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Mohammed Salah Sentenced to 21 Months
Here on Law and Disorder we’ve followed the pivotal moments in the Mohammed Salah case. Earlier this year, Salah was cleared of terrorism charges but recently convicted of lying about his ties to the Palestinian group Hamas. He faces nearly two years in prison. The sentence for a minor charge of obstruction of justice comes as a major setback for prosecutors who have spent a decade investigating charges that could have put Salah behind bars for life.
Guest – Michael Deutsch, Mohammed Salah’s attorney with the People’s Law Office in Chicago.
David Cole – The Grand Inquisitors
In his latest article in the New York Review of Books, David Cole, professor of law at Georgetown University reviews several books including, John Ashcroft’s Never Again: Securing America and Restoring Justice, General Ashcroft: Attorney at War by Nancy V. Baker and It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush, by Joe Conason and also Unchecked and Unbalanced: Presidential Power in a Time of Terror by Frederick A.O. Schwarz Jr. and Aziz Z. Huq.
These publications create an outline of how former Attorney General John Ashcroft helped create a platform that allowed the Bush administration to torture, allow coerced confessions and hold defendants indefinitely without trial.
Guest – Georgetown Law Professor David Cole
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Law and Disorder Series: Lawyers You’ll Like – Peter Weiss, Vice President of the Center for Constitutional Rights.
Peter Weiss is Vice-President, former President, of the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms and its US affiliate, the Lawyers’ Committee on Nuclear Policy; Vice-President, Federation Internationale des ligues des Droits de l’Homme; and Vice-President, Center for Constitutional Rights. Mr. Weiss is a graduate of Yale Law School and has lectured and written widely on the international law of war and peace, nuclear weapons and human rights. He was the principal author of the draft brief on the illegality of threat or use of nuclear weapons used by many countries in making written submissions to the International Court of Justice in the 1996 nuclear weapons advisory opinion, and served as counsel to Malaysia at the hearings.
He has published several articles on the ICJ opinion, including in the fall 1997 issue of Transnational Law and Contemporary Problems. Mr. Weiss is also a leading human rights lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights, and litigated the seminal case establishing the right of victims of torture to sue their torturers in US courts (Filartiga v. Pena-Irala). Since his retirement in 1996 from Weiss Dawid Fross Zelnick & Lehrman, a leading trademark firm, he has been Senior Intellectual Property Counsel to The Chanel Company Limited. He is also a founder and former President of the American Committee on Africa and former Chairman of the Board of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington. He has also long been an activist for peace in the Middle East and is currently a member of the Arab-Jewish Peace Group in New York and of the Executive Committee of Americans for Peace Now, which supports the Peace Now movement in Israel.
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