Law and Disorder July 31, 2023

Obit Philip Agee Mississippi Freedom Summer 01 Fannie Lou Hamer with bullhorn

Lawyers You’ll Like – Attorney Mel Wulf

Mel Wulf died at age 95 on July 1, 2023. He was one of the great constitutional litigators of his time. He served as Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union for 15 years. Today we bring you a re-broadcast of an interview that attorney Michael Ratner, and I, Michael Smith, did with Mel 10 years ago for a segment we called Lawyers You’ll Like. It is a scintillating fast paced discussion with a relevance to our situation now

We’re joined today by Attorney Mel Wulf, former legal director with the American Civil Liberties Union for 15 years. He was a law partner with former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark during the Kennedy Administration and much more. Wulf was part of some of the greatest contributions to the civil rights movement. He’s now retired after practicing law for 54 years. As part of our Lawyers You’ll Like series, we talk with Wulf about his work with the ACLU during the early 60s, and also about the forming of the Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee.

Attorney Mel Wulf:

  • Phil Agee was a dissident CIA agent who spent decades working against the CIA, published a couple of books.
  • He lost his passport because when the dissidents took over the embassy in Tehran in 1979, the New York Post carried a story accusing Phil of helping the students who’d invaded the embassy to put together all of that written material that had been shredded.
  • It was another New York Post bald faced lie.
  • The State Department, based upon that story revoked his passport.
  • I had represented Phil Agee, I was his principle lawyer for 30 years.
  • Agee was very widely disliked in Washington because he was well known to be a CIA dissident who disclosed the names of many CIA agents.
  • If Snowden went the same route today, he would do even worse in this Supreme Court than I did. That’s why Snowden won’t get his passport, thanks to me.
  • I was for the workers and not for the bosses and I’ve always been for the workers and not for the bosses, which I think is the distinguishing political factor in our world. Which side are you on?
  • I got my Bachelors Degree in ’52 and I had a Navy Commission which I had gotten from the New York State Maritime Academy earlier on.
  • The draft board sent me a 1A notice, I applied to Columbia and when I finished Columbia they sent me another 1A notice because the draft was still on. I spent 2 years in the Navy as a Liuetenant Junior Grade Officer in Southern California.
  • I went to work at the ACLU in 1958 as the assistant legal director, in 1962 I was given the job of the legal director of the ACLU.
  • I had actually been going down to Mississippi from 1961 to 1962, working with then one of the two black lawyers who were practicing in Mississippi.
  • We tried a couple of capitol cases in Mississippi. I continued to argue the systematic exclusion of blacks from the jury.
  • I finally got a case up to the Supreme Court on that issue.
  • Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee: We had several hundred lawyers who went down to Mississippi for periods of a week or two. They were representing people being arrested during the Mississippi summer.
  • Most of the judges allowed these lawyers to make some sort of presentation.

Guest – Attorney Mel Wulf, former legal director with the American Civil Liberties Union for 15 years. He was a law partner with former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark during the Kennedy Administration and much more. Wulf was part of some of the greatest contributions to the civil rights movement. He’s now retired after practicing law for 54 years.

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Lawyers You’ll Like: Attorney Bill Schaap

Attorney Bill Schaap, who died in 2016, was a friend and colleague of Mel Wulf’s. Bill and his wife, Ellen Ray published the historic whistleblowing magazine “Covert Action Quarterly“ that exposed to CIA. Then they started Sheridan Square Press. They published a number of memoirs of former CIA agents who revealed the truth about the activities of the CIA. Ex-CIA agent Phil Agee was one of Sheridan Square Press authors. He wrote Inside The Company which exposed the names of some 200 CIA agents involved in nefarious activities in South America. Mel Wulf represented Agee for 30 years and unsuccessfully tried to get his passport back when the government had it taken away.

