Afghanistan War, CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Impeachment, Supreme Court, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power
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Host Updates:
Michael Ratner and Michael Steven Smith update on the media discussions of whether to prosecute the “torture conspirators”, the details of Attorney General Michael Mukasey’s collapse, and a preventive detention scheme that could replace Guantanamo prison.
- No truth commission. Insist on criminal investigations and prosecutions of torture conspirators.
- Power concedes nothing without demand, it never did and it never will.
- Mukasey gives speech about not prosecuting people during Federalist Society speech, then collapses on the stage.
- A Seattle state court judge in the federalist society audience started yelling, Tyrant! Tyrant! Tyrant!
- This was about law itself, unless you have prosecutions going forward it will happen again.
- How will Guantanamo be closed? CCR general position: Repatriate 95 percent, try the rest in federal court.
Related Articles:
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Ali Al-Marri Case Update: Key Police State Building Block At Stake
In June of this year, an en banc Federal Appeals Court in Virginia ruled 5-4 that the Bush Administration could subject Ali Al-Marri to indefinite detention even though he was a resident of the United States. The court in the fourth circuit ruled that US residents could be locked up indefinitely as enemy combatants even though they were never charged with a crime. Al-Marri is the only enemy combatant currently in detention and without charges in the United States.
Jonathan Hafetz:
- Can the president declare legal residents including American citizens, enemy combatants, deprive them a right to a trial and hold them indefinitely.
- This, based on the idea that there is a global and never ending war on terror.
- Though on sovereign soil, no right to habeas corpus. He was declared an enemy combatant, the case was lost in an embank in the fourth circuit
- Why is this case so critical to liberty in the United States . . . ?
- The five judges who ruled against the case, said essentially that there must be this power to effectively detain people in the United States to prevent terrorist attacks.
- Ruling: the president can label legal residents including American citizens an enemy combatant in the United States, without a trial, no habeas, hold them indefinitely.
- It’s the idea of the president to use the military to seize people including citizens from their home or places of work.
- A very dangerous power to allow any president to have, it corrupts the justice system, it can be used as a weapon,
- Seven years of these cases of assertion of executive power, and the courts have not answered this fundamental basic question, who can be detained by the military, who is a soldier and who is a civilian?
- All that is stated is that if someone picks up a weapon on the battlefield, that person can be a soldier, but in the most extreme cases in the war on terror – – such as being picked up in the United States as a soldier in the extended geographic concept of the war on terror – – the courts have not grappled with whether there is habeas in those cases.
- Even the judges who ruled against us did say that it included American citizens.
Guest – Jonathan Hafetz, Staff Attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, National Security Project.
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Jeremy Scahill: This Is Change? 20 Hawks, Clintonites and Neocons to Watch for in Obama’s White House
As President-elect Barack Obama starts building his administration, many are watching who he selects and how these choices will be consistent with the rhetoric of change. Hosts talk with investigative journalist and author Jeremy Scahill about his recent article calling to question the list of recent appointees to the Obama team. Some have a history of supporting torture, despite Obama calling for the shutting down of Guantanamo, and others have associations with the neo-conservative Project For The New American Century.
Jeremy Scahill:
- Clinton’s policies laid the groundwork for some of the most repressive and violent policies of the Bush era, on Iraq, civil liberties, on economic policy.
- He (Clinton) rained missles down on Iraq, bombed Yugoslavia in 1999 without UN authorization. He pushed through NAFTA and GAT, he launched airstrikes against Sudan and Afghanistan, he militarized the war on drugs, particularly the counterinsurgency war in Latin America. CIA renditions began.
- Obama is taking these same individuals who were part of that bi-partisan war machine and putting them back in prominent positions.
- Obama’s defense secretary – Robert Gates, George HW Bush’s former director of the CIA.
- What message does that send not only to the anti-war people who were a large part of Obama’s base but to those which heard Obama say we’re going to change the way Washington’s foreign policy is run?
- Henry Kissenger says it’s (Obama administration) outstanding.
- The fact that these people are praising Obama, gives us a sense of what to expect from the economic team.
- The message is clear that corporate interests are going to reign supreme, over the interests of ordinary working folks in this country.
- A total contradiction in Obama’s campaign pledge to speak up for the middle class. The reality is is that he is putting together a team with the people who are part of the problem.
