Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, FBI Intrusion, Green Scare, Human Rights, Truth to Power
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Updates:
- Judge Shira Scheindlin of Federal District Court in Manhattan To Rule In Stop and Frisk Case
- NYPD Subpoena Phone Records of Stolen Phones – Amassing Database
- Julian Assange Book – Cypherpunks
- Bradley Manning Hearing Update
- Husband of Jeremy Hammond’s Judge Victim Of Stratfor Email Hack
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Who Bombed Judi Bari?
Who Bombed Judi Bari? is a recently released documentary film about the car bombing of labor and environmental organizer Judi Bari. Judi Bari was a natural leader that rallied thousands of activists to camp out and protest the clearcutting of red wood forests during the timber wars in 1990’s. Though Judi was crippled and in chronic pain from the car bomb, she went on to sue the authorities for civil rights violations winning a settlement but eventually died from cancer seven years after the bombing.
Darryl Cherney:
- Judi Bari was a union organizer and an Earth First organizer, she was the mother of two children, a professional carpenter, here in the Redwood region of California.
- That in a way is what made her so dangerous to the status quo because that what we know so well, a world divided and conquered by those that would rather us fight each other than those at the top.
- Judi Bari was a unifier, she was somebody who brought loggers, timber workers, mill workers, truck drivers together with environmentalists to find our common goals, and to focus attention on the corporate elites who are manipulating all of us.
- The issues are the same today as they’ve been for the last 6000 years of recorded history.
- Human beings have been logging the forests since the cedars of Lebanon. Judi was taking on the issue of mowing down ancient Redwood trees that stand 350 feet tall, 15 feet wide, 2000 years in age.
- A single Redwood can hold 4000 gallons of water. They’re worth 50 thousand dollars a piece.
- Redwood Summer did emulate Freedom Summers sometimes called Mississippi Summers in the deep South.
- The point was the same as long as things happened in the deep South without anybody looking, they could continue, Jim Crow would continue.
- The mowing down of our eco-system which we believe is a civil rights movement as much as a environmental movement because our ability to live on this planet depends on our ecosystem staying intact.
- We invited college kids as well as anyone who wanted to participate and that’s what Redwood Summer was.
- We received about 3 dozen death threats mostly by letter, by phone and some in person over a short period of time, about a month and a half, right after we announced Redwood Summer.
- We decided to get out of rural areas, so we were touring universities, as we were leaving Oakland, where Judi had spent the night heading toward Santa Cruz. Judi ordered me into her car, we drove for a couple of minutes a bomb exploded under her seat.
- Fracturing her pelvis, causing intestinal damage, pulverizing her lower vertebrae.
- Instantly within 5 minutes the FBI and Oakland Police showed up.
- They knew the bomb was a booby trap, designed to only go off in a moving car.
- They looked at the death threats and immediately dismissed them as irrelevant.
- Violence is a dominant gene. You can have a thousand peaceful people but one violent person can ruin for everybody else.
- The FBI and the Oakland Police were eventually found liable for violating the First Amendment of the US Constitution. It wasn’t that they were mistaken, they knew we were innocent.
- They found the motion trigger that said the bomb could only go off in a moving vehicle.
- Right to her death, the FBI and the Oakland never asked Judi one question.
- Judi Bari was a full-time working carpenter. She supervised a construction crew.
- WhoBombedJudiBari.com
Guest – Darryl Cherney, born in New York City where he was a child actor. For 20 years he has been an activist, topical singer -songwriter and organizer in Humboldt County California. He helped spearhead the successful campaign to protect the redwoods, including Headwaters Forests, now a national preserve. As creator and president of Environmentally Sound Promotions, the non-profit organization, he has produced five albums of his original songs dedicated to environmental protection. He also produced Judi Bari?s spoken word CD, Who Bombed Judi Bari?, and the benefit compilation, If a Tree Falls.
