CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Right To Dissent, Truth to Power, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister, Whistleblowers
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- Alarming Growth In Urban Homeless: Commentary by Attorney Jim Lafferty
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Judge Rules Attorney Donziger Guilty of Six Contempt Charges; Faces Jail Time
Steven Donziger, who listeners will recall has been embroiled in a decades long fight against Chevron over their pollution in the Amazon rainforest the size of Rhode Island, was found guilty this July of criminal contempt by US district judge Loretta Preska. She ruled that Steven was guilty of six contempt charges for refusing to turn over evidence in a complex legal case that has pitted the lawyer directly against Chevron.
In a 245-page judgement, Judge Preska said Steven had “repeatedly and willfully” defied court orders adding that “it’s time to pay the piper,” with Steven facing six months in jail.
It has now been two years since Steven has been wearing a monitoring bracelet and under house arrests in his NYC home. He said he expected the decision and will appeal.
In 2016, US judge Lewis Kaplan granted Chevron seizure of the lawyer’s laptop and phone. When Steven appealed, he was slapped with the contempt charges and placed under house arrest.
Judge Preska’s judgment explicitly denies the lawyer has been the victim of a conspiracy, however. “Contrary to Mr Donziger’s assertion that his conviction was ‘pre-ordained’, the court finds him guilty on each count for one reason and one reason only: Mr Donziger did that with which he is charged. Period,” she wrote.
DonzigerDefense.com
ChevronToxico.com
ChevronInEcuador.com
Guest – Attorney Martin Garbus, one of three pro bono lawyers representing Donziger in an attempt to get his law license restored. Garbus has a long and distinguished career as a civil rights and first amendment litigator. Attorney Martin Garbus has represented Nelson Mandela, Daniel Ellsberg, and Cesar Chavez and worked in Rwanda, China, and the Soviet Union, among other countries.
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Samuel Moyn’s Unprincipled Attack on Human Rights Giant Michael Ratner is Shameful
A controversy was ignited two weeks ago when the New York Review of Books published an article by Yale Law Professor Samuel Moyn. The article singled out human rights attorney Michael Ratner, the cofounder of Law Disorder Radio. Ratner was the longtime president of the Center for Constitution Rights. He died five years ago. Professor Moyn uses him as a whipping boy to support his bizarre theory that punishing war crimes prolonged the wars in the Middle East by making them more palatable.
Professor Moyn disingenuously claims that enforcing the conventions against torture and opposing illegal war are mutually exclusive.
Moyn’s book Humane: How the United States abandoned Peace and Reinvented War was recently published. It was a chapter from this book that appeared in the New York Review of Books. Moyn makes the false and astonishing claim that “no one perhaps has done more than Ratner to enable a novel sanitize version of permanent war.”
Moyn wrote that Ratner and the CCR prolonged the Middle Eastern wars by suing the Bush- Cheney administration to stop them from abolishing the right of habeas corpus for Muslims the American government had imprisoned on its offshore prison in Guantánamo. The right of habeas corpus is ancient. It allows for a person held by the government to be informed of the charges against him, to be allowed to have a lawyer, and to be given a trial.
Guest – Marjorie Cohn, former criminal law defense attorney and professor emeritus at the Thomas Jefferson school of Law. She was the past president of the National Lawyer Guild and is a member of the bureau of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. Professor Cohn has published four books about the war on terror. Last week she had published an article in the prestigious online magazine Jurist titled Samuel Moyn’s Unprincipled Attack on Human Rights Giant Michael Ratner is Shameful.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Torture, Truth to Power, War Resister
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David Gilbert Granted Clemency
My 77 year old friend David Gilbert was granted clemency by Governor Cuomo on August 23, 2021. David had served 40 years in almost every maximum-security prison in the state of New York. He had been sentenced to 75 years to life for his role as a getaway driver in the infamous 1980 Brinks armored truck robbery in in Rockland County. He was convicted of felony murder. Though he didn’t shoot anybody. Two Policeman and a security guard were killed. The law of felony murder states that if you are part of the crime even though you didn’t kill anybody you are also guilty of murder.
Cuomo granted clemency when he had one foot out the door with a moving van at the governor’s mansion and only five hours left as governor. David had support from many people including many influential people like two Nobel prize winners; one of them was Bishop Desmond Tutu, a hero of the South African anti-apartheid movement.
