Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Human Rights, NSA Spying, Surveillance, Violations of U.S. and International Law, Whistleblowers
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Biden Hypocritically Slams Arrest of US Journalist in Russia But Pursues Assange
May 3rd marks the 30th anniversary of World Press Freedom Day, established by the UN to remind governments about the necessity to respect their commitment to freedom of the press.
The Biden administration touts press freedom but continues the Trump administration’s efforts to extradite Julian Assange from the UK to the United States for trial on Espionage Act charges that could lead to 175 years in prison. Assange is being prosecuted for obtaining and publishing classified military and diplomatic documents evidencing US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is the first publisher to be charged under the Espionage Act for revealing state secrets.
The Biden administration hypocritically criticizes Russia for arresting Evan Gershkovich, a US journalist, for espionage while trying to extradite and try Assange, who is an Australian citizen. Both men are journalists detained in a foreign country on espionage charges for doing what journalists do.
Julian Assange Fact Sheet: Why Julian Must Be Freed
Guest – Marjorie Cohn is a member of the national advisory board of Assange Defense. She is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and former president of the National Lawyers Guild. Her new article about Assange and Gershkovich was just published by Truthout.
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Citizen Spies: The Long Rise of America’s Surveillance Society
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s program “If You See Something, Say Something,” launched in 2010, urges citizens to be aware of and to report, potential threats. Examples of suspicious activity include unattended packages or baggage; circumstances that appear out of the ordinary, like an open door that is usually closed; a person asking for detailed information about a building’s layout or purpose, and changes in security protocol or shifts. Also of concern is any person seen loitering around a building, writing notes, sketches, and taking photographs or measurements.
The DHS website is careful to note that, “Factors such as race, ethnicity, and/or religious affiliation are not suspicious.” Yet as listeners know, incidents of ethnic profiling are many, including one in which a Southwest Airlines passenger was taken off a flight for speaking Arabic.
The history of citizen spying and reporting on others is not new in this country. And the “See Something” campaign isn’t the only civilian spying program around. Many jurisdictions have Neighborhood Watch programs. The U.S. Department of Justice’s National Neighborhood Watch initiative enlists community members to assist crime prevention and to prepare neighborhoods for disasters and emergency response.
Guest – Joshua Reeves author of Citizen Spies, The Long Rise of America’s Surveillance Society . He is associate professor of New Media Communications and Speech Communication at Oregon State University, where he’s also a fellow in their Center for the Humanities. An associate editor of the journal Surveillance and Society, he’s also written the just-released book, Killer Apps: War, Media, Machine.
Hosted by attorneys Heidi Boghosian, Marjorie Cohn and Julie Hurwitz
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Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Human Rights
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Workers’ Rights And Leadership Moving Forward
Ex-president Donald Trump was indicted three weeks ago in New York City by progressive prosecutor Alvin Bragg on 34 separate counts for paying hush money to two women before the 2020 election. The charges are serious and provable. These are the first; there will likely be three even more serious indictments in other jurisdictions. Although Trump looks like the Republican nominee for the 2024 presidential election, the accumulation of charges against him will both narrow but harden, invigorate, and mobilize his political support.
Trump is the most prominent figure in what has quite accurately been described as an American version of fascism called white Christian nationalism. These forces have captured half the state houses in the country, many courts, and many local governments all the way down to school boards. Bertold Brecht, the great German playwright and political thinker, observed during the rise of Hitler and fascism in Germany that in order to understand fascism you must understand capitalism from which it springs.
Under a viral form of capitalism. known as neoliberalism, inequality of wealth has reached enormous proportions. Half the population of our country are poor or near poor. Healthcare, education and housing go abegging with 15 million people about to lose their health care and hundreds of thousands of others sleeping on the streets
Sections of the American working class are fighting back. Workers are organizing in Amazon and Starbucks. 9000 of them are on strike at Rutgers University. United Automobile Workers are gearing up for a strike. Polls show that most working people would like to be in a union.
But Americans are fighting back with one hand tied behind their backs. They have no independent working class party that defends their interests Both the Republican and Democratic parties are Corporate capitalist parties. In fact, last year, the Democratic Party received more massive dark money than Republicans.
Fascism is characteristically antiworker, anti-democratic, racist, nationalistic, misogynist, and violent. It is irrational. It believes in a make-believe past when America was once great.
Guest – Paul Street, historian and activist has written 10 books, most recently “ This Happened Here : Neoliberalis, Amiericaners, and the Trumping of America”. He wrote the introduction to “Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA“ co-edited by Law And Disorder cohost Michael Steven Smith. He writes regularly for “Counterpunch“ and manages “The Paul Street Report” on Substack.
