Law and Disorder January 28, 2013 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Mass Incarceration Epidemic

On January 19, the Malcolm X Commemoration Committee 1199 SEIU activists presented the 17th Annual Dinner Tribute to the Families of our Political Prisoners & Prisoners of War. It was called Transforming Solidarity: Working Together to End Political Imprisonment and Mass Imprisonment and was held at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Labor Center in NYC.

Professor Johanna Fernandez:

• The Republican Party begins to craft an ideological backlash against an emerging civil rights and black power movement.
• The Republican presidential candidate at the time Barry Goldwater in a speech begins to link crime to the activism of civil rights protesters that are being incarcerated in the south.
• He is deploying one of the most atrocious fears of the white supremacist South in the post-reconstruction era to delegitamize these protests. That black men are going to rape white women.
• What we see happening in the 1960s is that fear is manufactured by these P.R. firms that are working in consultation with Republican leaders but also with police organizations, the Fraternal Order of Police, and the Police Benevolent Association.
• 1968 saw and huge amount of riots especially in the aftermath of Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination.
• The criminalization of black and Latino protesters was the major strategy used to delegitamate the aspirations and the politics of this emerging revolutionary class.
• The Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 legalized wire-tapping and bugging by federal agents and local police without a court order.
• It also legalized on the stop search and seizure by police.
• The police are exempt from the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
• What is the purpose of this crime mania and moral panic? It’s to delegitamize the influence of black and Latino radicals of the working class of color in the nation.
• In 1970s, the apparatus of mass incarceration emerges.
• This apparatus is being deployed against the most vulnerable sections of American society in urban centers. African-Americans and Latinos that are being devastated by a crisis of de-industrialization.
• The poorest people of color are likely to resist, and this class is going to be controlled.
• It was a fabricated crisis of crime that never existed.
• Fear atomizes people they don’t start thinking in terms of community but individual.
• Crime becomes a code word for African Americans, Latinos and increasingly immigrants.
• The Black Panther Party had an analysis of oppression and inequality that addressed its root causes. It identified capitalism which is driven by profit rather than need as the problem.
• But also they had a newspaper and this is important around the issue of mass incarceration.
• Crime is an ideological wedge that is crafted by the Republican Party and the new Right in this nation for the purposes of social control.

Guest - Johanna Fernández,  a native New Yorker. She received a PhD in History from Columbia University and a BA in Literature and American Civilization from Brown University. Professor Fernández teaches 20th Century U.S. History, the history of social movements, the political economy of American cities, and African-American history. She has previously taught at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburg, PA and Trinity College in Hartford, CT and is, most recently, the recipient of a Fulbright Scholars grant to the Middle East and North Africa that will take her to Jordan in spring 2011, where she will teach graduate courses in American History.
—-

Policing Trends at National Special Security Events

On January 21, 2013, more than 3 thousand law enforcement officers and nearly 13 thousand military troops were activated and deployed to the Washington Mall. This magnitude of security at President Barack Obama’s 2013 inauguration raised the water mark of militarized police mobilization for National Special Security Events (NSSEs) High tech weaponry, mobile checkpoints and a large uniformed presence have become common sights at major sporting events, nominating conventions and international summits. NSSEs were created under President Bill Clinton, a designation that requires federal and local law enforcement to collaborate on event security under the management of the Secret Service. The report was issued by the National Lawyers Guild on NSSE trends is the Guild’s senior researcher.

Traci Yoder:

• The idea that this much security, this kind of multi-level, multi-agency is necessary is the assumption that these events are high profile, will have a lot of people and therefore are likely targets for terrorist attacks.
• There’s been about 40 NSSE’s since the designation was created and these include events like president inaugurations, state funerals, the annual State of the Union address, the Superbowl, Olympics, all International monetary organization meetings and of course the Democratic and Republican National Conventions.
• All to often we’re finding that protesters who are engaging in constitutionally protected and legitimate protest activities are lumped into this security threat.
• Over time, we’ve (NLG) have not only done legal support, we’ve also done a lot of research and writing and analysis of the different kinds of trends we see evolving.
• We wanted to use the RNC and the DNC in 2012 as case studies to look at some disturbing changing trends and express our concern that these security measures are simply becoming more normalized.
• Several months before an NSSE, the local government overrides city codes to create exceptional circumstances for these particular events. That means creating a security zone around the event itself, then limiting How When and Where people can protest within that zone.
• That can lead to limiting the times of demonstrations, the amount of people, the special permitting processes to prohibiting everyday, household items being allowed in the zone.
• What we see leading up to NSSE and this has been very consistent is the DHS and FBI circulating unsubstantiated reports that violent anarchists and outside agitators are plotting to come to these cities really to cause harm and injury – to bring explosive devices, to injure police.
• FBI informants and agents and undercover police were crucial to both encouraging and helping to set up these plots which they then use as evidence later.
• We’re asking law enforcement to stop spreading these unsubstantiated threats of protester violence before NSSEs and acknowledge that most of the violence that has taken place at NSSEs in the past has been on the part of police and not the protesters.
• The combined total of the security budget for the RNC and DNC was 100 million dollars. 50 million dollars going to each city.
• We see the continuation of the militarization of police departments and the NSSEs are playing a part in them.