Attorney William Schaap graduated from the University of Chicago Law School in 1964 and has been a practicing lawyer since. Bill specialized in military law and practiced in Asia and Europe. He later became the editor in chief of the Military Law Reporter in Washington for a number of years. In the 70’s and 80’s he was a staff counsel of the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City. In the late 80s, he was an adjunct professor at John J. College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York where he taught courses on propaganda and disinformation.

Attorney William Schaap:

  • One of first cases at this big Wall Street firm, they had some outside counsel working on it, one of whom was David Lubel, and Dave Lubel who had I think been a recruiter for the Communist Party in his youth, was always good at spotting somebody who was always worth recruiting and he started to tell me there was this convention of this lawyers group.
  • It was this 1967 Lawyers Guild Convention in New York. He dragged me to one event, I met Bill Kunstler, I met Arthur Kinoy, I met Victor Rabbinowitz. I’d been on Wall Street for a year or two, I said I didn’t know there were lawyers like this.
  • I joined the same day and met Bernadine Dorhn and a few weeks she called me and said we need your help.
  • She said you gotta defend a bunch of Columbia students. The next thing I knew the riot started at Columbia and she said you have to go down there and defend them.
  • I signed up to be staff counsel on the National Lawyers Guild Military Law Project in Okinawa, Japan.
  • When you work overseas in that kind of a climate with the military you learn a lot fast about American imperialism.
  • Once you learn that, you learn about the CIA.
  • That led us to originally working on Counter Spy magazine and then on Covert Action Magazine.
  • The original purpose was to expose the CIA. We worked with Lou Wolf who is an expert in uncovering CIA agents in US embassies, not through any classified documents but because if you knew how to read the paperwork and State Department things, you could tell who are the “ringers.”
  • We were so successful that Congress passed a law against us.
  • Our goal was to make these people ineffective because the only way most CIA could work, particularly the ones that were assigned to an embassy was to have to pretend to be something else.
  • They were all third assistant political secretaries and those were all phony things. Their job was to finagle their way into various community organizations in whatever foreign capital they were posted to recruit people to turn against their own countries and become traitors to their own countries, to become spies for the U.S.
  • We thought if we identified these people, it might make their job a little bit harder, which it did.
  • Of course, the problem with that is the government said we were trying to get them killed which we weren’t trying to do and nobody we did expose ever did get killed.
  • He (Philip Agee) had been an adviser to Counter Spy. Counter Spy folded when Welch got killed, cause the pressure was too much and started Covert Action Quarterly.
  • He was not the person discovering who the under cover people were, Lou Wolf was doing that.
  • Phil wrote articles for us in every issue and we worked very closely with him.
  • Once you start exposing these things, they really don’t have any defense.
  • They tried to catch us in something phony. We would get tips that would turn out to be CIA trying to get us to print some story that wasn’t true so they could then discredit us.
  • We had more interference from the government when we were doing military law work, before Covert Action Quarterly.
  • They would plant bugs in our attic in Okinawa, things like that.
  • The Intelligence Identity Protection Act has 2 parts. One makes it a crime for someone in the government who has classified information to reveal someone’s identity. The second part makes it a crime to reveal the identity of someone you did not learn from classified information or you position. (But if you were in the business of exposing these people . . .)
  • Regarding his newsletter The Lies of Our Times – It was in the 90s, from 1990 to 1995 I think. To a certain extent, the abuses we were crying about got a little bit less over time because that’s sometimes the helpful result of that kind of exposure.
  • We were just tired of people thinking that if it was in the New York Times it must be true.
  • The fact is that those people lie all the time.
  • I think we’ve gotten to a point where people recognize that the government lies to them and that there’s an awful lot that goes on that they don’t know.

Guest – Attorney William Schaap graduated from the University of Chicago Law School in 1964 and has been a practicing lawyer since. Bill specialized in military law and practiced in Asia and Europe. He later became the editor in chief of the Military Law Reporter in Washington for a number of years. In the 70’s and 80’s he was a staff counsel of the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City. In the late 80s, he was an adjunct professor at John J. College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York where he taught courses on propaganda and disinformation.

