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

Updates:

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

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Tariq Ali: Turning Points in the History of Imperialism

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

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

Tariq Ali:

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

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

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National Lawyers Guild 75 Years

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

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

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

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

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Law and Disorder Radio December 24, 2012 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

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

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Political Prisoner Lynne Stewart - December 2012 Update

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

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

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

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

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Michael Ratner Speech On Bradley Manning in Washington DC.

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

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Law and Disorder December 10, 2012 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Michael Ratner: Attends Bradley Manning Hearing
• Psychiatrist Testimony: Manning Not A Suicide Threat
• Rumsfeld Techniques:  Stripping, Lights 24 Hours, Sleep Disruption, Solitary
• Manning Testifies About Torture; Was it Aimed at Turning Him on Assange with Michael Ratner
• First Presentation by David Coombs –Manning Attorney with Michael Ratner
• Michael Ratner Discusses Jeremy Hammond Case On  “Hactavist Entrapment” RT TV
• Michael Ratner: Manning Describes Cruel and Unusual Punishment; Offers Plea Deal
• Daniel Ellsberg, Michael Ratner and Jessalyn Radack Discuss Bradley Manning Trial: HuffPost

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Facing The U.S. Prison Problem 2.3 Million Strong

As many listeners may know the United States has incarcerated more people than any other country in the world, and also within the history of humanity. The newly published book titled Facing The U.S. Prison Problem 2.3 Million Strong by Shawn Griffith gives the reader a rare perspective from an ex convict who served a 20 year sentence in some of the harshest conditions. These include being confined to a small cement cell in the late Florida summer without sheets, laying in pools of sweat on a plastic covered mattress. Vindictive prison guards and case workers in the criminal justice system had made life nearly unbearable for Shawn Griffith.  His book hopes to inspire movement building among the families of prisoners to develop a non-profit corporation called the Prisoner Family Union.

Shawn Griffith:

• As a youngster, it was a very difficult childhood.
• My parents were very religious, there was a lot of alcohol abuse.
• Early on I went on a truth seeking thing. I also became very rebellious at a young age.
• At 16, I met these people who were crack cocaine addicts. They were the only place I could find to stay off the street. They introduced me to the drug, which I had no knowledge of, how addictive it was.
• Then they told me I had to help them support their habit. They started training me, taking me to homes showing me how to burglarize them, steal cars, a number of things to support our habits.
• When I committed an armed robbery for 100.00 ended up with a 24 year sentenced in which I did 20 years.
• I knew that I had some emotional problems, I started studying psychology for about 4 years. By the age of 23, I attempted to escape initially.
• In Chapter 1, where I explain in detail, some of the sentencing laws that were passed in Florida, those same laws that were passed show decreases in crime rate before the laws were instituted.
• Inmates and their families are by majority below the poverty line. They don’t have a lot of resources to fight back.
• These large groups that influence the correctional system, they are unionized.
• Speakoutpublishing.com

Guest – Shawn Griffith, founder of Speak Out Publishing and  has been an institutional teacher of adult basic education for the past sixteen years. He has received many teaching and writing awards from professors and others with whom he has worked, as recently as 2011.  He is author of the recently published book Facing The U.S. Prison Problem 2.3 Million Strong

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Professor Francis Boyle: Palestine Observer Status

Now that Palestine has been voted in as a new non member state status within the United Nations,  Palestinian leaders can join the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court and challenge Israel’s violations of international law. We talk with Professor Francis Boyle, the leading expert in international about his role as a Palestine observer. In his book Palestine, Palestinians and International Law, Professor Boyle outlines 6 critical points, among them are:

1. “Palestine can join the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court and file a Complaint with the ICC against the illegal settlements and settlers, who are committing war crimes;

2. “Palestine can join the Statute for the International Court of Justice, sue Israel at the World Court, and break the illegal siege of Gaza;

3. “Palestine can join the Law of the Sea Convention and get its fair share of the enormous gas fields lying off the coast of Gaza, thus becoming economically self-sufficient;

4. “Palestine can become a High Contracting Party to the Four Geneva Conventions [this deals with the laws of war];

5. “Palestine can join the International Civil Aviation Organization and gain sovereign, legal control over its own airspace;

6. “Palestine can join the International Telecommunications Union and gain sovereign legal control over its own airwaves, phone lines, bandwidths.”

Professor Boyle is the author of many books including Palestine, Palestinians and International Law, The Palestinian Right of Return Under International Law, and United Ireland, Human Rights and International Law.

