Law and Disorder May 13, 2013 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Guantanamo Hunger Strike Update:
• Lynne Stewart Petition For Compassionate Release
• Michael Ratner Visits Julian Assange: Kissinger Documents
• Chris Hedges: The Death of Truth

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MOVE Bombing: 28th Anniversary

This week marks the 28th anniversary of an armed police mission in Philadelphia that ended in a helicopter bombing of the headquarters of the group known as MOVE. The fire commissioner in that city allowed a fire to rage unabated at 6221 Osage Avenue in West Philadelphia, killing six adults and five children, destroying 65 homes and leaving more than 200 people homeless. Despite two Grand Jury investigations, and a commission finding that top officials were grossly negligent, no one from city government was ever criminally charged. A recent film called Let the Fire Burn, chronicles the events leading up to the conflagration.

Ramona Africa:

• The government, through the media had mislead people to believe that what happened in May of 1985 was because of complaints from neighbors which is absolutely not true.
• What happened on May 13, 1985 happened because of our unrelenting fight for the release of our innocent sisters and brothers known as the MOVE 9 who were arrested in August 1978.
• After years of abuse, physical abuse, judicial abuse by this system, MOVE babies being killed through miscarriage and a 3 week old baby being trampled to death by police, after countless unprovoked beatings of MOVE men and women, children, even pregnant women, MOVE people took a stand and said listen, we are uncompromisingly opposed to violence, we’re a peaceful people. We’re not stupid and we’re not masochistic or suicidal.
• We do believe in self defense which is the law, the law of life. There is not a species on this Earth that doesn’t defend itself, when threatened, when attacked.
• When MOVE took that stand, the government became enraged.
• They alleged housing code violations, and they wanted MOVE to move out of the home based on housing code violations.
• MOVE people wouldn’t go along with that. A judge gave MOVE people til August 1 to get out.
• On August 2, 1985, a judge issued warrants on any MOVE people he knew of including people he knew were not in the house.
• After the warrants were issued, hundreds and hundreds of cops were sent out to our home.
• They shot thousands of bullets into that house. The fire department used deluge hoses to flood our home.
• The officer that was killed was standing on street level while everybody including the police acknowledged that all MOVE people were in the basement of our home.
• This policeman was shot from a bullet traveling on a downward angle.
• Hours after I was arrested on August 17, the city sent a demolition team out and completely demolished MOVE’s home which was the scene of the crime.
• The MOVE 9 trial was a bench trial, not a jury trial.
• They did it to silence our righteous protest and our unrelenting fight for the release of our family the MOVE 9.
• They came out to our home on Mother’s Day, May 12 1985, with warrants they obtained on May 11.
• The Fire Department as in 1978 was their first mode of attack.
• They came out there to kill, that’s the bottom line.
• When their ten thousand rounds of bullets didn’t kill us, the water hoses, the tear gas didn’t do the job, they concocted a bomb made from powerful military explosives, C4.
• They got the C4 from the federal government, from the FBI.
• The state police helicopter flew over our home without any warning, and two Philadelphia Police bomb squad police officers dropped that bomb on the roof our home. It ignited a fire. They made a conscious decision not to put the fire out.

Guest – Ramona Africa, the sole adult survivor of the 1985 police bombing of the home occupied by members of the MOVE organization. Email Ramona – onamovelleja (at) gmail.com

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Assata Shakur Placed On FBI Terror List

Last week, the FBI placed Assata Shakur on its Most Wanted Terrorists list, while the state of New Jersey raised the bounty on her head to 2 million dollars. These actions fall on the 40th anniversary of the 1973 shoot out in in which police allege Shakur killed a police officer during a traffic stop on the New Jersey turnpike.  Assata also known as JoAnne Deborah Byron is an African American activist was a member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army.    Assata Shakur: Understanding the politics behind the FBI’s new attack.

Eugene Puryear:

• I think why a 65 year old grandmother has been put on the FBI terrorist list is a reflection of the United States government’s fear of that which opposes it.
• Assata Shakur was part of the 60s movements . . . a movement that the Nixon administration attempted to criminalize, to say that political dissent and political opposition to the US government and its imperial moves around the world.
• She does fit the profile of what the US government has been trying to perpetuate for the last 30 years, in a sense an extension of COINTELPRO.
• One person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter.
• Assata Shakur, her actions and beliefs is certainly not something that is beyond the pale but the US government view her as a terrorist.
• By placing her on this terrorist list, it’s a way of criminalizing dissent.
• Assata’s trial was moved several times, it was placed in counties that were mostly wealthy, mostly white where pre-trial publicity around the case had biased people in a major way against Assata Shakur.
• When the government wants to put someone away and they know they don’t have the evidence they want to do everything possible to both manipulate the venue and also bring in people whose predisposition will make them more likely to believe the government’s version of events.
• Assata was in a position to be put in prison for the rest of her life in these human-breaking conditions.
• The day before this happened, the US government refused to remove Cuba from the state sponsors of terrorism list. This is used in part for keeping Cuba on that list.
• Also to give a chilling effect to progressive movements in the United States.
• The US seems to be redefining what are terrorist actions and what its responses are.
• The lock down of Boston, the reclassification of Assata Shakur, the issuing of the drone memo of what eminence actually means.
• The US is attempting to create enough ambiguity in the statutes.

Guest – Eugene Puryear, Eugene is a writer and on the editorial board of the Liberation,  Newspaper of the Party for Socialism and Liberations.

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CIW – Fair Food Program: Wendy’s

Last year Trader Joe’s and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers signed an agreement that formalized the ways in which Trader Joe’s support the CIW’s Fair Food Program, a hard won victory.. Since then efforts have turned to companies such as Publix supermarkets in Florida and the Wendy’s fast food chain. Recently, Fair Food activists across the country visited their local Wendy’s to deliver a message: It’s time to join the rest of the fast-food industry and support the Fair Food Program.

