CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Criminalizing Dissent, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Supreme Court, Surveillance, Truth to Power, Violations of U.S. and International Law, Whistleblowers
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Julian Assange: October 26 Appeal
Julian Assange was a young computer genius, an Australian citizen, the publisher of Wiki leaks, an award-winning journalist, and the person responsible for embarrassing the United States by publishing material on American war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. He figured out a way to receive information from whistle blowers and publish the information anonymously in order to protect them.
When Mike Pompeo was Trump’s Director of the CIA he called WikiLeaks, which was founded by Julian Assange, “a hostile non-state intelligence agency.” Pompeo suggested that Julian Assange be kidnapped from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he had received political asylum, rendered, and assassinated.
What has been the reaction of the major news media to this extraordinary revelation? Will this affect the US governments continued efforts to have him extradited to the United States where he would be tried for espionage?
Assange is presently being held in solitary confinement in London‘s infamous Belmarsh prison. In earlier developments, Judge Vanessa Baraitser ruled that he could not be extradited to United States in defiance of the American request because she feared his prison confinement in an American maximum-security prison might cause him to commit suicide.
Her decision is on appeal by the Biden U.S. Justice Department and will be heard by the British High Court on October 26th.
In response to the revelations about Pompeo, Julian’s American attorney Barry Pollack said that “the extreme nature of the type of government misconduct that Yahoo News reported would certainly be an issue and potentially grounds for dismissal.“ He believes that Assange was targeted by both Trump and Biden like Nixon had targeted Daniel Ellsberg for his release of the Pentagon during the Vietnam war. In Ellsberg’s case the presiding judge dropped all charges against him.
Assange Defense
@defenseassange – Nathan Fuller twitter
Defend.wikileaks.org
Guest – Attorney Nathan Fuller who has been attending Julian Assange’s extradition hearing in London. He leads the London-based Courage Foundation and the director of the newly formed Committee to Defend Julian Assange and Civil Liberties.
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Host Discussion: Challenges To Roe v. Wade And Donziger Case Updates
Last week thousands demonstrated across the country over woman’s right to choose. The demonstrations took place one month after Texas had enacted its infamous heart beat law which is nearly a total ban on abortion. It prohibits abortion after 6 weeks, when most women don’t know they’re pregnant. Currently the law established by Roe v Wade, defends women and affords them to get an abortion during the first two trimesters of their pregnancy. One in four women in the United States has had an abortion. The first thing the fascist Hitler government did in 1933 when in came to power was to lock up all the family planning clinics. Anti-abortion laws disproportionately attack black, brown and poor women. The Women’s Health Protection Act which would codify Roe v. Wade has passed the House and is now in the Senate where it will likely lose. Coming up in the Supreme Court is the Jackson Healthcare Case which originated in Mississippi. That state passed a law limiting the first 15 weeks of pregnancy. The first direct challenge to Roe v. Wade.
Guest – Marjorie Cohn, former criminal law defense attorney and professor emeritus at the Thomas Jefferson school of Law. She was the past president of the National Lawyer Guild and is a member of the bureau of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. Professor Cohn has published four books about the war on terror. Last week she had published an article in the prestigious online magazine Jurist titled Samuel Moyn’s Unprincipled Attack on Human Rights Giant Michael Ratner is Shameful.
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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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Post Occupation Afghanistan 2021
Afghanistan had a progressive modernizing government in the 1970s. It was headed by the Afghan Communist Party which was semi-independent of the Soviet Union. Women had the right to go to school. They did not wear burkas. They wore blue uniforms. Women had the right to a job. The infrastructure in Afghanistan was being built up with a lot of money from the Soviet Union.
But the Afghan people fell victim to the Cold War against Communism. The United States armed the Islamic fundamentalist Mujadaheen, in what became a full-scale civil war. They got help from the reactionary Pakistanis. The Afghan government invited the Soviet Union into Afghanistan. The Soviet Union got tied down in the battle and eventually withdrew. It so exhausted the Soviet Union economically and politically that by 1991, the Soviet government collapsed. President Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of State Zbignew Brzezinski, bragged about this as a great success for US policy.
