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Law and Disorder is a weekly independent civil liberties radio program airing on more than 150 stations and on Apple podcast. Law and Disorder provides timely legal perspectives on issues concerning civil liberties, privacy, right to dissent and practices of torture exercised by the US government and private corporations.
Law and Disorder April 21, 2025
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Radio Documentary – It Was Genocide: Armenian Survivor Stories
Around the world, April 24 marks the observance of the Armenian Genocide. On that day in 1915 the Interior Minister of the Ottoman Empire ordered the arrest and hangings of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople. It was the beginning of a systematic and well-documented plan to eliminate the Armenians, who were Christian, and who had been under Ottoman rule and treated as second class citizens since the 15th century.
The unspeakable and gruesome nature of the killings—beheadings of groups of babies, dismemberments, mass burnings, mass drownings, use of toxic gas, lethal injections of morphine or injections with the blood of typhoid fever patients—render oral histories particularly difficult for survivors of the victims.
Why did this happen? Despite being deemed inferior to Turkish Muslims, the Armenian community had attained a prestigious position in the Ottoman Empire and the central authorities there grew apprehensive of their power and longing for a homeland. The concerted plan of deportation and extermination was effected, in large part, because World War I demanded the involvement and concern of potential allied countries. As the writer Grigoris Balakian wrote, the war provided the Turkish government “their sole opportunity, one unprecedented” to exploit the chaos of war in order to carry out their extermination plan.
As Armenians escaped to several countries, including the United States, a number came to New Britain, Connecticut in 1892 to work in the factories of what was then known as the hardware capital of the world. By 1940 nearly 3,000 Armenians lived there in a tight-knit community.
Pope Frances calls it a duty not to forget “the senseless slaughter” of an estimated one and a half million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks from 1915 to 1923. “Concealing or denying evil is like allowing a wound to keep bleeding without bandaging it,” the Pope said just two weeks before the 100th anniversary of the systematic implementation of a plan to exterminate the Armenian race.
Special thanks to Jennie Garabedian, Arthur Sheverdian, Ruth Swisher, Harry Mazadoorian, and Roxie Maljanian. Produced and written by Heidi Boghosian and Geoff Brady.
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Investigating Armenian-American Debanking Trend
The greater Los Angeles area is home to the largest Armenian population outside of Armenia—estimated at over 200,000 people. For years, that community has faced instances of racism and discrimination, including a rise in anti-Armenian racism, known as “Armenophobia.”
In 2022, leaked audio recordings revealed derogatory remarks by Los Angeles City Council members about Armenians, reflecting underlying biases within political institutions.
Recently, the Armenian Bar Association has launched an investigation into alleged discriminatory practices by banks in the Los Angeles area, where Armenian-American individuals and businesses have reported abrupt and unexplained closures of their bank accounts. These closures raise alarms about potential ethnic or national origin-based profiling, particularly considering ongoing geopolitical tensions in the South Caucasus.
This troubling trend comes at a time when the U.S. government is considering a major financial arrangement with Azerbaijan. The Armenian Bar Association has issued a formal objection to a proposed $100 million loan or financial guarantee to Azerbaijan under the authority of the Export-Import Bank Act of 1945. The Bar Association argues that such financial support would not only contradict U.S. human rights values but could also embolden a regime with a well-documented history of aggression against Armenia and the indigenous Armenians of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh), many of whom have recently been displaced.
The Bar Association’s efforts reflect broader concerns about the security and civil rights of Armenian-Americans at home, as well as U.S. foreign policy decisions that may have far-reaching consequences abroad. arwc@armenianboard.org
Guest – Alex Hrag Bastian, a member of the ABA’s Board of Governors and Chair of its Armenian Rights Watch Committee.
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Law and Disorder April 14, 2025
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Oligarchs and Billionaires Reshape Economic-Political Landscape
We’re living at a time of profound changes in the institutions that previously governed our society. One hundred years ago V.I Lenin, the leader of the Russian Revolution, observed that sometimes nothing changes for decades and at other times decades-long changes occur within several days.
This is what is happening now in America as the old institutions, the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, the universities, the media, the government, including Congress, governmental agencies, the elite law firms, educational institutions and most recently long-standing tariff policy are being reconfigured as instruments of authoritarian rule.
More than 800 billionaires form the upper crust in America. Three people alone own as much as the entire bottom, half of the population. Democracy, the rule of the people, however aspirational, no longer prevails. We have become an oligarchy, a majority of our people ruled by a relative handful. Our institutions have rapidly changed to reflect this new reality.
We are governed by an amoral man who’s only interest is in power and money, which is another form of power.
Guest – Professor Henry A. Giroux, author of many books and articles, including most recently a piece in Counterpunch titled Abducting Bodies, Silencing Dissent : Mamoud Kailil and the Rise of State Terrorism. Professor Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies department and is the Pablo Frère, Distinguished Scholar in Creative Pedagogy. Henry Giroux has authored many books, most recently with Anthony DiMaggio, titled, Fascism on Trial: Education, and the Possibility of Democracy.
