Law and Disorder May 27, 2013 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• FDNY Lawsuit Update
• Guatemalan Genocide Verdict Overturned

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We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks -  Michael Ratner

Our own Michael Ratner delivers a critical review of the film documentary “We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks” by director Alex Gibney. The annotated transcript, reveals errors, rank speculation and a focus on personality that detracts from the important revelations by Manning and published by WikiLeaks. Bradley Manning’s 12-week trial commences on Monday (3 June) and the film may have been released to take advantage of that date.  Manning may face life in prison and could potentially face the death penalty. Julian Assange remains in the Ecuadorian embassy legitimately fearful that extradition to Sweden is a one way ticket to the US and potential for life in prison.

Attorney Michael Ratner, attorney in the US for Julian Assange and Wikileaks:

• (The film) does a great disservice to Bradley Manning and Julian Assange.
• I think it trivializes the incredible courage that both of them had as well as what was revealed by the documents.
• Julian Assange declined an interview by Alex Gibney and no one currently associated with Wikileaks participated in the film. This may explain in part Gibney’s poor treatment of Julian Assange.
• What grabs you immediately is the title, “We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks.” Wikileaks is a publisher. Yet the title implies that the story of Wikileaks is the story of it stealing secrets.
• That implication plays into the government’s theory that somehow Wikileaks and Julian Assange are co-conspirators with Bradley Manning in taking secrets. The film does so in other places as well.
• A second criticism is that part of the film focuses on Bradley Manning’s psychological problems and implies that those are the basis for Manning’s revelation of documents.
• Gibney has said as much in interviews given after the film: “I think it raises big issues about who whistleblowers are, because they are alienated people who don’t get along with people around them, which motivates them to do what they do.”
• In fact, Manning gave an incredibly moving political explanation for each leak of documents; an explanation not covered in any detail in the film.
• Third, Gibney claims Wikileaks is dead. Nothing could be more of fable.
• Since December 2011 Wikileaks has released the SpyFiles, the Stratfor emails dubbed the GIFiles, the Syria Files and in April 2013 both Cablegate and 1.7 million Kissinger Cables in an easily searchable Plus Public Library of US Diplomacy.
• Fourth, somehow, Gibney claims there are no charges filed against Julian Assange. How does he know that? It’s a secret Grand Jury, and if there’s an indictment, it’s going to be a sealed indictment because an indictment is not made public when a person is not in custody. In fact, there is significant, irrefutable evidence of an on going investigation and its likely there is a sealed indictment.
• Gibney diminishes the risk to Julian Assange if he were sent to the United States because he wants to claim that Assange is in the embassy to avoid going to Sweden to answer questions about sexual misconduct allegations. But it does not work. Were Sweden to guarantee Assange would not be sent to US he would go there to answer questions.
• Assange has also offered to answer those questions in the embassy–Sweden has refused. In the end, the problem is the United States–Gibney, in his effort to demean Assange, needs to play down the huge risk he faces in the US.

Law and Disorder Co-host Attorney Michael Ratner,  President Emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a non-profit human rights litigation organization based in New York City and president of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) based in Berlin. Ratner and CCR are currently the attorneys in the United States for publishers Julian Assange and Wikileaks. He was co-counsel in representing the Guantanamo Bay detainees in the United States Supreme Court, where, in June 2004, the court decided his clients have the right to test the legality of their detentions in court. Ratner is also a past president of the National Lawyers Guild and the author of numerous books and articles, including the books The Trial of Donald Rumsfeld: A Prosecution by Book, Against War with Iraq and Guantanamo: What the World Should Know, as well as a textbook on international human rights.

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Palestinian Prisoners Legal Support: Addameer

On the 17th of April, hundreds of Palestinians filled the streets in the West Bank in protest to mark Palestinian Prisoners Day. Right now there nearly 5000 Palestinian security prisoners in Israeli jails, 14 of them are women. More than half have been convicted, 33 percent have not been sentenced and 3 percent are being held in administrative detention.  235 of Palestinian prisoners are minors ranging in age from 14 to 18.  As many listeners may know, Palestinian activists are often targeted and detained. In prison, tactics are used such as solitary confinement and forbidding family contact.

