Freedom Of Speech, Gaza, Human Rights, Targeting Muslims, U.S. Militarism, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister
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Journalists Under Fire In Israel-Gaza Conflict
Today we turn to the status of press freedom in Israel. Since the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, and during the ensuing war in Gaza ever since, which is now moving into the West Bank, the pressure on journalists who are trying to cover what’s been happening there is increasing… and more dangerous.
According to the New York-based Committee To Protect Journalists, the Israel-Gaza war has claimed the lives of more journalists over the course of a year than in any other conflict the organization has documented. They estimate 128 journalists killed and 69 imprisoned.
The foreign and Israeli journalists who are bold enough to enter Gaza to report on what’s happening can only do so if they are accompanied by Israeli forces… and under strict surveillance. And the Israeli military has no qualms about shutting down news outlets like Al Jazeera – even its bureau in Ramallah, in the West Bank, which is an area supposedly under Palestinian control.
And just last week, Israeli Occupational Forces arrested a US citizen, journalist Jeremy Loffredo, charging him with endangering national security for his reporting on Iranian strikes. Reporters Without Borders condemns what it calls Israel’s climate of intimidation, and has called on the Israeli authorities to stop obstructing the work of journalists covering the war.
Guest – Kevin Gosztola is a journalist and editor of The Dissenter Newsletter, which regularly covers whistleblowing, press freedom, and government secrecy. He is the author of Guilty of Journalism: The Political Case Against Julian Assange and known for his work reporting on the extradition proceedings against Assange and the court-martial against Chelsea Manning. Both were prosecuted and convicted under the Espionage Act.
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Back From The Brink 2024
One issue from the Cold War topic stills looms large today: the growing threat of nuclear war. While many hoped the end of the Cold War would signal a retreat from the nuclear arms race, recent developments suggest otherwise. Tensions between amid U.S., Russia, and China have escalated, and key nuclear arms control treaties, such as the INF Treaty have eroded, with the future of the New START agreement uncertain.
The war in Ukraine, punctuated by Russia’s nuclear saber-rattling, has revived fears of potential nuclear escalation. At the same time, huge sums are being funneled into expanding and modernizing nuclear arsenals. In several decades, it is estimated that the total cost of modernizing and maintaining the U.S. nuclear arsenal amounts to approximately $1.7 trillion. Emerging technologies, like hypersonic missiles and Artificial Intelligence in military decision-making, further complicate the stability of nuclear deterrence, raising new questions about global security.
Guest – Dr. Ira Helfand is a member of the International Steering Group of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, or ICAN, which was awarded the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize. Dr. Helfand is also the immediate past president of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, or IPPNW, a founding partner of ICAN and itself the recipient of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize. He co-founded and served as past president of Physicians for Social Responsibility, the US affiliate of IPPNW. Dr. Helfand is also co-founder of the Back from the Brink campaign, the key vehicle for people in the U.S. who want to get involved in this issue.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Criminalizing Dissent, Extraordinary Rendition, Freedom Of Speech, Human Rights, Iraq War, Prosecution of the Bush Administration, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister, Whistleblowers
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September 11, 2001: Lessons Learned And Overlooked
It has been 23 years ago this week since the attacks on September 11, 2001 in New York City, the Pentagon, and Shanksville, PA, killing nearly 3,000 people and injuring more than 6,000. On that day, the United States had a choice: The George W Bush administration could have treated the attacks as a violation of US and international law, launched a criminal investigation, and brought the perpetrators to justice in accordance with the rule of law. Instead, President Bush waged endless wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, pushed through Congress the USA Patriot Act, opened the notorious detention center at Guantanamo Bay which remain to this day, rounded up Muslims and South Asians for indefinite detention, initiated a wave of civil liberties and human rights violations, and committed wholesale torture against detainees and others.
To assess the legacy of 9/11 and the lessons learned and the lessons overlooked, we’ve invited someone who was at the center of Bush’s War on Terror. John Kiriakou is a journalist, former CIA counterterrorism officer, former senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and former counterterrorism consultant for ABC News.
In 2007, Kiriakou blew the whistle on the CIA’s torture program, telling ABC News that the CIA tortured prisoners, that torture was official U.S. government policy, and that the policy had been approved by President George W. Bush. He knew what he was talking about. In 2002, he was responsible for the capture in Pakistan of Abu Zubaydah, then believed to be the third-ranking official in al-Qaeda.
He became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act of 1917 — a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his revelations.
In 2012, the Ralph Nader family honored Kiriakou with the Joe A. Callaway Award for Civic Courage, an award given to individuals who “advance truth and justice despite the personal risk it creates.” He won the PEN Center USA’s prestigious First Amendment Award in 2015, the first Blueprint International Whistleblowing Prize for Bravery and Integrity in the Public Interest in 2016, and also in 2016 the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence, given by retired CIA, FBI, and NSA officers.
Guest – John Kiriakou is the author of eight books, including The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA’s War on Terror; and The CIA Insider’s Guide to the Iran Crisis. I met John in 2017 and we collaborated on companion reviews or the Los Angeles Review of Books of the book with the euphemisitic title Enhanced Interrogation written by James E. Mitchell and Bill Harlow, the architects of the American torture system.
