CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Supreme Court, Truth to Power
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Venezuela Coup d’Etat
The last coup d’état the United States of America sponsored in 2009 in Latin America was under the Obama administration and supported by his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton when they overthrew a mildly social democratic president of Honduras. At that time the USA denied its role.
Today we are witnessing a quite open and blatant coup d’état in oil rich Venezuela against their recently and democratically elected socialist president Nicolas Maduro. The US boldly announced it no longer considered Maduro the legitimate president of his country.
In his stead the USA has recognized Jose Guida, an obscure legislator from the most right wing of the opposition parties after Vice President Mike Pence called him on the phone and gave him the blessings of United States government.
Venezuelan oil assets in the United States which amount to over $7 billion have been frozen. Likewise it’s $1 billion plus bank deposits in the United Kingdom have been seized. The United States has succeeded, in the infamous words of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who engineered the coup against the elected Democratic Socialist President Salvador Allende in Chile on September 11 of 1973, “ to make their economy scream”.
The Venezuelan economy is now half its former size and hobbling along at a depression level. Food and medicine there is increasingly scarce. Tens of thousands of people have been forced to leave their country. Nevertheless, President Maduro has retained popular support including the support of the Venezuelan army.
Guest – Greg Grandin, a professor of history at New York University and a Nation editorial board member, is the author of a number of prize-winning books, including The Empire of Necessity, which won the Bancroft Prize; Fordlandia, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award; Empire’s Workshop; The Last Colonial Massacre; The Blood of Guatemala; and, most recently, Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman. His new book, forthcoming this spring, is The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America.
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United States Executive Authority in Declaring Emergency Powers
U.S. presidents have the discretion to declare a “national emergency.” As soon as he does, he can sidestep many existing limits to presidential authority. In fact, 100 or more special provisions become available to him. Some provide reasonable responses to real emergencies, while others seem to bolster the power of a so-called unitary executive who wants to amassing or retain power. The president can activate laws allowing him to, for example, shut down many kinds of electronic communications inside the U.S. or to freeze Americans’ bank accounts. Other powers are available without a declaration of emergency, including laws that allow the president to deploy troops inside the country to subdue domestic unrest.
The rationale for having emergency powers is simple: The government’s ordinary powers may not be enough in times of crisis, and amending the laws to provide greater ones would take too long. Emergency powers are intended to give a temporary boost until the emergency passes or there is time to change the law through the regular legislative process. The problem comes when presidents don’t have the best interest of the country in mind.
Guest – Andrew Boyd, Counsel in the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program. Andrew spent 7 years prosecuting senior Khmer Rouge leaders on behalf of the UN for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. He also worked on cases resulting from the 1994 Rwandan genocide at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, FBI Intrusion, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Supreme Court, Surveillance, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Honoring the Legacy Of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Today on Law and Disorder we bring you a special hour-long program honoring the life and legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. Our listeners know all too well that the Nobel Peace Prize laureate was shot on April 4, 1968–51 years ago. Not so well known is the radical Dr. King, who said in the last months of his life that:
“Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world, declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo.”
Joining us are special guests Ruby Sales, a colleague of Dr. King’s and co-founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; and Rev. Dr. Emma Jordan-Simpson, Executive Director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (F.O.R.). We’re also joined by author and activist Matt Meyer, a board member of the AJMI.
Dr. King began close ties with A.J. Muste and with the F.O.R. during the Montgomery bus boycott, when FOR staff members Bayard Rustin and Glenn Smiley came to Alabama to support local efforts nonviolently challenging racial segregation. Dr. King developed a special relationship with former FOR chairman A.J. Muste, whose absolute pacifism King had, as a theological seminary student, questioned.
Before heading F.O.R., Muste was a prominent labor leader, helping to found the militant Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). And Dr. King, of course, was killed exactly one year after taking a staunch anti-Vietnam war position and in the midst of supporting a significant strike of sanitation workers, linking—as he had been—issues of race, class, and violence as King deepened his critique of the roots of oppressive U.S. society.
Guest – Ruby Sales is the founder and director of the “SpiritHouse Project”, a national organization that uses the arts, research, education, action and spirituality to bring diverse peoples together to work for racial, economic and social justice as well as for spiritual maturity. A life-long organizer, scholar and public theologian in the areas of civil, gender and other human rights, she was a member of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee and served as national convener of the Make Every Church A Peace Church movement.
Guest – Rev. Dr. Emma Jordan-Simpson is the Executive Pastor of The Concord Baptist Church of Christ, Brooklyn, NY. She has combined pastoral ministry with the social justice community. The former Executive Director of the Children’s Defense Fund she is now the Executive Director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation.
Guest – Matt Meyer is Secretary-General of the International Peace Research Association, Chair of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation’s Financial Advisory Committee, Africa Support Network Coordinator of the War Resisters International, and Senior Research Scholar at U-Mass Amherst. As current National co-chair of FOR and former Chair of the War Resisters League, he is second only to AJ Muste in holding the top post of those two historic US peace organizations. He is author of the recently published White Lives Matter Most And Other “Little” White Lies.