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Critical Media Update: War Made Invisible
With respect to the Israeli/U.S. war in Gaza, peace talks limp along; Israel has accelerated its war in Gaza and the West Bank; and recent remarks by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and president Donald Trump, make it clear that both countries intend, if they can do it, to ethnically cleanse all of the Palestinian people from Palestine, thereby bringing about the expected end result of their genocidal war on the Palestinian people.
Meanwhile here in the United States, President Trump has seized upon the claim of rampant anti-Semitism on our nation’s college and university campuses to deport non-U.S. citizen leaders in the movement on the campuses in support of the Palestinian side in the war, and to withhold tens of millions of dollars from the campuses until they eliminate the “anti-Semitic atmosphere on our campuses.” And, according to our guest today, press reporting in the mainstream media on the war has been less than clear and balanced.
Guest – Norman Solomon is the co-founder of RootsAction.org and Executive Director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, and is, in fact, the author or co-author, of 12 books, most touching on today’s topic in either close or tangential ways. His books include War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. The paperback edition of his latest book, “War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine,” includes an afterword about the Gaza war.
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Law and Disorder April 7, 2025
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The Israeli genocide in Gaza continues without any end in sight, resulting in the slaughter of over 50,000 Palestinians, with over 113,000 wounded. Meanwhile, the United States is escalating its support for Israel. Donald Trump is sending obscene amounts of military aid to Israel to help fuel the extermination of the Palestinian people, while threatening to take over the Palestinian homeland and turn it into the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
But most Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the war in Gaza; support for Israel in the United States is at the lowest its been in 25 years and support for the Palestinians is up 6 points since last year. About 60% of Americans support a ceasefire in Gaza.
So the question is what can be done to restrain the US government from its costly, illegal, and inhumane support for Israel’s war in Gaza?
Taxpayers Against Genocide – TAG- has an answer. TAG is a grassroots mass movement comprising of over 1,000 U.S. taxpayers. Countless federal tax payers repeatedly called, emailed, petitioned and peacefully protested their congressional representatives and U.S. government officials to stop using their tax dollars to fund what had become clear was a genocide in Gaza. After almost one year of having their congress members refuse to meet or consider their constituents’ pleas, a group of Northern California taxpayers formed TAG in fall 2024 and filed a federal class action lawsuit arguing that it is illegal to use tax dollars for genocide. But the case was dismissed on February 10th, 2025.
Undaunted, TAG is not giving up. On February 19th TAG launched a National Call to Action. With the support of National Lawyers Guild attorneys, on the day this program will be broadcast, April 7th, 2025, TAG will submit a comprehensive report to the United Nations Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review (UPR) and on April 30th, TAG will file an official complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights
Guest – Attorney Margaret DeMatteo is a movement lawyer and former class member of Donnelly et al. v. Thompson, et al. , a class action brought by the grassroots Northern CA group Taxpayers Against Genocide. She is currently working on an imminent submission to the United Nations Human Right Council’s Universal Periodic Review of the United States, based on its complicity in the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Guest – Attorney Huwaida Arraf is a Palestinian American attorney and human rights activist. She is a co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement, supporting Palestinian popular resistance on the ground in the occupied Palestinian territory and also an organizer with the Freedom Flotilla to break the siege on Gaza. In the US, she practices civil rights law and is an active member of the National Lawyers Guild.
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The Dangerous Militarization of AI and the Profiteering Behind It
A recent exposé by investigative journalist Peter Byrne, titled One Ring to Rule them All, and published by Project Censored, reveals the unsettling extent of Silicon Valley’s deepening ties to the military-industrial complex. Byrne traces the rise of Palantir Technologies—founded with seed money from the CIA and ominously named after the all-seeing stone in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Today, Palantir stands as a $200-billion powerhouse, fueling AI-driven military operations across the globe.
Byrne’s investigation uncovers how Palantir and its sister company Anduril Industries, has built an AI weapons consortium that appears to skirt antitrust laws, monopolize Pentagon contracts, accelerate the militarization of artificial intelligence, and bypass essential democratic oversight. His reporting lifts the curtain on the hidden architecture of autonomous weapons systems and exposes Silicon Valley’s quiet but profound military takeover. At the heart of the story is a troubling shift: AI systems that could soon make life-and-death decisions without human intervention.
Byrne also draws a sobering parallel between today’s AI-fueled war economy and the era of the Gilded Age robber barons. But this time, the stakes are even higher—not only economic inequality, but also the global proliferation of algorithmic warfare. His work raises a critical question: Are we witnessing the construction of a 21st-century “Ring of Power” capable of dominating both markets and militaries?
Guest – Peter Byrne is a veteran investigative reporter with decades of experience uncovering the dark intersections of Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and the ever-expanding military-industrial complex. His work, frequently featured by Project Censored and other independent outlets, has consistently exposed the hidden mechanisms behind surveillance, privatization, and unchecked corporate power.