CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Prison Industry, Surveillance, Torture, War Resister
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Updates:
- Abu Anas al-Libi Kidapping Update
- Glenn Greenwald Leaves The Guardian
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The Coalition of Immokalee Workers March On Union Square For Wendy’s Fair Food Campaign
We hear the voices of marchers involved in supporting the Coalition of Immokalee workers to urge Wendy’s to join its four fast food competitors in the award-winning social responsibility program that’s putting an end to decades of abuse in the fields. Burger King, Taco Bell, McDonald’s and others have come to the table to dialogue with farm workers to improve wages and working conditions in their supply chains. This demonstration was held on the eve of the CIW winning the Roosevelt Institute’s Freedom from Want Medal.
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Handschu Hearing on NYPD Muslim Surveillance
Earlier this month, the federal district court in Manhattan required the New York City Police Department to defend its Muslim spying program. The hearing lasted several hours and revealed what many listeners to this show may already know, and that is how the NYPD Muslim spying program has been found by the Associated Press to target innocent Muslims based on nothing more than their faith. The fallout from these spying programs are revealed in the stories related by today’s guest .
Fahd Ahmed:
- DRUM stands for Desis Rising Up and Moving. It’s a community organization of low income South Asians, organizing for worker rights, immigrant rights, racial justice.
- We’re a membership based organization of about 2000 low income South Asians. So they’re directly effected by these issues.
- About 2 years ago the Associated Press started releasing a series of articles that essentially confirmed what people in our communities had been feeling for years.
- That the NYPD has an extensive spying network on the New York City Muslim community.
- From their houses of worship to their work sites, to their social networks. The way that they accomplish this is through the use of under cover officers.
- Through the use of informants, many of whom are paid money for their services, and also through the use of surveillance equipment.
- We have members in our organization that have been directly targeted by the NYPD over the last 8-9 years.
- Even if you’re not doing anything wrong, this program is very bad for you.
- On the day the first AP report came out, we had launched a survey project to collect data.
- An Arab cab driver who cooperated with the police, he was eye witness to the person who conducted the robbery.
- He testified in court, the person was convicted. The NYPD then approached him several months later and said we’d like to talk with you about that case.
- They tell him we want you to become an informant for us. When he declines, for the next two weeks he ends up being followed in dark unmarked cars.
- We do believe its about a few 100 hundred in the police department in terms of intelligence.
Guest – Fahd Ahmed, Fahd came to the United States as an undocumented immigrant from Pakistan in 1991, and went on to attend Vanderbilt University, and CUNY School of Law. Fahd joined DRUM in 2000 when he had family members facing deportations. Within DRUM, Fahd led the work with Muslim, Arab, and South Asian immigrant detainees before, and immediately after 9/11, by coordinating the detainee visitation program. Fahd was a recipient of the Haywood Burns Fellowship from the National Lawyers Guild, served as an Ella Baker intern at the Center for Constitutional Rights, as a legal consultant with the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, and as a lecturer and researcher on Islamophobia, National Security, and social movements at the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative at the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University
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Two And A Half Party System Debt Ceiling Crisis
Today we’ll examine in depth how the United States reached the recent crisis with regard to debt ceiling. If you think its just the Tea Party that wants to cut current government benefits such as Social Security and Medicare you’d be wrong. It’s also the Obama Administration
Professor Jack Rasmus:
- The Republicans strategic focus since 2011 has been to cut the deficit at the expense of discretionary spending and in particular to target social security and medicare and medicaid.
- In the fiscal cliff deal of last year, they succeeded in pushing through most of the Bush tax cuts. 4 trillion in tax cuts.
- The Republicans in the last 2 years have cut 2.2 trillion dollars in government spending.
- They’re going to use the debt ceiling in order to extract more spending cuts, this time, social security and medicare, and probably more tax cuts.
- Obama has already called for 630 billion dollars in social security and medicare cuts. That’s a starting point, a beginning of negotiating.
- What’s happened is that the tea party have injected themselves into this thing. We’ve got 2 and a half parties in Congress now. The Tea Party is a faction of the Republican Party and its terrorizing the Republican Party even though its a minority in the House.
- The Tea Partiers are grandstanding for elections. This is all about mid-term elections next year.
- As far as the shutdown is concerned, that is a Tea Party problem.
- They have Republicans terrorized that they’re going to lose primaries.
- There’s another group within the Tea Party that are opportunists, they’re riding the crest.
- The people behind the Tea Party, out there in the grassroots, you know, the billionaires are funding it and the Heritage Action Groups. I think there are opportunists and confused ideologues.
- What you’re going to see is Obama blocking with corporate pressure on the leadership of the Republicans, and all 3 of them then giving the Tea Party a choice.
- Last year, unions lost 500 thousand members, even as a million and a half new jobs were created.
- Something real dangerous is going on with the labor movement.
- There is a nation wide formation called the Emergency Labor Network.
- Obama has been in favor of cutting Social Security for quite some time. He’s also been in favor of cutting the corporate tax rate from 35 to 28 percent. That doesn’t sound like the Democratic Party of years past.
