Civil Liberties, Guantanamo, Military Tribunal, Surveillance, Truth to Power, Uncategorized
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Update:
- Co-hosts Michael Ratner and Dalia Hashad discuss the key elements of the David Hicks military tribunal. They describe how two of the three lawyers representing were dismissed by the judge leaving attorney Major Michael Mori as counsel. David Hicks has become the first Guantanamo prisoner to plead guilty under the Military Commissions Act passed last year.
- Hosts describe the plea deal that was made with military prosecutors and Hick’s role training with the Taliban under the Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence ISI.
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An International Witchhunt: Police Spy on Protestors Before RNC Convention in New York City
A national and international effort was launched by police and intelligence to spy on protesters before the Republican National Convention in 2004. According to the New York Times, teams of undercover officers were sent across the US, Canada and Europe to spy on groups and individuals planning to take part in the protests in New York. Specially trained officers part of the “RNC Intelligence Squad,” posed as activists as they targeted anti-war organizations, environmentalists and artists.
Guest – Donna Lieberman, Executive Director of the NYCLU
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Disorder in the Court: Great Fractured Moments in Courtroom History
Co-host Michael Ratner, reads from Disorder in the Court: Great Fractured Moments in Courtroom History These are what people actually said in court, word for word, taken down and now published by court reporters who had to keep a straight face while these exchanges took place. Get ready to laugh.
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2006 Study Shows Half A Million People Stopped on New York City Streets
Last year New York City police stopped more than 500 thousand people on city streets. 2006 statistics show a near doubling in the average number of arrests as a result.
Of those stopped last year a disproportionate 55 percent were black and 30 percent were Hispanic. As mentioned here at length on previous Law and Disorder programs, the NYPD continues to build a database on each street stop. A database with information most likely shared with intelligence agencies around the world.
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- Click here to read the NYCLU’s letter and the NYPD order (PDF).
- Click here to read the NYCLU’s palm card “What to Do If You’re Stopped by the Police”.
Guest – New York civil liberties Executive Director Donna Lieberman.
Guest – Deborah Small, Executive Director of Break the Chains, an organization that seeks to build a national movement within communities of color against punitive drug policies.
Civil Liberties, Extraordinary Rendition, Guantanamo, Iraq War, Surveillance, Torture, Truth to Power
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Combatant Status Review Tribunals
Co-hosts Michael Ratner and Dalia Hashad discuss the legal efficacy of these tribunals for Guantanamo Bay detainees. From the Amnesty International USA site – “In the “war on terror”, detainees in US custody have been treated as potential sources of information first and criminal suspects a distant second. However, this secondary aspect is now coming into focus. Plucked from years of secret or virtually incommunicado detention, a few people held in the US Naval Base at Guant?namo Bay in Cuba are facing trial by military commission.”
Combatant Status Review Tribunals Proceedings:
- Detainees do not receive the presumption of innocence.
- Detainees do not get access to legal advice.
- Detainees are not entitled to access to the evidence against them, or in their favor.
- Hear-say evidence is allowed to be used against the detainees.
- The use of evidence acquired through coercive interrogation is allowed, there is no protection against self-incrimination.
- Evidence acquired through the torture of other suspects was allowed.
Architect of Torture
Co-host Michael Ratner adds perspective to the real reasons US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales should resign immediately.
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Law and Disorder sit down with authors Giuliana Sgrena and Anthony Arnove.
It’s two years since U.S. forces gunned down Italian intelligence agent Nicola Calipari in Iraq, and recently Washington is refuses to hand over the U.S. soldier charged in the case to be tried in Italy. Calipari the number two man in the Italian military intelligence was killed while escorting Italian reporter Giuliana Sgrena after securing her release from a month-long abduction in Iraq.
Giuliana Sgrena has written about her experience in, “Friendly Fire: The Remarkable Story of a Journalist Kidnapped in Iraq.” As a veteran foreign correspondent for the Italian newspaper Il Manifesto she has reported frequently from Afghanistan and Iraq. Sgrena joins Michael Ratner and Michael Smith today on Law and Disorder. We are also joined by editor and author Anthony Arnove who recently wrote the new book Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal.