Professor Francis Boyle:

• The negotiations between Israelis and the Palestinians broke off because Israel continued to build settlements. The Palestinians took the position that well, we’re negotiating over a pizza while you eat it.
• I went back with them with a proposal longstanding with President Arafat, that we apply for membership in the United Nations organization.
• That was approved by the PLO executive committee. The Obama Administration bottled the application up in the UN Security Council.
• The mainstream news media has it wrong, Obama can exercise over their admission if they want to, but under the Uniting For Peace Procedure, they can turn it over to the General Assembly where Palestine can be admitted as a full fledged state by a 2/3 vote.
• They took an intermediate step last Spring, the PLO executive committee that serves as the provisional government for the state of Palestine created by the 1988 Declaration of Independence, voted to apply for UN observer status.
• Look at what Switzerland did from the founding of the United Nations to about 10 years ago as a UN observer state. Palestine can now if it wishes join pretty much every international organization in the world and treaties.
• They can simply use the Swiss model, join the International Criminal Court, join the International Court of Justice, join the Law of the Sea convention, join the International Civic Aviation Convention.
• We already filed a complaint with the ICC after Operation Cast Lead.
• If you follow the Israeli press they’re deathly afraid of prosecution by the ICC.
• The step we saw last week, took two years in the making. The Palestinians had to go all over the world to line up that support.
• It’s been my advice, we go after the settlements now – what they do is up to them (PLO)
• The second legal step is to sue Israel at the International Court of Justice at the Hague. The so called World Court of the United Nations system.
• I’ve offered to do that work for them and try to break that genocidal siege of Gaza.
• You or I aren’t going to decide this.
• We have to stand back and support the Palestinians and let them decide what they’re going to do.

Guest – Professor Francis Boyle, leading American expert in international law. He was responsible for drafting the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, the American implementing legislation for the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. He served on the Board of Directors of Amnesty International (1988-1992), and represented Bosnia-Herzegovina at the World Court. He served as legal adviser to the Palestinian Delegation to the Middle East peace negotiations from 1991 to 1993.

In 2007, he delivered the Bertrand Russell Peace Lectures. Professor Boyle teaches international law at the University of Illinois, Champaign and is author of, inter alia, The Future of International Law and American Foreign Policy, Foundations of World Order, The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence, Palestine, Palestinians and International Law, Destroying World Order, Biowarfare and Terrorism, Tackling America’s Toughest Problems, and The Tamil Genocide by Sri Lanka.  He holds a Doctor of Law Magna Cum Laude as well as a Ph.D. in Political Science, both from Harvard University.

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

Michael Ratner and Michael Smith discuss Jeremy Hammond Court Case

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jim Douglass:

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

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

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

Updates:

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

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National Lawyers Guild 75 Years

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

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

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

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

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Law and Disorder October 29, 2012 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Supreme Court Decision on Qualified Immunity: Dick Cheney
• NYPD Turned Young Man Into Informant: Mosque Crawler

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Torture and Impunity:  The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation

It’s an undisputed fact: both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations actively engaged in various methods of torture, and have done so with impunity. Despite initial public outrage at graphic images from the bowels of Abu Graib and Guantanamo prisons, government-sponsored torture has, on one level, come to be accepted as integral in the several perpetual wars waged by the United States. References to torture are now commonplace, sprinkled throughout the mainstream media and in popular culture references. Even discussion of different forms of torture has, in ways, become abstract.

We’ve reported, for example, that Cornell University Medical Center scientists have deemed so-called “forced standing” the most devastating mode of torture. Standing motionless for hours can shut down the kidneys, cause hallucinations and wreak much more damage.

And we’ve looked at numerous cases in which the perpetrators of US-sponsored terror have gone unpunished. In one case, while Italy’s high court upheld sentences of 23 CIA operatives convicted of kidnapping a Muslim cleric under the US program of “extraordinary rendition, more than 10 years later, the commanders who authorized the torture yet to face charges.  This country’s practice of torture have become virtually sanitized, and in the process, does lasting damage to America’s moral authority as a world leader.

