Law and Disorder August 8, 2011: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

A People’s History of the Egyptian Revolution

Egypt’s revolution didn’t suddenly happen overnight, there was long important history. Beginning with Egypt and Israel signing the Camp David Accords in 1979 Egypt was rewarded with billions in US military aid that paved the way for neo-liberal style policies under Hosni Mubarak.  By 2000, the first signs of widespread opposition started in solidarity with the Palestinian Intifada. The protests centered around poverty, corruption and need for democracy.  A second wave of mass opposition ignited in 2003 in response to the US invasion of Iraq and Egypt’s support for the war.  Then the April 6 movement rose in 2008, protesting against rising food costs and low wages. By 2010 social media and blogs were outlets for organizing and dissent.

Guest – Co-writer of the article and founder of Left Turn Magazine Rami El-Amine.
Guest – Activist Mostafa Henaway who also contributed to the article A People’s History of the Egyptian Revolution.

—-

Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark on War of Aggression in Libya

As many listeners know, the military operation in Libya is not a humanitarian intervention, it is part of the global war and effort to militarize North Africa.  The Chinese have sizable interests in Libya in the battle for oil. Meanwhile, the Gaddafi leadership has continued to function despite the NATO bombing campaign in the last four months and the loss of significant parts of the the country. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney had recently returned from a fact finding mission in Tripoli during a time of intense bombing.  She has organized speakers to discuss how billions are spent in this military operation while we’re being told there are no funds available for jobs, health care and education. Former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark was among the speakers, he’s been following the US and NATO involvement in brutal attempts to overthrow the Gaddafi government.

Attorney Ramsey Clark:

• The reality is that its a war of aggression, which the Nuremberg charter and judgement defined as a supreme international crime.
• What we’ve done is used the appearance of a civil war, people rising up against their own government, to wage a massive assault. – really unrelated to their activities, the first place we hit was Tripoli, they were no where near Tripoli and we bombed the daylights out of it.
• The bombing is spreading away from the compound, its hitting areas outside of the city.  Interesting to note, people are still fleeing from Iraq to Syria. It’s safer in Syria, we read in our newspapers it’s violent in Syria.
• If you go back to Rwanda, and remember how everybody was outraged afterward but nobody intervened.
• A clearer illustration is what’s happening in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where hundreds of thousands of people have died and are dying by armed troops. Nobody bothers to intervene.
• What you do is, you want to go in anyway, you use humanitarian intervention as justification.
• The poor Congress is defaulting on its responsibility. The military budget exceeds all of the civilian budget. They can gloss over it but until we address the issue of US military expenditures, our country will be a threat to peace in the world.
• We spend more on the military then the rest of the world combined.  It’s almost impossible to think that the United States will curtail its foreign aggressions, while the military expenditures are at what they are.
• We’ve got in the Pacific Ocean today, 8 Trident nuclear submarines, the cost is enormous each one carries 140-145 nuclear warheads, anyone of which can destroy the biggest city in the country and go beyond it, their largest warhead will leave a crater with a 25 mile diameter.
• Hard to sleep in Tripoli and other places that are under direct attack by us.
• We tolerated him for 40 years while he created the highest standard of living in all of Africa. Highest per capita income, highest levels of education.  Health care and more public housing then they can use for their own citizens. – almost enough for their foreign labor. He doesn’t submit to the will of the United States.
• Sub-Sahara Africa primarily, all the places on Earth are dying.  It’s not just the conditions of weather in East Africa, but everyplace you go, structure’s crumbling. The chaos seems to be spreading and we seem to prefer it.
• Rebel Forces: It’s a group that doesn’t always know each other and doesn’t always like each other.
• We took out all of Gaddafi’s planes which was easy to do. It’s easy to hit his armor.
• They’ve held their own against the might of West Europe and the United States for months and months.
• We (U.S.Government) agreed to pay without admitting liability 300 million dollars for the people killed in 1986 by our bombing.
• People have to organize and rise up. I don’t think we’re going to get anything accomplished as far as peace and reduction of US militarization except by an enormous demand by the people.
• We can cut 90 percent of the military spending in my opinion and be safer, and not be engages in all these interventions – which we can’t handle anymore.

Guest – Attorney Ramsey Clark was the former Attorney General of the United States, under President Lyndon B. Johnson. He was the first Attorney General at the Justice Department to call for the elimination of the death penalty and all electronic surveillance. After he left the Johnson administration, he became a important critic of the Vietnam War and continued defending the rights of people worldwide, from Palestinians to Iraqis, to anyone who found themselves at the repressive end of government action.

—

National Lawyers Guild Lawyers Victorious in Internet Free Speech Case

At a 2008, Sunday Service at the Mount Hope Baptist Church in Lansing, Michigan, members of the queer rights group Bash Back! disrupted the service to protest anti-gay policies. Months later, the church and the Alliance Defense Fund, a reactionary Christian nonprofit organization, sued Bash Back! and 15 named activists under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act. The church and Defense Fund subpoenaed identifying information in an attempt to find out the protesters’ identities; Risup.net, a provider of online communication tools for individuals and groups working for social change, was the only email provider to challenge the subpoenas. Federal judge Richard A. Jones ruled that Riseup.net did not have to turn over the records, finding that “the Users’ First Amendment right to speak anonymously online outweighs Mount Hope’s right to discovery.” National Lawyers Guild members Larry Hildes of Bellingham, Washington, Devin Theriot-Orr of Seattle, and Mark Sniderman of Indiana successfully defended several activists who received subpoenas from Mt. Hope Baptist Church demanding they turn over their internet account records.  Once again, this shows how readily corporations share private personal data on activists with the government or other private entities.

Attorney Larry Hildes:

• This church is particularly virulent with their ministry aimed at turning gay people straight.
• The group picketed outside and tried to pass out leaflets inside.  Two women ran to the front of the sanctuary and kissed each other at the alter.
• Mount Hope Baptist Church called the police. The police showed up and said there’s no criminal activity here.
• The Alliance Defense Fund, a huge fundamentalist law firm and fund raising empire in Scottsdale, Arizona contacted the church and said we’ll take on your case.
• They sued the Bash Back folks under the “Faith Act”  – Freedom To Access To Clinics Act. They sued them and settled for 2500.00 and a consent decree that they would never disrupt a religious service in the United States again.
• In the meantime they went to look for anyone connected with Bash Back in any way. They went to Yahoo and subpoenaed records from list-serves and Yahoo without telling anybody gave them what they wanted.
• Then they went after RiseUp and RiseUp prides themselves on two things, the internet voice of the left and privacy for their subscribers.
• Riseup attorney Devin Theriot-Orr outlined the internet case law, there is some good law.
• In order to engage in free speech you need to have some degree of security and safety that your privacy is going to be protected otherwise, it chills the climate so that very few people are going to be able to take that risk.
• The victory is that there is a first amendment right to be on a list-serve of a group, even a group whose actions can be seen as civil disobedience or illegal. Your information is still protected and private and the Freedom of Association Privilege goes to that.
• We were awarded by the court 28 thousand dollars in fees.

—————
Attorney Devin Theriot-Orr:

• I’m the pro-bono lawyer for RiseUp.net. The identity information of subscribers is protected by a longstanding precedent going back to 2001.
• Obviously the first amendment has its limits, you can’t speak anonymously about threatening to kill people.
• One of the caveats of the first amendment is that if you have a bona fide law suit and you’re  trying to uncover the identity of the defendants there’s a whole balancing test to go through before you should be able to identify the defendants.
• They also provided identical subpoenas to Yahoo and Google, and even though these companies are located in silicon valley with very good federal benches, and they’re in the ninth circuit, its kind of amazing to me that other companies don’t take a stronger stance to protect their users privacy.
• We’re hoping this is a warning to overly zealous attorneys who are abusing discovery process.