Guest – Professor Jack Rasmus, Ph.D Political Economy, teaches economics and politics at St. Mary’s College in California. He is the author and producer of the various nonfiction and fictional workers, including the books ‘Obama’s Economy: Recovery for the Few‘, Pluto Press, 2012, ‘Epic Recession: Prelude to Global Depression‘, Pluto Press, 2010, and ‘The War at Home: The Corporate Offensive from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush‘, Kyklosproductions, 2006
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Afghanistan War, CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, FBI Intrusion, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, Torture, War Resister
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Updates:
- Lynne Stewart Turns 74
- Phone Campaign For Lynne Stewart To Be Let Out Of Prison Under Compassionate Release
- Director of Federal Bureau of Prisons – 202-307-3250
- U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder – 202-353-1555
- U.S. President Barack Obama – 202-456-1111
- Che Guevara Anniversary
- Shocking Statistics On Americans Under 30
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The United States Military Kidnapping In Libya And Failed Kill or?Capture In Somalia
The United States military had gone into 2 parts of Africa. In one case they went into Libya and brazenly seized a man who they claim to be a leader of Al-Qaeda, his name is Abu Anas al-Libi. He was seized out of Tripoli, Libya. The U.S. also went into Somalia and attacked a house or a compound in apparently an effort to grab or kill an alleged senior leader of the Somali group al-Shabab. Michael Ratner reports in this update.
Attorney Michael Ratner:
- It was shocking news to see that the United States think it can go into sovereign countries and kidnap, kill whoever they want. Did the US have the right to go into Libya at all?
- Article 24 of the UN Charter says that the territorial integrity of the a country is complete, except of the case of self-defense or authorized by the UN.
- There was no authority by the UN or international law to go into Libya.
- Then the question came up – Did Libya consent to it?
- He’s on some U.S. ship. It’s called the San Antonio.
- They’re keeping him floating on this ship while they’re going to interrogate him.
- Its true, Obama when he took office 5 years ago, he banned torture and he said all interrogations had to be done according to the Army Field Manual.
- Annex M allows 3 kinds of techniques that I think constitute cruel and inhuman, degrading treatment and taken together would constitute torture.
Law and Disorder Co-host Attorney Michael Ratner, President Emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a non-profit human rights litigation organization based in New York City and president of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) based in Berlin. Ratner and CCR are currently the attorneys in the United States for publishers Julian Assange and Wikileaks. He was co-counsel in representing the Guantanamo Bay detainees in the United States Supreme Court, where, in June 2004, the court decided his clients have the right to test the legality of their detentions in court. Ratner is also a past president of the National Lawyers Guild and the author of numerous books and articles, including the books The Trial of Donald Rumsfeld: A Prosecution by Book, Against War with Iraq and Guantanamo: What the World Should Know, as well as a textbook on international human rights.
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The United States, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Syria and Israel Part 2
October 7th of 2013 marked the 12th anniversary since the United States invaded Afghanistan as the war drags into its 13th year. The Afghanistan war and the Iraq war have been estimated to cost tax payers up to 6 trillion dollars. This year marks the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War – an illegal war launched despite the global protest in the streets.
Phyllis Bennis:
- On the one hand it was a huge victory for the U.S. and the anti-war mobilization effort, that we managed to prevent what was a very imminent US strike. The British also had their missiles ready to go. They were very close.
- In combination with the British Parliament decision to say no, led to a huge shift in what the Obama Administration was prepared to do.
- It turns out they were prepared to go to war without UN permission. They were ready to do without the UN, without NATO, without the Arab League, but not without the Brits.
- This was a political decision, this wasn’t rooted in concerns about international law or any kind of strategic or military necessity.
- When it was turned over to Congress, a lot of organizations mobilized and said you know what, we’re not going to let this happen.
- Members of Congress were reporting that their emails were running 500 to 1, 800 to 1, 1000 to 1 against US military intervention.
- What we found is that people were not willing to sign on to another war after so many failed wars in the region.
- You can call it war fatigue but it’s really about learning a lesson, that war is not an answer to these problems.
- Given that there have been 100 thousand victims in this war (Syria) about a third of them civilians, about 43 percent regime soldiers and militia, about 18 percent rebel soldiers. The rest were civilians.
- To claim this was all about the humanitarian consequences, simply, that’s not the case.
- The voices that have been marginalized the most are the original political opposition in Syria, who were incredibly brave and courageous, still out there fighting.
- The regime in Syria was forced to sign on to the chemical weapons treaty. That’s huge, there are only 7 countries in the world that had not signed that treaty.
- Israel of course being another one.
- The number of people killed with chemical weapons in Syria is tiny compared to the number of people killed with conventional weapons.
- The five wars in Syria, the regional power struggle, the sectarian war, the US-Russian war, the US-Israel vs. Iran war, those are still underway in Syria.
- President Rouhani, the new president of Iran, was on a major charm offensive.
- Rouhani has said ” I have the backing of the Supreme Leader in a new approach to our nuclear negotiations.”
- There are enormous pressures in the U.S from the arms industry, from AIPAC, from hawks in Congress of all sorts.
- The Palestinians are the ones that will pay the price if there is an agreement between the US and Iran because the US will be determined to give Israel something.
- Iraq has become as violent as it was in the height of the sectarian wars of 2006 and 2007.
- Hundreds of people are being killed on a daily basis. It’s a disaster. Much of that is the result of the exploding war in Syria. Syria and Iraq share a long border. It’s a very porous border.
- The division of Libya into 2 or 3 regions is a very likely possibility.
- Saul Landau was a giant in our movement, he made one of the first films about Fidel. It was called Fidel it was made in 1960 a year after the revolution.
- He died about a month ago after a 2 year battle with a very virulent cancer.