Professor Al McCoy:

• In the 1950s, the human mind was like the last continent to be discovered.
• People in Washington, the CIA were concerned that Russia was capable of programming people to do things against their will.
• Initially defensively and very quickly offensively the CIA led the US intelligence community, the British and Canadians on a massive search that lasted 12 years for sophisticated mind control techniques.
• It went through an exotic phase where they explored hypnosis and very famously almost notoriously drugs, that led to dead ends.
• They outsourced the mundane research to top ranking cognitive scientists. This produced two breakthroughs.
• One is sensory deprivation, second is stress positions.
• These two techniques self afflicted pain and sensory disorientation were combined in the CIA’s counter intelligence and interrogation manual in 1963.
• It was disseminated withing the US intelligence community and then through a bunch of CIA blinds then to international police training to US allies worldwide  . . .leading to a global proliferation of torture on our side of the Iron Curtain.
• The UN Convention barred with equal weight the physical and psychological torture.
• We illegally took people and seized them, transferred them to allied nations where they would be likely to be subjected to torture.
• One of the favorite blinds of the CIA was the office of Naval Research.
• President Bush authorized the CIA to open up its own prisons, lease its own fleet of executive jets in order to move them around from prison to prison.
• Torture became normalized for the American people. Torture became omnipresent on screens large and small across America.
• The show 24 became enormously popular with 15-20 million views per episode. We’ve had torture normalized within the mass media. 
• This process of impunity is really a transnational process.
• Rewriting history so that the fabric of the past is radically reconstructed to justify the use of torture.

Guest – Al McCoy,  Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to talk about his new book “Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation.” Al is also the author of “A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror” and “The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade.  The first edition of his book, published in 1972 as The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, sparked controversy, but is now regarded as the “classic work” about Asian drug trafficking.

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ACLU: When Boston Police Spy on Free Speech, Democracy Suffers

The Massachusetts National Lawyers Guild, along with the ACLU, recently issued a report detailing how the Boston Police Department has worked with its local fusion center to spy on lawful activities. The Center was established in the wake of 9/11 to more effectively share “terrorism-related” information among federal, state and local law enforcement agencies as well as with private entities.

Public police records, including documents and videotapes, obtained with a court order reveal a pattern of police surveillance of peaceful demonstrations, coupled with the practice of interrogating activists and labeling peaceful groups as extremists. Local groups and activists have long suspected that spying was taking place.

Urszula Masny-Latos:

• We know that various law enforcement agencies monitor peaceful activists.
• Even though COINTELL PRO ended in the 70s, we know that law enforcement agencies have continued spying.
• In 2009 when Israel attacked Gaza, there were many protests in Boston, one of those protests happened at the Israeli consulate.
• Four activists were arrested and the NLG represented them and eventually charges were dropped.
• While in jail the activists were interviewed by plain clothes officers.
• One of the activists was threatened because she refused to answer questions.
• Four BRIC officers interviewed those activists. BRIC (Boston Regional Intelligence Center) is one of two fusion centers we have in Massachussetts.
• We know that BRIC is not supposed to gather information or evidence from activists or anyone else.
• The Boston Police Department says BRIC officers only said they were available to talk with.
• Not only in Boston, people have to be very aware of it, fusion centers have been put in all states.

Guest – Urszula Masny-Latos, Executive Director of the Massachusetts National Lawyers Guild since 1996. She grew up in Poland, where she was active in the student movement. After moving to the U.S., she attended University of California at Santa Cruz where she majored in sociology and legal studies; her graduate work in arts management was done at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Prior to her Guild employment, Urszula organized arts festivals, managed a theater company, and worked as an organizer for a union in Boston.

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Law and Disorder October 22, 2012 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Michael Ratner: Military Commissions – The 911 Five
• Hamden Case Goes To The Court of Appeals In DC
• Former Guantanamo Detainee David Hicks Could Get Proceeds From His Book
• CCR: Julian Assange Jeopardy – NDAA

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Russell Tribunal on Palestine Findings

We follow up on the findings of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine. As many listeners may know, the tribunal was created in response to the international community’s inaction regarding Israel’s recognized violations of international law.  Jury and speakers included Angela Davis, Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappe, Peter Hansen, Diana Buttu, Phyllis Bennis, Katie Gallagher and Russell Means.

Attorney Noura Erakat:

• Each of the sessions focuses on a different component of the problems that has led to a failure to achieve a solution to what some may describe as the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
• More specifically to achieve Palestinian self-determination and equality with their Jewish-Israeli counterparts.
• The first tribunal explored the EU complicity. A condition for Israel’s acceptance into the United Nations was its acceptance of returning refugees to their homes per UN Resolution 194.
• Since the 1967 war they’ve been supported by unequivocal US financial, military and diplomatic support.
• Corporate complicity:  The corporations that are involved in funding the Israeli military arsenal and its construction arsenal to expand its colonial settlements in the Occupied Territory as well as building a wall deemed illegal by the National Court of Justice.
• This fourth and final session brought everything back to the U.S.
• To New York specifically because the U.S. has proven to be the primary obstacle in resolving this conflict.
• Consider first that Israel has received 115 billion dollars in aid since World War 2. Making it the highest recipient of US foreign aid.
• In addition to that Israel receives approximately 3 billion dollars a year. It receives money without any review in US law, specifically the Arms Export Control Act which conditions that all US aid to foreign countries must be used to further human rights or in self defense.
• The US is shielding Israeli responsibility in the UN Security Council
• The resolution process is stonewalled internationally.
• One of the things that we’d love to do is remove the veto power from the five permanent members of the UN Security Council.
• BDS Movement: 2011 – Dock Workers refused unload Israeli products from a boat.
• EndtheOccupation.org

Guest – Attorney Noura Erakat, human rights attorney and activist. She is currently a Abraham L. Freedman Teaching Fellow at Temple University, Beasley School of Law and the U.S. based Legal Advocacy Consultant for the Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Refugee and Residency Rights. She has taught international human rights law in the Middle East at Georgetown University since Spring 2009. Noura also has helped seed BDS campaigns as a national grassroots organizer with the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation.

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Russell Tribunal on Palestine: Ilan Pappé Speech

The final session of the Tribunal focused on the responsibility of the United States of America and the United Nations regarding the Israeli breaches of international law towards Palestine and Palestinians. There is now a situation in which Israel has achieved a status of immunity and impunity, facilitated by the US, despite its complete disregard for the norms and standards of international law.

Speaker – Ilan Pappé, an Israeli historian and activist. He is currently a professor with the College of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of Exeter in the UK, director of the university’s European Centre for Palestine Studies, and co-director of the Exeter Centre for Ethno-Political Studies. He is the author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006), The Modern Middle East (2005), A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples (2003), and Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (1988)

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Law and Disorder October 15, 2012 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Chipotle Signs Fair Food Agreement With Coalition of Immokalee Workers
• Michael Ratner: Supreme Court Rules On Telecom Immunity
• Bush Politicians Accepted Donations From Terrorist Group M.E.K.
• Veterans and Allies Arrested in New York as Afghanistan War Enters Year 12

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Anti-Drone Action: Code Pink Delegation to Pakistan

Two weeks ago a delegation of 40 members from Code Pink traveled to Pakistan protesting US drone strikes. The group is also visiting families of those injured or killed by drones and to encourage relations amid the broader Muslim world. The delegation is made up of students, doctors, veterans, retirees and artists.  Recently the group set out on a massive anti-drone march in Waziristan where drones have killed many civilians. In one statistic, within two years more than 90 drone attacks have killed 5000 innocent Pakistanis. We get an update on the delegation from Code Pink member Rae Abileah.  Rae is the co-director of CODEPINK Women for Peace.  She is also a founding member of Young Jewish Proud, the youth wing of Jewish Voice for Peace. Rae has visited Israel and the West Bank several times, and has traveled to Gaza and Iran.

Rae Abileah:

• I’m the co-director of Code Pink nationally. Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Code Pink has been doing work on drones for the past year and a half. She recently wrote a book Drone Warfare: Killing By Remote Control
• She partnered with PTI, the Pakistani Political Party and their leader and a well known lawyer for drone victims.
• They got this delegation rolling and ended up with 35 Americans in Islamabad setting out on this caravan to march to a place where really in the past decade no Americans have gone to.
• They put their bodies on the line and joined these Pakistanis going on this march.
• People in Waziristan are living with drones overhead, they don’t know when the next attack is going to come.
• It started out as a car caravan with more than 100 vehicles, they drove for hours.
• The goal was to get to south Waziristan the epicenter of the US drone attacks.
• President Obama has declared all young men in Pakistan to be potential militants. It gives the green light to shooting civilians.
• These soldiers are sitting there all day looking at the screen as if its a video game.
• These military pilots are going to work all day, pressing buttons that kill people thousands of miles away and going home to their dinner table in Vegas at night.
• It’s a primary tool for attracting militants to join the Taliban.
• We’re continuing to build grassroots support to oppose Obama’s drone program.
• During the delegation we were actually able to deliver thousands of signatures collected on a stop drones petition directly to Obama at one of his fundraisers in San Francisco.
• In Congress there’s also a Drones Caucaus, the leaders such as Bill Buck McKeon are taking hundreds of thousands of dollars from drone manufacturers.
• Soda Stream is manufactured in an illegal settlement in the occupied territories.

