Civil Liberties, Gaza, Human Rights, Surveillance, Torture, Truth to Power, Uncategorized, War Resister
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Historic International Support: Gaza Freedom March
Hundreds of activists from more than 40 countries staged demonstrations and sit-ins in Cairo to protest the Egyptian government’s refusal to allow them to cross the border into Gaza. Our own Michael Ratner and his family are among the 13 hundred solidarity marchers in the Gaza Freedom March. Among the marchers, 300 from the United States, 80 from New York State and 250 marchers from France. Last week organizers said an offer by Egyptian authorities to allow only 100 members of the group into Gaza was not enough. The Egyptian embassy has stalled the marchers and some were detained by police as crowds outside the embassies grew.
Abdeen Jabara / Dorothy Zellner:
- This has truly been one of the truly great, historic, international mobilizations of people in solidarity.
- Thousands upon thousands over the course of months have been working in over 42 countries around the globe.
- They go to Cairo, Egypt as a transit point to go to Gaza.
- This effort has heightened the consciousness about the siege on Gaza and exposed the United States, Israel and the Egyptian government to promote the division of the middle east for their own selfish reasons.
- There is the Gaza Freedom March, then there is Viva Palestina, which is a convoy of trucks loaded with humanitarian aid that actually made it into Gaza several months ago.
- Viva Palestina is led by George Galloway, former British parliament member, they are stuck in Jordan.
- The Egyptians initially said the trucks can go through but the people can’t. This is a massive international effort to prevent the Palestinians from getting the help that they need.
- The French have been lying down in the streets in front of the French Embassy for 3 days already.
- The Gaza Freedom March had been working with the Egyptians for months and it was only until the organizers got to Cairo that the Egyptians changed their decision.
- They said we didn’t come here to create any difficult for the government, we came here to stand in solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza.
- The Egyptian government then allowed 100 people to come through to Gaza, and to give them the names in 2 hours. A divide and rule approach, more conflict against the marchers.
- Congress voted to make Egypt the second largest aid recipient in the world : 1.7 Billion annually.
- Congress tried to take 100 million dollars away from Egypt because of the “smuggling tunnels to Gaza.” Egypt got the message. Egypt is not a democracy, Mubarak has been in power since 1981. It’s essentially a police state, they more people in their intelligence and police than they have in the Army.
- Egypt is planning to put in (with the help of the US Army Corp of Engineers) metal barriers, 50 feet into the ground to prevent tunneling to Gaza. Sixty percent of the Gaza is dependent upon that tunnel trade.
- This is the largest civilian population of the world that is completely trapped. If you ever go to Gaza, this could be the Riviera of the Mediterenean. This could be an unbelievable place if they would let them live like human beings.
- The problem is with the campaign finance system and the money that keeps them in office. This is where the problem is.
Guests – Abdeen Jabara and Dorothy Zellner give a broader scope on the Gaza Freedom March and the significance of demonstrations. Abdeen Jabara, civil rights lawyer and former president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. Dorothy Zellner, civil rights activist with Jews Say No, who has organized groups opposing Israeli violence in the occupied territories.
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Victor Toro: Chilean Socialist Faces US Deportation After 25 Years
Ex-political prisoner and human rights organizer Victor Toro joins us in the studio. Victor is a Bronx community organizer and he was a former leader in the resistance to Chile’s military dictatorship during the 1970s. In July of 2007 Victor was arrested in an immigration sweep by border officials aboard an Amtrak train in Rochester, New York. He was charged for being in the country illegally and has been out on bail since. Before coming to the United States in 1984, Toro helped found and lead the MIR, or Revolutionary Left Movement. The group opposed the US -sponsored coup against the military dictatorship led by Augusta Pinochet. The Department of Homeland Security and US Immigration are seeking to deport Toro, the prosecution has filed a 46 page court brief containing information on the MIR, claiming the group attacked government buildings. Meanwhile, a deportation hearing for Victor Toro was adjourned until Jan. 11, 2010. Victor joins us in the studio with his translator Gonzalo Venegas.
Victor Toro:
- I was arrested by Pinochet’s regime, April 20th, 1974. I was incarcerated for 3 years in different concentration camps in which I was tortured. I was expelled from Chile, and given a document stating never to return. I was expelled to Sweden, and then Cuba.
- When I was forced to leave Chile, I was officially declared dead by the Pinochet regime.
- I ended up in Mexico, where I was given transitional asylum, however my safety was at risk in Mexico, because agents of Pinochet were trying to murder me. I left Mexico in 1984, fleeing persecution of Pinochet’s agents.
