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It’s been almost 50 years since Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous speech about dreaming of the day when blacks would “not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” Sadly, many black political leaders still haven’t gotten his memo.

The alleged purpose of the civil rights movement was to bring about an end to racial discrimination, but the Orwellian nightmare we’ve built around race in this country requires that we pretend some racial discrimination is good, while other racial discrimination is bad.

In the county where I live, the city government of Birmingham — which includes the core older parts of the metro area, but almost none of the suburbs — is building a $60 million baseball stadium for a minor league team. In a newspaper story that came out Sunday, the mayor’s chief of staff bragged about the fact that 61 percent of the money is being contracted to minority-owned firms, suggesting that the color of the owners’ skin was a bit more important than either the content of their character or the quality of their work:

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When the charges came out five years ago, it was easy to write them off as lies or exaggerations. Iraqi police accused U.S. military forces of capturing 11 people — including women and children — and then simply executing them.

Even those of us who oppose the war found that hard to believe. It had to be lies, because Americans soldiers just don’t do things like that. Except … well … it appears there’s a good chance U.S. soldiers did do that, based on at least one of the secret U.S. cables released last week by Wikileaks.

The initial news report from 2006 quoted the Iraqi police report:

“The American forces gathered the family members in one room and executed 11 persons, including five children, four women and two men. Then they bombed the house, burned three vehicles and killed their animals.”

The U.S. military denied everything. In fact, a military spokesman denied ever having even heard of the allegations. There were promises to “get to the bottom of this” and find out the truth, but we never heard anything more about it.

It turns out that a UN special investigator — a law professor now teaching at New York University — pursued the story at the time, because his investigation told the same story that the Iraqi police had concluded. One of the newly released secret cables includes a document from the investigator:

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Laura’s face was covered in pain, but she never let herself cry. I’ve known her for more than a decade, but I’d never known her to be happy until the past year. After a previous marriage in which she was misunderstood and lonely, she had finally found real love. Now she was telling me that Daniel was dead.

It’s a raw slice of life that I don’t see very often, so I found it both moving and painful to talk with Laura Sunday afternoon. Her husband of barely more than a year had been dead for a couple of weeks from an auto accident, but I was just finding out about it. Things like this always affect me, but not nearly as much as it affected Laura.

“All my life, I’d been looking for love and I was lucky to find it,” she said. “I was searching all my life, but I don’t regret the wasted years now, because I don’t feel like I lived for nothing. Before Daniel, I felt like, ‘Why am I here?’ Now, it’s different. I fulfilled my dreams and accomplished the love I wanted. There’s nothing I really want to live for now.”

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