Emilio Faustino:
Translator Joe Parker:

• We’re farm workers who come from the town Immokalee, Florida that’s based in the Southwestern part of the state. Our community is a farm worker community and for many years we faced a number of different kinds of exploitation, poverty, wage theft, physical and verbal abuse as well as sexual harassment of many women working in the fields.
• We began our campaign focused on the big corporate buyers of the produce that we pick back in 2001 in an effort to improve wages and working conditions in the fields, we began with Taco Bell and from there had campaigns with McDonald’s, Burger King, until as you said 11 other companies came to the table to dialogue with farm workers and work to improving those wages and working conditions in their supply chains.
• We’re here in New York focused on Wendy’s fast food chain. For a number of years the coalition has been sending letters to the fast food chain asking them to join the Fair Food program. We launched a public campaign with them earlier this year but thus far they have ignored us.
• We want Wendy’s to do what most of these corporations have done, that’s pay one penny more for each tomato that they buy.
• We’re here for the Wendy’s shareholder action, and we’re going to be organizing an protest on Saturday, May 18, at 2PM at Union Square to send a message to company’s investors that this is something that farmworkers in Wendy’s supply chain really deserve. There will also be a number of actions taking place that day all over the country in a number of communities standing together with the CIW.
• Contact: www.ciw-online.org, email: workers@ciw-online.org, 239-657-8311

Guest – Emelio Faustino, farm worker, CIW activist living in Florida. He is among other workers picking tomatoes by hand for 10-12 hours per day, while getting paid 50 cents per bin, or about 200 to 283 dollars per week.

Guest – Joe Parker, CIW spokesman and translator.

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Law and Disorder January 14, 2013 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Guantanamo Bay Prison 11th Anniversary
• Abu Ghraib Settlement: Defense Contractor Engility Holdings Pays $5M To Iraqi Torture Detainees
• Stop and Frisk Lawyers Praise Decision Finding NYPD Stops Unconstitutional
• Bradley Manning Case: Judge Gives 112 Days of Sentence If Convicted
• Law and Disorder Tip of the Hat: New Yorkers Respond to Hateful Subway Ads & Declare Them War Propaganda
• In Memory of Adnan Latif, A Cleared Guantanamo Detainee Who Was Found Dead In His Cell

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Obama to Nominate John Brennan, ‘Kill List’ Architect, as New CIA Chief

As many listeners know, President Barack Obama has nominated John Brennan as director of the CIA. Brennan is currently Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism. In this capacity Brennan meets with the president daily and is governed the administration’s program of extrajudicial assassinations known as the “kill list.”

In 2011 and 2012, Brennan used his position to “re-organize” the process by which people outside of war zones were put on the list of drone targets.  Basically, this “reorganization” gave the White House the power to secretly determine who would die in the US assassination program overseas.

We welcome back retired CIA officer, Ray McGovern, now a political activist. McGovern was a federal employee under seven U.S. presidents in the past 27 years.  Ray McGovern’s article on Consortium News: The Grilling That Brennan Deserves.

Ray McGovern:

• After 9-11, the acceptance of things like torture has become even more widespread.
• I spent a little time in Germany and I know about Gestapo tactics, and it seem to me that enhanced interrogation techniques sounded very familiar, and indeed its right out of the Gestapo lexicon.
• The immediate post World War II experience was very vivid.
• Obama is very fastidious in looking over this “kill list.” He’s got his own priest.
• It did me great good to know there were a handful at least of Fordham students that stood with their back to Brennan and protested vigorously against not being the commencement speaker but awarded the Doctorate of Humane Letters.
• He openly advocated kidnapping, the euphemism there is extraordinary rendition.
• There are black prisons all over Europe and Asia where these people were kept and tortured.
• He was an open advocate of at least the kidnapping and he was there. He was at the right hand of George Tenet so to speak.
• I have good information that Brennan was among those in the White House basement supervising the demonstration of “enhanced interrogation techniques” that Condeleeza Rice arranged for all the personages there.
• It’s all a master weaving, webbing of deceit and John Brennan is at the bottom of it.
• He was a classis example of a failed analyst. Why did he get where he is?
• He made an important friend George Tenet.
• Is Brennan suggesting that Muslims are hard wired to want to knock down planes over Detroit.
• I have very good information in that report that Brennan is the prime mover in all these abuses.
• It’s not about success, it’s about principle here.
• I like Dr. King’s motto, there is such a thing is too late. Sometimes you really have to put your body into it.
• Unless we act, nothing will be achieved.
• There are 2 CIAs. The one that Truman set up to give him honest answers to what’s going on in the world.
• To speak without fear or favor, to tell ‘em the truth. That’s the one I worked in. That’s the one I could with career protection knock noses out of joint in the Pentagon and the State Department. I could do that.

Guest – Raymond L. McGovern,  retired CIA officer turned political activist. McGovern was a Federal employee under seven U.S. presidents in the past 27 years.  Ray’s opinion pieces have appeared in many leading newspapers here and abroad.  His website writings are posted first on consortiumnews.com, and are usually carried on other websites as well.  He has debated at the Oxford Forum and appeared on Charlie Rose, The Newshour, CNN, and numerous other TV & radio programs and documentaries. Ray has lectured to a wide variety of audiences here and abroad.   Ray studied theology and philosophy (as well as his major, Russian) at Fordham University, from which he holds two degrees.  He also holds a Certificate in Theological Studies from Georgetown University.

