CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, War Resister
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UN Panel: Julian Assange Has Been “Arbitrarily Detained”
Validating what WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s legal team has been long asserting, the United Nations working group on arbitrary detention recently found that Assange has indeed been subject to arbitrary detention. The working group called on Britain and Sweden to end his deprivation of liberty.
As listeners will recall, Assange was arrested in 2010, and has been has been staying in the Ecuadorian embassy in London since 2012, when he sought asylum. Assange is wanted for questioning over an allegation of rape in 2010, which he denies.
Great Britain and Sweden rejected the UN panel’s findings. Prime Minister David Cameron has said that Assange should leave the embassy and submit himself to a Swedish arrest warrant over allegations of rape to bring an end to what he called “this whole sorry saga.” Cameron dismissed as “ridiculous” the findings of a UN panel and said that Assange had in fact detained himself.
Guest – Carey Shenkman is a First Amendment and human rights attorney working for Michael Ratner, President Emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). Formerly at CCR, Carey worked on litigation on behalf of the press in the court-martial of whistle-blower Chelsea Manning. Carey holds two degrees in mathematics, and is an alumnus of NYU Law School, where he was an editor on the NYU Law Review. He can be reached on Twitter @CareyShenkman
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Remembering People’s Lawyer Myron Beldock
Myron Beldock, founding partner of the law firm Beldock Levine and Hoffman, peoples lawyer and longtime National Lawyers Guild member, passed away peacefully on February 1. He was 86 years old. Jim Dwyer of the New York Times wrote that Myron “had an important hand in cases that helped define the landscape of 20th-century law, and in others that merely righted the grievous wrongs done to unknown people.” Members of the National Lawyers Guild knew Myron not only as a brilliant attorney who took on the seemingly intractible cases of the wrongfully convicted, but also as a mentor, advisor and inspiration to a multitude of other people’s lawyerss. His death is a monumental loss to the criminal defense and civil rights bars. In the 1960s, Myron was one of the attorneys for George Whitmore, who dropped out of school in the eighth grade and was picked up by police in Brooklyn in connection with several rapes and three murders. Police interrogated him until he falsely confessed, even though he was in South Jersey at the time of some of the crimes watching Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech. The confession was 61 typed pages in length. The US Supreme Court, in the 1966 Miranda decision, called the Whitmore confession the “most recent conspicuous example of police coercion.” And as a result of this coerced confession, New York State abandoned the death penalty in 1965.
More recently, in 2013, Myron appeared in court on behalf of Everton Wagstaffe, who along with Reginald Connor, was convicting soley on the word of a crack-addicted police informant, of kidnapping a teenage girl found dead in 1992 in East New York. Mr. Wagstaffe spent two decades compiling records to show that the informant’s and detectives account were impossible. He wrote to Myron from prison, seeking his help. Myron worked with attorneys from the Innocence Project, the firm Davis Polk & Wardwell and the Legal Aid Society. In September 2014, the of the convictions of Mr. Wagstaffe and Mr. Connor were vacated. Myron was well known for securing the freedom of former boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter after he had served 19 years in prison for three murders in New Jersey. He also represented Yusef Salaam, one of five young black and Latino men who falsely confessed on videotape to the 1989 beating and rape of a woman who became known as the Central Park jogger. After serving terms of 7½ years to 13½ years, the five were exonerated in 2002, when an imprisoned man confessed to the crime and prosecutors confirmed his account with DNA evidence. We at Law and Disorder interviewed Myron in 2014, and remember him fondly as we take a listen to parts of that conversation:
In April of this year, celebrated boxer and prisoner-rights activist Rubin “Hurricane” Carter died at the age of 76. He had become an international symbol of racial injustice after his wrongful murder conviction forced him to spend 19 years in prison. Carter was arrested for a triple murder in his hometown of Patterson, New Jersey. He said he was innocent, was convicted by an all white jury, and sentenced to three consecutive life sentences. In 1976, the New Jersey State Supreme Court overturned his conviction on grounds the authorities withheld material evidence from the defense. But Carter was convicted again in a second trial in 1976. In 1985, that conviction was overturned by a U.S. district court judge, who concluded the state made an unconstitutional appeal to racial prejudice. In 1988, the Passaic, New Jersey, Prosecutor’s Office dropped all charges against Carter.
