CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Human Rights, Truth to Power, U.S. Militarism, Violations of U.S. and International Law
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JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass
President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, 58 years ago. Assassination is a political murder. His murder was a turning point in American history. The first question needed to be ask in a murder case is why. The second question is who.
Today we discuss this catastrophic turn in American history with filmmaker Oliver Stone who directed his just released new documentary JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass. Stone uses evidence from the “Assassination Record Review Board“ to bolster our understanding that the assassination was not accomplished by a lone individual, Lee Harvey Oswald.
Kennedy was killed because he was pushing for the detente. He wanted to end the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union. He wanted to get American troops out of Vietnam and end its counterrevolutionary involvement.
President Kennedy wanted to re-establish relations with Castro and revolutionary Cuba. He wanted to support the independent former colonial countries like the Congo. It was for this that he was murdered and the course of American history was changed.
One of the first things the new president Lyndon Johnson did – he had been Kennedy‘s Vice President – after he was installed, was to reverse Kennedy‘s order initiating the withdrawal of American troops in Vietnam. Instead Johnson escalated the war, eventually putting a half million American soldiers on the ground in that tragically ravished country, killing some 3 million Vietnamese people, including 53,000 American soldiers.
Guest – Oliver Stone, filmmaker, author, his 1991 movie “JFK“ was nominated for four Oscars, winning two of them. His new documentary JFK Revisited : Through the Looking Glass has been pretty much ignored by the mainstream American media.
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The Trend Toward Water And Waste Privatization
By 2025, two-thirds of the world’s population will be out of fresh drinking water, according to the World Bank. Fortune magazine recently called water “the oil of the 21st century.”
This situation has private companies flocking to privatize water delivery in areas parched for water. Rather than helping to protect existing water supplies, increase conservation measures, stem pollution, and assist needy populations, pressure mounts to commodify and profit from this natural resource and most fundamental human need.
Similarly, the National Waste and Recycling Association supports privatizing waste and recycling collection services at all levels of government. And Americans produce a lot of waste: on average at least 4.4 pounds each a day, or at least 728,000 tons total per day.
Private water companies have existed in the US for more than 200 years; today there are thousands serving more than 73 million Americans. And as of 1995, half of the nation used private waste management companies. But that’s one of the most dangerous jobs in the nation, with often lax job safety: in NYC private sanitation trucks killed 7 people in 2017; city municipal sanitation trucks haven’t killed anyone since 2014.
Privatization often brings rate hikes, decreased water quality, less reliability, and poor customer service. The average US community with privatized water paid 59 percent more than those with government supplied water. New Jersey has more private water systems than most states, and they charged 79% more. In Illinois, they charged 95% more.
Private water corporations have also been implicated in environmental disasters. The French multinational, Veolia, issued a report in 2015 certifying that Flint, Michigan’s water system met EPA standards, but neglected to mention high lead concentrations.
Guest – Attorney Terry Lodge is from Toledo where he specializes in environmental and energy issues. He is associated with the nonprofit Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, which offers free and affordable legal services.
Guest – Lindsey Schromen-Wawrin an attorney at Shearwater Law PLLC also affiliated with Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund since 2013, He serves as a city councilor in Port Angeles, Washington, and is a member of the International Parliamentary Alliance for the Recognition of Ecocide.
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Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Human Rights, Iraq War, Truth to Power, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister, Whistleblowers
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Recalling San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin
Chesa Boudin has been serving San Franciscans as their district attorney for nearly 2 years. He is a leading progressive in what has been called the progressive prosecutors’ movement. Other progressive district attorneys in that small cohort are George Gascon in Los Angeles and Larry Krasner in Philadelphia.
In Berger v. United States, the Supreme Court said that the duty of a prosecutor “in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done.” Yet all too many prosecutors are more concerned with winning cases than doing justice, which includes the protection of constitutional rights.
Chesa campaigned by proposing solutions to the disaster of mass incarceration, the civil rights issue of our time. He introduced policies of diversion and no cash bail. He put fewer juveniles behind bars. He opposed the death penalty and focused his efforts on helping victims of crimes. Chesa Boudin said that the recall effort is about criminal justice reform, that it is “a question of whether we are going to go forward and continue to implement data driven policies that center on crime victims, that invest in communities impacted by crime, and that use empirical evidence to address root causes of crime in our communities or if we are going to go back to the failed policies of Reagan and Trump.”
Chesa’s efforts are now being challenged. A claimed 83,000 signatures were gathered in San Francisco by paid workers to put a recall Boudin question on the San Francisco county ballot in June. Even Donald Trump has injected himself into the campaign in what has become a national well-funded Republican putsch.
ChesaBoudin.org
Fear mongering is employed to create a false conception that crime in San Francisco is rising. Today, my co-host Marjorie Cohn, a former criminal defense attorney and law professor, and I talk with Chesa Boudin about his philosophy and successful efforts as a progressive prosecutor.
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Decision To Not Extradite Julian Assange To U.S. Reversed
A devastating decision, the worst decision against free journalism in modern U.S. history came down on December 10th from a British appellate court against Julian Assange. It will abolish “National security“ journalism everywhere giving United States the power to reach across oceans and indict journalists and publishers who publish stories exposing and embarrassing the U.S. government. This is what Julian did.
The horrible but not unexpected decision reversed the decision of Vanessa Baraitser, the lower court judge who had refused a U.S. Government request to extradite Julian and send him to the Eastern District of Virginia where he will be put on trial for 17 counts under the 1917 Espionage Act. The charges stem from WikiLeaks’ 2010 revelations of U.S. war crimes. It is unlikely he could receive a fair trial in that most conservative district where most of the so-called War on Terror cases have been tried.
The lower court judge had ruled that the conditions of imprisonment in a U.S. prison are so egregious that Assange, who is in very frail mental health, would likely take his own life. He had already tried to do so in the wretched London Belmarsh prison where he is now being held in torturous solitary confinement.
When Baraitser’s decision came down, the United States was quick to offer so-called “assurances“ to the appellate court that Assange would not be sent to the maximum security prison in Florence, Colorado and would not be subjected to special administrative measures which would cut him off from human contact. It was these assurances on which the appellate court relied in overturning the lower court’s decision.
Julian Assange was a young computer genius, an Australian citizen, who figured out a way to receive information from whistle blowers and publish that truth telling material anonymously in order to protect them.
When he began publishing WikiLeaks, Assange won awards for his journalism. He exposed U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantánamo. He embarrassed the Democratic Party by showing how Hillary Clinton stole the nomination from Bernie Sanders.
When Mike Pompeo was Trump’s CIA director, he called WikiLeaks “a hostile non-state intelligence agency” and CIA officials suggested that Assange be kidnapped from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he had received political asylum, and assassinated.
It was to the United States that the British High Court had no hesitation in sending Julian. So can the U.S. government’s assurances be trusted? Probably not, as they have reneged on nearly identical assurances in the past.
Meanwhile Julian Assange sits in isolation in Belmarsh prison in failing physical and mental health. His lawyers will appeal the decision to the British Supreme Court. But in the meantime, the United States has Julian exactly where they want him in the upcoming months or years that an appeal would take.
U.S. smearing, persecution, and isolation of Julian Assange has been going on now for 10 years. The sordid story began a decade ago when the US Department of Defense took the position that Julian should be discredited and slandered. He was falsely blamed for sexual misconduct in Sweden involving two women who never wanted Julian targeted. But the United States was able to get a prosecutor who did. A warrant was sent from Sweden to England requesting that Julian be sent to Sweden for questioning.
Our own Michael Ratner was representing Julian at the time. In an attempt to avoid being sent to Sweden, which would have extradited Julian to the United States for trial under the Espionage Act, Julian was granted political asylum in the tiny apartment that serves as the Ecuadorian embassy in London. He remained there for seven years under the direct video surveillance 24 hours a day by the CIA
Then the U.S. bribed and bullied its way to reverse the grant of asylum after a U.S.-friendly president assumed the helm of the Ecuadorian government. The British police brutally extracted him from the embassy and put him in solitary confinement in the notorious London Belmarsh prison, where he has remained for nearly 3 years.
Then the Trump administration brought the Espionage Act charges against him. Biden had referred to Julian as “a high-tech terrorist,” and his administration continued Trump’s historically unprecedented pursuit of Assange.
AssangeDefense.org
Guest – Chris Hedges whose many books and brilliant journalism have caused him to be respected as a moral philosopher. He is a regular columnist for Scheerpost” and is host of the show On Contact. Chris’ most recent article on the decision to extradite Julian Assange.
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Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Racist Police Violence, Supreme Court, Violations of U.S. and International Law
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Presumed Guilty: How the Supreme Court Empowered the Police and Subverted Civil Rights
Erwin Chemerinksy is the Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law and Dean of the Berkeley Law School. He has also served on the faculties of USC Law School and Duke Law School, and he was the founding dean of the UC Irvine School of Law.
Dean Chemerinsky is a leading constitutional law scholar and teacher who has an uncommon ability to explain complex legal concepts so that non-lawyers can easily understand them. A study of legal publications between 2016 and 2020 found him to be the most frequently cited US legal scholar. He is the author of 14 books, including leading casebooks and treatises about constitutional law, criminal procedure, and federal jurisdiction. Dean Chemerinsky also handles legal cases, and has argued several times before the Supreme Court.
After a 2000 review of the Rampart scandal about corruption and excessive force in the LA Police Department attributed the problems to a few bad apples, Dean Chemerinsky conducted an independent analysis which uncovered systemic and structural issues in the department. In his new book, Presumed Guilty: How the Supreme Court Empowered the Police and Subverted Civil Rights, he writes, “Race has infected policing in the United States since its founding.” People of color are more likely than whites to be stopped, arrested and subjected to police violence.
Dean Chemerinsky cites the slave patrols which tracked and returned runaway slaves. We saw the three men who killed Black jogger Ahmaud Arbery use the logic of those slave patrols in their defense. Due in large part to a video of the killing, they were convicted of murder.
When I served as a commentator for CBS News during the O.J. Simpson trial, the people at KNX Radio called Erwin (who did frequent commentary) “the nicest guy in the world.” He is most generous in sharing his expertise. I can’t remember any time he has turned me down when I have asked him to speak at an event, even if it required traveling to San Diego. I have often said that if I were President of the United States, Erwin would be my first choice for a justice of the Supreme Court. Unlike most of the members of the Court, he would be a “justice” in the true sense of the word.
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Line 3 Is The New Standing Rock
Our guest today is water protector Chicago attorney Pat Handlin. She has been representing some of the 900 people who’ve been arrested for trying to stop Line 3. Line 3 brings the dirtiest oil on Earth down from Alberta, Canada to the shores of the Great Lakes. It is owned by the Canadian corporation Enbridge. President Trump issued their permit without any environmental impact statement. The governor of Minnesota or the President of United States you can stop Enbridge. But they haven’t.
The Line 3 oil pipeline has been operational since October. It snakes under 200 bodies of water including the Mississippi river. Native Americans from the Chippewa and Ojibwe tribe have treaty rights to the land affected by the Enbridge pipeline. Enbridge has a terrible record for oil spills, 194 of them since the year 2000. Since 1986, more than 7 million gallons have spilled in the Midwest. Much of it has never been cleaned up.
The pipeline runs through sacred land. The land has wild rice which the Native Americans harvest for nutrition and value for spiritual reasons. The land is protected by treaties which are being violated. Tribes are sovereign nations that have entered into treaties with United States. A treaty becomes the supreme law of the land. Biden has said that he would honor the treaties but has not done so.
Guest – Pat Handlin is a criminal defense attorney who represented numerous Water Protectors facing misdemeanor charges stemming from the Standing Rock No DAPL movement, provided legal support at the hearing challenging TC Energy’s permit application to use water for the KXL pipeline and represents Water Protectors charged in Minnesota for opposition to Line 3. She has been a public defender, legal services attorney, administrative law judge on employment discrimination matters, represented Occupy Chicago activists, and has litigated to protect victims of elder abuse, neglect and financial exploitation.
Censorship, Civil Liberties, Human Rights, Military Tribunal, Racist Police Violence, Right To Dissent, Truth to Power
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Kyle Rittenhouse got away with murder and the growing forces of violent reaction have been emboldened. Trump invited Rittenhouse to Mar-a-Lago and praised him as a “fine young man.” Street thuggery and violence against the opponents of his fascist party was the hallmark of Hitler’s rise to power. His goons, called Brown Shirts, smashed enemies on the left, trade unionist, and socialists. But Hitler always denied that he had any connection with the Brown Shirts, attempting to perpetuate an illusion that he respected the rule of law.
In 1931, two years before Hitler and the German fascists eventually took power, the courageous young German lawyer Hans Litten sued Hitler in Berlin. He put Hitler on the witness stand grilling him for three hours. He showed Hitler to be a liar. By contrast, and as a measure of how serious things have gotten in our country , Kyle Rittenhouse continues to be wildly praised by the right and the fascists, like the Proud Boys with whom he took publicity shots. They all have mobilized behind Rittenhouse. We rebroadcast what we believe to be two profound interviews on what fascism is and how to fight it.
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This is Not Populism : John Bellamy Foster
Is Trump a neofascist? Thoughtful analysts on the left like Cornell West, Noam Chomsky, and Judith Butler think he is. But mainstream liberal commentators refuse to associate the Trump phenomena with fascism. They call him a right wing populist. What is neofascism? Right wing Populism? Does it really matter what Trump is called? The great German playwright and political thinker who lived in Germany during Hitler’s reign, Berthold Brecht, asked in 1935: “How can anyone tell the truth about fascism, unless he’s willing to speak out against capitalism, which brings it fourth?” We speak today with John Bellamy Foster, the editor of the venerable magazine “Monthly Review”. He wrote the lead article in the current June 2017 issue titled “This Is Not Populism.”
Guest – John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review and professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. He has written widely on political economy and has established a reputation as a major environmental sociologist. He is the author of Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (2000), The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences (with Fred Magdoff, 2009), The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth (with Brett Clark and Richard York, 2010), and The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism: An Elaboration of Marxian Political Economy (New Edition, 2014), among many others.
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Crossing Hitler: The Man Who Put the Nazis on the Witness Stand
Author Benjamin Hett outlines the fascinating and tragic story of a young lawyer Hans Litten in his recent book Crossing Hitler: The Man Who Put the Nazis on the Witness Stand. Before the Nazis rose to power in the early 1930s, they incited calculated violence among the working class in German taverns. Four Nazi stormtroopers were charged with firing randomly into a dance hall where a communist hiking club were holding a party. Three young men were wounded. Hans Litton was the advocate for the 3 men.
Hans Litten called Hitler to the witness stand to show that the Nazi party was a violent party, and by cross examining Hitler he tried to prove that. Litten forced Hitler to contradict himself, reducing him to humiliating rage that revealed his true intention. At that time, Hitler wanted to be a legal party in Germany and of course you couldn’t be a party that was extra-constitutional and legal but at the same time he didn’t want to disappoint the base of his party which was this violent working class aspect. Two years later, the Nazi Party rose to power.
What came after the Reichstag Fire was the arrest of about 5 thousand people across Germany who the Nazis have identified as opponents or potential opponents. Hans Litten was among them and sent to a concentration camp. Author Benjamin Hett describes a powerful narrative of Hans facing torture yet still telling stories and teaching art to other prisoners.
Hans Litten was born in 1903 in Halle in Central Germany, his father was a law professor and Jewish but converted to German evangelical (Lutheran).
Guest – Benjamin Hett, author of Crossing Hitler: The Man Who Put the Nazis on the Witness Stand. Hett is a former trial lawyer, and now Associate Professor of History at Hunter College.
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