to the uniqueness of this case, Millbrook, Whitehead reports, “filed a handwritten petition, in pencil no less, to the U.S. Supreme Court.”

And on March 27, the Supreme Court, remanding the case, made Millbrook a citizen again, declaring that the law extends to “acts or omissions of law enforcement officers that arise within the scope of their employment, regardless of whether the officers are engaged in investigative or law enforcement activity, or are executing a search, seizing evidence or making an arrest.”

It should be noted that Justice Thomas has a fair civil liberties record, except when it comes to prisons; but he did a somersault in this case.

Whitehead summarizes: “Hopefully, the Supreme Court’s ruling … will send a strong message to the government’s various law enforcement agencies that they need to do a better job of policing their employees – whether they’re police officers or prison guards” (“Victory: Unanimous Supreme Court Rules That Citizens Can Hold Federal Government Liable for Abuse by Law Enforcement Officers (Police, Prison Guards),” www.rutherford.org, March 28).

The media could help if they’d wake up and tell Americans what happened in the case of citizen Millbrook.

Meanwhile, now that the Supreme Court has permitted Millbrook to resume his case against the government for damages, I wish him well. Of course, it would also help if former constitutional law professor Barack Obama spoke out about this case.

But, as I’ve reported previously in “Teachers bypassing your children,” Richard Weissbourd, a lecturer in education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is showing – through active research in a range of classrooms – how teachers, principals, school boards and legislators can rescue such kids from dead-end lives before they give up on schools.

Activating the pleasures and surprises of actually learning how to learn requires teachers who know more about each student than their collective scores on group achievement tests.

In his article “The ‘Quiet’ Troubles of Low-Income Children” in the Harvard Education Press book “Spotlight on Student Engagement, Motivation and (individual) Achievement,” Weissbourd delves deeply – and for me, alarmingly – into many teachers’ lack of concern or just plain inability to recognize individual students’ vision and hearing problems. He also discusses the blurringly disorienting effect sleep deprivation has on the many students who are afflicted by it.

Though I’ve spent many years reporting from failing classrooms around the nation, I learned a lot more from that article about those deprivations, while Weissbourd also taught me about other weighty “quiet problems” of low-income students I didn’t know about.

“Frequent mobility,” for example. How many of you, including me, have not taken this into account concerning the dropout statistics? Weissbourd writes:

“It’s not uncommon in urban schools for about 20 percent of the student body to change schools in a given year. A U.S. Government Accountability Office report revealed that ‘One-sixth of the nation’s third graders – more than half a million children – have attended at least three different schools since starting first grade.’

“In areas of highly concentrated poverty, that number is often far higher. As a result, students may bounce between schools that have entirely different curricula and teaching practices, putting them at risk of school difficulties and reducing the chance that they will stay in school.”

Nor had I thought of “caretaking responsibility” as a considerable “quiet problem.” Weissbourd has the figures to point out the effect of “having to take care of a depressed or sick parent or look after younger siblings. One study of high school students in three studies conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics indicated that 12 percent of high school dropouts nationwide left school to take care of a family member.

Among his reports of what’s being done to turn quiet problems into real-life learning achievements, he tells of the Lee Academy Pilot (public) School in Dorcester, Mass., getting a school social worker and a school intern to conduct an action-research project on “the causes of sleep deprivation among students.”

Parents in one preschool classroom began to “track evening activities in their household from 7 p.m. to wake-up the next morning.

“About 60 percent of the parents participated. The study found that children were getting an average of 9.5 hours of sleep at night, well below the 11.5-12 hours sleep that 3- and 4-year olds need.

“Simultaneously, the classroom teacher observed and tracked the behaviors, mood and academic engagement of each student.

“She saw a connection between the amount of sleep children had and their behavior and mood. The children getting less sleep and who were sleepy when they were awakened for the morning tended to be more irritable, teary and distracted and had more difficulty controlling impulses.”

As Richard Weissbourd continues to find teachers and schools focusing on the life-diminishing troubles of the increasing number of low-income children across the nation, I’ll be reporting them here along with those I discover elsewhere.