- Saul had been at IPS almost at the beginning. He wrote the book Assassination on Embassy Row that documented with such precision on how Operation Condor had gone forward.
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, Criminalizing Dissent, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Surveillance, Truth to Power
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Updates:
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Economic Update: Professor Rick Wolff
We welcome back returning guest Professor Rick Wolff to get an economic update. Recent news of Janet Yellen emerging as a frontrunner to succeed Ben Bernanke as Federal Reserve chairman garnered the support of many Democrats in the House and Senate, yet she urged to lower payments for senior citizens on Social Security and voted to repeal the Glass-Steagal Act. Meanwhile, President Obama with the support of the Republican Party has targeted Social Security and medicare for cut backs. We talk about these topics and more with Professor Rick Wolff who hosts Economic Update on WBAI Saturdays at Noon.
Professor Rick Wolff:
- The Federal Reserve is an enormously important institution all of the time.
- It has nothing less than the mandate in this economy to control and manage and manipulate the monetary system.
- It is a wonderful reality to throw at anyone who thinks we live in a free market economy where the government plays a marginal role.
- When the government controls the quantity of money and the cost of borrowing it, its not a marginal role, its most central role a government can play.
- We have a dysfunctional Congress and President who can’t figure out what to do, unwilling to take serious steps to deal with this crisis, leaving it to the Federal Reserve.
- We are now in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
- Clearly, now that we’re entering the 6th year of this calamity, and we have huge unemployment, huge foreclosures, the Federal Reserve also failed to make it short and shallow it is in fact long and deep.
- Ms. Yellen’s nomination would go through quickly and more smoothly than Summers would have. Obama and his folks don’t want a big review of how they manage the economic system since its an unmitigated disaster.
- Enough extreme right Republicans exist now in the House of Representatives to make serious the threat of denying the Federal Government the right to raise the debt ceiling.
- The President has already signaled his willingness to compromise with Republicans around Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
- There’s a long standing debate about measurements on the cost of living. That’s a very difficult thing to do and perfectly reasonable economists disagree.
- All they’ve done is picked the one that looks the smallest (cost of living for Social Security) to use as a benchmark to therefore give the smallest increase.
- The first thing you should understand, which is an outrageous injustice, is that the money for Social Security is only withheld from a wage or a salary.
- It’s not withheld if you earn interest income, if you earn dividend income or if you earn capital gain income.
- That’s why the tax for Social Security is called a payroll tax.
- Currently, its a payroll tax but its only on the first 113 thousand dollars a year that you earn.
- For every dollar above 113 thousand, you don’t pay anything.
- Saez and Piketty
- The inequality of wealth in the United States has gotten much worse in the last 30 years and more interesting has gotten worse across this crisis.
- That’s interesting because in the Great Depression, the crisis collapsed the gap between the rich and the poor.
- The top ten percent of American income earners this last year 2012, took home more than half the total income.
- Ten percent have half the income and the other 90 percent share the other half.
- The 400 richest people in America have more total net worth than half the population.
- There’s been movement of sheer outrage of what it means when you read about this extraordinary wealth that some people are earning 7.25.
- There are signs of upset within the United States beginning to build around this. (inequality of wealth)
- We have a minimum wage at the federal level, 7.25. We also have state minimum wages that vary all over the place.
- We have now a situation where wealth is so concentrated at the top that the folks who have that wealth understand perfectly the situation. They love the way the economy is going. They’re gathering the wealth into their own hands, but they’re not stupid.
- They understand that when you concentrate wealth that much you’re creating an impossible tension between an ostensibly democratic political system where universal sufferage means the mass of people vote on the one hand, and their concentrated wealth.
- “We have to worry that the political system will be used by the masses to undo politically the benefits we get economically.”
- A billionaire from California buys the Washington Post and a billionaire from Boston, buys the Boston Globe.
Guest – Richard D. Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst where he taught economics from 1973 to 2008. He is currently a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, New York City. Democracy At Work.
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Lawyers You’ll Like – Attorney Jan Susler
Attorney Jan Susler joined the People’s Law Office of Chicago in 1982. Before that she worked as a Clinical Law Professor at the legal clinic at Southern University’s School of Law, Prison Legal Aid. Susler continues to her litigation and advocacy work on prisoner’s rights issues and also represents people wrongfully imprisoned, falsely arrested, strip searched or subjected to excessive force by police officers.
Attorney Jan Susler:
- The National Lawyers Guild was an amazing refuge. When I went to law school women were 10 percent of the class and really resented.
- It was a hostile environment, lots of rich white boys who thought they were all that.
- The GI Bill actually even things out class-wise which was a delight.
- I worked at Legal Aid, while I went through law school it kept me sane. My first job was at Law School Clinic.
- We provided civil legal services to state prisoners.
- Through the process of doing abortion rights work, anti death penalty work and prisoner’s rights work through the Guild, and then I met the folks at the People’s Law Office.
- Even to today, there’s only a handful of people who do that work and we tend to know each other.
- Michael Deutsch whose been my law partner for the last 3 decades called me up and said we have a couple of Puerto Rican radicals who have been sent to the state prison near where you’re doing your work and you need to go see them. They’re quite at risk the state considers them to be enemies.
- I knew nothing about Puerto Rico being a US colony, having been invaded, them resisting colonialism. I learned about international law making it a crime against humanity.
- They really opened my world, what gift its been for me.
