CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Gaza, Human Rights, Targeting Muslims, Truth to Power
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US to Gaza: Flotilla 2011
The Turkish Islamic group, IHH The Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief have organized another flotilla carrying letters of support for the Palestinian people and bring attention to blockade on the Gaza Strip. As many listeners may know, last year’s flotilla ended with the death of nine activists when the Israeli Navy intercepted the Mavi Marmara. Meanwhile, the Israeli Navy is training to confront this years humanitarian effort. Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davuto?lu warned Israel not to “repeat the same mistake” – in using force against the flotilla. Last week, Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon said that IHH was deliberately provoking Israel and setting the stage for a confrontation, making it responsible for any clashes that happen, according to an Israeli newspaper. Past Law and Disorder shows last year’s flotilla. June 7, 2010 / June 21, 2010 / October 2010
Felice Gellman:
- I went to Gaza right after the 2008-2009 attack thinking naively that something could be done to rebuild Gaza.
- When I got there, I grew up very quickly and realized the Israeli blockade would prevent any rebuilding from this horrific attack.
- Last year there was a flotilla that sailed at the end of May that was brutally attacked and nine civilians were murdered by Israeli commandos. There will be an American flagged boat and the passengers will be American citizens, and that is to specifically confront the US covert support for the siege of Gaza.
- The flotilla has been very much on the minds of the Israelis because it was not received well to murder nine civilians. One of them was an American citizen and the United States has done near zero to support the family.
- The initial Israeli attack strategy was to use attack dogs and snipers. Israel signed a deal with Cyprus making it the main transshipment point of natural gas from Israels natural gas development out there.
- The next day the prime minister of Cyprus announced he would not allow the flotilla to sail from Cyprus. Israel asked the Greeks not to intervene.
- The idea was to make this as diverse as possible, as representative of America as possible.
- I’ve been to Gaza twice and people say to me over and over, please we want our freedom.
- They’re saying the same thing that people are saying Egypt, Syria, Bahrain. They don’t want to live in a hand out society.
- The Rafah crossing being open doesn’t end the siege of Gaza.
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Attorney Richard Levy:
- As an American Jew, I feel a special responsibility to do something around this issue. When Israel first came about and we knew so little about what happened. there. The first reaction was, well this wonderful homeland.
- And then as we grew and the years past and their conduct in the West Bank, their conduct in Gaza, in trapping people, and imposing these horrible checkpoints and settlements that take away the land and take away the water.
- We met with the State Department 2 weeks ago, and pointed out to the State Dept that while the president is applauding peaceful demonstrations across the Middle East, we too are planning a peaceful demonstration.
- Instead of getting a nod and an assurance, we got an email several days later, saying that there was a maritime warning and that people should not go into the zone, everyone can expect interference by the Israelis.
- The thing that is terrible about that we all know if the US said don’t do it, Israel wouldn’t do it. As a recipient of 3 billion dollars annually of US aid, on which it is totally dependent.
- I think the problem with Israel is we’re letting AIPAC be the voice of Jewish people everywhere. We gotta get up and say, they don’t speak for us.
- You take a place like Gaza where more than 40 percent of the population is under the age of 14. It’s kids, its women, they don’t have schools, they don’t have food, they don’t have medical care.
- 90 percent of the people (in Gaza) depend on charitable donations to live at all. The fact that we’re not getting up and being heard on this, is allowing only one voice to be heard.
- And that is a very conservative pro-Israeli voice that I don’t think speaks for the American people at all.
- My optimistic side says we’re going to be massively inconvenienced.
- I think we want to call attention to the Palestinian people that they’re not completely alone. The US boat is going to be carrying a cargo of letters. From Americans to Palestinians saying we understand your plight, we support your effort to live in peace and to live without these horrible restrictions on your life.
- There was so much fear of over reaching by the US government under the Terrorism Support Act that if you brought over the most innocent product, and it found its way into the hands of Hamas, some hyped up prosecutor could go after you in this country under this very draconian statute.
- In Turkey, the Turkish boat had a million applicants to be passengers on this flotilla.
Guest – Felice Gellman, member of the Wespac Middle East Committee and a member of the Steering Committee that organized The Gaza Freedom March. She has traveled to Gaza twice since the Israeli invasion.
Guest – Attorney Richard Levy, a labor and civil rights attorney. (Cornell, B.A., 1964, NYU School of Law, J.D., 1968) is a senior partner at LR. He has practiced labor, employment, employee benefits and civil rights law since 1971. During law school he was associate editor of the Annual Survey of American Law. A member of the United States Supreme Court Bar, Levy has lectured at conferences for the NLRB, AFL -CIO, Practicing Law Institute and has published articles on labor law and civil rights litigation. He has served on the Lawyers Advisory Panel of the AFL – CIO.