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Mumia Abu Jamal’s New Trial, Exculpatory Evidence
American political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal has served over 40 years in Pennsylvania’s harshest prisons; 16 of them on death row -for the murder of a
Philadelphia police officer that he did not commit. His trial was a sham from day one. The judge who convicted him was overheard promising, “I’m going to help fry the N-word“.
Before Mumia’s conviction, he was a nationally broadcast, award winning radio journalist, and the head of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists. He reported on the murderous racial violence of the Philadelphia police department and its notorious Police Chief, and later Mayor, Frank Rizzo. Mumia had been a member of the Philadelphia chapter of the Black Panther Party. While in prison, Mumia has written 13 books and had a weekly radio show, “Live from Death Row“. He holds a master’s degree and is working on a PhD in history.
Most recently, Mumia’s attorneys have sought a new trial for him based on their discovery of exculpatory evidence clearly supporting his innocence. The newly discovered evidence had been wrongly kept from Mumia’s lawyers at the time of his trial, being deliberately buried in the prosecutor’s files. This evidence documented that key witnesses had received promises of money and favorable treatment in their own criminal cases, in exchange for their perjured testimony in Mumia’s original trial. The petition also documented the unconstitutional practice of striking Black jurors during Mumia’s original trial.
But sadly, despite the obvious significance of this newly discovered evidence, his petition for a new trial has been denied.
Guest – Noelle Hanrahan, is a Pennsylvania attorney and longtime supporter of Mumia, and the producer the long-running radio show, “Prison Radio“. She was in the courtroom when the newly discovered evidence was presented in support of Mumia’s petition for a new trial, and again when it was recently denied. Prison Radio
Hosted by attorneys Michael Smith and Jim Lafferty
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genocide, Human Rights, Human Trafficking, Truth to Power, War Resister
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It Was Genocide: Armenian Survivor Stories
Around the world, April 24 marks the observance of the Armenian Genocide. On that day in 1915 the Interior Minister of the Ottoman Empire ordered the arrest and hangings of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople. It was the beginning of a systematic and well-documented plan to eliminate the Armenians, who were Christian, and who had been under Ottoman rule and treated as second class citizens since the 15th century.
The unspeakable and gruesome nature of the killings—beheadings of groups of babies, dismemberments, mass burnings, mass drownings, use of toxic gas, lethal injections of morphine or injections with the blood of typhoid fever patients—render oral histories particularly difficult for survivors of the victims.
Why did this happen? Despite being deemed inferior to Turkish Muslims, the Armenian community had attained a prestigious position in the Ottoman Empire and the central authorities there grew apprehensive of their power and longing for a homeland. The concerted plan of deportation and extermination was effected, in large part, because World War I demanded the involvement and concern of potential allied countries. As the writer Grigoris Balakian wrote, the war provided the Turkish government “their sole opportunity, one unprecedented” to exploit the chaos of war in order to carry out their extermination plan.
As Armenians escaped to several countries, including the United States, a number came to New Britain, Connecticut in 1892 to work in the factories of what was then known as the hardware capital of the world. By 1940 nearly 3,000 Armenians lived there in a tight-knit community.
Pope Frances calls it a duty not to forget “the senseless slaughter” of an estimated one and a half million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks from 1915 to 1923. “Concealing or denying evil is like allowing a wound to keep bleeding without bandaging it,” the Pope said just two weeks before the 100th anniversary of the systematic implementation of a plan to exterminate the Armenian race.
Special thanks to Jennie Garabedian, Arthur Sheverdian, Ruth Swisher, Harry Mazadoorian, and Roxie Maljanian. Produced and written by Heidi Boghosian and Geoff Brady.
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Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Human Rights, Truth to Power, Violations of U.S. and International Law
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UN Report Sounds Alarm On Climate Change
A new flagship United Nations report on climate change shows that harmful carbon emissions have never been higher in human history. And that this is proof that the world is on a fast track to disaster, with scientists arguing that it’s now or never to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees. Indeed, the report’s scientists claim that at the dismal rate matters to address climate change are now going, the world has but ten years—ten years–until catastrophic climate change is irreversible.
Or as the UN’s General Secretary Gutierrez puts it, the planet is now “nearing the point of no return.” In a Washington Post op-ed article, Gutierrez described the latest IPCC report as a “litany of broken promises,” which revealed a “yawning gap between climate pledges, and reality.” Indeed, the reality is that despite ever-increasing awareness of the consequences of climate change and the central role humans play–given our continuing use of fossil fuels, in bringing the change about–the amount of greenhouse gas emissions released into the atmosphere every year continue to rise every year and are each year greater than the prior year. For as Gutierrez wrote, corporations and high-emitting governments have not just turned a blind eye to the problem, “they are adding fuel to the flames by continuing to invest in climate-choking industries.”
