Civil Liberties, Climate Change, Human Rights, Truth to Power, U.S. Militarism, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister
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US Petitions The ICC For War Crimes
As the war in Ukraine continues to rage, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution that “encourages member states to petition the [International Criminal Court] or other appropriate international tribunal to take any appropriate steps to investigate war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the Russian Armed Forces.” Yet the United States has consistently undermined the ICC. The U.S. government thinks the ICC is reliable enough to try Russians but not U.S. or Israeli officials.
Today on Law and Disorder we will examine the matter of what constitutes war crimes, whether war crimes have been committed by either side in Russia’s war in Ukraine, and the role of the International Criminal Court in adjudicating whether or not war crimes have in fact been committed.
Guest – Marjorie Cohn – Law and Disorder co-host, professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, a member of the advisory board of Veterans for Peace, and the bureau of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. She writes a regular column on Truthout and provides frequent legal and political commentary for local, national and international media. Her books include Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral and Geopolitical Issues.
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Beyond Fossil Law: Climate, Courts, and the Fight for a Sustainable Future
The technology exists to halt and reverse the ongoing catastrophe of climate change. What is lacking is the political will to do it.
It is legal in the United States to put millions of tons of poison into the air but it is illegal to disrupt this ecocide. Our courts and Congress defend this ecocide. What is to be done?
In 2016, four people known as “the valve turners“ shut down four pipelines in the states of Washington, Montana, Minnesota, and North Dakota. They were arrested and tried. How did the valve turners defend themselves? They mounted the defense of necessity.
The necessity defense is the legal concept that a person can commit a minor crime in order to prevent a larger one. In this case the valve turners admitted to trespass on oil pipeline company property in order to prevent their ongoing contribution to the crisis of climate change.
Guest – Attorney Ted Hamilton, author of the just-published book, “Beyond Fossil Law: Climate, Courts, and the Fight for a Sustainable Future.“ Bill McKibben describes Ted Hamilton book as “a sweeping account of how the legal system enables the ongoing destruction of the planet.“. Ted Hamilton is a climate movement lawyer, writer, and literary scholar. After law school, he co-founded the Climate Defense Project, which provides legal assistance to climate justice activists including the valve turners. He lives in Worcester, Massachusetts.
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Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Supreme Court, U.S. Militarism, War Resister
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Federal Case Against Donald Trump
There is a great deal of speculation as to whether former president Donald Trump will eventually be indicted for crimes allegedly committed while he was the president. Well, in what might prove to be the most serious blow yet to Trump’s effort to stay out of jail, on March 28th, a federal judge ruled that both former president Trump and Atty. John Eastman who had advised him on how to overturn the 2020 election had most likely committed felonies, including obstructing the work of Congress and conspiring to defraud the United States. The ruling represents a highly significant breakthrough for the House committee investigating the January 6th attack on the Capitol. Judge David O. Carter found that the actions taken by Trump and Eastman amounted to “a coup in search of a legal theory.”
The judge’s ruling may be the House committee’s biggest win to date, as it suggests that the investigators have already built a case strong enough to convince a federal judge of Trump’s culpability in the January 6th insurrection.
Specifically, the ruling means that the House committee will now receive more than 100 emails related to the legal strategy proposed by Eastman to pressure Vice President Mike Pence not to certify electors from swing states when Congress convened on January 6, and thus to not certify the electoral vote. In making his ruling Judge Carter said, “Dr. Eastman and President Trump launched a campaign to overturn a democratic election, an action unprecedented in American history.”
Just how significant is this federal court ruling? What would a federal prosecutor need to show a judge and jury to be able to hold Trump liable for his actions around January 6th? And what about other actions by the former president while in office that many criminal law experts claim were illegal? And, of course, what role will politics ultimately play in determining whether Trump ever stands trial and is convicted by a jury?
Guest – Attorney Michael Tigar. Michael Tigar has been acting professor of law at UCLA, the Jos. D. Jamil Chair of Law at the University of Texas, and the holder of an endowed professorship at Washington College of Law. He is the author of numerous books, including Thinking About Terrorism: The Threat to Civil Liberties in Times if National Emergency and most recently, Sensing Injustice: A Lawyer’s Life in the Battle for Change. He has also represented such notable clients as The Washington Post, Rep. Ron Dellums, and Lynne Stewart.