- The National Lawyers Guild created a Puerto Rican project to work with Puerto Rican lawyers and activists in the Independence Movement and people who were trying to get the Navy out of the small Puerto Rican island of Vieques.
- It’s culminating in this wonderful convention we’re going to have in the middle of October in San Juan.
- There’s going to be a panel and workshop on the death penalty in Puerto Rico which the US imposes on its colony.
- There will be workshops about labor, and political prisoners.
- I think people in this country understand who Nelson Mandela is and what he stood for and sacrificed and what he meant for his country. These men and women are the same for the people of Puerto Rico.
- They were artists and working in universities. Most had college degrees, but really understood that colonialism is a crime against humanity.
- They organized clandestinely into an organization called the Armed Forces for National Liberation. They were arrested in the early 1980s and accused of seditious conspiracy.
- My job was to advocate for their human rights and educate about their situation. They refused to accept the jurisdiction of a US court.
- For the National Lawyers Guild, I’ve gone to the United Nations Decolonization Committee to present.
Guest – Attorney Jan Susler, In her 36 years as a lawyer, Jan Susler has worked with the Puerto Rican Independence Movement and with progressive movements challenging U.S. foreign and domestic policies. She was an adjunct professor of criminal justice at Northeastern Illinois University, and taught constitutional law at the University of Puerto Rico. Attorney Jan Susler joins us today as a guest on our Lawyers You’ll Like series.
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Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Death Penalty, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Surveillance, Torture, Truth to Power
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Corrections Association Program Releasing Aged Prisoners
Here on Law and Disorder we’ve reported about the Compassionate Release Program regarding Lynne Stewart’s condition. The CRP is designed to reduce the number of elderly and sick in prison, if they have a terminal health condition or a significant and permanent non-terminal health condition, disease or syndrome. This program is part of a larger effort to release aging prisoners in the United States. Nationally, the number of prisoners over age 55 nearly quadrupled from 1995 to 2010, eight times the pace of growth for the total prison population, according to a recent Human Rights Watch report. Because of long sentences handed out in the 70’s and 80’s, American prisons now serve as quasi-nursing homes, albeit lacking the long-term care we associate with geriatric facilities. We talk today about a major new initiative called the Corrections Association Program Releasing Aged Prisoners that’s working to make prison parole boards correctly assess elderly prisoner risk and get them out.
Laura Whitehorn:
- In New York State, there are about 9200 at the moment above the age of 50.
- By 2030, its estimated that about a third of the entire incarcerated will be over the age of 40. There will be at least 400 thousand.
- For the last 20 years this country has been drunk on the concept of lock em up and throw away the key.
- You lock em up and throw away the key. . .they’re gonna get old.
- Our project is called Releasing Aging People In Prison.
- These people have done a lot of time and the lowest rate of recidivism is in this group. They’re over the age of 50, have done 15-20 years in prison and have committed murder.
- This group is ready to be released without a threat to public safety.
- You’ve advocated for Lynne Stewart on this show for compassionate release. She’s in the Federal System.
- The Feds are very stingy with compassionate release, so is the state of New York. In 2011, I think it was, they let out 8 people on compassionate release, in a year when 200 people died in the system.
- I’m now 68, but I feel about 78 on some days.
- We don’t really need a new law to release the people we’re talking about.
- What we need is the parole board to follow the law. What we need is the state to follow the law for compassionate release for those who are ill.
- One thing we’re doing is we’re trying to join with other people in the state who’ve had enough of the way that parole board denies people over and over again and say use actual risk assessments that do exist.
- If the risk is low let them go.
- RAPP – Release Aging People In Prison – Harlem, NY – 2090 Adam Clayton Blvd, NY – 212-254-5700
- Email – mfarid@correctionalassociation.org
- www.nationinside.org/campaign/release-of-aging-people-in-prison
Mujahid Farid:
- The issue of mass incarceration has many facets. The impact on some communities is from the cradle to the grave.
- The prison population has somewhat stabilized. It’s still at a rate that beats out every other country. Although that rate has stabilized it hasn’t done so with the elderly.
- In New York State, the prison population has gone down 24 percent in the last 10 years.
- During that same 10 years the population of the elderly (in prison) increased by 64 percent.
- The zeitgeist in this country is about punishment and never giving up on punishing a person, especially those committed for serious crimes.
- In my own case, I had a sentence of 15 years to life, you would assume if I did the minimum sentence, if there were indications I had rehabilitated myself and shown that I was a changed person that I would’ve been released. But that didn’t happen. I served 18 years above and beyond that 15 year sentence.
- The sentencing structure that allows what we’re talking about is called an indeterminate sentencing structure. That means you’re given a minimum and a maximum.
- Some people get 10 to 20, some people get 10 to 15, and other with the most serious crimes get a number and on the end they get letters.
- In that indeterminate sentencing structure, there’s an indication that the prisoner should be released if they’re reformed or rehabilitated at that minimum posed term.
- In my case, I received a 15-life on attempted murder of a police officer. He didn’t get a scratch.
- That was the least amount imposed on me, I couldn’t get any less.
- So a person who is serving a sentence such as that would have an expectation of 15 years or whatever they have to be released if they change.
- To not give them a reason for the denial, saying its the nature of the crime, takes away hope from a person.
- I was arrested in 1978, I went upstate within 6 months. Before that 6 months came I had earned my GED. I did that while facing trial.
- I went upstate with no expectation of serving 15 years. I actually thought that because of the facts I was convicted for that I would eventually win on appeal.
