In Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, author Saidiya Hartman returns to Ghana and takes the reader with her to gain another perspective on one of the oldest and deepest divides in America: Slavery.
Saidiya Hartman is an expert on the African slave trade. She chose Ghana because it was the center for the slave trade with several key ports. Every man, woman, and child is measured against quantities of tobacco, sugar, coffee, copper pots, or brass bracelets. Reviews have described Lose Your Mother as a travel memoir on the surface but deeper in the thought-provoking chapters are angry meditations on slavery and its legacy.
Today we’re joined by Israeli and Palestinian peace activists Yonathan Shapira and Bassam Aramin, both members of a group called Combatants for Peace. It’s made up of former fighters from both Israel and the Occupied Territories. Shapira is a former elite commando with the Israeli military. Aramin was an armed member of Fatah and spent seven years in an Israeli prison. His ten-year-old daughter Abir was shot dead by an Israeli soldier last year. We’re also joined by Donna Baranski-Walker – executive director of Rebuilding Alliance, that is partnering with Combatants For Peace. Below are images of Abir and funeral procession.
Law and Disorder hosts also discuss with Bassam Aramin updates on the Israeli court case to re-open the investigation of the death of Abir Aramin, Bassam’s daughter. The investigation was previously closed for lack of evidence.
Today we welcome back civil rights attorney Lynne Stewart to discuss the recent stabbing death of Larry Davis in an upstate New York prison. Davis became known in the 80s when he was suspected of murdering drug dealers in the city. When police raided his apartment, Davis fired a pistol and shotgun from a darkened room and fled.
After more than a two week NYPD manhunt, Davis was captured. Davis’ legal defense included Lynne Stewart and prominent civil rights attorney Bill Kunstler who provided evidence of a frame up. In a recent New York Times article chronicling Davis’ story, it was written that Davis’ defense was quote made up of assertions without evidence.
Law and Disorder hosts were live in the studio with Naomi Wolf. Naomi Wolf is a feminist, social critic and political activist. The New York Times called her book, The Beauty Myth, one of the most important books of the 20th century. Wolf is the co-founder of The Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership, teaching young women to become leaders and agents of change. Naomi Wolf blog in the Huffington Post
Her latest book The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot is a call to return to the beliefs of our founding fathers. Wolf’s new book illustrates ten steps historically taken by leaders who are attempting to dismantle a democracy. Wolf jokingly called it the The Greatest Hits of Facism.
In The End of America, Wolf gives voice to the cause of every American patriot: the preservation of the Constitution and the liberties it embodies and protects.
“Recent history has profound lessons for us in the U.S. today about how fascist, totalitarian, and other repressive leaders seize and maintain power, especially in what were once democracies. The secret is that these leaders all tend to take very similar, parallel steps. The Founders of this nation were so deeply familiar with tyranny and the habits and practices of tyrants that they set up our checks and balances precisely out of fear of what is unfolding today. We are seeing these same kinds of tactics now closing down freedoms in America, turning our nation into something that in the near future could be quite other than the open society in which we grew up and learned to love liberty,†stated Wolf.
“Freedom and democracy†are two words we’ve been hearing from the right wing in this country for 25 years. In their quest to shore up support for the politics of wealth and privilege, the Right has organized patiently and consistently by focusing on a core ideology to amass a formidable base. The Right’s commentary on world affairs, morality, the state, and the economy, though, has had an overarching focus, namely to eliminate social equality as a legitimate public policy goal. Its success has resulted in one of the most dramatic, undemocratic, and insidious transfers of wealth and power in recent American history.
Guest – John Ehrenberg, author of the book “Servants of Wealth: The Right’s Assault on Economic Justice.†A professor of political science at Long Island University, in this, his third book, critically analyzes the rise of an ideologically coherent Right. He dissects their themes of military weakness, moral decay, racial anxiety, and hostility to social welfare to reveal their central organizing objective of protecting wealth and assaulting equality.
Hosts Update on spy legislation that would give immunity to utility telecom companies in recent eavesdropping bill. Companies such as Verizon would be protected from lawsuits after handing private consumer data (emails / phone conversations) to the federal government without a warrant.
USA vs. Al-Arian is the name of the new documentary that chronicles the arrest and trial of Dr. Sami Al0Arian, a Palestinian computer engineer and former university professor, who was convicted of conspiracy to aid terrorism. Norwegian film-maker Line Halvorsen interviews law professors and reporters and most of Al-Arian’s family to assemble a disturbing picture of a paranoid post-9/11 climate. The film tells the story from the day the FBI storms into Al-Arian’s home to arrest him in February of 2003. Hosts talk with Dr. Al-Arian’s oldest daughter Laila live in studio.
In the film we see the jury found Al-Arian not guilty on all counts yet, the judge hands down a prison sentence and deportation. Dr Al-Arian is still in prison.
Guest – Laila Al-Arian, Dr. Al-Arian’s oldest daughter
Rediker has scoured through letters, diaries, memoirs, captain’s logbooks, shipping company records to piece together the intimate realities of these 18th-century sailing vessel carrying enslaved Africans. Rediker draws startling parallels to global economy structures then and now, tracing back as New England timber was used to build Slave Ships yet nails and ropes were purchased from Liverpool at discounts, ship captain stock options and more. In his book, Marcus also documents revolts among underpaid sailors and the solidarity that evolves amid slaves and servants.
One review describes Slave Ship as “ a tale of tragedy and terror, but also an epic of resilience, survival, and the creation of something entirely new. Marcus Rediker restores the slave ship to its rightful place alongside the plantation as a formative institution of slavery, a place where a profound and still haunting history of race, class, and modern economy was made.â€
A delegation from the National Lawyers Guild has released a preliminary report on its findings regarding the impacts of the Proclamation of the Emergency in Pakistan. The report found that anything short of restoring the judges deposed on last November 2007 will have long lasting negative impacts on the judiciary and rule of law in Pakistan. The delegation also noted structural problems in the pre-election climate such as lack of an independent judiciary, allowing free and fair elections nearly impossible. Here is the NLG Pakistan Delegation report.
The delegation’s findings are based on over 50 interviews with political party leaders, lawyers, members of civil society, government officials, judges, students and journalists in Lahore, Karachi, Peshawar, Quetta and Islamabad.
Guest – David Gespass, the Vice President of the National Lawyers Guild, he has led a delegation of American lawyers to Pakistan to show solidarity with the Pakistani lawyers demanding a return to the rule of law and to oversee and assist with preparations for the upcoming election in that country.
Here on Law and Disorder we’ve covered in depth the scope of surveillance bearing down on the lives of people in a post 9/11 society. From intrusive RFID technology to phone companies and airlines handing over private consumer data to the FBI. Webb constructs a clear sense of the emerging panopticon singularity. The Panopticon Singularity bears a strong resemblance to the concept of “ubiquitous law enforcement.”
Excerpt from book: “Surveillance in a world of risk preemption requires that everyone be evaluated as a potential suspect in order to eliminate risk to the furthest degree possible. In this paradigm, the criminal law and due process protections that have been developed over centuries in democratic societies – such as the presumption of innocence; habeas corpus and rights against arbitrary, indefinite detention; attorney-client privilege; public trial; the right to know the evidence against one and to respond; the right against unreasonable search and seizure; and the right to remain silent – are viewed as intolerable risks.”
Guest – Canadian human rights lawyer Maureen Webb, she is the author of Illusions of Security: Global Surveillance and Democracy in the Post-9/11 World. In the book, Webb examines how governments worldwide follow the lead of the Bush administration in using quote terrorism as an excuse for public surveillance and information gathering.