A Catholic, Mr. McGovern has been worshipping for over a decade with the ecumenical Church of the Saviour and teaching at its Servant Leadership School.  He was co-director of the school from 1998 to 2004.  Ray came from his native New York to Washington in the early Sixties as an Army infantry/intelligence officer and then served as a CIA analyst from the administration of  John F. Kennedy to that of George H. W. Bush. Ray’s duties included chairing National Intelligence Estimates and preparing the President’s Daily Brief, which he briefed one-on-one to President Ronald Reagan’s most senior national security advisers from 1981 to 1985.

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Law and Disorder December 10, 2012 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Michael Ratner: Attends Bradley Manning Hearing
• Psychiatrist Testimony: Manning Not A Suicide Threat
• Rumsfeld Techniques:  Stripping, Lights 24 Hours, Sleep Disruption, Solitary
• Manning Testifies About Torture; Was it Aimed at Turning Him on Assange with Michael Ratner
• First Presentation by David Coombs –Manning Attorney with Michael Ratner
• Michael Ratner Discusses Jeremy Hammond Case On  “Hactavist Entrapment” RT TV
• Michael Ratner: Manning Describes Cruel and Unusual Punishment; Offers Plea Deal
• Daniel Ellsberg, Michael Ratner and Jessalyn Radack Discuss Bradley Manning Trial: HuffPost

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Facing The U.S. Prison Problem 2.3 Million Strong

As many listeners may know the United States has incarcerated more people than any other country in the world, and also within the history of humanity. The newly published book titled Facing The U.S. Prison Problem 2.3 Million Strong by Shawn Griffith gives the reader a rare perspective from an ex convict who served a 20 year sentence in some of the harshest conditions. These include being confined to a small cement cell in the late Florida summer without sheets, laying in pools of sweat on a plastic covered mattress. Vindictive prison guards and case workers in the criminal justice system had made life nearly unbearable for Shawn Griffith.  His book hopes to inspire movement building among the families of prisoners to develop a non-profit corporation called the Prisoner Family Union.

Shawn Griffith:

• As a youngster, it was a very difficult childhood.
• My parents were very religious, there was a lot of alcohol abuse.
• Early on I went on a truth seeking thing. I also became very rebellious at a young age.
• At 16, I met these people who were crack cocaine addicts. They were the only place I could find to stay off the street. They introduced me to the drug, which I had no knowledge of, how addictive it was.
• Then they told me I had to help them support their habit. They started training me, taking me to homes showing me how to burglarize them, steal cars, a number of things to support our habits.
• When I committed an armed robbery for 100.00 ended up with a 24 year sentenced in which I did 20 years.
• I knew that I had some emotional problems, I started studying psychology for about 4 years. By the age of 23, I attempted to escape initially.
• In Chapter 1, where I explain in detail, some of the sentencing laws that were passed in Florida, those same laws that were passed show decreases in crime rate before the laws were instituted.
• Inmates and their families are by majority below the poverty line. They don’t have a lot of resources to fight back.
• These large groups that influence the correctional system, they are unionized.
• Speakoutpublishing.com

Guest – Shawn Griffith, founder of Speak Out Publishing and  has been an institutional teacher of adult basic education for the past sixteen years. He has received many teaching and writing awards from professors and others with whom he has worked, as recently as 2011.  He is author of the recently published book Facing The U.S. Prison Problem 2.3 Million Strong

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Professor Francis Boyle: Palestine Observer Status

Now that Palestine has been voted in as a new non member state status within the United Nations,  Palestinian leaders can join the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court and challenge Israel’s violations of international law. We talk with Professor Francis Boyle, the leading expert in international about his role as a Palestine observer. In his book Palestine, Palestinians and International Law, Professor Boyle outlines 6 critical points, among them are:

1. “Palestine can join the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court and file a Complaint with the ICC against the illegal settlements and settlers, who are committing war crimes;

2. “Palestine can join the Statute for the International Court of Justice, sue Israel at the World Court, and break the illegal siege of Gaza;

3. “Palestine can join the Law of the Sea Convention and get its fair share of the enormous gas fields lying off the coast of Gaza, thus becoming economically self-sufficient;

4. “Palestine can become a High Contracting Party to the Four Geneva Conventions [this deals with the laws of war];

5. “Palestine can join the International Civil Aviation Organization and gain sovereign, legal control over its own airspace;

6. “Palestine can join the International Telecommunications Union and gain sovereign legal control over its own airwaves, phone lines, bandwidths.”

Professor Boyle is the author of many books including Palestine, Palestinians and International Law, The Palestinian Right of Return Under International Law, and United Ireland, Human Rights and International Law.

Professor Francis Boyle:

• The negotiations between Israelis and the Palestinians broke off because Israel continued to build settlements. The Palestinians took the position that well, we’re negotiating over a pizza while you eat it.
• I went back with them with a proposal longstanding with President Arafat, that we apply for membership in the United Nations organization.
• That was approved by the PLO executive committee. The Obama Administration bottled the application up in the UN Security Council.
• The mainstream news media has it wrong, Obama can exercise over their admission if they want to, but under the Uniting For Peace Procedure, they can turn it over to the General Assembly where Palestine can be admitted as a full fledged state by a 2/3 vote.
• They took an intermediate step last Spring, the PLO executive committee that serves as the provisional government for the state of Palestine created by the 1988 Declaration of Independence, voted to apply for UN observer status.
• Look at what Switzerland did from the founding of the United Nations to about 10 years ago as a UN observer state. Palestine can now if it wishes join pretty much every international organization in the world and treaties.
• They can simply use the Swiss model, join the International Criminal Court, join the International Court of Justice, join the Law of the Sea convention, join the International Civic Aviation Convention.
• We already filed a complaint with the ICC after Operation Cast Lead.
• If you follow the Israeli press they’re deathly afraid of prosecution by the ICC.
• The step we saw last week, took two years in the making. The Palestinians had to go all over the world to line up that support.
• It’s been my advice, we go after the settlements now – what they do is up to them (PLO)
• The second legal step is to sue Israel at the International Court of Justice at the Hague. The so called World Court of the United Nations system.
• I’ve offered to do that work for them and try to break that genocidal siege of Gaza.
• You or I aren’t going to decide this.
• We have to stand back and support the Palestinians and let them decide what they’re going to do.