- Naomi Klein: Obama represents the status quo, which is not good for people who roll up their sleeves everyday and go to work, or suffering poor
- Eric Holder, attorney general, though better than any AG the Bush Administration has appointed, Holder has worked the Chiquita Banana Co., the most vicious violators of human rights in Latin America.
- I think its incredibly important that we put tremendous pressure on the Justice Department, on the Obama Administration to actually seek out justice.
- Obama Adminstration may not prosecute “torture conspirators.” because they open themselves up to Democratic complicity. Complicity such as voting for the Patriot Act, supporting the illegal, unlawful prison in Guantanamo.
- Former Chief Assistant of the CIA, Brennen steps down from CIA director nomination, a passionate supporter of torture techniques.
- The idea that Obama even keeps him on board as one of the people who is going to decide who runs the intelligence apparatus in this country is shameful.
- It’s Orwellian, you vote for change, and you get torture and skewed intelligence.
- The reality is that Obama is not going to end the occupation in Iraq, he is going to escalate the war in Afghanistan.
- He’s not going to be great at all in holding the Bush officials accountable.
- We need to start building a movement in this country that is independent of electoral politics.
- Ultimately the premier issue of our time – Radical Privatization.
- Yes, its good that John McCain and Sarah Palin are not in power in this country but Obama is not a saint, he is a center democrat, closely tied to the democratic policy elite.
Guest – Jeremy Scahill, investigative journalist and author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. He is also a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute and a frequent contributor to The Nation. Scahill and colleague Amy Goodman were co-recipients of the 1998 Polk Award for their radio documentary “Drilling and Killing: Chevron and Nigeria’s Oil Dictatorship”, which investigated the Chevron Corporation‘s role in the killing of two Nigerian environmental activists.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Extraordinary Rendition, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Iraq Veterans, Iraq War, Military Tribunal, Supreme Court, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, Truth to Power
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Updates:
Federal Appeals Court Overturns Two Terrorist Convictions
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Sheik Mohammed Ali Al Moayad and Mohammed Mohsen Zayed, convicted of supporting terrorists, can have new trials. The men were convicted in federal court in Brooklyn after a six week trial in early 2005 on charges of conspiring to support Al Qaida and Hamas.
National Lawyers Guild Lawyer, Robert Boyle: This case involved an FBI sting operation where the FBI and the Dept of Justice lured Sheik Mohammed Ali Al Moayad and Mohammed Mohsen Zayed from their native Yemen to Germany.
- They were lured on the promise (…and this was an FBI informant that told them this) that they would provide hundreds of thousands of dollars to Al Moayad’s charitable organizations. The issue was entrapment – set up by the FBI.
- The Sheik went to Germany arrested there in 2003 after meetings with the informant -all recorded. He was brought to trial in Brooklyn but imprisoned in a Florence, Colorado supermax prison.
- The trial judge allowed the government to introduce a host of prejudicial and irrelevant evidence.
- Robert Boyle – “Its rare that they find the cumulative prejudicial evidence as grounds for reversal. This decision is gratifying and unique, its rare to get a reversal in a case where there is alleged terrorism.”
- Extremely similar to Lynne Stewart’s case, if you don’t have direct evidence, prejudice the jury. Raise the spectre of Osama Bin Laden and you hope that the jury overlooks the weaknesses of the government’s case and convicts.
Guest – Lynne Stewart, has also helped set up the Muslim Innocence Project for Muslims caught in similar entrapment.
Guest – Robert Boyle, a national lawyers guild attorney who represented Sheik Mohammed Ali Al Moayad and former civil rights lawyer Lynne Stewart who tells us why this brings other issues to light in her case.
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Luis Posada Carriles: A Tribunal
We hear a speech from Wayne Smith, Senior Fellow, Center for International Policy, he was among three speakers. We e will hear Brian Becker, Director of the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition in the weeks to come.
Wayne Smith addressed the failure of the United States, specifically the Bush family to prosecute Luis Posada Carriles on charges of terrorism. The failure to charge Posada with terrorism is an open violation of the Resolution 1373 of the UN Security Council. A resolution George Bush pushed through on the days following the attacks on 9/11.
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Collateral Damage : Chris Hedges
Author, journalist Chris Hedges exposes the dark violence deep within the ranks of the Iraq War. The type of violence and eyewitness accounts you don’t hear about in the media. His book pulls together the 50 stories from by combat veterans as they describe the day to day carnage.
Chris Hedges:
- We wanted to give people a window into the sheer terror that has been visited on Iraqi civilians.
