Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Gaza, genocide, Human Rights, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, War Resister
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
On Friday, following the taping of this show, the UK High Court ruled that the ban on Palestine Action, which we examine, was unlawful.
Our guest Fahad Ansari released this statement: “With jurors repeatedly refusing to convict individuals for smashing up Israeli weapons factories and now the High Court quashing the government’s proscription of a group dedicated to that goal, it is evident that the British public overwhelmingly opposes Britain’s support for Israeli genocide.”
British Movement Lawyer Exposes Being Targeted By Senior Politicians and Cointel Police
When repressive governments around the world attack their own people and liberal democracies fight back, some of the first responders are movement lawyers. Unlike cowardly law firms that capitulate in advance, as we have seen here in the United States, movement lawyers work hand-in-hand with activists not merely challenging what the government is doing but putting the government itself on trial.
The roots of movement lawyering in the United States can be traced back to the civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, where lawyers challenged laws that upheld segregation and other forms of discrimination. These lawyers used the legal system not just as a passive tool but as an active agent of change. They helped litigate landmark cases that desegregated schools, secured voting rights, dismantled discriminatory laws, challenged draft laws and questioned the legality of the Vietnam War.
The founders of this program Law and Disorder, Michael Ratner, Michael Smith, Jim Lafferty, and Heidi Boghosian are all prominent movement lawyers. But movement lawyers are not confined to the United States.
Guest- Fahad Ansari, is a senior civil liberties solicitor based in London. As a movement lawyer, he developed a niche in representing individuals and communities affected by counter-terrorism legislation, state surveillance, and discriminatory policing. His career has been defined by taking on some of Britain’s most sensitive cases including representing those stripped of their citizenship on grounds of national security and representing Hamas in its 2025 application to be removed from the British government’s list of proscribed terrorist organizations.
The Hamas case resulted in Ansari being smeared by senior politicians and targeted by British counter-terrorism police and the government agency that regulates the practice of law in the UK.
On August 6, 2025, Ansari was stopped by officers at the port of Holyhead as he returned from a family holiday in Ireland with his wife and four children. Ansari said the bulk of the questioning was about Palestine Action, a group recently proscribed under the Terrorism Act. He was also asked about Hamas but refused to answer, citing client confidentiality. Ansari said he was held by police for three hours, fingerprinted, photographed and swabbed for DNA and told to remove his face ID and pin from his phone or face arrest. The following day, the contents of his phone were copied by the police.
Ansari said that “In the decade that I have been involved in national security cases, I have never heard of lawyers in England being targeted to this extent because of their clients. Some have complained that representing Hamas brings the profession into disrepute. Yet, what really undermines the integrity of the profession is when unpopular clients are unable to secure legal representation because of fear of public opprobrium and state intimidation.”
—-
Michigan Movement Lawyer Mark Fancher
As we celebrate Black History Month, conversations often drift toward a comfortable, sanitized narrative of progress. But our guest today, Mark Fancher, has spent his career in the uncomfortable spaces where the struggle for racial justice remains ongoing, contested, and— for far too many communities—urgent.
Mark recently retired as Senior Staff Attorney with the Racial Justice Project of the ACLU of Michigan. But his commitment to justice did not begin there. A longtime leader in the National Conference of Black Lawyers and an active member of the National Lawyers Guild, he has devoted decades to challenging the systems that produce inequality—not merely documenting them.
In Michigan, those systems are stark, and those injustices are often enforced by the badge. Black residents comprise roughly 14 percent of the state’s population, yet account for nearly half of those incarcerated. That disparity is not incidental. It reflects policies, practices, and policing strategies entrenched over generations. Mark has litigated the human consequences behind those numbers—from confronting a culture of brutality in the City of Taylor, which he described as functioning like an “occupying army,” to defending Black officers such as Johnny Strickland, who faced retaliation within their own departments for speaking out.
Mark is no stranger to the friction that truth-telling provokes. More than a decade ago, at a “Unity Breakfast” in Muskegon, his remarks about white privilege and police misconduct prompted audience members to walk out. He was labeled “divisive.” But as Mark reminded them then—and reminds us now—Dr. King did not preach comfort. He taught the oppressed to confront injustice without fear and without retreat.