- Well, in the South Bronx, I continued doing the work, an extension of the work I had done in Chile in my earlier years. Working in the community and with unions.
- I’ve worked with undocumented people and immigrants in the United States. In California in 2007, I was engaging in the advocacy work for immigrant rights. On a train back to New York, I was caught in an immigration raid, with bomb sniffing dogs.
- Initially, I was facing the same case as any undocumented worker in the US. Recently the case took a political turn where the government has presented documents against me.
- I went from undocumented worker to becoming a terrorist because of my affiliations and work that I did in Chile in the 1970s.
- I was the leader of the organization MIR, that was building a socialist left movement. MIR resisted Pinochet’s oppressive tactics. MIR was branded a terrorist organization by the US.
- If you look at Chile’s current president of the senate, and house of representatives, the Navy, it all lead by former members of Pinochet’s political party.
- Demand asylum for Victor Toro / Friday January 8, 2010 – SEIU 1199 / Martin Luther King Auditorium. 310 West 43rd Street / between 8th and 9th Avenues.
- Monday January 11, 2010 – Court date 9 AM – / Rally afterward at NOON at 26 Federal Plaza, NY.
Guest – Victor Toro, a Chilean activist in the Bronx who fought against the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. Toro is one of tens of thousands of immigrants who are racially profiled and targeted for deportation unjustly and unfairly.
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Civil Liberties, Gaza, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Fraunces Tavern: Magna Carta and the Foundations of Freedom
Hosts visit Fraunces Tavern Museum in lower Manhattan, where the Magna Carta document was on display from September 15 to December 15. It’s been nearly 800 years since it was originally drafted, and this copy has traveled from Lincoln Cathedral in England to New York City very few times. The first was for the 1939 World’s Fair.
Fraunces Tavern was built in 1719, it was a residence and then bought by tavern keeper Samuel Fraunces. It’s also known as the site where George Washington gave his farewell address to the officers of the Continental Army in 1783. When New York City was the nation’s capital, the tavern was rented to house offices of the Department of War, Treasury and Foreign Affairs.
Jennifer Patton/Tony Wellman:
- The tavern was originally built as a house by the Delancey family in 1719.
- There’s been a lot of changes to the buildings, restorations throughout the centuries, and it does make it the oldest surviving building in Manhattan. Light would fade the document, the lighting is no more than 50 lumens.
- This 1215 document was one of four reproduced. Hand copied in Latin, the language of education and communication of those days. This was the only way to spread news, there was no paper, this is on sheepskin.
- Taxation issues, women’s issues, trial by ones peers issues. Written in very tiny tiny script by a Monk.
- At the bottom you’ll see 3 holes for a ribbon where the King’s seal was attached.
- The idea started with a select few, and you can’t hold that back. The Magna Carta was lost for 600 years.
- Article 39 of the Magna Carta
- In the Razul v Bush case, they actually cited the Magna Carta. They said when King John at Runnymede in 1215 was forced to sign the Magna Carta
- We have since that time been against executive detention. I have a feeling that when King John affixed his seal on this document he had no intention of it existing for very long.
- Other charters, Providence plantations and Virginia charter, rights to property and not have it taken away for various reasons.
- Flushing Remonstrance. When New York was New Amsterdam, established by the Dutch in 1624. When Peter Stuyvesant came in 1657 all of New Amsterdam was is in disarray, lawlessness. Stuyvesant established hospitals, schools and also made it by law that you had to go to the Dutch church.
- These are ideas that came out of the Magna Carta, traveled to these shores and became deep within our own laws here. This is truly a revolutionary museum, the only museum dedicated to the American Revolution.
- Bill of Rights: Five of the amendments on the Bill of Rights come from the ideas of the Magna Carta.
- Estover – Charter of the Forest / The Royal Forest / Land that is claimed by the King.
- You can’t do anything on the land without the King’s approval. You can’t kill game, or fish. The Magna Carta was originally called the Charter of Liberties. Articles 48 and 47 of the Charter of the Forest.
- Charter of the Commons – Creative Commons. Magna Carta is being revived.
Guest – Educational Director of Fraunces Tavern Museum Jennifer Patton, and Communications Director, Tony Wellman. Fraunces Tavern was built in 1719, it was a residence and then bought by tavern keeper Samuel Fraunces. It’s also known as the site where George Washington gave his farewell address to the officers of the Continental Army in 1783. When New York City was the nation’s capital, the tavern was rented to house offices of the Department of War, Treasury and Foreign Affairs.