In addition to being a practicing lawyer, Bill was a journalist, publisher and a writer specializing in intelligence as it relates to media. He was the co-publisher of a magazine called the Covert Action Quarterly for more than 20 years. He also published a magazine on propaganda and disinformation titled Lies Of Our Times. Attorney Bill Schapp has written numerous articles and edited many books on the topic of media and intelligence.

Hosted by attorneys Michael Ratner, Michael Smith and Heidi Boghosian

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Law and Disorder June 19, 2023

 

Remembering South Dakota Senator Jim Abourezk

South Dakota senator Jim Abourezk was an important figure in American politics. He died four months ago at age 92. Abourzeck was the son of immigrants from Lebanon. He grew up on the Rosebud Sioux Indian reservation. Politically he was part of the radicalization of the 60s. He served one term in the US House of Representatives and another in the United States Senate. Elected in 1973, Abourezk fought for policies that are crucially relevant today. He was against American imperial power and opposed the war in Vietnam. He tried to rein in the murderous CIA. He attempted to break up the powerful of big oil companies. He fought for Native American rights, normalization of American relations with Cuba, a government the USA has been trying to overthrow since the Cuban revolution of 1959.

After six years, despite extreme pressure from those who supported him, he left the Senate. disgusted by the power wielded by the monied influence of big business. Jim Abourezk went back to South Dakota and back to the his law practice. Jim Abourezk founded the Arab-American anti-discrimination committee because of the oppression Arabs faced both of United States and abroad, particularly in Palestine.

Guest – Charlie Abourezk, from Rapid City, South Dakota and is a trial attorney, longtime activist and community organizer in the native American community in South Dakota.   He is also a documentary film maker, his most recent is the feature length documentary “A Tattoo On My Heart: The Warriors of Wounded Knee 1973” which played on public television stations around the United States. He is the current Chief Justice of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe’s Supreme Court and a member of the South Dakota Advisory Committee to the US Commission on Civil Rights. His client base is made up largely of Native Americans, tribal schools and Indian tribal governments, but he also represents plaintiffs in civil rights litigation.

Guest – Alya James – Architectural Designer living in New York City.

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Former San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin Teaching At Berkeley Criminal Law and Justice Center

We turn to the subject of the criminal justice system – or, as a growing number of advocates refer to it, the criminal legal system. One reason for the name change is because it’s clear that our system of policing, prosecuting, judging, and sentencing rarely brings about justice. After all, our system was born nearly 250 years ago, at a time when slavery was legal and only white men with property could participate in public life, including voting. Non-white people were thought of as less than human, and women were afforded little if any autonomy apart from the men in their lives.

Since then, we’ve tried to correct course with laws and constitutional amendments that aim to protect everyone equally from the abuse of government power. But real-world statistics show that still – in 2023 – the criminal legal system does not treat all defendants equally, and not all defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty. Black men, for example, are arrested more, charged more, and given higher sentences than others in similar circumstances.

Guest – Chesa Boudin, founding executive director of Berkeley Law’s new Criminal Law & Justice Center is embarking on a new journey to study, brainstorm, experiment and transform for the better how the criminal legal system operates. He is uniquely suited for this new role, since he’s had experience not only in the public defender’s office representing criminal defendants, but also as the former District Attorney of San Francisco. And he’s unique in the legal profession for another reason: when he was just 14 months of age, he was separated from his parents, radical activists David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin. They were serving very long prison sentences for their part in an armored truck robbery which went astray and where three people killed. He saw firsthand the harmful impact of incarceration on those inside, as well as their families, communities, and society as a whole. These experiences informed his studies as a Rhodes scholar and as a student at Yale, his work as a lawyer, and most importantly, as a devoted husband, father and son. @berkeleylawcljc

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Law and Disorder March 20, 2023

My Country Is the World: Staughton Lynd’s Writings, Speeches, and Statements against the Vietnam War

Staughton Lynd was an activist, historian and attorney who became a leading critic of the U.S. war in Vietnam which claimed the lives of more than 3 million Vietnamese people and 58,000 Americans. He argued that the United States was committing war crimes and crimes against humanity and should immediately and fully withdraw from Vietnam.

