Law and Disorder May 21, 2012: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Federal Appeals Court Revives Lawsuit Brought By Two Iraqi Detainees
• Palestinian Prisoner Hunger Strike Update

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ACLU of Georgia to Release Report on Immigration Detention in Georgia

A report released by the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Georgia exposes the privatized corporate  immigrant detention facilities in that state. The report contains interviews from more than 60 individuals detained inside four different detention centers.

Guest – Azadeh Shahshahani, the National Security/Immigrants’ Rights Project Director with the Georgia ACLU.

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HIV Specific Criminal Laws

We talk today about HIV-specific criminal laws and sentence enhancement.  HIV criminal prosecution of occurs when an HIV-positive individual does not disclose their HIV status to a partner before engaging in sex.  The person charged may face decades in prison, life time registration as a sex offender and stigmatization.  While there have been hundreds of prosecutions for HIV crimes in the United States, disclosure and consent is a defense but is difficult to prove and actual transmission of HIV is unnecessary.

Sean Strub:

• About 35 states and territories have HIV specific statutes that only apply to people with HIV that mandate disclosure of their HIV status prior to engaging in intimate contact with another person, independent of whether there is any risk present, independent of whether there is any harm incurred and independent of any intent.
• The statutes have created a viral underclass that is pretty concerning. Right now there’s an explosion of laws based on people’s viral status.
• The vast majority of the prosecutions do not involve the transmission of the virus.
• There are also a number of HIV prosecutions that fall within the phenomenon we call HIV criminalization that aren’t about sex but are heightened charges for other behaviors.
• Willie Campbell in Texas is serving 35 years for spitting on a cop because the court found his saliva to be a deadly weapon even though saliva doesn’t transmit HIV.
• We’ve been alerting people to the fact that this horrific public health policy, that increasingly you hear, take the test, risk arrest.
• The best defense (under the current laws) for not getting prosecuted for HIV criminalization is not getting tested.  Not knowing your status in the first place.
• A man in Iowa just had a 50 year sentence upheld. These forms are driving the criminalization specifically as well as contributing to the stigmatization that makes people reluctant to get tested, reluctant to disclose.
• These states that HIV specific statutes, they don’t have specific statutes for hepatitis or HPV. Four thousand women last died from cervical cancer, almost every single one of them got it from Human Papilla Virus.  HPV – genital warts.
• But we’re not out prosecuting people for HPV.
• The answer is obvious those sexually transmitted diseases aren’t associated with an outlaw sexuality.  They’re not associated with people of color or gay men, with anal intercourse or people who use drugs.
• Poz Magazine The SERO Project

Guest – Sean Strub, writer and activist who founded several magazines and websites, including POZ magazine and POZ en Español, (for people impacted by HIV/AIDS), Mamm (for women impacted by breast cancer), He is the founder of the SERO project to help oppose the use of HIV specific criminal laws.

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Lawyers You’ll Like: Attorney Daniel Gross - Focus On the Food Chain Victory

Victories continue for Brandworkers,  a non-profit organization protecting and advancing the rights of retail and food employees. Last fall we talked with Attorney Daniel Gross, Executive Director of Brandworkers about the 470 thousand dollar settlement reached in a labor dispute with Pur Pac, a food distribution warehouse giant that illegally withheld wages from their workers. Today we discuss the latest victory in another settlement recovering nearly 600 thousand dollars in unpaid wages and compensation for workers at Flaum Appetizing. According to Daniel Gross, the Latino workers there were subjected to constant verbal harassment and forced to work at unsafe speeds.

Attorney Daniel Gross:

• New York City economy has a burgeoning food processing and distributing sector.  There are 35 thousand workers, the vast majority are immigrant workers of color.
• The vast majority depend on this sector for their livelihood.
• The business model is simple. It’s exploiting recent immigrant workers of color through wage theft, through reckless disregard of health and safety and egregious discrimination of workers from Latin America, China, Haiti, Nepal.
• Flaum Appetizing , regrettably but not surprisingly really fit the mold. Flaum is a hummus manufacturer and distributor of kosher food products based in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
• It starts the sector of the food corridor of food manufacturing and sweatshops.
• Flaum Appetizing  engaged in a tremendous amount of wage theft, a failure to pay overtime and in some cases, minimum wage.
• Millions and millions of dollars of real wealth had been illegally withheld from workers.
• There was offensive and insulting discrimination against Latino workers including Latino workers being called cockroaches and aliens.
• The Flaum Appetizing workers approached me in 2010 with some hope and energy because they had seen the victories of our members at the Wild Edibles Seafood had won.
• The workers through incredibly persistent grassroots energy persuaded over 120 of the best most prominent grocery stores in New York to stop selling Flaum products including their Sunny and Joe’s Hummus until workers’ rights were respected.
• Our commitment with Brandworkers, if fight to win. When we engage with an adversary, they should know if we have to, we will chase them to the gates of hell and back.
• Almost all of our members in the Flaum campaign are raising young children.
• There were two components we were able to bring home which was really a hard fought struggle.
• One was our members were proud to report they recovered 577 thousand dollars in wealth that will help them transform their families lives both here and in their home countries, Mexico and El Salvador.
• They also one a binding code of conduct which will force  Flaum Appetizing into full compliance of workplace protections.
• Our model is the labor movement of the late 19th century. Unions like Local 8, the great IWW on the Philadelphia docks that used worker direct action and everyday solidarity.
• Unions and worker centers and community groups are going to converge at the New School on June 6, 2012.  Food Justice Movement  Food Chain Workers
• I owe my politicization to a company that’s now bankrupt. That was Borders Books and Music.
• I come out of working in retail and fast food and Starbucks as you mentioned.
• My grandfather was a member of the teamsters union. He drove a liquor truck out of the Bronx. So I knew in the back of my mind he was able to live the last years of his life as amazing grandfather with dignity because he had his union pension.
• Fighting Starbucks honed my skills because they are such a sophisticated and determined adversary.
• The evil brilliance of the Starbucks union busting operation.
• I had the unique pleasure which I will remember all my life to be represented by Leonard Weinglass.

Guest – Attorney Daniel Gross, Executive Director of Brandworkers, a non-profit organization protecting and advancing the rights of retail and food employees.

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 Law and Disorder May 14, 2012: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• In Memory: Karen Detamore, Former Executive Director Friends of Farmworkers, Inc.
• Yelp Hit With Class Action Lawsuit

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Scapegoat: The Chino Hills Murders and The Framing of Kevin Cooper

Scapegoat: The Chino Hills Murders and The Framing of Kevin Cooper is the title of Patrick O’Connor’s new book. This is an important document chronicling Kevin Cooper’s  controversial conviction and death sentence in 1985.  When O’Connor committed to writing the book, he poured over thousands of case documents from trial transcripts, grisly autopsy photos, appeals and judicial rulings. He then began interviewing those involved in the trial and appeals. The picture began to take shape, a familiar one. The prosecution and the police withheld and destroyed evidence that would have exonerated Kevin Cooper from the brutal murders of the Ryen Family and their guest.