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Lincoln 2012: Analysis
As many listeners may know the recent film titled Lincoln hit theaters this fall. The film recounts how President Abraham Lincoln’s efforts to pass an amendment to the United States Constitution that would formally abolish slavery in the country. In January of 1865, Lincoln was expecting the Civil War to end within a month but concerned that his 1863 Emancipation Proclamation may be discarded by the courts once the war ends and the 13th Amendment defeated by the returning slave states. In the film, we see Abraham Lincoln working to pass the amendment by the end of January.
Professor Bruce Levine:
- Its a civil war movie that unlike so many others properly places slavery and the Republican Party’s determination to see slavery die at the center of the story.
- I think the movie is deficient in a number of ways. The prior course of the war. The growth of anti-slavery sentiment in the Union.
- It wasn’t Lincoln who came up with the idea of the 13th Amendment.
- Compromise and political manipulation was not at the heart of the success of Lincoln’s presidency.
- What we should be recognizing as Lincoln’s greatness is not is ability to bend, but his refusal to do that at most of the important points on which he was challenged.
- By the end of the civil war closer to 200 thousand black men served either as Union soldiers or sailors.
- This is somebody who grew during his presidency. He grew intellectually, and he grew politically and morally.
- Fall of the House of Dixie attempts to tell the story of the American Civil War as a social and political revolution.
- As slavery began to break down during the course of the US Civil War.
Guest – Professor Bruce Levine, is the James G. Randall Professor of History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. A noted scholar of the Civil War, he is author of Half Slave and Half Free: The Roots of Civil War (2nd ed., 2005), Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves during the Civil War (2005), and The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Destruction of Slavery and the Old South during the Civil War (2013). Levine will deliver a lecture on recent trends in Civil War scholarship.
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Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, FBI Intrusion, Green Scare, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Surveillance, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Occupy Wall Street: Attorney Margaret Ratner-Kunstler
There is a North America-wide strategy to take away the right to mass protest. We’ve talked about the book Hell No: Your Right To Dissent in 21 Century America, but today we have both authors of this book in the studio, attorney Magaret Ratner Kunstler and our own co-host Michael Ratner.
In Hell No, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the country’s leading public interest law organization, offers a timely report on government attacks on dissent and protest in the United States, along with a readable and essential guide for activists, teachers, grandmothers, and anyone else who wants to oppose government policies and actions. Hell No explores the current situation of attacks upon and criminalization of dissent and protest, from the surveillance of activists to the disruption of demonstrations, from the labeling of protestors as “terrorists,” to the jailing of those the government claims are giving “material support” to its perceived enemies. Offering detailed, hands-on advice on everything from “Sneak and Peak” searches to “Can the Government Monitor My Text Messages?” and what to do “If an Agent Knocks,” Hell No lays out several key responses that every person should know in order to protect themselves from government surveillance and interference with their rights.
Attorney Margaret Ratner-Kunslter:
- This is a time that we don’t know the return dates are because they weren’t put throught the system, they were given desk appearance tickets or summons, people arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge and elsewhere.
- Politically what do you make of the fact that they let these people stay in the park? Perhaps Michael they had an opportunity to do something about it if they did something quickly.
- In Boston, they closed it down much more quickly. Each Lawyers Guild office has a hotline.
- They (the NYPD) actually led people down to the bridge walkway. There’s a law in New York that says you can’t block roadways, but you can march on sidewalks.
- They led people down to the roadway, then announced with a bull horn that not everybody could hear of the more than 800 people on the bridge – – you’re now doing something illegally and we’re going to disperse immediately or we’re going to arrest you. Most people were chanting, nobody could hear that announcement.
- Why do this? There was no place to put these 800 people. To get their names, to get their pedigree information, to do intelligence work.
- Early on with the RNC arrests, they had a sheet of paper asking what political affiliations they had. We stopped that quickly. The police department in New York City has a tremendous intelligence division.
- Some people we have no idea why they were arrested.
- Yesterday morning a young woman was chalking on the sidewalk, “good morning NYPD.” Not only was she arrested, but the people photographing her arrest, were arrested.
- Much of the planning on how to stop demonstrators, happened after Seattle 1999. At that point there was this training program that began with all of these local police forces across the country and the FBI. It wasn’t til 9/11 that they were fully funded.