Left Forum 2007 – CCR Executive Director Vince Warren
We play part of a speech by the Center for Constitutional Rights Executive Director Vince Warren. He spoke at the Left Forum earlier this month on the state of current state civil liberties in this country. The panel, moderated by our own Michael Steven Smith examined the long term implications of eroding civil liberties and the laws that have allowed a surveillance police state. We will hear more speakers from this years Left Forum in the weeks to come.
Civil Liberties, Extraordinary Rendition, Guantanamo, Supreme Court, Surveillance, Truth to Power
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FBI Lies And Patriot Act Abuse
Angry lawmakers are considering setting limits on the Patriot Act after the inspector general of the Justice Department had found the FBI abusing an administrative subpoena called “national security letters.” The FBI used this subpoena to gather phone, bank and credit information on thousands of citizens without court oversight. They also made quote unusual contracts with 3 major phone companies to provide records without any legal process.
Guest – Lisa Graves, Deputy Director of the Center for National Security Studies.
“The Chief Judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) informed Congress that the court has no objection to sharing with the Senate Judiciary Committee (SJC) the orders authorizing wiretapping of people in the US who have been subject to warrantless wiretapping by the administration. Attorney General Gonzales initially refused to share that information with the Committee, stating during a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee that he needed to consult with his “principal,” President Bush. On January 31, 2007, the Attorney General announced that certain documents held by the FISC, such ? including investigators’ applications for permission to spy and court orders ? would be given to “some” lawmakers, such as Senator Patrick Leahy and Senator Arlen Specter, but not all Senators of the SJC or other concerned Members.” – – – Center for National Security Studies.
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Australian Guantanamo Bay Detainee David Hicks Update
David Hicks was the Center for Constitutional Rights’ first client and in the first group of detainees taken to Guant?namo. He is Australian and is now the first person charged before the reconstituted Military Commissions Act. He was charged earlier but those commissions were held illegal by the Supreme Court in the Hamdan case. He has been charged with one count of material aid to terrorism, which is not usually viewed as a war crime. To the extent any crimes are triable by military commissions they must be war crimes. Unlike the UK, the Australia government has willingly gone along with this trial and has not insisted on Hicks’ return.
Guest – Josh Dratel, civilian attorney for David Hicks.
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ACLU Sues Department of Homeland Security For Detaining Children in Prison-Like Conditions.
The Department of Homeland Security and the T. Don Hutto Immigration Detention Facility is facing a federal lawsuit filed by the The American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of children confined at the facility in Tyler, Texas. The ACLU claims adults and children at the center, which used to be a prison, live in jail-like conditions and that the children are not given adequate schooling or medical care.
Read more
Guest – Lisa Graybill, legal director for the ACLU of Texas.
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Guantanamo Bay Lawyers Attacked and Misquoted.
Newspapers run op eds that heavily criticized lawyers representing Guantanamo detainees. Criticism such as they’re quote “keeping the US military from doing its job and repatriating detainees back into action fighting the United States.
Guest – Scott Horton, Chair of International Law Committee at the New York City Bar Association and adjunct Professor of Law at Columbia University
Civil Liberties, Extraordinary Rendition, Guantanamo, Torture, Truth to Power
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Today on Law and Disorder we run excerpts from an event sponsored by the Center for Constitutional Rights. From Pinochet to Rumsfeld: Accountability of US officials for torture. Speakers include Janis Karpinski, former US Army Brigadier General at Abu Ghraib prison, Iraq. She was the commander of three large US- and British-led prisons in Iraq in 2003, eight battalions, and 3400 Army reservists. In October 2005 she published an account of her experiences, One Woman’s Army, in which she claims that the abuses were perpetrated by contract employees trained in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay and sent under orders from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and that her demotion was political retribution.
Also on this program, Law and Disorder co-host Michael Ratner president of the Center for Constitutional Rights and Scott Horton, chair of the International Law Committee, New York Bar Association. We hear about the long term effects of torture from another perspective. Kate Porterfield, Ph.D. who works with torture survivors describes the health consequences of torture.