J. Patrick O’Connor:

• In 2008, the Mumia book that I wrote was coming out and I was in the San Francisco Bay area with (attorney) Jeff Mackler of the Mobilization to Free Mumia.
• We had about 15 venues that we went to all over the bay area. Invariably, supporters of Kevin Cooper would come to these events and afterwards would take me aside and say you got to write a book about Kevin Cooper.
• His case is a lot different than Mumia’s but there are a lot of similarities.
• Once I started reading the transcripts of this trial, I could see there were a lot of things wrong with this case.
• It took me about 2 and half years from the start to the publication of the book.
• There was a terrible, in Chino Hills, this is Arabian horse country. This family named the Ryens, they live on a hilltop house with a very big spread, about 15 Arabians. San Bernadino-45 miles east of Los Angeles.
• In this area, most of the people were either raising horses or grazing cattle. This family was a mom and dad and they were both chiropractors. 41 year old chiropractors, and they had a 10 year old daughter named Jessica and an 8 and a half year old son named Josh.
• A friend of Josh’s 11 year old Christopher Hughs, spent the night.
• Around midnight that night, the home was breached. The master bedroom. The family was assaulted with an axe, or a hatchet, I think 2 knives, and an ice pick.
• It was an incredible fight, these people didn’t stand in line and say I’m next.
• The father Doug was 6’1″ 190lbs, a former Marine, an MP in the Marines and could take care of himself. The mother 5’8″ very strong, she was the one that could train the horses, these enormous horses that she could control.
• Both of them kept loaded weapons in the bedroom. The idea that one perpetrator could use 4 weapons to perpetrate this attack is kind of fecitious on its face.
• What put Kevin Cooper in the crosshairs is 3 miles from Chino Hills is Chino which is home to the California Institute for Men, where every felon in Southern California is sent for classification.
• Cooper was sent there for 2 burglaries in LA. Escapes and holes up in Chino Hills for the next 2 days, in a house located 125 yards from the Ryen’s house.
• Josh who had survived, told the deputy sheriff through a hand squeeze method that it was 3 white men.  They put out APBs for 3 white guys.
• When they discern Kevin Cooper’s prints are all over that hide out house, they discard that information and start planning evidence that would implicate Cooper and making big lies about stuff that would implicate him.
• He would have been the only African-American in the community.
• They contaminated the crime scene, there are 2 bathrooms in this house, the cops used one of the bathrooms that had blood in the sink.
• They don’t type the blood properly, they put blood from all different parts of the room in the same bag.
• So, there’s no way to track the motions of who died, what was the order of death?
• They took the walls out, they carted out all the furniture, put it on the front yard. Then they moved it to a warehouse where the air conditioner broke. It went to 120 degrees, they lose all the blood evidence in the warehouse.
• The night of the murders, Cooper left after 9pm to hitchhike to Mexico. Cooper sees his mugshot on TV, he goes on the lamb.  Cooper is got and convicted, he gets the gas chamber.
• He came with 3 hours and 45 minutes of being executed because of a moratorium. Kevin Cooper is fifth in line, this moratorium will end in 2013.
• They had to have the complicity of numerous people inside the sheriff’s department and a very willing DA’s office to perpetrate this fraud on Cooper.

Guest – J.Patrick O’Connor, editor of Crimemagazine.com and the author of The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal (2008). He has previously worked as a reporter for UPI, editor of Cincinnati Magazine, associate editor of TV Guide, and editor and publisher of the Kansas City New Times.

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Homeland Security Documents Show Massive Nationwide Monitoring of Occupy Movement

Last month we gave Mara Verheyden-Hilliard and Carl Messinio of the Partnership for Civil Justice the Law and Disorder Tip Of The Hat Award for creative use of FOIA.  The documents obtained by the Department of Homeland Security show a massive nationwide monitoring, surveillance and information sharing between DHS and local authorities.  But its only the tip of the iceberg. The documents are heavily redacted and don’t show the full scale of coordination. “These documents show not only intense government monitoring and coordination in response to the Occupy Movement, but reveal a glimpse into the interior of a vast, tentacled, national intelligence and domestic spying network that the U.S. government operates against its own people,” says Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, she’s the Executive Director of the PCJF.

Attorney Mara Verheyden-Hilliard:

• We filed a series of FOIA requests and demands in November of last year when it was clear the Occupy movement was being subjected to a coordinated assault.
• We wanted to expose and uncover the role of the federal government working hand in hand with local police and municipalities to shut down this movement. A movement that is inspiring people all over the country and is a force for social change.
• What we have is the tip of a very carefully submerged iceberg.
• What we’ve seen is massive surveillance, coordination, monitoring of peaceful protesters all over the country by the federal government.
• There is monitoring that’s gone on from Washington DC, to Atlanta, to Detroit, to Dallas, that there is an intense focus going all the way up to high ranking members of the administration.
• We know that with the creation of the fusion centers and the suspicious reporting activity, the vertical integration of law enforcement and intelligence operatives in the US, that coming from a federal level, from the Department of Homeland Security, with billions of dollars. There is in place where all of the hundreds and thousands of law enforcement officers . . local is almost deputized, where they’re collecting information and feeding data.
• It’s critical that the people of the United States see this. The way for this to be stopped is to uncover it and expose it.  We see time and again the FBI creating its own terrorist plots, in many times as PR to justify their oppressive apparatus.
• One of the defining features of the Obama Administration is the fact that it took on this apparatus put in place by the Bush Administration and not only didn’t take it apart, they have deepened it.
• There is really a structure now in the United States that has the US government spying and collecting data on its own citizens.
• We have regulation that has been put into place under the Obama Administration where there is growing use of military support for domestic civilian authorities which is very concerning.
• We can see that the real spark for social change is people getting together for collective action.
• What we want to accomplish is to keep the streets, sidewalks and parkland open for grassroots democracy and social change and people need the ability to come out and come together and in order to do that without fear that they’re going to be beaten . . or mass arrested.
• National Special Security Events: The Secret Service and Federal Government becomes the lead coordinating arm and local police work under that umbrella. In Tampa and Charlotte you can see they’re enacting these very repressive ordinances that facially look unconstitutional.
• The ordinances are trying to stop people from doing things are permitted, that are lawful.
• There is growing effort to take public space out from under our feet and one way of doing that is to say that there’s going to be an effort to restore the grass, and we fought this battle back in 2004 at the RNC in New York when we came to challenge the effort of New York City to ban mass assembly on the Great Lawn of Central Park.
• A lot of this effort is to make people feel alone and suffer in silence.

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.)

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 Law and Disorder May 7, 2012: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Michael Smith and Heidi Boghosian Discuss May Day Events
• Michael Smith Reads A May Day Letter From Lynne Stewart
• Retired Chemistry Professor Tried For Jury Tampering Represents Self and Wins.
• Federal Lawsuit Filed Against NYPD For Improper Use Of Barricades
• Four City Council Members File Suit Against NYPD For Police Abuse

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Former Head of CIA Clandestine Service Justifies Torture On CBS 60 Minutes

In a recent interview on CBS news, former head of the CIA’s clandestine service Jose Rodriguez discussed the destruction of 92 tapes in which terrorism suspects were subjected to water boarding and other forms of torture. Rodriguez told CBS that he destroyed the tapes to protect the people who worked for him at various black sites. But critics say Rodriguez is afraid of criminal prosecution because those 92 tapes contained compelling evidence of criminality and are a threat to Rodriguez and those who approved the use of torture.  Rodriguez,  a thirty-year veteran of the CIA, and spent most of his entire career in Latin America, supports the idea that torture works to get information.

