Censorship, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, FBI Intrusion, Human Rights, Truth to Power
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Private Prison Corporation To Have Its Name on Florida Atlantic Football Stadium
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Priests of Our Democracy, The Supreme Court, Academic Freedom, and the Anti-Communist Purge
Priests of Our Democracy, The Supreme Court, Academic Freedom, and the Anti-Communist Purge is the title of the recently published book by attorney Marjorie Heins. The book examines a very dark period in academic freedom within New York City’s municipal colleges. In the early 1940s, faculty, students and staff were the target of massive investigations into their political beliefs and associations. They hauled before tribunals of the New York State legislature, dozens were stripped of their careers.
Author Marjorie Heinz shows historically, that academic freedom is nothing to take for granted and is always on shaky ground despite being protected by the First Amendment. The backlash of controversy against Students for Justice in Palestine sponsoring a Boycott Divest Sanction event at Brooklyn College is recent example. This is a book for anyone working in education to understand the court battles that tried to preserve a right protected by the Constitution.
Attorney Marjorie Heins:
- Boards of Trustees which are dominated by corporate executives don’t like these new scholars in the field of social science who are also activists.
- It’s really an attempt of political purge of this national figure.
- The burgeoning forces of academic freedom rally round him, they see the danger.
- In those early days the main attacks on the activist professors really were on activities outside the classroom in support of labor organizing.
- A bunch of professors get together from around the country and form the AAUP, American Association of University Professors. They for the first time issue a declaration of principles on academic freedom.
- The first is freedom in the classroom. The second is freedom is your research and scholarship to pursue learning where it may lead, which means overturning conventional wisdom.
- The third is what they call extramural speech, outside the walls. That was the main target of repression in that period.
- We have to get all these leftists out of the school system because they’re going to indoctrinate the tender minds of our youth with Marxist ideas.
- Harry Keyishian starts the book, he’s one of the wonderful characters I discovered as I was working on it. The Keyishian v. Board of Regents case, 1967 Supreme Court case is famous among First Amendment lawyers because it reversed prior not so good decisions, strikes down the so called Feinberg law which had been passed in 1949 and upheld by the Supreme Court.
- Feinberg law creates a very sweeping program of loyalty investigations for teachers in the public schools.
- 1952 is the height of the witch-hunt at Queens College in New York City when the Senate Internal Security Sub-committee comes to town.
- The Senate Internal Security Sub-committee starts summoning teachers at city colleges.
- “Would you tell Pablo Picasso that he wasn’t qualified to teach art?”
- It’s obscene to see college administrators running around scared like keystone cops he said.
- Some of these investigations were very broad. What books they read, what magazines they subscribed to, did you have Paul Robeson records in your home?
- It’s not until the Keyishian case in 1967 that the Supreme Court says this whole system of loyalty investigations violates the First Amendment and the due process provisions of the Constitution.
- Marjorie Heins Book Events:
- Revolution Books March 5 is sponsored by the New York Civil Liberties Union – 7PM
- Harvard Bookstore, Cambridge, MA, Friday March 15, 3 pm.
- Talking Leaves Bookstore, Buffalo, NY, Sat. March 23, 5 pm.
- Politics & Prose Bookstore, Washington, DC, Sat. June 15, 1 pm.
Guest – Marjorie Heins, a civil liberties lawyer, writer, and teacher, and the founding director of the Free Expression Policy Project. Her previous book, Not in Front of the Children, won the American Library Association’s 2002 Eli Oboler Award for best published work in the field of intellectual freedom. Other books include Sex, Sin, and Blasphemy: A Guide to America’s Censorship Wars; Cutting the Mustard: Affirmative Action and the Nature of Excellence; and Strictly Ghetto Property: The Story of Los Siete de la Raza. She is a graduate of Harvard Law School.
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Encore Interview: New Vatican Rules On Handling Priest Sexual Abuse Cases
Earlier this year, the Vatican had revised its laws making it easier to discipline sex abuser priests. The new internal of the Vatican will use faster judicial procedures instead of full ecclesiastical trials. Critics of the revisions, say the Vatican merely tweaked the process and the new rules don’t hold bishops accountable for abuse by priests on their watch or require that they report the sexual abuse to the authorities. In the same report was the inclusion that attempting to ordain women as priests was comparable to heresy, apostasy and pedophilia. To many it was a comparison meant to resist any suggestion that pedophilia can be addressed by ending the requirement of celibacy.
