Afghanistan War, Civil Liberties, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Iraq Veterans, Iraq War, Prosecution of the Bush Administration, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Tomas Young’s War
At age 19 Tomas Young joined the Army two days after the 9/11 attacks. For patriotic reasons he wanted to fight in Afghanistan because of that country’s connection to the attack.
He was instead deployed to Iraq, a country that had zero connection to the attacks on September 11, 2001. He was in Iraq but a few days when he was shot in an insurgent ambush while sitting in the back of an open truck driving through an area of unrest in Baghdad.
The first shot severed his spinal cord paralyzing him from the nipples on down. The second shot shattered his knee. He never felt it. Tomas Young lived for nine years with his catastrophic injury. He became a forceful and eloquent spokesman against the war in Iraq.
The movie “body of war” was made about him. Tomas died of his injuries in 2014 at the age of 34.
Guest – Cathy Smith, a single mother who had cared for her son Tomas and advocated for him.
Guest – Mark Wilkerson spent eight years in the U.S. Army as an AH-1 Cobra & UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter crew chief with the 3rd Infantry & 101st Airborne Divisions. He was deployed with the 101st to Mogadishu, Somalia, for six months in 1993. Mark has three children, Alex, Nick and Sam. He lives in Louisville, Kentucky with his wife Melissa. This is his third book. Phil Donahue and the DONAHUE show have been honored with 20 Daytime Emmy Awards, including nine for Outstanding Host and a George Foster Peabody Broadcasting Journalism Award.
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Surveillance State and Tor
As computer technology has evolved and communications providers have profited, law enforcement and government intelligence organizations increasingly lobby to mandate that data services be engineered to allow them “back door” access to encrypted data.
Even as expansive anti-terrorism legislation provides more ways for the government to harvest our personal data, calls still continue for regulation of technology to ensure extra access channels. With each high-profile criminal attack, on U.S. soil or elsewhere across the world, government efforts to access personal communications gain momentum.
Years ago, many considered TOR, software that enables anonymous communication, to be equivalent to the Dark Net, the nefarious sites and services accessible on the Tor network that promote/enable illegal activity such as drug and gun marketplaces. After Edward Snowden’s massive data release, however, TOR use in the last year has grown quickly.
Guest – Shari Steele, Executive Director of the Tor Project. As the former director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Shari built it into the nation’s preeminent digital rights organization.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, War Resister
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We at Law and Disorder mourn the passing of our friend, co-host and co-producer Michael Ratner on May 11, 2016. Michael’s radical legal and political analysis, and his enormous compassion, was a rarity in the field of legal affairs broadcasting.
We shall miss him dearly.
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Updates:
- Co-host Michael Steven Smith Remembers Kent State Shootings May 4, 1970 and Jackson State University Shootings May 15, 1970.
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Discrediting the Red Scare: The Cold War Trials of James Kutcher, The Legless Veteran
Historian Robert Goldstein has just come out with the book “Discrediting the Red Scare: The Cold War Trials of James Kutcher, The Legless Veteran”. James Kutcher exposed some of the worst abuses of the red scare. His cases got massive publicity and contributed to the red scare’s demise and the discrediting of The Federal Employee Loyalty Program. Kutcher was a socialist in the 1930s and joined a small socialist organization. He was drafted shortly before American entry into World War II. He fought in north Africa and then Italy, where both of his legs were blown to pieces by a German mortar shell in 1943. After having both legs amputated and learning to walk with artificial limbs and two canes. In 1946, Kutcher was hired in a menial position at the veterans administration as a file clerk with no access to national security information.
However, as a result of President Truman’s March 1947 Federal Employee Loyalty Program, and more specifically due to the listing of Kutcher’s organization, the Socialist workers party, and the attorney generals list of subversive organizations mischaracterizing it as seeking to violently overthrow the government Kutcher was fired from his VA position. The government then sought to take away his World War II disability pension and then to evict him and his aged parents from there public housing project in Newark, New Jersey.
Goldstein’s book tells a dramatic story about a shy and timid person with true fortitude who fought for 10 years to establish his and all Americans’ constitutional rights to due process,freedom of speech and association. Robert Goldstein tells the story of a true American hero.
Guest – Robert Justin Goldstein is emeritus professor of political science at Oakland University. His many books include Flag Burning and Free Speech: The Case of Texas v. Johnson and American Blacklist: The Attorney Generals List of Subversive Organizations, both from Kansas.