Attorney Scott Horton:

• We know the government in response to FOIA requests, and litigation requests has released photographs and tapes repeatedly in the past, and always obliterates the faces involved, so of course the identities are not released.
• Obama announced in his speech from Kabul, al-Qaeda’s been defeated. It’s a faint shadow of what it was before.
• The tapes contained evidence of crimes, it showed water boarding and other torture techniques. It documented those techniques, and that presented a risk to Jose Rodriguez and to the the people up above Rodriguez who are responsible for putting through torture policy.
• George Tenet was involved, Bybee, a judge in the Ninth Circuit in Las Vegas, John Yoo who is a professor at the University of California, Steven Bradbury who is now a partner in a law firm in Washington DC and then it went into the White House where it went into the National Security Council.
• The trail consistently leads straight into the office of former Vice President Dick Cheney. He was the key mover for the introduction of torture policy.
• Domestically, we have an anti-torture statute that includes for conspiracy to torture, both of those things were violated. They apply outside of the United States, so they would have applied to the conduct of a CIA agent operating in Poland or Thailand for instance.
• Jose Rodriguez: He’s trying to make money, he’s selling a book, what you saw was a 36 minute advertisement for his book, published by an affiliate of CBS.
• Beyond that I’d say he’s trying to build sympathy and beat back calls for his own prosecution.
• I think this was an ill advised strategy and I think he confessed to criminal conduct in the course of this interview.
• At one point they claimed that they were able to track down and pick up Jose Padilla through the use of water boarding, which is very very interesting because Padilla was arrested and in custody before the first case of water boarding was applied.
• Mitt Romney has been out there punching away constantly on the advocacy of torture and the response from the Obama campaign has been silence. Silence.
• The guy came across to me as something of a psychopath (Jose Rodriguez)

Guest -  New York attorney Scott Horton, Scott is known for his work in human rights law and the law of armed conflict. Scott is also the contributing editor to Harper’s Magazine.

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Common Cause Files IRS Whistleblower Complaint Against ALEC

The American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, is a tax exempt charity that spends millions of dollars annually to lobby for hundreds of bills in state legislatures around the United States. It came to the attention of the public for having drafted and pressured passage of the so-called stand your ground legislation after the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in February. The watchdog group Common Cause has asked the IRS to review ALEC’s status claiming that ALEC is “a corporate lobby masquerading as a charity,” and that contributors should not be allowed to claim the gifts as charitable contributions.

Nick Surgey:

• ALEC describes itself as nonpartisan although the majority are members of the Republican Party.
• It’s concerning from a tax perspective, ALEC is operating as 501c non-profit, which means its a charity.
• Therefore corporations who are members of ALEC are allowed to take a tax deduction, when they contribute up to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
• If Visa, Verizon or Amazon then those lobbying would not be tax deductible, they would be subject to tax, but they do the same lobbying through ALEC.
• All of those contributions are subsidized by us – the tax payer. And that’s wrong.
• We shouldn’t be subsidizing the activities of any corporation.
• Until recently ALEC operated 9 Task Forces, they were forced to close one 2 weeks ago.
• Stand Your Ground Bill / Drafted by the NRA, lobbied by them and presented to legislators in Florida 2005.
• The NRA took it to ALEC, who they’re a member of, Walmart chaired the taskforce. Walmart the largest retailer of weapons in the United States.
• The Stand Your Ground bill is now law in 20 states.
• ALEC organizes around these 9 task forces. They have bills that really cover almost every policy area.
• Other areas include rolling back environmental protection, they have a commerce task force, where a lot of anti-union bills, the right to work legislation, it comes from that task force.
• Corporations will use the state essentially to lobby on their behalf.
• Common Cause has a very good picture of what ALEC has been doing in the last 2 years and this formed the basis of this massive IRS submission.
• One document are these scorecards which they send to their corporate members, where they celebrate the success that they have. Some of the early scorecards, they mapped out the complete picture of the United States and where all of their model bills have been introduced.
• A source provided us with emails going between ALEC and state legislators. We were very greatful to be represented pro-bono by one of the country’s leading whistle-blower firms, Phillips and Cohen.
• Voter ID has been increasingly connected to ALEC.
• We believe the bigger fraud is disenfranchising millions of predominantly African American, elderly or young student voters.  In wasn’t until 2009 when ALEC took it up, that it really injected energy into it at the state level and its been introduced in 34 states. (Voter ID)
• ALEC has an ability to take a law, not always a new law and sell it to their almost 2000 state legislator members.
• ALEC has about a third of all state legislators in the entire country as members.
• There was a fracking bill, and it was sponsored by Exxon Mobile.
• ALECExposed.org

Guest -   Nick Surgey, Nick conducted the research helping to expose the American Legislative Exchange Council.  Nick joined Common Cause in March 2011 as a Legal Associate.  He formerly worked at the British Refugee Council in Leeds, England, where he advocated on behalf of asylum seekers. He previously worked at an immigration law firm, as an elected student union officer and as a paid campaigner. Nick holds an undergraduate degree in History and Politics and a post-graduate diploma in law.
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 Law and Disorder April 30, 2012: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Update: Occupy The Justice Department
  
• Bradley Manning Trial Update: Attorney CCR Attorney Shane Kadidal
• Bradley Manning: A Show Trial of Secrecy by Michael Ratner
  

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39 Ways To Limit Free Speech

39 Ways To Limit Free Speech is the title Law Professor David Cole’s recent article.  Earlier this month, a 29-year old citizen from Sudbury, Massachusetts named Tarek Mehanna was sentenced to seventeen and a half years in prison for translating a document. The text he translated from Arabic is “39 Ways to Serve and Participate in Jihad” and its all over the internet, you can read it says David Cole, but don’t try to translate it. One issue in the government’s prosecution of this case is the use of the decision from the Brandenburg v. Ohio case in which the Supreme Court established that standard in ruling that the First Amendment protected a Ku Klux Klansman who made a speech to a Klan gathering advocating “revengeance” against blacks and “Jews.”

Professor David Cole:

• He was accused of providing material support to al-Qaeda by translating various documents and videos from Arabic into English. There’s no allegations that Mehanna ever met with or even talked to a member of al-Qaeda. There are no allegations that the translations were delivered to or provided to al-Qaeda which was the designated group.
• The government argued that because he translated these documents and put them up on the web and hoped to encourage people to support jihad and support al-Qaeda, that’s enough to constitute material support.
• Here’s an instant in which the government is prosecuting pure speech but no showing that the speech was connected to illegal conduct, no showing that it was intended to produce eminent lawless action, which the Supreme Court said is required to produce under Brandenburg.
• It’s enough that he put it up on the web and wanted to support al-Qaeda.
• If that’s a crime what about the New York Times when it does a report on one of the many messages Osama Bin Laden put after 9-11?
• I represented the Humanitarian Law Project in the case that went to the Supreme Court in 2010, in which the HLP was in engaging in advocacy of human rights and peace, clearly non-violent, non-criminal conduct.
• But because they wanted to do it to and with the Kurds in Turkey and particularly the political representatives of the Kurds in Turkey which is the Kurdistan Workers Party (designated as a terrorist organization) the government argued that it was a crime to teach the KWP to bring human rights claims in Geneva and work with them in peace overtures to the Turkish Government.
• The Supreme Court upheld that, but doesn’t apply to independent advocacy. (until now)
• Now if you wanted your speech to support terrorist organizations, even if you did it independently of that organization, even if you never met or talked to anyone in that organization, we can make it a crime.
• Very much about declaring a “new front” in the war on terror and the front is going after internet propaganda.
• To me it recalls the kind of aiding the enemy prosecutions we saw in World War 1.
• We as citizens need to be active in monitoring and pushing back against this material support statute.