- When Michael Ratner and I wrote this, we were totally depressed because we thought that demonstrations were over. There were so many ways of preventing demonstrations and people were penned.
- You can film the police in NYC. The law may be on your side, but the police don’t follow the law.
- If you’re recording audio, and only one party knows you’re recording, that’s ok in New York.
- The cop doesn’t have to give you his name, or badge number. If you ask a cop his badge number, he’ll give you the wrong number.
- I’d like to last through winter, I’m worried about these children. The demand for justice and equality is the demand basically all over the world.
- How can we say this is too abstract for us, isn’t this what we all want?
Guest – Magaret Ratner-Kunstler, an attorney in private practice. As education director at the Center for Constitutional Rights, she originated the Movement Support Network and authored “If an Agent Knocks.” Margaret is the President of the William Moses Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice, a foundation established in 1995 in the memory of her late husband to combat racism in the criminal justice system.
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Afghanistan War, CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, FBI Intrusion, Green Scare, Guantanamo, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power
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Medical Professionals Complicit In US Torture Policy
As many listeners know, health professionals were front and center and complicit in the US policy of torture. The torturers relied heavily on medical opinion. Medical professionals provided sanitizing and rationalization for the infamous torture memos. During water boarding procedures, a doctor would be present. Psychologists were directly involved in the supervision, design and execution of torture at US military and intelligence facilities. This is a violation of state laws and professional ethics. These “health professionals” that were involved with torture still hold their professional licenses to practice. Meanwhile a legal battle continues against the Louisiana Psychology Board for refusing to investigate professional misconduct allegations against Dr. Larry James. He’s a retired US Army Colonel and high ranking adviser on interrogations for the US military in Guantanamo Bay.
We talk more about this case and the breach of ethics in the medical profession since 9/11 with Dr. Stephen Soldz, former president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility. Stephen is a psychologist, psychoanalyst and public health researcher in Boston, he is also co-author of PHR’s report in Experiments in Torture.
Stephen Soldz :
- Psychologists played a central role, there were 2 professions, one was lawyers, the other less well known was psychologists. It turns out that it was psychologists that designed and implemented, the enhanced interrogation torture program, who monitored it, who trained others in it and who researched it and provided all the legal protection.
- It’s believed that it was psychologist James Mitchell who was present there, who was in charge.
- There’s the CIA program that was for so called high value detainees in CIA custody in various secret prisons called black sites. This is where the psychologists were central, they designed the whole thing.
- There was a black site at Guantanamo where a few people were held at various points.
- Guantanamo was technically under the military control, not CIA control.
- The CIA: like I said the psychologists designed this stuff, it was quite brutal. Forcing people to stand, shackling them up, with their arms out, naked in cold air. For 7 days at a time.
- Being forced to stand day after day is extraordinarily painful. Think about having to do that without using the toilet, with liquid food being forced into you. They at times used small boxes where a person could neither stand or sit.
- The boxes were banged on at times, they would throw people against walls, with special devices around their neck supposedly to protect them from permanent damage. There were various slaps that were authorized.
- The American Psychology Association has an ethics code and its binding on all members. Not all psychologists are members, but all the states base their own ethics code for licensed psychologists upon that of the APA, some mandate it exactly some adopt their own.
- The CIA and military insist that the psychologists that do this stuff be licensed by the state.
- Many of them are APA, so the APA ethics are intimately involved here.
- The APA equivocated and formed a task force. They said that psychologists had an obligation to keep interrogations, safe legal and effective. This language it turns out was taken from the Bush torture memos at the Justice Department. The task force was dominated by the military.
- They claim to be resolutely against torture, they make statement after statement. Psychologists shouldn’t be safety officers.
- In all 3 states, lawyers have joined my colleagues to force the APA board to do their job. The board doesn’t have the leeway to dismiss claims of torture without clearly investigating them.
- Larry James was a Biscuit 1 and later served at Abu Ghraib after the scandals there, he claims to have been the person who cleaned it up.