Attorney Myron Beldock:
- He was a defendant in a criminal case in New Jersey involved the triple shooting and three murders of 3 people in the Lafayette bar in Patterson, New Jersey.
- He and his co-defendant John Artis were represented at the first trial and they lost, (convicted) and Rubin started his campaign to get out of jail and wrote his book the 16th Round.
- He was charismatic and powerful, a great thinker, very very intellectually strong person as well as being spiritually strong.
- Almost a typical case, high profile case, where you get people who are vulnerable and easily manipulated because of their need for their own benefits to falsely testify.
- We set aside the convictions when we learned about the benefits that were given to the witnesses.
- We went again to trial in 1975. At that time the atmosphere had changed. There was a new prosecutor, they came up with a theory that it was actually a racial revenge killing.
- Earlier that night, a white former bar owner had shot and killed the black purchaser of the bar from him.
- That was always known and there was no motives attributed to the killings in the first trial but the second trial really based on speculation and bias, they argued persuasively to the jury that this was a racial revenge killing.
- Mr. Bellow who was the supposed eye witness who testified, there were two of them in the first trial, was being questioned by me on the stand as to why he recanted his recantation. The prosecutor persuaded him to again tell the story he told at the first trial, identifying Rubin and John and I was trying to establish that they had falsely manipulated him when I was pulled into the chambers along with my co-counsel Louis Steele who represented John Artis and told that if I question him further, the jury would learn that he passed the lie detector test, supporting what he said at the first trial. Supporting his identification (of Rubin Carter)
- We did have that test. It seemed like that was the result because that’s the way it was written. In fact that was a fraud.
- The polygraph results were completely opposite of what they were purported to be.
- The prosecutors in that case, two of them became judges, rewarded for what they did.
- Rubin was not a popular person, he had been an outspoken civil rights person. It was a cesspool of rumors without any evidentiary basis.
- The entire community there almost in Passaic New Jersey treated us like we were the devil.
- It was the coldest community reception I ever encountered in any place.
- Rubin would call every year (from Canada) on the anniversary of his release. He got a group of Canadian do-gooders and free thinkers to join him in fighting to set aside convictions for people who were wrongly convicted in Canada.
- He would vet the briefs that we sent. He was a very unusual client.
- Rubin refused to act as a prisoner because he wasn’t anyone who was guilty he said.
- So, he didn’t eat prison food, he didn’t take prisoner assignments, he didn’t wear prison clothes and somehow or other he was able to pull that off.
- People think of it as being another time, I’ve been practicing law long enough and I don’t think anything changes.
- The same kind of bias runs deep throughout the community its just masked somewhat differently.
- You make your luck in these cases, you have to forge ahead.
- His insistence on being an innocent person and will not compromise with the system is the kind of inspiration that pushes us on as lawyers.
Guest – Attorney Myron Beldock, graduated from Erasmus Hall High School in 1946, Hamilton College in 1950 and Harvard Law School in 1958. He served in the U.S. Army from 1951 to 1954 and as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of New York from 1958 to 1960. After several years as an associate with a small New York City firm and as a single practitioner, he brought together two friends and former Assistant U.S. Attorneys, Elliot Hoffman and Larry Levine, to form Beldock Levine & Hoffman in 1964. He is best described, by his own definition, as an old-time general practitioner. He concentrates on trial and appellate litigation, in state and federal courts, in defense of criminal charges and in pursuing plaintiffs’ civil rights actions based on police and prosecutorial misconduct and employer and governmental discrimination. He regularly consults and defends charges of professional discipline. He represents plaintiffs and defendants in a wide variety of personal and business related matters, working with others in the firm’s various practice areas.
