Attorney Rhonda Copelon is a professor at the Law School of the City University of New York and director of the school’s International Human Rights Law Clinic. Rhonda is also the Legal Advisor to the Women’s Caucus for Gender Justice.
From Article on New International Criminal Court: “The breadth and specificity of gender crimes in the court’s enabling statutes are directly attributable to a global caucus of women that formed in 1997 in the face of apathy and active resistance to prosecuting gender-based crimes. “Women made a huge difference,” said Rhonda Copeland, a professor at the Law School of the City University of New York and director of the school’s International Human Rights Law Clinic.
“They made it impossible to ignore that women have been left out of justice and that we have to be in it,” Copelon said. “If there were nobody there saying ‘this is violence,’ I don’t know how it would have happened.”Rhonda shares with listeners, her history of fighting for the constitutionality of the abortion cases in New York City and its effect on poor women in a pre-Roe v Wade climate. She also discuss the Harlem 6 case. This is the first part of the interview with Rhonda Copelon.
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Bill Would Let Insurers Track Where, When, How You Drive
A bill proposed by the California legislature would allow insurance companies to install black boxes on vehicles that track milage but also measure more sensitive information such as how aggressive you drive. The bill is structured so that insurance companies can encourage people to drive less with lower insurance. Consumer watchdogs say drivers shouldn’t have to choose between fair insurance rates and protecting their privacy when there are less intrusive ways to collect data.
Under the proposed bill titled AB 2800, the “black box†would allow insurance companies to track how fast drivers accelerate, where motorists go and which neighborhoods they drive through. The device would also monitor whether they come to a full stop at a stop sign; and when they apply their brakes. Privacy protection groups are also watching as similar proposals are being introduced in other states.
Currently under the Endangered Species Act, federal agencies are required to consult with federal wildlife experts to make sure activities such as mining, logging and road construction do not threaten endangered species. Now, the Bush administration has proposed a new plan that will give federal agencies the decision of whether they want expert consultation to determine if activities will affect endangered species.
Thousands of these consultations happen each year and federal wildlife experts have finely tuned their knowledge of protecting endangered species in the last twenty years. Critics say the proposal is a disturbing reversal.
Police Tactics Used During The RNC: Legal Analysis
Law and Disorder hosts debrief activist Laurie Arbieter who was among the demonstrators protesting during the Republican National Convention. Laurie was among a group of activists pulled over in St. Paul, held at gunpoint and let go. We later talk with Bruce Nestor, president of the Minnesota chapter of the National Lawyers Guild. Bruce gives us the background on the terrorism charges brought against 8 members of a prominent activist group. Most of the 8 defendants were arrested during the pre-emptive house raids and face up to seven years in prison. Ramsey County authorities have described the charges as “ in furtherance of terrorism,†based on the 2002 Minnesota version of the Patriot Act.
In an article published on the website – AfterDowningStreet, author David Swanson lays out another powerful case as to why it is critical to hold leadership accountable for war crimes. He explains that if much needed change is made in the United States such as a transparent electoral process, eliminating secret government and constitutional amendments, it would still not be enough to “chain the dogs of war.” Hosts discuss with David Swanson about why it’s critical to hold a conference to plan the prosecution of Bush and Cheney.
We are very pleased to talk with our own Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights about his recent book The Trial of Donald Rumsfeld: A Prosecution by Book. Michael’s book exposes how hundreds of individuals were victims of gruesome crimes inside the secret prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and Cuba while under International and American law. Michael Ratner not only levels the charge against former US secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld but lists others to be guilty of the US War Crimes Act of 1996 such as David Addington, George Tenet, Alberto Gonzales, and John Yoo.
The case is presented in shocking detail, it’s a blueprint for prosecuting war criminals and a powerful reference tool for holding the Bush administration’s rogue leadership accountable. One review states that it quote “presents a case that a prosecutor could bring against Donald Rumsfeld were he not shielded by dubious immunity doctrines crafted by the Bush administration and the judges it has appointed.â€
Law and Disorder RNC Street Coverage: Audio Document
Heidi Boghosian, Law and Disorder co-host and Executive Director of the National Lawyers Guild took to the streets of St. Paul Minnesota with producer Geoff Brady during the Republican National Convention. We bring you the voices and sounds of protesters, demonstrations, and interviews with legal observers, lead activists and lawyers. We begin this audio document with attorney Bruce Nestor, president of the Minnesota Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild. Amid this heavily militarized area of St. Paul, Bruce Nestor describes how riot police use minivans as quick, efficient transport and the trapping of protesters on a bridge.