Guest – Traci Yoder, National Lawyers Guild senior researcher. Before coming to the National Office, she coordinated the NLG Philadelphia Chapter.  She holds master’s degrees in Library and Information Studies and Anthropology, with a focus in the latter degree on gender studies and East Africa. In Philadelphia, Traci worked on many projects in addition to the NLG, including the Wooden Shoe Book Collective and the Radical Archives of Philadelphia.

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

—–

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.

—————————————————————————–

Law and Disorder January 7, 2013 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Chile: 40 Years Later Eight Former Army Lieutenants Charged in the Killing of Communist Performer/Songwriter Victor Jara.
  
• Heidi Boghosian and Johanna Fernandez Visit Mumia Abu-Jamal During Holidays
• Death Penalty States In The United States Update
  
• Jeremy Hammond’s Judge Refuses To Recuse Herself :  Contrary to what has been reported on Democracy Now and Law and Disorder, a motion has been filed (not ruled) for the judge to recuse herself.
  

——-

FBI Considers The Occupy Movement A Terrorist Threat: The State of Civil Rights and Public Policy

A few weeks ago the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund released secret documents obtained by Freedom of Information Act requests revealing that the Occupy movement was treated as a terrorist threat by the FBI. This is despite agency acknowledgement that the organizers called for peaceful protests.  The documents also show massive resources used to track the Occupy movement, a month prior to the encampment in Zuccotti Park. FBI and counter-terrorism agents in offices across the country, from Anchorage to Jacksonville, to Tampa, Virginia, Milwaukee, Birmingham, Memphis and Denver, coordinated with various local and federal law enforcement, to monitor and collect intelligence on OWS. The documents obtained by the PCJF are heavily redacted and the tip of the ice berg says our guest attorney Mara Verheyden Hilliard. We also talk with Mara about her thoughts on the  state of civil rights for the year moving forward.

Attorney Mara Verheyden-Hilliard:

• The Partnership For Civil Justice Fund filed a series of Freedom of Information Act requests with federal agencies, as well as with municipalities and police departments around the country.
• Prior to the FBI materials we have obtained a lot of documents showing the Department of Homeland Security’s involvement as well as local police involvement around the country.
• It doesn’t come as a shock to people that the FBI has continued unabated its historic role as the secret police in the United States, acting against the social justice movement in the US.
• The documents also show us this deep and close partnership the FBI and DHS have with Wall Street, and with the banks and businesses in the United States.
• The documents show the U.S. intelligence agencies and supposedly security agencies really working as the private intelligence arm for private businesses.
• You have the people in the United States rising up in opposition to an economic devastation caused by the banks and by Wall Street and the U.S. government acting in partnership with the banks and Wall Street against those people.
• These documents show for example the FBI was communicating with the New York Stock Exchange in August of 2011, a month before the first tent was set up in Zucotti Park.
• One of the documents we have involves the Domestic Security Alliance Council, where they’re planning on the West Coast port actions of the Occupy movement.
• The DSAC is a government agency that describes itself as a partnership between the FBI, DHS and the private sector. The Lower Manhattan Security Initiative.
• It shows that we’re not looking at something anomalous and aberrational, its pulling back the cloak on what the U.S. government, its intelligence agencies and its “terrorism” authorities is really doing and who its partnering with. It’s against the people of the United States and not for the people of the United States.
• Those people and that movement is then treated by the government as a potential criminal or terrorist threat.
• It helps understand when the government uses the terms of terrorism so broadly and how it uses the authority and the money that it takes from the people of the United States.
• If the FBI had materials that showed criminal activity, they would’ve been delighted to produce some and make those public. That’s not an uncommon action by the FBI given its routine willingness over the years to set people up and announce a big terrorism arrest.
• The sniper reference is a reference in Houston.
• I think it bares pointing out that this FBI, is President Obama’s FBI.
• When the feel the power of the people in the streets, the U.S. intelligence agencies and the local law enforcement agencies go into high gear, because it really is the movement of the people that does cause change.
• At times when it peaks like this, you can really see the truth of their operation.
• It is illegal to use administrative raids for other pretexts.
• We’re appealing both redactions as well as scope of production and scope of search.

