CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Supreme Court, Targeting Muslims, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Jeremy Hammond Refused To Answer Federal Grand Jury Questions
Imprisoned information activist Jeremy Hammond was recently found in contempt for refusing to answer seven questions in front of a Federal Grand Jury in the Eastern District of Virginia. Earlier this year Chelsea Manning was remanded into custody for failure to provide testimony before the same grand jury.
In late August 2019, Jeremy was removed from the Federal Correctional Institution in Memphis, Tennessee where he was serving a 10-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to charges he hacked the private intelligence contractor Stratfor Global Intelligence. At the time of his transfer Jeremy was enrolled in the Federal Bureau of Prison’s intensive Residential Drug Abuse Program. Participants qualify for early release on completion of the program. Jeremy’s release date was projected to come around mid-December of 2019. Because of his removal from the drug program and the summons to this grand jury his prison time incarcerated could be extended by over two years.
FreeJeremyHammond
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Jeremy is currently confined at William G. Truesdale Correctional Center in Alexandria, VA and will likely remain there for the duration of these proceedings.
Guest – Attorney Sarah Kunstler – Sarah attended law school and graduated from Columbia Law School in 2004. She began practicing law in 2005 and is an attorney at Kunstler Law, helping people with Civil Rights issues.
Guest – Jeremy Hammond is a member of the hacktivist network Anonymous and a gifted computer programmer whose case has attracted the attention of activists, civil libertarians and those concerned about the rights of whistleblowers. He is currently spending a decade in prison for allegedly disclosing information about the private intelligence firm Strategic Forecasting, Inc. (Stratfor), revealing that they had been spying on human rights defenders at the behest of corporations and governments.
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US Abandons Kurds Again
Russia was poised to step into the power vacuum left after President Trump ordered American troops to leave northeast Syria earlier this month, paving the way for a deadly Turkish offensive. U.S. forces only numbered around 1,000, but with their Kurdish partners they were able to beat back ISIS and bring relative stability to a large part of Syria after six years of war.
Thousands of the Kurdish-led fighters died while fighting ISIS, and now say they’ve been betrayed by America.
About 200,000 civilians have fled the clashes with Turkey, and a Kurdish lawmaker called on President Trump to stop what she called “ethnic cleansing” of the Kurds in northern Syria. Turkey insists its offensive has not targeted civilians and views the Kurdish-led forces as terrorists linked to a separatist movement based in southern Turkey.
Erdogan has said if the Kurds aren’t completely out of what he’s called a “safe zone,” stretching across most of Syria’s northern border and about 20 miles south into Syrian territory, his offensive against them will resume. Already it has claimed dozens of civilian lives and has forced hundreds of thousands from their homes.
Syria’s Russian-backed President Bashar Assad has lambasted Turkey for its offensive on his soil, and criticized Syrian Kurds for asking the U..S for help.
Guest – Phyllis Bennis is a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies, where she works on anti-war, US foreign policy and Palestinian rights issues. She has worked as an informal adviser to several key UN officials on Palestinian issues. Her books including Calling the Shots: How Washington Dominates Today’s UN, and Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict.
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Fall Out From US Troop Withdrawal From Syria
The US constitution commands that Congress must declare war before the President, the commander-in-chief of the arm forces, can engage in hostilities.
Moreover, the United Nations charter, to which the United States is a signatory, and which was established after World War II to prevent wars of aggression, requires countries to obtain permission from United Nations Security Council before going to war. There are no exceptions except for self-defense.
Since 2011 United States has had troops in Syria in violation of both the US Constitution and the United Nations charter.
When Donald Trump ran for the presidency in 2016 he criticized the Iraq war. Recently he said that war, commenced in 2003, was based on a lie. The lie was that Saddam Hussein, then leader of that country, had been in possession of weapons of mass destruction and in league with the terrorist organization Al Qaeda. As a result of this lie tens of thousands of lives were lost and millions of people displaced and made into refugees.
Three weeks ago Trump withdrew US troops from neighboring Syria, where they had been sent after the commencement of the war in Iraq. This move was condemned by a lopsided vote in the US in the US House of Representatives, which included many Republicans and was condemned as well in the mainstream media. Trump was accused of betraying the Kurds who live in Northeast Syria and who had fought alongside American troops against the terrorist organization ISIS. After the withdrawal of US troops the Kurds were immediately attacked by forces of neighboring Turkey which has resisted autonomy for the Kurds since the end of World War in 1917.
contact – jmackler (at) lmai (dot) net
Guest – Jeff Mackler, author of “Syria: Anatomy of Another Imperialist War“. He is on the administrative committee and a founder of the United National Antiwar Coalition. Jeff Mackler is Socialist Action’s candidate for the US presidency in 2020.
CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, Impeachment, Prison Industry, Supreme Court, Surveillance, Torture, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Impeachment Inquiry With Constitutional Law Professor Marjorie Cohn
Nearly 300 former U.S. national security and foreign policy officials signed an open letter on October 6, calling for an impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump’s dealings with Ukraine.
The signatures were gathered by National Security Action, an organization that former Obama administration officials formed out of concern for Trump’s “reckless leadership.” The list includes many others who served as career officials in Republican and Democratic administrations.
The former national security professionals said they had largely avoided politics during their public service, but said allegations revealed in the recent whistleblower complaints warranted an additional investigation.
“The revelations of recent days, however, demand a response,” the statement says. “President Trump appears to have leveraged the authority and resources of the highest office in the land to invite additional foreign interference into our democratic processes.”
Guest – Attorney Marjorie Cohn, professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law where she taught for 25 years. The former president of the National Lawyers Guild and criminal defense attorney is a legal scholar and political analyst who writes books and articles, and lectures throughout the world about human rights, US foreign policy, and the contradiction between the two. She has testified before Congress and debated the legality of the war in Afghanistan at the prestigious Oxford Union. MarjorieCohn
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Trump Impeachment Inquiry
Like President Richard Nixon before him President Donald Trump made the mistake of using his power as president to go after the wrong target.
Nixon had his people burglarize the Democratic Party’s headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington DC. President Trump himself used his power to try to get the president of the Ukraine to investigate his, Trump’s, main Democratic Party rival, Joe Biden.
This transgression, not Trump’s caging of children, violating the separation of powers, or violating the emoluments clause of the Constitution, was viewed by the mainstream of the Democratic Party and their leader Nancy Pelosi as a “high crime and misdemeanor” violative of the constitution and worthy of an impeachment inquiry. Joe Biden is the preferred candidate of the Democratic establishment.
By impeaching Trump they want to preempt any possible attack on Biden, or on themselves, that could emerge from the Ukraine. It is to be remembered that the Obama Biden Clinton administration orchestrated and overthrew the democratically elected government of Ukraine in 2014, replacing it with the current government, which, for the first time since World War II has actual fascists in the Ukrainian government.
The impeachment process as it gains momentum could spread to other figures in the Trump administration. Trump’s personal attorney Rudolph Giuliani seems likely to get indicted for violating election finance laws.
The impeachment inquiry could also expose the reality of the democratic party itself which under Obama, Biden, and Hillary Clinton organized the overthrow in 2014 of the democratically elected government of Ukraine and opened the door to American investment in the country, especially in natural gas. Hunter Biden, Joe’s son, as is now widely known, got a seat on the board of Berksems, the largest natural gas company in the Ukraine. This evident sinecure netted him $50,000 a month for a period of several years.
Guest – Ron Jacobs, author of Daydream Sunset: Sixties Counterculture in the Seventies published by CounterPunch Books. His latest offering is a pamphlet titled Capitalism: Is the Problem.
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Civil Liberties, Death Penalty, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Supreme Court, Truth to Power
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U.S. Judge Sides With Chevron, Blocks $9.5 Billion Judgement, Donziger Arrested.
In 2012 the Ecuadorian Supreme Court ordered the oil giant Chevron to pay $9.5 billion in damages to five indigenous tribes of the Amazon rain forest. It was one of the largest judgments in history.
The court ruled that Chevron systematically contaminated a patch of the Amazon forest the size of Rhode Island. The people there are suffering from cancer and other diseases and forced to drink toxic water and grow crops on poisoned land.
Chevron retaliated. They sued in federal court in the Southern District of New York, got Judge Louis Kaplan, an extremely pro corporate judge, who sided with the second largest oil company in the world, blocked the judgment from being enforced, and instead had the peoples’ attorney Steven Donziger charged with racketeering arrested, confined to his home, forced to wear an ankle bracelet, and suspended from the practice of law.
On March 4, 2019 the judge declared the judgment null and void. He said it was the fruit of an illegal shakedown, the result of “a five-year effort to extort and defraud Chevron.“ Donziger responded saying that the judge was an accomplice in “the biggest corporate retaliation campaign in history.“ He told Rolling Stone magazine that “Chevron has spent over $2 billion trying to wear us out and shut us down.”