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Sex Workers Project And Human Trafficking
Sienna Baskin is the Managing Director of the Sex Workers Project at the Urban Justice Center in New York City, where she has worked since 2007. At the Sex Workers Project she both directs a team that provides legal services to sex workers and is responsible for the Project’s policy and law reform work. Sienna also just returned from a Fullbright Fellowship in New Zealand – a country that completely decriminalized sex work/prostitution in 2003 and she went to learn what effects – positive and negative – decriminalization has had, both for people engaged in sex work and for the larger society.
Guest – Sienna Baskin -Managing Director of the Sex Workers Project. Ms. Baskin directs the legal services and policy advocacy of SWP. Ms. Baskin trains and supervises legal staff in providing direct legal representation, public education and outreach. She promotes reform of laws and policies affecting sex workers and survivors of trafficking, and oversees the production of SWP’s human rights documentation reports. Ms. Baskin also provides direct legal education, advice and representation to sex workers and survivors of trafficking on housing, criminal, employment, and immigration matters. Ms. Baskin joined SWP as an Equal Justice Works fellow in 2007. Sienna is a graduate of Hampshire College and the City University of New York School of Law.
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Civil Liberties, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Military Tribunal, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, Truth to Power
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Public Water Crisis Flint Michigan: Attorney Bill Goodman
We take another look at the public water crisis in Flint, Michigan. The legal cases being brought are being litigated at the intersection of environmental racism and capitalist austerity. Flint, a predominantly impoverished African-American city north of Detroit, had an emergency manager imposed on it by Tea Party Governor Rick Snyder. The emergency manager, acting outside of democratic controls, switched the clean water supplied to the city from the Detroit water system to the polluted Flint River claiming this would save money. Chemicals added to the filthy Flint River water caused lead from the supply pipes to leech into the drinking water. This caused lead poisoning to thousands of children in Flint. Lead poisoning is known to cause irreversible brain damage. FlintWaterClassAction.com
Guest – Bill Goodman is the attorney for a number of victims of water poisoning in Flint, Michigan. He’s a leading civil rights attorney in Michigan and the former Legal Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights.
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Remembering Attorney Michael Kennedy
We speak today with Bernadine Dohrn about the late Attorney Michael Kennedy. Kennedy died two weeks ago in New York City from cancer at the age of 78. He was one of the great civil rights in criminal law defense attorneys of his generation. Kennedy graduated from law school in California and began his career representing Cesar Chavez and the migrant farm workers. He also represented Black Panther leader Huey Newton and SDS leaders Rennie Davis and Bernadine Dohrn and Native American protesters at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. He later moved to New York and became staff counsel for the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee where he represented opponents of the war in Vietnam and supporters of the Irish freedom struggle.
Guest – Bernadine Dohrn, former leader of SDS and longtime member of the National Lawyers Guild where she served a student organizer in the late 60s. Until recently Bernadine Dorh taught law at Northwestern University Law School supporting justice for juveniles.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Targeting Muslims, Truth to Power
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Updates:
- Co-host Michael Smith Makes Presidential Election Prediction
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Mumia Abu-Jamal Health Lawsuit Update
For three days in late December, the 3rd Circuit Federal District Court heard Mumia Abu-Jamal’s lawsuit against the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections for refusal to provide him treatment for Hepatitis C. Testimony from Dr. Paul Noel, Chief Medical Officer of the Pennsylvania DOC revealed that under the DOC’s new protocols only 5 out of an estimated 5,000 prisoners with chronic Hepatitis C were being treated with the new anti-viral drug beginning this fall – less than 1/10th of one percent.
The trial ended with a stunning revelation that the lawyer representing the DOC had knowingly introduced false evidence. Dr. Noel was the final witness; he stated that an affidavit introduced by defense attorney Laura Neal bearing his signature was NOT his actual testimony. It quickly became evident that the DOC attorney had ignored Dr. Noel’s repeated requests not to insert an erroneous paragraph into the document–in other words, she tampered with the evidence. This same altered affidavit had been a key piece of evidence used by a PA magistrate judge in September to deny Mumia’s injunction against the DOC.
Guest – Bob Boyle, one of Mumia’s attorneys and a long time National Lawyers Guild member.