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Civil Liberties, Death Penalty, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Supreme Court, Truth to Power, War Resister
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White Lives Matter Most And Other “Little” White Lies
In a society in which entrenched racism persists, is it possible for white activists to meaningfully engage in anti-racist movements such as the movement for black lives?
Longtime peace activist, educator and author Matt Meyer examines that question in his new book White Lives Matter Most And Other “Little” White Lies. As we honor the life and legacy of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. we talk with Matt Meyer of whom Cornell West says “this legendary freedom fighter brings together the best of the peace movement and the best of the anti-racism movement. “
Guest – Matt Meyer is the International Peace Research Association representative at the United Nations, the national co-chair of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and the War Resisters’ International Africa Support Network Coordinator. A noted educator, author, and organizer, Meyer focuses on an extensive range of human rights issues including support for political prisoners; solidarity with Puerto Rico, the Black Liberation movement and all decolonization movements; and bringing an end to patriarchy, militarism, and imperialism.
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Attorney Angela Davis: Arbitrary Justice
“In the halls of justice”, it has been quipped, “the only justice you find is in the halls.” H. Rap Brown, a leader of SNCC, the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, said that justice in America means “just us”. There are 2.3 million people in American prisons today. A great proportion of them are African-Americans. If you assume Europe has the same social situation that we do in America, it is a telling fact that we have seven times as many prisoners. Part of the explanation for this phenomenon, In addition to the racist nature of the United States of America, is the power that the American prosecutor has. It is the power to choose whom to prosecute and for what crime. It is the power to obtain convictions, not to seek justice. It is a power that is discretionary and open to abuse. This abuse is rarely reviewable or punished.
Guest – Attorney and Professor Angela J. Davis author of Arbitrary Justice: The Power of the American Prosecutor. Her most recent book “Policing the Black Man” covers the key issues of the Black Lives Matter movement. Angela J. Davis, professor of law at American University Washington College of Law, is an expert in criminal law and procedure with a specific focus on prosecutorial power and racism in the criminal justice system. Davis previously served as director of the D.C. Public Defender Service, where she began as a staff attorney representing indigent juveniles and adults. She also served as executive director of the National Rainbow Coalition and is a former law clerk of the Honorable Theodore R. Newman, the former Chief Judge of the D.C. Court of Appeals. Davis is the author of Arbitrary Justice: The Power of the American Prosecutor
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Crony Capitalism, Habeas Corpus, Supreme Court, Surveillance, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Money And Class In America – Lewis Lapham
We are especially pleased and honored to spend the hour with our guest Lewis Lapham. After graduating from Yale in 1956 he started out working as a newspaper reporter in San Francisco and then in New York, where he currently lives and works. The editor of Harper’s Magazine for 20 years, Lapham has written 14 books. Currently, he edits “Lapham’s Quarterly.”
Lapham founded the quarterly magazine in an effort to further the consideration of history, which he calls “the advice and counsel of the past.” He sees history as “a guide to understanding and acting on the issues and ideas before us today.”
Major pillars of the rule of law have been defiled since 911. The edifice still stands, the promises remain, but as a nation, we have suffered huge losses. Last spring Lapham’s Quarterly addressed the topic, “The Rule of Law.” His 1988 book “Money and Class In America” was re-published by OR Books last year with a new introduction by Lapham and a forward by Thomas Frank. We speak with him in our studio today about the contradiction between the rule of the monied rich and the rule of law.
Guest – Lewis Lapham is editor and founder of Lapham’s Quarterlysince 2007 and editor of Harper’s Magazinefrom 1975 to 2006, Lewis H. Lapham is a member of the American Society of Magazine Editors Hall of Fame. He is the author of fourteen books, among them Money and Class in America, The Wish for Kings,Waiting for the Barbarians, Theater of War, and Age of Folly. He produced a weekly podcast,The World in Time, for Bloomberg News from 2011 through 2013. His documentary filmThe American Ruling Class has become part of the curriculum in many of the nation’s schools and colleges. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, Lapham has lectured at Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Stanford, the University of Michigan, and the University of Minnesota.
CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Human Rights, Supreme Court, Surveillance, Torture, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Michael E. Tigar On Challenges Lawyers Currently Face
Recently on Law And Disorder we interviewed Baher Azmy, Legal Director at the Center for Constitutional Rights, and National Lawyers Guild President Natasha Bannan. We were interested in their views of the challenges facing leftist lawyers and their movement clients face in these difficult times.
Attorney Jim Lafferty, the former head of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, who has a program on our sister station in Los Angeles, KPFK, joins me in the studio to cohost. We are going to speak for the entire hour with human rights attorney Michael Tigar.