The oil companies sole witness to its central charge of bribery was a corrupt Ecuadorian ex-judge named Alberto Guerra. They gave him $2 million, got him American citizenship, and installed him and his family in a home in the United States.
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.
Guest – Paul Paz y Miño, Associate Director at Amazon Watch since 2007, and a professional human rights, corporate accountability and environmental justice advocate.
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McCarthyism vs. Clinton Jencks By Raymond Caballero
Clinton Jencks was a decorated World War II hero, who in 1950 led a local of the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers in the famed Empire Zinc strike. It was memorialized in the blacklisted 1954 film Salt of the Earth—in which wives and mothers replaced strikers on the picket line after an injunction barred the miners themselves. Jencks was also a target of Senator Joe McCarthy’s anticommunist hysteria in which thousands lost their jobs, careers and reputations, even though none had committed a crime. Three years after the strike, Jencks was arrested and charged with falsely denying that he was a Communist. He was sentenced to five years in prison.
The Supreme Court in Jencks v. United States (1957), overturned his conviction in a landmark decision that mandated providing an accused person any previously hidden witness statements so that cross-examinations could be effective. In the new book McCarthyism vs. Clinton Jencks, scholar Raymond Caballero reveals for the first time that the FBI and the prosecution knew all along that Clinton Jencks was innocent.
Jencks’s case typified the era, exposing the myriad of injustices many suffered at the hands of McCarthyism. His journey for justice offers a new window into the McCarthy era’s oppression, which irrevocably damaged the lives, careers, and reputations of thousands of Americans.’
Guest – Raymond Caballero, author of Orozco: The Life and Death of a Mexican Revolutionary. Human rights attorney Michael E. Tigar wrote the introduction to McCarthyism vs. Clinton Jencks.
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Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, Supreme Court, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Kings Bay Plowshares 7 Case Update October 2019
In our society, nuclear weapons that can destroy all creation are taken as a normal, even an inevitable part of life. In a dramatic action to break what they call “the crime of silence” seven Catholic peace activists entered the Kings Bay trident submarine base in Georgia last April to perform an act of symbolic disarmament. They used hammers to follow the prophecy of Isaiah “to beat swords into plowshares” and poured blood to make holy what was evil in a sacramental action. Kings Bay is homeport to six ballistic missile trident submarines, each of which deploy 16 trident missiles carrying four or more warheads of at least 100 kilotons. The Hiroshima bomb was 14 kilotons. Each submarine thus has the destructive power of at least 500 Hiroshima bombs. The plowshares seven face up to 25 years in federal prison. Their trial is coming up. Theirs was the latest of 100 plowshares actions around the world since 1980.
Guest – Martha Hennessey, Kings Bay Plowshares 7 co-defendant, activist and volunteer with the New York Catholic Worker.
Guest – Patrick O’Neill, Kings Bay Plowshares 7 co-defendant, activist and volunteer with the New York Catholic Worker.
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Flint Water Crisis Case and Michigan Private Prisons Update
The notorious Flint, Michigan poison drinking water case has been in litigation for more than three years. Detroit constitutional attorney Bill Goodman joins us to give an update on the case.
Former Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, high-ranking former members of his staff and other state employees are the target of a federal civil rights lawsuit over the city of Flint’s water crisis. The lawsuit, which also targets the city, alleges that the officials tried to balance the City’s budget through a pattern of devious and race-based activity that targeted the people of Flint. It claims that these public official lied to the people of Flint by continuing to mail water bills to Flint residents, which they allege fraudulently misrepresents that the city is providing safe, clean water to its residents.
A group of Flint residents filed the lawsuit on behalf of all the citizens of Flint seeking financial compensation for injuring virtually every adult and child in that beleaguered city – for lead poisoning and brain damage to the kids, for severe skin ailments and hair loss for everyone, for death from Legionnaires disease, and countless other injuries; in addition, there had been tremendous psychological injury to the entire population. Beyond that, people in this community have sustained massive property damage, loss of business, and financial losses. In addition to compensation, they demand life-time future medical care.
This case asserts that this disaster was caused when a multitude of public officials decided to change the source of water from clean safe water, to dangerous, untreated water, knowing – at all times of the danger – and yet lying to the public and claiming that they water was safe when they knew that it was dangerous and poisoned.
We will also speak with him about his lawsuit against a private prison corporation for negligence in allowing a gang execution in one of the private prisons it owns. Attorney Goodman is counsel to the inmates at the Wayne County, Michigan jail in the oldest jail conditions case in the United States going back to 1971. Detroit is in Wayne County.