David’s great achievement was keeping his revolutionary politics and his health both mental and physical while serving those four decades of confinement, torment, and poor food. He wrote two books including one titled No Surrender. When my wife Debby and I would visit him it was always an up for us. He kept our spirits up. He would bound in to the visiting room and give us a hug. We will talk politics straight through for five hours. He was up to the minute on political events in America and around the world. He read widely. He subscribed to the New York Times which came three days late. A friend of his sent him a one hundred page collection of articles from the Internet every month. David never got a disciplinarian infraction over the course of all those years. He mentored many young people with whom he would correspond. Many would come visit him. Sometimes all the way to Wende Prison in Buffalo or to Dannemora in the Finger Lakes.
Because of the grant of clemency David is now eligible for parole and will soon come up before the parole board. They don’t necessarily have to let him out. We will keep up support and hope that sooner rather than later David Gilbert will be home and present amongst us. He is the real thing: A revolutionary leader and thinker. David, I’m behalf of all your friends and supporters we congratulate you.
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Remembering The Life Of Glen Ford
Glen Ford died last July 28 of lung cancer. I knew Glen the last seven years of his life. I first met him in 2014 after a speech that he gave at Harlem’s Riverside Church church on the occasion of the 7th anniversary of the Black Agenda Report of which he was the executive editor. The two other editors were Margaret Kimberley, who has taken over as the editor, and the late Bruce Dixon of Chicago who died two years ago. They were a formidable threesome. That night he spoke about what he called the Black misleadership class, a description he coined, and how it was an enemy of the movement. He said the Democratic party, which they populate, was not the lesser of two evils but the most effective of two evils.
In particular, he zeroed in on New Jersey Senator Cory Booker. I kept in touch with Glen. He was a guest on Law And Disorder several times.
I helped assemble a selection of his writings titled The Black Agenda which will very soon be published by OR books. Two months ago the publisher of OR books, Colin Robinson and I drove out to New Jersey to visit Glen.
He had just got out of the hospital where they took fluid out of his cancerous lung. He was somewhat frail but pretty chipper. We ate bagels and cream cheese at the dining room table and talked politics for two hours. As we left Colin remarked that it was a shame we hadn’t recorded our conversation. Glen was brilliant. Glen was the real thing. A Black nationalist and a socialist, as he described himself. He was a former Black Panther and usually wore a black beret when he spoke. He ended his speeches with his right arm held high in the air saying “power to the people.“
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The Black Misleadership Class Versus the Movement and its Legacy
We go now to hear Glen Ford speaking at the Black Agenda Report 7th anniversary gathering at Harlem’s Riverside Church. The theme of the event was ““The Black Misleadership Class Versus the Movement and its Legacy.” Ford gives strong criticism of newly elected New Jersey Senator Cory Booker as the essence of Black misleadership, showing the many ties of the current Newark mayor to corporate America.
Glen Ford is the Black Agenda Report executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
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American Spring: Unfolding Crisis
The Chinese word for crisis consists of two characters. One means danger, the other means opportunity. We currently are in an historically unprecedented situation fraught with both danger and possibilities. Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin once remarked that sometimes nothing happens in decades and other times decades happen in a few weeks. This is our situation now. We see an American spring unfolding.
The public lynching of George Floyd has triggered massive outpourings in several thousands of American cities, both large and small. Black Lives Matter is supported by a majority of Americans including a majority of whites. This kind of broad solidarity was absent during the time of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
The demonstrations are in large part led by people of color, mostly young people. Elected officials and traditional civil rights leaders are not leading the current uprising. As the L.A. Progressive has written, “The gross underlying inequality, racially and more broadly economically, affects every aspect of life in the US. and is the root cause of the volcanic anger irruption against the veneer of obsolete institutions.“
Guest – Glen Ford, editor of the Black Agenda Report. Ford founded the Black Agenda Report and has edited it since 2006. He was a founding member of the Washington chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists and he has delivered presentations at many colleges and universities.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry
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“I Have Nothing to Hide” and 20 Other Myths About Surveillance and Privacy
Should we give up our privacy all together because we think we have nothing to hide? This is the perhaps the most pervasive of the myths about surveillance and privacy that Heidi Boghosian explores in her new book titled I Have Nothing to Hide and 20 Other Myths About Surveillance and Privacy.