Just blocks from the Xcel Center, Heidi catches up with local activists and independent journalists who describe first hand accounts of police confrontations. A local journalist named Nick tells of the launching of paint and flash-bang grenades, the arrests and detainment of journalists and unwarranted use of pepper spray and tasers. On 4pm on Tuesday, marchers rally at Mears Park for the scheduled Poor Peoples March. There we spoke with a New York videographer named Dan, he described the pre-convention raids on I-Witness Video and more accounts of excessive police force. Below is a photo of the pre-convention raids from their website.
National Lawyers Guild attorney Bruce Nestor provides a chronology of events beginning with legal details involving the pre-convention raids on convergence centers. He also analyzes the overall impact of free speech when various factors come together. 1) Demonizing protesters and their message. 2) This allows use of military force by police. 3) Intelligence gathering and targeting lead organizers of alternative press. Combined, these tactics squelch the voice of dissent in all age groups and keep people from exercising their first amendment rights.
Below: Scenes gathered from the streets of St. Paul during the Republican National Convention 2008
“This is not intended to be a mere discussion of violations of law that have occurred,” says convener Lawrence Velvel, dean and cofounder of the school. “It is, rather, intended to be a planning conference at which plans will be laid and necessary organizational structures set up, to pursue the guilty as long as necessary and, if need be, to the ends of the Earth.†related article
Velvel Interview Notes:
Conference will be held in undisclosed location for the time being.
Until people have the fear they will be brought to book if they violate the law in a very serious ways that cause tens of thousands of deaths, what will stop them from doing it in the future?
Unless there is something to look back on, like the Germans and the Japanese apparently know, don’t do it again because people swung.
Who’s to say it won’t happen 20 or 30 years in the future again.
Guest – Lawrence R. Velvel, Dean of Massachusetts School of Law and a professor of law. Mr. Velvel is a 1960 graduate of the University of Michigan and a 1963 graduate of the University of Michigan Law School, where he served on the law review and was elected to the Order of the Coif. He was a law professor from 1966-1978, first at the University of Kansas and then at Catholic University. He has been a partner in major law firms in Washington, D.C., and was the first chief counsel of an organization established to write United States Supreme Court briefs in support of state and local governments. read more.
A Justice Department proposal which could be made public in a month, has given the government even broader license to open terrorism investigations, without any evidence of wrongdoing, relying instead on racial or ethnic profiling. Currently, FBI agents need specific reasons, such as evidence or allegations that a law probably has been violated, to investigate US citizens and legal residents. Last month, The Council on American Islamic Relations decried the forthcoming plan as “unconstitutional and un-American.â€
This proposal is among other aggressive plans the Bush administration has put in place such as new wiretapping regulations and authorizing greater sharing of intelligence information with the local police. The Director of National Intelligence has set up – Information Sharing Environment – where certain police authorities will have access to information produced by the FBI, by the intelligence community and also by police departments around the country.
It is “one stop shopping” for all these different police agencies and even private companies to have access to this highly speculative, accusatory, fragmented and often erroneous information.
Intelligence Fusion Centers – which I think is a real problem, particularly since there’s very little oversight of these centers
there’s no way to correct these watch files, – a main problem with the closed system, where no one has an opportunity to go in and say you got this piece wrong.
Giving the FBI more authority to collect more information isn’t helping the FBI be more effective.
Gathering information about innocent people won’t help find guilty people.
There is no terrorism profile, people are drawn to terrorism for all sorts of reasons.
Terrorism watch list : 1 million individual records – clearly nobody believes there’s a million terrorists out there.
The FBI don’t know to this day, how many national security letters they’ve issued.
Guest – Mike German, attorney with the ACLU and former FBI agent. Mike German is a recognized expert in terrorist group behavior, counter-terrorist operations, and right-wing extremism. He has appeared on Dateline NBC, Paula Zahn Now, CNN, and MSNBC and his commentary has been published in the National Law Journal and the Washington Post. Mike served for sixteen years as a Special Agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and is one of the few agents credited with actually having prevented acts of terrorism before it became the FBI’s number one priority.
