Censorship, CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, Iraq War, NSA Spying, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Torture, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Daniel Ellsberg: Julian Assange’s Case And The Doomsday Machine
Two weeks ago the Trump administration announced it had indicted Julian Assange in the Eastern District of Virginia on 17 counts of violating the 1917 Espionage Act. Assange is currently in the Belmarsh prison hospital in London. If extradited, tried, and convicted he faces 175 years in prison.
The Espionage Act is a 102 year old law used initially to imprison the great socialist Eugene V Debs for an anti-World War I speech he gave in Canton, Ohio and also used to crush the industrial workers of the world, the IWW, a large antiwar union at the time.
In 1971 it was famously used against Daniel Ellsberg who released the Pentagon papers to the New York Times and other media outlets. Lately the Espionage Act has been used against many truth telling whistleblowers during the Obama and Trump administrations.
This is the first time it is being used against a journalist.
Wikileaks Defense Funds:
Guest – Daniel Ellsberg, educated at Harvard and Cambridge and has been an activist since the 1970s. Ellsberg’s latest book, The Doomsday Machine, is an extensive study of nuclear theory and nuclear policy. In 2018 he was awarded the Olaf Palme prize for his “profound humanism and exceptional moral courage.
From 1957-59 he was a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows, Harvard University. He earned his Ph.D. in Economics at Harvard in 1962 with his thesis, Risk, Ambiguity and Decision. His research leading up to this dissertation—in particular his work on what has become known as the “Ellsberg Paradox,” first published in an article entitled Risk, Ambiguity and the Savage Axioms—is widely considered a landmark in decision theory and behavioral economics.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Supreme Court, Surveillance, Torture, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Updates:
- Two MOVE9 Members Released From Prison
- Julian Assange Update
- Never Get Rid Of Newspapers…The Headlines Alone Make Them Worth Keeping
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Suicide Increase In The United States
Suicide ranks among the top ten leading causes of death in the United States. As rates have generally fallen in other developed nations, the number of suicides per 100,000 rose over 30 percent between 1999 and 2015.
Those in midlife had the largest uptick in suicide. Researchers find that two social factors have contributed to this trend: the weakening of the social safety net and increasing income inequality.
One study of suicide in the U.S. found that the rising rates were closely linked with reductions in social welfare spending between 1960 and 1995. Such expenditures include Medicaid, a medical assistance program for low income persons; Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, which replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children; the Supplemental Security Income program for the blind, disabled and elderly; children’s services including adoption, foster care and day care; shelters; and funding of public hospitals for medical assistance other than Medicaid.
While their suicide rates are on the decline, three European nations still have rates higher than the U.S. They are Belgium, Finland and France.
Guest – Stephen Platt, Emeritus Professor of Health Policy Research at the University of Edinburgh, UK. His research focuses on the social, epidemiological and cultural aspects of suicide, self-harm and mental health. He is an adviser on suicide prevention research and policy to NHS Health Scotland and the Scottish Government, the Irish National Office for Suicide Prevention and Samaritans.
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Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Cuba, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Supreme Court, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Venezuelan Embassy Protected Against Staged Attacks In DC
Democracy and the rule of law are being rapidly unraveled in our country by President Trump, his advisers, especially convicted war criminal Elliot Abrams, who was put in charge of policy in Venezuela, and John Bolton, who said that if the top 10 floors of United Nations building were lopped off it wouldn’t make any difference, and with the support of the rightist insurgent Republican Party.
The latest example is the American government’s failed attempt military coup in Venezuela and its support of the ongoing attack on the Venezuelan embassy here in Washington DC.
On April 30th, the United States tried and failed to overthrow the democratically elected Venezuelan president Nikolai Maduro. They fail to supplant him with Juan Guaidó, the self-proclaimed a president who’s only real power is outside of Venezuela and comes mostly from the Trump administration.
Back home in Washington DC right wing counterrevolutionaries in support of Juan Guaidó have so far failed in their attempt to take over the Venezuelan embassy. Under centuries of international law the embassy is considered the property of Venezuela itself.