Barbara Blaine:
- SNAP is now a worldwide movement of survivors. We invite supporters join us, we have approximately 10 thousand survivors. Some are spouses and family members but most are survivors; survivors of sexual abuse by priests or other clergy members. Sometimes by religious brothers, by nuns, deacons even bishops.
- We grew in 2002 and 2003 as the headlines were exploding of abuse by priests.
- We have support group meetings in the United States in about 65 different cities. We were extremely naive, not to mention wounded trying to figure out how to make it from day to day. Its empowering for us if we can protect someone who is 12 or 13 from being abused.
- Some documents was released in 2009 in Ireland. Those were the result of government investigations into the allegations of priests and other religious figures sexually abusing children. Victims across Europe, in Germany and Belgium, Austria, Netherlands, England began speaking out and reporting their abuse. In Ireland at the end of 2009, four bishops were resigning their positions.
- From our perspective, what comes out of the Vatican is a lot of lofty words and empty promises. If you look for concrete action, you’ll see very little if any. We as victims are devout Catholics and its really incredible for us to comprehend that someone in the position of authority in the church would not want us to be protected.
- It was heartbreaking and devastating to learn the policy of the church officials is to protect the predators and their assets and their reputations, not the children.
- They’re accountable to no one and its okay for them to continue and commit these crimes.
- The vast majority of victims still do not report. More than 5 thousand priests have been identified are sexual offenders who have abused children between 1950 and 2008.
- 5 percent of priests abusing children. When someone rapes a child they get fired, in the church they get promoted. SNAPnetwork.org / bishopaccountability.org
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Attorney Pam Spees:
- We joined a conversation with SNAP looking for ways to insure accountability for what’s going on.
- Is there a legal framework that gets at the widespread nature of this. There’s one book out that discusses the 2000 year old paper trail of sexual abuse in the church.
- You’ll hear things like a cardinal or a pope attempt to make an apology. They’re sorry for what happened to these folks. It didn’t just happen.
- It shows the lack of attention and lack of awareness of the gravity of what’s going on and a prioritization of the church protecting itself and its power, rather than insuring the protection of the kids in the church and others who are vulnerable to abuse by priests.
- It also looks like an attempt to decentralize the responsibility. There are key legal experts who have discussed this as crimes against humanity.
- These are acts that are committed as a widespread or systematic assault or attack on the civilian population.
- When you’re talking about the massive sustained harm that is being caused here and the lack of awareness and acknowledgment. . it’s really astonishing.
- The International Criminal Court is a possible venue that has jurisdiction on crimes against humanity.
- The Church can’t be trusted to police itself.
Guest – Pam Spees, senior staff attorney in the international human rights program at the Center for Constitutional Rights. She has a background in international criminal and human rights law with a gender focus, as well as criminal trial practice
Guest – Barbara Blaine, founder of SNAP, Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, the nation’s oldest and largest self-help organization for victims of clergy sexual abuse.
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Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, FBI Intrusion, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Supreme Court, Surveillance, Torture
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Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking
In the past 2 years, we’ve discussed in many interviews and updates, the attacks on whistle-blowers and hackers. The emerging movement of programmers, hackers, open source software, online communities has challenged and exposed corporate and government control and surveillance, making them targets of prosecution. As many may know, our own Michael Ratner has represented whistle-blower Julian Assange, computer activist Jeremy Hammond, and has been a legal adviser to many others including the late Aaron Swartz. Today we talk with author Gabriella Coleman about her recently published book Encoding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking. It’s a good place to start for those learning about the political significance of free software, intellectual property and the morality of computer hacking.
Gabriella Coleman:
- When you utter the word hacker, usually the image that pops into people’s minds is nefarious criminal. That can be the case but really hackers are composed of an extremely lively group of individuals who tend to be computer programmers and network administrators, who actually are committed to a range of civil liberties such as free speech and privacy. Especially in the last decade they’ve been involved in political activities as well.
- They’re quite a bit of diversity among hackers, technically.
