CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Surveillance, Torture, Truth to Power
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Political Prisoner Russell Maroon Shoatz Update
We welcome back Bret Grote, a member of Russell Maroon Shoatz’s legal team. Political prisoner Russell Maroon Shoatz who has spent 39 years in the US prison system. As many listeners may know, Russell Shoatz has been held under intense lock down spending no more than one hour a day outside of his cell for the past 21 of those years. He was locked up in 1972 for his activity as a member of the Black Liberation Army. Bret gives us an update in recent developments of the case.
Bret Grote:
- Almost 2 weeks ago, I went to SCI Greene with a member of the legal team and Maroon’s son, Russell Shoatz III, and when we went into the visitor’s lobby we were informed that he was no longer there.
- After 18 years at SCI Greene which has the largest restrictive housing units which is the solitary confinement units, he had been transferred to SCI Mahanoy which is where Mumia Abu-Jamal is currently located in the general prison population.
- He was transferred there Thursday March 28, 2013, we put in calls the next day to inquire what was going on.
- We actually know this move is in response to the growing pressure campaign that is being waged. The growing support around the country and the legal team having increasing visits.
- The legal team is Dan Kovalic who represented Maroon in his due process based challenge in solitary confinement in the late 90s. There are also 2 attorneys from a large international litigation firm.
- There’s Dustin McDaniel, who along with myself has formed an organization called the Abolitionist Law Center and five students working on his case.
- There was a letter sent to Secretary Wetzel’s office stating that if he’s not released into the general prison population within 30 days a civil action will be filed.
- The major one is the 8th Amendment on prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. The law on solitary confinement is not very good but its also emerging in response to the 30 year emergence of this type of supermax style long term lock down as an affirmative policy of prison management.
- The basic rule of law is that solitary confinement is not unconstitutional per say, but there needs to be a fact specific inquiry into conditions of confinement and also the degree of harm that is imposed upon the prisoner.
- The prison officials need to demonstrate indifference to the deprivation of basic human needs.
- There are some other grounds that are being put forward to challenge solitary confinement. One of these is happening in the state of New York right now, where the NYCLU has begun representing an individual who was bringing a case pro se.
- Duration is one of the considerations that’s supposed to be taken into account by the court.
- The Supreme Court has been clear that the duration of deprivation is very significant for constitutional purposes.
- Maroon escaped from prison twice. After solitary confinement he was released in the general prison population at the state correctional institution in Pittsburgh in 1982.
- At this point Maroon had made a political decision. He had become part of the Pennsylvania Association of Lifers. This was a group approved by the prison authorities. After Maroon became involved and other lifers became involved to take more active role in their interest, more than 100 people began attending meetings there.
- They put him in solitary confinement based on participation in unauthorized meetings even though all the meeting spaces had to be opened by staff.
- Since 1989 he’s had only one disciplinary infraction while in the prison.
- Covering the vent in his cell, it was blowing cold air – SCI Greene.
- Maroon was constantly engaging all the other prisoners in educational seminars, studying lessons on geography, on history on working with people to transform their criminal consciousness into community oriented activist consciousness.
Guest – Bret Grote, member of the Russell Maroon Shoatz legal team and member of the Abolitionist Law Center.
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Court Orders FDA to Remove All Restrictions on the Morning-After Pill
After a multi-year grassroots campaign and an equally long lawsuit, the morning after pill will finally be available to females of all ages on the pharmacy shelf, without a prescription or point of sale or age restriction. This is thanks to a recent federal court reversal of decisions from the FDA and DHHS, under both the Bush and Obama Administrations. The US now joins at least 63 other countries including the UK, Denmark, France and Ghana in making the morning after pill available without a prescription.
Attorney Andrea Costello:
- The case was originally file in 2005 and this was after the FDA had really stalled out and delayed for years in its decision making in whether to put the morning after pill over the counter.
- Originally the morning after pill was prescription only and had to show identification in order to get it.
- In 2005, the government made a decision to make Plan B available for women over 18.
- Under President Bush, decisions were made by high level officials within the FDA to deny access to the morning after pill to women and girls. That was really an effort to appease the administration’s constituents.
- It was based on anti-birth control politics and not science.
- In 2011 for the first time in history, we saw Health and Human Services under the Obama Administration overruling a decision by the FDA when the FDA decided it wanted to put the morning after pill over the counter without an age restriction.