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Saudi Arabia Threatens To Dump US Assets If Blamed For 911
Phyllis Bennis is a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington DC and has written several books on the Middle East. She joins us to to talk about the alleged Saudi Arabian connection to 911 and Obama’s impending meeting with the Saudi Arabian king. The United States Congress is presently considering a bill to lift the sovereign immunity Saudi Arabia enjoys which protects their government from the pending wrongful death lawsuits brought by the families of the September 11, 2001 attack victims . Legislation to do this is backed by both Republicans and Democrats and opposed by the Obama administration.
The Saudi Arabian government has threatened, some have called it black mail, to dispose of the $750 billion in American assets, including treasury bonds, that it owns to protect itself if it’s sovereign immunity is lifted. Saudi Arabia along with Israel is America’s key ally in the Middle East.
Guest – Phyllis Bennis, directs the New Internationalism Project at IPS. She is also a fellow of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. She has been a writer, analyst, and activist on Middle East and UN issues for many years. In 2001 she helped found and remains on the steering committee of the U.S. Campaign to End Israeli Occupation. She works closely with the United for Peace and Justice anti-war coalition, co-chairs the UN-based International Coordinating Network on Palestine, and since 2002 has played an active role in the growing global peace movement. She continues to serve as an adviser to several top UN officials on Middle East and UN democratization issues.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, War Resister
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Updates:
- Co-hosts Heidi Boghosian and Michael Smith Discuss Raza v. City of New York and Handschu v. Special Services Division Settlements.
- Renaming Law School After Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia
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Miko Peled: The General’s Son, Journey of an Israeli in Palestine – Second Edition
Miko Peled comes from a distinguished Zionist family. His grandfather signed in 1948 the Israeli declaration of independence. His father General Matti Peled, was a hero in Israel’s victorious 1967 war against 3 of it’s Arab neighbors. Miko Peled wrote the book “The General’s Son, Journey of an Israeli in Palestine” in 2012. It is an account of his family history and his own personal political and moral evolution. He served in the Israeli Air Force. His sister’s young daughter was killed by a Palestinian in a terrorist attack. His book is considered so important that it has been republished in a new updated second edition. Peled moved from Israel and now lives in San Diego. He believes the only just solution in Israel – Palestine is for the creation of a bi-national state with equal rights for the Palestinian people. He is in New York on tour to promote the second edition of this book.
Guest – Miko Peled is an Israeli writer and activist living in the US. He was born and raised in Jerusalem. His father was the late Israeli General Matti Peled. Driven by a personal family tragedy to explore Palestine, its people and their narrative. He has written a book about his journey from the sphere of the privileged Israeli to that of the oppressed Palestinians. Peled speaks nationally and internationally on the issue of Palestine. He supports the creation of a single democratic state in all of Palestine, and a firm supporter of BDS
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Racism Within Chicago’s Police Department
Chicago Attorney Flint Taylor is a founding partner in the People’s Law Office. He’s been engaged in police abuse litigation since the 1960s when he and his partner Jeff Haas represented the Fred Hampton family after Chairman Hampton, the head of the Black Panther Party was assassinated by the Chicago Police and the FBI. Flint then for 30 years represented the victims of the Jon Burge torture machine. Burge, through the use of torture got false confessions from more than 100 African American men, sending them to prison. Recently, under court order a video was released showing the execution by the Chicago Police of a young black man named Shaquan McDonald. In the wake of the release of the video, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel was forced to fire his police chief and appoint a commission to investigate the lack of accountability and widespread racism in the Chicago Police Department.
Guest – Attorney G.Flint Taylor, a graduate of Brown University and Northwestern Law School, is a founding partner of the People’s Law Office in Chicago, an office which has been dedicated to litigating civil rights, police violence, government misconduct, and death penalty cases for more than 40 years.
Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, Torture, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Speaking In Turkish: Denying the Armenian Genocide
To commemorate this, the first genocide of the 20th century, Law and Disorder co-host Heidi Boghosian presents a 60-minute documentary special titled “Speaking In Turkish: Denying the Armenian Genocide.”
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.
Civil Liberties, Human Rights, Prison Industry, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power
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Dallas 6 Trial: No Conviction, Ends In Mistrial
In April of 2014 we spoke with Chandre Delaney, an activist and the mother of Carrington Keys, one of the Dallas 6. The Dallas 6 are a group of inmates who in April 2010 protested the ongoing abuse from prison guards while locked in solitary confinement known as the Restrictive Housing Unit at SCI Dallas prison in Pennsylvannia. Abuse included tasering genitals, being hog tied, cutting off clothes and leaving inmates in cages for hours. The inmates protested by placing bedding over the window of their cell doors to attract attention of the prison administrators. Instead of receiving assistance, the inmates were brought up on riot charges.