The media’s disinterest in these vital issues for the kids involved – and for this country – was exemplified by a tiny three-paragraph story in the March 20, 2013, New York Daily News:

“In a push to target (New York) city students who suffer from mental health conditions, schools chancellor Dennis Walcott plans to open 20 new school-based health clinics. … The schools will partner with hospitals to help students and their families deal with mental health issues that ‘impede academic achievement.’” Also, how about vision and hearing?

I do congratulate the Los Angeles Times for its substantial Feb. 26, 2013, story “Black students learning gaps start early, report says.”

At the very end of the story, Frank Gilliam Jr., UCLA professor of public policy and political science, says:

“Whatever adjective is worse than bad, this is it.” He said of lagging black students, “We’re concluding, either explicitly or implicitly, that these are throwaway kids.”

In our America, a variety of throwaway kids abound.

The March 18 headline in USA Today blares: “More teachers are grouping kids by ability.” What’s wrong with that? Because the actual problems of individual kids are overlooked when students, especially those starting in elementary schools, are tracked as a group by what they’ve learned.

But Patrick Boodey, principal of the Woodman Park School in Dover, N.H., tries to remind us in the same story: “As a teacher, you know in your heart you need to meet the needs of each child.”

Really? How many teachers do know that and act accordingly?

Disturbing answers to that question are documented in the most important article on education I’ve seen in many years: “The ‘Quiet’ Troubles of Low-Income Children,” by Richard Weissbourd of the Harvard School of Education. The article was first published in the March/April 2008 issue of the Harvard Education Letter and is also included in a valuable book, “Spotlight on Student Engagement, Motivation and Achievement.”

I have been an observer and interviewer of students in many classrooms around the country, and caught signs of some of these “quiet troubles.” But I had nowhere near the research depth of Weissbourd, whose revelations should be seen by teachers, principals, school boards and legislators in cities, states and the U.S. Congress.

His article, of course, should also be seen by those parents whose own troubles give them hardly any breathing room to focus on how well their children are actually able to learn in school.

Weissbourd, whom I have also interviewed, cites a study he conducted with other researchers:

“Some teachers fail to detect vision and hearing problems and sleep deprivation. Kids who are depressed and withdrawn can also escape teachers’ notice. One reason may be that teachers are often consumed by small numbers of students with loud problems. Teachers may also stop registering these quieter problems because they know that their schools don’t have the resources or time to deal with them.

“As one school counselor puts it, ‘You have to be extraordinarily withdrawn to be referred to me.’”

At a school where I was a guest lecturer on the Bill of Rights for a short time, one female eighth-grader in the back row never said a word in class or looked in my direction. After class one day, I came over to her and found that when she listened closely – she was hard of hearing – she was very interested in poetry. We talked for a while about Emily Dickinson. It was quite a large class, and she told me no teacher had noticed her hearing problem.

That reminded me of another school I once visited, where teachers did pay close attention to “the whole child.” There, a fifth-grade boy said to me: “Gee, in this school, they know my name!”

Weissbourd writes, “The number of children with undetected or untreated vision problems is a national scandal. In any urban classroom, it’s not uncommon to find one or two children squinting at their books or at the blackboard. By one estimate, at least 25 percent of urban students have uncorrected vision problems.

“Part of the problem is that kids lose their glasses easily, and it can take Medicaid up to six months to replace them. When they do come, they’re often big and chunky — the kind of glasses that no school-age child wants to wear.”

A “quiet trouble” I hadn’t known about: “Staff members in one elementary school I have worked with estimate that about one-quarter of their students experience sleep deprivation consistently enough to interfere with learning,” he writes. “That percentage is likely to be far higher in high school.”

Weissbourd suggests that “schools can … work with community health centers to prevent sleep deprivation among children — for example, by coordinating messages to parents about the importance of establishing bedtime routines and reducing late-night television watching.”

And what about the “quiet troubles” of some of these children’s parents?

Weissbourd writes: “Somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of parents will suffer from acute, severe depression, experiencing some combination of fatigue, loss of appetite, withdrawal, hopeless moods and suicidal thoughts.

“But a range of studies suggests that 30 to 60 percent of low-income parents will suffer from moderate depression for longer periods of time.

“I am not talking about mental illness. I am talking about the steady drizzle of helplessness and hopelessness that can afflict those trapped in poverty for many years, especially when these adults are isolated and in constant stress.”