In the wake of CCR’s groundbreaking filing of war crimes charges against Donald Rumsfeld, this Center for Constitutional Rights event aimed to examine different strategies for holding international officials accountable for their actions. We’ll hear an exploration of the devastating effects of torture techniques employed by the U.S. Government. Certainly not for the faint of heart but important in beginning to understand how torture used in the name of the people in the United States must end immediately.
Civil Liberties, Extraordinary Rendition, Guantanamo, Supreme Court, Torture, Truth to Power
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Guantanamo – Five Years
January 11th marks five years of detainment for the more than 400 people at Guantanamo. For the full hour, Law and Disorder co-host and President of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Michael Ratner takes listeners through the history and chronology of the US involvement at the Guantanamo Bay detainment camp. Michael Ratner begins with the US acquiring the 4500 square mile base near a harbor at the southeastern end of Cuba.
Guantanamo – A Law Free Zone – Haitian Camps – Read more
In the last quarter of the 20th century, the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base was used to house Cuban and Haitian refugees. In the early 1990s, it held refugees who fled Haiti after military forces overthrew democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. These refugees were held in a detainment area called Camp Bulkeley until United States District Court
Storming The Court – We hear a clip from an interview with attorney and author Brandt Goldstein. Before Guantanamo Bay, Cuba became notorious for its human rights violations against Muslims, it was the holding center for thousands of HIV-positive Haitian refugees. More than ten years ago a team of Yale law students and activists took up this cause. They worked victoriously to stop the US government from detaining these refugees indefinitely at Guant?namo, without charges or access to counsel.
David Hicks – Australian prisoner held at Guant?namo Bay, Cuba. He’s been detained for more than five years as an “unlawful combatant” and thus, it was claimed, outside the normal protections of U.S. law and those provisions of the Geneva Conventions which are specific to soldiers of an official military organization. His trial before a U.S. military commission was due to begin in November 2005. However, proceedings were cancelled following the Supreme Court Hamdan v. Rumsfeld ruling invalidating the constitutionality of the commission process.
Bounty Hunter – U.S. PSYOPS distributed flyers and leaflets
How did prisoners get to Guantanamo?
Many Guantanamo prisoners were rounded up by bounty hunters and sold to the U.S. It’s unknown how many were victims of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. In the days during and following the Afghan invasion, the U.S. military blanketed parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan with flyers encouraging people to turn in suspects, in return for large sums of money. “Get wealth and power beyond your dreams,” read one flyer. “You can receive millions of dollars helping the anti-Taliban forces catch al-Qaeda and Taliban murderers.”
See more PSYOPS leaflets/flyers here
How other prisoners arrived at GTMO
Uiger Muslims Transferred From Guantanamo To Albania – Recently, the Uiger Muslims were quietly sent to Albania to a larger compound. It was explained to Law and Disorder that in Albania, the Uigers can move about freely within the compound and cannot leave. We play a clip from the January 2006 interview with attorney Sabin Willet.
We play a clip from a Law and Disorder interview with Tausif Paracha. His Uncle, Saifullah Paracha, 58 was “kidnapped” and is detained in Guantanamo and Tausif’s cousin Uzair Paracha, 24 is detained in one of New York’s worst prisons. You can read more about this case at www.freeparachas.org
Mark P. Denbeaux – Seton Hall Report – One of most comprehensive reports of who is at Guantanamo.
Describe Guantanamo Bay, Cuba
Gita Guitierezz – attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights defending Guantanamo Bay detainees gives listeners a first hand description of the camp.
Torture
Co-host Michael Ratner describes his experience of first learning that the US military was involved with torturing detainees. Torture, including waterboarding and sleep deprivation.
Tipton Three is the name given to three young men from Tipton, United Kingdom, who were held in extrajudicial detention for 2 years in Guant?namo Bay detainment camps
Evidence of Torture – Gita Guitierezz – in an interview last November we listen to a clip where Gita describes how her client Mohamed Mani Ahmad al-Kahtani. was sleep deprived and tortured.