Attorney Sahar Francis:

• Currently there are still 4900 Palestinians inside Israeli prisons. Most of them are adults. There are 236 minors under age 18. 14 women and 14 Parliamentarians.
• The majority of them I would say were arrested because of political activism and being involved in the peaceful struggle, and resistance especially in the last couple of years against the wall, the checkpoints, the settlements, land confiscation, house demolition all these practices of the occupation.
• Including Jerusalem residents, they would be arrested inside Israel but they could be subjected to 2 different legal systems. The Israeli legal system or the military system that applies just to the Occupied Territories.
• Settlers are not subjected to the military court system that is imposed on the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.
• It’s violation of International Law to move them to prisons inside Israel.  This is what Israel was doing since 1995.
• They moved the prisoners from prisons inside the Occupied Territories to prisons inside Israel and this is a violation for the 4th Geneva Convention Act actually.
• The number of Palestinian prisoners decreased compared to previous years, 2005, 2006.
• Since 1967 til today more than 750 thousand Palestinians were arrested. It’s almost hitting every Palestinian house. It’s estimated to be about 40 percent of the Palestinian men population that were at least once incarcerated in their life.
• In the 7 years of Oslo, Israel kept 1500 political prisoners.
• Now I can say that the majority of the prisoners would be sentenced for periods less than 10 years.
• There’s around 430 of them sentenced for life.
• We still have cases of families where they have 4 sons or 5 sons in the same time in prison.
• In some cases they (the sons) would be distributed in all prisons, in north, south of Israel and the mother would be traveling all the way trying to visit them.
• The women prisoners number was much higher we used to have 120 female prisoners.
• Most of them involved in political activism, mainly supporting their brothers or husbands in their political activism or in stop cases involved in trying to stop soldiers.
• Addamer was established in 1991 by ex Palestinian political prisoners and lawyers who were aiming to give legal support for free to Palestinian prisoners in military court system.
• Our focus is on political arrests. We have 8 members in Addamer. We are members of the Israeli Bar Association and members of the Palestinian Bar Association.
• Most of the cases in military court would end in plea bargain without exhausting the system because neither the system or the lawyers don’t have much trust in the system.
• You could end up being interrogated in the detention centers inside Israel and they will decide whether to transfer the case for the civil prosecution or the military prosecution.
• You can have a person 90 days before charging them (military system) Civil system it’s 35 days.
• Law In These Parts – Film Documentary.
  
• Regarding torture and terms such as enhanced interrogation techniques : In our place its called moderate physical pressure.
• We can’t sue them because the prosecutors claim out of necessity we used the torture.
• Seeing the photos of Abu-Ghraib with this sack on the detainee’s heads, this was used in the Palestinians case since the early years of the occupation.
• This is the method that was used to prevent them from breathing, from sleeping, and they were tied to these kindergarten small chairs with the sack on their head, with playing music 24 hours a day. Then after in this position for 2 weeks, the interrogator shake you.
• We’re promoting Boycott Divest and Sanction.

Guest – Sahar Francis, human rights lawyer and director of the Palestinian NGO Addamer.  (Arabic for conscience) Prisoners Support and Human Rights Association is a Palestinian non-governmental, civil institution which focuses on human rights issues. Established in 1992 by a group of activists interested in human rights, the center offers support to Palestinian prisoners, advocates the rights of political prisoners, and works to end torture through monitoring, legal procedures and solidarity campaigns.It’s an organization offering legal services to political prisoners under Israeli occupation and represents prisoners in Israeli military and civil courts.

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Law and Disorder May 20, 2013 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Lynne Stewart Compassionate Release Petition
  
• Please Also Write to: Charles E Samuels Jr. / Federal Bureau of Prisons /
• 320 1st Street Northwest / Washington DC 20534

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Court Upholds Broad Injunction to Remedy FDNY Discrimination

We talk today about recent developments in the New York City Fire Department discrimination case known as the US and Vulcan Society v. City of New York. Last week, a three-judge panel of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals held that, in light of the City’s “distressing pattern of limited FDNY minority hiring,” broad relief ordered by the district judge to end discrimination in the FDNY was “entirely warranted.”

This decision includes an independent monitor in order to “oversee the FDNY’s long awaited progress toward ending discrimination.”  The Court also ruled that the plaintiffs’ intentional discrimination claim should proceed to a trial.  The district court had found that the evidence of intentional discrimination was so overwhelming that no trial was necessary. The Court of Appeals also reinstated the plaintiffs’ claim that former FDNY Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta is individually liable for intentional discrimination.

