Law and Disorder February 22, 2010 [55:12m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Historic John Brown’s Farm To Close
• Mamilla Cemetery Update

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CCR’s Second Stop and Frisk Lawsuit: Floyd, et al. v. City of New York

In the beginning of 2009, statistics show that 84 percent of the people who were stopped and frisked by the New York City Police Department were black or Hispanic. Very few stops yielded any contraband or weapons. Critics call these stops, racially oriented harrassement and despicable. Not everyone stopped by police is frisked however. About 59.4 percent of all Hispanics stopped were also frisked, 56.6 percent of blacks stopped were frisked and 46 percent of whites stopped were frisked. Whites had composed less than 16 percent of these stops in early 2009. The New York City Police Department insists the stops help fight crime. The Center for Constitutional Rights has filed a class-action lawsuit against the city and the Police Department over the stops.  Please visit MalcolmXGrassRootsMovement.

Plaintiff David Floyd:

• The case is surrounding stop and frisk cases, particularly in black and Latino communities.
• I’ve been stopped in community over the past couple years.  I live in Parkchester in the Bronx.
• Both times, I was stopped, I was going about my daily life, I work and go to school.  The second time I was stopped, was on the premises where I live.  The first time I was stopped, they gave no probable cause and I asked for names and badge numbers.
• The second time they said there were a string of robberies in the neighborhood.  It’s a script that we found, the police go by continually.
• It’s almost as if you’re walking down the street and somebody jumps up out of no where to rob you. They go in your pockets, they take your wallet, but in this instance, what they try to walk away with is your dignity.
• There are ways to very calmly challenge and ask questions but they don’t like that.  I ask “why is it that I’m being stopped, do you have probable cause?”   Part of our response as a community has to support young people, anyone and everyone who are getting stopped illegally.
• You should make sure that they know, that you know your rights.  People have cameras now, we need to make sure we document this constantly. Community members become activists so that internationally, there’s a voice that comes out.
• The securities industry is benefiting from tactics being used against black people here in the United States. Tactics that are being used against Palestinians, Iraqis, Afghans.  The tactics that the NYPD think are successful are being exported into other cities.  There is a veil of accountability with the CCRB
• Challenging state violence is the responsibility of those who go through it.

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Sunita Patel:

• The important thing to remember is that the Constitution requires that police have a reasonable suspicion that a crime is about to be committed.  In 2005, there were 4 hundred thousand stops.
• We also allege in our lawsuit that there is a failure to train and discipline police officers, that goes all the way up.  It’s important that there is still this historic memory of Amu Dudiallo, Abner Louima.
• We are also seeking more accountability within the CCRB, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, the body to hear civilian complaints regarding the NYPD.  We think the CCRB should have it’s own prosecutorial or enforcement powers.  There is a sense in the community, how can we bring change about when the system is so amomous?
• We also think there has to be a change in the way that police train rookie cops and undercover police officers that are flooding communities.  Make the Road By Walking / Malcolm X Grassroots Movement
• We don’t have the breakdown of arrests racially, yet.  The number of stop and frisks are on the rise and we should take a stand against it.  We think we will be able to obtain information about widespread practices

Guest - Sunita Patel,  Center for Constitutional Rights staff attorney,  Sunita is involved with racial profiling, immigrant rights and other human rights litigation.

Guest – David Floyd, plaintiff in the case and Bronx resident. MalcolmXGrassRootsMovement

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Chris Hedges – Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle

We are delighted to have back with us, award winning journalist and author Chris Hedges. His new book Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle thoughtfully examines the erosion of American culture and levels a heavy criticism. Chris Hedges says we are living in a totalitarian society that is image based. This image is not benign, he says. It is skillfully manipulated by for-profit corporations to get us to do things not in our interest. Right now, 40 million Americans are illiterate.  In this media landscape, nuanced discussions of ideas are replaced by carnival barking and interruption, meanwhile newspapers and publishing companies are in decline.  Hedges has called it a slow motion coup d’etat where democracy and the Constitution are held up as ideals while the levers of power are driven by destructive forces.

Chris Hedges:

• I think the best way to see how illusionned we are as a culture is through prism of popular entertainment.
• We’re of course a completely pornified society. The largest users of porn on the internet are teenagers.
• What are the messages being pumped out whether its the WWF or porn.
• Porn isn’t the back lit shaved bodies of the playboy channel. It’s violence and not simulated violence.
• The women are popping pain pills and require surgery after sex.   When you look at the stills from Abu Gharib, they could be stills from a set of a porn film, and I don’t think that is accidental.
• The narrative that we use to explain ourselves to ourselves is no longer print based.
• 42 million in the US illiterate, 50 million semi-illiterate.
• 80 percent of American households didn’t buy a book last year. The danger of that is the images we are fed are skillfully done by those with an agenda and power.  It is meant to confuse a brand with knowledge and not see the underlying structures of the corporate state.
• We are a culture severing ourselves from verifiable fact and replacing it with a culture where lies become true where opinions and facts are interchangable.
• Intellectual thought by its nature is subversive, because it questions structures and assumptions.
• I think there has been tremendous cultural transformation, with the rise of the corporate state.  Our form of inverted totalitarianism, which has been designed to shut out the bottom two thirds of the country.
• The jobs that we are shedding are not coming back, we are entering a form of neo-feudalism.
• A dream is something you strive towards, an illusion is something you live in.
• The system has been so ethically perverted by corporations, that we now sit by passively and allow our for-profit health care industry to legally hold sick children hostage while parents bankrupt themselves trying to save their sons or daughters.
• What kind of society I would like to see is one wresting back the government from the hands of the corporations.  Once somebody is dead, they’re not worth anything in a commodity culture.
• We have to walk out of the mainstream, don’t fall for this what Ralph Nader calls the least worst.

Guest – Chris Hedges, the author of many books specializing in American and Middle Eastern politics and society. He spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He was also the Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times.

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 Law and Disorder January 18, 2010 [57:57m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Haiti Relief : Partners In Health
• Fahad Hashmi Vigil

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Historic International Support: Gaza Freedom March Debrief

Hundreds of activists with the Gaza Freedom Marchers have returned from Israel, Palestine and Egypt bringing home incredible stories from the largest international mobilization of people in solidarity.  We hear first hand accounts from our own Michael Ratner who with his family were among the 13 hundred solidarity marchers. We are also joined by Felice Gelman who has also returned from the Gaza Freedom March. As many listeners may know, the Egyptian authorities refused to allow the 1,365 participants from 43 countries to enter the Gaza Strip, but later 100 people were let in to Gaza.

Felice Gelman / Michael Ratner:

• It was a remarkable event despite not getting into Gaza. 1400 people from 43 countries, Europe India, Australia, South Africa. Within 3 days the Egyptian government went from we need more info, we’re working with you to . . . you’re not coming.
• We were unable to get a meeting place at any time for any group of people. The Egyptians said that any gathering of more than six people would be illegal.  One of the prerequisites in order to get into Gaza is you don’t engage with local opposition in Egypt. In a way it was a perfect demonstration of what the siege in Gaza is all about.
• Egypt is a police state. There are 2 million police for a population of 60 million.
• Egyptian police are very brutal with their people. They’re disappeared, they’re tortured. No room for democracy. No support for a civil society to express itself to protest.
• The thing that was incredible was the number of Egyptians that wanted to join us.  There were a couple of instances where people were hurt. The secret police would try to single people out at a demonstration and punch or hit them.
• They would identify women who were Muslims. I don’t know if was that they were Egyptian and they (secret police) thought they could get away with it. They beat up a 12 year old girl and a 75 year old woman, they were not discriminating.
• Egyptians (opposition) joined in with GFM demonstrations in Cairo.
• We had a demonstration at the US Embassy in Cairo, the police surrounded them for five hours before they could get into Embassy. The US Embassy didn’t seem to think that this was bizarre until they were reminded of their legal obligation to help their citizens.
• the US Embassy informed the Egyptian police that they had no objection of us going to Gaza.
• There were some people who went to Al-Arish, and the Egyptian police were onto that. They surrounded a hotel in Al-Arish
• (Michael Ratner) I can’t imagine the logistics and the organizing nightmare it was for you guys
• I can’t think of a time since the Spanish Civil War, that there was a contingent of such size and national breadth that traveled to assist people in their distress from a brutal attack.
• I think this was an incredible demonstration of where the world stands on Gaza.
• My kids 19 and 21, seeing people with the courage to go to these demonstrations from all over the world. Out of that I think there will be a global organizing structure.
• The other thing is the drafting of the Cairo Declaration, drafted by the South African delegation.  Calling on the ending of the occupations of Gaza and the West Bank, primarily with global BDS movements.  (Palestinian unified call)
• When Gaza was getting attacked, it was the South African trade unionists that refused to load the weapons that were being sent to Israel.
• The potential for labor to move on this is enormous and powerful.
• The Gaza Freedom March website will be handed over to the committee working on the Cairo Declaration.
• New York Report Back – Judson Memorial Church January 21 / 55 Washington Square S.