Guest – Attorney Larry Hildes, National Lawyers Guild attorney in the case, Bellingham Washington.

Guest – Attorney Devin Theriot-Orr,  National Lawyers Guild attorney in Seattle and pro-bono attorney for RiseUp.net.

——————————————-

 Law and Disorder July 25, 2011: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Ten Years after 9/11: War, Operation American Condor (Guantanamo) , Civil Liberties and Hope

We  hear a talk from our own Michael Ratner who spoke at the James A Little Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was also in conversation with radio host Mary Charlotte Domandi. The event was titled -  Ten Years after 9/11: War, Operation American Condor (Guantanamo) , Civil Liberties and Hope.” Michael is introduced by Mary-Charlotte Domandi producer and host of the Santa Fe Radio Cafe on KSFR 101.1 FM (Santa Fe, NM, Public Radio)

Michael Ratner is President of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in New York and the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) in Berlin. Both are non-profit human rights litigation organizations. He was part of the small group of lawyers that first took on representation of the Guantánamo detainees in January 2001, a case that resulted in a victory in the Supreme Court in 2004. CCR established a network of over 600 pro-bono lawyers to represent Guantánamo detainees and continues that work.

He has filed criminal complaints in the courts of Germany, France and Spain against former US officials including Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld seeking the initiation of criminal prosecutions against them for the Abu Ghraib abuse and torture as well as for their actions at Guantánamo. Recently, CCR and ECCHR prepared papers to file in Switzerland against George W. Bush for torture. As a result Bush canceled his trip. A major area of Mr. Ratner’s litigation and writing is the enforcement of the prohibition on torture and murder against various dictators and generals who travel to the United States. He has sued on behalf of victims in Guatemala, East Timor, Haiti, Argentina, among other countries. He has also litigated numerous suits to prevent or stop illegal US wars ranging from Central America to Iraq. A constant in his work has been litigation against government spying and surveillance of activists.

Michael Ratner’s books, authored or coauthored, include the soon to be published, Hell No: Your Right to Dissent in 21st-Century America (2011) and Killing Che: How the CIA Got Away with Murder (2011). Other books include International Human Rights Litigation in U.S. Courts, Second Edition (2008); Against War with Iraq (2003); Guantánamo: What the World Should Know (2004); and The Trial of Donald Rumsfeld: A Prosecution by Book (2008). Ratner has taught human rights litigation at Yale and Columbia Law Schools. A past president of the National Lawyers Guild, Ratner has received many awards including Trial Lawyer of the Year, the Columbia Law School Medal of Honor (2005), the North Star Community Frederick Douglass Award, Honorary Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School (2005), and The Nation Institute/Puffin Foundation Prize for Creative Citizenship (2007). In 2006, the National Law Journal named Ratner one of the 100 most influential lawyers in the United States.

—-

Right-Wing Firms Train Public Servants on Terror Threats

There is a sprawling hidden world of counter-terrorism organizations growing beyond control in the United States. Twenty-four of them were created by the end of 2001, including the Office of Homeland Security and the Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking Task Force. The next year, 37 more were created to track weapons of mass destruction and collect threat tips. By 2009, nearly 260 organizations were created as 854 thousand civil servants, military personnel and private contractors with top-secret security clearances monitor national security concerns. However, according to a report from the Public Research Associates, those same  concerns have bolstered a class of self-proclaimed terrorism experts who decry Islam as an evil religion of terrorists and routinely brand Muslims as primitive, vengeful, duplicitous, and belligerent people who oppress women and gays, and have values irreconcilable with “western Judeo-Christian civilization.”

In fact, when PRA discovered earlier this year that the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) had contracted with Security Solutions International to con­duct a training on radical Islam, they noti­fied the Muslim American Society, ACLU, and our other advocacy partners, who used PRA’s research to compel the MBTA to cancel the agency’s training.

Chip Berlet :

• As part of the Homeland Security Initiatives and working with the FBI in other aspects of the national security apparatus, there was a need to train thousands as part of a local state and federal counter-terrorism “experts.”
• Some of these trainings are quite good. The problem is that there are a handful of groups that train hundreds and hundreds of local, state and federal counter-terrorism experts, with rhetoric that is basically Islamophobic.
• In the late 1970s there was an attempt to restrain this illegal surveillance. I’d have to say right now it’s worse.
• What used to be done illegally and covertly is now done ostensibly legally and openly and in fact proudly by both Democrats and Republicans who should be ashamed.
• The whole strategic suspicious reporting initiative which basically is a pipeline for unverified rumor and innuendo through local police departments up through a chain of information agencies to the federal government.  We know in Europe this kind of reporting is unconstitutional and bad for society.
• Now, everyone that was considered illegal and unconstitutional for which there were Congressional hearings and reforms under Jimmy Carter, now we do it.
• In proper training that is actually looking for criminal activity, not people of color who wear garb that we’re scared of.  What’s going on here is untrained, badly trained officers are reporting the names of people up into a huge infrastructure of information data storage, based on bias they’ve not been trained to resist or confront within themselves.
• We described this whole process as a platform for prejudice in a report by Tom Cincotta
• Tom has on his wall a wall chart of all the agencies of this information reporting system and it has 150 dots so inter-connected, no one can control this.
• I’m urging people to form broad coalitions across the political spectrum.

Guest – Chip Berlet, (senior analyst) is a veteran freelance writer and photographer who specializes in investigating right-wing social movements, apocalyptic scapegoating and conspiracism, and authoritarianism. A PRA staffer since 1982, he has written, edited and co-authored numerous articles on right-wing activity and government repression for publications as varied as the Boston Globe, the New York Times, The Progressive, The Nation, The Humanist, and the St. Louis Journalism Review.

 Law and Disorder June 27, 2011: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Obama Administration War Powers Resolution - Click Here For Partial Transcript
• Read Michael Ratner’s Article Permanent Gitmo & Permanent War: New Nat’l “Defense”Bill
• Congress Didn’t Fund This War = Unconstitutional
  
• Juan Cole War Critic?
• Sugar Law Center: Lawsuit Targets Emergency Manager Law
  
• New FBI Guidelines: Planting INFORMANTS With No Criminal Predicate
• Hell No, Your Right to Dissent in Twenty-First-Century America
• Anthing Goes: The FBI Guidelines  -  Heidi and Michael Ratner Read Excerpts
  

—————

Blair Mountain March

In protest to stop mountain top removal mining, hundreds of activists finished a five day fifty mile march earlier this month from Marmet, West Virginia to Blair Mountain in West Virginia. The massive under publicized march also marked the historic Battle of Blair Mountain, the largest armed conflict in US labor history. In 1921, thousands of miners near the area marched to organize non-union coal mines. This demonstration ended in a rally of speakers, musicians, celebrities, union workers and picketing at the top of Blair mountain. The demonstration drew attention to the demand of sustainable job creation in all Appalachian communities, abolish mountaintop removal, strengthen labor rights and preserve Blair Mountain. As many listeners know, mountain top removal is a highly destructive extraction coal mining process with usually no environmental remediation.