———————
Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Human Rights, Surveillance
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Raiding the Genome: How the United States Government Is Abusing its Immigration Powers to Amass DNA for Future Policing
Worldwide, governments are quietly stockpiling one of the most intimate forms of personal data imaginable: our DNA. What began as a tool for identifying suspects and reuniting families has become a global infrastructure for surveillance—an invisible archive of our genetic code, stored and searchable.
In 2024, Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy & Technology sounded the alarm in a report titled Raiding the Genome: How the United States Government Is Abusing its Immigration Powers to Amass DNA for Future Policing. The findings were stark: U.S. immigration authorities are collecting DNA on a massive scale, far beyond what the law permits.
In a follow-up report last month, the Center reveals that Customs and Border Protection is taking DNA from American citizens, too—routinely, without consent, and without oversight—then funneling those samples to the FBI. Once there, they’re added to the national criminal database known as CODIS, where law enforcement agencies nationally can access and search them.
Guest – Stevie Glaberson is the Director of Research & Advocacy for the Center, and an author of the report. She joined the Center after serving as a Visiting Professor and the Director of Georgetown Law’s Civil Litigation Clinic, which she helped found as a clinical teaching fellow and staff attorney.
—-
Inventing Antifa
On October 18, No Kings Day, in her popular Newsletter, author Sarah Kendzior wrote a disturbing column titled Inventing Antifa. It begins: “In 2005, the Uzbek government invented a group called ‘Akromiya’ to justify a massacre of protesters. Now I worry the US government will do the same.” She recounted how on May 13, 2005, the Uzbek government killed over 700 civilians gathered in the eastern city of Andijon to protest the economic, social, and political conditions of Uzbekistan. Prompted by the imprisonment and subsequent jailbreak of popular local businessmen, the crowd grew to 10,000 people, some drawn by a rumor that their dictator, President Karimov, would address the largest protest in Uzbekistan’s history. Instead, military forces greeted the demonstrators. According to the Uzbek government, the forces targeted only armed insurgents, 187 of whom were killed. But according to nearly all other accounts, the military fired indiscriminately into the crowd, murdering at least 700 people, including children.
At the center of the massacre was a group the Uzbek government called “Akromiya.” According to the Uzbek government, Akromiya armed the militants, Akromiya gave the orders, Akromiya was responsible for the deaths of Uzbek citizens in Andijon. Akromiya was a menace that had to be stamped out at any cost. There was one problem with this theory: Akromiya — according to Uzbek and international human rights groups, political organizations, journalists, citizens, and accused Akromiya members themselves — did not exist. The Uzbek government had invented “Akromiya,” which became the all-purpose label slapped on any Uzbek who dared to dissent.
Kendzior believes that just as the Uzbek government invented the bogeyman “Akromiya” to justify the brutal suppression of dissent, Donald Trump is using the label Antifa to do the same to suppress and criminalize the rising resistance against his fascist regime in the United States. Kendzior knows alot about the myth of “Akromiya” because she’s the one who debunked it, so we’re very pleased to have her with us today on Law and Disorder.
Guest – Sarah Kendzior is the bestselling author of The View From Flyover Country, Hiding In Plain Sight and They Knew. Her latest book The Last American Road Trip was published this year and I had the pleasure of reviewing it – favorably I might add – for Ms Magazine. From 2018 until 2023, she was the co-host of Gaslit Nation, a weekly podcast and she is well-known for her coverage of the Trump administration and for writing about authoritarianism, kleptocracy, transnational organized crime, racism and xenophobia, media, voting rights, technology, the environment, and corruption, among other topics. Sarah holds a PhD in anthropology from Washington University in Saint Louis and an MA in Central Eurasian Studies from Indiana University In August 2013, Foreign Policy journal named her one of “the 100 people you should be following on Twitter to make sense of global events.” Inventing Antifa – Sarah Kendzior’s Newsletter.