- The lawsuit has always asked for unrestricted access to the morning after pill and all forms of the morning after pill meaning emergency contraception for all women and girls in the United States regardless of age without any restriction on how its sold.
- In the history of our country no one has ever had to show their identification in order to get birth control.
- I think of this victory as building on the pioneering work of our feminist sisters in the National Lawyers Guild that I’ve had the opportunity and honor to work with.
- Catherine Roraback and Rhonda Copeland, Carol Sobel, Mara Verheyden-Hilliard
- We will be looking forward to seeing it in the grocery stores in 30 days.
Guest – Attorney Andrea Costello, Partnership for Civil Justice Fund Senior Staff Attorney representing the NWL Plaintiffs.
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It Was Genocide: Armenian Survivor Stories
99 years ago this month marks the beginning of the systematic implementation of a plan to exterminate the Armenian race. Carried out by the Young Turk government of the Ottoman Empire, over half of the Armenians living in the Empire were killed.
To commemorate this, the first genocide of the 20th century, Law and Disorder co-host Heidi Boghosian and producer Geoff Brady present part of the 90-minute program titled, It Was Genocide: Armenian Survivor Stories.
We wish to thank WBAI for their commitment to recognizing the Armenian genocide, and are grateful to the following individuals for opening their hearts and sharing the difficult memories of the past: Jennie Garabedian, Harry Mazadorian, Roxy Garabedian, Lucy Simonian, Roxie Maljanian, Mary Abrahamian, John Maljanian, Agnes Karanian, Ruth Swisher, and Artie Shahverdian.
For stations that want to air full 90 minute documentary
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Extraordinary Rendition, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Prosecution of the Bush Administration, Supreme Court, Targeting Muslims, Torture, War Resister
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Updates:
- Please Sign the Lynne Stewart Compassionate Release Petition
- Please Also Write to: Charles E Samuels Jr. / Federal Bureau of Prisons /
- 320 1st Street Northwest / Washington DC 20534
- Anniversary of Collateral Damage Video Release
- University Stadium Victory – GeoCorp Prisons
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Guantanamo Hunger Strike Update
Attorney Omar Farah speaks with Michael Ratner about a hunger strike at Guantanamo Bay Prison with more than half of prisoners from Camp 5 and 6f participating. Farah says the hunger strike was triggered by an arbitrary crackdown by the prison administration including cell searches and a search of the prisoner’s Qurans. This is viewed as out right desecration. More than half of the entire prison population has been cleared for release by every prominent national security and law enforcement agency in the US government, that includes the DOD, DHS.
Guest – Omar Farah joined the Center for Constitutional Rights in 2012 as a staff attorney in the Guantanamo Global Justice Initiative. Omar was previously in private practice, working mostly in the area of international commercial arbitration. Since 2008, he has represented several prisoners detained at Guantanamo Bay in habeas corpus litigation in federal court.
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Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East
While adviser to the Madrid and Washington Palestinian-Israeli negotiations, author and historian Rashid Khalidi collected documents, memos and meeting minutes as a research foundation for his recently published book Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East. The book focuses on 3 periods of opportunity for the United States to broker peace, one in the late seventies, the early nineties and 2010. This critical analysis addresses the basic distortions in language that has corrupted the peace processes. Rashid Khalidi is an American historian of the Middle East, the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, and director of the Middle East Institute of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, he joins us today to talk about his book and also the ongoing destabilizing hostility in Syria.
Professor Rashid Khalidi:
- Let me read to you what Orwell says, “the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. Bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even by people who should and do know better.”
- The argument I’m making in this book is much of the language used by pundits and politicians about the Middle East and the so called peace process, between the Palestinians and the Israelis is really corrupt language.
- One of the chapters in the book is devoted to the period when I was an adviser to the Palestinian delegation and negotiations from 1991-1993 starting in Madrid and continuing to Washington.
- If you go back to Madrid in October 1991, there were under 200 thousand Israelis living in the occupied West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem. Today, there are nearly 600 thousand of them.
- United States has been responsible for exacerbating the problem in effect by saying the only way to deal with this issue of occupation and settlement is through negotiations mediated by us.
- The United States in the meantime has put its big thumb on the scale in favor of the Israelis preventing a resolution of the problems.
- The first episode I talk about in the book has to do with the follow on to Camp David in the wake of the Lebanon War in 1982 when Israel invaded and 50 thousand Palestinians and Lebanese were killed and wounded.