The Taliban won the civil war, including with a promise to end the shelling of Kabul, and came to power in Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden located himself and his Al-Qaeda followers in that country. When the Twin Towers and the Pentagon were struck by Al-Qaeda on 9/11, and so many people in the US were paralyzed with grief and fear, the only response offered to the American people was revenge. This paved the way for the US invasion of Afghanistan, which soon won overwhelming popular support.
The US government was not really interested in bringing democracy to or preserving women’s rights in Afghanistan. The United States allied with the warlords of the Northern Alliance, showering them with money. Afghanistan became a tremendous supplier of heroin to the world market. Thousands of US soldiers died, tens of thousands were wounded, trillions of dollars were spent. The war was unwinnable. First Donald Trump announced he would withdraw US forces, then Joe Biden took US troops out of that country. What does the future hold for Afghanistan?
Guest – Phyllis Bennis is a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies, where she is she is the director of the New Internationalism Project and works on anti-war, US foreign policy and Palestinian rights issues. She has worked as an informal adviser to several key UN officials on Palestinian issues. Her books including Calling the Shots: How Washington Dominates Today’s UN, and Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Right To Dissent, Truth to Power, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister, Whistleblowers
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- Alarming Growth In Urban Homeless: Commentary by Attorney Jim Lafferty
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Judge Rules Attorney Donziger Guilty of Six Contempt Charges; Faces Jail Time
Steven Donziger, who listeners will recall has been embroiled in a decades long fight against Chevron over their pollution in the Amazon rainforest the size of Rhode Island, was found guilty this July of criminal contempt by US district judge Loretta Preska. She ruled that Steven was guilty of six contempt charges for refusing to turn over evidence in a complex legal case that has pitted the lawyer directly against Chevron.
In a 245-page judgement, Judge Preska said Steven had “repeatedly and willfully” defied court orders adding that “it’s time to pay the piper,” with Steven facing six months in jail.
It has now been two years since Steven has been wearing a monitoring bracelet and under house arrests in his NYC home. He said he expected the decision and will appeal.
In 2016, US judge Lewis Kaplan granted Chevron seizure of the lawyer’s laptop and phone. When Steven appealed, he was slapped with the contempt charges and placed under house arrest.
Judge Preska’s judgment explicitly denies the lawyer has been the victim of a conspiracy, however. “Contrary to Mr Donziger’s assertion that his conviction was ‘pre-ordained’, the court finds him guilty on each count for one reason and one reason only: Mr Donziger did that with which he is charged. Period,” she wrote.
DonzigerDefense.com
ChevronToxico.com
ChevronInEcuador.com
Guest – Attorney Martin Garbus, one of three pro bono lawyers representing Donziger in an attempt to get his law license restored. Garbus has a long and distinguished career as a civil rights and first amendment litigator. Attorney Martin Garbus has represented Nelson Mandela, Daniel Ellsberg, and Cesar Chavez and worked in Rwanda, China, and the Soviet Union, among other countries.
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Samuel Moyn’s Unprincipled Attack on Human Rights Giant Michael Ratner is Shameful
A controversy was ignited two weeks ago when the New York Review of Books published an article by Yale Law Professor Samuel Moyn. The article singled out human rights attorney Michael Ratner, the cofounder of Law Disorder Radio. Ratner was the longtime president of the Center for Constitution Rights. He died five years ago. Professor Moyn uses him as a whipping boy to support his bizarre theory that punishing war crimes prolonged the wars in the Middle East by making them more palatable.
Professor Moyn disingenuously claims that enforcing the conventions against torture and opposing illegal war are mutually exclusive.
Moyn’s book Humane: How the United States abandoned Peace and Reinvented War was recently published. It was a chapter from this book that appeared in the New York Review of Books. Moyn makes the false and astonishing claim that “no one perhaps has done more than Ratner to enable a novel sanitize version of permanent war.”