Guest – Professor Francis Boyle, leading American expert in international law. He was responsible for drafting the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, the American implementing legislation for the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. He served on the Board of Directors of Amnesty International (1988-1992), and represented Bosnia-Herzegovina at the World Court. He served as legal adviser to the Palestinian Delegation to the Middle East peace negotiations from 1991 to 1993.

In 2007, he delivered the Bertrand Russell Peace Lectures. Professor Boyle teaches international law at the University of Illinois, Champaign and is author of, inter alia, The Future of International Law and American Foreign Policy, Foundations of World Order, The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence, Palestine, Palestinians and International Law, Destroying World Order, Biowarfare and Terrorism, Tackling America’s Toughest Problems, and The Tamil Genocide by Sri Lanka.  He holds a Doctor of Law Magna Cum Laude as well as a Ph.D. in Political Science, both from Harvard University.

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Law and Disorder October 22, 2012 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Michael Ratner: Military Commissions – The 911 Five
• Hamden Case Goes To The Court of Appeals In DC
• Former Guantanamo Detainee David Hicks Could Get Proceeds From His Book
• CCR: Julian Assange Jeopardy – NDAA

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Russell Tribunal on Palestine Findings

We follow up on the findings of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine. As many listeners may know, the tribunal was created in response to the international community’s inaction regarding Israel’s recognized violations of international law.  Jury and speakers included Angela Davis, Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappe, Peter Hansen, Diana Buttu, Phyllis Bennis, Katie Gallagher and Russell Means.

Attorney Noura Erakat:

• Each of the sessions focuses on a different component of the problems that has led to a failure to achieve a solution to what some may describe as the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
• More specifically to achieve Palestinian self-determination and equality with their Jewish-Israeli counterparts.
• The first tribunal explored the EU complicity. A condition for Israel’s acceptance into the United Nations was its acceptance of returning refugees to their homes per UN Resolution 194.
• Since the 1967 war they’ve been supported by unequivocal US financial, military and diplomatic support.
• Corporate complicity:  The corporations that are involved in funding the Israeli military arsenal and its construction arsenal to expand its colonial settlements in the Occupied Territory as well as building a wall deemed illegal by the National Court of Justice.
• This fourth and final session brought everything back to the U.S.
• To New York specifically because the U.S. has proven to be the primary obstacle in resolving this conflict.
• Consider first that Israel has received 115 billion dollars in aid since World War 2. Making it the highest recipient of US foreign aid.
• In addition to that Israel receives approximately 3 billion dollars a year. It receives money without any review in US law, specifically the Arms Export Control Act which conditions that all US aid to foreign countries must be used to further human rights or in self defense.
• The US is shielding Israeli responsibility in the UN Security Council
• The resolution process is stonewalled internationally.
• One of the things that we’d love to do is remove the veto power from the five permanent members of the UN Security Council.
• BDS Movement: 2011 – Dock Workers refused unload Israeli products from a boat.
• EndtheOccupation.org

Guest – Attorney Noura Erakat, human rights attorney and activist. She is currently a Abraham L. Freedman Teaching Fellow at Temple University, Beasley School of Law and the U.S. based Legal Advocacy Consultant for the Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Refugee and Residency Rights. She has taught international human rights law in the Middle East at Georgetown University since Spring 2009. Noura also has helped seed BDS campaigns as a national grassroots organizer with the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation.

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Russell Tribunal on Palestine: Ilan Pappé Speech

The final session of the Tribunal focused on the responsibility of the United States of America and the United Nations regarding the Israeli breaches of international law towards Palestine and Palestinians. There is now a situation in which Israel has achieved a status of immunity and impunity, facilitated by the US, despite its complete disregard for the norms and standards of international law.

Speaker – Ilan Pappé, an Israeli historian and activist. He is currently a professor with the College of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of Exeter in the UK, director of the university’s European Centre for Palestine Studies, and co-director of the Exeter Centre for Ethno-Political Studies. He is the author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006), The Modern Middle East (2005), A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples (2003), and Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (1988)

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Law and Disorder October 8, 2012 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Mass Probable Cause – 2004 RNC Case Update
• Senate Report: 77 Fusion Centers “Pools of Ineptitude”
• Michael Ratner: Three Important Confinement Cases
• In Memory of Ernesto Che Guevara: 45 Years
  
• Lynne Stewart Update

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Universal Jurisdiction: Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Shell / Bush 6 Case In Spain

This week the US Supreme Court will decide if corporations could be held liable in U.S. courts for violations of international human rights law in the land mark case Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum.  The case was brought by families of seven Nigerians who were executed by a former military government for protesting Shell’s exploration and development and is pushing to hold corporations accountable for human rights violations. The Supreme Court will also consider how the Alien Tort Statute Claim can be used the Kiobel case.  A one sentence law that goes back to 1789 when the first judiciary act was brought in the United States. We’ve discussed this statute with several past guests including attorneys Peter Weiss and Rhonda Copeland who were instrumental in beginning the first cases in which human rights violations, taking place in other countries could actually be litigated in the United States.