Attorney Dan Gregor:

• It is not an exaggeration to say that big coal owns southern Virginia.
• Logan and Boone Counties where we walked through, big coal has more or less owned the politics, the citizenry, the economy for a century.
• The Congressional Delegation is very sympathetic to what they perceive as coal jobs.
• During the marches we had 200-250 people at any given time.
• Putting myself in the best way that I can do legal support, and one of the core logistics organizer of the event, best do organizing support, it put myself in a position where I was knowingly arrestable.
• It was alternately exciting and freeing and terrifying. It’s a very activist lawyer, resistance approach.
• There are locals who don’t understand this doesn’t mean more jobs or it means a fraction of unionized jobs for organized coal workers.
• The Boone County Sheriff department was somewhat less then helpful. For the most part, the West Virginia State Police were professional and did their jobs carefully. We didn’t see police misconduct, or police brutality as you would see in most mass protest situations.
• The broader strategy is calling for an end to mountain top removal coal mining, transitioning to a cleaner economy with wind and solar.
• One of the reasons you don’t see mountain tops blown up in Tennessee for example, is that the Congressional Delegation there, has been resistant to it, in West Virginia, historically it hasn’t.
• Mountain top removal coal mining produces very high quality, pure Anthracite Coal, this is part of Obama’s “Clean Coal” strategy.
• A great deal of my practice is resistance law, and is assisting resisting communities.
• I’ve been able to make this a significant focus of my life as an attorney.
• Ilovemountains.org / allianceforapplachia.org
• We can always use more people, more attorneys. It took six months to organize this March on Blair Mountain, no ordinary task for volunteers.

Guest – Dan Gregor, activist attorney whose practice includes protest defense, criminal defense, immigration, and human and civil rights law. This has included assisting and representing activists involved with the annual School of the Americas Watch vigil, the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride, people being harassed by Green Scare grand juries, and many other activist causes. Dan is a graduate of Northeastern University School of Law and Hampshire College. He is an active member of the National Lawyers Guild, and former National Vice President of the Guild.

——————

National Lawyers Guild Report: Human Rights In Tunisia

A wave civil resistance continues throughout the country of Tunisia, Africa sparked from high unemployment, food inflation, corruption, and lack of freedom of speech.  During the country’s civil unrest, President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was ousted as president, fleeing to Saudi Arabia after 23 years in power.  Now,  human rights violations are being investigated.  A group of lawyers from the U.S., U.K. and Turkey have been investigating U.S. and European complicity in human rights abuses committed by the Ben Ali regime.  The group has recently issued a warning that the U.S. and other Western governments must respect Tunisian sovereignty and not interfere in that country’s path to democracy. Atlanta attorney and National Lawyers Guild Executive Vice President Azadeh Shahshahani, was a member of the delegation and is on a speaking tour.

Azadeh Shahshahani:

• The Tunisian government passed this law, the 2003 anti-terror act. US State Department very supportive.
• If you go back to look at the US State Department Human Rights report on this, you can see the human rights violations are documented in the reports.
• It’s not like the US government didn’t know what was happening in those jails. Particularly the Islamists, after the legislation went into effect, a lot of people were picked up, for being a Muslim, for being a devout, perhaps engaging in religious discussions with your friends,
• A lot of youth were arrested and subjected to torture. Torture seemed to be really systematic, you’re arrested, detained, then tortured and confession is obtained.
• One family of a young man arrested, the father asked authorities why his son was arrested, he hasn’t done anything? They said, well, he does pray, doesn’t he?
• That was the sole basis of having been picked up. Arrests: one per day under the auspices of the Tunisian 2003 anti-terror act.
• Revolution in Saudi Arabia? Michael Ratner: That could the greatest thing that could happen.
• This “war on terror” provided the Ben Ali regime,  was an enabling mechanism and justification to continue his repressive tactics.

Guest – Azadeh Shahshahhani, the Director of the National Security/Immigrants’ Rights Project at the ACLU of Georgia. The project is aimed at bringing Georgia and its localities into compliance with international human rights and constitutional standards in treatment of refugee and immigrant communities, including immigrant detainees. To that end, a variety of strategies are employed, including the development of impact litigation, legislative advocacy, providing training to attorneys, human rights documentation and the publishing of reports, public education, and coalition and movement building. The current focus areas of the project include: immigration detention, racial profiling and local enforcement of immigration laws, governmental surveillance, discrimination faced by Muslim, Middle Eastern, and South Asian communities, immigrant access to higher education, and language access in the court setting.

——————————————————

 Law and Disorder June 20, 2011: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• President Obama Visits Puerto Rico
• Michael Ratner: History of Puerto Rico
• Is Common Wealth Status Ok?
• FBI and Intel Dominate Puerto Rico
• Michael Ratner Testified With the Decolonization Committee at the UN
• Internal Politics Have Moved to the Right In Puerto Rico: Privatization of Public Institutions
• Expanding War Powers:  Defense Authorization Act Moving Through Congress
• Hialeah, Florida Mayor, Honors Terrorist Luis Posada Carriles With Keys to the City
• CCR: Representing Families of Suicide GTMO Prisoners
• Asymmetrical Warfare Embarrassing the United States

——–

FBI to Expand Domestic Surveillance Powers

On many of our shows, we’ve discussed the broad over reaching powers and underhanded tactics the FBI use when targeting environmental or pro-Palestine activists, Mosques and Muslim-Americans.  Now, new expanded FBI guidelines would allow agents easier access to search commercial or law enforcement databases, conduct lie detector tests, search people’s trash and conduct physical surveillance. Read: Anything Goes: The New FBI Guidelines

Though the guidelines are still under review, they would allow agents further access into people’s lives without suspicion of wrongdoing. The guidelines will be part of a new edition of the FBI manual, the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide.  Civil libertarians criticize the guidelines in light of recent cases such as the Fort Dix Five, the Newburgh Four and Yassin Aref in Albany, where the FBI is accused of entrapping people by infiltrating poor or specific ethnic and religious communities. Michael Ratner’s Forthcoming Book:  Hell No, Your Right To Dissent

Attorney Mike German:

• The government is saying they have unfettered authority to look into your private life without any justification, and they’re claiming they don’t need any factual basis to suspect you of wrongdoing.
• National Security Letters were initially a tool to go after KGB spies, it was expanded to international terrorists. What the Patriot Act did is expand it to anyone who’s relevant to an investigation of spies or terrorists.
• The fact that the government had no reason to suspect you was no longer relevant if they could use this tool.
• That was originally set to sunset in 2005. Inspector General audit on the FBI’s use of this tool. There were five IG reports, that found the FBI were using these tools against people two or three times removed from the person of the investigation.
• Phone records, bank records, credit history and they gag the bank or place from telling you.
• IG audit found between 2003 and 2006 there were over 200 thousand National Security Letters.
• Its the FBI manual, the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, the FBI’s internal policy. Their internal authority created by the Department of Justice.
• These were initially designed to curb the abuse. As an FBI agent for 16 years, I found it useful to focus on the people doing bad things, not straying from that and focusing on people saying things I didn’t like, or doing things I didn’t think were right but wasn’t illegal.
• The outgoing administration in 2008 had radically altered the guidelines. People who are completely innocent and not suspected of doing anything wrong can come under suspicion and investigation under these assessments.
• The 2008 guidelines allowed the FBI to map communities based on race and ethnicity and track racial and ethnic behavior and facilities.
• Under these new guidelines 2011, an FBI agent would be allowed to search private databases, data aggregaters, that pull together all sorts of information based on marketing, state and local law enforcement information – includes if you’ve also been a victim of crime or witness to a criminal act.  No factual predicate required.
• It doesn’t require attorney general approval to open an assessment.  There’s no necessity to identify what federal crime they think you’re violating.
• The tools include physical surveillance, they can stand outside your house, follow you around 24/7. They can get an informant to start engaging you in a false pretense, and your friends or neighbors.
• They can interview your neighbors, they can interview your employer.
• When you become a subject of investigation you get on the terrorist watch list.
• The scary thing the Inspector General revealed, is that these (abuses) were all under the 2002 guidelines.  He said where he found violations, under the 2008, this would all be perfectly legitimate.
• We at the ACLU are not just seeing the abuse with the FBI but within state and local law enforcement. You can visit www.aclu.org/spyfiles we’ve documented spying and obstruction of first amendment activity in 31 states and the District of Columbia.
• It was predictable because these laws were put in place to prevent exactly that, because that’s what the state and local police and the FBI were doing in the absence of rules.
• It’s not surprising when you take those rules away, they go into political spying mode.
• It’s very frustrating, because so much of what’s happening is happening is secret.
• Scott Crow: He found under a FOIA request, the FBI had gone to the IRS to find some small tax violation that they could put him in jail for. Because they suspected him of something, yet they had years of investigation and found no wrong doing.
• Mike German’s book – Thinking Like A Terrorist, it’s a look at what terrorists are trying to accomplish, that is to coerce the government into taking measures that actually take away the government’s legitimacy.
• Past Law and Disorder interview with Attorney Mike German.

Guest -  ACLU attorney and former FBI agent, Mike German, German develops policy positions and proactive strategies on pending legislation and executive branch actions concerning domestic surveillance, data mining, freedom to travel, medical and financial privacy, national ID cards, whistleblower protection, military commissions and law enforcement conduct. German currently serves as an adjunct professor for Law Enforcement and Terrorism at the National Defense University and is a Senior Fellow with GlobalSecurity.org. German graduated from the Northwestern University Law School , and graduated cum laude from Wake Forest University with a B.A. in Philosophy. A sixteen-year veteran of federal law enforcement, German served as a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, where he specialized in domestic terrorism and covert operations. As an undercover agent, German twice infiltrated extremist groups using constitutionally sound law enforcement techniques. These operations successfully prevented terrorist attacks by winning criminal convictions against terrorists.

——————————————————————–

 Law and Disorder June 6, 2011: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Justices Block Suit Over Use of Material Witness Law Against Detainee
• Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Re-charged
• The Conspirator Movie and Military Commissions

—-

Chicago Torture Cases and Jon Burge’s Deposition

Torture has cast a long shadow over Chicago and its past administrations. Yet in the past year, with the conviction and sentencing of former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge, Chicago has been a beacon of light in the fight against torture.  Many are waiting to see how the city’s new administration will handle the ongoing torture cases of African American men that number in the hundreds.  Former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge was sentenced to 4 and a half years in prison for obstruction of justice and lying about torturing prisoners in the 1960s to obtain coerced confessions. Attorney Flint Taylor and the People’s Law Office in Chicago fought for decades to get prosecutions, and sentencing while the city poured millions of dollars to fund private lawyers for Burge’s defense.

Attorney Flint Taylor:

• We’ve been working on these cases since 1986. Deposing Jon Burge: We were reaffirming to the African American community that he was in prison and he is a prisoner.
• He was complaining about the lack of medical care and the kind of treatment he felt he should be getting.
• The struggle to put him behind bars has come to fruition. Pin stripe patronage, the city funding Burge’s defense. Rahm Emanuel needs to change course, he’s very close to Daly.
• Daly’s policy was not to settle these cases, not to apologize to the victims.
• There’s another issue about Burge getting his pension even though he’s in the joint.
• When you’re convicted you’re supposed to lose your pension.
• There’s eight people on the pension board, 4 of them are former cops.
• Several of the men who were responsible for Burge going to the penitentiary don’t have a claim civilly, never got a penny for the torture they suffered.
• There are about 20 men still in jail, still in the prisons, based on tortured confessions by Burge and his men.
• There is a demand to challenge these confessions, its been happening on a piece-meal basis.
• You most often find that torture does not lead to information that is useful. In the situation here it is to punish African American people.
• It’s a very racist type of torture in this city. There’s linkage here in what happened in Guantanamo, what happened in Abu Ghraib.
• The Fraternal Order of Police: They’re a very reactionary force when reforming the police department generally. In the early nineties when they fired Burge, the FOP stood up and paid for his defense.
• In case that has gotten him to prison now, the FOP paid a million dollars for 3 lawyers of his choice. Now, the same lawyers have switched hats, and the city is now paying them in the civil cases that we talked about.
• When it gets to a point where the city can’t pay for his defense, the FOP steps in.
• Burge deposition: I set up a series of questions for 3 hours where he consistently took the fifth amendment to all questions that would have implicated him if he answered truthfully.

Guest – Attorney Flint Taylor, a graduate of Brown University and Northwestern University School of Law and a founding partner of the Peoples Law Office. More bio

—–

California Inmate Reductions

Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling had ordered California to release 46,000 of its 143,435 inmates which has the state trying to figure out what happens next.  The SCOTUS ruling affirmed a lower court order that required California to reduce its inmate population to 137% capacity.  The state’s prisons are now at about 180% capacity and one cause of overcrowding problems is the state’s “three strikes law” which puts third time offenders in jail for life.  Meanwhile, under Governor Brown’s current “re-alignment” program, the tens of thousands convicted of non violent, non-serious, non-sex crimes will serve sentences under county instead of state supervision.  Our guest Professor Ruth Gilmore said to one media source, quote – “County jail expansion does not solve the underlying problems,”  – -These are goals we can achieve now if we take this opportunity to shrink prisons and jails. Building bigger jails to ease prison numbers is the same as rearranging the deck-chairs on the Titanic: wasting the same dollars in different jurisdictions.

Professor Ruth Wilson Gilmore:

• California is out of line with the rest of country when it comes to parole policy. California sends twice the number of people back to prisons than other jurisdictions, when the person has committed a technical violation, late for a meeting, that kind of thing.
• For that reason, California prisons have been bulging.
• We see that numbers are kept up by this one category, parole violation return to custody.  They have to start over and over and over again.
• The Supreme Court ordered the Department of Corrections to reduce the number of people in its custody in its current physical plant. In the 33 prisons, prison camps and dozens of facilities.
• One method to thin the prison population is shipping about 10 thousand prisoners out of the state of California, renting space in other jurisdictions. They’ve been shipping prisoners out of California for 2 and a half years.
• Cost does not seem to have an important effect on the kinds of political decisions, that have been made about prison expansion throughout the United States for the last 30 years.
• A year and a half ago the state presented a plan to the Ninth District court saying here are the changes that we will make to meet the 3 judges’ order that we reduce the number of people in the California State Authority Physical Plant.
• Then, the 3 judges agreed to let California delay in implementing the plan, while they appealed to the Supreme Court.
• California is the proving ground for a new relationship between the state and society.  California is a place that started turning its back on public education.
• For some time, the union of California prison guards were a political force and continue to be quite powerful.
• There are many alternatives to locking somebody in a cage for part or all of their life. We should be cautious in thinking GPS tracking is the answer, because one of the huge barriers, that people convicted of a felony face in their lives, is the impossibility of them reintegrating into society.
• My colleague Michelle Alexander has put out a call in a campaign to end The New Jim Crow.
• Criticalresistance.org / Curbprisonspending.org

Guest – Professor Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California.  Professor Gilmore has examined how political and economic forces produced California’s prison boom in Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (University of California Press, 2007), which was recognized by ASA with its Lora Romero First Book Award. Gilmore’s wide-ranging research interests also include race and gender, labor and social movements, uneven development, and the African diaspora. She comes to the Graduate Center from the University of Southern California, where she taught courses in race and ethnicity, economic geography, and political geography, was the founding chair of the department of American studies and ethnicity, and won the USC-Mellon Award for Excellence in Graduate Student Mentoring. She also works regularly with community groups and grassroots organizations and is known for the broad accessibility of her research. She holds a Ph.D. in economic geography and social theory from Rutgers University.