Moyn wrote that Ratner and the CCR prolonged the Middle Eastern wars by suing the Bush- Cheney administration to stop them from abolishing the right of habeas corpus for Muslims the American government had imprisoned on its offshore prison in Guantánamo. The right of habeas corpus is ancient. It allows for a person held by the government to be informed of the charges against him, to be allowed to have a lawyer, and to be given a trial.
Guest – Marjorie Cohn, former criminal law defense attorney and professor emeritus at the Thomas Jefferson school of Law. She was the past president of the National Lawyer Guild and is a member of the bureau of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. Professor Cohn has published four books about the war on terror. Last week she had published an article in the prestigious online magazine Jurist titled Samuel Moyn’s Unprincipled Attack on Human Rights Giant Michael Ratner is Shameful.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Human Rights, Iraq War, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Intelligence Matters: The CIA, the FBI, Saudi Arabia, and the Failure of America’s War on Terror
Retired Florida U. S. Senator Bob Graham was the head of the US Senate intelligence committee and also the chairman of the 9/11 commission of inquiry. He is the leading person trying to get President Obama to release to the public the suppressed 28 pages of the 911 report which have been hidden. Senator Graham contends that the 19 hijackers, 15 of whom who were Saudi Arabians, could not have pulled off the operation alone and that in fact they were part of a support network involving the Saudi Arabian monarchy and government which helped plan, pay for and execute the complicated 911 plot which, says Senator Graham, would have otherwise been impossible to accomplish. Senator Graham has written the book Intelligence Matters: The CIA, the FBI, Saudi Arabia, and the Failure of America’s War on Terror. It provides a candid insight to the workings of the US in Saudi relations and their implications on US foreign-policy making as it pertains to the middle east and bags tension, contemporary geopolitics.
Guest – Senator Bob Graham, is the former two–term governor of Florida and served for 18 years in the United States Senate. This is combined with 12 years in the Florida legislature for a total of 38 years of public service. As Governor and Senator, Bob Graham was a centrist, committed to bringing his colleagues together behind programs that served the broadest public interest. He was recognized by the people of Florida when he received an 83% approval ranking as he concluded eight years as Governor. Bob Graham retired from public service in January 2005, following his Presidential campaign in 2004.
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“I Have Nothing to Hide” and 20 Other Myths About Surveillance and Privacy
Should we give up our privacy all together because we think we have nothing to hide? This is the perhaps the most pervasive of the myths about surveillance and privacy that Heidi Boghosian explores in her new book titled I Have Nothing to Hide and 20 Other Myths About Surveillance and Privacy.
Other popular misconceptions detailed in the book include the notion that surveillance makes the nation safer, no one wants to spy on kids, police don’t monitor social media, metadata doesn’t reveal much about me, Congress and the courts protect us from surveillance, and there’s nothing I can do to stop surveillance.
Privacy is a fundamental right, and one that we often take for granted in the digital era. In her new book from Beacon Press, Heidi debunks some of the reasons these myths have evolved and why we unquestioningly believe them. She warns of the dangers they present to our freedoms and suggests ways to protect ourselves from the government and corporations.
Guest – Attorney Heidi Boghosian is a New York City attorney, activist, and nonprofit director. She currently runs the A.J. Muste Memorial Institute, a charitable organization providing support to activist organizations. Before that she was executive director of the National Lawyers Guild. Her book I Have Nothing to Hide: And 20 Other Myths About Surveillance and Privacy was published in July 2021 (Beacon Press) and her earlier book Spying on Democracy was published in 2013.
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Civil Liberties, Human Rights, Prison Industry, Supreme Court, Torture, Truth to Power, War Resister
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50th Anniversary Of The Attica Prison Uprising
September 9th marks the 50th anniversary of the Attica prison uprising and the subsequent massacre by New York State police and prison guards. The rebellion at Attica prison, a medieval looking place near Buffalo New York, began on September 9, 1971 and ended four days later with governor Nelson Rockefeller, and aspiring presidential candidate, ordering the massacre. It resulted in the most people ever killed in a civil setting in the history of the USA.