Guest – Professor David Cole teaches constitutional law, national security, and criminal justice at Georgetown University Law Center.  He is also a volunteer attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights, the legal affairs correspondent for The Nation, a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, and a commentator on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. He has been published widely in law journals and the popular press, including the Yale Law Journal, California Law Review, Stanford Law Review, New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and Los Angeles Times.

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FAA Releases Lists of Drone Certificates—Many Questions Left Unanswered
Earlier this year we discussed the partnership with Cornell University and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. The two institutions are working together to build a campus in New York City.  Technion is involved with developing robotic weapons systems, which include aerial drones, and unmanned combat vehicle technology.  There are many more universities involved with drone technology. Through a series of Freedom of Information requests by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the FAA has been forced to reveal approximately 63 active drone sites. These sites are located in 20 states and their owners include military and universities. Universities include Cornell, (which we just mentioned)  the University of Colorado, Georgia Tech, Eastern Gateway Community College and many more.

Attorney Jennifer Lynch:

• We filed a FOIA request with the FAA last April asking for copies of all the certificates of authorization and the special air-worthiness certificates that the FAA issues to anybody to wants to fly a drone in the US.
• We asked for these lists which are called COAs, or Certificates of Authorization. The COAs apply to public entities like state and local law enforcement, universities, the federal government.
• We got two lists from the FAA and the FAA says these cover all of the entities that applied for an authorization to fly a drone in United States.
• They’re very interesting, the COA list includes some unsurprising entities like DARPA, DHS, Customs and Border Protection, the FBI, various branches of the military. We already knew those entities were flying drones.
• What was more surprising was the number of universities and colleges on the list.
• Universities that have an aerospace engineering program they may be seeking authorization so the students can learn about and design drones.
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation is a civil liberties non-profit, we focus on civil liberties and new technology, and we’re concerned about surveillance equipment used by the government.
• Drones are a duel use technology, they can be used for good or for bad.
• They can see inside buildings, survey an area at night with heat sensors, they also have the ability to carry communications intercept tools. You could swap out various payloads on a drone.
• Then of course these drones can carry weapons.
• You can build your own drone, DIYDrones.
• We don’t know too much about what’s going on now. The reason the EFF file the FOIA request in the first place is that we just don’t know how agencies are using these drones.
• What we found is that a lot of the police forces that have drones are required to fly them under 600 feet. If its something that flying under 600 feet you’re going to be able to see that.
• Congress was getting a lot of pressure, and the FAA was getting a lot of pressure from state and local law enforcement, the military and the federal government to authorize more drones to be used in the United States.
• We’ve heard from the Congressional Research Service that 1 in 3 warplanes right now is a drone.
• The wars are going to end and the military is going to want to something with these drones.

Guest – Jennifer Lynch, staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and works on open government, transparency and privacy issues as part of EFF’s FOIA Litigation for Accountable Government (FLAG) Project. In addition to government transparency, Jennifer has written and spoken frequently on government surveillance programs, intelligence community misconduct, and biometrics collection. Prior to joining EFF, Jennifer was the Clinical Teaching Fellow with the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic at UC Berkeley School of Law. At the Samuelson Clinic, Jennifer specialized in privacy and intellectual property issues, including investigations on social media, privacy and the smart electrical grid, digital books, and open source regimes for biotech. Before the Clinic, Jennifer practiced with Bingham McCutchen in San Francisco and clerked for Judge A. Howard Matz in the Central District of California. She earned both her undergraduate and law degrees from UC Berkeley.

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 Law and Disorder April 2, 2012: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Park Slope Food Co-op Vote
• Mamilla Cemetary Update

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Vodak Settlement:  Setting Precedence For Demonstrations

Attorneys with the National Lawyers Guild recently settled a class action lawsuit brought against the Chicago Police Department on behalf of protesters falsely arrested during a 2003 anti-war demonstration. On March 20 2003 nearly 10 thousand anti-Iraq War protesters marched through downtown Chicago before police surrounded a large group, trapping and arresting more than 700 people without ordering them to disperse. A Seventh Circuit ruling on the case (Vodak v. City of Chicago, 639 F.3d, 738 (2011)) held that police can’t arrest peaceful protesters without warning because the demonstration lacks a permit. This decision bears new weight in light of mass arrests within the Occupy movement. The National Lawyers Guild attorneys reached a 6.2 million dollar settlement in this case on the eve of a scheduled trial. The suit was litigated over the course of almost nine years by a team of NLG lawyers and legal workers including People’s Law Office attorneys Janine Hoft, Joey Mogul, Sarah Gelsomino, and John Stainthorp, as well as People’s Law Office paralegal Brad Thomson, and attorneys Melinda Power and Jim Fennerty.

Attorney Joey Mogul:

• We think it sends a significant message to Chicago and the Chicago Police Department that it must honor and respect people’s right to protest.
• It was the day that Bush had dropped bombs on Iraq. There was a massive out pouring of opposition, and people came down to the center of Chicago, to the Federal Plaza which is the heart of downtown. There were 10 thousand people and they marched on Lake Shore drive, and this was all permitted by the Chicago Police Department. This was a spontaneous demonstration, there was no written permit, but the CPD allowed it.
• Toward the end of the march, they decided that they wanted it to be over. They proceeded to surround everyone on Chicago avenue, and they prevented them from leaving, trapped them there for hours.
• They then proceeded to take over 500 people into police custody. 200 hundred were released, the rest were arrested with bogus phony charges of wreck-less conduct.
• They mass arrested everyone in that area including joggers and people shopping. It had an extremely chilling effect for people participating or near a demonstration.
• The message to the Chicago Police is that they cannot mass arrest people without giving orders to disperse.
• The new changes in the Chicago ordinances are very scary, it does allow for this increased surveillance of protesters and individuals seeking to protest.
• We’re very well aware of what the law is and we will seek to vindicate people’s constitutional rights.

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Brad Thompson:

• I’ve been working on this case since 2004, when I first started at the People’s Law Office.
• The work that I’ve done is a tremendous amount of discovery work in terms of going through the video work that was shot that night, by protesters, independent journalists, mainstream media and by the police.
• I did a lot in maintaining communication with class members. We had over 800 people that were taken into custody or held in the street for over 90 minutes.
• We did obtain over 250 affidavits by people who had their rights violated that night.
• The majority of protesters were from Chicago or the Greater Chicago area.
• I was one of the people taken into custody that night and released without being charged.
• I was witnessing the police aggressively arrest someone and I started to point and chant “shame” and then I became targeted.  The police tackled me, and pulled me to my feet and struck me in the face which broke my nose and had a wound that required five stitches.
• I spent the night in jail bleeding all over myself.

Guest – Attorney Joey Mogul, partner at the People’s Law Office in Chicago and director of the Civil Rights Clinic at DePaul University’s College of Law. She focuses on civil rights cases involving police misconduct, criminal cases brought against individuals engaged in street demonstrations and other forms of First Amendment expression, and capital defense cases.

Guest – Brad Thompson, legal worker with the People’s Law Office in Chicago.

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Locking Away Children For Life Without Parole

The United States is the only country in the world that sentences children to life, without the possibility of parole. Last month, the US Supreme Court revisited the question of whether juveniles convicted of murder should be given mandatory life sentences without the possibility of parole. The Supreme Court had once ruled against imposing death sentences on juveniles and imposing life sentences on youth who aren’t convicted of murder. Currently, 2500 kids in jail are serving life sentences without parole in the US.  371 of those individuals are in Michigan prisons. Our next guest has been working on a lawsuit on behalf of 9 Michigan individuals who were sentenced to life in prison for crimes committed when they were minors and who are being denied the possibility of parole.