- Hackers – are keenly aware of the issues such as censorship, which impact the present and the future of the internet. Some hackers are committed to insuring internet freedoms for their own productive autonomy.
- Beyond productive autonomy they’re really starting to care about the broader issues relating to internet freedoms and how they relate to democracy at large.
- In order for software to be made, it must be written in a programming language such as C++, Python and Pearl and its written in source code. These are the underlying directions of software.
- A very prominent group of hackers who are committed to always having access to source code have actually reinvented the law to make sure that that source code is eternally available. They’re very much against copyrights and patents and have created something called a copyleft to make sure the source code that powers software is always accessible to them.
- Proprietary software such as the Microsoft Operating System is behind lock and key. We don’t have access to the underlying directions.
- There’s a contingent within the hacker world who believe that access is not only good for the sake of improving technology but is the morally right thing to do.
- That its a collaborative process, that everyone should have access to it. There are other hackers that are a little less concerned about the ethics of access and they’re more concerned about the pragmatics.
- I originally thought that these free software developers who were part of these large projects such as Debion, were raging Leftists. The project itself had collected people from all political orientations.
- Anonymous is a digital phenomena somewhat composed of hackers but not exclusively so, who has engaged in an enormous amount of political activities. They are innovating in the realm of direct action related to digital protest.
- Some will engage in hacking to get information about corporate corruption to leak to the world at large. They also engage in distributed denial of service attacks where a website is so overloaded with requests it comes off line.
- Free software, in order for it to be free speech is also like free beer, you have to make the source code available. But that doesn’t stop people from charging money for support or services.
- In the case of SOPA being passed, there was massive outcry, and massive organization to do something about it to stop it in its tracks. It came from different quarters of society, it came from corporate giants such as google, it came from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and there was a huge black out where people took down their websites. It had a massive effect and stopped it in its tracks.
- I’m currently working on a book on Anonymous. That should be definitely done by 2013.
Guest – Gabriella Coleman, Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy in the Art History and Communication Studies Department at McGill University. Trained as an anthropologist, she researches, writes, and teaches on hackers and digital activism. Her first book on Free Software, “Coding Freedom: The Aesthetics and the Ethics of Hacking” has been published with Princeton University Press. It is available for purchase and you can download a copy on here.
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Long Distance Revolutionary: A Journey with Mumia Abu-Jamal
The new documentary, “Long Distance Revolutionary: A Journey with Mumia Abu-Jamal,” is premiering across the country. The film includes interviews from Cornel West, Alice Walker, Ruby Dee, Dick Gregory, Amy Goodman, Michael Parenti, writers Tariq Ali, and Michelle Alexander. This film beautifully captures the importance of Mumia Abu-Jamal’s life as an American journalist, and radical. He published seven books in prison including the best selling “Live From Death Row.”
In Chris Hedges’ review he points out what Cornel West says in the film: “The state is very clever in terms of keeping track, especially [of] the courageous and visionary ones, the ones that are long-distance runners. You can keep track of them, absorb ’em, dilute ’em, or outright kill ’em—you don’t have to worry about opposition to ’em.”
Steve Vittoria:
- The arc of Mumia’s life and the body of his work which is remarkable under harsh and draconian conditions is much more than December 9, 1981. I’ve always seen his life as more than one moment.
- I wanted to tap into what I found was clearly a unique story. Here’s a young man who early on realized he was a revolutionary by the time he was 15 years old.
- He’s writing remarkable work for the Black Panther Party and their newspaper. By 26, he’s a vibrant radio broadcaster and journalist in Philadelphia, reaches NPR and All Things Considered.
- After incarceration, he publishes 7 or 8 books.
- I did from a creative standpoint and a very practical standpoint.
- I wanted to tell a really good story. Any filmmaker, that’s job number one. Mumia, you just have to turn the camera on and you can tell a great story.
- If the film starts to win awards and get fawned over then something’s wrong.
- My favorite interview in the film is Mumia’s sister Lydia Barashango who unfortunately passed away a few months after we interviewed her from her bout with cancer. She went to great lengths to secure her baby brother’s legacy.