Attorney  Dana Lossia:

• The Vulcan Society which is our client, a fraternity of black fire fighters sued the city of New York and said that the reason why the fire department back in the 60s and 70s was virtually all white was because of the hiring process that the city was using, it was discriminatory, it was unlawful.
• A federal judge agreed back in 1973 and ordered the city to hire one minority firefighter for every 3 white firefighters that was hired.
• Decades went on, we get up to the 90s and you look at the FDNY and it’s still 3 percent African American.
• It instituted the quota that was required for the bare minimum amount of time that was required and then it reverted to the all white club that the fire department has been its entire history in New York City.
• In a city that is 25 percent African American or more and 25 percent Latino.
• We made the case that not only was the city using these exams but they were continuing to use them with the knowledge and intent to perpetuate the fire department as it has existed.
• So that fathers could bring their sons and their nephews into the force and it would stay the way it had always been which is virtually all white, more than 90 percent white.
• The District Court Judge in Brooklyn agreed with us he said this was clearly intentional discrimination. He issued a remedial order requiring broad oversight  of the FDNY hiring process.
• The city didn’t like that, they appealed to the Court of Appeals. The Court of Appeals came down with a decision that largely upheld this very broad and deep oversight on everything the city does to hire firefighters.
• Every other fire department in a big city across the country is more racially diverse than in New York City.
• Back in the 80s women came into the fire department and face horrible harassment and retaliation.
• One of the things we learned is that fire fighting is less dangerous than construction work, its far less dangerous job than being a police officer, a roofer.
• Fire fighters are revered wherever they go and the job is much much more safe than sanitation work.

Guest – Attorney Dana Lossia (Northwestern University, B.A., summa cum laude 2001, Harvard Law School, J.D., 2005) joined Levy Ratner in December 2005. She represents unions in New York and New Jersey in arbitrations, administrative proceedings, NLRB cases and federal and state court litigation. She also represents plaintiffs in complex employment discrimination actions, including a challenge to racially discriminatory hiring practices at the NYC Fire Department. Lossia has also litigated on behalf of tenants in land use and zoning appeals before the NYC Board of Standards and Appeals.

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Lawyers You’ll Like: Anne O’Berry 

As part of our Lawyers You’ll Like series we’re joined by attorney Anne O’Berry, she’s the Vice President of the Southern Region of the National Lawyers Guild and the author of The Law Only As An Enemy:  The Legitimization of Racial Powerlessness Through the Colonial and Antebellum Criminal Laws of Virginia. While in law school, she served as Director of the Women in Prison Project at Rikers Island, where she taught incarcerated women how to prevent termination of their parental rights. In the last 12 years, Anne has served as counsel at a Florida law firm that specializes in class action litigation, particularly in the areas of securities, consumer and economic fraud, as well as some environmental and privacy rights litigation.

Attorney Anne O’Berry:

• We did a lot of historical research in terms of racism and the law back in pre-civil war Virginia.
• We focused on Virginia because it was a paradigm for slavery basically in the slave laws that were in place.
• We wrote an article for publication, it was published in the University of North Carolina law review. The Law Only As An Enemy:’ The Legitimization of Racial Powerlessness Through the Colonial and Antebellum Criminal Laws of Virginia.
• Depending on your status, if you were a free white person or a slave, you were treated differently by the law.
• As an overall theme, depending on the race of the victim was that would effect what your sentence would be.
• For example, if a black woman was raped, that was not considered a crime.  If you were a black person and you stole something, you would be put to death.
• It was ironic for the slave owner because if their slave was put to death, they would have to be compensated by the state.
• If the victim was black, the crime was treated less seriously than if the victim was white.
• I started out working at a firm in New York, a large prominent, Wall Street type.
• Among some people I was known as the pro-bono queen.
• I was there for 2 and a half years and the first pro-bono case was a death penalty case.
• The court ruled back then (1990s) that it was ok to execute the mentally retarded.
• I was so moved by that experience that I gave up my cushy job in New York and go do death penalty work full time.
• I ended up at the Federal Resource Center doing death penalty work in Tallahassee Florida.
• I worked for the Battered Women’s Clemency Project in Florida.
• More recently the Supreme Court did rule that it is unconstitutional to execute people who were juveniles at the time of the offense and unconstitutional to execute people who are mentally retarded.
• I believe in my lifetime we will see the end of the death penalty in this country.
• It’s just an amazing system that we have where the courts will say – yes you’ve got compelling evidence of innocence but we’re not going to hear your case.
• I would say what got me through was the victories.
• Presently,  I’m working with an attorney Jim Green, who’s a prominent civil rights attorney in West Palm Beach,  kind of a legend down here.
• I also some volunteer work with El Sol. It’s a day laborer center in Jupiter, Florida.