——————————————
Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Freedom Of Speech, Human Rights, Right To Dissent, Surveillance, U.S. Militarism
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
![]()
![]()
Law Firms Targeted By Trump Administration
Trump and the MAGA movement behind him have taken huge steps to upend and overturn the kind of democracy, however limited by race and class, that we have lived with since our independence from England some 250 years ago. In order to secure their rule, these fascists, like those in the Hitler movement 90 years ago, attempted to get control of the various apparatuses of our society. They aimed at the major media, the universities, the states like California, the scientific establishment, the medical profession, the cultural apparatus, the top brass in the military, and the big law firms.
Hitler’s fascist party in Germany called this effort “bringing it into line”. What we are going to examine today is Trump’s efforts to dominate the major law firms in America. He has succeeded in dominating some, but not all, of these law firms, which are known as “big law.“ The resistance has been impressive and a tribute to the spirit of fairness in the American legal tradition.
What did Trump do? He told the big law firms that he would sign an executive order banning them from federal buildings, including the courthouses where they practiced. Further, he would take away their security clearances and he would cancel any contracts they had with the federal government. This was calculated to break these firms and they knew it. A target was the venerable firm of Paul Weiss, established in 1875, which was active in the civil rights movement in the 50s. It helped to win the landmark desegregation victory in “Brown vs the Board of Education.” Paul Weiss initially tried to resist. It asked other firms for help. But to no avail.
The other firms refused and instead began to pick off their clients. Faced with financial ruin Paul Weiss gave in and agreed to donate millions of dollars in free legal work to projects of Trump‘s choice. So did other famous firms. Collectively, these firms agreed to furnish Trump with over $1 billion in pro bono assistance to Trump and his projects, like defending cops in cases of police abuse and murder, as in the George Floyd case.
Guest – Los Angeles attorney John Burton was the president of the Board of Directors of the National Police Accountability Project, an organization representing more than 600 police misconduct, lawyers and other professionals throughout the United States. He established his law firm in 1984. Mr. Burton has covered the story for the World Socialist Website. As he has written, the battle Trump started is not over. Four judges have ruled against him. 24 friend of the court amicus briefs have been filed. 1000 law firms have come on board.
—-
Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement to Pursue Criminals and Protect Innocent Citizens
Among the tsunami of Trump‘s executive orders is EO number 14288. Trump signed it on April 25, 2025. It is ominous. The order is titled Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement to Pursue Criminals and Protect Innocent Citizens.
It orders review and likely cancellation of police/citizen consent decrees like the one the movement in Minneapolis won against the Minneapolis Police Department after they murdered George Floyd several years ago. It militarizes law-enforcement by distributing military assets to local police forces and encouraging coordination between the Department of Defense and Federal-local law-enforcement. One of its core objectives is to establish pro bono representation by some of the biggest law firms in America to help shield offending police from suits against them for abuse of local citizens. Trump previously secured agreements with these firms to provide over $1 billion with a representation for free to entities that he designates.
Guest – Russ Bellant has researched rightist, fascist, and the Nazi forces in the United States for over 50 years. He has published articles in many magazines and has written three books based on his research. They include Old Nazis, The New Right and the Republican Party and The Religious Right In Michigan Politics. Email: RussBellant (at) gmail.com (reply that you want to be on the email list)
————
Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, FBI Intrusion, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Racist Police Violence, Right To Dissent, Surveillance, Torture, Truth to Power
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Malcolm X Shabazz et al. v. USA
A groundbreaking legal case seeks justice for the family of most iconic civil rights leaders, Malcolm X. In an unprecedented lawsuit filed by his daughters, the Shabazz family is challenging the U.S. government, the City of New York, and several high-ranking law enforcement agencies. At the heart of the case is the claim that state actors, including the FBI and NYPD, played an active role in the assassination of Malcolm X on February 22, 1965, and that this involvement has been systematically covered up for decades.
This suit, Malcolm X Shabazz et al. v. USA, not only seeks justice for the wrongful death of Malcolm X but aims to hold the government accountable for its complicity in the assassination. The case draws on newly uncovered evidence that links federal agencies to the events surrounding Malcolm X’s death, as well as the subsequent framing and wrongful conviction of two men who were exonerated in 2021.