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Guantanamo Bay Prison: 14 years
As of January 2016 more than 100 men remain at the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. While our own Michael Ratner was president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a network of hundreds of lawyers were at the forefront of the legal battle against indefinite detention and torture at Guantanamo. After the Center won landmark Supreme Court cases that established U.S. court jurisdiction over the prison and affirming detainee rights to habeas corpus review, hundreds of Muslim men and boys were gradually released from the offshore prison. Keep in mind the majority of the men at that prison weren’t charged with a crime. Many have been cleared for release yet remain trapped by political inaction or other bureaucracy. The pressure from concerned activist groups, organizations and citizens calling on the president of the United States to close Guantanamo has gained momentum.
Guest – Aliya Hussain, the Advocacy Program Manager for the Guantanamo Global Justice Initiative at the Center for Constitutional Rights.
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Drinking Water Crisis in Flint, Michigan
A severe water crisis in the city of Flint, Michigan is attracting mounting concern from around the country. Politicians, celebrities and even presidential candidates are focusing on the toxic tap water in one of Michigan’s biggest and most troubled cities. When the state took charge of the City’s budget during a financial emergency, it decided to temporarily switch Flint’s water source from Lake Huron to the Flint River to save money until a new supply line to Lake Huron was finished. After the April 2014 changeover, residents complained about water looking, smelling, and tasting odd. Virginia Tech researchers revealed that the water was highly corrosive. A class-action lawsuit alleges the state Department of Environmental Quality failed to treat the water for corrosion, as federal law requires, and because so many service lines to Flint are made of lead, the toxic element leached into the water of the city’s homes. Although the city switched back to the Lake Huron water supply in October, the damage was already done to the lead pipes. The state is now handing out filters and bottled water with the National Guard.
Guest – Sheila Foster, the Albert A. Wash Professor of Law at Fordham Law School and Faculty Co-Director of the Urban Law center at Fordham University.
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Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, NSA Spying, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, War Resister
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Updates:
- Volkswagen Could Face Up to $80 Billion in Penalties From U.S. Emissions Lawsuit
- Co-host Heidi Boghosian Reads A Poem By Bill Ayers
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Lawyers You’ll Like: Attorney Abdeen Jabara
Abdeen Jabara is a New York based civil rights attorney and co-founder of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. He was involved in a groundbreaking court case in the 1970s that forced the NSA to acknowledge it had been spying on him since 1967. At the time of the spying, Abdeen was a lawyer in Detroit representing Arab-American clients and people being targeted by the FBI. The disclosure was the first time the NSA admitted it had spied on an American.
He also took on the cases of people harassed by the FBI which had stepped up efforts to surveil Arab activists in the aftermath of the 1967 war, when the U.S. alliance with Israel was solidified. Abdeen was caught up in what was called “Operation Boulder,” a Nixon administration-era program that placed Arabs under surveillance.
Guest – Abdeen Jabara is a member of the legal advisory board for the American Muslim Council, a past president of the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee, a former board member of the Center for Constitutional Rights and former co-counsel with Lynne Stewart for Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman. He is an active member of the National Lawyers Guild.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, War Resister
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U.S. Pressed on Israeli Settlement Tax Breaks
The U.S. Treasury has long turned a blind eye to as many as 150 nonprofits that funnel up to $1 billion a year to Israeli settlements, according to a federal complaint filed in December. It now finds itself as a defendant in a just filed a lawsuit by Washington DC attorney Mark McMahon. Rather than engaging in “charitable activities,” these nonprofits—supported by US donations—are allegedly fueling land theft, forcible expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their land, demolition of homes and paramilitary activities carried out by armed Israeli settlers against Palestinian civilians. Some of the tax-exempt entities include the Hebron Fund, the Gush Etzion Foundation, American Friends of Ariel and Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces.