The Dallas 6 are Andre Jacobs, Anthony Kelly, Anthony Locke, Dwayne Peters, Derek Stanley and Carrington Keys and were forced to stay in solitary confinement for up to 10 years.They presented testimony in December of 2013 describing the details of their abuse in solitary confinement. The trial for the remaining 3 of the Dallas 6 ended in a mistrial.
Guest – Attorney Michael Wiseman who is representing Dwayne Peters of the Dallas 6. Michael is a criminal defense litigator focusing on criminal and capital defense at trial, on appeal and in post conviction proceedings in state and federal court.
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21 States Introduce Anti-BDS Legislation
Israel advocacy groups and state law makers who support them have introduced anti-BDS legislation in New York California Florida and 19 other states across the United States of America, including the US Congress.
BDS – boycott , divestment, and sanction – is a peaceful tactic to pressure Israel to comply with international law and to influence public opinion and policy in the U.S. in favor of respecting the human rights of Palestinians.
The demands of the BDS movement are : Israels’ withdrawal from the territories of the West Bank which they have occupied since 1967 and the right of Palestinians expelled by the Israelis in 1948 and 1967 to return to their homes and equal rights for Palestinians who are citizens of Israel.
Support for BDS is now more widely rooted and impactful than ever before. Israel and its supporters in the USA are failing to slow down their gradually intensified isolation.
As a result we are seeing well-funded campaigns to silence Israel’s critics. Journalist Glenn Greenwald has called this “the greatest threat to free speech in the west.”
Guest – Attorney Rahul Saksena with Palestine legal, a group formed by the Center for Constitutional Rights and the National Lawyers Guild to defend the civil rights and civil liberties of critics of the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
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Humanitarian and Economic Crisis in Puerto Rico
There is a humanitarian and economic crisis in Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico has been a colony of the United States since it was invaded in 1898. Puerto Ricans are unable to vote for president or Congress, enter into trade agreements, control their own borders, issue tariffs, or, unlike any other state or city or corporation, they are unable to take advantage of a bankruptcy laws to restructure their debt. There are 3 million people living in Puerto Rico and their government owes $72 billion in bonds bought up by American citizens and corporations. For the last seven years there’s been a fire sale of Puerto Rican assets, including the sale to private interests of the largest airport on the island and the largest highway. Forty percent of the population are unemployed. Three weeks ago Puerto Rican governor Alejandro Padilla signed into law an emergency bill that would allow him to suspend the counties debt repayment. $422 million is due on May 1, 2016.
Guest – Attorney Linda Backiel – long-term National Lawyers Guild member. Linda practices law in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
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Afghanistan War, CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Surveillance, Truth to Power
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From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation
Cornel West calls it the best analysis we have of the Black Lives Matter moment of the long struggle for freedom in America. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s new book, “From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation,” explores how a new generation of Black radicals–in challenging abusive policing practices, over-imprisonment of Black persons, deeply ingrained stereotypes of African Americans as especially dangerous and devoid of humanity, along with other forms of racist state oppression–is carrying on the fight for Black liberation through renewed activist uprisings. Combining historical accounts with insightful analysis, she demonstrates the interconnection between institutional racism and class oppression, reminding us how inequality and racialized state violence are byproducts of capitalism.
Guest – Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is assistant professor in the department of African American Studies at Princeton University. She writes on Black politics, social movements and racial inequality in the United States.
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Black Movement-Law Project
Several attorneys and legal activists involved in Ferguson, Baltimore and Cleveland protests have formed the Black Movement-Law Project. The Project provides legal support to local communities across the nation as they take to the streets to protest police misconduct, and systemic racism.
Their approach to community activism is itself community based: they offer legal and technical assistance based on the premise that local mass movements frequently lack legal expertise. They help arrange rapid responses to support activists on the ground by providing legal observers, know your rights trainings, and jail support. Their national network of human and civil rights attorneys offer assistance to local communities in the form of legal representation and long-term impact litigation.
Guests -Black Movement-Law Project co-founder Abi Hassen. Abi Hassen is an attorney, consultant and cofounder of the Black Movement-Law Project. He was formerly the mass defense coordinator at the National Lawyers Guild. He has a J.D. from New York University School of Law, and an undergraduate degree in computer science from The Evergreen State College. With his extensive background in labor, political and community organizing, Abi has been active at the intersection of law, technology and organizing for social justice for over a decade.
Guest – Black Movement-Law Project co-founder Nathan (Nash) Sheard, is a legal activist and organizer with the BMLP.
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