- I site at great length a now declassified document by a CIA analyst which one of my students actually found.
- The idea of Palestinian self determination doesn’t exist anywhere in the Oslo Accords signed by the PLO and Israel in 1993 and afterward.
- Autonomy and self determination are used by people in American political parlance and Israeli political parlance in ways that do violence to the real meanings of these words.
- Obama fits the pattern of every president since President Carter, with the sole exception of George W. Bush.
- Obama has adopted wholesale and entire Israeli narrative as to the idea that Israel is the victim.
- There is a people in existential danger that’s the Palestinians, the people faced with elimination, extermination, not physically but as a collective.
- Oslo was a terrible deal for the Palestinians. As a result of Palestinian failures since the 90s, a situation has emerged where we have one state and one sovereign body between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River.
Guest – Professor Rashid Khalidi, is the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University. He received his B.A. from Yale University in 1970, and his D.Phil. from Oxford in 1974. He is editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies, and was President of the Middle East Studies Association, and an advisor to the Palestinian delegation to the Madrid and Washington Arab-Israeli peace negotiations from October 1991 until June 1993.
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Judge Oks Civilians Right to Sue Military For Spying On Peace Activists
In a recent ruling, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a lawyer’s challenge to military spying on peace activists can proceed. This ruling is the first time a court allowed civilians to sue the military for violating their First and Fourth Amendment rights. National Lawyers Guild attorney Larry Hildes brought the lawsuit Panagacos v Towery in 2009 on behalf of a group of Washington state antiwar activists who discovered they were infiltrated for 2 years by John Towery, an employee at a fusion center inside a local Army base. The antiwar activists group Port Militarization Resistance sought to oppose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through civil disobedience. The lawsuit also names, the Army, Navy, Air Force, FBI, CIA, Department of Homeland Security and other law enforcement agencies.
Attorney Larry Hildes:
- Brendan Dunn was activist in Olympia, he was arrested in Seattle basically for sitting while anarchist.
- The Olympia Police Department cracked down on the Wobblies and the IWW for having newspaper boxes for which they paid for and took all the papers.
- We got them back, but Brendan got curious about what was going on, did a state public records act request for all emails and all intelligence to the city of Olympia concerning anarchists or the IWW.
- What he got back instead was hundreds and hundreds of pages of what are called “force protection memos” and “threat assessments” from Ft. Lewis about Port Militarization Resistance, a group that he was involved with that did protest against the use of public ports for shipment of Striker Brigade equipment to the occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan.
- He started looking at them and every police department and every military agency from north of Seattle to Portland was on this list. The FBI was on this list, Homeland Security, every branch of the military.
- It was detailed discussions of what PMR was planning, what they were going to do, how to fight it. The author of a lot of this was John Towery.
- PMR looked Towery up on Facebook and there’s a picture on Towery’s FB page of John Jacob who had been coming to PMR meetings for several years. Very closely involved with PMR in fact he ran their list serve on Rise Up.
- So they did some more checking. They looked up his voter registration, they got an address and the address matched John Jacobs.
- He was 20 years older than everyone else. I don’t know how but he blended in. He went to events, he brought his kids. He was very very good at what he did.
- Brendan considered him a close friend. Brendan and another member confronted him at a cafe in Tacoma and he said “yes, I’ve been spying on you. I’m doing it for your own good, there are other spies watching you that mean you much more harm than I do.”
- We do know that the Army at least one more spy. We caught the Coast Guard spy. There were 2 officers from the Tacoma Police Department’s Homeland Security Committee.
- The police would show up at unannounced demonstrations. The MP’s, local police and state patrols would already be there and everyone would be arrested as they were getting out of their cars.
- The Portland Militarization Resistance was a few dozen people. They were very creative, they had figured out a choke point for the military.
- The equipment would go out 3 weeks before the troops. If they couldn’t get the equipment there. They couldn’t send the troops.
- If they couldn’t send the equipment and the troops then no war.
- The succeeded in scaring the heck out of the military by these very peaceful acts of civil disobediance.
- They can’t arrest them before they get to the demonstration or before they even do anything.
- They think dissent against their wars is the enemy which scares me a great deal.
- Where else are they doing this, how much are they doing this?