————————————————

 Law and Disorder May 23, 2011 [57:07m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates

• Leonard Weinglass Memorial May 13, 2011

—

Egypt’s Aftermath and Continued Arab Protests

Civil rights lawyer and former president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Abdeen Jabara joins co-host Michael Smith in the studio.  Jabara gives an update and analysis on the current political and economic shifts in Egypt.  Meanwhile Israel recently celebrated the day it declared independence on May 14, 1948, the Nakba.  More than 60 years later, Palestinian descendants remain the central issue within the Israeli Palestinian conflict.  Last week a wave of coordinated Arab protests hit Israel on 4 of its borders.  Protesters were shot and killed when they clashed with Israeli forces at the Lebanon, Syrian, West Bank and Gaza borders.

Abdeen Jabara:

• There’s been a break down of law and order in Egypt, there’s been a rise in the crime rate.
• There’s been a huge drop in income from lack of tourism.  There have been various strikes, and even the police went on strike demanding higher wages. People have broken out of various prisons. The situation is very much in flux.
• Two sections of an Egyptian elite maintain control over popular forces.
• There were those that were the nouveau riche, that were being promoted by Gamal Mubarak.
• Many of them have been arrested and are in jail for ill-gotten gains.
• One of the most serious problems in Egypt have been, this neo-liberal development where they were trying to sell off state owned business.
• Open Door Policy, wanting Egypt to become part of the Western camp.
• Will there only be change in a cosmetic fashion where there is no change in the basic relationship with the people. That is the real issue.
• I think a lot depends upon the Army. Egypt is a very poor country and its main sources of income other tourism is the Suez Canal, finished clothes and canned goods.
• Under the Mubarak leadership in order to go on strike you had to get permission from the executive council of the trade union movement.  Since the fall of Mubarak, you’ve seen much more labor activism.
• We will be seeing Europe and the United States pouring money into the various formations in the country.
• Israel and Palestine: I think we’re going to see something new now, with all this turmoil.
• We have to understand that the Europeans have been developing some distance on the Middle East issue. The United States and Israel are becoming more isolated in the world.  The United States has never been an honest broker in this situation.
• Flotilla will leave in latter part of June, will have ten boats from different European and North American countries. Wednesday May 25, Flotilla Fund Raiser – UStoGaza.org

Guest – Abdeen Jabara, civil rights lawyer and former president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.

——

The American Dream As We Know It Is Obsolete

Will the Wisconsin and other state union protests be a catalyst for a general strike? Right now, the Wisconsin demonstrations are aimed at restoring collective bargaining rights for public servants, the goal to a middle class.  Reject the opiate of the middle class idealism says our next guest.  The revolution must be carefully thought out and be modeled on the ground breaking uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa. How could unions prepare their strategy to include a broader support base?  Unions could build alliances with single mothers, the poor, immigrants, the elderly and a wide range of groups.

Arun Gupta:

• It bugged me as all these progressives defended the middle class. I’ve been studying the Tea Party lately. Is the middle class really under attack?  The core of the Tea Party is middle class, very entrepreneurial, than more management supervisory.
• There’s a duel movement going on with the Republican attack. Social welfare and public sector jobs.
• In Wisconsin, a population of 5 million, there are 200 thousand public sector jobs
• We should expand our notion of who are defending and what are we fighting for?
• I think Krugman is the most egregious, he says the 1950s was era without great extremes of wealth and poverty.
• Really? There were no Rockefellers and sharecroppers in Mississippi?
• How do we understand the 1950s? We have to go back to the term corporatism. Corporatism doesn’t mean corporation, its derived from corpus meaning body.  The government is a mediator between significant sectors of society.
• American capitalism had needed the domestic market. Corporations don’t need internal consumption anymore.
• Capitalism has unmoored itself from geography.  For high speed rail in the US,  who will build it? The companies that are the most advanced are in China, Germany and South Korea.
• If Obama wanted to spend billions on high speed rail, the US doesn’t have the base, the human intellectual base to compete with Germany and South Korea.  We’d have to put tariffs on their goods then you raise the scenario of a trade war.
• Then we’re back in the 1930s which brought on the war. People are not really thinking about the hidden ideologies of green jobs and defending the middle class.
• I’ve seen hopeful potential, these movements pop up and recede so quickly. The immigrants rights movements.
• During revolutions, it is something wonderful, people want to become better people.
• What we don’t hear much about are the little Mubaraks in Egypt, in factories, the workplace, dictators all over the place, and they’re being ousted.
• The Right likes mass movements like the tea party, the Democrats hate mass movements.

Guest – Arun Gupta, Founding editor of the The Indypendent. He recently wrote The American Dream As We Know It Is Obsolete: Why progressives need to think beyond the mantra of creating a “middle class America.”

——————————————————————————

 Law and Disorder May 9, 2011: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Osama Bin Laden Story Inconsistencies: Analysis
• CF Law (By analogy in law) Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch
• Authorization To Use Military Force, the Justification For Torture, Blowback
• Torture Architect John Yoo Writing in the National Review
• Dalia Hashad: Article In The Scoop: Bin Laden Gone Problems Remain

—-

Guantánamo Leaks Must Be Met By Release of Obama Task Force Assessments

The 759 Guantanamo files that were classified “secret” cover nearly every inmate since the camp opened in 2002. The documents obtained by the New York Times and the Guardian last month, reveal how children, the elderly and mentally ill were wrongfully held. The documents also reveal that many prisoners were sent to Guantanamo for nearly nothing or to be interrogated. What did these documents reveal?

Attorney Shane Kadidal:

• These stories started on Monday morning, because administration officials gave out a briefing saying that the nickname of Osama’s couriers was given out by one of the detainees.
• Assuming information taken from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
• We do know it took eight months from the time they identified this compound to the point they decided to strike at it.  I think its clear, they relied on a whole slew of information from a variety of sources.
• We already know the true name of the courier, which is more important than a nickname came from agents on the ground and electronic surveillance.
• 172 detainees, 90 cleared from release, 2/3 of those from Yemen have been indefinitely suspended for repatriation because of the “underwear bomber.”
• The problem is so much of (media) attention is focused on the ones that will never be released.
• WikiLeaks – 2400 pages of documents almost all risk assessments of about 740 detainees who’ve been to Guantanamo
• They represent the Defense Departments best case for detaining someone.
• You have these long analysis of very shady facts, not detailing where allegations are coming from.
• If you look at the documents as a whole, it shows that most of the detainees were held on flimsy, unreliable information.
• The documents show that people were interrogated in GTMO about nothing to do with terrorist attacks in the United States. You had Samuel Hodge interrogated about the inner workings of Al-Jazzera
• Everyone ended up with the categorization of high or medium risk
• When you see a leak of this magnitude, the only corrective is to release more information and that’s what we’ve called for at CCR.
• The government quickly emailed us – They said consistent with the security clearances you signed on for, you have to treat this information as classified (leaked documents) even though its been scattered to the winds on every newspaper on Earth.