- Within a few years, I had earned an Associates Degree in Business. I went on and got a Bachelor’s Degree in Liberal Arts.
- Shortly after that, I earned a Master’s Degree in Sociology and then I earned another Master’s Degree in Ministry.
- All of that happened before that 15 year period.
- None of that was considered by the parole board when I entered that 15 year mark.
- They simply denied me and didn’t give me any guidance of what I could do to better myself to earn release.
Guest – Laura WhiteHorn is an ex-political prisoner and native New Yorker, who was active in supporting groups such as the Black Panther Party, the Black Liberation Movement and was active with Students for a Democratic Society and the Weather Underground. Laura also worked to expose the FBI’s Counter Intelligence.
Guest – Mujahid Farid is investigating potential mechanisms for increasing release rates for incarcerated aging people at the Correctional Association in New York. He’s spent more than three decades incarcerated in New York and co-founded the Prisoners AIDS Counseling & Education program and helped design prison-based sociology and theology courses that allowed others to earn college-credited in prison. He also earned four college degrees and other certifications while in prison, including his paralegal certificate, New York State Department of Labor Certificate in Human Development Counseling, and New York City Department of Health Certificate in HIV/AIDS Counseling.
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Mandatory Minimum Sentencing Circumvented For Non Violent Drug Offenders
When Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Justice Department would begin reassess the harsh mandatory minimum sentences on non-violent drug offenders that unfairly target young African Americans and Hispanics, some drug reform advocates said it was a breakthrough. However, our guest Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, says there was no mention of clemency or pardons for those imprisoned with disproportionately long sentences. Attorney General Holder did mentioned that the United States represents about 5 percent of the world’s total population and it incarcerates nearly 25 percent of the world’s prison population. The Drug Policy Alliance has made great strides in criminal justice reforms and to help decriminalize marijuana in states such as Colorado and Washington.
Ethan Nadelmann:
- Early on in the first term, President Obama and Attorney General Holder working with Drug Policy Alliance and a whole range of allied groups did actually change the penalties, the mandatory minimum for crack cocaine.
- Then they dropped the ball. They did nothing in the following years.
- The substance of the speech (recent by Holder) was important. By saying he was going to issue explicit directives to US attorneys around the country that would effect the way they charge people especially low level players in drug trafficking organizations. They’re really pushing this through in a bipartisan way.
- I think he (Holder) does regard this as a legacy issue.
- Obama has recently mentioned incarceration and the need to reduce it in the context of memorializing Martin Luther King Jr.
- We’ve seen the drug law violators from 65 percent of the total of federal prisoners to 48 percent of the total even as the absolute numbers have gone up.
- I think we’re going to see low level drug violators charged in different ways. One thing about mandatory minimums is they shift the discretion from judges to prosecutors.
- Mandatory minimums empower prosecutors at the hand of judges.
- I think what we’ll see is a downshifting in how much prosecutors are looking for. We’ll see fewer people going to prison on federal drug charges.
- Legislators are notoriously resistant to having sentencing reforms be retroactive. They’re willing to say going forward we’ll reduce the sentence but we’re not going to touch the issue of the people who are locked up under the old laws.
- I bet we would see some movement on behalf of the people who are behind bars as well.
- Non violent drug law offenders, sitting there for 10 or 20 years. Statewide 20 percent of all inmates are in for drugs and in the federal prisons its 50 percent.
- Half of all drug arrests in America are for marijuana. Overwhelmingly for marijuana in small amounts.
- When states move forward with the ballot initiative process to legalize marijuana either for medical purposes, which 20 states have now done, or more broadly for all adults which Washington and Colorado have done, that presents a basic issue for the federal government.
- What the US attorney general’s office can do is offer guidelines saying to US attorneys around the country, here are our priorities, here’s how we think you should handle this.
- The feds are basically saying, we get it. That legally regulating marijuana may accomplish the objectives of federal drug control, more effectively than continuing an ineffective prohibitionist policy.
- New York was one of 11 states that decriminalized the possession of marijuana of less than ounce, back in the 70s. Which means you could have less than ounce in your pocket or home and its like a traffic ticket.
- But if its in public view, than you can be arrested. It’s a misdemeanor offense.
- New York is the only state in the Northeast that hasn’t legalized medical marijuana.
- Every 2 years we organize the leading gathering in the world of people who are against the drug war. (reformconference.org) Denver, CO – Oct 4, 5, 6
Guest – Ethan Nadelmann, founder and executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, the leading organization in the United States promoting alternatives to the war on drugs.
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William Kunstler’s Performance at Caroline’ Comedy Club
We hear a part of William Kunstler’s presentation at Caroline’s Comedy Club. This was his last public appearance. He shares a great story about a particular dialogue with a judge and an envelope of marijuana.
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Afghanistan War, CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, Prison Industry, RFID, Surveillance, War Resister
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Updates:
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Spying on Democracy: Government Surveillance, Corporate Power, and Public Resistance Part II
This is part 2 of our interview with our own Heidi Boghosian who wrote the newly published book is titled Spying On Democracy: Government Surveillance, Corporate Power, and Public Resistance and it reveals in detail how the government acquires your information from sources such as telecommunications companies to compile a data base on “persons of interest.” Since ex-CIA staffer Edward Snowden’s release of top secret documents to the Guardian and Washington Post many are now aware of the frequency and scope to which they are being monitored. What this book has unveiled is how your personal consumer data is being gathered, bundled and sold. The spying, the collecting of phone records, accessing your online activity, all of it is unconstitutional says Heidi Boghosian, co-host of Law and Disorder and the National Lawyers Guild’s Executive Director.