Guest: Felice Gelman, member of the Wespac Middle East Committee and a member of the Steering Committee that organized The Gaza Freedom March. She has traveled to Gaza twice since the Israeli invasion last year.

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The Response: Sig Libowitz – Combatant Status Review Tribunals

January 11, 2010 marked the 8th anniversary since the Bush administration turned the US Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba into a “enemy combatant” detention facility. Essentially re-commissioning the base as a torture chamber and legal black hole, where prisoner suicides are considered acts of war.  As we’ve reported on in the last few months, the Obama administration has held on to the power to allow for a preventive detention system that would indefinitely jail terror suspects in the United States without trial.  Meanwhile, military tribunals are now mainstream news, the tribunals are called Combatant Status Review Tribunals, where military justices discern who is an enemy combatant.  These trials are also the subject of a 30 minute film titled The Response. The film is written and produced by actor Sig Libowitz who is transitioning from being an actor playing an attorney on the TV series Law and Order, to becoming a real lawyer. While in law school, Libowitz was tranfixed by the tribunal process of no jury and no defense lawyer. The film is based on actual court transcripts and is shortlisted for The Academy Award. The Response is screening at Columbia University’s School of Law on January 20th at 6pm.

Sig Libowitz:

• Michael Ratner: First of all there was no real process for people in Guantanamo. Then we won the right to Habeas Corpus, to go into a federal court and challenge their detention. At that point the Bush Administration set up a special process in Guantanamo.
• As we depict in the film, this is a process where the detainees don’t have a lawyer, they are not provided with the evidence that’s against them. The real transcripts told the story of the detainees and the judges in these CSRTs. From that I saw an incredible movie, and incredible opportunity.
• Because, I thought I had an understanding of what Guantanamo was all about, then I read the transcripts (of a CSRT)  It gives a human dimension to the detainee and the military judges.
• Screening at Columbia Law School, Wednesday January 20th 6PM All the cast will be there and Shane Kadidal and Matthew Waxman.  We’ve screened the movie at the Pentagon.

Guest: Sig Libowitz, an American lawyer, actor, film executive and director.  Libowitz is notable for producing, directing and starring in a film, The Response, he wrote after reading some transcripts from Guantanamo captives‘ Combatant Status Review Tribunals. Libowitz is an executive for the acquisitions department of Turner Classic movies.  He had a recurring roles in The Sopranos and Law and Order.

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Free Fahad Hashmi

Fahad Hashmi a Pakistani born American student, has spent nearly 2 1/2 years in solitary confinement in a Manhattan detention facility.  He has been isolated for one of the longest periods in America as a suspect before trial.  Hosts reported on this case in March 2008, we spoke with Fahad Hashmi’s father Syed Anwar, and Fahad’s attorney Sean Mayer. Fahad is accused of storing waterproof socks, ponchos and raincoats. The US charges were based on allowing an acquaintance “Janaid Babar” to store this rain gear in the closet of his London flat. Janaid Babar was a paid government cooperator who has been used to testify against Muslims around the world.  Nicknamed ‘Supergrass’ by the British media, Babar was used by the UK government to testify against Omar Khyam and several other Muslim men in the so-called Fertilizer Case. Meanwhile Fahad’s trial is expected in January 2010, the prosecution will use Junaid as a main witness.  Hashmi has been held under the SAM’s Special Administrative Measures that include a 23 hour a day lockdown, constant video surveillance of his cell and limited visitation.

(Fahad’s Brother)Faisal Hashmi:

• I’m under SAMs as our family is. Our visits with him, we can’t talk about it, but I can say from open court, he looks frail, he looks jittery He’s been in solitary confinement for 2 and half years.
• He’s in the Metropolitan Correctional Center a few blocks from here. Within his own cell, he’s videotaped at all times. He’s not allowed to talk out loud. He has a microphone in his cell.
• This is about deconstructing a human being, depriving him of his humanity. He’s 29 years old.
• Charged with four counts of material support for terrorism. He stored ponchos and rain gear.
• In 2004, this acquaintance while working on his Master’s degree stayed with Fahad.
• This was January 2004, he went to the US in April 2004, was arrested, and became a cooperating witness for the US government.  At this time about 8 people got arrested, some in Pakistan, London and Canada, all on Junaid Barbar’s witness cooperation.
• In June 2006, my brother gets arrested. They tell Fahad, that Junaid gave the ponchos and gloves to Al-Qaeda and you gave material support to terrorists. You let Junaid use your cell phone, and Juanaid borrowed 300.00 from Fahad, saying that his ailing daughter needed the money. Fahad’s trial starts January 6, 2010
• FreeFahad.com This case has nothing to do with ponchos and socks.

Jeanne Theoharis:

• This is a case we need to be concerned about for those who value the first amendment. I had Fahad as a student in Brooklyn College in 2002
• There’s no way to understand this case without understanding the way Fahad was being watched many years ago even as a college student. We’ve sent a letter to the attorney general addressing 3 main issues, the conditions of his confinement, the way his due process is being violated and then first amendment issues.
• The letter was signed by more than 550 scholars and writers.  Organizing among the Muslim student community.
• Theaters Against War calling attention to Fahad’s case.
• Free Fahad Vigil January 18, 2010

Guests: Fahad’s brother Faisal Hashmi and Jeanne Theoharis, an associate professor of political science at Brooklyn College, City University of New York.  She was one of Fahad’s professors and she has been following this case.

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 Law and Disorder December 28, 2009 [57:47m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Michael Ratner and Family Leave For Gaza Freedom March: 1350 People
• Help Keep Rafa Entranced To Gaza Open
  
• Call Egyptian Embassy – Omar Youssef – 202-895-5400
• Please Call – UPDATE: Egyptian Police Detaining U.S. Citizens in Egypt, Reportedly at Request of US Embassy
• Music Break: Eli Smith Instrumental

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Fraunces Tavern: Magna Carta and the Foundations of Freedom

Hosts visit Fraunces Tavern Museum in lower Manhattan, where the Magna Carta document was on display from September 15 to December 15.  It’s been nearly 800 years since it was originally drafted, and this copy has traveled from Lincoln Cathedral in England to New York City very few times. The first was for the 1939 World’s Fair.

Fraunces Tavern was built in 1719, it was a residence and then bought by tavern keeper Samuel Fraunces. It’s also known as the site where George Washington gave his farewell address to the officers of the Continental Army in 1783. When New York City was the nation’s capital, the tavern was rented to house offices of the Department of War, Treasury and Foreign Affairs.

Jennifer Patton/Tony Wellman:

• The tavern was originally built as a house by the Delancey family in 1719.
• There’s been a lot of changes to the buildings, restorations throughout the centuries, and it does make it the oldest surviving building in Manhattan. Light would fade the document, the lighting is no more than 50 lumens.
• This 1215 document was one of four reproduced. Hand copied in Latin, the language of education and communication of those days. This was the only way to spread news, there was no paper, this is on sheepskin.
• Taxation issues, women’s issues, trial by ones peers issues. Written in very tiny tiny script by a Monk.
• At the bottom you’ll see 3 holes for a ribbon where the King’s seal was attached.
• The idea started with a select few, and you can’t hold that back. The Magna Carta was lost for 600 years.
• Article 39 of the Magna Carta
• In the Razul v Bush case, they actually cited the Magna Carta. They said when King John at Runnymede in 1215 was forced to sign the Magna Carta
• We have since that time been against executive detention. I have a feeling that when King John affixed his seal on this document he had no intention of it existing for very long.
• Other charters, Providence plantations and Virginia charter, rights to property and not have it taken away for various reasons.
• Flushing Remonstrance. When New York was New Amsterdam, established by the Dutch in 1624. When Peter Stuyvesant came in 1657 all of New Amsterdam was is in disarray, lawlessness. Stuyvesant established hospitals, schools and also made it by law that you had to go to the Dutch church.
• These are ideas that came out of the Magna Carta, traveled to these shores and became deep within our own laws here.  This is truly a revolutionary museum, the only museum dedicated to the American Revolution.
• Bill of Rights: Five of the amendments on the Bill of Rights come from the ideas of the Magna Carta.
• Estover – Charter of the Forest / The Royal Forest / Land that is claimed by the King.
• You can’t do anything on the land without the King’s approval. You can’t kill game, or fish. The Magna Carta was originally called the Charter of Liberties. Articles 48 and 47 of the Charter of the Forest.
• Charter of the Commons – Creative Commons.  Magna Carta is being revived.