Already millions of the world’s people have been displaced by climate change, and the world now experiences a greater and greater increase in severe storms, unprecedented heat waves, widespread water shortages, and the extinction of millions of species of plants and animals.
Guest – Eleanor Stein, professor of law at Albany Law School, where she teaches Transnational Environmental Law is the author of Ecological Sensitivity and Global Warming: An International Human Rights Violation? For ten years Eleanor Stein served as an Administrative Law Judge at the New York State Public Service Commission in Albany, New York, where she presided over and mediated New York’s Renewable Portfolio Standard proceeding, a collaboration and litigation of over 150 parties, authoring in June 2004 a comprehensive decision recommending a landmark state environmental initiative to combat global warming with incentives for renewable resource-fueled power generation.
NY Times ON CLIMATE newsletter with Somini Sengupta, climate writings in NYT by David Wallace-Wells; NOT TOO LATE by Solnit and Lutunatabua; FALTER by Bill McKibben and all his current writings (and his breakthrough 1989 book on climate, The End of Nature and its sequel, EAARTH); Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker; Websites of WEACT (We Act for Environmental Justice), www.weact.org; UPROSE (United Puerto Ricans of Sunset Park), www.UPROSE.org, NYC-EJA, NYC Environmental Justice Alliance, www.nyceja.org.
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CCR Lawsuit: Louisiana’s Cancer Alley
The call it “cancer alley.” It is the 135 mile long strip along both sides the Mississippi river between Baton Rouge, Louisiana south down to New Orleans
In an environmental racism case, three Louisiana organizations sued on March 21 in Federal District court in New Orleans against the Parish Council of St. Jame’s Parish. A Parish is a county in New Orleans and the Parish Council is their government.
The predominantly white Parish Council granted a permit for a company to build $9 billion petrochemical plant to make plastics. The plant is expected to spew 6000 tons a year of cancer-causing chemicals into the atmosphere.
The lawsuit seeks to protect Black neighborhoods and is asking for a moratorium on the building of more hazardous petrochemical plants where people live and breathe and where Black people are getting sick and dying in disproportionate numbers.
Guest – Attorney Astha Sharma Pokharel of the Center or Constitutional Right where she specializes in international human rights law and in challenging racial and environmental injustice. In the “cancer rally“ lawsuit she represents the Mount Trump Baptist Church and inclusive Louisiana. A project at the Tulane law school represents RISE St. James. These are the three Black neighborhood organizations that are plaintiffs in the lawsuit.
Hosted by attorneys Michael Smith and Jim Lafferty
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Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Human Rights, Racist Police Violence
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You Might Go to Prison, Even Though You’re Innocent
There is a common belief that if you’re arrested, you are probably guilty because “where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” People assume that only the guilty confess to crimes because why would an innocent person confess to a crime they didn’t commit? And when a person pleads guilty or is convicted by a jury, that’s the end of the matter, in the minds of most people.
In fact, many innocent people are arrested, especially people of color, due to racial profiling and other forms of discrimination by law enforcement. Implicit bias often infects the case as it moves through the criminal legal system – from the initial police stop, to interrogation, arrest, charging, trial and sentencing. This is particularly tragic when a person is charged with a capital crime for which the death penalty is imposed and that sentence is carried out.
However, it is estimated that 10,000 to 20,000 people are currently serving time in prison after being convicted of crimes they did not commit, largely due to prosecutorial misconduct and police misconduct. Unfortunately, even when exonerated, the psychological and physical damage done is so extensive that many people are never able to fully recover from the trauma. In addition, when the wrongful conviction is solely the result of prosecutorial misconduct, those convicted have no legal recourse to be compensated for the wrong done to them because of prosecutorial immunity.
Guest – Justin Brooks criminal defense attorney and law professor has spent decades working to free innocent people from prison. The Founding Director of the California Innocence Project, Brooks is the author of the provocative new book, “You Might Go to Prison, Even Though You’re Innocent.” In it, he discusses false identifications, junk science, lying snitches, and incompetent defense lawyers – which too often lead to the imprisonment of innocent people.
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Expert Panel On Grutter v. Bollinger
Last October, Law and Disorder aired a segment exploring the possibility that the Supreme Court might be poised to overrule Grutter v. Bollinger and gut affirmative action. That’s the landmark 2003 case that held that the 14th Amendment allows public universities to consider race as a factor to assemble a diverse student body.