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Russia, Ukraine War Analysis
And now to the matter of Russia’s war in Ukraine and the role of a free press in war time. Today, much is made of the fact that in Putin’s Russia, little or no accurate news of the war is reaching the Russian people. Instead, what they read in their newspapers or hear on their radios and see on their televisions is no more or less than what Putin wants them to read or see or hear. Meanwhile, here in the United States, the American people are provided with virtually non-stop newspaper and live eve-witness television coverage of the war in Ukraine; “coverage” that comes from reporters and others, often in real time, and on the ground in the middle of Putin’s war. Surely the dramatically contrasting way in which the Russian people and the American people are experiencing the war via the media must play a major role in how the two peoples feel about the war. So, too, how the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were covered by the US media must have played a role in how we, the American people, felt about those wars. Well, today we look at the role a nation’s media can play in shaping public support for or against a war that is being fought by that nation.
Guest – Norman Solomon is truly one of America’s true champions of a free and honest press, free and honest in war time as well as in peacetime. Mr. Solomon is one of the founders of F.A.I.R., or Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, which has proved to be a powerful watchdog of the US media. Norman Solomon is also the co-founder of the internet news and opinion source, RootsAction.org. He is, of course, the author of too many articles to recite here. He is also the author of a number of books, including “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death;” and “Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State.”
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Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Crony Capitalism, Supreme Court, Violations of U.S. and International Law
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The Effects Of War On Our Economy
The US government is seeking regime change in Russia. According to Biden, they want to get rid of Putin and impose the most draconian sanctions ever on Russia after its illegal war of aggression on Ukraine, a war that the US-led NATO provoked. Once again, as it did in Afghanistan, the United States got Russia involved in a war and now hopes to bleed and bury her. For this ignoble end, the US military will fight Russia in this proxy war with every last drop of Ukrainian blood.
It is the opinion of many historians and economists that the American empire is on the way out. They think its exit has been accelerated by the sanctions it has imposed on Russia, that these sanctions have boomeranged and that the unipolar world headed by the United States is about to be fragmented.
What will be the effect of the sanctions on the US dollar, which is now the currency of international trade, if the United States loses its place as the unipolar power on the planet? How will the US economy be affected if the dollar is no longer used as the only reserve currency for international trade and what will the consequences be for Americans?
How will the war affect those who depended on Ukraine as the breadbasket of the world for its massive production of wheat? What about its effect on Europeans, who depend on Russian natural gas and oil?
Guest – Economist Richard Wolff assesses the catastrophic effect of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Richard Wolff is professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, where he was the chairman of the economics department. He is the founder of Democracy at Work and the author of numerous books. He is presently a visiting professor at the New School in New York City.
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Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas Ethical Conflict Of Interest
In an ethics bombshell for the legal community, the Washington Post recently broke the story of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife Virginia (or “Ginni”) Thomas’s text messages to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.
In her texts, Ginni Thomas urged Meadows to do anything he could to subvert the democratic voting result and to fight, in her words, for good over evil. The goal was to frustrate Joe Biden’s victory and keep Donald Trump in power.
Ginni Thomas has been a persistent voice on behalf of tea party activism. She founded Growdswell, a group of far-right activists, nonprofit heads, journalists, and others who reportedly meet weekly at the offices of Judicial Watch to strategize in order to advance a right-wing agenda. A New York Times Magazine investigation revealed that Thomas oversaw Groundswell’s project of a “30-front war” to “exchange and amplify hardline positions on immigration, abortion, and gun control.”
Ginni Thomas also sits on the board of the action arm of the Center for National Policy, a secretive, right-wing entity that helped advance, according to the Times, the “Stop the Steal” movement. Thomas was thus greatly involved in efforts to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election.
Advocacy on these and other issues that come before the Supreme Court, without Ginni Thomas’s husband recusing himself, threaten to further erode Americans’ trust in this legal pillar of democracy.
Guest – James Sample is a professor at Hofstra Law School. Professor Sample regularly comments on ethical issues for leading media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Law Journal, Slate.com and The Huffington Post, and he is a frequent presenter at national conferences.
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Animal Rights, Civil Liberties, Human Rights, Supreme Court
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The Supreme Court Nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson
During vicious, racist questioning by Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson remained dignified, poised and unruffled. Jackson’s record is impeccable. No nominee for the Supreme Court has had stronger credentials.
GOP senators on the committee leveled racist and sexist attacks against Jackson, playing to their radical right-wing base. Many of the questions mirrored QAnon talking points. GOP committee members apparently sought to peel off votes for Jackson’s confirmation while appealing to right-wing voters in their forthcoming congressional and presidential campaigns.