Attorney Deborah LaBelle:

• The concept that we’ve been talking about that these are children both under international law and US law for civil matters, children are different from adults.
• The Supreme Court seemed to readily grasp that, they weren’t speaking about juveniles or teenagers or young adults, they spoke continuously on what to do about children who are involved in homicide crime.
• The court had two cases in front of them, both involving 14 year olds, one in which the 14 did not commit a homicide, but convicted of either felony murder or aiding and abetting.
• That juvenile got mandatory life without possibility of parole, because the child was sentenced as an adult, the other case, the 14 year old actually committed the homicide.
• There is a handful of states, Michigan and I think 8 others who treat 17 year olds always as adults for all purposes in the criminal justice system.
• Under the 38 states, there’s a whole range, some you can only get life without parole, if you’re 16 and up, some allow it for 15, some states allow it for a child of any age, Michigan is one of them.
• One of the justices talked about that. Is there an age in which we would all share a collective cringe. What about a 5 year old, what about a 10 year old.
• The frontal lobe area of the brain that really addresses impulse control and long term consequences, and control issues of risk management, is developing through adolescence.
• People draw the age at different points, some say not til 19, some not til 23 as you say.
• There’s a bright line in civil law that’s been drawn in civil law that youth have a maturity that they can vote, when they can decide to leave school, when they can drink in some places, when they can drive.
• There are these bright lines.
• Every other country who has signed on to the conventions of the rights of the child which prohibits putting children in prison for life without possibility of parole explicitly has recognized that this practice is banned.
• The only other country that hasn’t signed on is Somalia and they don’t quite have a government right now to do that.
• We stand alone in not adhering to that convention on the rights of the child as well as we stand alone on approving this sentence.
• We have over 2500 youth who are serving of life without any possibility of parole. About 70 percent are children of color. A third of them, did not commit homicides.
• No one is arguing that there might not be circumstances, that a state couldn’t decide upon review that child couldn’t be released.  What the argument is, you can’t keep them in there without any hope. You have to give them an opportunity to demonstrate upon maturation that they have been rehabilitated and they aren’t a threat to public safety.
• We should think of putting children in places where we can nurture, council and believe in their rehabilitation and give them a second chance.
• I read transcript after transcript of judges saying, – listen I don’t want to do this to this 14 or 16 year old, but I don’t have any choice.  What is the value of putting a child away with no hope. It’s certainly not a public safety issue, because that can be addressed by the state by having parole or review hearings.

 Guest – Attorney Deborah LaBelle, an attorney with the ACLU of Michigan’s Juvenile Life Without Parole Initiative.

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

Updates:

• Rene Gonzalez – Cuban Five Update: Contact Form
• CIW: Publix Campaign Fast – Publix Surveillance Truck
• Ugandan LGBT Activists File Case Against Anti-Gay U.S. Evangelical in Federal Court
• The Progressive: Michael Smith’s Book Interview “Who Killed Che?”

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Church Puts Legal Pressure on Abuse Victims’ Group

Earlier last year, we reported on the Vatican revising its laws making it easier to discipline sex abuser priests.  This month, lawyers for the Roman Catholic Church and priests accused of sexual abuse and pedophilia have used the courts to force the group SNAP Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests to disclose more than two decades of e-mails that could include correspondence with victims, lawyers, whistle-blowers, witnesses, the police, prosecutors and journalists.  A Kansas City judge decided SNAP must comply with lawyers because it had relevant information regarding 2 cases in Missouri.

Attorney Barbara Blaine:

• As you know we are a not for profit, self help support group run by and for people who have been victims of clergy sexual abuse.  We have been providing support information to each other since 1988.
• The church officials have taken an unprecedented move and they have subpoenaed records from our SNAP leaders.
• We are an international group, we have groups forming in other countries as well.
• Here in the United States, we have support groups meeting in about 70 cities. In these support groups people share their feelings and tidbits of information on how to cope with the repercussions of sexual violence.
• There are subpoenas from 2 different cities, 2 different cases, both from the state of Missouri.
• In Kansas City, what’s happen in the past year, is a lot of sex abuse by priests has been uncovered, exposed and brought to light. In the process, the Bishop himself was indicted for failure to protect children.
• In one particular civil case, the church attorneys have subpoenaed the records of our national director and they are looking for very extreme information.
• These subpoenas are not tailored to be helpful to get information for the case, SNAP is not a party to either of these cases. They ask for records with no date, from the very beginning of SNAP, from 1988.
• They’re asking for all the information in our emails, in our files, and they’re looking for any information that names any priest from the diocese of Kansas City, St Joseph.
• We do believe that the victims who have spoken out in Kansas City, have had an impact. I think its empowered other victims to come forward. I think they’re trying to shut down SNAP in Kansas City.
• The biggest concern we have now is the fear that this is spreading. In many ways, the intended effect has already taken place.
• I started SNAP, I did so, after I was raped and sexually violated by a priest in my parish growing up.
• Stop The Legal Bullying Petition.

Guest - Attorney Barbara Blaine, founder of SNAP  the nation’s oldest and largest self-help organization for victims of clergy sexual abuse 10 thousand survivors.

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Court Rules FDNY Liable for Up to $128 Million in Back Pay to Black and Latino Applicants

Last week, a US District judge awarded plaintiffs back pay in a class action lawsuit that found the New York Fire Department to have racially discriminatory hiring practices.  US District Judge Nicholas Garaufis also ruled that the City of New York is liable for nearly 129 million in lost wages.  This amount will be distributed to Black and Latino applicants,  82 and 42 million dollars respectively.   The judge also ordered the FDNY to hire 186 Black firefighters and 107 Latino firefighters.

Attorney Darius Charney:

• The Vulcan Society which is the Black fraternal organization for New York City brought a lawsuit in the early 1970s challenging the hiring practices of the department as violative of the equal protection clause of the Constitution, saying that they racially discriminated.
• Blacks and Latinos, its over half of the city’s population today. If you look at the fire department today, its roughly if you combine Blacks and Latinos about 10 percent.
• A federal judge in New York found that the hiring practices were discriminatory and violated the 14th amendment, the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that decision and the Fire Dept was ordered to make some changes in 1970s.
• As of 2002 when we actually formerly brought this case, the department was 3 percent Black, 5 percent Latino, which is not much different than it was in 1970.  The city was asked to work out a settlement, the city refused for 2 years.
• So, the EEOC referred the case to the Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division. This was during the Bush Administration and as you know the Civil Rights Division didn’t do much.
• We’ve proven discrimination about 3 times over now to the judge. Last year we had a big federal trial in Brooklyn on what relief the court should order because of the discrimination that was found.
• If you try to obstruct a federal court order, that could lead to some serious penalties.
• Our clients, the Vulcans first met with Mayor Bloomberg when first came to office in 2002 about this problem.
• We felt it was a purposeful and intentional effort by the city to exclude people of color.
• There have been incidence, we think retaliatory incidence we think against Vulcan members for there efforts in this case.
• The FDNY has really dropped the ball in responding to these acts of discrimination.
• The court has to oversee a lot of different aspects to this case. There’s a new test being developed, they’re going to start administering this week. There’s now the piece about the compensation for the plaintiffs.
• Federal judges can’t closely supervise the case so they appoint these monitors to simply act in the role of the judge and oversee each of these aspects of the case.
• We hope that the city will at some point stop fighting because all the things the judge has ordered for changing, I think benefits the fire department.
• A group of women sued in the early 1980s alleging sex discrimination and again they pointed to the test and other aspects of the hiring process.
• They were victorious and the court ordered them to hire 50 women, which they did do.