Guest – Anne O’Berry, National Lawyers Guild’s Regional Vice President for the Southern Region and a member of the Guild’s South Florida chapter.  She obtained her undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1983 and her law degree from New York University Law School in 1986.  While in law school, she served as Director of the Women in Prison Project at Rikers Island, where she taught incarcerated women how to prevent termination of their parental rights.  She was a member of the law school’s civil rights clinic and an editor on one of the law school’s journals, and authored a law review article on prisoners’ rights.

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Guatemalan Ex Dictator Found Guilty of Genocide

After weeks of powerful testimony the trial of former Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt and his intelligence chief José Rodríguez Sánchez ended with a guilty conviction on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. The verdict marked the first time a former head of state had been found guilty of genocide in his or her own country.The government’s lead prosecutor, Orlando López, gave more than two hours of summation based heavily on the Guatemalan military plans, manuals, and operational records entered as evidence. During the months of General Ríos Montt’s rule, the army used a scorched-earth policy to flush out leftist guerrillas fighting in the hills. The villages of the Mayan highlands suffered the worst of the army’s brutality in the early 1980s, during Guatemala’s 36-year civil war.

Kate Doyle:

• I’m one of a couple of analysts that look at foreign policy in Latin America. My specialty is Central America and Mexico and I’m the director of something called the Evidence Project at the Archive, which is a way of connecting the right to information, right the truth with human rights and justice struggles around the region.
• We’ve worked very closely with truth commissions, with prosecutors and judges to try to get some of the classified US documents and sometimes even the national documents from their countries in to their hands when they’ve got a human rights investigation underway.
• The impetus for this case really came from the affected communities themselves that is in this case, the community of the Mayan Ixil.
• In the Northwestern part of the country, which worked for decades to identify exhumation sites. Sites where they knew there were clandestine mass graves of their own mothers, fathers, children who had massacred during the scorched earth operations of Rios Montt in 1982 and 1983.
• In March of 1982, Rios Montt headed a trio of military officers that overthrew the previous president. There was a guerrilla armed insurgency underway in Guatemala and had been since the 1960s. Rios Montt decided he was going to launch a series of counterinsurgency operations not only to target the armed insurgents in the highlands but also to destroy or eliminate their social base.
• That meant going after communities of mostly Mayan peoples that lived in the same area where the insurgents operated. It’s one of the most brutal acts of what used to be called low intensity warfare.
• The officials that carried out those operations were left to enjoy total impunity after the regime ended some 17 months later.
• Prosecutors and both the government prosecutors and civil prosecutors who represent the victims who also get to sit at the table ask questions and participate in the investigation pulled together a real interesting case for genocide and crimes against humanity.
• I’ve been working with those prosecutors for years to help them incorporate both declassified US documents as evidence in the case but also those Guatemalan military archives.
• Because of the very tight relationship between the United States and the Guatemalan regime of Rios Montt and predecessor regimes, we knew these agencies would have countless records of the operations themselves of the Guatemalan military structure of command and control.
• Some of the most extraordinary testimony for me came from women because the Guatemalan military like many militaries in these irregular wars used sexual abuse and violation as a part of their counterinsurgency tactics and they actually talk about the destruction of the “semia” the seed.
• The day the verdict came down, the court that seats about 500 people, was absolutely packed to the gills, so every seat was full. When the mood in the room began to feel tense, because of the intensity of the verdict and what that meant for Guatemala. Everybody began to stand up and sing this beautiful song, this poem that was set to music by a Guatemalan musician, over and over again and brought the tension down slowly slowly, it was one of the most beautiful moments I’ve ever witnessed in a court room.
• The Guatemalans were focused on legally convicting the authors of genocide, and they did it.

Guest – Kate Doyle,  a Senior Analyst of U.S. policy in Latin America at the National Security Archive. She directs several major research projects, including the Guatemala Project, which collects declassified U.S. and Guatemalan government documents on the countries’ shared history from 1954, and the Evidence Project, connecting the right to truth and access to information with human rights and justice struggles in Latin America. Since 1992, Doyle has worked with Latin American human rights groups, truth commissions, prosecutors and judges to obtain government files from secret archives that shed light on state violence. She has testified as an expert witness in numerous human rights legal proceedings, including the 2008 trial of former President Alberto Fujimori of Peru for his role in overseeing military death squads; the case before the Spanish National Court on the 1989 assassination of the Jesuit priests in El Salvador; and the 2010 trial of two former policemen in Guatemala for the forced disappearance of labor leader Edgar Fernando García in 1984

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Law and Disorder April 22, 2013 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Please Sign Petition To Help Lynne Stewart

Long time literary agent Francis Goldin has for years visited inmates on death row.  She’s recently returned from visiting Lynne Stewart in the Carswell Medical Facility in Texas. She joins hosts to talk about her visit.