Attorney Heidi Boghosian:
- They create dossiers of our spending habits, of our communication habits.
- The corporations benefit from this which makes them create more equipment for surveillance and almost makes it impossible for the government to perform traditional government functions because they’re so reliant on corporate partners.
- There’s also a revolving door among CEOs of these big companies and high level positions within government intelligence.
- The National Lawyers Guild was spied on by the FBI. More than 1000 agents were assigned to us for nearly 3 decades. They rummaged through our members garbage. We had an infiltrator in Washington DC serving as a staff person.
- They tried to label us (and failed) as a subversive organization.
- The People’s Law Office had also been monitored for years. Apparently across the street from the office an apartment was taken by the FBI who spied on them for their work representing politically active individuals.
- With all of this spying, the chilling effect of knowing that you may be spied on, you conversations may be listened to, changes the way you do business.
- I’ve always been interested in cooperation between municipal public police and private security organizations.
- We’re seeing an entire industry giving birth to Stratfor and other intelligence organizations that exist just to conduct intelligence be it on activists or critics of corporate or government policies, as well as defense contractors beefing up and creating a whole sector of intelligence.
- They are in big contracts with the US government.
- One of the problems constitutionally is they’re not held as private businesses to the same strictures as the US Constitution as we saw recently with the Hemisphere program revelations. We have our government paying AT&T staff to sit next to drug enforcement officers and go through AT&T’s files that go back 26 years. They’re not overseen by a judge.
- My question is how many more agencies of the government are doing this?
- They are getting access to this information through what’s called administrative subpoenas.
- Many mannequins have small cameras embedded in the eyeballs.
- When you’re spying on the fourth estate as its called which is intended to be a watch dog on government you really get to the heart of what democracy is about.
- Without a free press, we don’t have any chance of preserving those fundamental freedoms of First Amendment association and the ability to bring our grievances to the government for redress.
- A student group working with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers got suspicious because a new member on their listserve started asking questions and they did some research and found she owned her own private security company, in fact she was spying on them for Burger King.
- Congress is calling for an investigation for these large data aggragators. Once again, there’s no oversight, there’s no accountability, they go to a variety of sources to gather personal information on us. Some in the public domain, others not.
- They have vast troves, electronic dossiers on each of us.
Guest – Heidi Boghosian, executive director of the National Lawyers Guild. She is the co-host of the weekly civil liberties radio show Law and Disorder on Pacifica’s WBAI in New York and over 40 national affiliates. She received her JD from Temple Law School where she was the editor-in-chief of the Temple Political & Civil Rights Law Review. She also holds an MS from Boston University and a BA from Brown University.
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Syria: U.S. Humanitarian Intervention
What is the difference between an illegal war and humanitarian intervention? At the 2005 United Nations World Summit, government leaders agreed unanimously that “each individual State has the responsibility to protect its populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.” If a state fails to protect its own citizens from such atrocity as its known, the agreement implies a collective responsibility of humanitarian intervention upon other agencies. President Obama has threatened to use military force against Syria and recently commented during a speech that “we cannot and must not turn a blind eye to what happened in Damascus” The US, however has in the past, turned a so called blind eye to other alleged chemical weapons attacks in other countries. Why would President Obama now want to go forward with a Navy missile strike in Syria and try to do so without UN Security Council approval?
Ajamu Baracka:
- There’s no basis in international law that allows the US or any sovereign state to take that kind of unilateral action.
- This notion of humanitarian intervention and this responsibility to protect, is a particular type of creation that’s been cooked up in the west that has provided some kind of moral justification to engage in unilateral action on behalf of the world community.
- To circumvent the United Nations and impose their own vision and understanding of international order on any nation they see fit.
- This is no more than a dressed up, rearticulation of the white man’s burden.
- This notion that the US and the European, ex-colonial nations, have a right and a responsibility to impose their particular interests and world views on the rest of humanity is a notion that needs to be rejected but its something that many people in the west have embraced.
- It was the foundation for the NATO intervention of Libya. It has been the justification for intervention in Kosovo.
- It’s been very skillfully implanted into the minds of many people in this country as a justification for unilateral actions on the part of the US or in conjunction again with European allies.
- What about the images we were bombarded with, the rows of piled up bodies in Egypt? Why are those lives less important than those who died in Syria?
- Is it the mode in which they were murdered, gas as opposed to US supplied weapons?
- I think the US objective is the dismemberment of the Syrian state. They are in almost a win-win situation. Either they affect regime change and allow this motley crew of oppositional forces much aligned with jihadist movements, come to power or they force the state to become a non-functional state.
- The long term objective is to further isolate Iran, to diminish the power of Russia.
- Right at the moment when it was clear that the Assad government had turned the tide militarily on the ground, the US decided it was going to intervene to effect the equalization of forces in Syria.
- The US found itself in a very unique isolated position. Kerry has been given an opportunity to pull back from this ill-advised strike.
- I think the Obama Administration is one of the most effective weapons ever deployed against the progressive and radical movement here in this country, perhaps in the whole post-war period.
- He had been the answer to Ronald Reagan, but even a more effective communicator.
- A more effective demobilzer if you will. (Obama Administration) has demobilized the anti-war movement, it has disarmed radicals, confused traditional liberals.
