"I'm completely public about being a racist and Nazi," he says. "I get into fights maybe twice a month, because some niggers will get pissed off with it." Every time a black person enters the bar, he emits a hiss of disapproval.

"I just don't want to be around them," he tells me. "I don't want to look at them, I don't want them near me, I don't want to smell them. And people say, 'Oh people who are racialist you've never hung around black people'... bullshit, I've showered with them, I've lived with them, I don't like them... they're fucking savages, they're tribal motherfuckers, they are different to us, how they think, how they conduct themselves."

Despite his vitriolic racism Fogarty wasn't worried about not being allowed into the army. Military protocol stipulates that each new recruit with suspicious tattoos must write an explanation about the divinity and meaning of their body art. Fogarty's are quite clearly the kind written about in ARP 600-15 -- a Nordic warrior, and a Celtic cross. But this didn't hinder him. "They just told me to write an explanation of each tattoo and I made up some stuff and that was that," he says. Fogarty was enlisted and stationed in the 3rd Infantry Division based at Fort Stewart, GA, the largest Army installation east of the Mississippi River.

This happened in 1997 even before the new military attitude to tattoos really took hold as troops were needed ever more desperately. It shows that regulations were loose before and have got even looser. Now more Fogarty's are getting through, as the commanders in the army hierarchy admit to a liberalism that wasn't in place previously.

...

The Army tome which deals with all the multifarious obligations that a soldier must uphold in the military is called AR 600-20, or "Army Command Policy". It devotes one of 125 pages to the problem of extremism, and states the policy generally as: "Participation in extremist organizations and activities by Army personnel is inconsistent with the responsibilities of military service".

...

There is no mention that membership itself is prohibited; it is the public display of allegiance that is barred. The options available to a Commander should these rules be transgressed are involuntary separation, reclassification action or bar to reenlistment actions, or other administrative or disciplinary action 'deemed appropriate' by the Commander.

...

Fogarty was dragged away from his girlfriend when he was positioned in Georgia. And the woman, who would later be the mother of Fogarty's first child, born in 1999, grew angry. "She hated that I was in the military," he says. Her anger became so acute that, according to Fogarty, she sent a dossier of pictures to his military command that showed him at white supremacist and neo-Nazi rallies, as well as performing his racist rock for Attack.

"They hauled me before some sort of committee, and showed me the pictures and asked me what they were. I just denied it and said my girlfriend was a spiteful bitch, which is true.

"They knew what I was about, but they let it go because I'm a great soldier, and they knew that."

The person heading the investigation was Command Sgt. Maj. Tommy Dunn. I contacted him and he claimed he couldn't remember who Sgt. Fogarty was. "It's funny," says Fogarty when I tell him, "he gave me medals and everything."

...

Fogarty gives me the latest Attack album, "Survival". The jacket is a picture of him in military fatigues while in Iraq and his songs give a clear indication of his thoughts on his time there. "Eye For An Eye" opens with the lines: "A slow painful death I strive/ Why are you still alive?" The chorus includes the lines: "It's our turn to watch you bleed/ It's our turn to tear you limb from limb... We will leave no survivors of this bloody war.
"
"In Battle" includes the lines "In battle there are no laws... Its kill or be killed, die with the rest... Relief came when I pulled the trigger and watched you die/ I can't stop laughing everytime I remember you start to cry/ Watch you cry!"

"To tell you the truth I hate Arabs more than anybody," he says at Lowry Zoo. "For the simple fact I've served over there and seen how they live. They're just a backward people... them and the Jews are just disgusting people as far as I'm concerned, their customs, everything to do with the Middle East is just repugnant to me."

But he believes the war can be won. "You have to break these people's will to fight, the only reason they are fighting is that there is some sort of profit to it, or its not that bad, that the Americans are not going to do what they did in World War Two and kill everybody."

Would he nuke Baghdad? "Fuck yeah! ... If we had occupying force cracking down on spitting on sidewalk would you spit on sidewalk if they shot you in the head for it? Go in with iron-fist, this is how you will live, if you don't we'll kill you... Quit pussy footing around, listen to us or die."

...

Fogarty was confident enough of carte blanche from the military that during his break from service in January 2004, he flew not back to see his family in the U.S but to Dresden, Germany to give a concert to 2,500 skinheads, on the army’s budget.

In 2003, a team led by J. Correll flashed random photos of white and black faces, some superimposed with guns, others with harmless items such as cell phones and wallets. They asked college students to press one key indicating "shoot" the suspect, and another indicating "don't shoot." The students were more likely to mistakenly fire at black faces that were unarmed compared to unarmed white faces.

But what about police officers? With their special training and rules about when to fire, perhaps they will do better. A study by E. Ashby Plant and B. Michelle Peruche tested police officers on a similar task.

...

48 mostly white police officers who volunteered to participate in the project were told only that the study was about "decisions to shoot." They had 630 milliseconds after each face was displayed to press the "shoot" or "don't shoot" button on the computer running the test. As the test began, results were the same as with college students: Police officers were more likely to mistakenly shoot black suspects holding harmless items than white suspects holding the same items. They made an average of 3.63 errors over 20 trials when the suspect was black, but only 2.65 errors when the suspect was white.