Guest – Educational Director of Fraunces Tavern Museum Jennifer Patton, and Communications Director, Tony Wellman. Fraunces Tavern was built in 1719, it was a residence and then bought by tavern keeper Samuel Fraunces. It’s also known as the site where George Washington gave his farewell address to the officers of the Continental Army in 1783. When New York City was the nation’s capital, the tavern was rented to house offices of the Department of War, Treasury and Foreign Affairs.

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Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All

In January of 2008, hosts interviewed author Peter Linebaugh on his book the Magna Carta Manifesto. It’s a sweeping history of the Magna Carta as a longstanding retraint against tyranny, the support of trial by jury and due process of law, the prohibition of torture and the rights of habaes corpus. Peter Linebaugh worked to construct the original history of the Great Charter and it’s little known companion, the Charter of the Forest, which was created to protect the rights of the poor.

Peter Linebaugh:

• On November 11, 1217, after the 1215 document was lost and civil war had resumed, the Magna Carta was founded again and a smaller version was produced called the Charter of the Forest.
• Charter of the Forest: Forms of protection of subsistence rights for people to the woodlands. The woods was the form that hydrocarbon energy took.
• There’s a parallel with the protection of woodlands for all, back then, and our own oil economy. Common Rights for oil, share in the wealth of commons.
• Origins of rights.  Magna Carta and Charter of Forest dividing civil and economic rights. Similar to UN documents now.
• W.E.B. DuBois attacked the separation of rights of the “stomach” from rights of speech, or from civil and political rights and economic rights.
• DuBois argued with Eleanor Roosevelt at Breton Woods on behalf of millions of people in the third world.
• Gerrard Winstanley - “The Earth Belonged To No One” It is a common treasury for all. John Locke was afraid of them and developed his notions of private property in contrast to them.
• The lessons for us today, depends on creativity and widespread discussion that must occur at the grassroots.
• Historically, the ruling class has been able to retain it’s avaricious powers only to the extent that it keeps us apart. We’re familiar with gender and racial divisions, and we’ve become a Carceral continent.
• When we get together we learn that so much of our history has been stolen from us. Our land, wealth, we must recover the knowledge of our own Commoning.

Guest- Peter Linebaugh, Professor, a student of E.P. Thompson, received his Ph.D. in British history from the University of Warwick in 1975. A graduate of Swarthmore and of Columbia, he taught at Rochester, New York University, University of Massachusetts-Boston, Harvard and Tufts before joining The University of Toledo in 1994. Grants from the Max Planck Institute in Göttingen and from the Fulbright and Mellon fellowship programs have supported his research. Peter Linebaugh is currently at work on a study of an Irish insurrectionary during ‘the great transformation’ of the Atlantic revolutions.

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 Law and Disorder December 21, 2009 [58:01m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Lynne Stewart Visit in Prison
• Write to Lynne: Lynne Stewart / MCC-NY / Prisoner # 53504-054 / 150 Park Row 100007, NY, NY
• Jeffrey Luers – SUV Burning Case – 22 year sentence
• NLG  Report State Level Versions of AETA – Beyond AETA (PDF Report/White Paper)
  
• Green is the New Red
• Guantanamo Moves to Ilinois: Crossing the Rubicon: Preventive Detention

WBAI Listeners Click Here For Rundown on Tito Gerassi

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Lawyer’s You’ll Like: Rhonda Copeland Part II

This is the second part of our Lawyers You’ll Like interview with attorney Rhonda Copeland.  She is a professor at the Law School of the City University of New York and director of the school’s International Human Rights Law Clinic. Rhonda is also the Legal Advisor to the Women’s Caucus for Gender Justice.  Rhonda shares with us, her history of fighting for the constitutionality of the abortion cases in New York City and its effect on poor women in a pre-Roe v Wade climate.  She also discuss the Harlem 6 case. Let’s have a listen.

From Article on New International Criminal Court: “The breadth and specificity of gender crimes in the court’s enabling statutes are directly attributable to a global caucus of women that formed in 1997 in the face of apathy and active resistance to prosecuting gender-based crimes. “Women made a huge difference,” said Rhonda Copeland, a professor at the Law School of the City University of New York and director of the school’s International Human Rights Law Clinic.

“They made it impossible to ignore that women have been left out of justice and that we have to be in it,” Copeland said. “If there were nobody there saying ‘this is violence,’ I don’t know how it would have happened.”Rhonda shares with listeners, her history of fighting for the constitutionality of the abortion cases in New York City and its effect on poor women in a pre-Roe v Wade climate. She also discuss the Harlem 6 case.

Rhonda Copeland:

• Harris v McRae – Rhonda Copeland argued. The case tried to get the federal government to pay for poor women’s abortions.  We didn’t go to court to get medicaid for women, we went to court to save it.
• McRae has become a 2 line footnote in text books today and there’s a certain way that people have accepted that medicaid doesn’t have to pay for abortions
• 30 years is enough campaign.
• The more these terrible precedents come down, the more we absorb them as culture instead of viewing them as needing to be reversed.
• Historically, based on race and class, women have been treated differently in terms of their reproductive rights.
• When the original anti-abortion laws started to come in to the United States, it was primarily wanting to be sure that the white population of the US would not be out reproduced by the immigrant population and the way to do that was to cut back on abortion.
• The anti-abortion law, the original purposes was to increase reproduction among the elite and also to get rid of those women lay-healers.
• The original abortion laws were class based. In 20th century, class based eugenics laws, sterilization laws. Buck v Bell / you sterilize those who are socially inappropriate.
• Puerto Rican sterilization program. Before Roe v Wade, you couldn’t get a legal sterilization without the rule of 120.
• Religion twisted this around. The Catholic church in the mid 70s – a pastoral plan for pro-life activities.
• The goal was a human right amendment, which was a complete prohibition on abortion. Affecting poor women dependent on tax payer money.
• There’s a lot of evidence that the church went along with family planning in poor neighborhoods in the 60s because it had a population reduction role.
• When you get to abortion, they put the political / religious ahead of the population goals, and what you get is this mobilization to stop medicaid funding for poor women.
• In 1978, you had a historic coming together of the Catholic church and the Protestant evangelicals on the issue of abortion.
• It’s very important to look at the role of extremist religion in this country. When you look at the mega-churches, the power they’ve had to undo the first amendment, in terms of establishment of religion.
• Hyde amendment: the cutoff of medicaid.

Guest – Attorney Rhonda Copeland, professor at the Law School of the City University of New York and director of the school’s International Human Rights Law Clinic. Rhonda is also the legal adviser to the Women’s Caucus for Gender Justice.

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(Encore Interview:) FBI Defends Use of Informants To Spy On Mosques

FBI Director Robert Mueller defended the practice of using informants to monitor mosques in the United States, despite being heavily criticized by attorneys, and Muslim American leaders. Last month a judge ordered the FBI to submit 100 documents detailing the bureau’s surveillance of Muslim leaders in California, which revealed the FBI paid informants to be provocateurs. These cases fit into patterns where paid informants (often a former felon) entice innocent people into a crime, not unlike the Liberty 7 case, the Fort Dix case and the Memorial Day weekend terror plot in upstate New York.  In the New York case, Mike German, a former FBI agent of 16 years and now an attorney with the ACLU told Law and Disorder, they “could have wrapped up without making it seem like they’re saving New York City from this terrible destruction.” The media then reports the story which will often prop up the ongoing “War on Terror.”

Shakeel Syed:

• Council of Islamic Organizations sent a letter to Attny Gen. Eric Holder complaining about the FBI infiltration and harassment
• We are baffled at this time, there is a great deal of surplus of rhetoric by the current administration and a deficit at the policy level.
• When Mueller says the FBI will escalate surveillance of mosques and the Obama Administration is silent, that disturbs me.
• This is legal religious bigotry, Mueller is lying in regard to they’re not surveilling the mosques but only the suspected individuals.
• I have stopped using the word provocateur, I shuffle between using the word provocateur and predator.
• Those targeted have pending immigration and naturalization files or converting from H1 visa to resident visa.
• When our community was doing outreach with public officers, I was in the FBI offices during 2003-2005, and I realized then I was being tailgated.
• My phone was tapped on. A few times the phone automatically dialed the local police.
• My hope as a Muslim American is that good American people will stand up in these challenging times.