- I think we use this last incident to intensify the conversations around exposing the interests of this administration.
Guest – Ajamu Baraka, Longtime activist, veteran of Black Liberation Movement, Human Rights defender, Former founding director of US Human Rights Network, currently Public Intervenon for Human Rights with Green Shadow Cabinet, member of Coordinating Committee of Black Left Unity Network and Associate Fellow at IPS.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Military Tribunal, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Surveillance, Truth to Power, Uncategorized, War Resister
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Army PFC Bradley Manning Sentenced To 35 Years
Our own Michael Ratner reports back from Fort Meade, Maryland on the day Army PFC Bradley Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison for leaking classified information to Wikileaks. As reported by Michael Ratner, Manning faced a maximum of 90 years in prison after his conviction last month on charges of espionage, theft and fraud. Now, his sentence goes the Army Court of Criminal Appeals, where he may seek a reduction of his prison term.
Attorney Michael Ratner:
- 35 years is a completely off the wall sentence. First of all he shouldn’t have been prosecuted at all.
- That’s been the Center for Constitutional Rights position. That’s my position.
- He’s a whistle-blower, he exposed torture, criminality, killing of civilians.
- Then, they over prosecute him, charge him with espionage, make whistle-blowers into spies.
- They charge him with all these years, then people are relieved when gets 35 years.
- It’s a very long sentence for someone who actually gave us the truth about Iraq, about Iran, about the helicopter video that killed a Reuters journalist, about the diplomatic cables that gave us the secret war in Yemen, the revelations about the corrupt Ben Ali government in Tunisia that helped bring on the Arab Spring.
- He’s a hero. The people who committed the crime are sadly still in our government enjoying their lives, they’re the ones that ought to be prosecuted.
- We’re in a time where there is a sledgehammer taken to whistle-blowers.
- The demand now is that Obama pardon him or give him clemency. That’s from the Bradley Manning Support Committee.
- Because of Bradley Manning, people like Ed Snowden came forward. They understood that when they see criminality, they’re young people of conscience and they act on it, and we should be very proud of each of these people.
Law and Disorder Co-host Attorney Michael Ratner, President Emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a non-profit human rights litigation organization based in New York City and president of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) based in Berlin. Ratner and CCR are currently the attorneys in the United States for publishers Julian Assange and Wikileaks. He was co-counsel in representing the Guantanamo Bay detainees in the United States Supreme Court, where, in June 2004, the court decided his clients have the right to test the legality of their detentions in court. Ratner is also a past president of the National Lawyers Guild and the author of numerous books and articles, including the books The Trial of Donald Rumsfeld: A Prosecution by Book, Against War with Iraq and Guantanamo: What the World Should Know, as well as a textbook on international human rights.
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Journalist Barrett Brown Faces 105 Years In Prison
Journalist Barrett Brown has spent more than 330 days in pre trial detention and faces charges that add up to a 105 year sentence. What Barrett Brown did was merely take a link from a chat room and copied that link then pasted it to a chat room for a wiki-based crowd source group called Project PM. The link was to the Stratfor hack information of 5 million emails. He needed help to sift through the data and posted the link that was already publicly out there to the attention of the editorial board of Project PM. There were unencrypted credit card numbers and validation codes within those emails and the government is claiming that Barrett Brown was engaged in credit card fraud. Why go after Barrett Brown? The backstory begins with the Bank of America being concerned that Wikileaks had specific information. They go to the Department of Justice who lead them to a big law firm in Washington DC, then to a private intelligence firm. Meanwhile, a defense fund for Barrett Brown continues to raise money for his case.
Kevin Gallagher:
- Barrett Brown is an investigative journalist and freelance writer who has had a career writing for the Huffington Post, the Guardian and many other places.
- Through his observing the media landscape over the last ten years in America, I think he grew very dissatisfied with things so when this phenomenon called anonymous popped up in 2010, making major news headlines, he attached himself to it.
- All he was doing was looking at this information leaked by Jeremy Hammond out of Stratfor as part of his journalistic inquiry into the world of private intelligence firms.
- The fact that they can indict someone on identity theft and credit card fraud just for sharing a link of information. . there’s no allegation that he sought to profit from it.
- Project PM over its lifespan was a number of different things but that’s what it eventually evolved into.
- A crowd sourced project with a wiki that was devoted to investigating soley, the state corporate alliance on surveillance. This was known as Team Themis, a consortium of these firms.
- This all started when Wikileaks said it had information from the Bank of America.
- Barrett was investigating. There are other journalists who do very good work on this. He was one of the most vocal who was involved in investigating all these relationships between the private intel firms and the DOJ. He was using leaked emails to do so.
- I think they were very upset to see these things revealed.
- Barrett recognized that this was a threat and he was looking into it.
- Before the court right now is a motion for a media gag order which was presented by the prosecution which would silence Barrett and his attorneys from making statements to the media.
Guest – Kevin Gallagher, writer, musician and systems administrator based in western Massachusetts. He graduated with a B.A. in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He’s currently pursuing activism on issues related to digital rights: freedom of information, privacy, and copyright; while also taking an interest in information security. He is the director and founder of Free Barrett Brown, a support network, nonprofit advocacy organization and legal defense fund formed for the purpose of assisting the prominent internet activist and journalist, Barrett Brown, who is the founder of Project PM.
