Academic Freedom, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Gaza, genocide, Human Rights, Targeting Muslims, U.S. Militarism, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister, Whistleblowers
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Nationwide Peaceful Protests Against Genocide In Palestine
Around the nation, peaceful campus protests against the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza are spreading. And they’re meeting with a rash of arrests by local police departments, dozens of school suspensions, and evictions from student dormitories. Many of those evicted have been students of colors, students with disabilities, and first-generation students. In New York, the NYPD arrested 108 students at Columbia University, and gave them 14 minutes to gather their belongings and leave their dormitories. New York University erected a plywood wall around Gould Plaza, an outdoor campus space in Greenwich Village, where police had earlier arrested protesting students.
All this because they took part at the large protest. Officials at Harvard University closed Harvard Yard in anticipation of possible protests and suspended the student group Palestine Solidarity Committee. Police arrested 9 students at the University of Minnesota for their refusal to dismantle a pro-Palestinian encampment. The California campus of Cal Poly Humboldt was shut down after students occupied a building. Shutitdown4Palestine.org
In an April 23 letter to the New York Times, nearly 60parents of students at Columbia and Barnard, from a variety of religious faiths ad social backgrounds wrote that they “find the actions taken by the administration deeply troubling and contrary to the principles of liberty, justice and academic freedom that are fundamental to the mission of higher education.”
Guest – Brian Becker is the director of the Answer Coalition, a founder of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and host of The Socialist Program.
—-
Julian Assange Extradition Case Update
Regarded by many as the greatest journalist of our generation for exposing American war crimes Julian Assange is about to be extradited at America’s request to a federal criminal court in Virginia to be tried for his journalistic activities which exposed extensive murderous American crimes and embarrassed US government particularly the CIA.
Julian was a young computer genius in Australia. He figured out a way to receive information from whistleblowers anonymously. This was done in order to protect them when his publication company WikiLeaks revealed to the world the activities of the CIA, the American military and U. S. diplomats.
As published by WikiLeaks the Vault Seven revelations exposed the CIA had developed technologies to turn our cell phone into listening devices, even when turned off and tap our personal computers, and even control our automobiles. WikiLeaks exposed American torture in Afghanistan. They published a video of an American gunship helicopter murdering Iraqi civilians, even children, and two Reuters journalists on the streets of Baghdad.
Julian was given political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he holed up for seven years. Then five years ago the British police at America’s request removed him from the embassy and put him into solitary confinement in the notorious Belmarsh Prison.
Now the United States has succeeded in getting a compliant British court to extradite Julian , despite the law, preventing extradition of political prisoners, especially to a country that has the death penalty, and no guarantee of free speech for foreigners.
Guest – Vincent De Stefano is the National Organizing Director of the U.S. Julian Assange Defense Committee. Mr. De Stefano is on the Southern California ACLU board of directors and executive committee and he has worked with Amnesty International for more than four decades.
——————————————
Academic Freedom, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Violations of U.S. and International Law, Whistleblowers
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Guilty of Journalism
The pending criminal case against journalist Julian Assange is the most significant far reaching First Amendment matter in our lifetime. It will have, in fact it already has had, an impact on publishing and journalism. This is so because it constricts our freedom to know as well as journalists and publishers freedom to publish.
Our government functions as the executive committee of the ruling rich. It intends to keep it this way, in the words of the great civil rights attorney William Kunstler, “by any means necessary and for as long as possible.”
If as is likely the imprisoned journalist Julian Assange is extradited at America’s request from his solitary prison cell in London’s Belmarsh prison where he has been kept for four years and sent to Virginia to be tried for espionage he will be certainly be convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
His victimization is being accomplished under the 1917 Espionage Act, a law originally put into place during World War I to imprison spies. It is now used to get truth tellers like Julian Assange silenced.
Julian Assange Fact Sheet: Why Julian Must Be Freed
Guest – Kevin Gosztola who more than anyone has covered the whistleblower situation since he attended the court martial trial of Sergeant Chelsea Manning. Manning was convicted of giving government secrets to Julian Assange. Kevin Gosztola‘s book “Guilty of Journalism “was published by Seven Stories Press and Censored Press last month.
—-
Attorney Stephen Rohde: A Set Of Ideas Under Threat
American history has been marked by ongoing conflicts between those who are seeking an open, equal and inclusive society and those who cling to the racist origins of the United States and seek to literally whitewash that history and perpetuate white privilege.