- Trying to find what it was like as a young African-American kid growing up in one of the great racist northern cities of Philadelphia, what it was like
- I didn’t realize how funny he could be. He’s kind of a science fiction nerd. He calls himself a nerd.
- Mumia has a very strict schedule for work.
Guest – Steve Vittoria, the writer, director, producer and editor of Long Distance Revolutionary: A Journey with Mumia Abu-Jamal. The film premiered in theaters in New York City earlier this month.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, FBI Intrusion, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Military Tribunal, Political Prisoner, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power
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Central Park Five Civil Suit
On April 19, 1989 a group of five black and Latino teenagers were arrested and convicted for the brutal rape of a white female jogger in Central Park, New York City. It was one of the highest profile criminal cases in the city. A New York court overturned the convictions of the five teenagers after a serial rapist confessed to the crimes. By this time of this confession, the five defendants had already served sentences of 7and 13 years. Now, the city of New York is refusing to settle a $250 million decade-long federal civil rights suit brought by the defendants. Attorney Roger Wareham talks more about the case and the Ken Burns documentary on the Central Park Five that could provide footage for the federal civil lawsuit.
Attorney Roger Wareham:
- I’m part of a team of lawyers among five firms that represent the five defendants.
- She almost died. She lost 75 percent of the blood in her body that night.
- The police at some point arrested 30 youths who had allegedly been in the park earlier that night. Some of them were charged with attacking people jogging in the park.
- Most of them had been released, these five were in custody.
- Maybe four or five hours after they were arrested the police received word of this woman who was near death.
- So they held these five children for questioning which basically became and interrogation, which basically became a coerced false confession where each one of them implicated the other ones in the rape and attack of this woman.
- Even though none of them knew each other or what actually happened because they didn’t do it, they just wanted to go home.
- By the time the parents became part of the process, the false statements had already been elicited.
- Especially when a black man is a accused of touching, raping a white woman, logic, justice, objectivity, evidence goes out the window and there’s a presumption of guilt.
- They went to trial and were convicted even though there was no forensic evidence.
- Once they were released from prison they had to register as sexual predators.
- Thirteen years after their conviction, the person who actually committed the crime came forward and admitted he’d done it.
- He was arrested after a failed attempt at a rape. There was an m.o. that he employed with the rapes that he conducted.
- I’m part of a political organization called the December 12 Movement.
- Manhattan’s District Attorney’s office had done a very thorough investigation and this is the same office that had prosecuted them.
- They put forth a really damning affirmation in support of our motion basically admitting they had prosecuted the wrong people, errors had been made. It was clear that the one and only perpetrator was Mateas Raes and they were not going to retry the case.
- Their convictions were overturned 10 years ago, in December 2002.
- Why hasn’t it been settled? You look to Police Commissioner Kelly who endorsed the report.
- Subpoenaing the outtakes is a reflection of their desperation. See, they know the truth. They’re floundering around looking for different straws to grab at.
- Contact the December 12th Movement directly at 718-398-1766.
Guest – Attorney Roger Wareham is a lawyer and political activist of over four decades. He is a member of the December 12th Movement, an organization of African people which organizes in the Black and Latino community around human rights violations, particularly police terror. Wareham is also the International Secretary-General of the International Association Against Torture (AICT), a non-governmental organization that has consultative status before the United Nations.
Since 1989, he has annually presented evidence of human rights violations facing people of color in the United States and other parts of the world at assemblies of the United Nations’ Human Rights Council (formerly the Commission on Human Rights) and its other bodies that meet in Geneva, Switzerland. His work was instrumental in having Mr. Maurice Glele, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance; conduct the first U.N. investigation of the United States in history. Roger Wareham was an active organizer of and participant in the United Nations’ World Conference against Racism held from August 30 – September 7, 2001 in Durban, South Africa.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Torture
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Remembering the Life and Influence of Aaron Swartz
Last week, computer activist and programmer Aaron Swartz allegedly took his own life. Swartz as many listeners may know helped develop RSS, essentially revolutionizing how people use the internet and was the key architect of Creative Commons. He believed information should be free and used his tech-saviness to promote his views. Many blame his unnecessary death on the stress of being the target of federal prosecutors who went after him for covertly downloading millions of public domain academic journals on the MIT campus using a non-profit university research portal. It’s unclear if Swartz broke any laws, MIT provided free access to anybody on campus including visitors without campus affiliation. Swartz has had run ins with the law before in connection with hacktivist activity and would’ve faced a 35 year sentence. Petition to remove US District Attorney Carmen Ortiz from office.