Guest – Rae Abileah,  co-director of CODEPINK Women for Peace and is a co-organizer of Occupy AIPAC, Stolen Beauty boycott of Ahava cosmetics, and Women Occupy. Rae is a contributing author to 10 Excellent Reasons Not to Join the Military; Sisters Singing: Incantations, Blessings, Chants, Prayers, Art and Sacred Stories by Women; Beyond Tribal Loyalties: Stories of Jewish Peace Activists; and Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution.  She lives in San Francisco, CA.

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11 Years of War In Afghanistan

This month marks 11 years since the colonial war in Afghanistan was launched. Operation Enduring Freedom armed forces include the United States, the UK, Australia and the Afghan United Front.  We’ve talked with past guests about how multi-national corporations are involved to integrate Afghanistan into the global system by building schools and infrastructure. We’ve also talked about the strategic energy alliances forming between Russia and China on one side and how three Caspian Sea oil companies continue to lock the US in to the war.

Phyllis Bennis:

• This already the longest war in history.
• We hear from President Obama that within the year 2014 combat troops will be withdrawn.
• We’re hearing new calls from different forces including most recently the Secretary General of NATO indicating there was a possibility that NATO may pull out its troops earlier then the end of 2014 because of the insider killings.
• The only figures we have began in 2007, they began counting some confirmed deaths. About 13 thousand Afghan civilians only since 2007.
• The US is there in two ways, the US has a commander happens to be the NATO commander. Other US troops are there separately. The US has almost 70 thousand troops there now, NATO has 40 thousand other troops and there are about 90 thousand US paid contractors.
• US troop casualties: Even that now is unclear.
• Last week a number of press outlets reported the 2000th US military casualty.
• Young people in Afghanistan join the military for the same reasons young people in the United States join the military, because they’re desperate for a job.
• Remember a couple of weeks ago 9 Afghan women and little girls were killed gathering wood before dawn to build a fire, to make breakfast.
• The Pentagon said, oh sorry, and somehow think that its going to make it ok.
• Add to that the lack of cultural sensitivity, the lack of language training so there’s no sense from soldiers on the ground that they have any idea what this culture is about, who these people are.
• Afghanistan is about 25 million people, the vast majority don’t live in the cities. They live in tiny hamlets and small towns, small villages, very scattered.
• What we’re seeing is an expansion of the global war on terror.
• There is an anti-war movement it’s just not as visible as we’ve seen in earlier times.
• That’s the hardest part of our work, its not building an anti-war movement, its making our government take into account the opinions of not only a movement but the American people.
• Understanding the Palestinian Israeli Conflict.

Guest -  Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute For Policy Studies.  She is also a fellow of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. She has been a writer, analyst, and activist on Middle East and UN issues for many years. In 2001 she helped found and remains on the steering committee of the U.S. Campaign to End Israeli Occupation. She works closely with the United for Peace and Justice anti-war coalition, co-chairs the UN-based International Coordinating Network on Palestine, and since 2002 has played an active role in the growing global peace movement. She continues to serve as an adviser to several top UN officials on Middle East and UN democratization issues.
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Law and Disorder September 24, 2012 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Michael Ratner: Judge Basically Says NDAA is Lawless
• War Crimes and Truth Tellers: Baltasar Garzón and Julian Assange – by Michael Ratner

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The Russell Tribunal on Palestine

The Russell Tribunal on Palestine is holding its fourth and last session in New York City, October 6 through the 7th. This public session focuses on the denial of the Palestinian right to self determination and the role of the US and the United Nations. This tribunal will draw attention to the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestinian Territories and how Israel continues to act with impunity under international law. There will be many speakers at this event including Ilan Pappe, Noam Chomsky, and Cynthia McKinney. We talk today with Pulitzer Prize winning novelist and poet Alice Walker and Dennis Banks, a Native American leader, activist and author. Both of whom will be speaking at the tribunal.