We also discuss the recent amicus filing by a group of international human rights organizations and experts before the Spanish Supreme Court. The brief asks the Spanish Supreme Court to overturn a decision not to pursue a criminal case against six former officials from the Bush administration for their role in directing and implementing a systematic torture program.  Past shows with Katherine Gallagher.

Attorney Katherine Gallagher:

• The Kiobel case has been in US courts since 2004.
• The claims were brought in the Southern District of New York, under a law from 1789, known as the Alien Tort Statute.
• This law allows non-US citizens to come into a US federal court and assert violations of the Laws of Nations or International Law.
• A recent precedence for this is Citizens United, what happened was that the Second Circuit ruled that corporations could not be held liable for these egregious human rights violations under the Alien Tort Statute.
• The question of corporate liability went up to the Supreme Court first.
• We had 2 judges from a 3 bunch panel in the Second Circuit suddenly come out in the fall of 2009 and say there is no corporate liability. That is the question that went up to the Supreme Court.
• Four other circuits had look at this question and they said of course corporations can be held as liable as an individual, a natural person.
• The Alien Tort Statute allows for a civil suit and civil liability rather than criminal liability.
• The key case from 1980 that CCR brought, the case of Filartiga, this case which the Supreme Court affirmed in 2004 as being on solid legal basis, claims by a Paraguayan, against a Paraguayan for actions that occurred in Paraguay.
• So its very strange that the Supreme Court was asking in a very broad fashion whether the ATS could apply to actions that occurred in another country. That is what the bulk of the cases brought under the ATS have been about.
• Some of the cases where the ATS is used are for some of the most serious violations. Cases of war crimes, crimes against humanity, torture, not your run of the mill case.
• What the justices seem to coalesce around was the issue of whether there’s an alternate forum. If the claims against Shell could have been brought in the UK or in the Netherlands, maybe they don’t need to be brought in the US.
• We’ve seen a trend in the last 20 years of other countries adopting stronger laws that allow for redress, and accountability, so we don’t have to be the world’s policeman.
• There have been 2 cases that percolated up in the last 4 years in Spain.
• The first is a widespread investigation of the torture program then Judge Balthazar Garzon. This is a case looking at torture in Guantanamo, and potentially in Iraq and Afghanistan, looking at the whole U.S. torture program. That case was brought on by 4 named plaintiffs.
• That case is very wide ranging, and willing to go up the chain of command as far as the evidence leads.
• There is a second case that was brought against specific U.S. individuals. They’re known as the Bush 6, including, Jay Bybee, John Yu, David Addington, Alberto Gonzalez. Six men who served as lawyers and argued to have essentially created both the legal structure that enabled the torture program,  providing arguements for immunity and protecting participants of the torture program from accountability.
• Spain has a long and proud history of upholding International Law. Spain is where we had the case against Augusto Pinochet in the late 90s.
• We’ll be doing this as long as we need. We need to have accountability, its really critical.

Guest – Katherine Gallagher, Senior Staff Attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), where she focuses on holding individuals, including US and foreign government officials, and corporations, including private military contractors, accountable for serious human rights violations. Among the cases she has worked, or is working, on are international accountability efforts for U.S. officials involved in torture (Spain, Switzerland, Canada); ICC Vatican Officials Prosecution; Arar v. Ashcroft, Corrie v. Caterpillar, Matar v. Dichter, Saleh v. Titan, Al-Quraishi v. Nakhla and L-3, Estate of Atban v. Blackwater.
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Law and Disorder September 17, 2012 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

•     US Refuses To Extradite Former Bolivian President
•     Jose Padilla Re-Sentencing
•     Ward Churchill Case Update – Are University Board of Regents Immune?
•     Armenia Protests Extradition of Axe Murderer

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Department of Defense Declassifies Report on Alleged Drugging of Detainees

Hosts discuss a recently declassified report on alleged drugging of Guantanamo detainees with Attorney Shane Kadidal.

Guest – Attorney Shane Kadidal, senior managing attorney of the Guantánamo Global Justice Initiative at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City. He is a graduate of the Yale Law School and a former law clerk to Judge Kermit Lipez of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. In his eight years at the Center, he has worked on a number of significant cases in the wake of 9/11, including the Center’s challenges to the detention of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay (among them torture victim Mohammed al Qahtani and former CIA ghost detainee Majid Khan), which have twice reached the Supreme Court, and several cases arising out of the post-9/11 domestic immigration sweeps.

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Adnan Latif – the Face of Indefinite Detention – Dies at Guantánamo

A prisoner held at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base since 2002 died last week. Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif was a 32 year old from Yemen who was allegedly suicidal and mentally ill. Latif won a U.S. court order for his release but it was overturned on appeal.  In 2009, President Obama imposed a moratorium on Guantanamo prisoners from Yemen after a Yemeni trained Nigerian was found with a bomb in his underwear on a Detroit bound plane in 2009.  Latif is the ninth prisoner to die at Guantanamo Bay prison.

Attorney David Remes:

• We decided to put out a statement by the lawyers.  We wanted to call his family but the government said let the ICRC do it.
• He was approved in 2004, he was approved in 2007, and approved in 2009 for transfer out of Guantanamo.
• Adnan filed a habeas corpus petitions in 2004. In 2008 those cases began to move forward, Adnan was among them. He won his habeas case. The whole case against him hinged on an intelligence report that the district court judge said was unreliable. The case was appealed by the Obama Administration.
• He was a very sweet man, he was small, he was thin.
• He was very sensitive and a fine poet. He felt everything more keenly, perhaps more keenly than any of the other detainees.
• He felt that his spirit was being crushed. That he was always being roughed up by the guards. He was on long hunger strikes, he was held in isolation for the majority of his time in Guantanamo.
• He was mentally very fragile.
• At one point in my representation of him in 2009, he slit his wrists as I was speaking with him . . by chipping formica from under the table and cutting into his vein let the blood drip into a little cup and then threw his blood on me.
• I took an inventory of his various bumps, bruises and swellings. It was almost like a doctor’s visit.
• He was a small guy.
• He could be very lucid, he was very intelligent.
• You just have to question the NCIS reports from the beginning.
• Whatever the conclusions that were announced it was Guantanamo that killed Adnan. It ruined his health, it ruined his spirit, it may have led him to suicide.