The legal team behind this case includes civil rights attorneys Benjamin Crump and G. Flint Taylor, and if successful, their argument could rewrite the historical narrative surrounding one of America’s tragic and significant moments. At the core of this case is the question: How deep was the state’s involvement in silencing Malcolm X? Was the assassination part of a coordinated campaign by law enforcement agencies determined to prevent the rise of powerful Black leaders? The lawsuit raises profound questions about the government’s role in suppressing movements for racial justice and civil rights, both in the past and in the present.
Guest – Flint Taylor of the Peoples Law Office. Flint represented the family of Fred Hampton and revealed that the FBI and Chicago Police Department murdered him in 1969. Flint is an editor of the Police Misconduct Law Reporter and is author of The Torture Machine: Racism And Police Violence In Chicago.
—-
A History Of Anti-Black Racism
National chauvinism and racism are essential features of fascism. The practice of white racism in the United States during the Jim Crow era was something that Hitler’s party in Germany studied and emulated. This kind of anti-black racism went on in the United States from shortly after the Civil War up until the 1960s. It has never really gone away as the mass mobilizations of the Black Lives Matter movement has recently demonstrated. This Black resistance, this fight back, will be a central aspect of anti-fascist activity in the future.
Guest – Bill Mullen is professor emeritus of American studies at Purdue University and the co-founder of The Campus Anti-fascist Network. He’s also co-author of The Black Antifascist Tradition and his new book published last month We Charge Genocide: American Ashes and the Rule of Law.
——————————
Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Climate Change, Human Rights, NSA Spying, Supreme Court, Surveillance
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
The Center for Climate Integrity
Today, we’re delving into a legacy of deception and destruction. For more than 50 years, Big Oil companies like ExxonMobil, Chevron, and BP have known that burning fossil fuels would raise global temperatures. Yet, instead of taking responsibility or warning the public, they have orchestrated campaigns of denial, disinformation, and delay.
As a result, we are living with unprecedented climate disasters. Following the hottest year on record in 2023, extreme weather events have intensified, from record-breaking wildfires scorching California and Canada, to catastrophic hurricanes pounding the Gulf Coast. During this past June, nearly 5 billion people globally faced intense heat over nine days, with more than 60% of the world’s population encountering temperatures made at least three times more likely by climate change. These events not only devastate ecosystems and communities, but they also cost taxpayers billions of dollars in damage and recovery.
Guest – Corey Riday-White, Managing Attorney at the Center for Climate Integrity, an organization that is fighting to hold Big Oil accountable for its deceit. The Center is supporting litigation efforts in several states, aiming to force fossil fuel companies to pay for the damage they’ve caused. Let’s hear more about their approach, and how the legal system might be used to confront this ongoing climate crisis.
—-
Surveillance Dragnet: Geofence Warrants
Recently, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals handed down a landmark decision in U.S. v. Jamarr Smith, holding that geofence warrants are “categorically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment.” What is a Geofence Warrant? They compel companies such as Google to hand over data on every device in a particular geographical area over a set period of time. Not surprisingly they are a controversial tool in law enforcement’s investigative arsenal.
Privacy experts argue they amount to a dragnet search that violates the privacy of countless innocent individuals. Proponents, on the other hand, see them as necessary for solving crimes in our digital world. The Fifth Circuit ruling is a major development in the ongoing debate over privacy and mass surveillance.
Guest – Alan Butler, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center or EPIC, in Washington, DC. EPIC has been at the forefront of legal battles to improve data protection standards to protect individual rights in the rapidly advancing surveillance state. Alan Butler is Chair of the Privacy and Information Protection Committee of the American Bar Association Section on civil Rights and Social Justice. He has authored briefs on behalf of EPIC in significant privacy cases, including an amicus brief in Riley v. California that was cited in the Supreme Court’s unanimous landmark ruling that the warrantless search and content seizure of cell phones during an arrest is unconstitutional.