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COP 29 Held In Azerbaijan Dictatorship
This year the UN Climate Conference — known as COP29 — will be hosted by the petrol-dictatorship of Azerbaijan. As COP29 delegates prepare to attend talks in Baku, the international community has a chance to shine a spotlight on Azerbaijan’s abysmal human rights record, notably the blockade and ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh’s (Artsakh’s) Armenian population last year, and amid the government’s escalating domestic crackdown on freedom of speech, assembly and the press.
Ironically, Azerbaijan’s dictator Ilham Aliyev allocated $1 million to the UN Human Settlements Program, one day before a UN mission visited the Artsakh region who reported ‘no irregularities’ despite the territory being depopulated by Azerbaijan’s military invasion.
As one of the world’s top environmental and fossil fuel polluters, during its invasion of Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan used the outlawed, lethal and environmentally hazardous White Phosphorus as a chemical weapon on the native Armenian population and their highly forested environment. In that fatal siege, which liquidated all native Armenians, the Azeri government-sponsored blockaders posed as climate activists, while punishing true protesters of lethal pollution, in Azerbaijan, especially journalists and activists in advance of COP29.
Guest – Karnig Kerkonian, one of 23 legal advisors representing the Republic of Armenia at the ICJ (International Court of Justice) in 2021. Karnig’s team presented their case against Azerbaijan, calling on the Tribunal to take provisional measures “as a matter of extreme urgency” to “protect and preserve Armenia’s rights and the rights of Armenians from further harm.” Azerbaijan has ignored the ICJ’s November 2023 ruling to “take all necessary measures to prevent and punish acts of vandalism and desecration affecting Armenian cultural heritage, including but not limited to churches and other places of worship, monuments, landmarks, cemeteries and artifacts.” Attorney Kerkonian has also represented the Armenian community of Old Jerusalem in recent Israeli settler incursions upon the Armenian Quarter.
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Censorship, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Freedom Of Speech, Human Rights
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Book Banning, Censorship And Freedom Of Speech
Americans have a love-hate relationship with freedom of speech: They love to protect their own free speech and they hate to protect the free speech of those they disagree with. The First Amendment to the US Constitution was intended to protect freedom of speech and freedom of the press, yet throughout American history, governments at all levels have censored speech and tried to muzzle the press.
The anti-censorship group PEN America, in a survey of the 2022-23 school year, found that “freedom to read is under assault in the United States — particularly in public schools — curtailing students’ freedom to explore words, ideas, and books.” Authors whose books are targeted are most frequently female, people of color, and/or LGBTQ+ individuals.
According to the American Library Association, the number of titles targeted for censorship surged 65 percent in 2023 compared to 2022, reaching the highest levels it has ever documented. According to Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, “Each demand to ban a book is a demand to deny each person’s constitutionally protected right to choose and read books that raise important issues and lift up the voices of those who are often silenced.”
Guest – Robert Corn-Revere is Chief Counsel for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, known as “FIRE.” He has practiced First Amendment law for 40 years. From 1989 to 1994, Corn-Revere served as legal advisor and later chief counsel to the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.
Corn-Revere is a prominent writer, thinker, and advocate on free expression issues and is regularly listed as a leading First Amendment and media lawyer by various national publications. He co-authored the three-volume treatise, “Modern Communication Law.” In 2021, Cambridge University Press published his book, “The Mind of the Censor and the Eye of the Beholder: The First Amendment and the Censor’s Dilemma,” which explores how free expression became a part of America’s identity. I reviewed “The Mind of the Censor” for Los Angeles Review of Books and called it an “entertaining, enlightening, and timely book.”
Another form of censorship – Report: Record Number of Journalists Killed in Gaza by Stephen Rohde
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Disappeared: Criminalizing The Unhoused
Late this June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that cities can punish people for sleeping in public places. In a 6-3 decision along ideological lines, the Court overturned lower court rulings that held it is cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment to penalize people for sleeping outside if they had nowhere else to go. This ruling now allows localities the right to dismantle encampments of tents and cardboard coverings, even when there is no locally available housing or shelter.
Human Rights Watch has condemned this ruling and released a comprehensive report titled, You Have to Move! The Cruel and Ineffective Criminalization of Unhoused People in Los Angeles. The report documents the experiences of persons living on the streets, in vehicles, in temporary shelters, and in parks as they struggle to survive. In Los Angeles alone, tens-of-thousands of people are living in the streets, with death rates among the unhoused population reaching alarming levels. Governor Gavin Newsom, a supporter of the Court’s decision, has urged all local jurisdictions in California to destroy unhoused encampments. Several cities in the state have already begun doing so.
Western Regional Advocacy Project
The lack of housing is a national crisis, and this ruling raises the risk of increased use of such punitive tactics not only in Los Angeles but across the entire country.
Guest – John Raphling, Senior Researcher in the U.S. Program of Human Rights Watch and author of the report we’ve mentioned. Before joining Human Rights Watch, John spent years as a Deputy Public Defender in Los Angeles. He has represented political and community activists targeted for their activism, and homeless people prosecuted for crimes related to their status. John is also a member of the National Lawyers Guild.
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