Guest – Shakeel Syed, Executive Director of the Islamic Shura Council of Southern California.

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 Law and Disorder December 07, 2009 [56:35m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Gregory Craig Steps Down As Whitehouse Lawyer
• Obama Adds Troops In Afghanistan (Pipelanistan)
• Illinois: MCC College Calls Off GTMO Lecture, Cites Not Prepared For Crowds?
• McHenry County College, 8900 US Hwy 14, Crystal Lake, Illinois 60012-2738 – (815) 455-3700
• WBAI Listeners Click Here For Rundown
• (NEW) Michael Ratner – Muting Our Criticism of Obama: If We Don’t Speak Out Who Will?
  

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Talking With Sartre: Conversations and Debates

Professor John Gerassi, author of the recently published book titled – Talking With Sartre: Conversations and Debates joins hosts in studio. As a child, Gerassi’s parents had become close friends with the French existentialist philosopher, playwright, and novelist, Jean Paul Sartre. Later in his life, Gerassi conducted a series of interviews in the early 70s. These interviews are now edited into book form and as one review states, – quote – it has produced this revelatory and breathtaking portrait of one of the world’s most famous intellectuals.

The brings into to focus Sartre’s thinking on the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the disintegration of colonialism, it also reveals how Sartre has wrestled with the apparent contradiction between his views on freedom and the influence of social conditions on our choices and actions.

John (Tito) Gerassi:

• My father was an artist and said ridiculous things like I don’t care if my son starves or my wife starves, first I paint.
• This appealed to Sartre who said in effect the same thing as a man of letters.
• Sartre became fascinated by my father. My father refused to join the OSS / CIA
• Gerassi to Sartre: You have a problem uniting the idea of free choice that you have in existentials because you begin with the I, to the Marxist situation which is a class derivative to which you want to align. I don’t see how you can align them.
• After a series of criticisms to this dichotomy, Sartre said, “This kid’s brilliant.” And so I became part of the family.
• Sartre always supported counterterrorism. Those who fought the establishment’s terrorism.
• Sartre’s anti-position has always been consistently correct.
• He opposed Ridgeway when Ridgeway took over NATO. Get your base out of France.
• No country is free with a foreign base on its territory. If you get rid of Ridgeway don’t put in a European general.
• During the Algerian War, the magazine that Sartre basically created called Modern Times, supported the Algerians right from the beginning.
• It supported sedition, that was a step further than any lefty in France.
• Supporting sedition is one thing, but they actually supported it in action.
• They were called the suitcase carriers, they gave medicine and ammo to Algerians in suitcases.
• The editor in chief of Modern Times assembled 120 intellectuals and produced the Declaration of 121.
• It included Sartre and existentials but also the Catholic left and notable communist intellectuals.
• That began the split in the communist party.
• In Algeria, the communist party there was in favor of the Algerian revolution.
• Sartre : Never judge the powerless by the same criteria that you judge the powerful.
• That means you support the Palestinians, and you praise the suicide bombers because you judge them with a different criteria than Israelis who have tanks, airplanes etc . .
• Sartre interpretation:  The fact that he (Ft Hood shooter) is a member of a dominated class, and he is rebelling against the dominating class. He is perfectly justified in what he’s doing.
• Sartre: The trouble with all revolutions is they give up too soon.
• He did go to all sorts of places and because he was Sartre, he got to see the leaders of Russia and China, the only influence where he was pleased with contact was Che Gueverra.
• Supporting the early action of the Palestinians: When Israel subjugates the Palestinians, takes away their lands. . I’ve always supported counterterror against established terror.
• Marxist – Group Infusion – people briefly connecting, moving from I to we.

Guest – Professor John Gerassi, once an editor at Time magazine, then at Newsweek, who obtained his PhD at LSE, is a long time civil rights and anti-war militant. He is the author or editor of ten books and scores of articles and pamphlets published on both sides of the Atlantic. He is currently Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York.

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 Law and Disorder November 30, 2009 [58:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Michael Ratner: Sartre, Existentialism and Marxism on the Question of Terror: Talking with Sartre

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THE ASSASSINATION OF FRED HAMPTON: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther

We are pleased to have with us author and National Lawyers Guild attorney Jeff Haas. His new book The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther, is a page turning true crime story chronicling the tragic murder of Fred Hampton, the young leader of the Chicago Black Panthers.  On a dark December day, Chicago police unloaded 80 rounds into Fred Hampton’s bedroom, leaving his pregnant fiancee Deborah Johnson in shock having barely survived.  The killing horrified the black community in Chicago.  As Haas describes, it took 13 years of grueling litigation from the attorneys at the People’s Law Office collective to finally convict the FBI, the Cook County States Attorney Edward Hanrahan, and the Chicago police for their summary execution Fred Hampton. He was only 21.  Today, 40 years later, the People’s Law Office still active in suing and scandalizing the Chicago police for torturing and extracting false confessions from over l00 black men in a south side police station. Jeff Haas Book Tour Dates NYC

Jeff Haas:

• Fred Hampton started in high school, he led a walk out because black girls weren’t considered for Homecoming Queen. He took on the issue of not having enough black teachers and black administrators. Wherever he saw injustice, he felt compelled to deal with it.  At ten years old, he started his own breakfast for children program.
• He came from a warm family, in Louisiana, on farms where his grandparents had been slaves.
• I came from Atlanta, GA, a middle class Jewish family. I grew up as many were somewhat raised by blacks, there was a black man who worked at our farm who I idolized. He taught me how to plow with a mule, drive a tractor, things most kids don’t know how to do.
• At school in Chicago, my classmates consisted of John Ashcroft and Bernadine Dorhn. Ashcroft didn’t have much to say in those days.  I was with Dr. King, when he marched in Chicago, the anti-war movement was at a peak, the black power movement was strong. There had been riots in the cities.
• Kennedy and King had been assassinated in 1968. It seem like things were headed for the falls, or the rapids.
• I met Fred Hampton because I was in Chicago. He was then head of the NAACP youth branch. A dynamic speaker.  Fred could talk to welfare mothers, he could talk to law students, he could talk to gang kids.
• He said basically, if you’re not going to do any revolutionary act by the time you’re 20, you’re dead already.
• The Chicago panthers grew quickly from Nov. 1968, when they started, until his death in 1969.
• Forty  years ago, my partner knocked on my door.  I opened it and he said the chairman is dead, the pigs vamped on his crib this morning.
• It took me, how the police had killed him. I went and interviewed his fiancee. She told me they entered a room where Fred was semi-conscious.
• First we and with a lot of support from the National Lawyers Guild, the Center for Constitutional Rights filed a civil suit to find out what happened.
• Quickly we found out that the police raid was a shoot in, not a shoot-out. Ninety police shots to 1 shot from the Panthers. We also found out 3 years into the investigation that the FBI had provided a floor plan to the raiders, that showed the bed where Fred would be sleeping.
• And that bed was where the shots converged, so we pursued discovery.
• We found out that the FBI sent a letter to head of the Blackstone Rangers, a year before Fred was killed saying, dear brother, Fred has put a hit out on you. The FBI wanted someone else to do their dirty work.
• The FBI worked on creating conflict between the 2 groups. One of the objectives of the COINTELPRO program was to prevent the rise of a messiah who could unify and electrify the masses.
• Fred Hampton had a slogan, you can kill the revolutionary, but you can’t kill the revolution.
• You can still kill a freedom fighter, but you can’t kill freedom fighting. I think losing a black leader like Fred Hampton does set back the people’s struggle. His spirit, the non-compromising pursuit of justice lives on also.

Guest – Jeffrey Haas is an attorney and cofounder of the People’s Law Office, whose clients included the Black Panthers, Students for a Democratic Society, community activists, and a large number of those opposed to the Vietnam War. He has handled cases involving prisoners’ rights, Puerto Rican nationalists, protesters opposed to human rights violations in Central America, police torture, and the wrongfully accused.

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The Center For Constitutional Rights:  Acorn Lawsuit

The Center for Constitutional Rights has filed a lawsuit on behalf of the community group ACORN. ACORN was recently barred funding by a Congressional Resolution. The lawsuit charges that Congress unfairly targeting the organization and is seeking a temporary restraining order to prevent the government from reallocation funds meant for ACORN. The Center for Constitutional Rights Legal Director Bill Quigley says it’s an outrage to see Congress violating the Constitution and politically grandstand. Bill continues -  “With all the crimes and infractions committed by banks, pharmaceutical companies, and private government contractors, they have been rewarded with bailouts, tax credits, and billions of dollars in new contracts. Congress bowed to FOX News and joined in the scapegoating of an organization that helps average Americans going through hard times to get homes, pay their taxes, and vote. Shame on them.”