Last year, twenty-eight senior scientists and engineers at Jet Propulsion Laboratory challenged the United States government and the California Institute of Technology in a lawsuit claiming that NASA’s new background investigations were unconstitutional. The scientists include members of the Mars Rover program are fighting Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12 or (HSPD-12). This directive requires all federal employees and contractors to “voluntarily” sign a form allowing the government the right to investigate them “without limit” for two years- even if they leave government work during that time. NASA and Caltech employees were told, non-compliance will result in immediate termination.
In the interview Bob Nelson describes the drama in a Ninth Circuit Court decision: the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a temporary injunction at 4:40pm. The same day around 5pm, JPL managers were approaching the several hundred JPL employees who were non-compliant and reading them an order saying if you don’t comply by Monday, we will advertise your job. You have until 5pm today to decide.
A few minutes before 5pm Bob Nelson brought in a faxed copy of the order by the Ninth Circuit Court judge and told JPL managers that what they’ve done may be illegal, if you have a problem, consult your lawyer. The Ninth Circuit ruled that NASA and the DOJ were out of order and that Caltech was in the wrong for serving as an enforcer.
The lawsuit caused a lot of interest within Caltech alumni who then wrote to the board of trustees and later began to fund the lawsuit. Nelson says, “You can fight the system of a completely entrenched bureacracy that constantly rewrites the rule in their favor.”
Today we welcome cultural historian H Bruce Franklin, author of many books including The Most Important Fish In The Sea and one we will talk with him today titled War Stars: The Superweapon and The American Imagination. One review writes “this book reveals how and why the American quest for the ultimate defensive weapon, guaranteed to end all war and bring universal triumph to American ideals has led to the creation of forces increasingly capable of automated global annihilation.”
“How did we get to a place where we built weapons capable of destroying our own society, human civilization, possibly exterminating the human species, while always thinking that we’re making ourselves more secure, bringing global peace, bringing democracy to the world?”
Franklin explores the influences of the collective imagination in movies, novels and stories from obscure pre-World War I fiction to modern classics such as Slaughterhouse Five and Dr. Strangelove. War Stars interweaves culture, science, technology and history to demonstrate how the American consciousness shapes ingenious new superweapons while creating its antithesis in art.
Guest – Bruce Franklin, American cultural historian who has authored or edited nineteen books on a range of subjects. As of 2008, he is the John Cotton Dana Professor of English and American Studies at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. He first attained prominence as a Melville scholar and has served as president of the Melville Society. His award-winning books and teaching on science fiction played a major role in establishing academic study of the genre. His books on American prison literature have been said to open an entirely new field of study. His most recent work has focused on relations between the marine environment and American cultural history.
Local police may be finding themselves on the frontlines of domestic counter-terrorism if a program launched recently by the Los Angeles Police Department is adopted in other large cities. Since 9/11 the government has tried to engage local police to do their counter-terrorism work for them, collecting so-called street level intelligence about suspicious activities that might predict another attack.
So far it hasn’t worked out that way. But an LAPD official has devised a possible solution that the LA Times calls “so cheap, so easy to implement and so innovative†that officials in DC are thinking of making it a national model for all police departments. What are the implications of the implications of having local police become intelligence officers. Jim Lafferty, Executive Director of the Los Angeles National Lawyers Guild says to start, many people may find themselves on more lists.
The Iron Heel, written by Jack London was one of the first dystopian novels chronicling a growing police state in the US. Part of the Iron Heel is also newly published in a reader titled The Radical Jack London, edited by Jonah Raskin. Reviews say that Jonah shows London to be America’s leading revolutionary writer at the turn of the twentieth century. Today we are joined in studio by Jonah Raskin and will examine comparisons of what London sets forth in his novel to what has happened to the United States since 9/11.
London set out to travel as a hobo by train, eventually arrested in Erie County, New York and spent time in a penitentiary. He wrote “The Road” which inspired Jack Kerouac. He spoke to bankers and businessmen about socialism and revolution. While wanting to meet the charismatic writer, the businessmen had listened but eventually responded, “we’re going to crush you.” London was a socialist, artist and propagandist.