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.

——-

Green Is The New Red: An Insiders Account of A Social Movement Under Siege

We welcome Will Potter award-winning independent journalist and now the leading authority on “eco-terrorism.” He’s the author of the new book ,Green Is the New Red: An Insider’s Account of a Social Movement Under Siege, and it reveals a complex environmental movement emerging amid police state pressure. As we’ve reported here on Law and Disorder, environmental activism have been labeled terrorism under certain interpretation of the Patriot Act, essentially criminalizing dissent and chilling free speech in this country at a critical time.  Our guest was an FBI target for merely leafleting against animal testing, and he was threatened to be put on the domestic terrorist watch list if didn’t comply with FBI demands. We talk more about that, the environmentalist movements and his new book.

Will Potter:

• My background is in mainstream newspapers. As I was working as a reporter at the Chicago Tribune, about 9 months after 9/11. I was covering breaking news, blood and guts.
• I decided to go out leafleting on a campaign I became aware of against a controversial animal testing company.
• Couple weeks later the FBI knocks on my door telling me I need to become a government informant and help infiltrate animal rights and environmental groups and if I didn’t they’d put me on the domestic terrorist list.
• It scared the tar out of me. I wish I could say it didn’t.
• Afterward it really lit a fire under me to figure out what was going on.
• One of the reasons I started the website was because of this new law being considered called the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act.
• What I decided to do with the book is tell the personal stories of the people involved.
• I followed Daniel McGowan a few days before his sentence to how he ended up in this facility, his own journey as an activist. Daniel was convicted of serious crimes, two arsonists that didn’t harm anyone and he was labeled a terrorist.
• The book looks at the wide range of activity being labeled “eco-terrorism”
• The FBI has labeled the environmental and animal rights movement the number one domestic terrorism threat.
• These corporate campaigns were pushed for so long through the courts, politicians, and the press that over time they began to dovetail with government policy.
• The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act is so broad it can even wrap up non-violent civil disobedience as terrorism, only if its directed at what is called animal enterprises.
• The real power of this is fear.
• The activists who are really effective and pushing the boundary are the ones being labeled eco-terrorists.
• I recently wrote about 3 bills that are under consideration for the Huffington Post. What Is Big Ag Trying To Hide.

Guest – Will Potter,  award-winning independent journalist based in Washington, D.C., who focuses on “eco-terrorism,” the animal rights and environmental movements, and civil liberties post-9/11. Will’s work has appeared in publications including the Chicago Tribune, the Huffington Post, and the Vermont Law Review, and he has testified before the U.S. Congress about his reporting. He is the author of Green Is The New Red: An insider’s account of a social movement under siege forthcoming from City Lights Books.

 Law and Disorder May 2, 2011: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

• Federal appeals court orders a new sentencing hearing for Mumia Abu-Jamal
• CCR Says Guantánamo Leaks Must Be Met By Release of Obama Task Force Assessments
• Memorial for Leonard Weinglass Friday May 13 At the New York Ethical Culture Society

—-

Largest Human Trafficking Case In The US?  Workers Lured To U.S. After Hurricane Katrina And Subjected To Abusive Conditions Seek Class Certification

In what may be the largest human trafficking case in US history, Indian guest workers are suing Signal International for human trafficking ad racketeering. Several law firms filed the lawsuit on behalf of seven plaintiffs representing 500 formers guest workers lured into the US after Hurricane Katrina. The guest workers were subjected to racial discrimination, forced labor and other abuse.

Signal is a multi million dollar marine fabrication company with shipyards in Mississippi, Texas and Alabama. They repair and build oil rigs and ships and subcontract with the Dept of Defense and multinational companies. After Hurricane Katrina, Signal’s workforce scattered and they used the government’s guest worker program to import employees as welders and pipe fitters. Between 2004 and 2006 hundreds of Indian men were paid up to 20 thousand dollars each for travel, visa and other fees after being told it would lead to good jobs and permanent US residency.

When the men arrived at Signal they discovered they would not receive green cards, but instead were given 10-month guest worker visas. Signal forced the men to pay $1,050 a month to live in overcrowded, unsanitary and racially segregated labor camps with no visitors allowed.  To talk more about this case, we’re joined by Chandra Bhatnagar is a Staff Attorney with the Human Rights Program and Sabulal Vijayan, a former guest worker involved in the lawsuit.

Chandra Bhatnagar:

• Signal used the opportunity of the storm to seek out new labor pools. Signal in partnership with an American labor broker, an American Immigration lawyer and an Indian recruiter, conspired to bring in a group of 500 men from India as H2B guest workers.
• The workers were promised green cards, permanent residency, and the opportunity for long term jobs.
• Sabulal Vijayan: I was working in the middle east, the United Arab Emirates, I saw the ad by Signal that said we would get permanent residency in America. I paid about 18 thousand dollars, I cut my wrists in fear, I tried to kill myself because I spent a bunch of dollars. I was in the hospital for 3 days. I couldn’t go back to my family in India with bare hands, because I spent all the money on this job. Not only me but 500 workers, sold all their land and houses for this job.
• The EEOC, brought a separate lawsuit against Signal, alleging racial and national origin discrimination and hostile work environment.
• Because Sabulal was one of the workers seeking his rights under the law,  he was particularly targeted by Signal and rounded up in an early morning raid.  The camp was built on a lead contaminated waste site.
• It’s not OSCHA compliant to have 24 guys jammed together in a temporary trailer.
• These are in the United States and in debt. The average income in India is 3000 dollars a year for a ship worker. To pay 20 thousand dollars, you have to sell your property, borrow money from loan sharks.  You have to mortgage your whole life for the opportunity to come here.  Signal also said if you file a lawsuit, we’ll send all of you back.
• Signal is a marine fabrication company, a multi-million dollar company. They repair and build oil rigs and ships. They have yards in Mississippi, Alabama and Texas. They provide services to the Department of Defense and major corporations.
• It was a conspiracy between the Immigration lawyer, the Indian recruiter, the labor broker and Signal.
• Signal got this vulnerable pool of workers who they could throw away whenever they wanted to.
• You don’t have freedom of contract as a guest worker, you’re the disposable property of the employer.

Guest - Chandra Bhatnagar, ACLU  Staff Attorney with the Human Rights Program. He leads the domestic and international advocacy around racial profiling, affirmative action, and juvenile justice issues, and is engaged in federal court litigation and litigation in international tribunals involving the rights of low-wage immigrant workers, undocumented workers, and guest-workers.

Guest – Sabulal Vijayan, guest worker from India, who is involved in the case. Sabulal, a pipefitter, paid nearly 20 thousand dollars to work in the United States as a guest worker. He worked with others in slave labor-like conditions for Signal International.