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Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All
In January of 2008, hosts interviewed author Peter Linebaugh on his book the Magna Carta Manifesto. It’s a sweeping history of the Magna Carta as a longstanding retraint against tyranny, the support of trial by jury and due process of law, the prohibition of torture and the rights of habaes corpus. Peter Linebaugh worked to construct the original history of the Great Charter and it’s little known companion, the Charter of the Forest, which was created to protect the rights of the poor.
Peter Linebaugh:
- On November 11, 1217, after the 1215 document was lost and civil war had resumed, the Magna Carta was founded again and a smaller version was produced called the Charter of the Forest.
- Charter of the Forest: Forms of protection of subsistence rights for people to the woodlands. The woods was the form that hydrocarbon energy took.
- There’s a parallel with the protection of woodlands for all, back then, and our own oil economy. Common Rights for oil, share in the wealth of commons.
- Origins of rights. Magna Carta and Charter of Forest dividing civil and economic rights. Similar to UN documents now.
- W.E.B. DuBois attacked the separation of rights of the “stomach” from rights of speech, or from civil and political rights and economic rights.
- DuBois argued with Eleanor Roosevelt at Breton Woods on behalf of millions of people in the third world.
- Gerrard Winstanley – “The Earth Belonged To No One” It is a common treasury for all. John Locke was afraid of them and developed his notions of private property in contrast to them.
- The lessons for us today, depends on creativity and widespread discussion that must occur at the grassroots.
- Historically, the ruling class has been able to retain it’s avaricious powers only to the extent that it keeps us apart. We’re familiar with gender and racial divisions, and we’ve become a Carceral continent.
- When we get together we learn that so much of our history has been stolen from us. Our land, wealth, we must recover the knowledge of our own Commoning.
Guest- Peter Linebaugh, Professor, a student of E.P. Thompson, received his Ph.D. in British history from the University of Warwick in 1975. A graduate of Swarthmore and of Columbia, he taught at Rochester, New York University, University of Massachusetts-Boston, Harvard and Tufts before joining The University of Toledo in 1994. Grants from the Max Planck Institute in Göttingen and from the Fulbright and Mellon fellowship programs have supported his research. Peter Linebaugh is currently at work on a study of an Irish insurrectionary during ‘the great transformation’ of the Atlantic revolutions.
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Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Guantanamo, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, Truth to Power
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Lawyer’s You’ll Like: Rhonda Copelon Part II
This is the second part of our Lawyers You’ll Like interview with attorney Rhonda Copelon. She is a professor at the Law School of the City University of New York and director of the school’s International Human Rights Law Clinic. Rhonda is also the Legal Advisor to the Women’s Caucus for Gender Justice. Rhonda shares with us, her history of fighting for the constitutionality of the abortion cases in New York City and its effect on poor women in a pre-Roe v Wade climate. She also discuss the Harlem 6 case. Let’s have a listen.
From Article on New International Criminal Court: “The breadth and specificity of gender crimes in the court’s enabling statutes are directly attributable to a global caucus of women that formed in 1997 in the face of apathy and active resistance to prosecuting gender-based crimes. “Women made a huge difference,” said Rhonda Copeland, a professor at the Law School of the City University of New York and director of the school’s International Human Rights Law Clinic.
“They made it impossible to ignore that women have been left out of justice and that we have to be in it,” Copeland said. “If there were nobody there saying ‘this is violence,’ I don’t know how it would have happened.”Rhonda shares with listeners, her history of fighting for the constitutionality of the abortion cases in New York City and its effect on poor women in a pre-Roe v Wade climate. She also discuss the Harlem 6 case.
Rhonda Copelon:
- Harris v McRae – Rhonda Copelon argued. The case tried to get the federal government to pay for poor women’s abortions. We didn’t go to court to get medicaid for women, we went to court to save it.
- McRae has become a 2 line footnote in text books today and there’s a certain way that people have accepted that medicaid doesn’t have to pay for abortions
- 30 years is enough campaign.
- The more these terrible precedents come down, the more we absorb them as culture instead of viewing them as needing to be reversed.
- Historically, based on race and class, women have been treated differently in terms of their reproductive rights.
- When the original anti-abortion laws started to come in to the United States, it was primarily wanting to be sure that the white population of the US would not be out reproduced by the immigrant population and the way to do that was to cut back on abortion.
- The anti-abortion law, the original purposes was to increase reproduction among the elite and also to get rid of those women lay-healers.
- The original abortion laws were class based. In 20th century, class based eugenics laws, sterilization laws. Buck v Bell / you sterilize those who are socially inappropriate.
- Puerto Rican sterilization program. Before Roe v Wade, you couldn’t get a legal sterilization without the rule of 120.
- Religion twisted this around. The Catholic church in the mid 70s – a pastoral plan for pro-life activities.