Lynd traveled to Hanoi with Tom Hayden and Herbert Aptheker at the end of 1965 to the beginning of 1966 to try to open diplomatic channels between the U.S. and the Vietnamese. For that effort, he was denied tenure at Yale University and his passport was revoked. Lynd and his wife Alice worked in the draft resistance movement and advocated civil disobedience including the non-payment of taxes to confront the war machine.

Guest – Luke Stewart is a historian and has collected many of Lynd’s writings and speeches against the Vietnam War and published an important book called “My Country Is the World: Staughton Lynd’s Writings, Speeches, and Statements against the Vietnam War.”

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Detroit Poet Warrior: Dr. Gloria Aneb House

Around Detroit, one woman has touched many lives in many ways: artistically, intellectually and spiritually. A poet-warrior on the front lines of the fight for social justice, Dr. Gloria Aneb House has lived for decades at the intersection of art, education and urgent political movements — from the 1960s free speech movement in Berkeley, and the civil rights struggles organizing sharecroppers in Alabama and her involvement in SNCC, to the movement for justice for Cuba, and the anti-war movement, to the current movement to end racist police brutality. During Detroit’s water shutoffs, and other human rights and anti-war causes, she was in the streets protesting.

Among other accomplishments, she taught and fought discriminatory policies at Wayne State University for 27 years, and then went on to develop and direct the African American Studies major at the University of Michigan-Dearborn for 10 years, until her retirement in 2014. She has also been an instrumental leader in the efforts to win freedom for several political prisoners over the years, including former Black Panther Ahmad Rahman.

Guest – Dr. Gloria Aneb House has published several books of poetry since the 1980s under her chosen African name Aneb Kgositsile. She has also published essays and books since the early 1980s and taught at universities from Michigan to South Africa. Among her many awards, she received the Kresge Eminent Artist Award in 2019.

Hosted by attorneys Heidi Boghosian, Marjorie Cohn and Julie Hurwitz

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Law and Disorder December 19, 2022

The Greatest Evil is War

United States has been at war almost continuously over the last 80 years. Chris Hedges has titled his latest book, The Greatest Evil is War. He is our guest today. What is the driving force behind this nearly a century of war? Who is responsible? What are the institutions in United States that carry it on? What is to be done about it?

What forces in our country can stop the slaughter and the constant waste of resources that is consuming us and threatening us with the possibility of nuclear war, which would wipe out all life on our planet. Today we will explore the economic, institutional, and ideological underpinnings of the American war machine. We will talk about the military industrial complex about which Eisenhower warned us. We will talk about its handmaidens, the media, Congress, the universities and the think tanks which advocate for war.

We will talk about the political consequences of permanent war and the fascist direction America is increasingly going in. Most profoundly we will talk about capitalism and fascism from which it springs. And finally we will talk about the social forces necessary to stop and reverse war.

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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American political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal has served 40 years Is Pennsylvania’s harshest prisons-16 of them on death row -for the murder of a Philadelphia police officer which he did not commit
The judge who convicted him was overheard promising“I’m going to help fry the N-word“.

Mumia is an important figure in African-American history. Before his conviction he was a nationally broadcast award winning radio journalist and the head of the Philadelphia Association of Black journalists. He reported on the murderous racial violence of the Philadelphia police department and it’s notorious Police Chief and then Mayor Frank Rizzo.

He had been a member of the Philadelphia chapter of the Black Panther Party. While in prison Mumia has written 13 books and had a weekly radio show “ Live from Death Row“. He holds a masters degree and is working on a PhD in history.