Ted Cruz attacked Jackson with charges about critical race theory. Josh Hawley tried to paint Jackson as “soft on crime.” And Lindsey Graham accused Jackson of aiding terrorism by representing Guantánamo detainees.
Nevertheless, it appears that Jackson will be confirmed to the Supreme Court, the only Black woman ever to serve as a justice on the high court. Although Jackson’s confirmation will not change the skewed ideological balance of the court, she and Sonia Sotomayor will comprise a strong progressive wing of the court.
Guest – Attorney Marjorie Cohn, who is a co-host on Law and Disorder. Marjorie is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, and a former criminal defense attorney. Her books include The United States and Torture: Interrogation, Incarceration, Abuse, and she writes a regular column for Truthout.
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Basic Legal Rights For Animals: Activists and Advocates
Discussions over whether animals are sentient beings, capable of feeling pain, pleasure or suffering, date back as far as ancient thinkers such as Plutarch, Hippocrates and Pythagoras. They all advocated for the fair treatment of animals. The term animal rights stands for the proposition that non-human animals have the right to be treated, not as property, but rather as the individuals they are, with their own desires and needs.
Animal law is now widely taught in law schools across North America. There are 167 law schools in the U.S. and Canada, and 11 in Australia and New Zealand, teaching courses in animal law. Several legal scholars support extending basic legal rights and to personhood to non-human animals.
Critics of animal rights argue that nonhuman animals are unable to enter into a social contract, and thus cannot have rights. Another argument is that animals may be used as resources as long as they don’t undergo unnecessary suffering.
Certain forms of animal rights activism, such as the destruction of fur farms and animal labs by the ALF or Animal Liberation Front, have also attracted criticism, and prompted Congressional reaction by enacting of harsh laws allowing these activities to be prosecuted as terrorism. These laws include the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act.
Guest – Attorney Tamara Bedic, chairperson of the National Lawyers Guild Animal Rights Project. She is a graduate of the University of Virginia School of Law and a masters degree from Columbia University-NY University. Tamara practices employment law with a focus on women and harassment in the workplace.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Human Rights, U.S. Militarism, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister
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Russia, Deescalation And Nuclear Disarmament
If the U.S. nuclear policy doesn’t change immediately and rapidly we are in a lot of trouble. Seventy-seven years ago, the United States became the first, and so far the only, country to use nuclear bombs when we destroyed the two Japanese cities of Hiroshima and then Nagasaki to frighten the Russians and secure an immediate and unconditional surrender of Japan in World War II. The dropping of these bombs was the first move against Russia that would devolve two years later in 1947 into the Cold War.
The threat of nuclear war has never eased and it is now imminent with the fighting in the Ukraine which could draw the U.S. and NATO into a direct conflict with Russia. We are now in a new stage of this war. It has become hot and so perilous it threatens all of humanity, all of earth’s creatures, with annihilation. Any mistake, any miscalculation would quickly and irretrievably doom us all. This almost happened during the Cuban Missile Crisis where nuclear war was avoided, according to scholars, by luck and decent leadership.
What has been the history of attempts to contain and roll back the threat of nuclear war? What has been tried and what is failed? What will it take to get the nine countries who possess nuclear weapons to give them up?
The Veterans for Peace organization spelled it out clearly. There should be a “no first use” policy and nuclear missiles must be taken off hair trigger alert. The United States should rejoin the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, from which George W. Bush and Donald Trump withdrew, respectively. The U.S. should sign the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Our country should initiate negotiations to reduce and eventually eliminate all nuclear weapons, as required by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to which the U.S. is a party.
To start, there must be a cease-fire in the Ukraine, the withdrawal of Russian forces, and guarantees of Ukrainian sovereignty and Russian security.
Peter’s recent article – Beijing should help mediate to end the Russia-Ukraine crisis
Guest – Peter Kuznick is a professor of history at American University and directs the Nuclear Studies Program. at that institution. Peter and Oliver Stone wrote The Untold History of the United States and also produced a showtime documentary series based on the book.
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World Peace Through Law: Replacing War with the Global Rule Of Law
In 1945, following World War I and World War II, wars that claimed millions of lives, the nations of the world enacted the United Nations Charter “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” The Charter prohibits the use of military force except in self-defense after an armed attack by another state or when the Security Council approves it. The five victors of World War II, who became the permanent members of the Security Council, agreed to the Charter because they each received a veto over matters of war and peace.