- The goal was a human right amendment, which was a complete prohibition on abortion. Affecting poor women dependent on tax payer money.
- There’s a lot of evidence that the church went along with family planning in poor neighborhoods in the 60s because it had a population reduction role.
- When you get to abortion, they put the political / religious ahead of the population goals, and what you get is this mobilization to stop medicaid funding for poor women.
- In 1978, you had a historic coming together of the Catholic church and the Protestant evangelicals on the issue of abortion.
- It’s very important to look at the role of extremist religion in this country. When you look at the mega-churches, the power they’ve had to undo the first amendment, in terms of establishment of religion.
- Hyde amendment: the cutoff of medicaid.
Guest – Attorney Rhonda Copelon, professor at the Law School of the City University of New York and director of the school’s International Human Rights Law Clinic. Rhonda is also the legal adviser to the Women’s Caucus for Gender Justice.
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(Encore Interview:) FBI Defends Use of Informants To Spy On Mosques
FBI Director Robert Mueller defended the practice of using informants to monitor mosques in the United States, despite being heavily criticized by attorneys, and Muslim American leaders. Last month a judge ordered the FBI to submit 100 documents detailing the bureau’s surveillance of Muslim leaders in California, which revealed the FBI paid informants to be provocateurs. These cases fit into patterns where paid informants (often a former felon) entice innocent people into a crime, not unlike the Liberty 7 case, the Fort Dix case and the Memorial Day weekend terror plot in upstate New York. In the New York case, Mike German, a former FBI agent of 16 years and now an attorney with the ACLU told Law and Disorder, they “could have wrapped up without making it seem like they’re saving New York City from this terrible destruction.” The media then reports the story which will often prop up the ongoing “War on Terror.”
Shakeel Syed:
- Council of Islamic Organizations sent a letter to Attny Gen. Eric Holder complaining about the FBI infiltration and harassment
- We are baffled at this time, there is a great deal of surplus of rhetoric by the current administration and a deficit at the policy level.
- When Mueller says the FBI will escalate surveillance of mosques and the Obama Administration is silent, that disturbs me.
- This is legal religious bigotry, Mueller is lying in regard to they’re not surveilling the mosques but only the suspected individuals.
- I have stopped using the word provocateur, I shuffle between using the word provocateur and predator.
- Those targeted have pending immigration and naturalization files or converting from H1 visa to resident visa.
- When our community was doing outreach with public officers, I was in the FBI offices during 2003-2005, and I realized then I was being tailgated.
- My phone was tapped on. A few times the phone automatically dialed the local police.
- My hope as a Muslim American is that good American people will stand up in these challenging times.
Guest – Shakeel Syed, Executive Director of the Islamic Shura Council of Southern California.
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Afghanistan War, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Guantanamo, Human Rights, Supreme Court, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, Truth to Power
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Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces That Put It in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America
From the Kennedy assassination to Watergate to Prescott Bush’s ties to Nazi Germany, the book Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces That Put It in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America, digs into the hidden history of the Bush family. Author Russ Baker takes on the Bush legacy with powerful investigative journalism. One review states that the chapter on George W Bush’s private life is worth the price of the book alone. Baker also reveals George H Walker Bush’s connections with the CIA began in 1953, not when he publicly joined the agency in 1976. Bush’s oil companies were used as fronts for the intelligence agencies around the world with an agenda controlled by power brokers. Award winning investigative reporter Russ Baker also tells us why this insight into the Bush family is important to know now during the Obama administration.
Russ Baker:
- I was training investigative journalists in Yugoslavia 2002, and when I traveled Europe people were asking me what has happened to your country. I knew superficially what happened, but I didn’t know why it happened.
- From the son, I looked into the father,because had the father not been president, the son wouldn’t be president.
- George HW Bush had a secret past more than 20 years, preceding his appointment to the CIA in 1976
- George HW Bush, starts up offshore drilling companies that make no sense, very few customers, very few rigs, but he’s traveling all over the world. It’s perfect intelligence cover.
- They even put a rig in Cuba before the Bay of Pigs, they had Cuban exiles working there
- Ok, he’s working in intelligence, I assume that’s what he’s doing while he was a Congressman, an oil man, an ambassador to the UN. This is fascinating and also deeply troubling.
- I think what we’re looking at is a permanent construct of power.
- Journalists: I don’t think they’ll say so publicly but privately they’ll tell you how scared they are, whether for their personal safety or they don’t want to lose their job.
- The Bush dynasty was the ultimate triumph of the military industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower, a formal general had warned us about.