Other popular misconceptions detailed in the book include the notion that surveillance makes the nation safer, no one wants to spy on kids, police don’t monitor social media, metadata doesn’t reveal much about me, Congress and the courts protect us from surveillance, and there’s nothing I can do to stop surveillance.
Privacy is a fundamental right, and one that we often take for granted in the digital era. In her new book from Beacon Press, Heidi debunks some of the reasons these myths have evolved and why we unquestioningly believe them. She warns of the dangers they present to our freedoms and suggests ways to protect ourselves from the government and corporations.
Guest – Attorney Heidi Boghosian is a New York City attorney, activist, and nonprofit director. She currently runs the A.J. Muste Memorial Institute, a charitable organization providing support to activist organizations. Before that she was executive director of the National Lawyers Guild. Her book I Have Nothing to Hide: And 20 Other Myths About Surveillance and Privacy was published in July 2021 (Beacon Press) and her earlier book Spying on Democracy was published in 2013.
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Julian Assange Update: Attorney Marjorie Cohn
The Julian Assange case is the most important civil liberties first amendment freedom to write/freedom to learn case of our times. Democracy cannot thrive without a free press that watches over the government and tells the truth. The government wants secrecy. We need transparency.
Julian Assange was a young Australian computer genius when he figured out a way for whistle blowers to reveal truths of government corruption, duplicity, and war crimes. Whistleblowers could report these things with anonymity.
The great Australian journalist John Pilger describes his accomplishments: “ WikiLeaks, of which Assange is founder and publisher, exposed the secrets and lies that led to the invasion of Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, the murderous role of the Pentagon in dozens of countries, the blueprint for the 20-year catastrophe in Afghanistan, the attempts by Washington to overthrow elected governments such as Venezuela‘s, the collusion between nominal political opponents (Bush and Obama), and the CIA Vault campaign that turned your mobile phone, even your TV set, into a spy in your mitts. And there is much more.“
The US government soon realized Julian Assange had to be crushed and silenced. Years ago the Department of Defense issued orders to smear his name. He was falsely accused of everything from rape to abusing his pet cat. Their smear campaign was largely effective with many leftists and liberals give only lukewarm support to Julian who now sits in solitary in Britain’s infamous Belmarsh prison awaiting extradition to a court in eastern Virginia which will certainly convict him and imprison him for the rest of his life. He faces charges of spying under the 1917 Espionage Act, which was never intended to be used against journalists but is now used regularly against whistleblowers.
He is in terrible physical and psychological shape. A lower court judge in Great Britain recently ruled that it’s likely that he will commit suicide and refused America’s request to extradite him. But an appeals court in Britain wants to take another look at the lower court’s evaluation. A hearing is scheduled for October 27th.
Guest – Attorney Marjorie Cohn is a retired constitutional law professor from the Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego. She is a past president of the National Lawyers Guild and a regular columnist in the online magazine ”Truthout” where she has a recent column on Julian Assange.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Supreme Court, Surveillance, Torture, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Charges Dropped Against Pipeline Activists
The climate movement won a significant victory on July 13 when all charges were dropped against 16 pipeline protesters and a journalist. The local district attorney in Saint Martinsville, Louisiana rejected all criminal charges and vowed not to prosecute them for alleged violations of Louisiana’s anti-protest amendments to their critical infrastructure law.
The Bayou Bridge pipeline is the tail end of the infamous 1172 mile long Dakota access pipeline which brings dirty oil from North Dakota to the Gulf of Mexico. The end of the pipeline runs from Texas to Louisiana.
In 2018, in the midst of fierce opposition to the Bainbridge Pipeline and at the urging of an industry association to Louisiana legislator added pipelines to the definition of critical infrastructure to significantly raise the penalties for people protesting pipeline project. Those found guilty could be punished with five years in prison with or without hard labor.
This critical infrastructure law is part of a national effort to crack down an environmental activists across the US. The law in Louisiana was adopted from model legislation put forward by ALEC, the corporate funded politically conservative group. Similar legislation aimed at pipeline protesters has been introduced more than 23 times in 18 states since 2017 and is in effect in 15.