On October 26, 2022 Mumia’s attorneys appeared in court in an effort to get him a new trial. His defense petition included newly discovered evidence that had been buried in the prosecutor’s files. This evidence documented a key witness receiving promises of money for their testimony and evidence of favorable treatment of another in a criminal case. The petition also documented the unconstitutional practice of striking Black jurors during Mumia’s original trial.

Judge Lucretia Clemons preliminarily denied his constitutional right to present this information. She is likely to finalize this ruling on his upcoming court date in Philadelphia on December 9, 2022.

Guest – Noelle Hanrahan is the director of Prison Radio, a multimedia production studio that brings to the public the voices of incarcerated women, men and children. She seeks to honor the agency and humanity of prisoners by bringing their uncensored essays into mainstream discourse. She has produced over 3,500 multimedia recordings from over 100 prison radio correspondents, including the critically acclaimed work of Mumia Abu-Jamal. In 1995, she brought out of prison his first book, Live From Death Row (Harper Perennial), which became a best seller. In 2013, she co-produced the theatrically released feature documentary Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary (Street Legal Cinema/First Run Features). She received her BA in Gender, Race and Class in the 19th and 20th Centuries from Stanford University, and an MA in Criminal Justice from Boston University. She also holds private investigator licenses in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.

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Law and Disorder September 12, 2022

 

Mass Rally Mumia, Assange and Palestine in Berkeley, California September 17, 2022

Veteran socialist and organizer Jeff Mackler initiated a call for a mass rally on September 17, 2022 in Berkeley, California in support of Mumia Abu-Jamal, Julian Assange, and Palestinians. In 1982 radio journalist and Black Panther Mumia Abu -Jamal was wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death for murdering police officer Daniel Faulkner on a Philadelphia Street. He served 28 1/2 years on death row before his sentence was reduced to life in prison. Still in prison, he has served 40 years. An International movement has developed demanding “Free Mumia.”

Award winning Australian journalist and publisher Julian Assange sits in Belmarsh. a maximum security prison in London. In declining mental and physical health,he has been incarcerated for over 1000 days while he awaits extradition to the Northern District federal court in Virginia where he will be tried and certainly convicted of violating the espionage act of 1917. His crime: embarrassing United States by publishing true information about US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and spying on the American public.

The Gaza Strip imprisons 1 million Palestinians. It is largest open air prison in the world. A month ago the Israeli military killed 49 people, 17 of them children, in military attacks. The weapons were made and supplied by America. North of the Gaza Strip in June in the Israeli militarily occupied territory of the West Bank an Israeli sniper assassinated the beloved veteran Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh who was covering an Israeli army incursion. She had been reporting on the situation of Palestinians In the West Bank for many years.

American ideology has it that our country is a force for good in the world. That it is a democratic society, that it promotes freedom and democracy abroad, and that at home it is a place where hard work leads to success. But the truth is quite different. These myths are increasingly being exposed for what they are.

Recognizing that free journalism is at stake a diverse group of organizations are sponsoring the September 17th mass rally In Berkeley. Mumia will speak via phone. Vincent de Stefano of the Assange Defense Committee will speak. So will Daniel Ellsberg, famous for his release of the Pentagon papers, Susan Schnall, President of Vets for Peace, Mama Pam of Friends of Mumia’s International Family, the great journalist Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize winning author Alice walker, and Jeff Mackler among others.

The slogan of the rally is Free Mumia! Free Julian! Free Palestine!

Guest – Jeff Mackler is a founder and leader of the United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC), hey founder of the Northern California Climate Mobilization, and the national secretary of Socialist Action and it’s two time candidate for the US presidency.

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Analysis: The Taiwan-US Relationship And China

Trips to Taiwan, by Congressional leaders like Nancy Pelosi, followed up by  trips to Taiwan by other members of Congress, has served to push the United States and China closer to a catastrophic conflict. Richard Becker, our guest for this topic today has written, “Pelosi’s decision raises the specter of all-out war between the two world powers. and the consequences of her actions remain to be seen.”