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Native Hawaiian Prisoner Transfer to Arizona Private Prison
Hawaii is know for sending more prisoners across state lines than any other state. According to the Native Hawaiian Legal Corporation, a disproportionate number of those prisoners are Native Hawaiian inmates. Because of over crowding, Native Hawaiian inmates are transferred from a Hawaii state prison to a for-profit Corrections Corporation of America prison in Arizona. This particular CCA private prison however was built specifically for Native Hawaiian inmates, yet they’re denied cultural and religious rites. Additional transfer impacts include difficult reentry back into Hawaii, away from family and homeland, and no opportunity for proper atonement.
Attorney Sharla Manley:
- We’ve been involved in a lawsuit for 2 years concerning the impact of Hawaii’s policy of transferring inmates to the mainland. Native Hawaiians.
- Native Hawaiians are the indigenous people of the state of Hawaii. They have a similar experience to American Indians on the continent.
- Our firm focuses on Native Hawaiian rights and the focus on what self determination remains despite the history.
- Native Hawaiians are disproportionately incarcerated. They are transferred more often than any other racial group.
- The state of Hawaii creates a menu of prisoners, for private prisons to select.
- Our focus on the transfer is very narrow, the Native Hawaiian prisoners who still want to adhere to native traditions and practices.
- In Arizona you don’t have access to cultural teachers and spiritual advisers who could provide the kind of guidance or counseling, really the kind of instruction of passing on a tradition.
- The Native Hawaiian women were being transferred for a period of time, but there were so many sexual assaults, the state finally brought them back.
- You’re taking away the men, breaking the cultural transmission because many of these men are fathers, grandfathers. Yes they would be in prison here, but there is a difference when your family can see you on the weekends.
- In effect, it’s a form of cultural genocide.
- I’m beside myself as to why this hasn’t been rectified at this point. There’s not even a plan really.
- This is an issue that is personal for me. I am Native Hawaiian, and know what its like to have someone in your community, in your family to be effected by the criminal justice system.
Guest – Attorney Sharla Manley, with the Native Hawaiian Legal Corporation. Sharla Manley joined NHLC as a staff attorney in 2010. Before joining NHLC, Sharla was an associate at an international law firm in Los Angeles in its global litigation department for over three years. In addition to handling commercial litigation matters, she also took pro bono cases, involving voting rights, asylum, and California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act. Also, Sharla was an associate at a plaintiff-side class action firm where she primarily handled appeals of wage and hour cases before state appellate courts and the Ninth Circuit. Before law school, Sharla was a policy analyst on Native Hawaiian rights at the Office of Hawaiian Affairs. She focused on water rights and the impact of military activities on cultural resources in Makua Valley.
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Solidarity Sing A Long: Wisconsin Labor Protests Continue
The noontime sing-along has protested Gov. Scott Walker’s policies daily at Wisconsin’s Capitol since March 11, 2011. However, a new round of arrests began two weeks ago and more than 100 citations have been issued to protesters by Capitol Police. But this is in addition to nearly 200 citations already since July 2012 when the Department of Administration began enforcing new permitting requirements for gatherings in state facilities. What is the noontime solidarity sing-along protest?
Attorney Jonathan Rosenblum:
- When you have a new governor who within weeks in office describes his legislation as a bomb, which was to end collective bargaining for public sector workers.
- This led to more than a hundred thousand people, multiple times on the square where I’m sitting right now here on Wisconsin Avenue.
- Beyond the anti-union agenda, this governor has come in with a pedigree from ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council. He as a legislator in the same building was a member of ALEC, was a proponent of its agenda.
- His agenda as it moved along, was to remove vast numbers of children from medicaid, of claiming a jobs agenda would bring Wisconsin to the top in the United States, instead it plunged to the bottom.
- He eliminated funding for high speed trains, instead the trains for Wisconsin are now sitting in Oregon.
- The main point about this governor is about closing the doors of this government to the public.
- Even the union legislation that led to the crowds was passed in violation of a Public Meetings Act.
- Let me take you to March 11, 2011 when it all started. I was standing there with my friend Steve Burns, folks had slept in the capitol for weeks, the anti-union legislation was passed and signed that day and Steve had printed up a few copies of a songbook that had the dome of the capitol opening up with musical notes on the cover of it and 10 tunes, the classics of the civil rights movement.
- Several of them modified in the great Wobbly tradition.
- This sing-along has preceded from that day March 11, 2011 without skipping a beat, every single week day since that date. More than 650 consecutive sing-alongs.
- The sing-along is a joyful conglomeration. It’s reached about 300-400 daily as the crack down has actually caused a surge of concerned citizens to join us.
- We Don’t Want Your Millions, Mister.
- A Long Range Acoustic Device is being used. The police have started to use the recordings of Chief Irwin’s declaration of unlawful assembly to blast into the rotunda so nobody misses it.
- They use the siren that ramps up to 150 db to disable people. They haven’t put it to that level yet.
- The State Capitol Police are in a bind. They have their orders, most are executing them with a little more zeal than they should. Some of them seem to be maintaining friendships that they had before with the singers.
Guest – Jonathan Rosenblum, PRWatch.org contributor, an author, award-winning journalist, and practicing lawyer. His book, Copper Crucible: How the Arizona Miners’ Strike of 1983 Recast Labor-Management Relations in America (Cornell University Press, 1995; Second Edition, 1998) was named as one of Princeton University Library’s “Ten Noteworthy Books in Industrial Relations and Labor Economics” in 1996.
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