Music out: The Down Hill Strugglers – Abandoned Orchards That Grow
———————-
CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Criminalizing Dissent, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, Truth to Power, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister, Whistleblowers
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Lawyers You’ll Like – Attorney Mel Wulf
Mel Wulf died at age 95 on July 1, 2023. He was one of the great constitutional litigators of his time. He served as Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union for 15 years. Today we bring you a re-broadcast of an interview that attorney Michael Ratner, and I, Michael Smith, did with Mel 10 years ago for a segment we called Lawyers You’ll Like. It is a scintillating fast paced discussion with a relevance to our situation now
We’re joined today by Attorney Mel Wulf, former legal director with the American Civil Liberties Union for 15 years. He was a law partner with former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark during the Kennedy Administration and much more. Wulf was part of some of the greatest contributions to the civil rights movement. He’s now retired after practicing law for 54 years. As part of our Lawyers You’ll Like series, we talk with Wulf about his work with the ACLU during the early 60s, and also about the forming of the Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee.
Attorney Mel Wulf:
- Phil Agee was a dissident CIA agent who spent decades working against the CIA, published a couple of books.
- He lost his passport because when the dissidents took over the embassy in Tehran in 1979, the New York Post carried a story accusing Phil of helping the students who’d invaded the embassy to put together all of that written material that had been shredded.
- It was another New York Post bald faced lie.
- The State Department, based upon that story revoked his passport.
- I had represented Phil Agee, I was his principle lawyer for 30 years.
- Agee was very widely disliked in Washington because he was well known to be a CIA dissident who disclosed the names of many CIA agents.
- If Snowden went the same route today, he would do even worse in this Supreme Court than I did. That’s why Snowden won’t get his passport, thanks to me.
- I was for the workers and not for the bosses and I’ve always been for the workers and not for the bosses, which I think is the distinguishing political factor in our world. Which side are you on?
- I got my Bachelors Degree in ’52 and I had a Navy Commission which I had gotten from the New York State Maritime Academy earlier on.
- The draft board sent me a 1A notice, I applied to Columbia and when I finished Columbia they sent me another 1A notice because the draft was still on. I spent 2 years in the Navy as a Liuetenant Junior Grade Officer in Southern California.
- I went to work at the ACLU in 1958 as the assistant legal director, in 1962 I was given the job of the legal director of the ACLU.
- I had actually been going down to Mississippi from 1961 to 1962, working with then one of the two black lawyers who were practicing in Mississippi.
- We tried a couple of capitol cases in Mississippi. I continued to argue the systematic exclusion of blacks from the jury.
- I finally got a case up to the Supreme Court on that issue.
- Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee: We had several hundred lawyers who went down to Mississippi for periods of a week or two. They were representing people being arrested during the Mississippi summer.
- Most of the judges allowed these lawyers to make some sort of presentation.
Guest – Attorney Mel Wulf, former legal director with the American Civil Liberties Union for 15 years. He was a law partner with former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark during the Kennedy Administration and much more. Wulf was part of some of the greatest contributions to the civil rights movement. He’s now retired after practicing law for 54 years.
—-
Lawyers You’ll Like: Attorney Bill Schaap
Attorney Bill Schaap, who died in 2016, was a friend and colleague of Mel Wulf’s. Bill and his wife, Ellen Ray published the historic whistleblowing magazine “Covert Action Quarterly“ that exposed to CIA. Then they started Sheridan Square Press. They published a number of memoirs of former CIA agents who revealed the truth about the activities of the CIA. Ex-CIA agent Phil Agee was one of Sheridan Square Press authors. He wrote Inside The Company which exposed the names of some 200 CIA agents involved in nefarious activities in South America. Mel Wulf represented Agee for 30 years and unsuccessfully tried to get his passport back when the government had it taken away.
Attorney William Schaap graduated from the University of Chicago Law School in 1964 and has been a practicing lawyer since. Bill specialized in military law and practiced in Asia and Europe. He later became the editor in chief of the Military Law Reporter in Washington for a number of years. In the 70’s and 80’s he was a staff counsel of the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City. In the late 80s, he was an adjunct professor at John J. College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York where he taught courses on propaganda and disinformation.