Guest – Attorney Larry Hildes, an NLG member and one of the attorneys involved in bringing the case Panagacos v Towery.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, Torture, Truth to Power
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Updates:
- New York Times Continues To Deceive About Iraq War
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New York City Stop and Frisk Trial Begins
Here on Law and Disorder, we’ve been covering the stop and frisk case known as Floyd v City of New York and the New York Police Department. This is a federal class action lawsuit challenging New York City Police Departments’ practice of stopping and frisking hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers each year. Some five million within the last few years. The high majority of which are Latino and African American. It’s taken the Center for Constitutional Rights along with its allies united with a group called Communities United for Police Reform many years to bring this case to trial. It’s an historic moment for challenging these practices in New York and a precedent that will hopefully lead to ending this practice, not only here in New York but throughout the country. The trial began last week in federal court in Manhattan. It will last some 4 to 6 weeks.
Annette Dickerson:
- In order to be legal the stops need to be based on reasonable suspicion of criminal activity and we’re challenging the city’s use of these illegal stops.
- They violate the 14 Amendment guarantee of equal protection because they are racially discriminatory.
- 87 percent of those stopped are black and Latino.
- The NYPD commissioner seemed to have dug in his heels deeper, as has the mayor in defending the program.
- There is no empirical data that “stop and frisk” has a role in reducing crime.
- It severely damages relationships between the police and the community.
- This is an historic moment in the lifelong struggle of members of the community and organizations like CCR. Our first case against the police department was Daniels which was filed in 1999 in the aftermath of the shooting of Amadou Diallo.
- David Floyd was actually helping someone who was locked out of their apartment, he had an extra set of keys.
- In 2011 685 thousand people stopped.
- There are many other people in the community who are stopped including members of the LGBT community, the immigrant community, people who are homeless, women.
- There is a presumption of criminality.
- On the first day of trial, the courtroom was packed, as was the overflow room.
Guest – Annette Warren-Dickerson, the Director of Education and Outreach at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), is responsible for overseeing the development of CCR’s political and public education strategies as a companion to CCR’s litigation. Annette served as the Statewide Coordinator of the New York Campaign for Telephone Justice, which successfully ended the high collect call rates for the families of those incarcerated in New York State prisons.
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Cuban Five Case Update: Free The Cuban Five – Columbia University 2013
Fourteen years ago, the Cuban Five were convicted on conspiracy to commit espionage at some time in the future. Recently, prominent First Amendment attorney Martin Garbus joined the case of the Cuban Five. He’s help expose how US government paid journalists in Miami who received hundreds and thousands of dollars of payments from the office of Cuba broadcasting. A fact unknown to the defense at the time of the trial. As listeners may know, those paid reporters covered the case in an almost hysterical and prejudicial fashion. This month, Martin Garbus and many others will be discussing the case of the Cuban Five during an event held at Columbia University March 29.
Attorney Martin Garbus:
- During the time the jury was deliberating, the television media bombarded the Miami area with pictures of the jurors. The judge barred any pictures of the jurors going out because she didn’t want the jurors intimidated by a public awareness of who they were.
- Because she was concerned pressure would be put on them.
- Unknown to the judge and defense lawyers at the time, the channels each day repeatedly showed the faces of the jurors, sometimes identifying them so that the entire community knew who they were.
- And they presented very slanted interpretations of the case.
- Television misuse: we found it not only for the time the jurors were deliberating but we’ve now traced it throughout the entire trial.
- Where are now is we’ve submitted our papers and the judge is sitting on it.
- Radio Marti was made to beam into Havana, it can most anything it wants. What happened hear is that Radio Marti beamed into the entire Miami area. You have a 38 million dollar budget beaming into Miami endless stories. Then you have the US government through Radio Marti and various democracy projects also paying the print media to write propaganda. Each one of these articles are a violation of the law.
- On March 29, at the Roone Arledge Auditorium, Lerner Hall, Columbia University, 116th Street and Broadway in Manhattan.
- Martin Garbus, Lead Attorney for the Cuban Five
Ambassador Rodolfo Reyes, Cuban Ambassador to the United Nations
Ambassador Julio Escalona, Venezuelan Deputy Ambassador to the United Nations
Luis Rosa, Puerto Rican independence fighter, political prisoner for 19 years
Imani Brown, Columbia University Caribbean Students Association
Guest – Attorney Martin Garbus, one of the country’s leading trial lawyers. He has appeared before the United States Supreme Court and the highest state and federal courts in the nation. Time Magazine has named him “legendary . . . one of the best trial lawyers in the country.” He’s also known as the most prominent First Amendment lawyer.