- He admits that he observed abuse by other people and didn’t report it to the commanders.
- He’s now out of the military and the Dean of the School of Psychology at Wright State University in Ohio.
- It’s rather sad, instead investigating what did or did not happen, they attack those who raise issues about Colonel James.
- Physicians For Human Rights / When Healers Harm
Guest – former President of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, Stephen Soldz is a psychologist, psychoanalyst, and public health researcher in Boston, and was a co-author of PHR’s report Experiments in Torture. He is the Director of the Center for Research, Evaluation, and Program Development at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. He was Adjunct Assistant Professor of Psychology (Psychiatry) at Harvard Medical School, and has taught at the University of Massachusetts Boston, Boston College, and Boston University.
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Guantanamo Bay and Offshore Prisons
The Obama Administration has allowed the Bush policy to continue allowing for the practice of torture, rendition and secret prisons to continue. We talk about the ongoing practice of torture, secret sites and Guantanamo Bay. There are 3 groups at Guantanamo, the first is 2 dozen that are genuinely Al Qaeda. The second group shouldn’t have been there in first place, around 200 of them will be sent home. The third group are refugees who are from countries with horrible human rights records.
Attorney Vince Warren:
- What role do the people play in order to stop this? (wars) We are at war to make war is what the public has bought into. By using the war paradigm, the president seized power that belonged to Congress, seized power that belonged to the Courts and seized power that belonged to the people.
- You can’t be at war with the “concept” of terror.
- Prior to 9-11 when terrorism would happen. There was an investigation, an indictment, prosecution and if there was a case, they were to be convicted.
- As of 2011, more people in Guantanamo have died than have been referred for criminal charges.
- We shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that this was a genuine reaction to a tragic event.
- This aggressive war(s) that are based on lies, without any legitimate security threat, is a crime.
- The other piece since 9-11 is the interesting double speak. Torture and aggressive war become justifications since 9-11.
- The Bush Justice Department said that the law simply does not just apply to the President, when he’s acting as Commander In Chief. It doesn’t matter if Congress passed a law that we expect the President to be bound, the Justice Department said he could ignore it if it didn’t fit in to what he wanted to do.
- That led to the Bush lawyers counseling him that he could ignore a law that said torture was illegal or could ignore a law that says the government can’t wiretap without a warrant.
- President Obama talked very big about ending torture and about ending these policies.
- What is happening now in the United States is that local police forces, immigration forces, private contractors are colluding and conspiring to infiltrate political movements and largely peaceful political movements.
- – in order to “uproot the terrorist.”
- Course there are no terrorists there, what there are are people who have a very vibrant and credible claim.
- Myself and a number of other human rights people went to a meeting with President Obama in May 2009. I was shocked at how President Obama completely understood the legal issues we were raising.
- The very next day he essentially came out with a preventive detention scheme. An indefinite detention scheme in Guantanamo.
- What really troubled me is that he knows. He knows precisely what the right thing to do is.
- This thing is not going to fix itself. CCR Facebook – Twitter @theCCR
Guest – Attorney Vince Warren, Executive Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a national legal and educational organization dedicated to advancing and defending the rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Vince oversees CCR’s groundbreaking litigation and advocacy work which includes using international and domestic law to hold corporations and government officials accountable for human rights abuses; challenging racial, gender and LGBT injustice; and combating the illegal expansion of U.S. presidential power and policies such as illegal detention at Guantanamo, rendition and torture.
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Afghanistan War, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, FBI Intrusion, Green Scare, Guantanamo, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Iraq Veterans, Iraq War, Political Prisoner, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power, War Resister
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The State of Perpetual War
Since September 11, 2001 the US global war on terror has reached beyond Afghanistan and Iraq. The US constructed the largest embassy ever in Baghdad to control the resources of Iraq. Meanwhile strikes against Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, led an air war against Libya without any Congressional authorization continue as pointed out by author Anthony Arnove. In his article titled The 10th Anniversary of 9/11 Arnove describes US foreign policy of preventive war and how the US continues to use drone strikes against Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Now other countries are adopting the preventive war idea to fight (quote) terrorism. Today, the Obama Adminstration has gone beyond the Bush policies as trillions are spent on perpetual war while schools, health care and social needs crumble.