Francis Goldin:

• We were there for 4 days and most of the time we were in the prison with her.
• If we kissed more than once, or hugged more than once she would be fined.
• That’s how they become correctional by denying kissing and hugging and loving.
• We were only there for about 70 hours, we didn’t have enough time to talk.
• The day we left, all the plans were changed, no more 4 day visits, only Saturday and Sunday. The inmates were heart broken.
• The breast cancer has moved to her lungs. The reason she has it in her lungs is because they didn’t treat her when they should have.
• It’s tremendously important to go to LynneStewart.org and sign on for this release.
• When you sign on, email every person on your list whether its 10 or 500.
• It’s really important that we send a million signatures.
• I visited Maroon for 27 years, every 3 months. I was there for 2 whole days.
•  Lynne Stewart Compassionate Release Petition
  
• Please Also Write to: Charles E Samuels Jr. / Federal Bureau of Prisons /
• 320 1st Street Northwest / Washington DC 20534

Guest – Francis Goldin, has worked in publishing for 63 years, as an agent and as editor-in-chief of a children’s publishing company; she founded the Frances Goldin Literary Agency and sold her first book in 1977. Authored by Black anthropologist Betty Lou Valentine and titled Hustling and Other Hard Work, the book continued to receive royalties for 32 years. Among her clients are Barbara Kingsolver, who she has represented for all of her 14 books, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Dorothy Allison, Frances Fox Piven, Martin Duberman, iconic feminists including Charlotte Bunch and Esther Newton, more.

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Maroon The Implacable

We welcome back Teresa Shoatz, daughter of political prisoner Russell Maroon Shoatz who has spent 39 years in the US prison system. As many listeners may know, Russell Shoatz has been held under intense lock down spending no more than one hour a day outside of his cell for the past 21 of those years. He was locked up in 1972 for his activity as a member of the Black Liberation Army.

Meanwhile, Theresa Shoatz is on book tour promoting her father’s book titled Maroon The Implacable. We catch up with her in Chicago while on tour. Maroon The Implacable is the first published collection of his accumulated written works analyzing the prison system, imperialism, the drug war. He also writes with great insight about the Maroon communities throughout America. Newer essays examine current political movements including eco-feminism and matriarchy

Theresa Shoatz:

• Maroon had been told that he would die at SCI Greene. For him to be free from prison in general, would be when I would say we have won.
• We’ve been fortunate to have Bret Grote, assistant to the legal team. Dan Kovalic and we just got a major commitment from a big law firm.
• Maroon has been writing since the eighties. In the nineties, some anarchists took his writings and put them in a zine, and took them throughout the United States and into Canada. They were used for education.
• So you get Maroon’s span from the eighties, to the present day.
• His view now on women is so incredible because he stressed how important women are to the movement throughout the sixties and the seventies.
• At that time he didn’t recognize how important the women were. The women, I would say are really the back bone of any community.
• On his second escape we was returned to prison an inmate said to him, they had a hell of a manhunt on you, you were chased down like a “Maroon.”
• He didn’t know anything about the Maroons. He dug in deep about their history and how they came about.
• The Maroons were slaves who had escaped from plantations, some went deep into the woods and joined with Native Americans and some poor whites who were totally against this slave thing.
• His digging into the history of the Maroons, he also involved me and my siblings. They were so awesome because they were fighting off attacks, also in the Caribbean areas, even into Mexico.
• Maroon has endured such torture, just outrageous treatment. Twenty plus years of no-contact visits. The impact of this really does control mindsets.
• Maroon doesn’t have computers nor has he seen one up close. He does everything long hand, and through snail-mail.
• Right now, I’m at the University of Texas. I’m presently with the dean and a professor in a writing class.
• If they haven’t heard of him, they want to know more.
• We have to step over what this government has thrown at us.
• They have more a hand on these youth than some these youths own parents.
• When you can punch right through that wall that’s candy coated reality system that our youth are mixed up in, its not only uplifting for me but for them.

Guest – Theresa Shoatz,  a Philadelphia-based prison justice activist and the daughter of Russell “Maroon” Shoatz.

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Shadow Lives: How the War on Terror in England Became a War on Women and Children

It’s obvious and yet an unfortunate reality, war, prisoners of war and the prison industrial complex tear apart families. Very seldom are the voices of family members heard that were left behind by the tragedies of war.  In the book Shadow Lives: How the War on Terror in England Became a War on Women and Children, author Victoria Brittain brings the reader close to these individuals who’s lives were capsized by war. They’re usually socially invisible and their civil liberties are often trampled by the state under the guise of the “war on terror.”