Karl Fogel:
- He’s portrayed as a technical whiz kid, a genius who knew how the internet worked.
- He was a very precocious and very technically adept person who started doing significant work on internet standards and access to information and moving information around communication networks at the age of 13.
- They didn’t know he was 13 until they held an in person conference.
- No one knew he was a kid, he was so widely read and very able to express himself.
- He was a very good organizer of people who were themselves.
- Aaron helped develop this standard. RSS – Really Simple Syndication Format is a means of having a website notify people via an efficient and timely information push mechanism.
- Stop Online Piracy Act, a clampdown on websites that provide access to information in ways that terms of service or restrictive laws in Aaron’s opinion don’t permit.
- Creative Commons is another organization that promotes much loser and more permissive copyright regulations and gives authors and creators of content tools like more liberal licenses to release their content under.
- All of these things he did have one thing in common, giving people access to knowledge.
- Information that is often artificially restricted.
- The wires of the internet are perfectly willing to carry any piece of information. When they don’t its because a human has decided we’re going to block access.
- He’s talking about access to scholarly articles that were funded by tax payer dollars.
- You can think of Reddit as a kind of early facebook in that it gave people an online surface to share conversations on the internet.
- Demand Progress that Aaron helped start that organized a massive protest around SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act.
- He was intensely collaborative. He was often an engine of what was moving.
- Questioncopyright.org is founded to change the way the debate of copyright law and copyright practices happen.
- If you talk to people about copyright, they say artists have to make living. People shouldn’t steal stuff.
- It’s not about attribution. It was instituted initially as a regulation to help support the publishing industry and was lobbied for by the publishing industry 300 years ago.
- Aaron understood that and understood that poor frames of debate was causing us to have increasing restrictive laws in an age where we have this gigantic worldwide copy machine.
- CFAA, two parties sharing information with each other, it criminalizes that.
- He was always referred to as a hacker, meaning someone who breaks in and does damage to computers. That’s inaccurate. What these laws say is someone knowingly uses a computer network to use someone else’s server in a way that that person didn’t intend. In other words if you violate terms of service. Everyone clicks through.
- Making criminalized and punishable by jail is ridiculous.
- He was opposed to artificial scarcity. It bothered his sense of justice that we were behaving as if there was a scarcity. It was always portrayed as young hacker steals computer files from MIT.
- What the facts of the case are, he wanted to download a lot of articles from JSTORE. These are articles were available for free. However they put a limit on how many you can download from a given address and time.
- He found a tactical way to work around it by getting into a network closet and using a computer that changes its network address. Yes, he engaged in very mild, non-malicious subterfuge.
- Alex Stamos article: The Truth About Aaron Swartz’s Crime
- He was doing research on the effects of funding on academic research. He wanted to do it in a big data approach.
- He needed these millions of articles in order to write programs to parse them and look for conclusions and funders to do a gigantic database.
- It makes me angry that they (prosecutors) knew what they were doing, they knew what Aaron’s intentions were.
- Their careers should be over. I know that’s cruel to say, but they should go no further.
- I wrote that there might have been something illegal about it but its a bad law.
- Acting for Aaron and Open Access – Adi Kamdar
Guest – Karl Fogel co-founded Cyclic Software in 1995, a company offering commercial CVS support. In 1999 he added support for CVS anonymous read-only repository access, inaugurating a new standard for access to development sources in open source projects. That same year, he wrote Open Source Development with CVS (published by Coriolis), now in its third edition via Paraglyph Press. He has also written Producing Open Source Software, from O’Reilly Media. From 2000-2006, he worked for CollabNet, Inc., managing the creation and development of Subversion, a open source version control system meant to replace CVS as the de facto standard among open source projects. After a brief stint at Google in 2006 as an Open Source Program Specialist, he left to become editor of QuestionCopyright.org. He also participates in various open source projects as a module maintainer, patch contributor, and documentation writer.