Anthony Arnove:
- 911 was seized upon by the Bush Administration as an opportunity. Condoleezza Rice specifically used the word opportunity to describe the geo-political shifts that she saw occurring in the wake of 9-11.
- We’ve seen the invasion of Iraq, the invasion of Afghanistan, covert operations and Arab bombardment of dozens of countries. There’s an estimate now that this year the US will be operating in 120 countries in some capacity through use of commandos.
- You’ve seen increased troop levels in Afghanistan so that even with the current so called draw down of the troops in Afghanistan, even with the reductions that are currently being undertaken, we’re still going to be ahead of the number of troops that were in Afghanistan at the end of the Bush Administration.
- Withdrawal, the word no longer has any meaning. It actually means slight reduction of troops after they’ve been increased.
- There are 46 thousand active duty troops in Iraq. The claim is that those 46 thousand will leave at the end of 2011 after an agreement reached under pressure from social movements in Iraq.
- Then you look at the military installations that scatter the country, they’re not going to walk away from that easily.
- In Afghanistan, they’re literally talking about dates as far as 2024 in terms of troops on the ground involved in a number of capacities.
- I think Libya is truly an opportunistic action by the United States concerned its losing control in the middle east. You’ve had uprisings and revolutions that have toppled governments aligned with the United States.
- The US has been so contemptuous of the freedoms of people around the world. So contemptuous of democracy, so contemptuous of people fighting for self determination.
- So contemptuous of nationalist movements that would have put resources into the control of the people.
- The actions of the Bush Administration and now Obama have only made us more hated, and made the world more dangerous.
- They claim they’re making the world more safe, and protecting us. The reality is the opposite.
- At least Barack Obama will be more responsive to social movements, we’ll be able to pressure him. It is clear that is not the case, there has been a demobilizing of sections of the anti-war movement who define the political horizons as the debate between the Republicans and Democrats.
- The anti-war movement has been silenced.
- The people who most vociferously supported invading Iraq, claimed there would be weapons of mass destruction, all of those things we now know to be lies, those people are regularly asked to be commentators on Iraq and Afghanistan.
- Yet the people who got it right, saying this is what will happen if we invade, those people are never heard from.
- The gap between what the elite are doing and what they are saying, and what is in their interest and the interest of ordinary people has never been wider.
- On October 6, 2011, a number organizations have called for demonstrations in Washington DC and solidarity actions in other cities. On October 15 actions have been called for by the United National Anti-War Coalition. NationalPeaceConference.org
Guest – Editor and writer Anthony Arnove. He is best known for his books on Iraq and the Iraq War. Arnove is the author of the book Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal, published in hardcover by the New Press and in paperback by Haymarket Books. Arnove toured the country promoting the book in spring 2006 as part of the New Press’ “End the War Tour”.
Arnove is also the editor of Iraq Under Siege, published by South End Press, the co-editor with Howard Zinn of Voices of a People’s History of the United States, published by Seven Stories Press, and the editor of The Essential Noam Chomsky, published by the New Press. He writes frequently for left-wing publications; he is a featured author at ZNet, a columnist for Socialist Worker, and on the editorial board of the International Socialist Review.
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The Guantanamo Syndrome
Attorney Michael Ratner:
- Pinochet’s Operation Condor was to round up opponents all over the world to torture and imprison them. This is now an American Operation Condor.
- AUMF and Military Order #1 allow the administration to use drones around the world. This is the key piece of legislation. Out of the AUMF came military order # 1, November 13, 2001. The president can arrest anybody, they can be kept anywhere, American citizen or not.
- From there flows the Guantanamo Syndrome. Habeas Corpus, a person who’s the prisoner of the executive can go to court and say put the executive on the defensive. Why am I being held? You have to have a legal basis.