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Racism, Torture, and Impunity in Chicago
Here on Law and Disorder, we continue to follow up on the Chicago torture cases and since the conviction and sentencing of former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge in 2011, the Chicago criminal courts have become a model in seeking justice for crimes of torture. Last year we discussed with our guest attorney Flint Taylor how the city’s new administration will handle the hundreds of ongoing torture cases of African American men. The question is answered in Flint Taylor’s recently published article in the The Nation titled Racism, Torture and Impunity in Chicago.
In the article, Flint writes “Chicago City Council and Mayor Rahm Emanuel signed off on a settlement for another torture survivor, Michael Tillman, who was exonerated in 2010. It was the perfect chance for the mayor to apologize on behalf of the city to the African-American community that helped elect him. He chose not to do so. Instead, picking up where the Daley administration left off, the mayor has continued to fund Burge’s defense, paying private lawyers a total of $3.8 million to date in the Cannon and Kitchen cases alone.”
Attorney Flint Taylor:
- In the civil rights cases we are seeking the testimony of Richard Daley, the former mayor and former states attorney to question him in detail of his long standing and central role of the police torture scandal here in Chicago.
- Evidence was brought directly to Daley through the Chicago Police Superintendent of the torture of a specific man by the use of electric shock, bagging, beating and burning to get a confession.
- Daley decided not to investigate Jon Burge, not to prosecute Jon Burge and as a result of that over 75 African American men were tortured, gave confessions, many of them went to death row.
- At this point we’ve tried to negotiate with his lawyers (Daley) they are paid for by the tax payer. We moved in court to compel him to testify.
- It took a long time, very hard struggle by community groups, lawyers activists and of course the families of the victims themselves.
- The media (local) is interested when the name Daley comes up.
- The called the box that they electrocuted them with the “n*****” box.
- We see the attacks on the genitals again and again.
- It’s a remarkable racist conspiracy. We’re using the Civil Rights Act that was used during Reconstruction, right after the Civil War, which is called the Anti Klu Klux Klan Act.
- We’re trying to get a statute passed in Congress to make torture a Federal crime.
Guest – G. Flint Taylor, a graduate of Brown University and Northwestern Law School, is a founding partner of the People’s Law Office in Chicago, an office which has been dedicated to litigating civil rights, police violence, government misconduct, and death penalty cases for more than 40 years.
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French-led Invasion of Mali, Africa
The Obama Administration has recently stepped up US military deployment within the French led military offensive to force out Islamist rebels in Mali, Africa. The U.S. Reaper drones are helping to provide targeting information for French aerial attacks. Those countries publicly supporting France include Canada, Belgium, Denmark and Germany. Meanwhile, human rights groups call for independent investigations into civilian deaths in Mali.
Ernie Harsch:
- The stakes are not so much Mali. Some of the insurgent forces, some have local grievances, like the Tuareg in Northern Mali.
- Others consider themselves Jihadists. They also target, US, French and other European in the region and elsewhere in the world.
- Whatever happens in Mali, could have wider implications. The situation in Mali is quite serious. There are lots of risks.
- Mali, Africa is a former French colony and after decolonization the French were active in intervening into the former colonies of Africa.
- There was a popular upsurge in the 90s, (in Mali) that regime was ousted by a military coup. That leader of the coup quickly transitioned to an elected leader of a civilian government.
- In Mali in particular you also had a series of rebellions in the North by an ethnic group called the Tuareg.
- The basic issues never got resolved. You didn’t have development up in the North, you didn’t have autonomy which is what they were pressing for.
- What happened in 2011, we had the Arab Spring, in like many periods of revolution or popular upsurge, old coercive states may collapse and you have opportunities for popular action but you also have other people who come in because states are fragmented.
- Some of the fighters that had been with Gaddafi, they were from Mali, and they had been Tuareg.
- Now its sort of dragging down into a protracted guerrilla phase.
- To be clear, the French intervention has gotten political backing from the African Union and from the economic community group, the Economic Community of West African States or ECOWAS.
- The French PR justification has worked fairly well.
- This is open terrain, this is semi-desert area. With air power and heavy equipment you can push far and very quickly. You can take cities and towns. The Islamists, there’s a few thousand. They’ve pulled back up into the mountains. They know the terrain better than the French actually.
- The chance of French mounting losses is there.
- Since 2005, the US has spent 1 billion dollars for counter-terror operations in the region.