The Biden Administration, which obviously approved of Pelosi’s Taiwan visit, added fuel to the fire by deploying an aircraft carrier off the coast of Taiwan along with accompanying warships.

Pelosi’s argument that the U.S.-Taiwan relationship was based on a shared belief in “self-determination and self-government, democracy and freedom” is ridiculous. The U.S. and other colonial efforts to dismember Taiwan from the rest of China goes back to at least the 19th century. And at the end of World War Two, the U.S. government supported the Nationalist Party of dictator Chiang Kai-Shek in the civil war between his party and the ruling communist party of China; a war that Chiang lost. After Chiang lost that civil war he retreated to the Chinese island of Taiwan, where he ruled as a vicious dictator. Of course, he continued to receive with massive military and diplomatic support from the United States. And even after it was forced to abandon its absurd policy that Taiwan represented the legitimate government of China, the U.S. has maintained its de facto alliance with the regime in Taiwan. And China, which still claims Taiwan as a part of China, has not ruled out eventually bringing Taiwan back under mainland China’s governance, including with the use of force if need be.

Guest – Richard Becker a leader in the Party for Socialism and Liberation. He’s also the Western Regional Coordinator of the ANSWER Coalition, the coalition to end war and end racism; and Mr. Becker is the author of a number of books, including, Storming the Gates: How the Russian Revolution Changed the World, the book,  Palestine: Israel and the U.S. Empire; and the book, The Myth of Democracy and the Rule of the Banks.

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Law and Disorder August 8, 2022

January 6 Committee Has Provided Sufficient Evidence for Garland to Indict Trump

During the course of eight public hearings, the House of Representatives Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack presented overwhelming evidence of former President Donald `Trump’s guilt of at least 2 federal crimes and crimes in the state of Georgia. Although it has been more than 2 years since Trump initiated his wide-ranging conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, Attorney General Merrick Garland still has not indicted the ex-president.

Through the testimony primarily of Trump loyalists, the Committee demonstrated that Trump was the fulcrum of a multipronged conspiracy to fraudulently declare himself the winner of the election. The Committee has provided Garland with more than enough evidence to indict Trump. But will Garland bring charges against Trump?

Guest – Marjorie Cohn, is a former criminal defense attorney, professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and past president of the National Lawyers Guild. She has published several books and writes a regular column for Truthout. Her most recent piece is titled, “January 6 Committee Has Provided Sufficient Evidence for Garland to Indict Trump.”

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Lawyers You’ll Like: Attorney Bill Goodman

Bill Goodman, the son of Ernie Goodman, who was one of the founding members of the National Lawyers Guild, is a legend in his own right. A past national president of the NLG, one of the founding officers of the NLG National Police Accountability Project, the former Legal Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, and a founding board member of the Sugar Law Center for Economic and Social Justice, Bill was also a partner in the first racially integrated law firm in the United States. He is currently a partner in the Detroit civil rights firm, Goodman Hurwitz & James, where he continues to work tirelessly for the rights of victims of government and corporate abuse. Bill is also an adjunct professor of law at Wayne State Law School, where he teaches Constitutional Litigation. Bill has successfully litigated numerous police and government misconduct cases as well as other high-profile cases on behalf of prisoners, toxic tort victims, the wrongfully convicted and victims of racism, always in the pursuit of constitutional, social and economic justice.

Host Attorney Julie Hurwitz: Bill is also my law partner in Goodman Hurwitz & James and a former long-term partner in life – we’ve known each other a long time! We’ll discuss two cases that have been brought to confront the unconstitutional and inhumane conduct of individual police officers, but more importantly, the historically unconstitutional and inhumane ways in which police departments institutionally tolerate, promote and reward such behavior by their officers.

Hosted By Attorneys Marjorie Cohn and Julie Hurwitz

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