- Harry Truman speech on the CIA: I signed the Act that created the CIA, but they never told me the kinda things that they got in to.
- The Bush Family: You see them as the ultimate operatives on behalf of the coalition of powerful Wall St. interests, military contractors, resource extraction mining interests, going all over the world to bring back the plunder essentially.
- They (Bush family) are the representatives, they are not the bosses.
- Obama: It’s very difficult to go against these interests. Our economy runs on war, it’s very difficult to undo that.
- I, myself was naive, and I covered politics for more than 20 years, and I never understood the extent at which democracy is subverted.
- Power in America resides in pool of people about whom we’ve never even heard, the only way you find out is if you look at these Fortune 1000 lists. This is not a conspiracy, it’s just the way things work.
- Michael Smith: When I was starting out and learning how this country works, I was reading C.Wright Mills, Ferdinand Lunberg.
- Guest host Jim Lafferty: This is a matter of commonality of interests that run this country
- Whowhatwhy.com – specialized in doing deep politics investigation – historic epics that haven’t been properly explored.
- Everybody hated Kennedy except the people.
Guest – Russ Baker is an award-winning investigative reporter with a track record for making sense of complex and little understood matters. He has written for the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, the Nation, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Village Voice and Esquire. He has also served as a contributing editor to the Columbia Journalism Review. Baker received a 2005 Deadline Club award for his exclusive reporting on George W. Bush’s military record. He is the founder of WhoWhatWhy/the Real News Project, a nonpartisan, nonprofit investigative news organization, operating at whowhatwhy.com.
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MondoWeiss: The War of Ideas In the Middle East
Did the recent bombing of Gaza and killing of 1400 Palestinians create a breakdown in the traditional Jewish American support for Israel? In the first of its kind, last month’s J Street Conference brought together 1500 people to the meeting aimed at ending the Arab-Israeli and Israeli-Palestinian conflicts peacefully and diplomatically. The conference is a political arm of the pro-Israel pro peace movement that also lobbied more than 100 members of Congress to press forward with the peace process and two state solution.
Meanwhile the Boycott Divest and Sanction movement gains momentum and Code Pink activists continue to protest, demonstrate in and around Gaza. As many listeners may know living conditions in the Gaza Strip has deteriorated. Salt water has contaminated a large percentage of drinking water and is damaging the kidneys of Palestinian children.
Philip Weiss:
- J Street is the alternative Israel lobby or alternative Jewish lobby because they identify themselves as a Jewish organization.
- They are taking on AIPAC, which has traditionally taken on the role to shape the US response to Israel.
- It was landmark moment in changing the original purpose of the Israel lobby to speak with one voice
- Here’s a lobby that says. . guess what? Jews are not going to speak with one voice, we’re going to have a lot of different voices that contend on this issue.
- Finally there’s a little bit of fragmenting of this reactionary force of AIPAC and the Israel lobby.
- 160 Congressmen were at the J Street Conference in Washington DC. You saw lefty-Jews with a spring in their step. The conference disappointed me in a number of ways, it only had Zionists, progressive Zionists. It condemned the Goldstone Report
- There were some bright lights at this conference. It’s not that different from AIPAC in a number of ways.
- There was a strong sense if you were to speak there (J Street Conf.) you had to be a Zionist.
- Zionist: I think it is support for a Jewish state. We need a Jewish state because we could be persecuted again and we need to go somewhere.
- Generally the rank and file of these people are old Jewish leftys. J Street represents a break in the heresy. The heresy is that we speak with one voice. This process of colonization continues in the West Bank, unabated basically.
- One state with an apartheid system and that’s going to be the struggle. I think if you scratch any Jew in this country he has some connection to Israel. For me it was the 9/11 thing. As they say.
- My brother said, I demonstrated against the Vietnam War, as I did, but my Jewish newspaper says the Iraq War could be good for Israel.
- I couldn’t avoid the issue anymore then when I confronted the issue I became this Palestinian Solidarity person.
- The desperation is heightened by the fact there’s so little recognition of that in the United States.
- Goldstone, a Jewish Jurist from South Africa who fought apartheid and Bosnian war crimes, that he could say. . look this is persecution . . and that can be so ignored, defied and stomped on in the United States. .it’s a horror.
- Our country can affect the situation ( In Gaza / West Bank)
Guest – Peter Weiss, longtime journalist and regular contributor to the Nation and a fellow at the Nation Institute Philip is the author of two books a political novel, Cock-A-Doodle-Doo, and American Taboo, an investigative account of a 1976 murder in the Peace Corps in the Kingdom of Tonga. His website is called Mondoweiss, it explores Middle East policy and Israel/Palestine issues. Philip attended the J Street Conference 2 months ago.