Attorney William Schaap:
- One of first cases at this big Wall Street firm, they had some outside counsel working on it, one of whom was David Lubel, and Dave Lubel who had I think been a recruiter for the Communist Party in his youth, was always good at spotting somebody who was always worth recruiting and he started to tell me there was this convention of this lawyers group.
- It was this 1967 Lawyers Guild Convention in New York. He dragged me to one event, I met Bill Kunstler, I met Arthur Kinoy, I met Victor Rabbinowitz. I’d been on Wall Street for a year or two, I said I didn’t know there were lawyers like this.
- I joined the same day and met Bernadine Dorhn and a few weeks she called me and said we need your help.
- She said you gotta defend a bunch of Columbia students. The next thing I knew the riot started at Columbia and she said you have to go down there and defend them.
- I signed up to be staff counsel on the National Lawyers Guild Military Law Project in Okinawa, Japan.
- When you work overseas in that kind of a climate with the military you learn a lot fast about American imperialism.
- Once you learn that, you learn about the CIA.
- That led us to originally working on Counter Spy magazine and then on Covert Action Magazine.
- The original purpose was to expose the CIA. We worked with Lou Wolf who is an expert in uncovering CIA agents in US embassies, not through any classified documents but because if you knew how to read the paperwork and State Department things, you could tell who are the “ringers.”
- We were so successful that Congress passed a law against us.
- Our goal was to make these people ineffective because the only way most CIA could work, particularly the ones that were assigned to an embassy was to have to pretend to be something else.
- They were all third assistant political secretaries and those were all phony things. Their job was to finagle their way into various community organizations in whatever foreign capital they were posted to recruit people to turn against their own countries and become traitors to their own countries, to become spies for the U.S.
- We thought if we identified these people, it might make their job a little bit harder, which it did.
- Of course, the problem with that is the government said we were trying to get them killed which we weren’t trying to do and nobody we did expose ever did get killed.
- He (Philip Agee) had been an adviser to Counter Spy. Counter Spy folded when Welch got killed, cause the pressure was too much and started Covert Action Quarterly.
- He was not the person discovering who the under cover people were, Lou Wolf was doing that.
- Phil wrote articles for us in every issue and we worked very closely with him.
- Once you start exposing these things, they really don’t have any defense.
- They tried to catch us in something phony. We would get tips that would turn out to be CIA trying to get us to print some story that wasn’t true so they could then discredit us.
- We had more interference from the government when we were doing military law work, before Covert Action Quarterly.
- They would plant bugs in our attic in Okinawa, things like that.
- The Intelligence Identity Protection Act has 2 parts. One makes it a crime for someone in the government who has classified information to reveal someone’s identity. The second part makes it a crime to reveal the identity of someone you did not learn from classified information or you position. (But if you were in the business of exposing these people . . .)
- Regarding his newsletter The Lies of Our Times – It was in the 90s, from 1990 to 1995 I think. To a certain extent, the abuses we were crying about got a little bit less over time because that’s sometimes the helpful result of that kind of exposure.
- We were just tired of people thinking that if it was in the New York Times it must be true.
- The fact is that those people lie all the time.
- I think we’ve gotten to a point where people recognize that the government lies to them and that there’s an awful lot that goes on that they don’t know.
Guest – Attorney William Schaap graduated from the University of Chicago Law School in 1964 and has been a practicing lawyer since. Bill specialized in military law and practiced in Asia and Europe. He later became the editor in chief of the Military Law Reporter in Washington for a number of years. In the 70’s and 80’s he was a staff counsel of the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City. In the late 80s, he was an adjunct professor at John J. College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York where he taught courses on propaganda and disinformation.
In addition to being a practicing lawyer, Bill was a journalist, publisher and a writer specializing in intelligence as it relates to media. He was the co-publisher of a magazine called the Covert Action Quarterly for more than 20 years. He also published a magazine on propaganda and disinformation titled Lies Of Our Times. Attorney Bill Schapp has written numerous articles and edited many books on the topic of media and intelligence.
Hosted by attorneys Michael Ratner, Michael Smith and Heidi Boghosian
————————————–