———–

Professor John Ehrenberg: Class Warfare Update and Analysis

Returning guest, professor and author John Ehrenberg joins us in the discussion of where the last 3 years the Obama Administration has led the country.  The United States is pouring trillions into multiple war theaters, unemployment continues to rise, CEOs of banks and corporations have been rewarded with taxpayer bonuses and bailouts, and a massive unequal distribution of wealth has polarize the country. Meanwhile, the very rights that protect organized labor and the benefits of workers are attacked and disassembled during one of the worst economic downturns to hit the United States.  Corporations and the far right wing of the Republican Party are behind some of the union busting yet even President Obama turned his back on supporting union labor demonstrations.  Most recent show with John Ehrenberg

Professor John Ehrenberg:

• The elephant in the room that nobody talks about is the role of the state and the role of the government.
• Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer–and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class
• What you had since the 1980s is a policy pushed by the Republicans and acquiesced by the Democrats of undoing the Great Society. We’ve seen this in the union busting and refusing to tax the rich. It’s been happening because the Republican party is getting more radical.
• The villan in the room is governmental and fiscal policy.
• The top 1 percent of the population received more than a third of all the wealth created in the country from 1979 to the beginning of the recession.  The top 1/10 of one percent, that’s one out of every thousand households, received over 20 percent of all the after tax gains between 1979 and 2005.
• It was a conscious policy. It began in the late 70s by business. If you look at the neo-conservatives of that period, their target is the Great Society.
• Basically in the late 60s and the early 70s, the traditional stimulus programs of the Democrats failed.
• Along comes Reagan and he takes on a radical restructuring of the economy.
• Which began this process of shoveling huge amounts of wealth to the rich, hoping that it would trickle down and you’d have sustained growth.
• Consider that Obama is going to raise a billion dollars for his reelection campaign. Where is he going to get it from?
• Look, anybody at this stage of the game who continues to trust the Democratic party to lead the country out of this mess, is a fool.
• The Democratic Party by itself is incapable of democratic initiative and progressive change unless forced to respond from pressure from outside.
• When do they have enough? The answer in 1100 pages of Capital: A Critique of Political Economy is it’s never enough.  That the logic of capital is to reduce everybody to starvation and take everything they have.
• This is the motor of the system, this has nothing to do with the Koch Brothers.
• Hopefully people are tired of being pushed around. American exceptionalism, meant that Americans were more tolerant of inequality, than were people from a stronger labor tradition.
• That American’s didn’t care so much if other people got rich as long as they got rich too.
• If you have a situation where Americans are misinformed about the distribution of wealth and are open to appeals to redistribute wealth in the name of fairness and equity, then this is the time for a redistributus Democratic party to step forward.
• If the Democratic Party is even a modicum of sanity in America, it’s because its going to have be pushed again.  Pushed and pushed and pushed from outside.
• 55 percent of Republicans want higher taxes on the rich.
• There are local manifestations of outrage and rebellion, in Wisconsin, Indiana, Ft Lauderdale, around different aspects of the mal-distribution of wealth. – but nothing has been coordinated on the national level.
• There are as yet, no forces talking about the system as a whole, as a state.
• There are a lot of indications across the board that people have had enough.
• Go out there and join something and get involved.
• UNICEF publication. The Children Left Behind. Indices: Health, Education, Material Well Being.  The United States is last of the 24 countries.
• If you look at the fall of any of the world’s empires, it was a combination of the over reach and the refusal of the rich to pay their share of taxes.

Guest – John Ehrenberg,  author of Servants of Wealth, The Rights Assault on Economic Justice, he’s also professor of political science at Long Island University.

————————————————————————-

 Law and Disorder April 25, 2011: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Pfc. Manning To Be Transferred To Army Prison
• New York State Assembly Passes Rent Regulation Bill
• Michigan: Police Search Cell Phones During Traffic Stops
• Using Emergency Powers to Dismantle Unions In Michigan – Update with Zainab Akbar Legal Fellow at the ACLU of Michigan

—–

Court Vindicates Prisoners in Right to Challenge Federal Experimental Isolation Units Restricting Communication

Last month, the Center for Constitutional Rights won the right for prisoners to challenge a violation of their constitutional rights. Prisoners in 2 experimental federal prison units called “Communications Management Units” or CMUs, will have their claims heard in court.  About 70 percent of CMU prisoners are Muslim men.  Judge Urbina agreed that the prisoners raised serious constitutional questions about CMUs.  The Center for Constitutional Rights filed Aref v. Holder in the D.C. District Court on behalf of current and former prisoners of the units in Terre Haute, IN and Marion, IL; two other plaintiffs are the spouses of those prisoners.

As many listeners may know, these CMUs were secretly opened under the Bush administration in 2006 and 2007. They were designed to monitor and control the communications of certain prisoners and to isolate them from other prisoners and the outside world.  The five plaintiffs in Aref were designated to the two CMUs despite having relatively or totally clean disciplinary histories, and none of the plaintiffs have received any communications-related disciplinary infractions in the last decade.

In addition to heavily restricted telephone and visitation access, CMU prisoners are categorically denied any physical contact with family members and are forbidden from hugging, touching or embracing their children or spouses during visits.

Attorney Alexis Agathocleous:

• We’re very troubled about policies and conditions at these units. A number of the restrictions imposed at the CMUs are severe. They are truly cutting people off from their loved ones, they’re community and the outside world
• Blanket ban on physical contact, unparalleled to any other single unit anywhere, including Supermax.
• We feel this needlessly impinges on their right to family integrity and their need to maintain these ties to the outside world.
• What we’re challenging is that there is no due process attached to designation to these (CMU) units.
• Without a disclosure of factual allegations that were used to designate them, without a demonstration of past abuse of communication devices, without a hearing, without an appeal. Once you’re there, no one is told how to earn their transfer to get out. Our clients have benign or in some cases perfectly clean histories.
• What is happening is that Muslim prisoners are being designated there, based on the discriminatory belief that as Muslims they inherently pose a great danger to institutional security, than do other prisoners.
• We’re very concerned also about a pattern of designation of political prisoners and specifically includes environmental and animal rights activists.
• We do believe these are acts of retaliation for protected First Amendment activity, such as speaking out on social justice issues.
• What we’ve asked for in the case is a thorough review of polices and practices in the CMUs.
• What’s next is we’re going into discovery, which is our opportunity to learn a lot more about the CMUs, about their inception, who was involved in designing them and why and about how designations are made.
• CMUs were opened quietly.

Guest – Alexis Agathocleous, staff Attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights and works on CCR’s Government Misconduct and Racial Justice docket.  He is lead counsel in Aref v. Holder, challenging policies and conditions at the federal Bureau of Prisons’ Communications Management Units, and Doe v. Jindal, challenging a Louisiana law that requires individuals convicted of Crime Against Nature to register as sex offenders.

—–

Financial Regulators Failed: Crooks Go Unpunished

Last week, the Securities and Exchange Commission Friday charged Goldman Sachs & Co. and one of its executives with fraud in a risky offshore deal backed by subprime mortgages that cost investors more than $1 billion. The SEC also contends that Goldman allowed a client, Wall Street hedge fund Paulson & Co., to help select the securities to be sold. Paulson in turn bought insurance against the deal and when the securities sank, losing nearly all value, Paulson then made a $1 billion profit.