The United States is a party to the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Nevertheless, it continues to violate the provision of that treaty that requires the parties to move toward the elimination of nuclear weapons. Although he won the Nobel Peace Prize, Barack Obama’s administration advanced a policy, which Donald Trump and Joe Biden continued, to develop leaner and meaner nuclear weapons. The proposed U.S. budget calls for nearly $2 trillion over the next 30 years to build two new bomb factories, missiles, planes, submarines and redesigned warheads. In spite of the UN Charter and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, we are now facing the most dangerous threat of nuclear war in the last 60 years.
Guest – James Ranney is a retired Adjunct Professor at Widener Law School, co-founder of the Jeanette Rankin Peace Center, a legal consultant to the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, and a board member of the Project for Nuclear Awareness. Professor Ranney has written a book called “World Peace Through Law: Replacing War with the Global Rule of Law.” In this book, he calls for arms reduction, including the abolition of nuclear weapons, and global alternative dispute resolution mechanisms, with enforcement mechanisms.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Human Rights, U.S. Militarism, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister
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Ukraine, Russia, NATO and United States Conflict Analysis
As attacks escalate in Ukraine, the push for a no-fly zone over the country grows stronger. However last week there were indicators that top Ukrainian negotiators are moving toward a cease-fire deal. This comes as we’ve reported last week that the United States has baited the Russian bear repeatedly, starting in 1990 with the breakup of the Soviet Union. At that time, US Secretary of State James Baker promised the Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev that the US-led NATO organization would not move “one inch” east towards Russia. This promise was broken.
The Russians were betrayed.Since then, NATO has recruited 11 former Soviet bloc and Warsaw Pact countries into its military organization. Led by the United States, NATO is an organization has played an aggressive role, having carried out the bombings of Serbia, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, and Libya.
NATO has placed missiles in Poland within 100 miles of the Russian border. Missiles on the long border between Ukraine and Russia could hit Moscow in 10 minutes making it impossible for Russia to defend itself. Russia’s attempts to make United States understand that they have crossed a red line has been consistently rejected.
This is not to defend Russia’s actions but to place them in historical context. The world now has come to the edge of an abyss. A nuclear war could easily be started, annihilating all of humanity. The rule of law must be restored.
Russia must honor a cease-fire and withdraw. The United States must forswear arming Ukraine and recruiting the Ukraine into NATO. Ukraine must go forward as a neutral country like Austria or Finland.
Guest – Chris Hedges spent two decades as a foreign correspondent, 15 of them with The New York Times, covering conflicts in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the former Yugoslavia. He learned overseas that the evils of empire are the external expression of white supremacy, just as mass incarceration, which he describes as the civil rights issue of our age, is the most brutal internal expression of white supremacy. Prisons , he writes, are the modern iteration of slave plantations. Hedges is the author of 14 books, The winner of a Pulitzer Prize for journalism, a graduate of Harvard Divinity school, and an ordained Presbyterian minister. chrishedges.substack.com
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Assata Taught Me: State Violence, Racial Capitalism, and the Movement for Black Lives
Assata Shakur is an inspiration to many young Black and brown activists today. She was a Black Panther Party member in New York in 1968 when FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover said that the Panthers were the single “greatest threat to the internal security of the country.“ Hoover launched the Cointelpro program to eliminate the Black Panthers.
When the Panthers broke up, Assata became a member of the Black Liberation Army. She was seriously wounded and apprehended in 1973 by state troopers in a shoot-out on a New Jersey highway. She was tried and convicted of murdering a state trooper even though the medical evidence showed that she was badly injured and could not have fired a gun.
Assata escaped from prison in 1979 and five years later, she was given political asylum in revolutionary Cuba where she lives today. The FBI has put a $2 million bounty on her head. She has a target on her back inasmuch as she is wanted dead or alive.
Guest – Donna Murch, associate professor of history at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Professor Murch, who specializes in African-American and US History, Black Radicalism, and History of Mass Incarceration, is known as the historian of the Black Panther Party. She has recently written the book “Assata Taught Me: State Violence, Racial Capitalism, and the Movement for Black Lives” published by Haymarket Books. In it, she analyzes the forces giving rise to Black Power and Black radicalism, mass incarceration, the militarization of the police who target people of color, and the genesis of Black Lives Matter.
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