- After many years of litigation representing this incommunicado people at Guantanamo, we ended up representing their parents or relatives, because we couldn’t represent them, the Supreme Court finally said, it’s a Constitutional right to go to court to test your detention. They said that about the people in Guantanamo in particular, they didn’t say that about the people in Baghram or other places.
- Once we won that right, the Bush Administration and the Obama Administration went into court and completely opposed that right having any meaning. It is really an unrecognizable world from what we had ten years ago.
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Audio Collage
- Surveillance State: The 51st State
- Targeting Muslims Since 9-11
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Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, FBI Intrusion, Green Scare, Guantanamo, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Iraq War, Military Tribunal, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power
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Guantánamo Leaks Must Be Met By Release of Obama Task Force Assessments
The 759 Guantanamo files that were classified “secret” cover nearly every inmate since the camp opened in 2002. The documents obtained by the New York Times and the Guardian last month, reveal how children, the elderly and mentally ill were wrongfully held. The documents also reveal that many prisoners were sent to Guantanamo for nearly nothing or to be interrogated. What did these documents reveal?
Attorney Shane Kadidal:
- These stories started on Monday morning, because administration officials gave out a briefing saying that the nickname of Osama’s couriers was given out by one of the detainees.
- Assuming information taken from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
- We do know it took eight months from the time they identified this compound to the point they decided to strike at it. I think its clear, they relied on a whole slew of information from a variety of sources.
- We already know the true name of the courier, which is more important than a nickname came from agents on the ground and electronic surveillance.
- 172 detainees, 90 cleared from release, 2/3 of those from Yemen have been indefinitely suspended for repatriation because of the “underwear bomber.”
- The problem is so much of (media) attention is focused on the ones that will never be released.
- WikiLeaks – 2400 pages of documents almost all risk assessments of about 740 detainees who’ve been to Guantanamo
- They represent the Defense Departments best case for detaining someone.
- You have these long analysis of very shady facts, not detailing where allegations are coming from.
- If you look at the documents as a whole, it shows that most of the detainees were held on flimsy, unreliable information.
- The documents show that people were interrogated in GTMO about nothing to do with terrorist attacks in the United States. You had Samuel Hodge interrogated about the inner workings of Al-Jazzera
- Everyone ended up with the categorization of high or medium risk
- When you see a leak of this magnitude, the only corrective is to release more information and that’s what we’ve called for at CCR.
- The government quickly emailed us – They said consistent with the security clearances you signed on for, you have to treat this information as classified (leaked documents) even though its been scattered to the winds on every newspaper on Earth.
Guest – Attorney Shane Kadidal, senior managing attorney of the Guantánamo Global Justice Initiative at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City. He is a graduate of the Yale Law School and a former law clerk to Judge Kermit Lipez of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. In his eight years at the Center, he has worked on a number of significant cases in the wake of 9/11, including the Center’s challenges to the detention of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay (among them torture victim Mohammed al Qahtani and former CIA ghost detainee Majid Khan), which have twice reached the Supreme Court, and several cases arising out of the post-9/11 domestic immigration sweeps.
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Green Is The New Red: An Insiders Account of A Social Movement Under Siege
We welcome Will Potter award-winning independent journalist and now the leading authority on “eco-terrorism.” He’s the author of the new book ,Green Is the New Red: An Insider’s Account of a Social Movement Under Siege, and it reveals a complex environmental movement emerging amid police state pressure. As we’ve reported here on Law and Disorder, environmental activism have been labeled terrorism under certain interpretation of the Patriot Act, essentially criminalizing dissent and chilling free speech in this country at a critical time. Our guest was an FBI target for merely leafleting against animal testing, and he was threatened to be put on the domestic terrorist watch list if didn’t comply with FBI demands. We talk more about that, the environmentalist movements and his new book.
Will Potter:
- My background is in mainstream newspapers. As I was working as a reporter at the Chicago Tribune, about 9 months after 9/11. I was covering breaking news, blood and guts.
- I decided to go out leafleting on a campaign I became aware of against a controversial animal testing company.
- Couple weeks later the FBI knocks on my door telling me I need to become a government informant and help infiltrate animal rights and environmental groups and if I didn’t they’d put me on the domestic terrorist list.