- This isn’t all military by any means. A lot of it has to do with training local African military forces in counter-terrorism operations and coordinate and logistics support.
- Also, basically propaganda.
- They do humanitarian actions to curry favor with local populations.
- This isn’t well known, but the US has air bases all across Africa.
- Sometimes they’re simply a hangar operated in secret at some African military or civilian air base.
- They’re (U.S. Government) setting up an airbase in Niger, that’s openly acknowledged.
- They started out with surveillance drones in Somalia but then they used a few strikes against Islamists leaders there in Somalia.
- Everything is going to be framed in the language of the war on terror. That’s the justification. That’s a real concern for the US authorities.
- Also material resource interests. Not so much gold, but Mali does have gold in the northwest.
- Things that are very vital to the Western dominated global economy.
- There is a rivalry that’s developed with China, it’s not been terribly direct at the moment.
- It’s blowback.
Guest – Ernie Harsch, a 40 year journalist who has made numerous trips to Africa. He’s a former editor of the magazine Africa Renewal. He joins us today to discuss the conflicts in Mali and the big picture regarding the seizure of natural resources in Africa.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Extraordinary Rendition, FBI Intrusion, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Iraq War, Military Tribunal, Political Prisoner, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Updates:
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The Search for Colonel James Steele: US Special Forces Veterans Links General Petraeus With Torture In Iraq
A 15-month investigation and documentary film by the Guardian and BBC Arabic James Steele: America’s Mystery Man In Iraq has revealed how US colonel James Steele, a veteran of American proxy wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, played a key role in training and overseeing US-funded special police commandos who ran a network of torture centers in Iraq. Steele and another special forces veteran retired Colonel James Coffman reported directly to General David Petraeus. Petraeus as listeners may know was tasked with organizing Iraqi security services.
Patrick Farrelly:
- The projections that they made about being welcome in Iraq were just not true.
- It looked like the insurgency at that point in 2004 was just getting off the ground.
- This is where they turned to General Petraeus, I know he’s seen in the think tanks in Washington as the scholar warrior.
- Rumsfeld called upon him to go back into Iraq and to organize a pretty massive police force in Iraq.
- He hooked up with 2 people there, Colonel James Coffman and Colonel James Steele.
- Mill Group is essentially a bunch of military advisers who are training the Salvadorian security forces to fight the guerrillas.
- Colonel James Steele was the guy in charge of the American advisers who were training these people and also directing these forces.
- Counter-insurgency force went from 400 to 17 thousand.
- What the United States needs really badly is intelligence, they need to know who the insurgence are and where they can get them.
- That’s Steele’s expertise, having these guys on the ground, they draw in thousands of people and basically torture them for information.
- It’s Steele’s job to collate that information so that they can then hand it over to the US military. The US can then go after the insurgence informed for the first time.
- Part of the Wikileaks discovery, in terms of the war-logs which was released by Bradley Manning to wikileaks, shows this entire pattern of US soldiers coming across these detention centers,
- – they’re giving consistent reports of seeing torture of seeing abuse.
- Frontline: The Gangs Of Iraq.
- It’s a production line. These young men come in, these people were hung up on ceilings, nails pulled out with pliers, it was water boarding.
- They turned the city library (in Iraq) into a torture center.
- It became this interrogation and torture mill, that no doubt produced a lot of information.
- For empire, people like James Steele are very very important.
- Empires tend to roam into other people’s countries, and you know.
- Where did the sectarian civil war come from? Who played a part in bringing this about?
- James Steele, lives in Texas, at one point he was Vice President of Enron.
- The public is not really aware of what’s being done in the name of US taxpayers in foreign lands.
- I think its clear that the Sunni community is completely disenfranchised. I think its still in a state of terror.
Guest – Patrick Farelly, a TV, radio and print journalist who has worked in the US and Ireland. Farrelly was producer of Michael Moore’s Emmy award-winning NBC/BBC2 series TV Nation and later Bravo/Channel 4 co-production Awful Truth. He was the founding editor of the New York based weekly newspaper Irish Voice and has also been features editor of the New York Post. He has also worked for HBO, Discovery, PBS and Irish broadcasters RTE and TG4.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, FBI Intrusion, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Military Tribunal, Political Prisoner, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power
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Central Park Five Civil Suit
On April 19, 1989 a group of five black and Latino teenagers were arrested and convicted for the brutal rape of a white female jogger in Central Park, New York City. It was one of the highest profile criminal cases in the city. A New York court overturned the convictions of the five teenagers after a serial rapist confessed to the crimes. By this time of this confession, the five defendants had already served sentences of 7and 13 years. Now, the city of New York is refusing to settle a $250 million decade-long federal civil rights suit brought by the defendants. Attorney Roger Wareham talks more about the case and the Ken Burns documentary on the Central Park Five that could provide footage for the federal civil lawsuit.