Bill Quigley:

• ACORN is an association of community organizations that has about 500 hundred thousand members across the United States. They’ve been in existence for some 35 years. They do voter registration, housing foreclosure work, issue organizing.
• In the last five years or so, they’ve registered nearly 2 million to vote. So, they’ve been the target of the right wing for some time. They do very aggressive outreach to get folks who haven’t been registered.
• Regarding sex scandal: The people in those offices, they’re low paid workers, but their goal is to help first time home buyers. So, these tricksters, they were into prostitution, the truth is the people at ACORN would try to help you whether you were a prostitute or not.
• ACORN tried to give advice and some of the people went too far concealing the nature of their work.
• Apart from the politics of punishing people for registering folks to vote, there is a specific part in the US Constitution that’s been in there since the beginning that prohibits what’s called a Bill of Attainder
• Constitution of the United States, Article I, Section 9, paragraph 3 provides that: “No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law will be passed.”
• We’re familiar with what happened in England, in Parliament, people in parliament would get all fired up about something and they would just have a specific bill naming a person or organization, and they were outlawed, they could receive the benefits of being a citizen.  So the Congress outlawed that.
• So, what they did here, is without any hearings before Congress, without any investigation whatsoever, just based on the rumors and the FOX news sort of stuff. They said that ACORN and any of subsidiaries, or even allies, couldn’t receive any federal funds.
• A one sentence prohibition. It impacts millions of dollars of funds, not going to big salaries.
• It effects ACORN Housing organizations around the country. A lot of the housing works stopped.
• ACORN people have come to us and say we’ve been to law firms around this country but no one can help us now, because we are so stigmatized.
• The framers of the constitution didn’t want Congress to be the prosecutor, judge jury and executioner. We have a way to do this.
• If there’s more to this than just the rumor mongering that’s been done, then there are ways to do it. HUD, Department of Justice, IRS, can say, we suspect you’re misusing the funds and set up a hearing.
• The right wingers didn’t want to go this way, they did an end run and we’re hoping that the courts are going to set that aside.

Guest – CCR Legal Directory Bill Quigley. Bill has been an active public interest lawyer since 1977 and worked with a wide range of public interest organizations on an equally wide range of issues. He has litigated numerous cases with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., the Advancement Project, and with the ACLU of Louisiana, for which he served as General Counsel for over 15 years.

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Film Professor Sues University for Violating Right to Academic Free Speech

In the fall of 2007, Dr. Terri Ginsberg was hired to teach a film class at the North Carolina State University focusing on the media treatment of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in 2008. She was also hired to help program a Middle Eastern film series.  As Terri details in a grievance the director of the film studies program and the director of the Middle East studies program made a series of decisions that violated her academic freedom. Among the decisions was the limiting of Terri’s invovlement in the series that she had initially been hired to curate. Another was the criticism of an introduction she gave at the screening of the Palestinian film “Ticket to Jerusalem” as biased and overly political.

The grievance filed alleged violations of her First Amendment and equal opportunity rights under the University Code. Her grievance was dismissed on the grounds that it was filed too late and that she was no longer a university employee. Terri has now filed a lawsuit, one mention in the complaint states that in the views of several faculty,  Jews who question and challenge the zionist colonial project are non-conforming Jews and therefore are outsiders and dangerous.

Terri Ginsburg / Attorney Rima Kapitan

• I was given strong indication the teaching professorship would convert into a permanent tenure track position.
• That I should apply for it and that I was a shoe in for that position. So I moved down from New York City, where I lived for many years to Raleigh, NC. Not long after I got there, a number of incidents occured that led me to believe the conversion was not going to take place.
• Key people in the faculty were very unhappy with my perspectives on the Israeli – Palestinian conflict and on Zionism. I am a Jewish Anti-Zionist, and I wanted to supply a genuinely balanced perspective on the issue of Zionism and the history as it has been depicted in cinema
• I showed Israeli films, I showed Palestinian films, I showed the array of cinema on this topic.
• This is a large campus upwards to 40 thousand students.
• I was asked to resign from a middle eastern series after I gave an introduction to a film that was pro-Palestinian.
• Attorney Rima Kapitan: Right now we’re alleging they violated her North Carolina Constitutional Rights. They breached her right to academic freedom and equal protection under the law.
• Terri covered every path in North Carolina, the only thing left is a constitutional claim in North Carolina.
• Under the equal protection claim, we’re saying Terri was treated differently because of her religion.
• Terri: The atmosphere is increasingly worse not only for Jews but anyone who speaks out on this issue, especially for non-tenured and temporary labor.
• I had minimal support from the AAUP, they failed until we put out a petition that received over 500 signatures.
• Most faculty on campus were afraid to communicate with me, over email, over telephone.
• I think the Israel-Palestine conflict is one of the core issues facing the United States.
• Film is a small field and gossip travels fast. I’m unemployed. When I did my research on the holocaust, I couldn’t ignore the structural relationship between the holocaust and the Nakba.

Guest- Dr. Terri Ginsberg joins us in the studio today she has a Ph.D. in Cinema Studies from New York University and previously taught in the Jewish Studies Program at Dartmouth College and the Cinema Studies Program at Rutgers University.  CODZ

Guest – Attorney Rima Kapitan - staff Attorney at CAIR-Chicago. She is a graduate of DePaul University College of Law and Indiana University and a partner with Amal Law Group, LLC, a general practice law firm. Her main areas of interest and specialization are plaintiff-side employment discrimination, civil rights law, workers compensation and estate planning. She is active in the National Lawyers Guild Middle East Committee.

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 Law and Disorder November 16, 2009 [57:54m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Settlement in 2002 FBI Interrogation Case
• Justice Dept Asks Philadelphia-based Indymedia.us for visitors list
  
• Mets-City Field Sponsors Meeting of Hebron Fund

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Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It (THE BOOK)

Today we welcome back Rick Wolff, Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts to discuss his new book titled Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It.  In his book, Rick takes the reader back to 2005 and step by step reveals how policies, economic structures and wage-to-profit systems led to a global economic collapse.

Rick Wolff will give us an update on why the media claims the recession is over, he also tells us if there be another leg down as predicted in the September 21st interview. Another leg down meaning, will the economy continue to drop? This was mentioned because of the way people were investing, investing in a way that expected the market to drop.

Rick Wolff:

• The origin of the economic crisis goes deep into history. It’s one of the key things that people don’t understand or want to face. Roots of a System’s Crisis
• We were a country founded by foreigners coming here, they got rid of the indigenous population. They established a mix system. Capitalism on one hand, with employers and employees, and then self employed farmers and small crafts people, and in the Southern US, slavery.
• When the dust cleared, capitalism came through, it destroyed slavery and suboridinated the self employed to be small and on the margins.
• For 150 years – 1820-1970 the growth of capital was outrunning the available labor supply. Laborers had options, could go West.
• For 150 years, the goods and services a person could buy from an hour of their wages kept going up. It produced a strange and unusual notion that you were blessed, if you worked hard you would make more money.
• That Americans could have a dream like that. . their children could have a better life and deliver on the promise.
• It drew millions of immigrants from all over the world etc.
• Then after the 1970s capitalism reminded us that it is not a guarantee that if you work hard you will be rewarded.
• In the last 30 years wages have not anymore gone up. It’s a sea change in our culture’s history.
• Wages stayed the same for these reasons:
• The arrival of the computer that substituted people for machines on a mammoth scale
• The movement of corporations to other parts of the world to take advantage of cheaper labor.
• Women and immigrants moving into the paid labor force. This plunged the US economy into a disaster zone.
• The end of rising wages. Americans today work 20 percent more hours a week, than their counterparts in France, Germany or Italy.  They are exhausted physically. The families are in disarray.
• Then to consume more, live the American dream, they borrowed on credit, the likes of which no working class in the history of the world has ever done.
• The average debt  of US family in the 1920s equaled about 1/3 of its annual income. In 2007, the level of debt equaled 125 percent of annual income.  At the same time, the last 30 years have been greatest boom of profitability of American corporations.
• Where did the money come from to lend unprecedented amounts?  The money came from the boom in profits made possible by there no longer being a rise in wages.  You not only get the profitability of a flat wage situation but you get the added income from the interest that comes from lending.
• The reforms and regulations we’ve seen, don’t work.  The only thing that got Americans working again after a 10 year depression – 1929-1939, was not economic reform and regulation, it was something called WWII.
• Corporations used their profits to weaken reform laws, buy politicians, create army of Lobbyists.
• The American people MUST demand different responses to this crisis than what there was in the past.
• Handing corporations the citizen’s tax money as bail out is folly.
• We have 15 million adults looking for work, 10 million more are discouraged and have given up.
• The first thing this government should do is provide work for the unemployed.
• Not bailing out the banks. The private sector has failed in the United States.
• The government should support enterprises that workers run them, form them as their own enterprises in a collective way that is different from capitalist corporations
• Let workers choose if they want to work for an enterprise run by workers or capitalists. Let us as consumers choose from good and services produced in a non-capitalist way alongside the capitalist.