Karen Savage, an independent journalist who was arrested, said that “the first amendment guarantees water protectors the right to protest and protects my right as a journalist to report those protest without fear of retribution.“
Guest – Anne White Hat, one of the people arrested and charged under the law. Whitehat Botanicals
Guest – Attorney Pam Spees, one of the team of attorneys that handled the criminal defense case. She’s also representing Anne White Hat in a case challenging the constitutionality of the Louisiana law. Whitehat v. Landry
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Continued Erosion Of Voting Rights In The United States
We are in the middle of a second great disenfranchisement in America. The first was after the Civil War reconstruction ended and Black people were stripped of their right to vote and their ability to hold office. This disenfranchisement lasted almost 100 years until the modern civil rights movement of the 1960s.
Legislatures in Republican run states are imposing new voting restrictions particularly on non-white voters. The Brennan Center found that as of June 20th, 17 states enacted 28 new laws restricting the ability to vote since the start of the year.
Republican run states hastened to restrict voting by mail and in person, voting hours and locations, and the implementation of voter registration and voter ID requirements.
Georgia banned giving food or water to voters waiting in long lines, lines that were caused by reduced access to ballot casting locations in Black precincts. They get away with this by raising the imaginary problem of voter fraud.
The Supreme Court has six reactionary judges and three liberals. Three of the reactionaries were added to the court by Donald Trump. The reactionaries recent decision in Brnovich v Democratic National Committee delivered a huge hit to American democracy, such as it is. The decision makes the Court look like an obvious political institution where justices are simply partisan politicians with robes.
In the recent Brnovich decision, the court eviscerated the strongest remaining sections of the Voting Rights Act rights of 1965 which held that election laws and voting rules that actually had a racially discriminatory impact could be blocked.
The first major blow to the voting rights act was in 2013 when the court held in Shelby versus Holder that federal authorities could no longer block regressive new election laws or voting rules in jurisdictions with histories of discrimination.
“Effectively, most of the Voting Rights Act is now dead,” declared Hamlin University scholar David Schultz who specializes in elections.
Guest – Marjorie Cohn, professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law where she taught from 1991-2016, and a former president of the National Lawyers Guild. She lectures, writes, and provides commentary for local, regional, national and international media outlets. Professor Cohn has served as a news consultant for CBS News and a legal analyst for Court TV, and a legal and political commentator on the BBC, CNN, NPR, and other major stations.
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Civil Liberties, Human Rights, NSA Spying, Political Prisoner, Surveillance, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Source For The Intercept Outed, Faces 10 Years In Prison
In 2019 the Department of Justice indicted Daniel Hale—a former intelligence analyst for the U.S. Air Force and NSA—for giving classified national defense information to Jeremy Scahill for the online publication The Intercept. The events in question took place between 2013 and 2015. In late March, Daniel pleaded guilty to one count of violating the Espionage Act, punishable by up to 10 years in prison. He is scheduled to be sentenced by U.S. District Judge Liam O’Grady on July 27, 2021.
Hale was named as the source of several documents that revealed grave government wrong-doing, much related to the Obama administration’s expansion of the drone war and other counterterrorism programs that lacked adequate oversight and have brought about as yet unknown numbers of civilian deaths abroad. One document published in the Intercept in 2014 revealed that most of the individuals in the government’s terror suspect database had no affiliation with any terror group.
Many have criticized the Intercept for its failure of source protection. As we recently covered in an interview with Reality Winner’s attorney, The Intercept’s lapses resulted in her identifying information being shared by the Intercept with the government.
StandWithDaniel
Guest – William Neuheisel, the Development and Program Manager for the Whistleblower and Source Protection Program, (WHISPeR), at ExposeFacts. William brings nearly a decade of marketing, communications, and development experience to WHISPeR as well as an expertise and passion for privacy, civil liberties, and First Amendment advocacy.
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Aerial Investigation Research Pilot Program And Persistent Tracking
As the nation erupts in protests against racially-infused police violence, the Baltimore Police Department has just launched a six-month, day-time aerial surveillance experiment. A Texas billionaire has funded the project that is being operated by an Ohio-based company, Persistent Surveillance Systems. The plane flies overhead and records the movements of everyone in the city.
Michael Harrison, Baltimore Police Commissioner, has justified the nearly $4 million experiment by saying, “There is no expectation of privacy on a public street, a sidewalk.”