Attorney Roger Wareham:
- I’m part of a team of lawyers among five firms that represent the five defendants.
- She almost died. She lost 75 percent of the blood in her body that night.
- The police at some point arrested 30 youths who had allegedly been in the park earlier that night. Some of them were charged with attacking people jogging in the park.
- Most of them had been released, these five were in custody.
- Maybe four or five hours after they were arrested the police received word of this woman who was near death.
- So they held these five children for questioning which basically became and interrogation, which basically became a coerced false confession where each one of them implicated the other ones in the rape and attack of this woman.
- Even though none of them knew each other or what actually happened because they didn’t do it, they just wanted to go home.
- By the time the parents became part of the process, the false statements had already been elicited.
- Especially when a black man is a accused of touching, raping a white woman, logic, justice, objectivity, evidence goes out the window and there’s a presumption of guilt.
- They went to trial and were convicted even though there was no forensic evidence.
- Once they were released from prison they had to register as sexual predators.
- Thirteen years after their conviction, the person who actually committed the crime came forward and admitted he’d done it.
- He was arrested after a failed attempt at a rape. There was an m.o. that he employed with the rapes that he conducted.
- I’m part of a political organization called the December 12 Movement.
- Manhattan’s District Attorney’s office had done a very thorough investigation and this is the same office that had prosecuted them.
- They put forth a really damning affirmation in support of our motion basically admitting they had prosecuted the wrong people, errors had been made. It was clear that the one and only perpetrator was Mateas Raes and they were not going to retry the case.
- Their convictions were overturned 10 years ago, in December 2002.
- Why hasn’t it been settled? You look to Police Commissioner Kelly who endorsed the report.
- Subpoenaing the outtakes is a reflection of their desperation. See, they know the truth. They’re floundering around looking for different straws to grab at.
- Contact the December 12th Movement directly at 718-398-1766.
Guest – Attorney Roger Wareham is a lawyer and political activist of over four decades. He is a member of the December 12th Movement, an organization of African people which organizes in the Black and Latino community around human rights violations, particularly police terror. Wareham is also the International Secretary-General of the International Association Against Torture (AICT), a non-governmental organization that has consultative status before the United Nations.
Since 1989, he has annually presented evidence of human rights violations facing people of color in the United States and other parts of the world at assemblies of the United Nations’ Human Rights Council (formerly the Commission on Human Rights) and its other bodies that meet in Geneva, Switzerland. His work was instrumental in having Mr. Maurice Glele, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance; conduct the first U.N. investigation of the United States in history. Roger Wareham was an active organizer of and participant in the United Nations’ World Conference against Racism held from August 30 – September 7, 2001 in Durban, South Africa.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, FBI Intrusion, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Surveillance, War Resister
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Mass Incarceration Epidemic
On January 19, the Malcolm X Commemoration Committee 1199 SEIU activists presented the 17th Annual Dinner Tribute to the Families of our Political Prisoners & Prisoners of War. It was called Transforming Solidarity: Working Together to End Political Imprisonment and Mass Imprisonment and was held at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Labor Center in NYC.
Professor Johanna Fernandez:
- The Republican Party begins to craft an ideological backlash against an emerging civil rights and black power movement.
- The Republican presidential candidate at the time Barry Goldwater in a speech begins to link crime to the activism of civil rights protesters that are being incarcerated in the south.
- He is deploying one of the most atrocious fears of the white supremacist South in the post-reconstruction era to delegitamize these protests. That black men are going to rape white women.
- What we see happening in the 1960s is that fear is manufactured by these P.R. firms that are working in consultation with Republican leaders but also with police organizations, the Fraternal Order of Police, and the Police Benevolent Association.
- 1968 saw and huge amount of riots especially in the aftermath of Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination.
- The criminalization of black and Latino protesters was the major strategy used to delegitamate the aspirations and the politics of this emerging revolutionary class.
- The Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 legalized wire-tapping and bugging by federal agents and local police without a court order.