Guest – Attorney Darius Charney,  senior staff attorney in the Racial Justice/Government Misconduct Docket.  He is currently lead counsel on Floyd v. City of New York, a federal civil rights class action lawsuit challenging the New York Police Department’s unconstitutional and racially discriminatory stop-and-frisk practices, and Vulcan Society Inc. v. the City of New York, a Title VII class action lawsuit on behalf of African-American applicants to the New York City Fire Department which challenges the racially discriminatory hiring practices of the FDNY.

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 Law and Disorder March 12, 2012: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Squatters Museum, Lower East Side
  
• AIPAC Speech and Netanyahu Gifts Obama Esther Scroll
  
• CIW Fast Campaign Against Publix Supermarkets
• Co-host Michael Smith Returns From Who Killed Che? Book Tour

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Nestlé Test Case: Charges filed on murder of Colombian Trade Unionist

In a previous show we discussed the lawsuit Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, a case pushing to hold corporations accountable for human rights violations. We talk today about a similar case. Recently a Columbian Trade Union filed charges against the Swiss company Nestle and members of its senior management.  They are accused of failing to take precautionary measures for the 2005 murder of Luciano Romero. Romero was murdered by paramilitaries in Valledupar, a north eastern part of Columbia. His body was found with 50 stab wounds. Romero worked for a the Columbian Nestle subsidiary company Cicolac. Cicolac is accused of being negligent in failing to prevent this crime. 

Attorney Wolfgang Kaleck:

• We are presenting cases against European Transnationals who are involved in human rights violations.
• One of our targets is Nestle’s, Switzerland whom we try to hold accountable for an assassination of a Columbian Trade Unionist Luciano Romero in 2005.
• The Nestle subsidiary was very close to the paramilitary.
• Columbia has a record of killing over 2000 trade unionists over the last 20 years.
• The solidarity movement here in Switzerland was very active of the defense of the threatened trade unionists. They were threatened over years, some of them had to go into exile, some of them moved within Columbia.
• What we accused them of is negligent killing through omission.
• If you go into a conflict region and if you link with one of the conflict parties, you can be held accountable.
• The companies have the duty of due diligence. You have the task to take a human rights risk assessment. Then you have as a mother company, you have a role to play for your subsidiaries.
• That’s why we presented the case here in Switzerland, we’re not only talking about the murder in 2005, we’re also talking about future responsibilities of transnational companies.
• That’s why the whole complaint here, got huge media coverage.
• The managers who we are suing live in Switzerland, and are Swiss citizens.
• We want the prosecutor in Switzerland to undertake an investigation.
• In Columbia there is no real possibility to sue a transnational company, but this is why the Swiss judges and prosecutors have to act right now.
• The spectacle in the German and Swiss media helped us put the problems on the table.
• Havard Professor was appointed by the UN to elaborate principles to regulate the behavior of transnational companies and human rights. The principles are very general.
• The prosecutor got quite a difficult criminal complaint. He has to decide in the next weeks or months to open this criminal procedure.
• Nestle did the other way around, because they didn’t like the trade unionists. They were an obstacle.

Guest – Attorney Wolfgang Kaleck,  General Secretary and co-founder of ECCHR,  specializing in criminal law, he has established an international reputation as an advocate for human rights. He made a name for himself when he filed suit against the U.S. Defense Minister Donald Rumsfeld for war crimes and torture committed at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.
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Exposed: NYPD Surveillance of Muslims Spill Over Into Other States, Africa and Europe

We’ve covered a wide range of stories involving the FBI spying on Muslim students and using undercover agents at mosques.   Last month, news of this spying had broke into the mainstream news.  The New York Police Department’s ongoing surveillance operations of Muslims across the Northeast has exposed a broad spectrum of civil rights violations. Documents recently obtained by the Associated Press reveal the NYPD built databases showing where Muslims live, buy food, and where they watch sports. The NYPD municipal spy operations spilled out of New York City and reached into New Jersey, Long Island and to colleges across the Northeast.

Cyrus McGoldrick:

• This program amounts to a comprehensive and warrant-less and invasive surveillance program of all Muslim life.
• Not just here in New York City but now we have reports of cops going down to UPenn in Philadelphia.
• Up to Yale in New Haven, Albany and Buffalo. It’s even worse than that. NYPD officers out in North Africa and Europe.
• This is one of the worse things I’ve seen is people being scared out of their public activities. I think there’s a fear of speaking publicly about things.
• We’re hearing reports of a network of up to 15 thousand informants feeding information to the NYPD.
• One of the earliest documents that came out was a powerpoint presentation from the NYPD called the demographics unit. The third or fourth slide in this document is titled “ancestries of interest.”
• Anyone who is trying to make the argument, “they’re trying to protect us” they need to see this slide.
• It’s human mapping, community mapping, modeled off of how Israelis operate in the West Bank.
• It’s essentially Muslim until proven innocent.
• The documents are there, they’re online, we’ve seen them for ourselves. I would love to put Mayor Bloomberg in front of the power point presentation of the demographics unit and let him justify that.
• They’ll trot out pictures of terrorists and say this is what we’re keeping you safe from .
• You’re really in danger of honey bees than from a terrorist attack
• And don’t let the NYPD tell you that that’s because they’re spying on Muslim students from Philadelphia to New Haven because that’s not the case.
• There’s maybe two cases where the FBI was not the primary planner of that attack.
• Within 200 miles of New York City, the NYPD are sending people just a shocking number of informants and sometimes undercover officers culling political speech, political activity, hearing what people are talking about.
• So they’re watching everything they can, and anyone who is expressing some anger.
• Watching for raising a dissenting voice, that’s what the rakers were.
• Mosque crawlers played a similar role.
• Rakers is a more general term for the invasion, infiltration.
• We’re lucky that this got discovered.
• The involvement of the CIA is very interesting. David Cohen from the CIA who came to the NYPD after 9/11. Sometimes they refer to him as a former CIA agent. I’m not sure that’s a type of club you can leave.
• There are other CIA agents that were on CIA payroll but were posted in the NYPD.
• Later, the CIA actually removed the officers that were in the NYPD because of a lack of supervision, they called it.
• When you see these people lining up to defend this, you have to wonder why.
• They’re using the fear of us to get to your rights.
• It’s really amazing the assumptions of power that the government has justified with the war on terror.

Guest – Cyrus McGoldrick,  Civil Rights Manager with the Council on American-Islamic Relations-New York

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 Law and Disorder March 5, 2012: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Julian Assange Update
• Michael Ratner Discusses Bradley Manning’s Arraignment
• Coalition For Immokalee Workers Fast
• Occupy For Mumia Abu-Jamal April 24,2012
• Egypt NGO Update
• Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum
• Follow Michael Ratner on Twitter – @JustLeft
• Follow Heidi Boghosian on Twitter @occupylawyer

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Judge Dismisses Lawsuit Filed Over Boycott of Israeli Goods

Last month, a judge in Olympia, Washington dismissed a lawsuit tailored to force the Olympia Food Co-op to rescind its boycott of Israeli goods. The judge ruled that the lawsuit brought by opponents of the boycott violated a Washington State law designed to prevent abusive lawsuits which are aimed at suppressing lawful public participation. Interestingly, an investigation by ElectronicIntifada had unearthed that the lawsuit against individuals with the Olympia Food Co-op Board was also planned in collusion with a national anti-Palestinian organization called StandWithUs that was working with the Israeli government. Lawyers with the Center for Constitutional Rights argued that the lawsuit qualified as a SLAPP, that stands for – - Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation.  SLAPPs are lawsuits that target the constitutional rights of free speech and petition in connection with an issue of public concern.