- It scared the tar out of me. I wish I could say it didn’t.
- Afterward it really lit a fire under me to figure out what was going on.
- One of the reasons I started the website was because of this new law being considered called the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act.
- What I decided to do with the book is tell the personal stories of the people involved.
- I followed Daniel McGowan a few days before his sentence to how he ended up in this facility, his own journey as an activist. Daniel was convicted of serious crimes, two arsonists that didn’t harm anyone and he was labeled a terrorist.
- The book looks at the wide range of activity being labeled “eco-terrorism”
- The FBI has labeled the environmental and animal rights movement the number one domestic terrorism threat.
- These corporate campaigns were pushed for so long through the courts, politicians, and the press that over time they began to dovetail with government policy.
- The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act is so broad it can even wrap up non-violent civil disobedience as terrorism, only if its directed at what is called animal enterprises.
- The real power of this is fear.
- The activists who are really effective and pushing the boundary are the ones being labeled eco-terrorists.
- I recently wrote about 3 bills that are under consideration for the Huffington Post. What Is Big Ag Trying To Hide.
Guest – Will Potter, award-winning independent journalist based in Washington, D.C., who focuses on “eco-terrorism,” the animal rights and environmental movements, and civil liberties post-9/11. Will’s work has appeared in publications including the Chicago Tribune, the Huffington Post, and the Vermont Law Review, and he has testified before the U.S. Congress about his reporting. He is the author of Green Is The New Red: An insider’s account of a social movement under siege forthcoming from City Lights Books.
Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Crony Capitalism, Green Scare, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power
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Court Vindicates Prisoners in Right to Challenge Federal Experimental Isolation Units Restricting Communication
Last month, the Center for Constitutional Rights won the right for prisoners to challenge a violation of their constitutional rights. Prisoners in 2 experimental federal prison units called “Communications Management Units” or CMUs, will have their claims heard in court. About 70 percent of CMU prisoners are Muslim men. Judge Urbina agreed that the prisoners raised serious constitutional questions about CMUs. The Center for Constitutional Rights filed Aref v. Holder in the D.C. District Court on behalf of current and former prisoners of the units in Terre Haute, IN and Marion, IL; two other plaintiffs are the spouses of those prisoners.
As many listeners may know, these CMUs were secretly opened under the Bush administration in 2006 and 2007. They were designed to monitor and control the communications of certain prisoners and to isolate them from other prisoners and the outside world. The five plaintiffs in Aref were designated to the two CMUs despite having relatively or totally clean disciplinary histories, and none of the plaintiffs have received any communications-related disciplinary infractions in the last decade.
In addition to heavily restricted telephone and visitation access, CMU prisoners are categorically denied any physical contact with family members and are forbidden from hugging, touching or embracing their children or spouses during visits.
Attorney Alexis Agathocleous:
- We’re very troubled about policies and conditions at these units. A number of the restrictions imposed at the CMUs are severe. They are truly cutting people off from their loved ones, they’re community and the outside world
- Blanket ban on physical contact, unparalleled to any other single unit anywhere, including Supermax.
- We feel this needlessly impinges on their right to family integrity and their need to maintain these ties to the outside world.
- What we’re challenging is that there is no due process attached to designation to these (CMU) units.
- Without a disclosure of factual allegations that were used to designate them, without a demonstration of past abuse of communication devices, without a hearing, without an appeal. Once you’re there, no one is told how to earn their transfer to get out. Our clients have benign or in some cases perfectly clean histories.
- What is happening is that Muslim prisoners are being designated there, based on the discriminatory belief that as Muslims they inherently pose a great danger to institutional security, than do other prisoners.
- We’re very concerned also about a pattern of designation of political prisoners and specifically includes environmental and animal rights activists.
- We do believe these are acts of retaliation for protected First Amendment activity, such as speaking out on social justice issues.
- What we’ve asked for in the case is a thorough review of polices and practices in the CMUs.