- It also legalized on the stop search and seizure by police.
- The police are exempt from the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
- What is the purpose of this crime mania and moral panic? It’s to delegitamize the influence of black and Latino radicals of the working class of color in the nation.
- In 1970s, the apparatus of mass incarceration emerges.
- This apparatus is being deployed against the most vulnerable sections of American society in urban centers. African-Americans and Latinos that are being devastated by a crisis of de-industrialization.
- The poorest people of color are likely to resist, and this class is going to be controlled.
- It was a fabricated crisis of crime that never existed.
- Fear atomizes people they don’t start thinking in terms of community but individual.
- Crime becomes a code word for African Americans, Latinos and increasingly immigrants.
- The Black Panther Party had an analysis of oppression and inequality that addressed its root causes. It identified capitalism which is driven by profit rather than need as the problem.
- But also they had a newspaper and this is important around the issue of mass incarceration.
- Crime is an ideological wedge that is crafted by the Republican Party and the new Right in this nation for the purposes of social control.
Guest – Johanna Fernández, a native New Yorker. She received a PhD in History from Columbia University and a BA in Literature and American Civilization from Brown University. Professor Fernández teaches 20th Century U.S. History, the history of social movements, the political economy of American cities, and African-American history. She has previously taught at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburg, PA and Trinity College in Hartford, CT and is, most recently, the recipient of a Fulbright Scholars grant to the Middle East and North Africa that will take her to Jordan in spring 2011, where she will teach graduate courses in American History.
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Policing Trends at National Special Security Events
On January 21, 2013, more than 3 thousand law enforcement officers and nearly 13 thousand military troops were activated and deployed to the Washington Mall. This magnitude of security at President Barack Obama’s 2013 inauguration raised the water mark of militarized police mobilization for National Special Security Events (NSSEs) High tech weaponry, mobile checkpoints and a large uniformed presence have become common sights at major sporting events, nominating conventions and international summits. NSSEs were created under President Bill Clinton, a designation that requires federal and local law enforcement to collaborate on event security under the management of the Secret Service. The report was issued by the National Lawyers Guild on NSSE trends is the Guild’s senior researcher.
Traci Yoder:
- The idea that this much security, this kind of multi-level, multi-agency is necessary is the assumption that these events are high profile, will have a lot of people and therefore are likely targets for terrorist attacks.
- There’s been about 40 NSSE’s since the designation was created and these include events like president inaugurations, state funerals, the annual State of the Union address, the Superbowl, Olympics, all International monetary organization meetings and of course the Democratic and Republican National Conventions.
- All to often we’re finding that protesters who are engaging in constitutionally protected and legitimate protest activities are lumped into this security threat.
- Over time, we’ve (NLG) have not only done legal support, we’ve also done a lot of research and writing and analysis of the different kinds of trends we see evolving.
- We wanted to use the RNC and the DNC in 2012 as case studies to look at some disturbing changing trends and express our concern that these security measures are simply becoming more normalized.
- Several months before an NSSE, the local government overrides city codes to create exceptional circumstances for these particular events. That means creating a security zone around the event itself, then limiting How When and Where people can protest within that zone.
- That can lead to limiting the times of demonstrations, the amount of people, the special permitting processes to prohibiting everyday, household items being allowed in the zone.
- What we see leading up to NSSE and this has been very consistent is the DHS and FBI circulating unsubstantiated reports that violent anarchists and outside agitators are plotting to come to these cities really to cause harm and injury – to bring explosive devices, to injure police.
- FBI informants and agents and undercover police were crucial to both encouraging and helping to set up these plots which they then use as evidence later.
- We’re asking law enforcement to stop spreading these unsubstantiated threats of protester violence before NSSEs and acknowledge that most of the violence that has taken place at NSSEs in the past has been on the part of police and not the protesters.
- The combined total of the security budget for the RNC and DNC was 100 million dollars. 50 million dollars going to each city.
- We see the continuation of the militarization of police departments and the NSSEs are playing a part in them.
Guest – Traci Yoder, National Lawyers Guild senior researcher. Before coming to the National Office, she coordinated the NLG Philadelphia Chapter. She holds master’s degrees in Library and Information Studies and Anthropology, with a focus in the latter degree on gender studies and East Africa. In Philadelphia, Traci worked on many projects in addition to the NLG, including the Wooden Shoe Book Collective and the Radical Archives of Philadelphia.