We find ourselves in the midst of one of those conflicts today. The right of Black people to learn their own history is being denied them. The same is true of anyone who is not heterosexual.
The teaching of critical race theory is increasingly disallowed. The study of human sexuality in schools is being obliterated. Books are being banned in record numbers, and curricula is being rewritten to conform to a sanitized version of American history. Seven states, including Florida, Tennessee, Oklahoma and Utah, have already passed laws limiting materials in libraries…and at least 113 bills are pending across the country that would negatively impact libraries or curtail peoples’ freedom to read.
As Jonathan Friedman, the Director of free expression and education at PEN America, a free speech organization said, “People need to understand that it’s not a single book being removed in a single school district, it’s a set of ideas that are under threat just about everywhere.”
Guest – Stephen Rohde is a noted constitutional scholar and activist. He is the past Chair of the ACLU Foundation of Southern California; the founder and current Chair of Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace; the author of American Words of Freedom, and of Freedom of Assembly. Steve Rohde is a regular contributor to TruthDig as well as the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Hosted by attorneys Michael Smith and Jim Lafferty
————————-
Academic Freedom, Censorship, CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Surveillance, Truth to Power, War Resister
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Library Freedom, TOR And Right To Privacy
Libraries in this country have long been sanctuaries in which to read, think, dream and pursue intellectual pursuits free from judgment or outside intrusion. But historically outside forces HAVE tried to intrude on this sanctitude. During the Cold War, for example, librarians exposed the FBI’s efforts to recruit library staff to spy on certain patrons, especially Russians, through the so-called Library Awareness Program. And after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the USA Patriot Act’s Section 215 has often been dubbed the “library provision” because it allows patron’s library records to be accessed and monitored by law enforcement agencies without a warrant.
In 2015 Law & Disorder reported on a New Hampshire Library that installed the Tor relay node to allow patrons to privately browse computers. Tor is anonymizing software that lets users conduct online searches without being monitored. Soon after, the Department of Homeland Security contacted local officials who visited the library, warning that Tor could aid criminal behavior.
Alison asks to please visit your local library website and facebook pages to increase their usage metrics which in turn help when applying for funding.
Guest – Alison Macrina was one of the people responsible for the New Hampshire library’s privacy tools. Alison is a librarian, privacy rights activist, and the founder and director of the Library Freedom Project, an initiative that helps educate librarians and their local communities about surveillance threats, privacy rights and law, and privacy-protecting technology tools to help safeguard digital freedoms.
—-
Julian Assange Extradition Update
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s extradition hearing began in January but is on hiatus at least until September 2020. At the January appearance, the prosecution pleaded for the media to stop characterizing the US effort as a politicized war on journalism. In response, Julian’s defense provided a comprehensive summary of the many reasons that journalists and human rights activists have called Julian’s indictment a threat to a free press.
James Lewis argued for the Crown Prosecution Service, which acts on behalf of the United States in its extradition request. Lewis explicitly asked journalists covering the case not to report that it represents a matter of free speech or the right to publish. Lewis depicted the indictment as solely a matter of exposing informants in the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs and the State Department cables.
Julian’s defense lawyer Edward Fitzgerald detailed how extradition proceedings constitute an abuse of process. He asserted that they have been brought for ulterior political purposes, as an attack on freedom of speech, and fundamentally misrepresent the facts in order to extradite Julian to the US, where he faces torture, unusual and degrading treatment.
Guest – NYC attorney Nathan Fuller, Executive Director of the Courage Foundation.
—————————————
—————————————
Academic Freedom, CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Gaza, Human Rights, Targeting Muslims, Torture, War Resister
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Mark Crispin Miller – Julian Assange, Voter Fraud and Fake News
WikiLeaks founder the truth telling publisher Julian Assange is in escalating danger of being sent from England to America where he would likely be tried for espionage, a crime that carries the death penalty.
Assange and WikiLeaks have revealed American war crimes in the middle east, CIA global machinations , and the work of Clinton Democrats in preventing the popular Bernie Sanders from heading up the party ticket.
Assange is presently holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London where he was granted political asylum six years ago by past leftist president Rafael Correa. But now, with the change of presidents in Ecuador, Assange has been cut off from the outside world. He has no phone, no computer, and no visitors.
The fresh offensive against him occurred the day after American General Joseph DiSalvo, the head of the US Southern Command, the Pentagon’s arm in Latin America, visited the new right wing Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno. Moreno has said that Assange is “an inherited problem” and is seeking s better relationship with the United States government, to whom he has already granted a military base.
Guest – Mark Crispin Miller who is a professor of media studies at New York University. Professor Miller has frequently spoken about media propaganda, the engineering of consent for empire, fake news, and the destruction of the independent press. He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for the humanities and is a vigorous defender of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.
—-
CCR Delegation To Israel
Like the USA, Israel is a colonial-settler state which, beginning in 1948, 70 years ago, expelled 750,000 native Palestinians, took their land, homes and businesses, and reduced those who remained to abused second class citizens, not unlike what was done to native Americans by white settlers in the USA. Their land was stolen, their tribes uprooted, and their culture practically destroyed.
In 1967 Israel expanded further, militarily occupying Palestinian territories to their north, east, and south, including East Jerusalem.
Last month Attorney and Columbia law professor Katherine Franke, the Chair of the Board of Trustees of the CCR, along with Attorney Vince Warren, the CCR’s Executive Director, headed up a 20 person delegation of American activists who traveled to Israel to report on the human rights situation there. Franke and Warren never made it past the airport in Tel Aviv. They were stopped, questioned , detained for 14 hours, and then deported back to the USA. Franke was told she could never return.
Guest – Attorney Katherine Franke, is the Sulzbacher Professor of Law, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Columbia University, where she also directs the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law and is the faculty director of the Public Rights/Private Conscience Project. She is a member of the Executive Committee for the Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality, and the Center for Palestine Studies. She is among the nation’s leading scholars writing on law, religion and rights, drawing from feminist, queer, and critical race theory. She is the author of Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality. Her next book will be coming out from Haymarket Press in the spring: Repair: Slavery’s Unfinished Business makes the case for racial reparations in the U.S.
Academic Freedom, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, Truth to Power, War Resister
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
North and South Korea Diplomacy
In a historic diplomatic break-through the leaders of North Korea and South Korea met earlier this month. The North Korean leader Kim Jung-Un promised to give up his country’s nuclear weapons declaring that its not necessary to have them if the United States formally ends it’s provocations and promises not to launch any military aggression against his country. He promised that North Korea will dismantle is nuclear test site in Punggye-ri in May.
The Korean War which began in 1950 came to an end in 1953. An armistice was signed but peace was never officially declared and the two countries have been officially at war ever since.
This state of affairs will hopefully be resolved. At the meeting, South Korean President Moon Jae-in embraced North Korean leader Kim Jong-un after signing the Panmunjom Declaration for Peace, Prosperity, and Unification of the Korean Peninsula.
Guest – Attorney Jim Lafferty is one of the leaders of the anti-Vietnam War movement and has remained a peace activist for five decades. Jim Lafferty is currently the head of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Lawyers Guild and an organizer of and speaker at last week’s Los Angeles teach-in on the Korean situation.
—-
Columbia University Protests of 1968: Fifty Years Later
1968 was a momentous year. Huge historical events happened in the USA, Latin America, Europe, and Asia fifty years ago that shaped the course of history.
In France the students and workers came close to overthrowing capitalism in an advance capitalist country.
In Eastern Europe the Czechoslovakian people would’ve installed a democratic socialism, what they called socialism with a human face, but for the intervention by the power of Soviet Union which sent in troops to crush the uprising.
In Vietnam, the American war effort to prevent the Vietnamese people from determining their own destiny showed the world to be a losing proposition by the Tet Offensive. The Vietnamese National Liberation Front and the Hanoi coordinated military strikes throughout the south of their country, temporarily took over the southern capital of Saigon including the American Embassy.
Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968 provoking rebellion in the inner cities of the USA. Two weeks later the students, both black and white, rose up at Columbia University in New York City.
The African-American students demanded that the university stop encroaching in neighboring Harlem, where the university was planning to build a gymnasium for its students in a public park. They took over Hamilton Hall, a classroom building on the campus and received wide support from the Harlem community. The white students supported this demand. They took over four other buildings, including the administration building (Lowe Library) demanding that the University end its complicity in doing research that supported the American imperial war in Vietnam.
After a week of the student occupation, the New York City Police on behalf of the administration descended on the campus, violently beat the students, and arrested some 700 of them. They were defended by members of the National Lawyers Guild. After the arrests, the students went on strike. In the end the university’s complicity with the war in Vietnam and it’s landgrab in Harlem were ended.
Guest – Attorney Eleanor Stein, she was a law student at Columbia at the time and a participant in the student strike. She teaches a course called the Law of Climate Change: Domestic and Transnational at Albany Law School and SUNY Albany, in conjunction with the Environmental and Atmospheric Sciences Department at SUNY. Eleanor Stein is teaching transnational environmental law with a focus on catastrophic climate change. For ten years she served as an Administrative Law Judge at the New York State Public Service Commission in Albany, New York, where she presided over and mediated New York’s Renewable Portfolio Standard.
Guest – Professor Stefan Bradley whose primary research area is recent African-American history. He is the author of Harlem versus Columbia University: Black Student Power in the Late 1960s. Professor Bradley teaches at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and is the chairperson of the African American studies department. He was a much appreciated participant in last weeks conference on the Columbia strike.
—————————————-
Academic Freedom, CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Human Rights, Iraq War, Military Tribunal, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power, War Resister
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Victory: West Virginia Teachers’ Strike
After nine days on strike, the West Virginia governor and the state legislature caved, granting the teachers and all school staff a 5% wage increase. The pay raise also covers all state employees.
In an attempt to save face the Republicans talked about funding the pay increase by cutting social services and Medicaid. But there is no such wording in the agreement that was signed by the West Virginia Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers , the two workers organizations.
One strike supporter in West Virginia stated that “At this point the teachers and school staff have all the momentum and they can fight to make sure the funds for the raise come from the rich, not working people when the budget is eventually passed. Strikers here are ecstatic, people are literally hugging strangers, and whipping enjoy. It’s in a stark victory for the working class. Hopefully it will be the first of many to come.”
The strike was caused by decades of stagnating pay and rising health costs. 3/4 of the teachers are women.They played leading roles in the strike. West Virginia, especially its southern counties, have a history of militancy, Especially in the coal mines. Teacher job actions and walkouts spread from these very same southern counties.
The West Virginia teachers have shown Americans what it takes to win a strike. This is especially important when the anticipated Supreme Court ruling in the Janus case comes down. That ruling will likely reduce the power of public employee unions by taking away their right to collect dues.
Guest – Dale Lee is a graduate of Clinch Valley College (Wise, VA) and obtained his special education certification through the West Virginia College of Graduate Studies (WV COGS). He is completing his Master’s degree through Salem International University. A veteran teacher of 22 years, Dale’s assignment was teaching special education at Princeton Senior High School
—-
Law Firm Files 911 Terror Lawsuit Against Saudi Arabia
Nearly sixteen years have passed since the 911 attacks. The truth of who was behind the attacks has allegedly come out in a class action lawsuit brought by over 6500 victims and survivors. The lawsuit alleges that it was elements of the Saudi Arabian government that attacked the United States on 9/11. The Defendant in the lawsuit is Saudi Arabia. The Saudi Arabian government hired 15 public relations firms to help them deny responsibility. They hired several Washington white shoe high powered connected law firms They hid behind the law of sovereign immunity, which had to be overturned by an act of Congress in order for the lawsuit to proceed. They were helped by the US government in the cover-up by the Bush and Obama administrations.
After more than sixteen years the case is now proceeding rapidly through the Federal courts and will either be dismissed, settled or tried. The object of the lawsuit is to obtain money explained Sharon Pemboli, one of the plaintiffs and leaders of a group of women from New Jersey known as “the Jersey girls” who lobbied to win passage of the law which made the lawsuit possible. She believes that if the Saudi Arabian government is deprived of funds it will not be able to fund Al Qaeda and the extremist Wahhabi clergy responsible for supporting the terrorism of Al Qaeda.
The American public has been led to believe mistakenly that Saddam Hussein and Iraq were behind 911. The attack on Iraq was a war of aggression. At the end of World War II, the United States set up the Nuremberg trials to try Nazi war criminals. They wanted to set forth principles that were not merely “victor’s justice.“ At the Nuremberg trials the Germans were found guilty of starting a war of aggression, which was called the greatest of all crimes because it has contained within it all other crimes.
Guest – Attorney Justin Green, Justin has successfully represented families in many major aviation cases. These include airline disasters, corporate airplane and helicopter accidents, and civil airplane and helicopter accidents. His practice has also included personal injury and wrongful death cases arising from other transportation accidents.
—-
Lynne Stewart Anniversary 2018
Hosts remember fearless activist and attorney Lynne Stewart. Heidi reads an excerpt from Michael’s yet to be published Lawyers You’ll Like. We’ll also hear a powerful speech by Chris Hedges delivered at Lynne’s memorial.