Attorney Maria LaHood:

• The Olympia Food Co-op is a non-profit in Olympia Washington, that not only makes good food accessible to people, but also encourages economic and social justice in other ways.
• So it has a long history of doing social justice work, including adopting boycotts.
• The board decided to boycott Israeli goods in 2010 by consensus. A few months after that there was a co-op election. Three of the five plaintiffs who ended up bringing the lawsuit, members of the co-op, the co-op has about 22 thousand members. They ran for the election opposing the boycott and they lost.
• They ran for the board on an anti-boycott agenda and not voted in by the members.
• The board decided to boycott Israeli goods and divest from any Israel investment.
• One Israeli product: Gluten free ice cream cones,
• Obviously it had symbolic significance so that the five plaintiffs decided to send a letter to the board promising litigation that would be complicated, burdensome and expensive if the board didn’t end the boycott.
• CCR got involved and CCR cooperating council to represent the board members and decided to file an anti-SLAP motion as well as a motion to dismiss.
• Plaintiffs were also seeking discovery which of course they had promised. They started out serving 200 pages of discovery on all 16 defendants and trying to depose all 16 defendants. After we file the anti-SLAPP motion which actually stays discovery, they sought to depose three of the defendants as well as additional document requests.
• We challenged that discovery request.
• Olympia, Washington, is where Evergreen College and that’s also where Rachel Corrie is from.
• Stand With Us is basically an anti-BDS organization.
• The lawsuit against the co-op board members was actually identified by Stand With Us as one of its projects months before the case was even filed.
• Stand With Us also produced and posted online an anti-BDS video with four of the five plaintiffs in the case.
• They described themselves as an international organization ensuring Israel’s side of the story is told.
• They also have apparently connections as well to the Israeli government.
• The hearing was last Thursday, there was a great turn out, they had to move us to a bigger court room.
• The judge ruled that this lawsuit did challenge public participation so it did fall under the anti-SLAPP statute.
• Boycotts are constitutionally protected under the first amendment.
• This kind of suit is exactly what this statute was meant to address.
• We argued that the board under the bylaws has the authority to adopt any policy essentially it wants, that promotes the co-opts mission.
• He (the judge) did say that it was a nationally recognized movement.
• The victory here sends a message that you cannot sue to chill free speech issues.

Guest – Senior staff attorney Maria LaHood, who specializes in international human rights litigation, seeking to hold government officials and corporations accountable for torture, extrajudicial killings, and war crimes abroad. Her cases have included Arar v. Ashcroft, against U.S. officials for sending Canadian citizen Maher Arar to Syria where he was tortured and detained for a year; Al-Aulaqi v. Obama, to prevent the “targeted killing” of a U.S. citizen in violation of constitutional and international law;  Matar v. Dichter, against an Israeli official responsible for a “targeted killing” that killed 15 Palestinians; Belhas v. Ya’alon, against a former Israeli official responsible for the 1996 shelling of a United Nations compound in Qana, Lebanon, that killed over 100 civilians; Corrie v. Caterpillar, on behalf of Palestinians killed and injured in home demolitions, and Rachel Corrie, a U.S. human rights defender who was killed trying to protect a home from being demolished; and Wiwa v. Royal Dutch/Shell, for the torture, detention and execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa and other human rights activists and protestors in Nigeria. After graduating from the University of Michigan Law School in 1995, Maria advocated on behalf of affordable housing and civil rights in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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 Law and Disorder February 27, 2012: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Camp Delta Cases Won’t Proceed
• NLG 75 Year Anniversary February 20th, 2012
• Supreme Court Chooses To Take Review Affirmative Action Case In Austin, Texas
• Coalition for Immokalee Workers Update
• Groups Condemn Appointment of Archbishop Dolan to Cardinal of New York
  

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Egypt Places Travel Ban On US Citizens: NDI / IRI and Freedom House

Egypt Places Travel Ban and Charges Against US Citizens Working With NDI / IRI and Freedom House In the last few weeks, the military backed Egyptian government has targeted the National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute and Freedom House–U.S. government funded groups working in Egypt. These groups have often come under attack as tools of US foreign policy. For example the IRI was blamed for playing a role in the coup against President Aristide of Haiti. As part of its crackdown, the Egyptian authorities raided the offices of some of these organizations and brought charges against at least 16 US citizens, six of whom remain in Egypt.

Three of them including the son of the US Transportation Secretary, Sam LaHood have taken refuge at the US embassy. They’re cases have been referred to criminal courts in Egypt. Recently, Egypt refused to back down despite a US threat to cut aid. We bring you two perspectives on the NDI/IRI and the charges against them.  Paul Sullivan from the National Defense University raises serious questions as to whether these US funded organizations should be in Egypt at all.  Then,  Sally Sami, a human rights activist, is unwilling to be as critical presumably because she sees the crackdown as past of a larger crackdown on democracy advocates in Egypt even if NDI and IRI are not playing a constructive role.

Professor Paul Sullivan:

• Essentially these NGOs are not registered in this country. There was an NGO law in 2002 that required these NGOs to register. 
• These NGOs state they did put in the documents to register and they didn’t hear anything back and assumed everything was going well.  
• They’re also unlicensed. That is also true.
• They’re funded by the US government. The required duties is to train people in exactly what voting is, what is democratic development.  
• One of the charges that has been leveled against them is paying political certain parties and of course both these groups deny it. Freedom House, the third one involved also denies it.
• There are certain charges that neither the IRI or the NDI deny.
• The emotions are very high, and the issues are becoming more hardened on both sides.
• When Mubarak was in charge, these organizations were in a wink and a nod were allowed to be in the country.
• Now some of the NGOs that had nothing to do with anything political are now having a difficult time even on the streets of Egypt.
• There has always been a certain degree of anti-Americanism in Egypt.  This is starting to stoke anti-Egyptian sentiment on the Hill and in the public. . .many of whom don’t understand Egypt as people who’ve live there, such as I understand Egypt, really quite wonderful people.
• It’s much more important to build friendships, to build relations, to help them get jobs. Investment, education, and human development, and leave the politics to the country.

Guest – Professor Paul Sullivan, professor of economics at the National Defense University (NDU) since July 1999. He is an Adjunct Professor of Security Studies and Science, Technology and International Affairs at Georgetown University, where he teaches classes on global energy and security, energy security in the Middle East, and natural resources and conflict in Africa and the Middle East. Dr. Sullivan was the Vice President, Programs, for the United Nations Association, National Capitol Area, where he was a strategic leader and adviser for the many programs and committees run by UNA-NCA during June 2010 to June 2011.

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We get another perspective on the ground in Cairo, Egypt. Sally Sami, former director with the Cairo Center for Human Rights Studies and human rights activist.

Sally Sami:

• We’re talking about a moment, a time when the essence of the revolution itself is being stolen.
• We see a revolution that is being arrested, attacked, harassed.
• It seems like we’re being punished for taking the stand, for continuing it to be outspoken about the violations that are taking place, even after the revolution.
• One of the worst attacks was during a Christian protest, and people were killed enmass, we’ve seen this becoming more and more frequent.
• The continued denial of taking the responsibility to the protect the lives of Egyptians.
• We want it clear that should not be any double standards, its a human rights thing, ok? There shouldn’t be any double standards.
• Some countries deserve human rights, some don’t, it depends on the concept of national security, until now we don’t know what it means.