The Aerial Investigation Research Pilot Program is, by contract, limited to monitoring such felony crimes as robberies, car jackings, shootings and homicides. Images recorded are, in theory, to be used solely in criminal investigations and will be stored for 45 days. A first prong of the program was conducted covertly in 2016 under a different police commissioner.
The ACLU of Maryland calls this initiative the most comprehensive surveillance of a U.S. city in history. ACLU Senior Staff attorney David Rocah said, “It’s the virtual equivalent of having a police officer follow a resident every time they walk out the door, and if that happened in real life, all of us would understand the huge privacy implications in doing that.”
Guest – ACLU Senior Staff attorney David Rocah has worked on a number of significant cases involving free speech, police misconduct, privacy, election law and more. In 2011 he was an inaugural recipient of the James Baldwin Medal for Civil Rights. David previously worked as a Senior Trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division at the US Dept of Justice, focusing on police misconduct and conditions in prisons, jails and other state institutions.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Crony Capitalism, Gaza, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, NSA Spying, Political Prisoner, Supreme Court, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Public Intellectual: The Life of a Citizen Pilgrim by Professor Richard Falk
If we are ever to have a world not threatened by catastrophic climate change and devastating nuclear war we will need a world governed by respect for the rule of law, democracy, and the democratic right of peoples to self- determination. After the World War II, the United Nations was established in 1945 in an effort to prevent future wars. In this it has failed. The United States of America has been at war almost every year since its beginning and almost every year since the 50’s starting with Korea, then Vietnam, then Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya.
Today the United States has 800 bases abroad in 80 countries. It spends $753 billion a year on the military, which is 53 cents out of every tax dollar.
Michael Ratner, a founder of Law And Disorder Radio and who practiced human rights law internationally, used to say that you cannot have imperialism abroad and democracy at home. He said it was a truth established by the decline of both the Greek and Roman empires thousands of years ago.
Guest – International Law Professor Richard Falk who is still teaching and going strong at age 90. He has recently had published his magnificent memoir titled Public Intellectual: The Life of a Citizen Pilgrim. Professor Falk is a leading international law professor, prominent activist, public author, and a pioneer thinker dedicated to peace and justice. He taught at Princeton University for 40 years and was active in seeking an end to the Vietnam war, a better understanding of Iran, a just solution for Israel/Palestine, and improved democracy everywhere. He also served as the UN Special Rapporteur for Occupied Palestine. He has written 50 books. Since 2009 he has been nominated annually for the Nobel Peace Prize.
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In Defense of Whistleblowers: Attorney Sarah Alexander
James Glenn was working for NetDesign, a Cisco Systems reseller in Denmark when he came across a vulnerability in software made for a line of Cisco’s video surveillance cameras. The flaw made it easy for would-be hackers to access the systems running the devices and to penetrate the systems on a deeper level after gaining entry. Glenn made the discovery after taking part in his company’s “own medicine” initiative, where staffers test equipment and software for security holes. In 2008 he reported the issue to his employer and to Cisco, assuming that he’d be praised for finding the problem. Instead, he was fired.
Cisco Systems is one of the world’s leading information technology and networking companies. With a market cap of close to $195 billion, Cisco dominates the networking and communications devices industry. Glenn notes that he learned the cameras and software were still being used by the Los Angeles International Airport, and in 2010 he spoke with law enforcement personnel about his concerns regarding LAX. According to court filings cited by Glenn’s attorneys, Cisco failed to fix the vulnerability until an updated version of the software was released in 2012. It then took the company 3 more years to release a security advisory to companies using the previous, flawed version of the software.
Stories like this are all too common. Whistleblowers frequently lose their jobs and suffer significant personal hardships as a result of coming forward on behalf of the public’s interest.
Guest – Attorney Sarah Poppy Alexander of the law firm Constantine, Cannon. Poppy represents whistleblowers and government entities in so called “qui tam” lawsuits in both federal and state court, as well as under the IRS and Securities and Exchange Commission’s whistleblower programs. Poppy has been selected to the Northern California Super Lawyers Rising Stars list every year since 2016. Before joining Constantine Cannon, Poppy was an associate attorney at Rosen, Bien, Galvan & Grunfeld LLP, where she worked to ensure prisoners received appropriate medical and mental health care and adequate accommodations for disabilities in jails and prisons. Poppy graduated from Harvard Law School and holds an M.A. in Political Theory from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.A. from Yale College.
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