Since the attacks on September 11, 2001, our democracy, however restricted at the time, has been even further shrunk by the growth of the national security state and the all knowing surveillance apparatus that has been set up. Moreover, the President, as the head of the executive branch of the government, has gathered unto to himself an unprecedented amount of power over the judicial and the legislative branches of the government. tigarbytes.blogspot.com/
Guest – Michael Tigar, emeritus professor of law at Duke University and at Washington College of Law. He has been a lawyer working on social change issues since the 1960s. He has argued numerous cases in United States Supreme Court and many Circuit Courts of Appeal. His books include “Law and the Rise of Capitalism”, “ Fighting Injustice ”, and the forthcoming Mythologist of State and Monopoly Power.“
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Human Rights, Iraq War, Military Tribunal, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Prosecution of the Bush Administration, Supreme Court, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Guantanamo Diary: Mohamedou Ould Slahi
The American offshore prison camp in Guantánamo, Cuba is still operating. After the attacks on September 11, 2001, it was set up as a place where neither American or international law would apply and where prisoners could be brought, tortured, detained forever, and never charged with a crime. Ten years ago, former President Obama promised to close the offshore prison when he ran for office. It remains up and running to this day. Mohamedou Ould Slahi spent 18 years of his life there. He was an electrical engineer from Mauritania in Africa and educated in Germany. He was 32 years old when he was apprehended in his home, taken to Jordan where he was tortured, then to Afghanistan, then to Guantanamo and 16 years later at age 48, he was released. He walked out of Guantanamo Bay Prison in October 2016 without being charged with a crime and returned to his native Mauritania.
While in prison in 2005 he wrote a memoir, in English, one of his four languages. His attorney Nancy Hollander had asked him to do it and she finally got it declassified in 2012 but with heavy redactions. It was made into a book, titled Guantánamo Diary, and published in 2015 and became an international bestseller.
In it, he describes how he was tortured in ways personally approved by then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Torture is a criminal act under both US and international law. As many know, Rumsfeld has yet to be prosecuted.
Guest – Mohamedou Ould Slahi joins hosts from his native country of Mauritania where he is a writer. He is the author of Guantanamo Diary.
Guest – Attorney Nancy Hollander has been a member of the firm Freedman Boyd Hollander Goldberg Ives & Duncan, P.A. since 1980 and a partner since 1983. Her practice is largely devoted to criminal cases, including those involving national security issues. She has also been counsel in numerous civil cases, forfeitures and administrative hearings, and has argued and won a case involving religious freedom in the United States Supreme Court. Ms. Hollander also served as a consultant to the defense in a high profile terrorism case in Ireland, has assisted counsel in other international cases and represents two prisoners at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. Nancy is co-author of WestGroup’s Everytrial Criminal Defense Resource Book, Wharton’s Criminal Evidence, 15th Edition, and Wharton’s Criminal Procedure, 14th Edition. She has appeared on national television programs as PBS Now, Burden of Proof, the Today Show, Oprah Winfrey, CourtTV, and the MacNeill/Lehrer News Hour.
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Manhattan Neighborhood Network Supreme Court Case
Is a public-access TV channel run by private nonprofit corporation subject to the First Amendment? The Supreme Court will consider that question in a case involving the Manhattan Neighborhood Network or MNN. In 1991 MNN was designated to operate as a public-access channel in New York City. The Manhattan Borough President has no control over MNN but does pick two of its thirteen board members.
In 2012 Jesus Melendez, an occasional contributor to MNN, was suspended for trying to attend a board meeting. His associate Deedee Halleck then videoed him outside talking about the situation. MNN banned the video from airing. Melendez and Deedee brought a First Amendment claim against MNN asking if the network is a state actor for purposes of their First Amendment rights. The district court said no, noting that, while it was a close call, other circuits had concluded that privately run public-access networks were not state actors.
The Supreme Court hasn’t directly weighed in on this question although Justice Anthony Kennedy, in a 1996 concurrence in a case dealing with laws regulating content on public-access channels, wrote they should be considered state actors who run public fora and thus be subject to the First Amendment. Justice Clarence Thomas disagreed in his concurrence, writing that “franchising authorities require cable operators to create public access channels, but nothing in the record suggests that local franchising authorities take any formal easement or other property interest in those channels that would permit the government to designate that property as a public forum.”
Defenders of MNN claim, that while it’s possible that some public-access channels could be rightly called state actors, the Court should take the case to clarify the state-actor test and to review the Second Circuit’s unnecessarily broad opinion.
Guest – Deedee Halleck one of the plaintiffs in this case and among the top media activists. She’s co-founder of Paper Tiger Television and also the Deep Dish Satellite Network, the first grass roots community television network. She is Professor Emerita in the Department of Communication at the University of California at San Diego.
Guest – Attorney Paul W. Hughes, a partner in the law firm Mayer Brown’s appellate and Supreme Court practice. Paul has handled more than 200 appellate matters, more than 125 of which were in the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2017The American Lawyer named Hughes “Litigator of the Week” in connection with his immigration work.