Guest – Rick Wolff, Professor of Economics at University of Massachusetts at Amherst. In his new book Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About, Rick takes the reader back to 2005 and step by step reveals how policies, economic structures and wage to profit systems led to a global economic collapse.

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Amy Goodman: Breaking the Sound Barrier.

Today, we’re very pleased to talk with award-winning investigative journalist and syndicated columnist, author and the host/executive producer of Democracy Now! Amy Goodman. Her new book titled Breaking the Sound Barrier is a collection of wide-ranging articles reminding the reader of what true independent journalism can do. Amy’s style of journalism breaks through the corporate media noise with stories from community organizers in New Orleans to the brave soldiers resisting war in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Truthout

Author and journalist Chris Hedges writes : “Amy Goodman is one of the most important voices in America. She defies the noise and clamor of celebrity gossip. She challenges the manipulation of information and dissemination of lies by the power elite. She refuses to pander to a culture where news is seen as another form of entertainment designed to bolster corporate profits. She holds steadfast to the core values of our trade. Her integrity and honesty remind us that a culture that cannot distinguish between illusion and reality dies.”

Amy Goodman:

• Picasso’s famous anti-war painting Guernica in front of the UN Security Council.  When Colin Powell went to the UN and they had a press conference, this painting was the backdrop and so they shrouded it in a blue curtain. We have to rip that shroud every which way, we have to tear it, because that’s what journalism is all about.
• Most of the voices in these columns are the people we interview on Democracy Now. The media is ahistoric, it whites out history.  How are young people supposed to figure out what to do when they have no sense of what came before? What are the models, what works, what doesn’t work?
• Look at the money shifting from those who least have it to those who most have it, whether we’re talking about the economic meltdown.  Obama surrounding himself by the Goldman Sachs folks.
• The model of community organizing has to be adopted by people all over the country.
• It’s not going to happen because there’s one person in the white house.
• The people with money and power walking the halls of the west wing, whispering in the commander in chief’s ear, and he says, if I do that, they will storm the Bastille.
• If there’s no one out there that he’s pointing at, we’re all in very big trouble.
• Breaking the Sound Barrier is the name of the column I do every week and the column appears in more than a hundred newspapers around the country. I think it is very important for people who consider themselves activists in this country hold their leaders accountable.
• It’s the right for people to conduct their lives in this country without being spied on or infiltrated.

Guest – Amy Goodman, host and executive producer of Democracy Now!, a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program airing on over 800 TV and radio stations in North America. Time Magazine named Democracy Now! its “Pick of the Podcasts,” along with NBC’s Meet the Press.

Goodman is the first journalist to receive the Right Livelihood Award, widely known as the ‘Alternative Nobel Prize’ for “developing an innovative model of truly independent grassroots political journalism that brings to millions of people the alternative voices that are often excluded by the mainstream media.” She is also one of the the first recipients, along with Salon.com blogger Glenn Greenwald, of the Park Center for Independent Media’s Izzy Award, named for the great muckraking journalist I.F. Stone.

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 Law and Disorder November 9, 2009 [57:58m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates

• Maher Arar Case – No Justice – Outsourcing Torture Made Legal?
• 23 People Convicted in Kidnapping Abu Omar – Victory in Italian Case – Abu Omar
• 22 Out of the 23 are CIA Agents
• Five NYC Men Abused and Detained During Post 9/11 Sweeps Settle Case
  
• Uighers Sent To Palau
  

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ENCORE:  Cuban Five Update: The Re-sentencing of Antonio Guerrero

Earlier this month, Federal Judge Joan A Lenardo replaced the life sentence for Antonio Guerrero, one of the Cuban Five.  Mr. Guerrero, a United States citizen, was convicted of spying for Cuba while working at the Naval Air Station in Key West.   His sentence was reduced to almost 22 years, which means he could be out of prison in nearly seven years. Mr Guerrero’s attorneys had asked for the sentence to be reduced to 240 months, but Judge Lenardo set it at 262 months.
Mr. Guerrero’s lawyer, Len Weinglass told the New York Times, it was an odd decision,  he said   “You have a man who was on a military base but who didn’t take a single classified document and no one testified that he injured U.S. national security, but the judge still rejects the prosecutors’ request to lighten the sentence.”  Transcript of Hearing

Len Weinglass:

• Antonio Guerrero who I represent, was originally sentenced to life in prison.
• The appellate courts reduced the life sentence for the conspiracy to commit espionage against 3 of the Cuban Five
• The decision only remanded life sentences for ultimately 2 of the Cuban Five including Antonio Guerrero
• We returned to Miami for the re-sentencing on October 13.  Prior to the re-sentencing, we negotiated with the government on the issue of re-sentencing alone, making it clear there was no admission of guilt on the underlying charge, which we are still contesting on a later collateral attack.
• We agreed that it should come down from a life sentence to a period of 20 years.
• In Miami, the judge took the very unusual step of setting the agreement aside, and set the term to 21 years and 10 months.
• You can’t give a life sentence ( in this case) on what they intended to get, you can only give a life sentence  on top secret information they did get. So, the original life sentence was wrong.
• When we got into the re-sentencing hearing, she got back to her original position as if the appellate court hadn’t ruled.
• I got very upset, the courtroom was packed. Packed with the same old crowd. The crowd in Miami that backs these para-miltary forces, they put the widows up front.
• I got upset at what I sought to be a climate that was being generated in that hearing and so I reminded the judge very forcibly that she was sentencing an individual not a country.
• I had given the court government documents from the Bureau of Prisons, all of them saying that Antonio Guerrero who was serving a faulty life sentence, and sent to a maxium security prison, which he shouldn’t have been sent, because the sentence was wrong.
• But the warden, his counselor and the supervisor of the unit, all extolled his behavior and most significantly pointed out that he had helped save a number of inmates all of whom were doing life sentences, from an encouragable future, by training them in English and Math and overseeing them getting their GED.
• At that time, she was about to pronounce sentence, then she stopped, walked off the bench.
• When the judge came back, the first thing she did is recite a Supreme Court decision, all federal judges must sentence an individual according to his character.
• Antonio was 39 when he was arrested and he will be nearly 60 when he is released. That’s the heart of a lifetime.
• There was no acknowledgment of context here. That this was provoked by a pattern of violence by the US directed at Cuba. Where more than 3000 people have died in the past 40 years from violence coming from Southern Florida.
• The Cuban Five performed their task, nobody was harmed, no property damaged and they end up with life sentences for that operation.
• It came to light that the federal government was paying members of the press in Miami as part of their anti-Castro campaign to write articles about this case that were highly prejudicial. People who were reporters but were on the federal payroll.
• Can the government be responsible for creating a prejudicial atmosphere?
• He was at the most hard-nosed prison and after seven years the warden of that prison wrote the Regional Bureau of Prisons, asking that Antonio be released from that prison.  He doesn’t belong, there, he is a lovely sensitive man.

Guest – Attorney Len Weinglass, who represented the Cuban Five, as William Kunstler’s younger partner, Len Weinglass was considered the work horse of the defense team. He’s worked on a number of political cases including the Pentagon Papers trial and the Angela Davis case. He’s a Yale Law School graduate and former U.S. Air Force Captain.

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Will The Sun Set On Surveillance? Patriot Act Reform

Recently, the House of Representatives introduced their own USA Patriot Act reform bill, responding to the Patriot Act renewal bill approved by tthe Senate Judiciary Committee. The Electronic Frontier Foundation says it’s a significant improvement over the earlier Senate bill that gave more authority to government spying power. The renewal bill was introduced by House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, Jr. and others including Civil Liberties Subcommittee Chairman Jerrold Nadler; and Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security Subcommittee Chairman Bobby Scott. These bills are proposals that could pave the way to dismantle the broad surveillance and overreaching executive power currently intact.