Victoria Brittain:

• I got involved way back when people began disappearing and they were described as the worst of the worst by Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush. Some of those people came from Britain and we didn’t know anything about them.
• A friend of mine had a project to do verbatim plays about the families, and he asked me to be the person to interview the families to try to find out who these people were and what had brought them together in Guantanamo Bay.
• I find complete confusion. Nobody in the families knew anything about why their son or their brother had ended up in Guantanamo Bay. In the course of that I got to know some of the families.
• I was particularly curious about one family that didn’ t want to cooperate in the play which was a Palestinian woman with five children, living alone and not speaking much English.
• I wrote to her about the play and told her how ashamed I was of my country from the research that I’ve done.
• We became close friends. Through her and her children, I met other women.
• Over these past ten years its been a rich experience, and sobering experience about injustice.
• I think she was suppressing the agony and loneliness and fear that she was in, course she was so desperate to have her children approach something of a normal life.
• It was only when other people began to come back to Britain from Guantanamo, that we began to get a picture the conditions in which people were.
• Her husband had gone off to west Africa with 3 or 4 other men to try and start a peanut business. This was his idea as a refugee Palestinian in Britain. He wanted to find a way of making a life for his family.
• When she found out he was taken from Afghanistan to Guantanamo, she was completely, . . there was no explanation.
• There was absolutely no recourse for her for a long time.
• It’s so sad, the Obama administration, he said he was going to close Guantanamo, here we are years down the road, these innocent people are still there and in the last 3 months, these people have become so desperate, because Congress is blocking them from getting out.
• Again and again, every legal victory from CCR has been overturned by a higher court.
• For these men, they really feel they’re at the end of the road.
• The horror of this has been so well laid out by so many lawyers. I find it astounding that there isn’t an uproar in Congress.
• Thank goodness Sami-Al-Arien is no longer in prison, but he’s under house arrest.
• Most of their friends turned away from them.
• He spent about five years in about a dozen maximum security prisons.
• FreeSamiAlArian
• The British and American intelligences work so closely together.

Guest – Victoria Brittain has lived and worked as a journalist in Washington, Nairobi, Saigon and London. She worked at the Guardian for 20 years and is the author of Death of Dignity: Angola’s Civil War, and Enemy Combatant.

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Law and Disorder March 18, 2013 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Bradley Manning Plea Update:
• Freedom of the Press Foundation Bradley Manning Audio
• Michael Ratner On The Bill Keller’s Bradley Manning/Wikileaks NYT Op Ed
• Ten Years Later: Iraq US-led Invasion
• Remembering Hugo Chavez
• Free Lynn Stewart: Compassionate Release Petition

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The Search for Colonel James Steele: US Special Forces Veterans Links General Petraeus With Torture In Iraq

A 15-month investigation and documentary film by the Guardian and BBC Arabic James Steele: America’s Mystery Man In Iraq has revealed how  US colonel James Steele, a veteran of American proxy wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, played a key role in training and overseeing US-funded special police commandos who ran a network of torture centers in Iraq. Steele and another special forces veteran retired Colonel James Coffman reported directly to General David Petraeus. Petraeus as listeners may know was tasked with organizing Iraqi security services.

Patrick Farrelly:

• The projections that they made about being welcome in Iraq were just not true.
• It looked like the insurgency at that point in 2004 was just getting off the ground.
• This is where they turned to General Petraeus, I know he’s seen in the think tanks in Washington as the scholar warrior.
• Rumsfeld called upon him to go back into Iraq and to organize a pretty massive police force in Iraq.
• He hooked up with 2 people there, Colonel James Coffman and Colonel James Steele.
• Mill Group is essentially a bunch of military advisers who are training the Salvadorian security forces to fight the guerrillas.
• Colonel James Steele was the guy in charge of the American advisers who were training these people and also directing these forces.
• Counter-insurgency force went from 400 to 17 thousand.
• What the United States needs really badly is intelligence, they need to know who the insurgence are and where they can get them.
• That’s Steele’s expertise, having these guys on the ground, they draw in thousands of people and basically torture them for information.
• It’s Steele’s job to collate that information so that they can then hand it over to the US military. The US can then go after the insurgence informed for the first time.
• Part of the Wikileaks discovery, in terms of the war-logs which was released by Bradley Manning to wikileaks, shows this entire pattern of US soldiers coming across these detention centers,
• - they’re giving consistent reports of seeing torture of seeing abuse.
• Frontline: The Gangs Of Iraq.
• It’s a production line. These young men come in, these people were hung up on ceilings, nails pulled out with pliers, it was water boarding.
• They turned the city library (in Iraq) into a torture center.
• It became this interrogation and torture mill, that no doubt produced a lot of information.
• For empire, people like James Steele are very very important.
• Empires tend to roam into other people’s countries, and you know.
• Where did the sectarian civil war come from? Who played a part in bringing this about?
• James Steele, lives in Texas, at one point he was Vice President of Enron.
• The public is not really aware of what’s being done in the name of US taxpayers in foreign lands.
• I think its clear that the Sunni community is completely disenfranchised. I think its still in a state of terror.