Guest – Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, co-chair of the Guild’s national Mass Defense Committee. Co-founder of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund in Washington, DC, she recently secured $13.7 million for about 700 of the 2000 IMF/World Bank protesters in Becker, et al. v. District of Columbia, et al., while also winning pledges from the District to improve police training about First Amendment issues. She won $8.25 million for approximately 400 class members in Barham, et al. v. Ramsey, et al. (alleging false arrest at the 2002 IMF/World Bank protests). She served as lead counsel in Mills, et al v. District of Columbia (obtaining a ruling that D.C.’s seizure and interrogation police checkpoint program was unconstitutional); in Bolger, et al. v. District of Columbia (involving targeting of political activists and false arrest by law enforcement based on political affiliation); and in National Council of Arab Americans, et al. v. City of New York, et al. (successfully challenging the city’s efforts to discriminatorily restrict mass assembly in Central Park’s Great Lawn stemming from the 2004 RNC protests.)
———

Challenging The National Defense Authorization Act of 2012

Last September a federal judge struck down part of the National Defense Authorization Act signed by President Obama that gave the government power to indefinitely detain anyone, anywhere in the world it considers to substantially support or be in associative force with terrorism. This includes US citizens. Judge Katherine Forrest of the Southern District of New York had ruled the indefinite detention provision of the National Defense Authorization Act likely violates the First and Fifth Amendments of U.S. citizens.

Attorney Carl Mayer:

• Some people call it (NDAA) the Homeland Battlefield Act because it treats the United States as a battlefield and allows the military to exercise power over civilians which is antithetical to our democracy and to our 200 years of Constitutional precedence.
• In May of 2012, we after a trial before Katherine Forrest who’s a federal judge in the Southern District of New York we achieved a preliminary injunction. That was then appealed but the appeal would stay pending a trial on a permanent injunction and on September 12, 2012, Judge Forrest issued a permanent injunction against the NDAA.
• The NDAA was stopped between May 16, 2012 and December 12, 2012.
• However, once that happened, the Obama Administration went into overdrive and immediately appealed that to the Second Circuit and asked for a stay of Judge Forrest’s order pending appeal.
• That stay lifted Judge Forrest’s injunction unfortunately the NDAA of 2012 now operates.
• In their papers, the government promised our clients would not be touched under the NDAA and they seemed to imply that no one in their (clients) position would be touched under the NDAA.
• StopNDAA.org
• People can go there and read Judge Forrester’s 112 page opinion and all the documents from the case.
• What’s at stake is the liberty and the right to free speech of all journalists and all activists and indeed any citizen of the United States of America.
• Because the military has never had the power to detain civilians.
• The only exception to that was during World War 2 when Japanese-Americans were interred in prison camps.
• There’s not right to a trial by jury, there’s no right to an attorney. This an authoritarian measure.
• I would venture to guess your hosts and co-hosts are on a list somewhere.
• Chris Hedges for example was a correspondent for several years that covered not only al-Qaeda but 17 other groups that are one the State Department Terrorism List
• He testified that he had a reasonable fear that the NDAA could put him in jeopardy.
• You know as attorneys what’s incredible about this law is there’s no definitional section.
• It doesn’t define what associated forces are. It doesn’t define what substantially supportive means.
• Chris Hedges was detained by the military for leaving the press pool in Iraq.
• Now the NDAA allows these detentions “until the end of hostilities.”
• It really is a heinous statute.
• We lost the stay but we got an expedited appeal.
• The briefing is complete and we’re waiting for an oral argument date.
• The government has two moves, they say whoever brings the suit has no standing, then if it gets past that point they say, sorry the state’s secrets doesn’t allow you to have discovery here.
• Attorney General Holder stated that Americans are entitled to due process but that doesn’t necessarily means judicial process.
• It takes the view that “during war time” that the judiciary has no role to play.
• The NDAA is the culmination of 10 years of anti-civil liberties measures.

Guest – Attorney Carl Mayer runs the Mayer Law Group LLC and is the author of several books including “Shakedown” and “Public Domain, Private Dominion.”   Carl Mayer is a former law professor and served as special counsel to the New York State Attorney General.