Last week the Washington DC utility company, undoubtedly at the request of the US government, turned off the building’s water electricity supply. Washington DC police and the Secret Service are preventing people from bringing food and water into the embassy. A number of American citizens, acting in support of democracy in Venezuela, entered the building to protect it against an invasion by coup supporters. They are also demonstrating outside of the building. The embassy protectors are being represented by attorney Mara VerhaydenHilliard of the Washington DC Partnership For Civil Justice.
Popular Resistance, Answer Coalition, Code Pink
Guest – Attorney Mara Verheyden-Hilliard has in the past successfully sued both the Washington DC police department and the New York City Police Department for their abuse demonstrators. She is co-chair of the Guild’s National Mass Defense Committee. co-founder of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund in Washington, DC, she secured $13.7 million for about 700 of the 2000 IMF/World Bank protesters in Becker, et al. v. District of Columbia, et al., while also winning pledges from the District to improve police training about First Amendment issues. She won $8.25 million for approximately 400 class members in Barham, et al. v. Ramsey, et al. (alleging false arrest at the 2002 IMF/World Bank protests). She served as lead counsel in Mills, et al v. District of Columbia (obtaining a ruling that D.C.’s seizure and interrogation police checkpoint program was unconstitutional); in Bolger, et al. v. District of Columbia.
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Lawyers For The Left: In The Courts, In the Streets And On The Air
Lawyers For The Left: In The Courts, In the Streets And On The Air is the title of the just published book by our own Michael Steven Smith. It profiles the some of the nation’s most effective agents of social change. Michael discusses how he came to write this book and previews several of the lawyers profiled therein.
As Chris Hedges quotes “The lawyers in this book valiantly fought the erosion of justice and assault on the court system.”
Portside Review by Bill Ayers:
Now open Michael Steven Smith’s smart and compelling Lawyers for the Left, and you’ll find yourself plunged into the contradictions and swirling through the vortex where that question—what is the law?—is on everyone’s mind all the time. It takes on a unique urgency and a fresh vitality as it’s debated case by case and issue by issue by these committed advocates battling against a system they see as deeply and unfairly stacked against their clients—Black freedom fighters, Puerto Rican independistas, Indigenous and immigrant rights activists, women warriors, anti-war militants, water defenders, dissidents and radicals. None of the lawyers you’ll meet here holds fast to the traditional view that the law is simply a civilized mechanism for resolving disputes in an intelligent and reasoned way. They agree, rather, that any honest analysis of the law begins elsewhere, noting that in all times and in all places, the law is constructed in the service of whatever social/economic system created it. In other words, the law is a mechanism of control that works to protect and perpetuate existing social relations.
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Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, Human Trafficking, Political Prisoner, War Resister
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Speaking In Turkish: Denying the Armenian Genocide
Around the world, April 24 marks the observance of the Armenian Genocide. On that day in 1915 the Interior Minister of the Ottoman Empire ordered the arrest and hangings of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople. It was the beginning of a systematic and well-documented plan to eliminate the Armenians, who were Christian, and who had been under Ottoman rule and treated as second class citizens since the 15th century.
The unspeakable and gruesome nature of the killings—beheadings of groups of babies, dismemberments, mass burnings, mass drownings, use of toxic gas, lethal injections of morphine or injections with the blood of typhoid fever patients—render oral histories particularly difficult for survivors of the victims.
Why did this happen? Despite being deemed inferior to Turkish Muslims, the Armenian community had attained a prestigious position in the Ottoman Empire and the central authorities there grew apprehensive of their power and longing for a homeland. The concerted plan of deportation and extermination was effected, in large part, because World War I demanded the involvement and concern of potential allied countries. As the writer Grigoris Balakian wrote, the war provided the Turkish government “their sole opportunity, one unprecedented” to exploit the chaos of war in order to carry out their extermination plan.
As Armenians escaped to several countries, including the United States, a number came to New Britain, Connecticut in 1892 to work in the factories of what was then known as the hardware capital of the world. By 1940 nearly 3,000 Armenians lived there in a tight-knit community.