But an interesting result occurred as the test continued. After another 80 trials, about 40 of which included the key situation of a person holding a harmless object, the disparity between reactions to white and black suspects disappeared. During the second half of the experiment, the average number of errors for black suspects diminished to 2.60, statistically indistinguishable from the rate for white suspects.

When we decided to pursue a domestic adoption nearly five years ago, my husband and I -- both of us white -- decided that we were open to adopting transracially. We were naïve about this -- we really didn't understand the challenges for children adopted transracially -- but when we started researching agencies we made note of their cross-cultural adoption programs.

We are in Columbus, OH and we wanted a local agency. We knew we didn't want to adopt across state lines because things get iffy when you start mixing up adoption laws. (Every state has its own rules and regulations.) Also we were hoping for an open adoption and I knew it would be unlikely that we could have regular visits between our family and our child's birth family if airfare became an issue.

We narrowed it down to three agencies in our city. (One other agency had religious requirements we would not meet being an interfaith Jewish/Christian family.) Only one called us back and that's the agency we chose.

The three agencies we looked at all had separate programs with different costs that were dependent on characteristics of the child -- namely children with "special needs" or of African descent cost less to adopt. White kids, kids of mixed race not including black -- it's the full fee to adopt them. Black kids and kids with special needs -- about half.

...

When we approached the agency we offered to pay the full fee and take whatever baby came our way. The social workers told us that we had to choose a program and that given that we were open to “any race,” we would be placed with a black child because there were fewer waiting parents in that program.

“You may as well get the fee break,” one told us. “Because if you are open to adopting a black baby, you will get a black baby.”

What's next, smart ones carrying a 10% premium?

It was from this unlikely setting, the United States alleged, that Ann Colomb and three of her four sons ran one of the largest crack cocaine operations in Louisiana. Over the course of a decade, prosecutors said, the Colombs bought $15 million in illicit drugs with a street value of more than $70 million. Judging solely from the indictments, the government's case seemed formidable: a trail of police reports throughout the 1990s accusing the Colomb boys of possessing or selling drugs; a 2001 raid on the Colomb home that turned up 72 grams of crack, a Titan .25-caliber pistol, and a rifle; and more than 30 prison informants who were prepared to testify that they had sold crack to one or more members of the Colomb family. In 2006 a jury in Lafayette, Louisiana, convicted the African-American family on federal drug conspiracy charges. Ann and her sons served almost four months in a federal prison while awaiting their sentences, which would likely have ranged from 10 years to life.

But in the ensuing months, the government's case unraveled, exposing some unsettling truths about the way jailhouse informants are used in America's courtrooms. In December 2006, all charges against the family were dismissed. The federal judge who presided over the trial was so upset about what happened in his courtroom that he has since taken the rare step of speaking out about it publicly.

The legal fiasco was partly attributable to familiar themes of racism and overly aggressive prosecution. But Ann and James Colomb the Colomb story is mostly about the war on drugs. It shows how the absurd incentives created by the unaccountable use of shady drug informants by police and prosecutors can quickly make innocent people look very guilty.

The case loomed over the family for more than five years. It wrecked their finances. The Colombs' son Danny was convicted shortly after learning that his wife Elizabeth was expecting their first child. He spiraled into severe depression while incarcerated. He and Elizabeth say they spent their entire savings on attorney's fees. Ann Colomb had a serious diabetic attack in prison. She too spent her savings on her defense.

Last September, my newspaper reported that on August 26, 2006, Jackson, Mississippi Mayor Frank Melton had taken an entourage of police officers and teenagers (some with criminal records) to a duplex in a poor neighborhood. Stating that the duplex was home to drug dealers, Mayor Melton then directed the odd mix of cops and teenagers to destroy the house with sledgehammers.

Strange as it may seem, none of this surprised us.

This is just our mayor--"Frank," as the former television executive and ousted director of the Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics insists that everyone call him. Most people, including a doting mainstream media, do.
Even before he was elected mayor, Frank Melton was known around Jackson as a loose cannon with little regard for civil liberties or the U.S. Constitution. He was adept at saying what people want to hear. The African American TV executive from Texas defeated the capital city's first black mayor in 2005 by absurdly promising to rid the city of crime and "thugs" (clearly referring to the black variety) within 90 days of taking office (yes, we still have crime). Former Mayor Harvey Johnson Jr., the man Melton defeated, was quieter, more methodical, and more focused on issues like development and infrastructure, and balancing the city's budget. He sat back and allowed a professional police chief do the job of crime fighting--and presided over a steady drop in crime over his eight-year tenure.

On September 7, Brett Darrow drew national attention when he recorded video of an abusive police officer threatening to lock him up on "made-up" charges. The police officer was subsequently fired.

Now, the local police are staking out his home.

This is not the young man's first run-in with the law. Last year, Mr. Darrow had a similar encounter at a police roadblock. Afterwards, he was the subject of posts containing threats of retaliatory harrassment and death on St. Louis CopTalk, a unofficial local police messaging board.

Because a racist bunch like this are what a city needs for its police force.

Oh, and it is spelled "suicide".