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Civil Liberties, Death Penalty, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Supreme Court, Surveillance, Torture, Truth to Power
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Talking With Sartre: Conversations and Debates
Professor John Gerassi, author of the recently published book titled – Talking With Sartre: Conversations and Debates joins hosts in studio. As a child, Gerassi’s parents had become close friends with the French existentialist philosopher, playwright, and novelist, Jean Paul Sartre. Later in his life, Gerassi conducted a series of interviews in the early 70s. These interviews are now edited into book form and as one review states, – quote – it has produced this revelatory and breathtaking portrait of one of the world’s most famous intellectuals.
The brings into to focus Sartre’s thinking on the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the disintegration of colonialism, it also reveals how Sartre has wrestled with the apparent contradiction between his views on freedom and the influence of social conditions on our choices and actions.
John (Tito) Gerassi:
- My father was an artist and said ridiculous things like I don’t care if my son starves or my wife starves, first I paint.
- This appealed to Sartre who said in effect the same thing as a man of letters.
- Sartre became fascinated by my father. My father refused to join the OSS / CIA
- Gerassi to Sartre: You have a problem uniting the idea of free choice that you have in existentials because you begin with the I, to the Marxist situation which is a class derivative to which you want to align. I don’t see how you can align them.
- After a series of criticisms to this dichotomy, Sartre said, “This kid’s brilliant.” And so I became part of the family.
- Sartre always supported counterterrorism. Those who fought the establishment’s terrorism.
- Sartre’s anti-position has always been consistently correct.
- He opposed Ridgeway when Ridgeway took over NATO. Get your base out of France.
- No country is free with a foreign base on its territory. If you get rid of Ridgeway don’t put in a European general.
- During the Algerian War, the magazine that Sartre basically created called Modern Times, supported the Algerians right from the beginning.
- It supported sedition, that was a step further than any lefty in France.
- Supporting sedition is one thing, but they actually supported it in action.
- They were called the suitcase carriers, they gave medicine and ammo to Algerians in suitcases.
- The editor in chief of Modern Times assembled 120 intellectuals and produced the Declaration of 121.
- It included Sartre and existentials but also the Catholic left and notable communist intellectuals.
- That began the split in the communist party.
- In Algeria, the communist party there was in favor of the Algerian revolution.
- Sartre : Never judge the powerless by the same criteria that you judge the powerful.
- That means you support the Palestinians, and you praise the suicide bombers because you judge them with a different criteria than Israelis who have tanks, airplanes etc . .
- Sartre interpretation: The fact that he (Ft Hood shooter) is a member of a dominated class, and he is rebelling against the dominating class. He is perfectly justified in what he’s doing.
- Sartre: The trouble with all revolutions is they give up too soon.
- He did go to all sorts of places and because he was Sartre, he got to see the leaders of Russia and China, the only influence where he was pleased with contact was Che Gueverra.
- Supporting the early action of the Palestinians: When Israel subjugates the Palestinians, takes away their lands. . I’ve always supported counterterror against established terror.
- Marxist – Group Infusion – people briefly connecting, moving from I to we.
Guest – Professor John Gerassi, once an editor at Time magazine, then at Newsweek, who obtained his PhD at LSE, is a long time civil rights and anti-war militant. He is the author or editor of ten books and scores of articles and pamphlets published on both sides of the Atlantic. He is currently Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York.
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Criminalizing Dissent, FBI Intrusion, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Prison Industry, Supreme Court, Surveillance, Truth to Power
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THE ASSASSINATION OF FRED HAMPTON: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther
We are pleased to have with us author and National Lawyers Guild attorney Jeff Haas. His new book The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther, is a page turning true crime story chronicling the tragic murder of Fred Hampton, the young leader of the Chicago Black Panthers. On a dark December day, Chicago police unloaded 80 rounds into Fred Hampton’s bedroom, leaving his pregnant fiancee Deborah Johnson in shock having barely survived. The killing horrified the black community in Chicago. As Haas describes, it took 13 years of grueling litigation from the attorneys at the People’s Law Office collective to finally convict the FBI, the Cook County States Attorney Edward Hanrahan, and the Chicago police for their summary execution Fred Hampton. He was only 21. Today, 40 years later, the People’s Law Office still active in suing and scandalizing the Chicago police for torturing and extracting false confessions from over l00 black men in a south side police station. Jeff Haas Book Tour Dates NYC
Jeff Haas:
- Fred Hampton started in high school, he led a walk out because black girls weren’t considered for Homecoming Queen. He took on the issue of not having enough black teachers and black administrators. Wherever he saw injustice, he felt compelled to deal with it. At ten years old, he started his own breakfast for children program.