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Speech by Former Attorney General of the United States Ramsey Clark
We hear speech delivered by Ramsey Clark at Riverside Church in Harlem celebrating his 85th birthday. Ramsey Clark is a former Attorney General of the United States, under President Lyndon B. Johnson. The first Attorney General at the Justice Department to call for the elimination of the death penalty and all electronic surveillance.
During his years at the Justice Department:
After he left the Johnson administration, he became a vociferous critic of the Vietnam War and continued on a radical path, defending the underdog, defending the rights of people worldwide, from Palestinians to Iraqis, to anyone who found themselves at the repressive end of government action.
Past Law and Disorder Interviews with former US Attorney Ramsey Clark:
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Afghanistan War, CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Extraordinary Rendition, FBI Intrusion, Guantanamo, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Military Tribunal, Political Prisoner, RFID, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, Torture, War Resister
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Updates:
- Guantanamo Bay Prison 11th Anniversary
- Abu Ghraib Settlement: Defense Contractor Engility Holdings Pays $5M To Iraqi Torture Detainees
- Stop and Frisk Lawyers Praise Decision Finding NYPD Stops Unconstitutional
- Bradley Manning Case: Judge Gives 112 Days of Sentence If Convicted
- Law and Disorder Tip of the Hat: New Yorkers Respond to Hateful Subway Ads & Declare Them War Propaganda
- In Memory of Adnan Latif, A Cleared Guantanamo Detainee Who Was Found Dead In His Cell
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Obama to Nominate John Brennan, ‘Kill List’ Architect, as New CIA Chief
As many listeners know, President Barack Obama has nominated John Brennan as director of the CIA. Brennan is currently Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism. In this capacity Brennan meets with the president daily and is governed the administration’s program of extrajudicial assassinations known as the “kill list.”
In 2011 and 2012, Brennan used his position to “re-organize” the process by which people outside of war zones were put on the list of drone targets. Basically, this “reorganization” gave the White House the power to secretly determine who would die in the US assassination program overseas.
We welcome back retired CIA officer, Ray McGovern, now a political activist. McGovern was a federal employee under seven U.S. presidents in the past 27 years. Ray McGovern’s article on Consortium News: The Grilling That Brennan Deserves.
Ray McGovern:
- After 9-11, the acceptance of things like torture has become even more widespread.
- I spent a little time in Germany and I know about Gestapo tactics, and it seem to me that enhanced interrogation techniques sounded very familiar, and indeed its right out of the Gestapo lexicon.
- The immediate post World War II experience was very vivid.
- Obama is very fastidious in looking over this “kill list.” He’s got his own priest.
- It did me great good to know there were a handful at least of Fordham students that stood with their back to Brennan and protested vigorously against not being the commencement speaker but awarded the Doctorate of Humane Letters.
- He openly advocated kidnapping, the euphemism there is extraordinary rendition.
- There are black prisons all over Europe and Asia where these people were kept and tortured.
- He was an open advocate of at least the kidnapping and he was there. He was at the right hand of George Tenet so to speak.
- I have good information that Brennan was among those in the White House basement supervising the demonstration of “enhanced interrogation techniques” that Condeleeza Rice arranged for all the personages there.
- It’s all a master weaving, webbing of deceit and John Brennan is at the bottom of it.
- He was a classis example of a failed analyst. Why did he get where he is?
- He made an important friend George Tenet.
- Is Brennan suggesting that Muslims are hard wired to want to knock down planes over Detroit.
- I have very good information in that report that Brennan is the prime mover in all these abuses.
- It’s not about success, it’s about principle here.
- I like Dr. King’s motto, there is such a thing is too late. Sometimes you really have to put your body into it.
- Unless we act, nothing will be achieved.
- There are 2 CIAs. The one that Truman set up to give him honest answers to what’s going on in the world.
- To speak without fear or favor, to tell ’em the truth. That’s the one I worked in. That’s the one I could with career protection knock noses out of joint in the Pentagon and the State Department. I could do that.