Pope Frances calls it a duty not to forget “the senseless slaughter” of an estimated one and a half million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks from 1915 to 1923. “Concealing or denying evil is like allowing a wound to keep bleeding without bandaging it,” the Pope said just two weeks before the 100th anniversary of the systematic implementation of a plan to exterminate the Armenian race.
Special thanks to Jennie Garabedian, Arthur Sheverdian, Ruth Swisher, Harry Mazadoorian, and Roxie Maljanian. Produced and written by Heidi Boghosian and Geoff Brady.
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Censorship, CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, Human Trafficking, Iraq War, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Surveillance, Truth to Power
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Attorney James Goodale On Julian Assange Arrest
Last week, at the behest of the U.S. government, police entered the Ecuadorian Embassy and arrested Julian Assange on charges of espionage. This case promises to threaten the First Amendment rights of all journalists. We’re honored to have one of the nation’s foremost authorities on First Amendment law, Attorney James Goodale. In the April edition of the Atlantic, he wrote an article titled, Why Julian Assange deserves First Amendment Protection.
Listeners may recall that last fall, a court filing inadvertently suggested that the Justice Department had indicted WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and other outlets reported soon after that Assange had likely been secretly indicted for conspiring with his sources to publish classified government material and hacked documents belonging to the Democratic National Committee, among other things.
Assange started WikiLeaks in 2006 to provide a place for newsworthy information to be confidentially released. The site came gained prominence when Assange obtained thousands of classified documents relating to the Iraq War from US Army soldier Chelsea (born Bradley) Manning.
Guest – Attorney James C. Goodale has represented The New York Times in four of its cases to go to the Supreme Court: the Pentagon Papers case (The New York Times Co. v. The U.S.), The New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (libel), Branzburg v. Hayes (see below) and The New York Times Co. v. Tasini, (digital rights). He developed the argument that the Espionage Act does not apply to publishers or the press.
In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court ruled the U.S. Government could not stop the Times from publishing the Pentagon Papers, holding that prior restraints were barred by the First Amendment unless the publication “will surely result in direct, immediate, and irreparable damage to our Nation or its people.” He became known as the “father of the reporter’s privilege.” A prolific writer, he has written two books on the First Amendment, The New York Times v. The U.S. and All About Cable, and approximately 200 articles, particularly on the role of the press in the Information Revolution.
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Al Otro Lado and the Border Crisis
United States President Donald Trump said that we have a “crisis” on the border. He called it an “infestation” and said that “These aren’t people. These are animals.” Last week he fired Kirstjen Nielsen who as the head of the Department for Homeland Security pursued the most aggressive enforcement strategy of any secretary in the history of the organization. Nielsen and the Trump administration has separated children from their parents and instituted an illegal turn back policy using tactics to restrict the numbers of asylum-seekers who want to access the asylum process at points of entry like Tijuana and El Paso.
Tactics used by the administration include lies, intimidating coercion, verbal abuse, physical force, out right denial of access, unreasonable delay, threats, and family separation. The Center for Constitution Rights is currently representing Al Otro Lado, a legal and human rights organization that helps migrants at the border. They are challenging the U S. Customs and Border Patrol on its turnaround policy in a pending lawsuit.
Last month CCR’s chairwoman of the board and Columbia Law Professor Katherine Franke met six students in Tijuana Mexico, across the border from San Diego, California, to advise migrants on what they will face in the hands of US legal authorities.
- Al Otro Lado provides essential legal support to migrants to prepare them for the asylum process in the U.S. You can support here.
- Santa Fe Dreamers also provides free legal support to immigrants, with a particular focus on transgender immigrants.
- Please visit this site if you are interested in contributing to the parole/bail fund for detainees.
- If you are interested in serving as a sponsor for an asylum seeker.
- This video offers a very good portrait of the situation at Chaparral where La Lista is maintained and asylum seekers wait for their number to be called.