- He came from a warm family, in Louisiana, on farms where his grandparents had been slaves.
- I came from Atlanta, GA, a middle class Jewish family. I grew up as many were somewhat raised by blacks, there was a black man who worked at our farm who I idolized. He taught me how to plow with a mule, drive a tractor, things most kids don’t know how to do.
- At school in Chicago, my classmates consisted of John Ashcroft and Bernadine Dorhn. Ashcroft didn’t have much to say in those days. I was with Dr. King, when he marched in Chicago, the anti-war movement was at a peak, the black power movement was strong. There had been riots in the cities.
- Kennedy and King had been assassinated in 1968. It seem like things were headed for the falls, or the rapids.
- I met Fred Hampton because I was in Chicago. He was then head of the NAACP youth branch. A dynamic speaker. Fred could talk to welfare mothers, he could talk to law students, he could talk to gang kids.
- He said basically, if you’re not going to do any revolutionary act by the time you’re 20, you’re dead already.
- The Chicago panthers grew quickly from Nov. 1968, when they started, until his death in 1969.
- Forty years ago, my partner knocked on my door. I opened it and he said the chairman is dead, the pigs vamped on his crib this morning.
- It took me, how the police had killed him. I went and interviewed his fiancee. She told me they entered a room where Fred was semi-conscious.
- First we and with a lot of support from the National Lawyers Guild, the Center for Constitutional Rights filed a civil suit to find out what happened.
- Quickly we found out that the police raid was a shoot in, not a shoot-out. Ninety police shots to 1 shot from the Panthers. We also found out 3 years into the investigation that the FBI had provided a floor plan to the raiders, that showed the bed where Fred would be sleeping.
- And that bed was where the shots converged, so we pursued discovery.
- We found out that the FBI sent a letter to head of the Blackstone Rangers, a year before Fred was killed saying, dear brother, Fred has put a hit out on you. The FBI wanted someone else to do their dirty work.
- The FBI worked on creating conflict between the 2 groups. One of the objectives of the COINTELPRO program was to prevent the rise of a messiah who could unify and electrify the masses.
- Fred Hampton had a slogan, you can kill the revolutionary, but you can’t kill the revolution.
- You can still kill a freedom fighter, but you can’t kill freedom fighting. I think losing a black leader like Fred Hampton does set back the people’s struggle. His spirit, the non-compromising pursuit of justice lives on also.
Guest – Jeffrey Haas is an attorney and cofounder of the People’s Law Office, whose clients included the Black Panthers, Students for a Democratic Society, community activists, and a large number of those opposed to the Vietnam War. He has handled cases involving prisoners’ rights, Puerto Rican nationalists, protesters opposed to human rights violations in Central America, police torture, and the wrongfully accused.
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The Center For Constitutional Rights: Acorn Lawsuit
The Center for Constitutional Rights has filed a lawsuit on behalf of the community group ACORN. ACORN was recently barred funding by a Congressional Resolution. The lawsuit charges that Congress unfairly targeting the organization and is seeking a temporary restraining order to prevent the government from reallocation funds meant for ACORN. The Center for Constitutional Rights Legal Director Bill Quigley says it’s an outrage to see Congress violating the Constitution and politically grandstand. Bill continues – “With all the crimes and infractions committed by banks, pharmaceutical companies, and private government contractors, they have been rewarded with bailouts, tax credits, and billions of dollars in new contracts. Congress bowed to FOX News and joined in the scapegoating of an organization that helps average Americans going through hard times to get homes, pay their taxes, and vote. Shame on them.”
Bill Quigley:
- ACORN is an association of community organizations that has about 500 hundred thousand members across the United States. They’ve been in existence for some 35 years. They do voter registration, housing foreclosure work, issue organizing.
- In the last five years or so, they’ve registered nearly 2 million to vote. So, they’ve been the target of the right wing for some time. They do very aggressive outreach to get folks who haven’t been registered.
- Regarding sex scandal: The people in those offices, they’re low paid workers, but their goal is to help first time home buyers. So, these tricksters, they were into prostitution, the truth is the people at ACORN would try to help you whether you were a prostitute or not.
- ACORN tried to give advice and some of the people went too far concealing the nature of their work.
- Apart from the politics of punishing people for registering folks to vote, there is a specific part in the US Constitution that’s been in there since the beginning that prohibits what’s called a Bill of Attainder
- Constitution of the United States, Article I, Section 9, paragraph 3 provides that: “No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law will be passed.”