Guest – Attorney David Remes,  a human rights lawyer who has been deeply involved in the litigation on behalf of Guantanamo prisoners since 2004. He represents 16 Yemenis and has made several visits to Yemen to press for his clients’ release and brief their families. He was among the first lawyers to visit Guantanamo after the Supreme Court ruled in Rasul v. Bush in 2004 that the prisoners had a right to legal counsel.

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Law and Disorder September 3, 2012 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates

• Michael Ratner: Update on Verdict – Corrie v State of Israel
• Cardinal Dolan Who Approved Payoffs For Priests Accused of Sex Abuse To Leave Priesthood Gives Speech At RNC and Closing Speech for DNC

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Islamophobia: Anatomy of an American Panic

In the last few weeks, 8 places of worship connected with South Asians or Middle Easterners have been targets in the United States. As many listeners know, six people were murdered at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin but later that evening a mosque in Joplin Missouri was burned down. Other targets recently included mosques in Rhode Island, Southern California, Oklahoma City and Dearborn, Michigan. These tragic events mark another wave of existential Muslim threats inciting fear and violence against Middle Eastern people while helping to justify the ongoing war on terror.

According to the University of Maryland’s National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Response to Terrorism, since 9/11 to 2010 there have been 155 terror incidents in the U.S., and exactly two of them or 1.3 percent have been attributed to international Islamist terror groups. The majority of events involved individuals such as anti-abortionists, right-wing extremists, or extreme animal rights activists.

The Nation Magazine has highlighted the disproportional focus put on Muslim communities in a special issue titled “Islamophobia: Anatomy of an American Panic.” We talk with journalist Lizzy Ratner and authors Deepa Kumar and Moustafa Bayoumi who contributed articles to the Nation Magazine special.

Lizzy Ratner:

• The Nation did a special issue about Islamophobia. It came out in the beginning of July. You can still find the majority of the articles online. The real credit has to go to Abdeen Jabara whose idea this really was.
• The civil rights attorney came to me last year and said the anti-Arab, anti-Muslim has reached fever-pitch.
• So I began to do some research about what exactly was going on and very quickly compiled a massive roster of possible articles.
• For the most part, the Left and Progressives have been far too quiet.
• This bigotry that is flourishing right now has a real history, it’s not a just a product of 9/11 and the post 9/11 era.
• Some of the seeds of bigotry have to do with the role of the United States historically in the Middle East.
• Islamophobia served an agenda and a number of purposes.

Guest – New York City journalist Lizzy Ratner has written extensively for the Nation and Alternet on issues involving Islamophobia. Lizzy is also co-editor of The Goldstone Report: The Legacy of the Landmark Investigation of the Gaza Conflict.
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Moustafa Bayoumi:

• I was happy to see that the Nation was happy to take on the question of Islamophobia for a double issue.
• There’s been a shift in the last ten years from paranoia around security to a paranoia about the basic facts of Muslim life in the United States.
• In a way you can say it’s a shift from security to culture.
• At any stage, anything that has to do with a daily concerns about living a life as a Muslim American, somehow now becomes charged with sedition. Part of the funding of the anti-Muslim movement in the United States is basic conservative politics and extreme conservative politics.
• And also due to the Israel-Palestine conflict. So people who want to come aboard Israel will make a very distorted picture of what Muslim life is like.
• The NYPD has now a decade long history of “othering” the Muslim-American community.
• The NYPD had been screening The New Jihad for its new recruits.
• It’s a crazy film saying that all of the American Muslims are here as a fifth column ready to pounce. It’s a training film for new recruits. That’s true for the Pentagon and the FBI.
• Muslim Americans are still seen as perpetual foreigners.
• That Muslim American rights are different than everyone else’s rights.
• You’re average American consumer of media does not relate to the victims of the Oak Creek massacre because they don’t see them as being part of the American family.
• They asked American’s in this poll, and 62 percent of the population has never met a Muslim.
• If you’ve never met a Muslim then it’s very easy to believe all these boogey man ideas. That’s why media plays an important role in this issue.
• The FBI (training manual) said that it was in the nature of Muslims to try to take over this country.

Guest – Author Moustafa Bayoumi wrote Fear and Loathing of Islam joins us, his book : Being Young and Arab in America, won an American Book Award and the Arab American Book Award for non-fiction. He is also a professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York.

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Deepa Kumar:

• As of late the anti-Muslim statements coming from Michelle Bachmann, Joe Walsh, all of whom are Republicans, there is a sense of which it is the Republicans who are responsible for Islamophobia, for the demonization of Muslims and so on.
• This brand of the war on terror gets hatched and part of that was language developed in the 1990s, called the Clash of Civilizations. It was a man named Bernard Lewis who first penned this term.
• It’s not so much we’re going to carry out revenge on Osama Bin Laden but that we’re going to rescue Afghan women. In the case of Iraq, we’re going to bring democracy when no weapons of mass destruction were found.
• This rhetoric has a long history it goes back to the 19th century.
• Both presidents need Islamophobia. They need to generate this fear and hatred of the “Muslim other.”
• Operation Boulder
• The Jonathan Institute holds this conference in Jerusalem . . Islamofacism, the roots are sown at that conference.
• The idea of this menacing Muslim enemy is not new. It was not something created after 9/11 but in fact it goes back a millennium.
• It’s about political goals but religious rhetoric gets used. Same thing with the re-conquest of Spain.
• The Islamophobic rhetoric is one that’s mobilized by the elite.
• I hold both Republicans and Democrats responsible. These rabid right wingers get their confidence from mainstream figures like Walsh, like Bachmann and others.
• The sad reality is that the Democrats have done nothing to counter this.
• The Democrats are not an ally in this fight.
• I take inspiration from 2 movements in the sixties, the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement. I think these 2 strategies need to come together in fighting Islamophobia.
• We have to take on both the far right and challenge the priorities of empire and bring together a multiracial coalition that can actually change a generation.
• It was President Clinton with Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act in 1996 which made it legal to actually deport people with secret evidence. We know this lays the basis for the Patriot Act. This has really been a bipartisan project in the interest of empire.

Guest – Deepa Kumar, an Associate Professor of Media Studies and Middle Eastern Studies at Rutgers University. Her work is driven by an active engagement with the key issues that characterize our era–neoliberalism and imperialism. Her first book, Outside the Box: Corporate Media, Globalization and the UPS Strike (University of Illinois Press, 2007), is about the power of collective struggle in effectively challenging the priorities of neoliberalism.

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Law and Disorder June 18, 2012 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• PCJF Victory For Occupy Protesters on Brooklyn Bridge
• Boumediene v Bush Update – The Habeas Cases Are Essentially Done
• Jose Padilla’s Case – Prisoner Abuse Sustained Under Category of “Enemy Combatant”
• Court Rules In Favor Of Executive Power Authorizing Torture

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Quebec Students Protests: Largest Act of Civil Disobedience In Canadian History

Social unrest in Montreal continues unabated with nightly protests as thousands fill the streets in what is now the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history. Protests against tuition hikes and austerity are evolving into community assemblies,  and also into increasingly popular pots and pans protests. These larger protests against tuition hikes and austerity turn into community assemblies and also the loud pots and pans protests. In response, police randomly searching and detaining people wearing the red square in solidarity of the movement and try to break up each emerging protest.

Gabriel Nadeau – Dubois:

• The strikes started in the beginning of February, and the debate about tuition hikes became a larger debate about privatization.  It started as a student strike and is now a popular movement.
• The context in Quebec is the reason we were able to build a movement. There has been so much dissatisfaction toward the government in the last 10 years.
• Many other workers saw an opportunity to go into the street because a lot of people were very angry.
• Bill 78 is a special law. This bill has 3 major sections.
• The first section suspends the Winter semester with the objective to stop the student strikes.
• Now we’re in sort of a lock out these days.  The Winter semester will start in August.
• The main objective of the bill is to break the mobilization.
• We have seen thousands of illegal protests of civil disobedience.
• Last week there were hundreds of police in the subway station, who were systematically and illegally searching the students and the citizens who were wearing the red square.
• The bad thing about too many protests is the citizens get used to seeing police brutality.
• We currently contesting the law in front of the court. We are trying to suspend the law and declare it unconstitutional.
• We are planning 2 major protests this summer one on June 22, 2012 and one on July 22.
• What we’re asking for is still very simple stop the increase of tuition fees in order to keep the universities accessible to everyone

Guest – Gabriel Nadeau – Dubois, the co- spokesperson of the Coalition off the Solidarity Trade Union Association for Student (aka CLASS), which is opposed, since the beginning of this year , with rising tuition fees in Quebec decreed by the Jean Charest government.

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Austerity and Second Round of Elections in Greece

The elections in Greece have just occurred. We talk with Greek-American National Lawyers Guild attorney Eric Poulos about the left, right and center parties in Greece. Eric explains party platforms and makes a few predictions on election outcomes.

Attorney Eric Poulos:

• Greece has got money from the European Union, not to bail out Greece, it’s a misnomer in the press, it’s to bail out the banks.  It’s going to pay off debt service to banks.
• There’s no stimulus to create jobs in Greece, jobs are being lost.
• Unemployment is up 20-25 percent, among youth it’s 50 percent.
• If they can, Greeks are leaving the country, taking their money out of the banks.
• Pharmacies are not filling prescriptions, doctors are not getting reimbursed from the state.
• Political party Syriza emerged from the last election. This is run off election from one that occurred in May where there was no clear victor.
• Syriza’s a left wing party that emerged from almost obscurity. Syriza is made up of many forces. It’s a coalition.
• Looks like the right wing party might be gaining votes. Syriza wants to cancel the memorandum which triggered the loan from the EU.
• It wants a moratorium on the payment of the debt, and it has various measures to deal with corruption, it wants remove immunity.
• The memorandum imposed austerity measures which Greece has tried to fulfill, and has resulted in devastation.
• Even the mainstream parties that agreed with the memorandum say they want to renegotiate that agreement.
• Greece has huge military contracts with German and French defense contractors, which they will not let Greece out of.  The far left says to cancel those contracts. 
• There is an out and out fascist party that got almost 7 percent of the vote. Golden Dawn.
• There’s a huge anti-immigrant sentiment that these far right parties have tapped into.
• I think conservatives will gain. I think Syriza will gain

Guest – Attorney Eric Poulos, writer and National Lawyers Guild member.
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Cuban Five Case Update: Government Paid Media Helped Shape Public Perception

The Cuban Five were convicted 14 years ago this month on conspiracy to commit espionage at some time in the future.  Recently, prominent First Amendment attorney Martin Garbus joined the case of the five.  He’s concentrating his legal efforts on US government paid journalists in Miami who received hundreds and thousands of dollars of payments from the office of Cuba broadcasting. A fact unknown to the defense at the time of the trial.  The reporters covered the case in an almost hysterical and prejudicial fashion.