Guest – Raymond L. McGovern, retired CIA officer turned political activist. McGovern was a Federal employee under seven U.S. presidents in the past 27 years. Ray’s opinion pieces have appeared in many leading newspapers here and abroad. His website writings are posted first on consortiumnews.com, and are usually carried on other websites as well. He has debated at the Oxford Forum and appeared on Charlie Rose, The Newshour, CNN, and numerous other TV & radio programs and documentaries. Ray has lectured to a wide variety of audiences here and abroad. Ray studied theology and philosophy (as well as his major, Russian) at Fordham University, from which he holds two degrees. He also holds a Certificate in Theological Studies from Georgetown University.
A Catholic, Mr. McGovern has been worshipping for over a decade with the ecumenical Church of the Saviour and teaching at its Servant Leadership School. He was co-director of the school from 1998 to 2004. Ray came from his native New York to Washington in the early Sixties as an Army infantry/intelligence officer and then served as a CIA analyst from the administration of John F. Kennedy to that of George H. W. Bush. Ray’s duties included chairing National Intelligence Estimates and preparing the President’s Daily Brief, which he briefed one-on-one to President Ronald Reagan’s most senior national security advisers from 1981 to 1985.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, FBI Intrusion, Green Scare, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Supreme Court, Targeting Muslims, Truth to Power
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Updates:
- Chile: 40 Years Later Eight Former Army Lieutenants Charged in the Killing of Communist Performer/Songwriter Victor Jara.
- Heidi Boghosian and Johanna Fernandez Visit Mumia Abu-Jamal During Holidays
- Death Penalty States In The United States Update
- Jeremy Hammond’s Judge Refuses To Recuse Herself : Contrary to what has been reported on Democracy Now and Law and Disorder, a motion has been filed (not ruled) for the judge to recuse herself.
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FBI Considers The Occupy Movement A Terrorist Threat: The State of Civil Rights and Public Policy
A few weeks ago the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund released secret documents obtained by Freedom of Information Act requests revealing that the Occupy movement was treated as a terrorist threat by the FBI. This is despite agency acknowledgement that the organizers called for peaceful protests. The documents also show massive resources used to track the Occupy movement, a month prior to the encampment in Zuccotti Park. FBI and counter-terrorism agents in offices across the country, from Anchorage to Jacksonville, to Tampa, Virginia, Milwaukee, Birmingham, Memphis and Denver, coordinated with various local and federal law enforcement, to monitor and collect intelligence on OWS. The documents obtained by the PCJF are heavily redacted and the tip of the ice berg says our guest attorney Mara Verheyden Hilliard. We also talk with Mara about her thoughts on the state of civil rights for the year moving forward.
Attorney Mara Verheyden-Hilliard:
- The Partnership For Civil Justice Fund filed a series of Freedom of Information Act requests with federal agencies, as well as with municipalities and police departments around the country.
- Prior to the FBI materials we have obtained a lot of documents showing the Department of Homeland Security’s involvement as well as local police involvement around the country.
- It doesn’t come as a shock to people that the FBI has continued unabated its historic role as the secret police in the United States, acting against the social justice movement in the US.
- The documents also show us this deep and close partnership the FBI and DHS have with Wall Street, and with the banks and businesses in the United States.
- The documents show the U.S. intelligence agencies and supposedly security agencies really working as the private intelligence arm for private businesses.
- You have the people in the United States rising up in opposition to an economic devastation caused by the banks and by Wall Street and the U.S. government acting in partnership with the banks and Wall Street against those people.
- These documents show for example the FBI was communicating with the New York Stock Exchange in August of 2011, a month before the first tent was set up in Zucotti Park.
- One of the documents we have involves the Domestic Security Alliance Council, where they’re planning on the West Coast port actions of the Occupy movement.
- The DSAC is a government agency that describes itself as a partnership between the FBI, DHS and the private sector. The Lower Manhattan Security Initiative.
- It shows that we’re not looking at something anomalous and aberrational, its pulling back the cloak on what the U.S. government, its intelligence agencies and its “terrorism” authorities is really doing and who its partnering with. It’s against the people of the United States and not for the people of the United States.
- Those people and that movement is then treated by the government as a potential criminal or terrorist threat.
- It helps understand when the government uses the terms of terrorism so broadly and how it uses the authority and the money that it takes from the people of the United States.