- Convoys have to keep moving: Running over children. If an IED goes off, soldiers lay down withering suppressive fire.
- The Sunnis are building a powerful force and will soon unleash a civil war
- Barack Obama speaks in the same toxic language of war bequeathed to us by the Bush Administration. He wants to expand the war in Afghanistan, he talks about leaving behind troops in the green zone and the super bases and fighting terrorism.
- We have no rights as citizens of this country to debate the terms of this occupation, in post Nuremberg terms this war is a criminal war of aggression.
- Resistance. We find our spiritual worth in our ability to resist and to take moral stance n0 matter how lonely.
Guest – Chris Hedges, author of many books specializing in American and Middle Eastern politics and society. He spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans and right now, he’s a senior fellow at The Nation Institue in New York City and a lecturer in the Council of the Humanities.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Guantanamo, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Truth to Power
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Updates:
(Encore Interview) Economics Professor Rick Wolff: The Capitalist Crisis
In this interview Professor Rick Wolff focuses on the larger issues beyond finance such as banking, money lending and credit, he says it was a problem in the making for the last 30 years. He describes historic underlying causes such as the end of the wage increase back in 1970. From 1820-1970 the American economy delivered a rising standard of living, wages went up every decade in that time and they used that money to buy more things.
In the last 30 years the wages in the United States did not go up. In order to keep buying things, people worked more hours and borrowed money, exhausting themselves in additional work and taking on more debt. From the workers point of view, there is increased anxiety and exhaustion, their lives are strained, pressurized. Meanwhile financial markets and banks compete with each other to profit from the workers’ massive debt.
Bail outs and extreme right anti-immigration moves will not solve underlying problem. A fundamental reorganization of the American economic system will not be done by the people who run the corporations, yet the change has to begin at the Board of Directors, the small groups of people heading corporations who have been making decisions in a classical way for 150 years.
Rick Wolff – Possible Solutions:
- Reorganize the way business works so that the people become there own board of directors.
- Corporations reorganized so that workers collectively become there own boss.
- Mon-Thurs – You come to work and do your job as you always did, less hours, wage increase.
- Friday – Attend meetings all day to assess the impact of the product on the community, what products to make, what to do with profits. Cultivating the community.
“This, instead of a handful of people, “the bosses†set against the employees in a conflicted situation that periodically makes each group behave in antagonistic ways in turn destroying the community – which is where we are now.â€
Guest – Rick Wolff, Professor of Economics at University of Massachusetts at Amherst Rick teaches at the Brecht Forum and the New School in New York City. (Read Rick’s article, Economic Blues in the Monthly Review)
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Luis Posada Carriles: A Tribunal
We hear a speech from Historian, Jane Franklin, she was among three speakers. Jane is a contributing editor to the Cuba Update, the journal of th eCenter Cuban Studies in New York City, since 1979. She is the author of two books: Cuban Foreign Relations 1959-1982 and Cuba and the United States: A Chronological History (Ocean Press, Melbourne, Australia) Jane has published numerous articles, poems and film reviews and has lectured extensively about Cuba, Vietnam, Nicaragua El Slavador and Panama.
We will be hearing from speakers Wayne Smith, Senior Fellow, Center for International Policy and Brian Becker, Director, A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition in the weeks to come.
From the New York Daily News: “It took years, but he is finally going to be charged in the U.S. for his crimes – even if only symbolically. It will occur here, in New York, when a tribunal composed of scholars and human rights activists take up the case of international terrorist Luis Posada Carriles, a man who is responsible for a long list of murderous attacks.
Posada, though, is a very lucky man. Despite his dark history, Posada remains free to roam Miami’s sunny streets and happily lives at home with his family. His rap sheet is long and deadly. A convicted terrorist in two countries – he escaped Venezuela and was pardoned in Panama – Posada is considered the mastermind behind the 1976 bombing of Cubana Airlines Fight 455, which killed the 73 passengers on board, including the Cuban national fencing team. He is believed responsible for a string of hotel bombings in Cuba, resulting in the death of Italian tourist Fabio diCelmo. But these are only two examples of his treachery. Posada later boasted about the diCelmo killing in a New York Times interview, which should give everybody a clear idea of what kind of person this man is. Inexplicably, the Justice Department has refused to classify the former CIA operative as a terrorist. The reason may have to be found in Posada’s long and extensive ties with the CIA and several other nation’s intelligence agencies.”
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