Alice Walker:

• Citizens around the world are very concerned that nothing seems to move forward between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
• The traditional one (tribunal) that came into being because of Vietnam and the American war against the Vietnamese people.
• I was in Gaza shortly after the bombing and that would’ve made anyone want to have a tribunal because it was so completely devastating and horrible.
• The Israelis just sailed along as if everything was ok to kill 1400 people and 300 children, destroy the water system. We don’t have a lot of power in terms of making things change, but I think consciousness is our only hope in any case.
• The UN has been relatively helpless against the US and Israeli veto of their resolution. We want to look at – Why is that?
• How is it that we can’t get any movement in the UN toward justice for the Palestinian people?
• I think the United States and Israel are in agreement they want that territory.
• We have to remember this is an entrenched long standing pattern of how you treat indigenous people when you want what they have.
• In this country what they did is destroy the Indians.
• The Palestinians are just seen as obstructions to this grand vision. When people say real politic, they mean no matter what they have to do to implement their plan. Their plan whatever it is is supreme.
• They just gonna do that if it takes 100 years, 200 years.
• I remember sitting in Gaza after the bombing. The thing that got me was they bombed this school, not only a school but it was the American school.
• We must as human beings gather together. Gather ourselves and address these issues of destruction and they’re coming faster and faster.

Guest – Alice Walker, American author, poet, and activist. She has written both fiction and essays about race and gender. She is best known for the critically acclaimed novel The Color Purple (1982) for which she won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
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Dennis Banks:

• It seems that they’re taking a page out of Native American history and using it over there.
• You look at the burning of the sweat lodges. The whole experiment to take Native people away their parents and destroy them, put them in foster homes, boarding schools, military boarding schools.
• And keep them there for five, six, seven years. In my case it was six years before I was even allowed to see my parents.
• The whole thing is all over again.
• What can I say to warn people, to warn people about the future?
• I know they’re gonna dispossess the land from the Palestinians.
• I will not forgive the government for what it did not only to me but to thousands of thousands of young Native children.
• I’m speaking against the American people, I’m speaking against the policies of the American government.

Guest - Dennis Banks, a Native American leader, teacher, lecturer, activist and author, is an Anishinaabe born on Leech Lake Indian Reservation in northern Minnesota. Banks is also known as Nowa Cumig (Naawakamig in the Double Vowel System). His name in the Ojibwe language means “In the Center of the Ground.” He has been a longtime leader of the American Indian Movement, which he cofounded in 1968 with Native Americans in Minneapolis.

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Chicago Teacher Strike

The Chicago teachers, with deep community support, have won a good victory last week  in their ten day strike.  their victory, while not complete, defends one of the great gains of the American people, public education, against the neo-liberal goal of supplanting it with private for profit  non union charter schools.  The teachers strike was about more than wages and hours.  They fought against the dismantling of public schools in favor of for profit charter schools, a project that both the democrats from Obama down to Chicago Mayor Rahm Emannuel, champion.

The teachers demanded smaller class size, school aids, school supplies, and an end to the use of standardized tests. The new leadership of the teachers union gained its strength by being democratic and being rooted in the community, largely Black and Latino,  and allied with the families of the students they teach.  They began organizing in defense of their students 3 years ago.

Debby Pope:

• I started out the week as a strike coordinator. We went out and worked with 8 to 12 schools in a particular area on the picket lines and then someone else moved in to a communications role.
• Right now I’m working in a grievance department working on contract enforcement issues.
• I think the fundamental issue is the defense of public education and the defense of teaching as a profession.
• Let me make it clear that we were not legally able to bargain on some of the issues I talk about due to restrictive labor laws in Illinois.
• They have made over a hundred charter schools in Chicago in the last decade or so.
• They’ve eliminated bargaining in those schools, they’ve eliminated Chicago Teacher’s Union membership, they’ve eliminated the decent working conditions and the rights that we’ve fought for.
• They’ve given the billionaire business men a huge control over their schools.
• They have systematically defunded neighborhood schools.
• They allowed our buildings to crumble. They’ve given us computers that are decades old.
• This is an example of how they’ve been starving the public schools and then blaming us when the schools don’t work.
• We went out to the schools. We started contract action committees in all the schools. We helped teachers to understand what their rights were.
• We resumed our place as one of the largest unions in Illinois as a part of the labor movement.
• Is a teacher’s effectiveness related to his or her class size?
• Can a teacher teach 40 kids as well he or she can teach 25 kids?
• We want a better school day with a richer curriculum with art, music and drama.
• The enemies of poor children, the enemies of public education, the enemies of giving every child an opportunity are within both parties.
• We put ourselves in a position where the schools are failing.
• We blamed the schools for failing when in fact as a society set them up to fail.
• Then of course the billionaire rescuers . . . came in and said Oh my God look at what a mess the schools are. We have to privatize them, we have to charter them. We have to turn them into little business models.
• These people believe in factory schools.
• The next fight on the horizon is against school closings.

Guest – Debby Pope, member of the executive board Chicago Teachers Union and delegate. Debby Pope is a retired teacher and currently works on the CTU grievance board in contract dispute.

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