The rebellion was inspiring to many around the country and around the world in that it represented a growing movement fighting for prisoners and human rights.
Civil rights attorneys, many from the National Lawyers Guild, came from around the country to immediately respond to the massacre. They provided legal representation to inmates who were charged with crimes due to their involvement in the rebellion.
Many of the participants, particularly key organizers, were subject to abuse and torture by the prison guards after the rebellion was suppressed.
Guest – attorney Michael Deutsch from the Peoples Law Office in Chicago. He along with the late attorney Elizabeth Fink were the main lawyers for the Attica brothers. He represented several Attica brothers in criminal lawsuits and the brothers in a class action civil rights lawsuit which lasted over 20 years and settled in 1999 for $12 million.
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Stevens Thaddeus Stevens: Civil War Revolutionary, Fighter for Racial Justice by Bruce Levine
The 1861 to 1865 Civil War and the reconstruction period which followed it is widely considered to be the second American revolution. The slave-owning planter class in the south was defeated, at least for a while. Slave labor was abolished, but came back in other forms after reconstruction was crushed by 1877.
The promise of the declaration of independence that all men are equal before the law was fulfilled, at least for a while. Pennsylvania congressman Thaddeus Stevens was the foremost political leader in the struggle, even more than Abraham Lincoln. Stevens helped to bring about the abolition of slavery and was a leader in the effort during Reconstruct to make the United States a biracial democracy This wise and eloquent revolutionary has been vilified and rendered rendered obscure during most of the years since he died 153 years ago.
The distinguished historian Bruce Levine in his just published biography of Stevens “Thaddeus Stevens: Civil War Revolutionary, Fighter for Racial Justice” has secured a place for him alongside his contemporary John Brown in the pantheon of American revolutionary figures.
Guest – Bruce Levine, emeritus professor of history at the University Illinois and the author of four previous books on the Civil War era.
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Civil Liberties, Human Rights, Supreme Court, Surveillance
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Alison Cornyn: The Incorrigibles
People in America are currently living through multiple crises. The economy is in tatters with unemployment very high. The health situation is a disaster with over a third of 1 million people dead from Covid and tens of millions uninsured.
The educational system has been ravaged, underfunded, inflicted with charter schools. Billionaire right-wing secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has only recently resigned. Almost half of the population is living in poverty. Families are in bad shape with suicides, drug addiction, and divorces soaring. Many don’t have enough food and homelessness is rapidly increasing. All this within the framework of a divided society, deeply impacted by racism.
How does this affect young people? And especially rebellious teenage girls? What laws apply to young people? How are they treated in a criminal justice system, historically and currently? What do we know about the level of abuse and neglect including sexual abuse?
Guest – Alison Cornyn, is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist, activist, and educator. She has focused her career on social justice issues. A special interest of Allison Cornyn’s has been the criminal justice system treatment of “wayward” teenage girls. She has focused her career on social justice issues and teaches in New York at the School of Visual Art’s Design for Social Innovation Program.
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Surveillance State and Tor
As computer technology has evolved and communications providers have profited, law enforcement and government intelligence organizations increasingly lobby to mandate that data services be engineered to allow them “back door” access to encrypted data.
Even as expansive anti-terrorism legislation provides more ways for the government to harvest our personal data, calls still continue for regulation of technology to ensure extra access channels. With each high-profile criminal attack, on U.S. soil or elsewhere across the world, government efforts to access personal communications gain momentum.
Years ago, many considered TOR, software that enables anonymous communication, to be equivalent to the Dark Net, the nefarious sites and services accessible on the Tor network that promote/enable illegal activity such as drug and gun marketplaces. After Edward Snowden’s massive data release, however, TOR use in the last year has grown quickly.
Guest – Shari Steele, Executive Director of the Tor Project. As the former director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Shari built it into the nation’s preeminent digital rights organization.
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