While these are not criminal charges, the recently released 650-page report of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Wall Street and the Financial Crisis (PDF) had exposed the deceptive and risky practices within major financial institutions, that deceived clients and the public.  New Economics Perspective Blog

Professor William K. Black:

• Many people still call it the subprime crisis, it would be far better to call it, the liar’s loan crisis.
• Roughly half of all subprime loans by 2006.
• Somewhere between a quarter and 49 percent of new home loans, were in the form of liar’s loans.
• The incidence of fraud when there have been independent studies has ranged from 90 to 100 percent.
• A liar’s loan is when there is no underwriting, no verification of what’s put into the loan application.
• Overwhelmingly, it was the lenders who put the lie is liar’s loans.
• You can sell these loans in the secondary market if they appeared to have 2 characteristics that finance has told us you can’t have simultaneously.
• A premium interest rate and low risk. You could have the best of both worlds. The way to do that was to gimmick two ratios. Debt to income ratio and loan to value ratio.
• Inflating the value of homes, covered up by industry. An honest secure lender would never inflate value.
• It makes perfect sense for a fraudulent company to inflate the value of the house so they can sell the loan on the secondary market for a higher profit.
• Then Attorney General Cuomo, now governor found this as a common practice at Washington Mutual, the biggest bank failure.  WAMU had a blacklist of appraisers, you were blacklisted if you refused to inflate value of property. None of these people are being prosecuted.
• In 2004, the FBI testified there was an epidemic of mortgage fraud and predicted that it would cause a financial crisis.
• The Savings and Loans debacle cost 150 billion, the current crisis is costing over 10 trillion.
• The Office of Thrift Supervision, Chainsaw James Gilleran
• Instead of being embarrassed that they were working hand in glove with the lobbyists, they were proud of this and put this in their annual report.
• Geithner and Cuomo urged there not be investigations much less prosecutions of the elite financial frauds because he thought the financial system was too fragile.
• The Justice Department ruined an FBI initiative to try and investigate the elite frauds.
• If you are powerful enough, if you have enough ties, after citizens united, and make enough political contributions, you will not be prosecuted.
• You can’t have crony-capitalism and democracy either.
• Big finance is only supposed to be a middle man, it’s supposed to help the real economy, by simply allocating most efficiently capital to the most productive uses.
• Like any middle man you want absolutely minimal profits going to the middle man.
• Under some measures, finance has 40 percent of the total profits of all American businesses.
• This is the worst group of people you can possibly imagine having power.
• We’ve turned too many of our schools into fraud factories, where we train people how to gimmick accounting.
• Citizen’s United is a fragile case, it doesn’t make much sense in terms of the law.
• What these people are, engines for destroying wealth
• They only get 10 billion, they destroy 10 trillion dollars in wealth. They cost 10 million Americans their jobs.

Guest -  William K. Black, a professor of law at University of Missouri, Kansas City who has criticized the absence of any criminal referrals or national task force to effectively punish the elite fraudsters.  Professor Black teaches White-Collar Crime, Public Finance, Antitrust, Law & Economics.

——————————————————-

 Law and Disorder April 11, 2011: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Israeli Arab Actor, Juliano Mer-Khamis, Killed In Jenin’s Refugee Camp
• Professor Shanara Gilbert and Professor Haywood Burns
• Military Commissions Guantanamo
• Law and Disorder National Pacifica Radio Special:  Class Warfare  – Click Here

–

New York City Rent Laws Set To Expire June 15, 2011

Rent and tenant protections for half of all New York City renter households plus thousands more are set to expire on June 15, 2011.  These laws have been the foundation for affordable rental housing for middle-class and low-income New Yorkers. If the rent laws are not renewed, it could lead to unprecedented evictions and homelessness could spiral even further out of control.   It’s explained in the above linked article by Patrick Markee Senior Policy Analyst at the Coalition for the Homeless,  titled Tell Albany: Renew and Strengthen Rent Laws.

Patrick Markee:

• Two out of three households in New York City are renters. Half of all New York City renters are protected by rent and eviction protection laws that go back 60 years to the New Deal era.
• Right now the stakes are as high as they could be and the political environment is as bad as it can be.
• We have a governor who’s been strongly supported financially by the real estate industry.
• Fortunately we have a state assembly there that is strongly pro-tenant.  Half of all New Yorkers are rent stabilized apartments which means rent increases are regulated each year.
• The fundamental protection for tenants is they can’t be evicted except for just cause.
• Those protections have been weakened by vacancy destabilization. Because of that we’ve lost 300 thousand rent stabilized apartments over the last decade and a half.
• Right now we have 39 thousand people including 16 thousand children bedding down in the municipal shelter system.
• Just this past month we’ve reached the highest census in the shelter system since the city has been keeping records.  Forty percent more people are cycling through the shelter system than when (mayor) Bloomberg took office in 2002
• We’ve had a perfect storm, loss of affordable rental housing across the country, due to Bush Administration cut backs, at the same time, we get the economic recession, and unemployment, add on top of that the foreclosure crisis.  3 out of 4 homeless people are families with kids.
• New Yorkers have a state constitutional right to shelter.
• Contact Governor Cuomo, contact your state legislator.

Guest - Patrick Markee, Senior Policy Analyst at the Coalition for the Homeless and writer of many of the fine articles on the Coalition For the Homeless website.

———-

The Goldstone Report Now Belongs to the World

Lead author of The Goldstone Report, detailing the 2008-2009 Israeli assault on Gaza has changed his position on the issue of targeting civilians.  In an editorial by the Washington Post, Judge Richard Goldstone said, “Civilians were not intentionally targeted [by Israel] as a matter of policy.” And then Israel has called on the United Nations to retract the report on Operation Cast Lead, the war that led to the death of about 1,400 Palestinians, including hundreds of civilians, and 13 Israelis. Earlier this year, Law and Disorder talked with co-editors of the book titled, The Goldstone Report: The Legacy of the Landmark Investigation of the Gaza Conflict.

Phil Weiss:

• Our book came out 2 years after the Gaza conflict and people said why now, who cares about this? Now we see why.
• This statement by him (Judge Goldstone) was immediately seized upon as a disavowal of the report by many supporters of Israel.
• Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel immediately called on the UN to withdraw the report.
• The US State Department came out and said this just shows there were no war crimes committed during the Gaza conflict.
• What remains in the Goldstone Report? Geneva Convention: Principle of Distinction and Disproportional Attack
• Other important crimes noted in the report: using white phosphorus, targeting infrastructure, destroying a water treatment facility, destroying a flour mill, destroying food production.
• Even you have a military target, you have to attack that proportionately. One Israeli commander said, we don’t want a hair of our soldiers to fall here.
• This (Gaza) is the size of the Bronx and Queens put together
• The central case that Goldstone based his reconsideration was one of the most horrific cases during the war.
• That took place on January 4, 2009 in a village outside of Gaza City.
• The Israelis were trying to secure parts of Gaza City from the east. They seized this area as a strategic base. They had herded 120 members of an extended family into one house. They had forced them to stay there for a couple of days.
• In the midst of this operation, on that morning, helicopter gun ships came  and shelled that house, killing 29 people. In the report Goldstone offered this as another case of targeting civilians.
• I would say “because” this report came out, Israel has produced evidence that the helicopter gunship guys misread drone images. Showing men carrying firewood back to this house as being men carrying rocket launchers.
• Goldstone is saying, I accept the Israeli version here, I think that it was out of negligence or a mistake.
• This reconsideration has got more attention than the whole report.
• This fall the UN General Assembly could vote to establish to make Palestine, a Palestinian state.

Guest – Philip Weiss,  founder of the blog Mondoweiss, longtime journalist and regular contributor to the Nation and a fellow at the Nation Institute  Philip is the author of two books a political novel, Cock-A-Doodle-Doo, and American Taboo, an investigative account of a 1976 murder in the Peace Corps in the Kingdom of Tonga.  Weiss is one of the editors of The Goldstone Report: The Legacy of the Landmark Investigation of the Gaza Conflict.

——————————–