Guest -Attorney Bill Goodman is the former Legal Director at the Center for Constitutional Rights and a past president of the National Lawyers Guild. He is the attorney for a number of victims of water poisoning in Flint, Michigan.
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Civil Liberties, Climate Change, Human Rights, Iran, Supreme Court, Truth to Power, War Resister
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When at Times the Mob Is Swayed, A Citizen’s Guide to Defending Our Republic
Trump was elected by about 25% of the eligible voters. Half of the voters who could have, didn’t vote. He lost the popular election by 3 million votes. Since then, this appalling man has proceeded to aggrandize his power. Backed by large corporations to whom he gave huge tax breaks and for whom he cut regulations, the military to which he just gave a $750 billion budget, a Republican Supreme Court and the right wing media such as Sinclair Broadcasting and Fox News he has maintained a steady base of support in the population.
Increasing a sense of dread has spread across our country, it appears possible that Trump may get reelected. Democracy and the rule of law are increasingly threatened.
Guest – Constitutional Lawyer, Burt Neuborne is the former legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union and has argued many cases before the US Supreme Court. Attorney Neuborne’s book “When at Times the Mob is Swayed” has been recently published by the New Press. He is currently the Norman Dorsen Professor of Civil Liberties at NYU School of Law.
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Prominent Environmental Activist Maggy Hurchalla Loses Appeal Of 4.4 Million Dollar Jury Verdict
Issues of the environment, citizen advocacy, and the public’s right to know are converging in two South Florida court cases. One involves 78-year-old Maggy Hurchalla, a former Everglades Coalition’s Conservationist of the Year and winner of a National Wetlands Award from the Environmental Law Institute. Now she owes a developer $4.4 million for speaking out about a critical local environmental issue.
In 2012 Hurchalla learned that Lake Point Restoration was considering conveying water to West Palm Beach for a fee. She complained about the company’s operation in emails to Martin Country commissioners and after Lake Point lost out on some contracts. Lake Point claims Maggy lied and was intent on hurting the company.
In a second related case, the nonprofit Everglades Law Center requested a transcript of a closed door meeting of South Florida Water Management’s governing board. The response? They were hauled into court, with Maggie Hurchalla added to the lawsuit.
Guest – Professor Richard Grosso, director of environmental and land use practice at NOVA Southeastern University. Professor Grosso is a widely recognized legal expert, practicing attorney and policy advocate, with over 30 years of experience litigating and advocating on statewide and south Florida environmental issues.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Human Rights, Supreme Court, Truth to Power
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The Movie SKIN and One People’s Project
In the recently-released 2019 movie SKIN, skinhead Bryon Widner’s body is covered in racist tattoos, each marking a hate crime he committed. His parents Shareen and Fred “Hammer” Krager, run a kind of camp that recruits and trains young men—often lost and hungry–to become white supremacists.
Bryon meets and falls in love with single mother Julie Price. When he begins to realize he wants to give up his hateful habits, he faces a host of difficulties, one of which is the long and painful process of removing many of the hate tattoos that cover his body.
The film follows writer-director Guy Nattiv’s Oscar-winning short film of the same name. In the narrative version, actor Mike Colter plays the film’s true hero, Daryle Lamont Jenkins, who has devoted his life to helping people escape neo-Nazi groups.
Guest – Daryle Lamont Jenkins, founder of One People’s Project, is able to join us in the studio today. Since 1988 Daryle has been documenting and writing about right wing individuals and organizations even back while he was serving as a police officer in the U.S. Air Force. In 2000, he founded One People’s Project out of a counter-protest to a rally in Morristown, NJ. The organization quickly gained the reputation of publicly documenting hate groups and their activities.
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Reforming Sex Offender Laws
The U.S. legal system and sentencing practices rely too often on emotion rather than facts when it comes to defendants with developmental disabilities charged with sex offenses. Sentences for possessing child pornography are severe, and don’t take into account a defendant’s lack of awareness or inability to understand the societal values being punished. This is true for individuals on the autism spectrum whose social intelligence quotient may lag their intelligence quotient.
Two professors want to change that.
St. Francis College professor Emily Horowitz and co-editor and law professor Larry Dubin make the case for reform in their book Caught in the Web of the Criminal Justice System: Autism, Developmental Disabilities, and Sex Offenses.
Guest – Professor Emily Horowitz discusses her book and work related to sex offender laws in the United States. Dr. Horowitz is chair of the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice at St. Francis. She is the author of Protecting Our Kids? How Sex Offender Laws Are Failing Us and founder and co-director of the St. Francis Post-Prison program. Her research on the sex offense registry been widely cited.
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