——————————————————————————

Law and Disorder December 31, 2012 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Khaled El-Masri and the European Court of Human Rights Decision
• European Court of Human Rights Labels CIA Interrogation Procedures as “Torture”

—–

Tariq Ali: Turning Points in the History of Imperialism

Today we’re joined by internationally renowned writer and activist Tariq Ali. Tariq is visiting from London where he is editor of the New Left Review.

A writer and filmmaker, Tariq has written more than 2 dozen books on world history and politics, including The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power, The Obama Syndrome and On History. We talk specifically about several turning points in global history, the Occupy movement and US elections. .

Tariq Ali:

• The think the first World War was crucial but it wasn’t the war itself it was the consequences of that war. Here you had huge empires.
• The Russian revolution challenged capitalism frontally and its leaders said we want Europe to be with us, on our own we can’t do it. We need the Germans, we need a German revolution. That frightened the capitalist class globally.
• Woodrow Wilson, decided that the time had come to intervene. 22 countries came to intervene.
• This intervention made it impossible for the early infant Soviet Union to achieve what it wanted to achieve.
• The Second World War was an effort by the German ruling class to get its share of the world market in countries.
• The US helped rebuild Japan and Germany. They helped build France and Britain by the Marshal Plan and that has never been done by a big imperial power before.
• They managed to get the Soviet Union to implode by having an arms race. The Russians fell into their trap and decided to go for the arms race, had they not history might have been different.
• I hope the Chinese do not fall into the same trap, threatened by Obama’s puny little bases in Australia.
• People, early settlers in the United States got land totally free and they took it and that created the belief in the American psyche of private property.
• The Soviet Union imploded because the people lost faith in the system.
• The entire elite in the United States and Western Europe is wedded to the Washington consensus that emerged after the collapse of communism. The center piece of this consensus was a system which believed in market forces. I refer to it as market fundamentalism.
• We are confronting the extremism of the center and the result of this is no alternatives exist within mainstream politics. The effect that this is having is hollowing out democracy itself.
• Occupy: What we need is for these movements to call an assembly nationally and discuss a charter of demands for progressive America which need only be ten demands but something around which people can rally. I think its a movement that should be created bearing what the needs of ordinary people are.
• In order to understand the laws of motion of capital, you have to read Marx. It’s true capitalism has become much much more complex. Zombie capitalism, or fictitious capitalism, where money is used to make more money.
• It’s not money that’s creating productive goods.
• I had written a book on South American because I got very engaged in the Venezuela-Boliverian struggle and got to know Chavez very well.
• If Americans had access to Cuban medicine, the pharmaceutical companies would collapse, they would never let it happen.

Guest – Tariq Ali, writer, journalist and film-maker, born in Lahore and educated at Oxford University. He writes regularly for a range of publications including The Guardian and The London Review of Books.  He has written more than a dozen books including non-fiction as well as scripts for both stage and screen.

—–

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.

——————————————————————-

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

——

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

——

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.

—————————————————–

Law and Disorder November 26, 2012 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Michael Ratner and Michael Smith discuss Jeremy Hammond Court Case

• Jeremy Hammond is charged with hacking into the computer system of intelligence firm Strategic Forecasting Inc.
• Hammond is one of five charged with conspiracy to commit computer hacking and other charges
• Michael Smith and Michael Ratner visited him in prison.
• November 20, 2012  – Michael Ratner and Michael Smith go to federal court – Jeremy Hammond’s case. 
• Defense Council, Liz Fink, Margie Ratner Kunstler, Sarah Kunstler and a couple of other people were at the table.
• Emily Kunstler was there as a paralegal.
• Jeremy came into the room, he looked very good – in a blue jumpsuit.
• Then the hearing happened, an hour and a half on getting bail. It’s up to the government to prove why shouldn’t this person be out on bail. You haven’t been convicted of anything so you should be out on the street.
• The government has to prove you will abscond, not come back to trial. The other thing they have is the burden of proof on is that you’re a danger to the community. Michael Smith offered a spare room for Jeremy Hammond to stay.
• It was a hostile hearing and the judge reads her decision denying bail. It was obvious it was prepared way in advance.
• Jeremy’s lawyer Liz Fink: He’s got to be free (on bail) in order for us to work together to prepare his defense.
• Factor 1: Is he going to flee if he gets out on bail? Factor 2: He flaunts legal authority.
• Liz Fink said to the judge, he doesn’t have a passport and his parents are putting up their home for bail.
• He could get 39.5 years. Freehammond.com

—-

• Israel and Gaza Bombing Update
• Israel The Third Largest Arms Seller Globally
• Weapons Experimenting In Gaza

—-

Iyad Burnat, Head of the Popular Committee in Bil’in, Palestine

We hear excerpts of the presentation by Iyad Burnat, head of the Bil’in Popular Committee and a leader in the village’s non-violent popular resistance movement.  Since 2005 citizens of Bil’in have held weekly demonstrations against the building of the Israeli separation wall through the community’s agricultural lands, and the steady encroachment of illegal settlements.  The demonstrators are joined by Israeli and international peace activists, and have maintained a commitment to non-violent methods of resistance in spite of armed, military opposition that has resulted in many injuries and some deaths.