Attorney Martin Garbus:

• We’re trying to get all the facts nailed down on the paid journalists issue.
• The motion is to get discovery of those facts and then to proceed to the hearings to reverse the convictions.
• What we’ve been trying to do for the last 15 years is trying to get these facts and we’ve failed to do it.
• What you have is a cauldron, when this is in the public debate. It’s not the just the question of the media being influenced, not just the question of the jury pool being saturated,
• its not just the question of the jurors themselves being saturated.
• We understand that the government was paying people who were on major newspapers, major media, substantial sums of money to write stories to get indictments, as well as convictions, and to influence the whole question of how you charge people.
• In a normal world, these defendants would not have been charged.
• It’s not just the question of the media effecting the jury pool, it goes long before that.
• Given the circumstances, one would expect the prosecutors to try and get the highest charges that they could.
• It’s government legal influence at every single part of the legal process.
• You had both governments trying to de-fang very bad situations.
• Instead of stopping the planes, they chose instead 18-17 months later, they chose to arrest these five people whose names they knew because it was part of the cooperation pact.
• There were many people in Miami who didn’t like the idea of the Cuban government and the American government through government representatives, trying to cut back the Miami terrorists.
• A lot of them became rogue agents and trying to ruin whatever cooperation there was.
• Its seems apparent that it was purely a political prosecution.
• There’s a reason why the government has been withholding documents.
• I don’t know of any other case where you’re going to get an accumulation of facts in a situation that’s as explosive as this, given the traditional historic politics as what was going on at that time.
• You had two judges saying this was a fire storm.

Guest – Attorney Martin Garbus, one of the country’s leading trial lawyers. He has appeared before the United States Supreme Court and the highest state and federal courts in the nation. Time Magazine has named him “legendary . . . one of the best trial lawyers in the country.” He’s also known as the most prominent First Amendment lawyer.

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Law and Disorder February 6, 2012 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• OWS: Three Months of Twitter Supoenaed
• Hackers, Copyright Pirates and US Extradition
• The Third Jihad Film Shown To 1498 NYPD Officers
• Past Show: Fear Inc: The Roots Of Islamaphobia In America
• Taliban Prisoners In Guantanamo Used As Bargaining Chip
• Sundance Film Festival: The Law In These Parts.
• Sundance Film on Paul Simon Playing South Africa Undercuts Power of Cultural Boycott
  
• Mumia Abu-Jamal In General Population: With Heidi Boghosian and Johanna Fernandez
• Update: Coalition of Immokalee Workers and Trader Joe’s Sign Fair Food Agreement

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Weapons of Mass Destruction Part 2: Iran

Similar to accusing the Iraqi government for stockpiling weapons of mass destruction as a pretext for a military invasion, Israeli and US intelligence assert that Iran is bent on becoming a nuclear weapons state by enriching uranium. This narrative as many listeners know has been going for many years  In the New York Times article titled Confronting Iran In A Year of Elections, New York Time’s chief Washington correspondent David Sanger platforms his article on the assumption there is evidence Iran is making nuclear weapons. We talk today with Professor Bill Beeman author of The “Great Satan” vs. the “Mad Mullahs”: How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other. Beeman has criticized the New York Times and other media for falsely claiming there is evidence Iran is developing nuclear weapons. He also points out that Iran has a right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes and that their facilities are monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Professor William Beeman:

• First of all its very important to understand there is no evidence anywhere that Iran has a nuclear weapons program.  Every report from the IAEA has reaffirmed that Iran has not diverted any nuclear material for military purposes, including the last report in November 2011.
• The news media, especially the New York Times, I must tell you has distorted the IAEA report in order to make it seem as if Iran is building nuclear weapons.
• We have no evidence to the contrary.
• The New York Times article written by an Israeli journalist not only has actually attracted hundreds and hundreds of objections.  Because of its war mongering tone and because it contains a lot of inaccuracies.
• Clapper claims Iran is most likely to attack the United States based on the incident that took place a few months ago.
• There are some countries like Japan that have said outright that they intend to develop the capacity to construct nuclear weapons.  Iran has said it doesn’t intend to do this.
• The United States is not coming after Japan. . or Brazil which has issued a similar statement or any of the 20 countries that don’t have weapons but are now enriching uranium.
• When Colin Powell went before the United Nations saying Iraq had weapons of mass destruction I wrote a column saying its simply not true.
• That got me on the Bill O’Reilly show where I had a big arguement with him about this.
• I said simply show us the actual proof.
• My feeling at the time was that Colin Powell had been badly misused by the Bush administration in order to sell a false picture of what was actually going on in Iraq.
• Iran was given uranium many years ago during the time of the Shah to use in a medical reactor to develop isotopes for the treatment of cancer.
• Every scrap of uranium that they’ve been working with is under inspection.
• The IAEA is watching the process as it goes on every day.
• They say if Iran wants to wipe Israel off the map they’re probably going to use nuclear weapons.
• The joke is of course we knew Iran was enriching uranium, because we started the enriching program 40 years ago.
• The idea that it was carried out in secret, quite frankly revealed the extraordinary ignorance of the Bush Administration.
• They have a continual drum beat to attack Iran. The aim is not to stop Iran’s nuclear program because Iran’s nuclear program is anemic. The aim is regime change.

Guest – Professor William O. Beeman, Professor and Chair of Anthropology and specialist in Middle East Studies at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis-St. Paul Minnesota, formerly of Brown University. It includes current publications on Middle Eastern affairs, especially Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf region; anthropology; linguistics; performance; opera; things Japanese and Central Asian.

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