- What’s next is we’re going into discovery, which is our opportunity to learn a lot more about the CMUs, about their inception, who was involved in designing them and why and about how designations are made.
- CMUs were opened quietly.
Guest – Alexis Agathocleous, staff Attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights and works on CCR’s Government Misconduct and Racial Justice docket. He is lead counsel in Aref v. Holder, challenging policies and conditions at the federal Bureau of Prisons’ Communications Management Units, and Doe v. Jindal, challenging a Louisiana law that requires individuals convicted of Crime Against Nature to register as sex offenders.
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Financial Regulators Failed: Crooks Go Unpunished
Last week, the Securities and Exchange Commission Friday charged Goldman Sachs & Co. and one of its executives with fraud in a risky offshore deal backed by subprime mortgages that cost investors more than $1 billion. The SEC also contends that Goldman allowed a client, Wall Street hedge fund Paulson & Co., to help select the securities to be sold. Paulson in turn bought insurance against the deal and when the securities sank, losing nearly all value, Paulson then made a $1 billion profit.
While these are not criminal charges, the recently released 650-page report of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Wall Street and the Financial Crisis (PDF) had exposed the deceptive and risky practices within major financial institutions, that deceived clients and the public. New Economics Perspective Blog
Professor William K. Black:
- Many people still call it the subprime crisis, it would be far better to call it, the liar’s loan crisis.
- Roughly half of all subprime loans by 2006.
- Somewhere between a quarter and 49 percent of new home loans, were in the form of liar’s loans.
- The incidence of fraud when there have been independent studies has ranged from 90 to 100 percent.
- A liar’s loan is when there is no underwriting, no verification of what’s put into the loan application.
- Overwhelmingly, it was the lenders who put the lie is liar’s loans.
- You can sell these loans in the secondary market if they appeared to have 2 characteristics that finance has told us you can’t have simultaneously.
- A premium interest rate and low risk. You could have the best of both worlds. The way to do that was to gimmick two ratios. Debt to income ratio and loan to value ratio.
- Inflating the value of homes, covered up by industry. An honest secure lender would never inflate value.
- It makes perfect sense for a fraudulent company to inflate the value of the house so they can sell the loan on the secondary market for a higher profit.
- Then Attorney General Cuomo, now governor found this as a common practice at Washington Mutual, the biggest bank failure. WAMU had a blacklist of appraisers, you were blacklisted if you refused to inflate value of property. None of these people are being prosecuted.
- In 2004, the FBI testified there was an epidemic of mortgage fraud and predicted that it would cause a financial crisis.
- The Savings and Loans debacle cost 150 billion, the current crisis is costing over 10 trillion.
- The Office of Thrift Supervision, Chainsaw James Gilleran
- Instead of being embarrassed that they were working hand in glove with the lobbyists, they were proud of this and put this in their annual report.
- Geithner and Cuomo urged there not be investigations much less prosecutions of the elite financial frauds because he thought the financial system was too fragile.
- The Justice Department ruined an FBI initiative to try and investigate the elite frauds.
- If you are powerful enough, if you have enough ties, after citizens united, and make enough political contributions, you will not be prosecuted.
- You can’t have crony-capitalism and democracy either.
- Big finance is only supposed to be a middle man, it’s supposed to help the real economy, by simply allocating most efficiently capital to the most productive uses.
- Like any middle man you want absolutely minimal profits going to the middle man.
- Under some measures, finance has 40 percent of the total profits of all American businesses.
- This is the worst group of people you can possibly imagine having power.
- We’ve turned too many of our schools into fraud factories, where we train people how to gimmick accounting.
- Citizen’s United is a fragile case, it doesn’t make much sense in terms of the law.
- What these people are, engines for destroying wealth
- They only get 10 billion, they destroy 10 trillion dollars in wealth. They cost 10 million Americans their jobs.
Guest – William K. Black, a professor of law at University of Missouri, Kansas City who has criticized the absence of any criminal referrals or national task force to effectively punish the elite fraudsters. Professor Black teaches White-Collar Crime, Public Finance, Antitrust, Law & Economics.
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