The Bush administration is yielding nothing in its campaign to create special military commissions to try those designated terror suspects or "unlawful combatants." Its proposed legislation, if enacted by Congress, would confer legal legitimacy on the same kind of special tribunals the Supreme Court described as unconstitutional in its recent Hamdan v. Rumsfeld decision. Those tribunals would be permitted to employ hearsay evidence, testimony obtained through torture and other dubious methods, withhold evidence from the accused, and other practices long forbidden by the Anglo-Saxon tradition of due process under law.

King is the icon of the Civil Rights movement. Children all over the country can quote the beginning of the famous “I Have a Dream” speech and he even has a holiday in honor of his birthday. At this time, the only other person to have a U.S. national holiday on their birthday is Christ. So, the question I have is, why does King deserve this great honor?

King received a bachelor’s degree from Morehouse College in 1948 and a doctorate from Boston University in 1955. Records indicate that King had been plagiarizing throughout his undergraduate and graduate school years. The first book that King wrote, “Stride Toward Freedom,” --was plagiarized from numerous sources, all unattributed, according to documentation recently assembled by Keith D. Miller, Ira G. Zepp, Jr., and David J. Garrow. In fact, King’s doctoral dissertation itself was plagiarized from several different sources. According to “The Martin Luther King Papers,” in King's dissertation “only 49 percent of sentences in the section on Tillich contain five or more words that were King's own…”

“The Martin Luther King Papers” also acknowledges that many of King’s works were plagiarized from many sources. King Papers stated of King's writings at both Boston University and Crozer Theological Seminary: “Judged retroactively by the standards of academic scholarship, [his writings] are tragically flawed by numerous instances of plagiarism… Appropriated passages are particularly evident in his writings in his major field of graduate study, systematic theology.”

And yet, Boston University didn’t see fit to revoke the degree. In today’s universities, that sort of plagiarism would be grounds for expulsion. In fact, the University of British Columbia now uses King’s work as examples of near-to-complete plagiarism in their brochures to students.

King has also been reported to have used money from the foundation Southern Christian Leadership Conference to buy prostitutes. According to martinlutherking.org, the man most responsible for the FBI's probe of King was Assistant Director William C. Sullivan. Sullivan describes himself as a liberal and initially said, “I was one hundred percent for King...because I saw him as an effective and badly needed leader for the Black people in their desire for civil rights.” According to Sullivan, King often misappropriated or embezzled funds for the “civil rights movement” that were in fact used to carry on drunken sex parties that sometimes lasted for several days.

Unfortunately, this information is locked up by the FBI and is not allowed to be available to the public until 2027.

So, why has Martin Luther King Jr. been immortalized and shown as a great leader for the Civil Rights movement? It seems strange to me that a man who cheated on his papers, and even plagiarized his “I Have a Dream” speech would be held above the founding fathers and have his own holiday.

The solution is to really see King for who he is. Yes, great things were done during his time for the Civil Rights Movement. But, there were many other leaders that were dedicated to the cause. People like Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, Rosa Parks, Frederick Douglas, Ruby Bridges, Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth.