Censorship, CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, Surveillance, Truth to Power
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Nobody’s Child: A Tragedy, a Trial, and a History of the Insanity Defense
Public opinion surveys of knowledge, attitudes, and support for the insanity defense show that Americans dislike the insanity defense. They want insane law-breakers punished, and believe that insanity defense procedures don’t protect the public. Polls also show that most overestimate the use and success of the insanity plea.
In the book Nobody’s Child: A Tragedy, a Trial, and a History of the Insanity Defense, forensic psychologist and attorney Susan Vinocour tells the story of a three-year-old child found dead in his mentally-ill grandmother’s home. Vinocour agreed to evaluate the defendant. She explains how the legal terms”competency” don’t reflect psychiatric realities, and how, in criminal law, the insanity defense has to often been a luxury of the rich and white.
Nobody’s Child is an engaging portrait of injustice in the United States, and a complex examination of the troubling intersection of mental health and the law.
Guest – Susan Vinocour is a retired clinical and forensic psychologist, a former prosecutor and a former associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Rochester School of Medicine.
—-
President Donald Trump And The White House Response To Pandemic
The place to start in understanding Trump and Trumpism is to accurately define what he represents. A disease cannot be countered unless it is correctly diagnosed.
Mainstream liberal commentators refuse to associate the Trump phenomena with fascism, calling him a right wing populist or a nationalist. But it really matters what Trump is called if we are to fashion a resistance to him with the possibility of triumph. Analysts on the left like Noam Chomsky , Chris Hedges, and Cornell West understand that he and the constellation of forces that make up his movement – principally big business and white non-college educated middle-class people – are fascists.
The poet, playwright, and political thinker Berthold Brecht was asked about German fascism in 1935: “How can anyone tell the truth about fascism, he replied, unless he is willing to speak out against capitalism, which brings it forth.”
It was the failure of a united socialist movement in Germany in the early 30s that allowed Hitler to gain power. We have seen with the Bernie Sanders phenomena the possibilities of building a socialist movement in the United States. This is our hope.
Guest – John Bellamy Foster, professor of sociology at the University of Oregon and the editor of the venerable independent socialist magazine “Monthly Review”. Professor Foster is the author of “Trump in the White House: Tragedy or Farce.“
————————————–
————————————–
Censorship, CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Iraq War, NSA Spying, Political Prisoner, Supreme Court, Surveillance, Truth to Power, Uncategorized, War Resister
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
In Defense Of Julian Assange: Attorney Renata Avila
We continue our ongoing coverage of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who remains in confinement at London’s high-security Belmarsh prison. Julian is fighting extradition to the United States on 18 charges, including violating the Espionage Act and conspiring to hack government computers. As listeners will recall, the charges are in connection with Wikileaks’ release of thousands of secret cables in 2010.
Guest – Renata Avila, a member of the Julian Assange legal team. Renata is an international Human Rights lawyer from Guatemala, specializing in preserving human rights during the next wave of tech challenges. She is a Board member for Creative Commons, the Common Action Forum and is a Global Trustee of the Think Tank Digital Future Society. She is also a member of the WEF’s Global Future Council on Human Rights and Technology and a Steering Committee Member of the Information Society Advisory Council for the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.
—-
The Prosecution of Julian Assange – CUNY School of Law and UCLA
We listen to two presentations from a panel discussion among leading journalists, attorneys and human rights defenders as the extradition trial in London of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is set to begin.
The first speaker is lead attorney Barry Pollack representing Julian Assange speaking at The Prosecution of Julian Assange forum at UCLA.
We then hear from Glen Ford speaking at the CUNY School of Law, Glen is the Executive editor, Black Agenda Report. He’s a broadcast, print and web pioneer and founding member of the Washington chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists.
————————————
————————————
Censorship, CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, Human Trafficking, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Torture, Truth to Power
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Victory In New York City Wikileaks Case
Truth telling journalist and publisher Julian Assange and his organization Wiki-leaks won a significant First Amendment victory in federal court in New York City on July 29.
As reported by Oscar Grendel in the World Socialists Website, “The decision by Judge John Koeltl of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York rejected that Assange colluded with Russia. It upheld his status as a journalist and publisher and dismissed claims that WikiLeaks 2016 publication of the leaked emails from the Democratic National Committee was illegal.
We speak today with WikiLeaks lawyer Josh Dratel, who represented WikiLeaks, about this victory for civil liberties and freedom of the press and the right of people to know.
Assange is in terrible and declining health in Belmarsh prison in London waiting extradition to the United States to be tried on 17 counts of espionage for publishing in 2010 troves of information leaked to him by Chelsea Manning demonstrating United States committed war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The July 29 victory came about when the Democratic National Committee of the Democratic Party attempted to sue Assange and WikiLeaks for publishing DNC Emails on the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign. They showed that the DNC rigged the primary election against Sanders. Clinton was exposed for taking a $675,000 speakers fee, which some described as a bribe, from the investment banking house of Goldman Sachs to whom she pledged loyalty.
The case the DNC brought against The Russian federation, WikiLeaks and Assange, among others, in 2016 was thrown out of court, with prejudice, by federal judge John Koeltl, a Clinton appointee. Attorney Joshua Dratel defended WikiLeaks.
Please write Julian Assange at this address:
Mr Julian Assange
DOB: 3/07/1971
HMP Belmarsh
Western Way
London SE28 0EB, UK
(Follow These Details In Preparing Letter)
Guest – Attorney Josh Dratel heads a renowned New York City law firm and has a national reputation as a trial and appellate lawyer. He graduated Harvard law school in 1981. Dratel is the past president of the New York State Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. His many honors include the Frederick Douglass award and the Clarence Darrow award from the ACLU of Idaho. He is the co-editor of the book The Torture Papers: the Legal Road to Abu Graib.
—-
The Case Of Espionage And Billionaire Pedophile Jeffrey Epstein
When he was alive, the major news media characteristically covered the story of Jeffrey Epstein’s huge pedophile sex ring for a brief news cycle. He was in a federal jail in Manhattan awaiting trial and was dropped out of public view. The salacious aspects of his story were covered briefly. Then he died under mysterious circumstances. The story was briefly revived but diverted to conditions in the jail. But there is much more to it.
In 2007 Florida federal prosecutor Alex Acosta went along with a plea deal which allowed Epstein to plead guilty to a Florida state charge involving prostitution with children and was given an extraordinary light sentence. Acosta dropped federal charges were dropped.
When questioned about this Acosta told a Senate committee inquiring about his credentials to become the secretary of labor in the Trump administration that he, Acosta , was told to back off because Epstein was part of the “intelligence community.“
Was he part of an espionage and blackmail operation? For whom did he work?
Guest – Phillip Giraldi, former CIA agent and counterterrorism specialist and military intelligence officer with the CIA. He is currently executive director of the Council for the National Interest. Geraldi has a masters degree and a PhD.
———————
———————
Censorship, CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, Iraq War, NSA Spying, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Torture, Truth to Power, War Resister
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Daniel Ellsberg: Julian Assange’s Case And The Doomsday Machine
Two weeks ago the Trump administration announced it had indicted Julian Assange in the Eastern District of Virginia on 17 counts of violating the 1917 Espionage Act. Assange is currently in the Belmarsh prison hospital in London. If extradited, tried, and convicted he faces 175 years in prison.
The Espionage Act is a 102 year old law used initially to imprison the great socialist Eugene V Debs for an anti-World War I speech he gave in Canton, Ohio and also used to crush the industrial workers of the world, the IWW, a large antiwar union at the time.
In 1971 it was famously used against Daniel Ellsberg who released the Pentagon papers to the New York Times and other media outlets. Lately the Espionage Act has been used against many truth telling whistleblowers during the Obama and Trump administrations.
This is the first time it is being used against a journalist.
Wikileaks Defense Funds:
Guest – Daniel Ellsberg, educated at Harvard and Cambridge and has been an activist since the 1970s. Ellsberg’s latest book, The Doomsday Machine, is an extensive study of nuclear theory and nuclear policy. In 2018 he was awarded the Olaf Palme prize for his “profound humanism and exceptional moral courage.
From 1957-59 he was a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows, Harvard University. He earned his Ph.D. in Economics at Harvard in 1962 with his thesis, Risk, Ambiguity and Decision. His research leading up to this dissertation—in particular his work on what has become known as the “Ellsberg Paradox,” first published in an article entitled Risk, Ambiguity and the Savage Axioms—is widely considered a landmark in decision theory and behavioral economics.
———————-
———————-
Censorship, CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, Human Trafficking, Iraq War, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Surveillance, Truth to Power
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Attorney James Goodale On Julian Assange Arrest
Last week, at the behest of the U.S. government, police entered the Ecuadorian Embassy and arrested Julian Assange on charges of espionage. This case promises to threaten the First Amendment rights of all journalists. We’re honored to have one of the nation’s foremost authorities on First Amendment law, Attorney James Goodale. In the April edition of the Atlantic, he wrote an article titled, Why Julian Assange deserves First Amendment Protection.
Listeners may recall that last fall, a court filing inadvertently suggested that the Justice Department had indicted WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and other outlets reported soon after that Assange had likely been secretly indicted for conspiring with his sources to publish classified government material and hacked documents belonging to the Democratic National Committee, among other things.
Assange started WikiLeaks in 2006 to provide a place for newsworthy information to be confidentially released. The site came gained prominence when Assange obtained thousands of classified documents relating to the Iraq War from US Army soldier Chelsea (born Bradley) Manning.
Guest – Attorney James C. Goodale has represented The New York Times in four of its cases to go to the Supreme Court: the Pentagon Papers case (The New York Times Co. v. The U.S.), The New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (libel), Branzburg v. Hayes (see below) and The New York Times Co. v. Tasini, (digital rights). He developed the argument that the Espionage Act does not apply to publishers or the press.
In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court ruled the U.S. Government could not stop the Times from publishing the Pentagon Papers, holding that prior restraints were barred by the First Amendment unless the publication “will surely result in direct, immediate, and irreparable damage to our Nation or its people.” He became known as the “father of the reporter’s privilege.” A prolific writer, he has written two books on the First Amendment, The New York Times v. The U.S. and All About Cable, and approximately 200 articles, particularly on the role of the press in the Information Revolution.
—-
Al Otro Lado and the Border Crisis
United States President Donald Trump said that we have a “crisis” on the border. He called it an “infestation” and said that “These aren’t people. These are animals.” Last week he fired Kirstjen Nielsen who as the head of the Department for Homeland Security pursued the most aggressive enforcement strategy of any secretary in the history of the organization. Nielsen and the Trump administration has separated children from their parents and instituted an illegal turn back policy using tactics to restrict the numbers of asylum-seekers who want to access the asylum process at points of entry like Tijuana and El Paso.
Tactics used by the administration include lies, intimidating coercion, verbal abuse, physical force, out right denial of access, unreasonable delay, threats, and family separation. The Center for Constitution Rights is currently representing Al Otro Lado, a legal and human rights organization that helps migrants at the border. They are challenging the U S. Customs and Border Patrol on its turnaround policy in a pending lawsuit.
Last month CCR’s chairwoman of the board and Columbia Law Professor Katherine Franke met six students in Tijuana Mexico, across the border from San Diego, California, to advise migrants on what they will face in the hands of US legal authorities.
- Al Otro Lado provides essential legal support to migrants to prepare them for the asylum process in the U.S. You can support here.
- Santa Fe Dreamers also provides free legal support to immigrants, with a particular focus on transgender immigrants.
- Please visit this site if you are interested in contributing to the parole/bail fund for detainees.
- If you are interested in serving as a sponsor for an asylum seeker.
- This video offers a very good portrait of the situation at Chaparral where La Lista is maintained and asylum seekers wait for their number to be called.
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 Law, Rights, and Religion Project (Formerly 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.
——————
——————
Censorship, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Crony Capitalism, Human Rights, Supreme Court, Surveillance, Truth to Power, War Resister
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
How the Rats Re-Formed Congress
A fable is a short tale that anthropomorphizes animals. The animals personify human virtues and vices, and function as an instrument of moral instruction. We mention this because Ralph Nader joins us to discuss his new book How the Rats Re-Formed Congress. It’s a Fable about an invasion of rats in Congress that triggers a peoples’ political revolt. It begins when a Congressional reporter breaks a bizarre story: “Rats have invaded the toilet bowls” of the Speaker of the House and the Minority Leader. A national news frenzy ensues.
Activists seize on the breaking story to organize for a populist agenda. Spontaneous rallies erupt. The activists see the rats upending “business as usual” routines on Capitol Hill as a symbol against lobbyists and corporate Congress. Millions flood into the nation’s capitol to take back Congress from Wall Street. Congressional offices are deluged with citizen rallies and meetings. Members are challenged in primaries. Incumbents join the movement.
Wall Street and its lobbyists warn of economic collapse and mass layoffs if the people’s agenda passes Congress. Corporate front groups are formed to disrupt peaceful crowds. Despite that, corporate lobbyists and think tanks can’t overcome the organized will of the determined citizenry. Tortmuseum.org
Listen to our past interview with Ralph Nader about the Tort Museum.
Guest – Ralph Nader, one of the nation’s most effective and well-known social critics. He has raised public awareness and increased government and corporate accountability. As a young lawyer in 1965 he made headlines with his book Unsafe at Any Speed, leading to congressional hearings and passage of a series of life-saving auto safety laws in 1966. His example has inspired a generation of consumer advocates, citizen activists and public interest attorneys. Full biography.
————————-
————————-