- We’re familiar with what happened in England, in Parliament, people in parliament would get all fired up about something and they would just have a specific bill naming a person or organization, and they were outlawed, they could receive the benefits of being a citizen. So the Congress outlawed that.
- So, what they did here, is without any hearings before Congress, without any investigation whatsoever, just based on the rumors and the FOX news sort of stuff. They said that ACORN and any of subsidiaries, or even allies, couldn’t receive any federal funds.
- A one sentence prohibition. It impacts millions of dollars of funds, not going to big salaries.
- It effects ACORN Housing organizations around the country. A lot of the housing works stopped.
- ACORN people have come to us and say we’ve been to law firms around this country but no one can help us now, because we are so stigmatized.
- The framers of the constitution didn’t want Congress to be the prosecutor, judge jury and executioner. We have a way to do this.
- If there’s more to this than just the rumor mongering that’s been done, then there are ways to do it. HUD, Department of Justice, IRS, can say, we suspect you’re misusing the funds and set up a hearing.
- The right wingers didn’t want to go this way, they did an end run and we’re hoping that the courts are going to set that aside.
Guest – CCR Legal Directory Bill Quigley. Bill has been an active public interest lawyer since 1977 and worked with a wide range of public interest organizations on an equally wide range of issues. He has litigated numerous cases with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., the Advancement Project, and with the ACLU of Louisiana, for which he served as General Counsel for over 15 years.
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Film Professor Sues University for Violating Right to Academic Free Speech
In the fall of 2007, Dr. Terri Ginsberg was hired to teach a film class at the North Carolina State University focusing on the media treatment of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in 2008. She was also hired to help program a Middle Eastern film series. As Terri details in a grievance the director of the film studies program and the director of the Middle East studies program made a series of decisions that violated her academic freedom. Among the decisions was the limiting of Terri’s invovlement in the series that she had initially been hired to curate. Another was the criticism of an introduction she gave at the screening of the Palestinian film “Ticket to Jerusalem” as biased and overly political.
The grievance filed alleged violations of her First Amendment and equal opportunity rights under the University Code. Her grievance was dismissed on the grounds that it was filed too late and that she was no longer a university employee. Terri has now filed a lawsuit, one mention in the complaint states that in the views of several faculty, Jews who question and challenge the zionist colonial project are non-conforming Jews and therefore are outsiders and dangerous.
Terri Ginsburg / Attorney Rima Kapitan
- I was given strong indication the teaching professorship would convert into a permanent tenure track position.
- That I should apply for it and that I was a shoe in for that position. So I moved down from New York City, where I lived for many years to Raleigh, NC. Not long after I got there, a number of incidents occured that led me to believe the conversion was not going to take place.
- Key people in the faculty were very unhappy with my perspectives on the Israeli – Palestinian conflict and on Zionism. I am a Jewish Anti-Zionist, and I wanted to supply a genuinely balanced perspective on the issue of Zionism and the history as it has been depicted in cinema
- I showed Israeli films, I showed Palestinian films, I showed the array of cinema on this topic.
- This is a large campus upwards to 40 thousand students.
- I was asked to resign from a middle eastern series after I gave an introduction to a film that was pro-Palestinian.
- Attorney Rima Kapitan: Right now we’re alleging they violated her North Carolina Constitutional Rights. They breached her right to academic freedom and equal protection under the law.
- Terri covered every path in North Carolina, the only thing left is a constitutional claim in North Carolina.
- Under the equal protection claim, we’re saying Terri was treated differently because of her religion.
- Terri: The atmosphere is increasingly worse not only for Jews but anyone who speaks out on this issue, especially for non-tenured and temporary labor.
- I had minimal support from the AAUP, they failed until we put out a petition that received over 500 signatures.
- Most faculty on campus were afraid to communicate with me, over email, over telephone.
- I think the Israel-Palestine conflict is one of the core issues facing the United States.
- Film is a small field and gossip travels fast. I’m unemployed. When I did my research on the holocaust, I couldn’t ignore the structural relationship between the holocaust and the Nakba.
Guest- Dr. Terri Ginsberg joins us in the studio today she has a Ph.D. in Cinema Studies from New York University and previously taught in the Jewish Studies Program at Dartmouth College and the Cinema Studies Program at Rutgers University. CODZ
Guest – Attorney Rima Kapitan – staff Attorney at CAIR-Chicago. She is a graduate of DePaul University College of Law and Indiana University and a partner with Amal Law Group, LLC, a general practice law firm. Her main areas of interest and specialization are plaintiff-side employment discrimination, civil rights law, workers compensation and estate planning. She is active in the National Lawyers Guild Middle East Committee.
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