Torture and Waterboarding; ancient practice – Henri Alleg, Author of The Question – We listen to a clip of Henri Alleg describing waterboarding. He was revived then brought to the brink of death, then revived again. An similar brutality and sadism often described by prisoners in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Hosts Michael Ratner and Michael Steven Smith interview Henri Alleg a French journalist living in Paris. He supported Algerian independence during the French Algerian War (1954-1962). He was arrested by French paratroppers during the Battle of Algiers in June 1957 and interrogated.
Fighting back in the Courts, Congress and in the Streets
The effort to get Guantanamo closed down and to get prisoners the rights they’re entitled under International Law and the Constitution. It’s a difficult fight explains co-host Michael Ratner but the opposition is growing.
We hear clips from a demonstration against the Guantanamo Prison Camp in Herald Square and also from Amnesty International’s anti-torture rally in Portland, Oregon, recorded from interviews by co-host Dalia Hashad. Amnesty International staff members and activists who gathered to speak out, listen and share their stories.
Take Action Now – Fight Back – Thursday January 11, 2007
Witness Against Torture – Fight Back – January 11, 2007 Thursday: The 5 year anniversary of the first prisoners being brought to Guant?namo. March, Press Conference and Nonviolent Direct Action in Washington, DC. Endorsed by Center for Constitutional Rights, CodePink, Network of Spiritual Progressives, Pax Christi USA, School of Americas Watch, United for Peace and Justice and other groups such as FIDH and Reprieve.
Civil Liberties, Guantanamo, Supreme Court, Truth to Power
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Happy New Year from Law and Disorder – Co-host Michael Ratner delivers update on the state of the new US Congress, the Iraq War and Guantanamo.
Venezuelan Election Observers
Ming Alterman, Ellen Meyers and Supreme Court Justice Gustin Reichbach have returned from Venezuela after observing December 3rd elections where voting machines actually print out a paper receipt. The last report from CNE, National Electoral Council from Venezuela at gave Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez Frias the victory with 61.35% of the total counted so far, 75.3%. His counterpart, Manuel Rosales have received 38.39%.Shortly after the partial results were given, Hugo Ch?vez showed up in the Balc?n del Pueblo (The People’s Balcony) in the presidential palace to celebrate his victory and address his followers.
Ming Alterman – Latin American Scholar
Supreme Court Justice Gustin Reichbach – Evaluated whether elections were free and fair; that is whether the election produced an outcome expressing the will of the Venezuelan people.
Ellen Meyers is a founder and senior vice president of Teachers Network, a non-profit organization–by teachers, for teachers–with a 25-year track record of success, dedicated to improving student learning in public schools nationally and internationally. Ellen has written numerous articles that have appeared in major media outlets and has presented at conferences across the country. She has been a newspaper columnist, film producer, political campaign manager, election monitor, community board member, and foundation and federal grants advisor. She has a weekly radio show on WHCR, Harlem Community Radio.
Spoken Word Performance – Katrina
Professor Louie and Fast Eddie deliver a powerful spoken word performance on the devastation of Katrina. These Brooklyn natives poets/musicians weave stream of consciousness style prose with conga. They performed live in the studio at WBAI. To order CDs by Professor Louie and Fast Eddie – call Free Brooklyn Now at 718-768-8728
Uneven Distribution of Wealth?
Michael Smith talks with Professor Rick Wolff, formerly the head of the Economics Department at the University of Massachusetts and currently the NASDAQ professor of Economics at the New School University and Catherine Albisa Executive Director of the National Economics and Social Rights Initiative – NESRI. Albisa is also an attorney specializing in the implementation of human rights standards in the United States. She is the former director of the Human Rights in the US program at the Center for Economic and Social Right and was the Associate Director of the Human Rights Institute at Columbia Law School.
Both guests discuss their reactions to and the implications of the recent 16.2 billion dollar bonus that the investment banking house of Goldman Sachs announced just before Christmas.
More than $50 million went to the Goldman Sachs Chairman alone. Pfizer, the drug company, paid a “severance package” of $200 million to its just-resigned chief executive. Many other large corporations acted similarly. All this is legal, given the laws and rules that corporations win from their political “allies.” Indeed, the latest ruling by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) allows corporations to obscure what they pay top executives (the New York Times, December 27, 2006, page C1, called it “a victory for corporations”).
Read Story Here by Professor Rick Wolff. More stories – here and here.