Guest – Attorney Katherine Franke, is the Sulzbacher Professor of Law, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Columbia University, where she also directs the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law and is the faculty director of the Law, Rights, and Religion Project (Formerly the Public Rights/Private Conscience Project). She is a member of the Executive Committee for the Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality, and the Center for Palestine Studies. She is among the nation’s leading scholars writing on law, religion and rights, drawing from feminist, queer, and critical race theory.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Guantanamo, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Iraq War, Political Prisoner, Supreme Court, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power
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Misuse of Grand Juries And The Prosecution Of Chelsea Manning
The Trump administration wants to prosecute the news organization Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange. In order to do so they have recently jailed whistleblower Chelsea Manning, who has been in solitary confinement since March 8th, 2019 in hopes to squeeze her to get testimony that could be used against Assange. Prolonged solitary confinement is a form of torture.
Chelsea Manning has refused to answer questions of the Government Prosecutor in front of a grand jury. In 2010 Chelsea Manning, then in the Army, released documents to WikiLeaks known as the Iraq War Logs. One of them was a video showing a U.S. Apache attack helicopter killing 12 people, including two Reuters journalists, two children and a passerby who stopped his van to rescue the wounded. She maintains that there’s nothing new to be learned and that she’s already given full testimony.
Chelsea Manning was convicted and served 7 years of a 35 year sentence before her sentence was commuted by Barack Obama. The prosecution of WikiLeaks for accepting leaked secret documents is a threat to press freedom and would criminalize journalism. The government is trying to frame Assange charging him with actively colluding with Manning, not just being a passive recipient of the leak. Historically grand juries have been misused in order to suppress political dissent.
Write to Chelsea Manning in solitary confinement:
Chelsea Manning
Ao181426
William G. Truesdale Adult Detention Center
2001 Mill Rd.
Alexandria, VA 22314
Guest – Attorney Michael Deutsch, an expert on the misuse of grand juries. He is a partner in the Chicago law firm The People’s Law Office and a former director of litigation at the Center for Constitutional Rights. He has represented political activists and victims of government repression. Among his clients have been the Attica prisoners in the 1971 uprising, Puerto Rican independence fighters, members of the black liberation movement, grand jury resistors, and Palestinians falsely accused of terrorism.
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The Brooklyn Folk Festival April 2019
In the political radicalizations and social upheaval’s within the United States of America in the 30s and again in the 60s, we saw an increased interest in folk music. This phenomenon is repeating itself today. We speak today with Eli Smith, the producer of the Brooklyn Folk Festival. He is a banjo player, a folklorist, and a member of the string band The Downhill Strugglers. The Brooklyn Folk Festival is the largest of its type in the country and is now in its 11th year. It takes place in Brooklyn Heights at the historic Saint Ann’s Church this April.
Guest – Eli Smith, a musician, producer and activist from Brooklyn, who has helped organize the event. Eli Smith is also a folklorist and music producer who organizes the annual “Brooklyn Folk Festival.”
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U.S. Appeals Court Opens Abu Ghraib Prison Abuse Case
In 2016, the United States appeals court re-instituted the Abu Ghraib prison abuse case against a private military contractor CACI. Since that time, the plaintiffs have had multiple victories.
The Center for Constitutional Rights is representing the abused prisoners. CCR‘s legal director Baher Azmy said “There is no question that torture is unlawful under domestic, military, and international law. The only issue in this case is whether CACI Will be held accountable – or treated with impunity – for its role in torture at Abu Ghraib. Now, the case is set for trial in Alexandria, Virginia on April 23.
Guest – Attorney Katherine Gallagher filed the case nearly 11 years ago and she is a Senior Staff Attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. Katherine works on universal jurisdiction and international criminal law cases involving U.S. and foreign officials and torture and other war crimes, and cases involving private military corporations and torture at Abu Ghraib. Her major cases include Al Shimari v. CACI, the international U.S. torture accountability cases, and Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) v. Vatican, seeking accountability for the crimes against humanity of sexual violence by clergy and cover-up.
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