Guest – Sally Sami, former director with the Cairo Center for Human Rights Studies and human rights activist.

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 Law and Disorder February 20, 2012: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Greece, the EU, the United States and Fight Back

The huge and sustained fight back against massive austerity cuts continues in Greece, in that small southern European country of 11 million people, half of whom live in Athens, there’s been a wave of general strikes going back to August of last year. Not only are the economic powers that be particularly in Germany forcing terrible cut backs on the standard of living of the Greek people, there also hollowing out democracy in that country. The country, after all, the birth place of democracy. Despite their efforts, the Left in Greece has grown enormously and now rivals in size the combination of the right wing parties. What happens in Greece is going to have a ripple effect in other European countries particularly, Portugal, Italy, Spain, Ireland and Hungary.

Professor Rick Wolff:

• In Europe, we see the rich countries working really hard to punish the debtors.
• Not to ask what the conditions were that got them into debt, not to admit that for the years these people were in debt, they paid off handsomely to the creditors in high interest rates.
• Nor is there any examination of the conditions under which this happened so that there’s nothing being done to change those conditions.
• We are instead engaged in a vicious punishment of a small country, 11 million people. It’s attempt to terrorize the rest of Europe into thinking of not resisting.
• Those that are closest to Greece that are in trouble are the following: Portugal, Spain, Ireland, Italy, Hungary.
• How did it come that the Germans are doing so well and the Greeks so badly?
• The Europeans as a people had gone through 2 of the worst wars human beings had ever experienced, fought overwhelmingly on European soil.
• So they embarked on a unity starting in 1945 and came about in the 1990s. Took them a long time.
• In order for a unified Europe to be, a source of peace and prosperity, it’d have to balance out the rich and the poor.
• Who were the poor ones coming into the European Union. Greece and Portugal and Spain, and later eastern Europe.
• None of that was done under the unified Europe the equalizing process. The Germans the French and the Dutch were terrified of unity, they wanted the big market, but they were afraid that businessmen would move production from the high wage parts of Europe, Germany, Scandinavia, etc. to the poorer places where wages were lower.
• The extreme example is Greece. They lost out, they had to pay high European prices, they are stuck with the currency of Europe, they’re buying more German products, as their own industries disintegrate.
• German wealthy people took the profits they earned and lent them to the Greeks and the other southern Europeans. To blame the borrower and exonerate yourself as the lender is to not see the entire disaster.
• This is capitalism delivering a disaster to the majority of people.
• Greece is also a population coming out of shock and its very very angry.
• A socialist party that imposed austerity on the mass of the people has now got the people’s response, 8 percent support you.
• It’s hard to imagine that you’re not moving toward a fundamental civil conflict.
• Workers taking over the enterprises is number one. Number two there ought to be a nationalization of wealth in this society, so that its redistributed in a way that makes society fair and equitable.
• Socialism has its problems too, but we have a capitalism that is becoming intolerable for tens of millions of people.
• We have to recognize that not making a dramatic break is plunging people into an even greater degree of risk.
• The Iowa Farmer’s Militia issued a decree. The next judge that authorizes a foreclosure, we’re going to kill him.
• Roosevelt had to mobilize the Army and the National Guard to protect the judges.
• This is a re-run of an old movie and it never ends well.

Guest -  Richard D. Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst where he taught economics from 1973 to 2008. He is currently a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, New York City. He also teaches classes regularly at the Brecht Forum in Manhattan.
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Why I’m Suing Barack Obama: Chris Hedges

In March of this year, the latest version of the National Defense Authorization Act signed by President Barack Obama on Dec 31, 2011 will take effect.  As many listeners know, this act authorizes the military for the first time in more than 200 years to begin domestic policing. That means the military can indefinitely detain without trial any US citizen deemed to be a terrorist or an accessory to terrorism. You could then be shipped to a black site or offshore prison. We’ve discussed in past shows the vague premise of materially aiding terrorism or in this bill the terms “substantially supported,” “directly supported” or “associated forces.” We’re joined today by returning guest Chris Hedges to talk about his recent article Why I’m Suing Barack Obama which examines why the National Defense Authorization Act was passed.

Chris Hedges:

• It turns over almost 200 years of legal precedence so that the military is allowed to engage in domestic policing.
• Diane Feinstein had proposed that US citizens be exempt from this piece of legislation both the Obama Whitehouse and the Democratic Party rejected that.
• Obama issued a signing statement saying this will not be used against American citizens.
• That fact is that it can be legally used against American citizens.
• There was an opportunity to protect American citizens and due process, the chose not to do that.
• It expands this endless war on terror.
• There are all sorts of nebulous terms such as associated forces, substantially supported.
• When you look at the criteria by which Americans can be investigated by our security and surveillance state, its amorphous and frightening.
• People who have lost fingers on a hand, people who hoard more than 7 days of food in their house, water proof ammunition. I come from rural parts of Maine, that’s probably most of my family.
• Its a very short step to adding the obstructionist tactics to the Occupy Movement.
• The very agencies that are being pulled into domestic policing, especially the Pentagon, didn’t push for the bill.
• They approached me and said they needed a credible plaintiff, because I had been the Middle East Bureau Chief for the New York Times.
• I spent considerable time with both individuals and organizations that are considered by the US State Department to be either terrorists or terrorist groups.
• I’m trying to be proactive, I’m trying to fight it while we can still fight it. The reason we filed in the Southern District Court is because they have a fairly good record of at least being open to issues of civil liberties.

Guest – Chris Hedges, American journalist, author, and war correspondent, specializing in American and Middle Eastern politics and societies. His most recent book is ‘Death of the Liberal Class (2010). Hedges is also known as the best-selling author of War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.

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Immokalee Workers: Trader Joe’s Victory, Campaign Turns To Publix Supermarkets

Earlier this month, Trader Joe’s and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) announced they have signed an agreement that will formalize the ways in which Trader Joe’s will work with the CIW and Florida tomato growers to support the CIW’s Fair Food Program.  The efforts to push the farm worker living standards above slave labor is gathering momentum in Florida. Now efforts turn to Publix supermarkets. The 28 billion dollar supermarket giant has refused to pay a single penny more to help end farm worker poverty.  The Fair Food Program campaign has shifted its focus onto Publix and we get an update from Jake Ratner and CIW member Elbin Perez.

Elbin Perez:

• We finally won with Trader Joe’s and its extremely important for us.
• One of the main tactics we use is protest. We were planning an enormous protest the day Trader Joe’s opened their first Florida store about 30 miles from Immokalee in Naples.
• With that pressure, the day before they opened the store, they signed an agreement with us.
• Historically some received some poverty wages there are no rights in the fields and workers have had no voice in the work place. What are rights without enforcement.
• Workers are now seeing an increase in their paychecks in the form of a bonus that they are receiving from companies like Trader Joe’s.
• Currently we’re also asking Publix to do the same thing and to sign on to the Fair Food Agreement.
• What we’re calling for is a fast. A fast to begin outside of the Publix headquarters which is located in Lakeland Florida. There refusal to participate in these agreements will result in more hunger from more workers.

Guest – Elbin Perez, Coalition of Immokalee Workers member.

Translator:  Jake Ratner -son of co-host Michael Ratner. Jake graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. He’s traveled and studied in Cuba and Bolivia, South America. He now works with the Coalition of the Immokalee Workers.