These demonstrations are the subject of the recent award-winning documentary film 5 Broken Cameras, which was made by Iyad’s brother, Emad Burnat. Iyad was born in Bil’in in September of 1973.  He is married and has four children.  He became involved in popular resistance as a teenager, and was arrested by the Israeli military for the first time at age 17.  He was accused of throwing stones, and imprisoned for two years.  Since then he has been arrested and imprisoned by the Israeli military several more times. The event was recorded at Unitarian Church of All Souls in Manhattan.
—-

JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters by Jim Douglass

JFK, The Unspeakable, is the first book of 3 on the assassinations of the 1960s. Orbis Books has commissioned author James W. Douglass to write about the murders of JFK, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, and his  the third will be on the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. The heart of JFK the Unthinkable, is not how Kennedy was killed or how Kennedy became a threat to the systemic war machine, but why DID Kennedy die? Author James Douglass says Kennedy knew that he would die and had the guts to stand up to the system and take the hit. This narrative was lost for decades, obscured by disinformation about Kennedy’s character and the conspiracy of his assassination. One review summarizes Douglass’s book in this way : JFK’s belated effort to turn America from an armed culture of victory to a member of an international peaceful world was shot down in Texas for a reason.

Jim Douglass:

• John F. Kennedy’s experience in WWII:  He was in the South Pacific, he volunteered. He was on that PT boat.
• What happened on that PT boat, is that it got split into two by a Japanese destroyer. He lost brothers and friends at that time.  An extraordinary experience being adrift on the ocean warning other PT boats. The experience create a distrust in military authority.
• He said that he wanted to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter to the winds.
• As Kennedy said to his friends, “they figured me all wrong.”
• The Unspeakable: the kind of evil and deceit that seems to go beyond the capacity of words to describe. The midst of war and nuclear arms race, the assassinations of Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcom X that the term was used.
• JFK’s vision is articulated in the address June 10, 1963, arising from the turnaround of the missile crisis and Bay of Pigs.
• He wanted to move step by step into a disarmed world. Nikita Khrushchev put that speech all over the Soviet Union.  The Cuban Missile Crisis is a deeply misunderstood part of our history, because it’s usually portrayed as Kennedy going to war with Nikita Khrushchev and beating him.
• The truth was that Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev were in over their heads, the US generals wanted nuclear war, because they had more warheads than the Soviets.
• Nikita Khrushchev: We now have a common enemy from those pushing us toward war.
• At that point the Cold War turned upside down because Kennedy and Khruschev became closer to each other than either was toward their own military power system.
• Vietnam: Kennedy’s military people would not give him an exit policy. He signed the withdrawal order from Vietnam before he was assassinated.
• His friends said that he had an obsession with death. It was not an obsession but a real assessment that he was going to die. If you try to turn around a national security state that is dominating the world,
• and you do so as president of the United States, of course you’re going to die. Kennedy knew that.
• The book is a story on the deliberate destruction of hope, the vision of change, a turning of this country all of which was happening and had to be stopped.  US Agencies killed Dr. Martin Luther King – 1999 Verdict
• We’re in the same scene right now with Petraeus and McChrystal setting up Obama. They were dictating terms to Obama, unlike Kennedy, he did not face them down.
• We need to get out ahead of Obama so that he can do something.

Guest -author, James W. Douglass. He’s a longtime peace activist and writer. James and his wife Shelley are co-founders of the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action in Poulsbo, Washington, and Mary’s House, a Catholic Worker house of hospitality in Birmingham, Alabama.

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

—

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.

————————————

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

—

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.

———-

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)

——————————————————————————-

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

Updates:

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

——

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

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

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

Attorney Katherine Gallagher:

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

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

Law and Disorder September 17, 2012 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

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

——

Department of Defense Declassifies Report on Alleged Drugging of Detainees

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

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

——

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

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

Attorney David Remes:

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

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

————————————————————————–