Pro bono attorney for the plaintiffs in the case, Martin McMahon, claims that huge tax deductions are being taken that support ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Proving the allegations could lead the U.S. to designate these entities as “special designated global terrorists,” stripping them of their tax-exempt status and freezing their assets, he says. In addition to entrenching Israel’s occupation of Palestine, the complaint alleges that these organizations have undermined U.S. foreign policy in support of a Palestinian state and helped breed the conditions from which Palestinian violent resistance emerges. It alleges that the Treasury’s “double standard” in enforcing its own regulations has led to the proliferation of the Israeli settlement enterprise, resulting in up to $1 trillion in lost U.S. tax revenue.
Guest – Attorney Martin McMahon, the founding member and managing partner of Martin F. McMahon & Associates. He has extensive experience in the securities industry, civil rights litigation, and has argued in over 10 appellate cases before the D.C. Court of Appeals and Maryland Court of Appeals.
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Islamophobia 2016
After 9/11, and now in response to recent events around the globe, thousands of innocent Muslims continue to be monitored, entrapped, and arrested in the name of subverting radicalized terrorism. Hateful rhetoric from presidential candidate Donald Trump and others have inflamed anti-Muslim stereotypes and led to numerous instances of hate crimes.
Joining us to discuss law enforcement ideologies and strategies, as well as the general public’s perceptions of Muslims, is Arun Kundnani, author of the 2014 book The Muslims Are Coming! Islamophobia, extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror.
Guest – Arun Kundani – Born and bred in London, Arun moved to New York in 2010 on a fellowship with the Open Society Foundations. He lives in Harlem. He is also the author of The End of Tolerance: Racism in 21st Century Britain, selected as a New Statesman book of the year in 2007. A former editor of the journal Race & Class, he attended Cambridge University, holds a PhD from London Metropolitan University, and teaches at New York University.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Crony Capitalism, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power
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Mumia Abu-Jamal Lawsuit Update
Mumia Abu-Jamal has gone to federal court in Scranton, Pennsylvania to get an order compelling the state of Pennsylvania to provide him with medical care for Hepatitis C. Mumia has suffered symptoms of slurred words, elephants skin, scales and bloody cracks in his skin on 90 percent of his body. Other symptoms include extreme weakness, swelling of his limbs and loss of mental acuity. Mumia Abu-Jamal is being represented by Bret Grote of the Abolitionist Law Center and by Robert Boyle a National Lawyers Guild lawyer and prisoner’s rights advocate.
Guest – David Lindorff, is an American investigative reporter, a columnist for CounterPunch, and a contributor to Businessweek, The Nation, Extra! and Salon.com. His work was highlighted by Project Censored 2004, 2011 and 2012. Born in 1949, Lindorff lives just outside Philadelphia. He currently writes for ThisCantBeHappening.
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The General’s Son, Journey of an Israeli in Palestine
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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Trotskyists on Trial: Free Speech and Political Persecution Since the Age of FDR
The American war against Iraq, originally called Operation Iraqi liberation, (O.I.L.) was not fought, as we can clearly see now, to bring freedom and democracy to Iraq. But what about World War II, often called “the good war”? There were socialists indicted tried and convicted for opposing the American government’s aims in World War II, which they said was an imperialist war for markets and territories. They were falsely accused of conspiracy to overthrow the American government by force and violence, a thought crime, and imprisoned in Minnesota before the American government got involved in the war, that is, during peacetime. This was accomplished by the Roosevelt government, urged on by J Edgar Hoover and the FBI. The indictments and convictions were secured under the recently passed alien and registration act, known as the Smith Act, named after its sponsor Howard K Smith, a southern anti-labor racist democratic senator. Back then in 1941 fear was marshaled against socialists union liters who were called subversives just as fear is used now against Muslims and terrorists.
Guest – Professor Donna Haverty-Stacke, is an Associate Professor of History and Roosevelt House Faculty Associate at Hunter College, CUNY where she teaches courses in U.S. cultural, urban and labor history. She received her BA in American Studies from Georgetown University in May 1994. As the recipient of the Joseph L. Allbritton Scholarship she studied at Brasenose College, Oxford University where she earned an MSt in Historical Research in 1995 and an MLitt in Modern History in 1997. She then attended Cornell University, where she graduated with a PhD in History in May 2003.
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