Kevin Bankston:

• Patriot passed after 9/11/2001 – a lot of the provisions were set to expire in 2005, most of those were renewed, but there were 3 provisions left to expire in the end of 2009.
• Provisions that expanded the government’s power to get orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court or any tangible thing, mostly business records. They’re mostly called section 215 orders, under the Patriot Act section 215.
• Roving wiretaps, more accurately roving “john doe” wiretaps. One that doesn’t name target, or address of target. (These sound the like the warrants our founders rebeled against)
• Lone Wolf authority, whereby the government can get wiretapping authorities from the FISA court for people who are unrelated to any foreign power but are suspect to engage in or preparing to engage in crimes related to terrorism.
• The Lone Wolf authority begins to un-moor from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court – it looks to be unconstitutional under the fourth amendment. Most in Obama Administration want this to expire.
• Those are the 3 set to expire. Though worrisome, more worrisome is the National Security Letter Authority, whereby the FBI can write a letter to the court, without suspicion of terrorism, and get bank, telephone and internet records.
• The Justice Act – Senator Feingold / Durman – reform patriot act authorities- including FISA surveillance act passed last summer, which allows foreign surveillance of Americans.
• Also, repealing telecom immunity – Reforming the Patriot Act without addressing FISA is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
• Unfortunately, Senator Leheay, instead of sponsoring Feingold’s Justice Act reform bill, came out with his own bill that didn’t address the FISA amendment acts at all. That was the bill the Judiciary Committee considered 6 weeks ago.
• The Republicans offered to remove reforms to the already watered down bill, and the Republicans say they got their reforms from the Obama Administration.  The Obama Administration is not only falling down on its promise to reform the Patriot Act, it is working through Republicans to make these bills even worse.
• So that’s when the USA Patriot Act reform bill, responding to the Patriot Act renewal bill approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee was proposed.
• We have 2 lawsuits, the first was brought against AT&T in early 2006 based on news reports and whistle blower evidence based on an AT&T technician info, that the NSA had backdoor access to key domestic communication switches.
• Whereby the NSA was sucking up millions upon millions of communications and then sorting out the stuff they were interesting in.
• If the telecom companies aren’t willing to say “NO” when the government secretly comes to them and asks them to break the law, then all of our privacy is in big trouble.
• We sued AT&T and then Congress passed this Telecom Immunity last summer, and our case along with others were dismissed. If the Repealing of the Telecom Immunity passes, our cases will be revived.
• Obama can end the Telcom Immunity right now, and have Attorney General Holder withdraw the certification on which the immunity is based.

Guest -  Kevin Bankston, senior staff attorney specializing in free speech and privacy law, was the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Equal Justice Works/Bruce J. Ennis Fellow for 2003-05. His fellowship project focused on the impact of post-9/11 anti-terrorism laws and surveillance initiatives on online privacy and free expression. Before joining EFF, Kevin was the Justice William J. Brennan First Amendment Fellow for the American Civil Liberties Union in New York City. At the ACLU, Kevin litigated Internet-related free speech cases, including First Amendment challenges to both the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (Edelman v. N2H2, Inc.) and a federal statute regulating Internet speech in public libraries (American Library Association v. U.S.). Kevin received his J.D. in 2001 from the University of Southern California Law Center, and received his undergraduate degree from the University of Texas in Austin.

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 Law and Disorder November 2, 2009: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Listen to Law and Disorder live Monday November 9 at 9:00AM EST  WBAI 99.5 FM: At 9:30 AM Michael Ratner Interviews Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman on her new book Breaking the Sound Barrier -  Based on her columns for King Features Syndicate, this wide-ranging new collection of articles breaks through the corporate media’s lies, sound-bites, and silence.  In place of the usual suspects— the “experts” who, in Goodman’s words, “know so little about so much, explain the world to us, and get it so wrong”

Updates:

• The Beginning of the End? – Former Marine Cpt. Matthew Hoh Resigns
  
• Jane Mayer: Predator Versus International Law?
• Code Pink Protest  Drones in Nevada

Michael Ratner Update:  Congress Should Not Reject Goldstone Report

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FBI Threaten Deportation To Muslim Man Refusing To Be Secret Informant

It was in 2004, that the FBI began to apply intense pressure on Foad Farahi to become a secret informant and spy on members of his mosque. Farahi, an Imam in Miami Florida refused. As many listeners may know, an imam is among the designated leaders in a community or mosque who leads prayers during gatherings and helps others understand the teachings of Islam.  The FBI saw Farahi to be in a unique position to know local Muslim men. Farahi had met several South Floridians who allegedly had links to terrorism, including Jose Padilla.

Farahi refused to become a secret informant and the FBI knew he was in a vulnerable position. His student visa expired and he had applied for political asylum that could allow him to stay in the U.S. indefinitely. More than 2 years had past and in 2007, two agents showed up again asking Farahi to become an informant, he refused.  In late 2007 Farahi was at a routine hearing for his political asylum case when he was told by his attorney that the ICE has a file with evidence that he is involved with a terrorist case. He was later presented with an ultimatum to drop the asylum case and leave the United States voluntarily, or be charged as a terrorist. Farahi agreed to voluntarily leave the US, but his passport expired, that gave him a little more time, and he later realized the government was bluffing and then hired attorney Ira Kurzban, a well-known advocate for immigrants’ rights.

(Law and Disorder archive Targeting Muslims Page 1 / Page 2)

Kurzban asked the Board of Immigration Appeals to throw out Farahi’s voluntary departure order, they refused. The legal battle has put Farahi’s immigration status in limbo. Kurzban told the Miami Times quote I think the real issue is, does the government have the right to pressure people… to make them informants?” —- “It’s clearly modus operandi of the FBI to recruit people who are going to be informants and  to use whatever leverage they can.”

Ira Kurzban:

• Foad as an Imam, did not want to spy on others, but said to the FBI he would help them anyway he could.
• He was then put into removal (deportation) proceedings.
• The guilt by association method that the FBI has been using as an intimidation tactic is very reminiscent of the McCarthy period.
• The judge who originally denied Foad’s hearing was dismissed.
• We are now at the 11th Circuit of Appeals and an oral argument has been set.
• Immigrantslist.org – Political Action Committee
• This case represents a much broader pattern by the FBI and the government in trying to intimidate people into working as informants.
• They’re desperate to get informants but they’re using upstanding citizens to do bad things.
• The tragedy is that they’re turning people who are friendly to the United States into enemies.

Guest – Attorney Ira Kurzban,  an adjunct faculty member in Immigration and Nationality Law at the University of Miami School of Law and Nova Southeastern University School of Law and has lectured and published extensively in the field of immigration law, including articles in the Harvard Law Review, San Diego Law Review and other publications.

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Michael Steven Smith – In Memory of Bob Boehm, Center for Constitutional Rights Vice President
On the recent eighth anniversary of the events of September 11th, our own Michael Steven Smith, draws a balance sheet on the state of democratic rights in America. He spoke to a captive audience on the long standing Five Towns Forum on Long Island in honor of recently deceased Center for Constitutional Rights Vice President Bob Boehm.

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Cuban Five Update: The Re-sentencing of Antonio Guerrero

Earlier this month, Federal Judge Joan A Lenardo replaced the life sentence for Antonio Guerrero, one of the Cuban Five.  Mr. Guerrero, a United States citizen, was convicted of spying for Cuba while working at the Naval Air Station in Key West.   His sentence was reduced to almost 22 years, which means he could be out of prison in nearly seven years. Mr Guerrero’s attorneys had asked for the sentence to be reduced to 240 months, but Judge Lenardo set it at 262 months.
Mr. Guerrero’s lawyer, Len Weinglass told the New York Times, it was an odd decision,  he said   “You have a man who was on a military base but who didn’t take a single classified document and no one testified that he injured U.S. national security, but the judge still rejects the prosecutors’ request to lighten the sentence.”  Transcript of Hearing

Len Weinglass:

• Antonio Guerrero who I represent, was originally sentenced to life in prison.
• The appellate courts reduced the life sentence for the conspiracy to commit espionage against 3 of the Cuban Five
• The decision only remanded life sentences for ultimately 2 of the Cuban Five including Antonio Guerrero
• We returned to Miami for the re-sentencing on October 13.  Prior to the re-sentencing, we negotiated with the government on the issue of re-sentencing alone, making it clear there was no admission of guilt on the underlying charge, which we are still contesting on a later collateral attack.
• We agreed that it should come down from a life sentence to a period of 20 years.
• In Miami, the judge took the very unusual step of setting the agreement aside, and set the term to 21 years and 10 months.
• You can’t give a life sentence ( in this case) on what they intended to get, you can only give a life sentence  on top secret information they did get. So, the original life sentence was wrong.
• When we got into the re-sentencing hearing, she got back to her original position as if the appellate court hadn’t ruled.
• I got very upset, the courtroom was packed. Packed with the same old crowd. The crowd in Miami that backs these para-miltary forces, they put the widows up front.
• I got upset at what I sought to be a climate that was being generated in that hearing and so I reminded the judge very forcibly that she was sentencing an individual not a country.
• I had given the court government documents from the Bureau of Prisons, all of them saying that Antonio Guerrero who was serving a faulty life sentence, and sent to a maxium security prison, which he shouldn’t have been sent, because the sentence was wrong.
• But the warden, his counselor and the supervisor of the unit, all extolled his behavior and most significantly pointed out that he had helped save a number of inmates all of whom were doing life sentences, from an encouragable future, by training them in English and Math and overseeing them getting their GED.
• At that time, she was about to pronounce sentence, then she stopped, walked off the bench.
• When the judge came back, the first thing she did is recite a Supreme Court decision, all federal judges must sentence an individual according to his character.
• Antonio was 39 when he was arrested and he will be nearly 60 when he is released. That’s the heart of a lifetime.
• There was no acknowledgment of context here. That this was provoked by a pattern of violence by the US directed at Cuba. Where more than 3000 people have died in the past 40 years from violence coming from Southern Florida.
• The Cuban Five performed their task, nobody was harmed, no property damaged and they end up with life sentences for that operation.
• It came to light that the federal government was paying members of the press in Miami as part of their anti-Castro campaign to write articles about this case that were highly prejudicial. People who were reporters but were on the federal payroll.
• Can the government be responsible for creating a prejudicial atmosphere?
• He was at the most hard-nosed prison and after seven years the warden of that prison wrote the Regional Bureau of Prisons, asking that Antonio be released from that prison.  He doesn’t belong, there, he is a lovely sensitive man.

Guest – Attorney Len Weinglass, who represented the Cuban Five, as William Kunstler’s younger partner, Len Weinglass was considered the work horse of the defense team. He’s worked on a number of political cases including the Pentagon Papers trial and the Angela Davis case. He’s a Yale Law School graduate and former U.S. Air Force Captain.

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 Law and Disorder October 26, 2009 [54:57m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• 13 Uighers Captured By Warlords For Bounties Still in GTMO
• SHAC 7 Case Update – First Amendment Rights = Domestic Terrorism?

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Historic Strike – Privatizing Puerto Rico; Bar Association Dismantled.

Public services grinded to a halt on October 15 in Puerto Rico as a massive one day general strike brought more than 100 thousand people to protest the lay off of about 17 thousand of Puerto Rico’s public employees. The demonstration shut down all state-owned enterprises including the island’s schools and colleges. The airport remained opened, while tens of thousands were reported to converge on San Juan’s Plaza Las Americas.

Main labor organizations, the General Workers Union and the All Puerto Rico for Puerto Rico Coaltion supported the general strike. In May of this year, the Puerto Rican government laid off nearly 8 thousand employees and then hired about 3 thousand temporary teachers and assistants. Union leaders claim that Governor Luis Fortuno is planning to privatize government services. Outrage to the proposed layoffs have rippled into New York City, amid second largest community of Puerto Rican people.

Attorney Judith Berkan:

• Public worker dismissals at almost 25 thousand.
• Any agencies who deal in service to the poor or working class in Puerto Rico
• Two days before the strike, the governor signed and passed a bill aimed at dismantling the Bar Association
• After the massive first strike there have been daily strikes
• They want to return us to the days of the Oligarchy, concentrating wealth into the hands of a few while the remainders pick up the crumbs
• Protesters: Students from every university, every sector of the labor movement, the religious sector, cultural organizations, 700 school principals.
• There were 2000 janitors in the schools, right now there are no janitors in the schools of Puerto Rico and that’s going to be privatized.
• Two thousand school janitors were fired in the middle of the swine flu scare. The government plans to put these jobs out to bid for private companies.
• The atitude is . . . we’re doing this and the rest of you be damned.
• Puerto Rican government:  Marcus Rodriguez Ema brought in again whose forte has always been privatization. He said on a radio station that if there was any blockage of commerce that it could be brought under the Patriot Act.  He said that they are terrorists and they’re trying to block commerce.
• The way they framed it, if you stop commerce, particularly, the docks and the airports, that would be sanctionable under federal law.
• There have been a number of very offensive comments by the people in charge. Calling community leaders leeches, lowlifes, openly.
• The legislation has cut off funding for the Bar Association in Puerto Rico.
• I think the militancy will continue, we have not seen the last of general strikes here.

Guest – Attorney Judith Berkan, is a partner in the San Juan law firm of Berkan/Mendez.  She specializes in government misconduct litigation and employment discrimination cases. Berkan worked as an attorney in New Haven, Connecticut before going to Puerto Rico as the staff attorney for the Puerto Rico Legal Project of the National Lawyers Guild, now the Puerto Rico Civil Rights Institute.  For twenty-seven years, she has been teaching, primarily in the Constitutional Law area, at the Inter American University Law School in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

A frequent speaker and author of many articles on civil rights issues, she was the President of the Human Rights Commission of the Puerto Rico Bar Association in the mid-1990’s and a member of the Commonwealth Supreme Court’s task force on gender discrimination.

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Guantanamo Update: 223 people left in Guantanamo, 97 are Yemeni.

Alla Ali Bin Ahmed was among the 98 remaining Yemeni prisoners let go from Guantanamo Bay prison.  In May of this year, a judge reviewed the government’s classified evidence again Ahmed, and ruled that his incarceration had never been justified. Never been justified?  Yet, he remained like many Yemenis in Guantanamo Prison. Earlier this year, the Center for Constitutional Rights called for all Yemeni detainees to be released and repatriated.  In a media statement, CCR attorney Pardiss Kabriaei, said ” More than one-third of the prisoners at Guantanamo right now are from Yemen. Most have been detained without any charge and in brutal conditions for over six years.  It is unacceptable that the Yemeni and U.S. governments have not come to an agreement to bring these men home. There is absolutely nothing which should prevent their return to Yemen.”  Law and Disorder March 2009 Interview with Pardiss

Attorney Pardiss Kebriaei:

• This is the part of Guantanamo that is about accountability.
• A case filed in 2008 on behalf of 2 men that died in Guantanamo on June 2006
• We brought this case against 20 officials, including Rumsfeld and Michael Leonard, Jeffrey Miller, people who were in charge of and approved torture techniques.
• U.S. Army General Bantz John Craddock who introduced a policy of force feeding in Guantanamo whereby detainees are literally strapped into chairs that are called restraint chairs, strapped in at five points, while a tube is forced up their nose and down their stomachs and formula is pumped into them for about an hour
• also named are physicans who knew by virtue of reports from the Red Cross.
• Center for Constitutional Rights – When Healers Harm – A focus on the accountability of medical personnel in Guantanamo who have a professional duty and oath to protect the health and well-being of men.
• It took 2 years for the military to conduct its investigation of these suicides.
• We filed Monday Oct 6, a motion to dismiss, they want to get rid of the case essentially, under the point that reporting claims of abuse are barred under the Military Commissions Act of 2006
• There is a provision in it Section 7, we’re challenging the constitutionality of that provision, the provision in the Military Commissions Act of 2006, that prevents detainees to bring lawsuits against the United States, the first time this MCA, has been asserted, now under the Obama Administration.
• Mohammed al Qahtani video tapes documents the torture he was experiencing, forced nudity, prolonged solitary confinement, using dogs and sexual abuse. Those are the methods that were approved by Donald Rumsfeld in 2002
• January deadline to close Guantanamo is not going to be met, according to US Attorney Gen. Holder
• 223 people left in Guantanamo, 97 are Yemeni.
• Federal judges have ruled on some 30 cases, that there is no lawful basis to hold them, yet of 30, 19 remain in Guantanamo. (Kuwaitis / Yemenis)
• Not the worst of the worst left in Guantanamo, it is nationality.
• There are innocent people who have been in prison for 8 years, it’s not a solution to sit back any longer.
• Guantanamo may stay open a few months past January and then transfer prisoners to the US.

Guest – Pardiss Kebriaei, Staff Attorney with the Guantanamo Global Justice Initiative, at the Center For Constitutional Rights.

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