While “many of these people, despite their depression, are warm, effective parents … children of depressed parents are more likely to suffer from an array of problems, including development delays, juvenile delinquency and depression. What’s more, it’s far harder for depressed parents to do the things critical for their children’s school success.”

Are you aware of these quiet, smoldering troubles being recognized – and acted upon – by many school boards, education reformers and legislators? Presidents who have school-age children send them to private schools, so they’re often silent about all of this, including in their state of the union addresses.

If more of the citizenry were not silent, many of these students’ blighted lives could begin to be revived. They’d be surprised at their new capacities to become lifelong learners.

(Next week: More quiet troubles and more ways to really do something about them.)

Old news.

And despite the tremendous national impact of Sen. Rand Paul’s 13-hour filibuster speech, how much of its startling details even registered for long? Meanwhile, the Republican from Kentucky was teaching many of us what we never realized – on just how subservient we are becoming to the state.

As I wrote last week, Paul said he was concerned that Americans targeted for suspected terrorist ties would be destroyed in America itself. He revealed in an editorial in the Washington Times: “The president said, ‘I haven’t killed anyone yet, and I have no intention of killing Americans. But I might’” (“Rising in defense of the Constitution,” Rand Paul, washingtontimes.com, March 8).

I have a complete transcript of Paul’s 13-hour speech, including his follow-up to this presidential contempt for the separation of powers: “What if the president were to say, ‘I haven’t broken the First Amendment yet; I intend to follow it, but I might break it.’”

Later, Paul said: “Presidents, Republican and Democrats, believing in some sort of inherent power that’s not listed anywhere … For a hundred years or so, power’s been gravitating to the president – and the executive branch.”

And dig this from Rand Paul: “One of the complaints that you hear a lot of times in the media is about there is no bipartisanship in Congress. (But) if you look at people who don’t really believe in much restraint of government as far as civil liberties, it really is on both sides.”

So, “Republicans and Democrats (also) vote overwhelmingly against the Constitution giving Congress the power to declare war.

“The Constitution gave it to us (the people),” Paul emphasized, “but we are giving it back.”

Also, on the question of bipartisanship, he adds: “The bipartisanship that we have now, which many in the media fail to understand, they see us not getting along on taxes and on 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.”

How about a Citizens’ Teacher of the Year Award to Rand Paul? Or at least something that gets teachers who know enough about constitutional rule of law to discuss his illumination of Americanism in their classrooms.

An awful lot keeps getting debated about Obamacare – in bars, restaurants, by hospital patients and among doctors – but during those 13 hours, Paul added this very troubling dimension to what is going to affect the health care of more and more of us, whether young or an octogenarian, as I am:

“When we passed Obamacare, it was 2,000-some-odd pages. There have been 9,000 pages of regulations written since. Obamacare had 1,800 references that the secretary of health shall decide at a later date. We (the people) gave up that power. We gave up power that should have been ours, that should have been written into the legislation. We gave up that power to the executive branch … many of whom we call bureaucrats, unelected.”

Since some of those bureaucrats, who have never examined us as patients, will soon be telling us that our doctors’ treatment of us is too expensive, how angry are we at giving away our power to maybe live longer?

How many voting Americans know and care about this Rand Paul regeneration of the Constitution, as it can affect our very lives?

He told us: “Your government was given a few defined powers (by the Constitution), enumerated powers. … But your liberties are many. … When you read the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, 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.”

How many Americans are familiar with the Ninth and Tenth Amendments – or have read them at all?

Perhaps you remember this from Paul during his 13-hour speech:

“They say the United States is the battlefield (against terrorism) now. … This battlefield being here at home means you don’t get due process at home. … Is that what we’re moving toward?”

Paul got more penetratingly specific: “The question is, if the government is going 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?”

The answer is in the database records of the FBI and state and local police intelligence divisions.

The ACLU and other non-partisan civil-liberties and human-rights organizations should set up continuing debates around the country that are rooted in Paul’s revival of the Bill of Rights and other now-somnolent parts of the Constitution.

But also, the growing number of active civics classes I’ve been reporting on in schools around the country should bring Paul into the lives and intentions of these students who are learning to be authentic, informed Americans.

And Rand Paul himself, in addition to now campaigning for the presidency in 2016, should start visiting schools and getting students to learn how this patriot suddenly regenerated American values that they can continue strengthening throughout their lives as citizens.