- If the FBI had materials that showed criminal activity, they would’ve been delighted to produce some and make those public. That’s not an uncommon action by the FBI given its routine willingness over the years to set people up and announce a big terrorism arrest.
- The sniper reference is a reference in Houston.
- I think it bares pointing out that this FBI, is President Obama’s FBI.
- When the feel the power of the people in the streets, the U.S. intelligence agencies and the local law enforcement agencies go into high gear, because it really is the movement of the people that does cause change.
- At times when it peaks like this, you can really see the truth of their operation.
- It is illegal to use administrative raids for other pretexts.
- We’re appealing both redactions as well as scope of production and scope of search.
Guest – Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, co-chair of the Guild’s national Mass Defense Committee. Co-founder of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund in Washington, DC, she recently 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 (involving targeting of political activists and false arrest by law enforcement based on political affiliation); and in National Council of Arab Americans, et al. v. City of New York, et al. (successfully challenging the city’s efforts to discriminatorily restrict mass assembly in Central Park’s Great Lawn stemming from the 2004 RNC protests.)
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Challenging The National Defense Authorization Act of 2012
Last September a federal judge struck down part of the National Defense Authorization Act signed by President Obama that gave the government power to indefinitely detain anyone, anywhere in the world it considers to substantially support or be in associative force with terrorism. This includes US citizens. Judge Katherine Forrest of the Southern District of New York had ruled the indefinite detention provision of the National Defense Authorization Act likely violates the First and Fifth Amendments of U.S. citizens.
Attorney Carl Mayer:
- Some people call it (NDAA) the Homeland Battlefield Act because it treats the United States as a battlefield and allows the military to exercise power over civilians which is antithetical to our democracy and to our 200 years of Constitutional precedence.
- In May of 2012, we after a trial before Katherine Forrest who’s a federal judge in the Southern District of New York we achieved a preliminary injunction. That was then appealed but the appeal would stay pending a trial on a permanent injunction and on September 12, 2012, Judge Forrest issued a permanent injunction against the NDAA.
- The NDAA was stopped between May 16, 2012 and December 12, 2012.
- However, once that happened, the Obama Administration went into overdrive and immediately appealed that to the Second Circuit and asked for a stay of Judge Forrest’s order pending appeal.
- That stay lifted Judge Forrest’s injunction unfortunately the NDAA of 2012 now operates.
- In their papers, the government promised our clients would not be touched under the NDAA and they seemed to imply that no one in their (clients) position would be touched under the NDAA.
- StopNDAA.org
- People can go there and read Judge Forrester’s 112 page opinion and all the documents from the case.
- What’s at stake is the liberty and the right to free speech of all journalists and all activists and indeed any citizen of the United States of America.
- Because the military has never had the power to detain civilians.
- The only exception to that was during World War 2 when Japanese-Americans were interred in prison camps.
- There’s not right to a trial by jury, there’s no right to an attorney. This an authoritarian measure.
- I would venture to guess your hosts and co-hosts are on a list somewhere.
- Chris Hedges for example was a correspondent for several years that covered not only al-Qaeda but 17 other groups that are one the State Department Terrorism List
- He testified that he had a reasonable fear that the NDAA could put him in jeopardy.
- You know as attorneys what’s incredible about this law is there’s no definitional section.
- It doesn’t define what associated forces are. It doesn’t define what substantially supportive means.
- Chris Hedges was detained by the military for leaving the press pool in Iraq.
- Now the NDAA allows these detentions “until the end of hostilities.”
- It really is a heinous statute.
- We lost the stay but we got an expedited appeal.
- The briefing is complete and we’re waiting for an oral argument date.
- The government has two moves, they say whoever brings the suit has no standing, then if it gets past that point they say, sorry the state’s secrets doesn’t allow you to have discovery here.
- Attorney General Holder stated that Americans are entitled to due process but that doesn’t necessarily means judicial process.
- It takes the view that “during war time” that the judiciary has no role to play.
- The NDAA is the culmination of 10 years of anti-civil liberties measures.
Guest – Attorney Carl Mayer runs the Mayer Law Group LLC and is the author of several books including “Shakedown” and “Public Domain, Private Dominion.” Carl Mayer is a former law professor and served as special counsel to the New York State Attorney General.
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