Guest – Patrick Farelly, a TV, radio and print journalist who has worked in the US and Ireland. Farrelly was producer of Michael Moore’s Emmy award-winning NBC/BBC2 series TV Nation and later Bravo/Channel 4 co-production Awful Truth. He was the founding editor of the New York based weekly newspaper Irish Voice and has also been features editor of the New York Post. He has also worked for HBO, Discovery, PBS and Irish broadcasters RTE and TG4.

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Law and Disorder February 4, 2013 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Long Distance Revolutionary: A Journey With Mumia-Abu-Jamal
• Freedom 7 Case Challenging NDAA of 2013 – Pack the Courtroom: Wednesday February 6th, 2013, 10:00 AM – Room 1505, 40 Foley Square
• CCR and NLG Team Up To Provide Legal Support For Palestinian Activism: Palestinelegalsupport.org
• Obama Administration GTMO Office Vanishes
• Michael Ratner’s Sundance Film Festival Report: Occupy 99 Percent / CIA Propaganda Film: Manhunt

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Central Park Five Civil Suit

On April 19, 1989 a group of five black and Latino teenagers were arrested and convicted for the brutal rape of a white female jogger in Central Park, New York City. It was one of the highest profile criminal cases in the city. A New York court overturned the convictions of the five teenagers after a serial rapist confessed to the crimes. By this time of this confession, the five defendants had already served sentences of 7and 13 years. Now, the city of New York is refusing to settle a $250 million decade-long federal civil rights suit brought by the defendants.  Attorney Roger Wareham talks more about the case and the Ken Burns documentary on the Central Park Five that could provide footage for the federal civil lawsuit.

Attorney Roger Wareham:

• I’m part of a team of lawyers among five firms that represent the five defendants.
• She almost died. She lost 75 percent of the blood in her body that night.
• The police at some point arrested 30 youths who had allegedly been in the park earlier that night. Some of them were charged with attacking people jogging in the park.
• Most of them had been released, these five were in custody.
• Maybe four or five hours after they were arrested the police received word of this woman who was near death.
• So they held these five children for questioning which basically became and interrogation, which basically became a coerced false confession where each one of them implicated the other ones in the rape and attack of this woman.
• Even though none of them knew each other or what actually happened because they didn’t do it, they just wanted to go home.
• By the time the parents became part of the process, the false statements had already been elicited.
• Especially when a black man is a accused of touching, raping a white woman, logic, justice, objectivity, evidence goes out the window and there’s a presumption of guilt.
• They went to trial and were convicted even though there was no forensic evidence.
• Once they were released from prison they had to register as sexual predators.
• Thirteen years after their conviction, the person who actually committed the crime came forward and admitted he’d done it.
• He was arrested after a failed attempt at a rape. There was an m.o. that he employed with the rapes that he conducted.
• I’m part of a political organization called the December 12 Movement.
• Manhattan’s District Attorney’s office had done a very thorough investigation and this is the same office that had prosecuted them.
• They put forth a really damning affirmation in support of our motion basically admitting they had prosecuted the wrong people, errors had been made. It was clear that the one and only perpetrator was Mateas Raes and they were not going to retry the case.
• Their convictions were overturned 10 years ago, in December 2002.
• Why hasn’t it been settled? You look to Police Commissioner Kelly who endorsed the report.
• Subpoenaing the outtakes is a reflection of their desperation. See, they know the truth. They’re floundering around looking for different straws to grab at.
• Contact the December 12th Movement directly at 718-398-1766.

Guest – Attorney Roger Wareham is a lawyer and political activist of over four decades. He is a member of the December 12th Movement, an organization of African people which organizes in the Black and Latino community around human rights violations, particularly police terror. Wareham is also the International Secretary-General of the International Association Against Torture (AICT), a non-governmental organization that has consultative status before the United Nations.

