To Appeal to 'President's Conservative Religous Base,' DoJ Looked the Other Way as Kids Were Sexually Molested by Those 'Protecting' Them...
By Brad Friedman on 8/5/2007, 11:34am PT  

Blogged by Brad Friedman from Plano, TX...

"Compassionate Conservatism" at work.

Dallas Morning News reports today that there were 2000 confirmed allegations of kids in the Texas juvenile penal system who were beaten and molested by those who were supposed to be protecting them between Jan 2003 and Dec 2006.

The U.S. Justice Department knew about it and declined to prosecute. 2000 cases.

Notably, one of the sick and twisted "voter fraud" zealots at the U.S. DoJ, Bradley Schlozman, also finds his way into the middle of this story. As the Morning News, who spent three months on their investigation, reports on the ignored cases of rape, abuse, and manipulation of these kids:

[T]wo former career attorneys in the [DoJ] Civil Rights Division contended the department's political leadership shifted enforcement priorities to human-trafficking prosecutions because that would appeal more to the president's conservative religious base. One of the attorneys said there was also a desire not to anger the law-and-order segment of the Bush constituency with abuse of authority prosecutions.

[Albert Moskowitz, chief of the Criminal Section from 1999 to 2005, said] his supervisor, Bradley Schlozman, left no doubt about his distaste for abuse of authority cases.
...
"He sort of made that clear, and that had a sort of self-censoring effect on people," Mr. Moskowitz said. "People got awards not for doing police cases but for doing [human] trafficking cases."

The U.S. Attorney in San Antonio, Johnny Sutton, who received the case referral is "chairman of the U.S. attorney general's advisory committee and a Bush family friend." He declined to prosecute, on the grounds that no federal laws were broken by the detailed cases of sexual abuse in which "victims revealed that none sustained 'bodily injury'...None of the victims claimed to have felt physical pain during the course of the sexual assaults which they described."

The Bush Administration, and their DoJ, have similarly parsed the definition of "torture," claiming that if there's no permanent bodily injury, it couldn't be "torture."

No doubt "the president's conservative religious base" is prouder than ever of their man.

Share article...