Around the time of our interview, the National Lawyers Guild New York City Chapter and the Society of American Law Teachers, or SALT, held an educational panel exploring the two affirmative action cases that the Supreme Court will decide by June or July. As many await the high court’s decision, we are pleased to present excerpts from this panel.
The speakers are Victor Goode, former Executive Director of the National Conference of Black Lawyers and Professor Emeritus at CUNY School of Law. Corinthia Carter is a board member of the NLG-NYC Chapter Foundation and president of the Legal Services Staff Association of the UAW. Rounding out the panel is law professor Vinay Harpalani from the New Mexico School of Law and a member of SALT’s board of governors. The panel was moderated by Olympia Duhart, co-president of SALT and a law professor at Nova Southeastern University College of Law.\
Hosted by Attorneys Heidi Boghosian, Marjorie Cohn and Julie Hurwitz
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Civil Rights, Human Rights, Immigration, worker's rights
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Zachary Sklar: The Work: A Jigsaw Memoir
Screenwriter and journalist Zachary Sklar grew up in Hollywood as, in his words, “a child of the blacklist.” His fine book The Work: A Jigsaw Memoir has just been published. We will speak with him today.
In the 1950s, Zach’s father George Sklar, a playwright and screenwriter, was blacklisted from the movie industry for his past membership in the Communist Party. His mother, Miriam Blecher, was a modern dancer in the Martha Graham company and founding director of The New Dance Group. During the McCarthy era, many of their friends were hauled in front of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, calIed HUAC. Several of them fled the country. Others were imprisoned. As a result, Zach grew up in an atmosphere of all-pervasive fear.
Richard Nixon rode to power on fear. After he retired, a reporter asked him what his secret was. He replied instantly, “It was fear, fear, and they don’t teach you that in the Boy Scouts.”
Zach’s beautiful collection of personal essays tells his story of how he overcame the fear he experienced as a child growing up in Hollywood during the blacklist years.
Guest – Zachary Sklar is a writer, editor, and teacher. A graduate of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, he has taught magazine writing at that institution and also has served as the executive editor of The Nation magazine. Zach Sklar edited several books about the CIA for Sheridan Square Press, including Ari Ben-Menashe’s Profits of War and New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison’s bestselling On the Trail of the Assassins, which makes the case that the CIA was behind the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Zach later co-wrote with Oliver Stone the Oscar-nominated screenplay for the movie JFK. He has been a creative adviser at Sundance Screenwriting Labs for more than two decades, and currently teaches screenwriting for the Harlem Dramatic Writing Workshop in New York. Zach Sklar was a friend of our show’s co-founder Michael Ratner and edited Michael’s memoir Moving the Bar: My Life as a Radical Lawyer.
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Exploiting The Labor Of Migrant Children
The New York Times headline, in its February 25th edition, says it all: “Alone and Exploited, Migrant Children Work Brutal Jobs Across the U.S.” Yes, last year 130,000 unaccompanied minors entered the United States, and last year the federal agency responsible for placing these children in suitable situations as their cases are processed, lost track of at least 85,000 of them. But we know where all too many of them can be found: working 10-12 hours a day in violation of our nation’s child labor laws in the American supply chain for many major brands and retailers…retailers like Ford and General Motors. Retailers like Walmart and General Mills, whose brands include Cheerios, Lucky Charms and Nature Valley, and PepsiCo, which owns Frito-Lay and Quaker Oats…and the list goes on.
So, underaged children, here in the U.S., and needing to earn money to send to their destitute families back home, or pay off the smuggler who brought them to the United States, are working under long, unsafe and exploited conditions, for some of America’s largest corporations. Never mind that the federal child labor provisions, authorized by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, also known as the “child labor laws,” were enacted to ensure that when minors do work, the work is safe and does not jeopardize their health, well-being or educational opportunities, and that sets age limits for various types of work.
As we will shortly learn from our guest for this topic today, that Act is being violated over and over again in 2023. Twelve-year old roofers in Florida and Tennessee, underage slaughterhouse workers in Biden’s home state, Delaware, and children sawing planks of wood on overnight shifts in South Dakota. The shame of this should be mind boggling for the American people. But as we now begin interviewing today’s guest, this is still the despicable reality of the lives of these minors now in our country.
Guest – Professor Sara Rogerson, the Director of the Justice Center at Albany Law School, where she is also the faculty Director of the Immigration Law Clinic, in which students represent immigrant victims of crime. Her scholarship addresses flaws in the administration of immigration laws and policy, including intersections with domestic violence and international law. SSRN.com
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