In an interview that aired Wednesday, Attorney General Eric Holder told ABC’s Pierre Thomas that he’d been racially profiled as a college student. Asked if he thought law enforcement was color blind, Holder answered: “No, not yet.” The nation’s first black Attorney General made the remarks after being asked about the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates. He said:
“I was a young college student driving from New York to Washington, stopped on a highway and told to open the trunk of my car, because the police officer told me he wanted to search it for weapons.” Holder continued, “I remember, as I got back in the car and continued on my journey how humiliated I felt, how angry I got.”
Holder also talked about the security threat posed by Americans who’ve become radicalized, by “Leaving this country and going to different parts of the world and then coming back, all, again, in aim of doing harm to the American people.” (Note how Holder carefully avoids using the words “Islamic” or “Muslim.”) He would seem he’s referring to incidents such as the recent arrests of a North Carolina man and his associates for an alleged overseas jihad plot, and the Somali-born men who disappeared from Minneapolis, apparently to wage jihad in Somalia.
Finally, of the Bush-era legal authorizations of torture, Holder said: “Some of the people who worked here simply lost their way.” View the interview here.
[...] granted only a handful of extended interviews. in July, he spoke on camera with Pierre Thomas of ABC News and gave an interview to Daniel Klaidman [...]
[...] exposure has been more limited. He has granted only a handful of extended interviews. In July, he spoke on camera with Pierre Thomas of ABC News and gave an interview to Daniel Klaidman of [...]