Since 1989, he has annually presented evidence of human rights violations facing people of color in the United States and other parts of the world at assemblies of the United Nations’ Human Rights Council (formerly the Commission on Human Rights) and its other bodies that meet in Geneva, Switzerland. His work was instrumental in having Mr. Maurice Glele, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance; conduct the first U.N. investigation of the United States in history. Roger Wareham was an active organizer of and participant in the United Nations’ World Conference against Racism held from August 30 – September 7, 2001 in Durban, South Africa.

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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 Radio December 24, 2012 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Hosts Discuss War Culture and the Newtown Connecticut School Massacre
• Letter to University of California President Advising Him of Need to Protect Protect Pro-Palestinian Speech on Campus
• Michael Ratner Remembers Former Federal Judge and Conservative Legal Scholar Robert Bork
• Six Month Anniversary Julian Assange at Ecuadoran Embassy: Free Press Foundation

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Political Prisoner Lynne Stewart - December 2012 Update

Criminal defense attorney, political prisoner and good friend, Lynne Stewart continues to inspire  people around her while serving a 10 year sentence at the Federal Medical Center in Fort Worth Texas.  As many listeners know, Lynne was convicted on charges related to materially aiding terrorism, related to her representation of Omar Abdel Rahman.  Her original 2 year sentence was increased to 10  years after the government pressured the trial judge to reconsider his sentencing decision.

Co-host Michael Smith reads a few paragraphs from a recent letter by Lynne.  Lynne Stewart turned 73 this past October, she’s a breast cancer survivor and has recently come out of surgery.  She says she’s feeling better and ready to take on the next step in her case.

“I am now beginning my fourth (4th) year of imprisonment.  It does not get better and I have to gut check myself regularly to be certain that I am resisting the pervasive institutionalization that takes place.  A certain degree of reclusiveness  with the help of good books, interesting people to correspond with, writing on topics of public interest, seems to work for me.  Of course I still am working with any woman who needs help but I know that my sometimes truth-telling self is not what folks here want to hear.  I do try to give folks whatever comfort I can.  An old timer here, 18 years in, has begun an initiative to mobilize for prison reform by getting people on the outside to sign off on her well written petition to the White House.  She is straight out of the courage and style of the old southern civil rights struggle but has now dedicated herself to this.  The demands are modest. I have placed her petition on this, my website.  Please sign on.”

Guest – Ralph Poynter, activist and Lynne’s partner. Please write to Lynne Stewart: #53504-054 / Federal Medical Center, Carswell / PO Box 27137 / Ft. Worth, TX 76127

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Michael Ratner Speech On Bradley Manning in Washington DC.

We hear a speech by our own Michael Ratner delivered at the Bradley Manning support event.  Michael Ratner, President Emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights, who represents WikiLeaks and Julian Assange.  Attorney David Coombs also speaks about the case of his client, Bradley Manning. He is preceded by Emma Cape of the Bradley Manning Support Network.  The event was held at All Souls Church Unitarian in Washington DC, December 2012.

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Law and Disorder November 19, 2012 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Jeremy Hammond Case Update: Currently In MCA
• Julian Assange Update: Ecuador Embassy, London
• Bradley Manning Hearing at Fort Meade – November 27-December 22
• National Security State Eats Its Own? General Petraeus Scandal Analysis
• Israel Bombing Gaza: Operation Pillar of Cloud.  Timeline
• CCR Files Complaint Against the UN Committee Against Torture: Canada Directly Violates Convention Against Torture
• UN Vote On Cuba Embargo: Israel Is Among Major Investors In Cuba

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National Lawyers Guild 75 Years

Hundreds of National Lawyers Guild members and allies gathered to celebrate the organization’s 75th anniversary at the Law for the People convention in Pasadena, California.  We hear excerpts from speeches from the National Lawyers Guild Convention by Attorney Jim Lafferty  The 2012 Law for the People Award was given to Jim Lafferty.

Scholar and activist Angela Davis delivered the keynote address and among the convention honorees will be Margaret Burnham, a professor of civil rights law who, as a young lawyer, helped secure Davis’s 1972 acquittal on high-profile charges.

Founded in 1937, the National Lawyers Guild is the oldest and largest public interest/human rights bar association in the United States. Its headquarters are in New York City and it has members in every state.

Jim Lafferty, Executive director of the National Lawyers Guild in Los Angeles and host of The Lawyers Guild Show on Pacifica’s KPFK 90. 7 FM.

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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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