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The Arab Revolt and the Imperialist Counterattack by Jim Petras
The Arab Revolt and the Imperialist Counterattack is the title of Jim Petras’ timely new book. It was rushed to print and chronicles the growing militarization of US policy in North Africa and the Gulf region. The essays also give an important historic narrative of the long over due Arab democratic revolution and the popular uprisings. Now as the empire’s crumbling dictatorships began to spread, the United States, France and the UK race to intervene. NATO is deployed using its new “responsibility to protect” doctrine authorizing “humanitarian intervention.”
Professor James Petras:
- Obama supported Mubarak since he (Obama) entered office, and only when it was absolutely clear there were millions of people in the street, the military was divided, there was absolutely no future for Mubarak, Washington then began to leverage Mubarak into a departure which would retain the entire economic, police and military apparatus intact.
- Essentially, sacrifice the dictator to save the neo-liberal, pro-Israeli state.
- The Egyptian economy has been part of a pillage, the US has been giving Egypt, 2 billion a year for decades. This is bribe money so that Egypt will continue collaborating with Israel in keeping the Palestinians under Israeli control.
- Participating in the blockade of Gaza. That’s part of the economy. The other part is that Mubarack family and cronies have essentially run the economy into the ground.
- Egypt draws its income from the Suez Canal, tourism, visiting the pyramids, on a minor scale, agriculture and textiles. But there are enormous disparities in wealth, the per capita of about 40 percent of Egyptians is 2 dollars per day.
- Egypt has a handful of billionaires all organized around the regime.
- It’s a big country with great potential but it was run into the ground by this corrupt family dictatorship.
- The picture now is the ousting of Mubarak has not amounted to substantial change in the governing class. Essentially, the military took over and kept many of the Mubarak personalities in position of power. The minister of the interior is still there, the generals are still there. They’ve been arresting and disappearing some of the pro-democracy people.
- The struggles in Egypt haven’t ended. The Washington Post and the New York Times keep talking as if the democracy process has reached its culmination.
- The surveys show that a vast amount of Egyptians want to renegotiate the arrangement the Egyptians had with the Israelis.
- This is a hot potato because the military wants to continue to get the hand outs from the US.
- The Egyptian military is trying to make a deal with the Muslim brotherhood, especially the elder statesmen.
- There is an attempt here to substitute elections for social changes and economic improvements.
- The business men who’ve been so accustomed to having everything their way are calling on the military to clamp down. To arrest the strikers. There’s been a proliferation of strikers in the hotel industry, manufacturing, public employees.
- We don’t read about those unless you go into some of the Egyptian newspapers.
- The Obama Administration and the Europeans are going to pump in 2 billion dollars on condition that these social reforms are not carried out. That there isn’t any effort to redistribute income. Washington is jumping in at this moment with taxpayer’s money to try to head off any real democratization that effects the great majority of the people.
- You have an opposition that’s divided, you still have the old patronage apparatus of Mubarak. Mubarak had a program of hand outs, never any substantial changes in people’s condition.
- On Libya: This is a war on Libya with the United States and Europe, there’s no question about it.
- The issue here is that Libya has enormous oil and gas wells. We are trying to control Africa through our military operations, while the Chinese are in there making massive investments, establishing economic presence which far surpasses what Washington can imagine.
- This costs the tax payers billions. We don’t get anything back. This isn’t an investment into a coal mine, or diamond mine where you would get returns.
Guest – James Petras, author and former Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York.
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Civil Liberties, Death Penalty, Guantanamo, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Military Tribunal, Prison Industry, Supreme Court, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power
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Chicago Torture Cases and Jon Burge’s Deposition
Torture has cast a long shadow over Chicago and its past administrations. Yet in the past year, with the conviction and sentencing of former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge, Chicago has been a beacon of light in the fight against torture. Many are waiting to see how the city’s new administration will handle the ongoing torture cases of African American men that number in the hundreds. Former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge was sentenced to 4 and a half years in prison for obstruction of justice and lying about torturing prisoners in the 1960s to obtain coerced confessions. Attorney Flint Taylor and the People’s Law Office in Chicago fought for decades to get prosecutions, and sentencing while the city poured millions of dollars to fund private lawyers for Burge’s defense.
Attorney Flint Taylor:
- We’ve been working on these cases since 1986. Deposing Jon Burge: We were reaffirming to the African American community that he was in prison and he is a prisoner.
- He was complaining about the lack of medical care and the kind of treatment he felt he should be getting.
- The struggle to put him behind bars has come to fruition. Pin stripe patronage, the city funding Burge’s defense. Rahm Emanuel needs to change course, he’s very close to Daly.
- Daly’s policy was not to settle these cases, not to apologize to the victims.
- There’s another issue about Burge getting his pension even though he’s in the joint.
- When you’re convicted you’re supposed to lose your pension.
- There’s eight people on the pension board, 4 of them are former cops.
- Several of the men who were responsible for Burge going to the penitentiary don’t have a claim civilly, never got a penny for the torture they suffered.
- There are about 20 men still in jail, still in the prisons, based on tortured confessions by Burge and his men.
- There is a demand to challenge these confessions, its been happening on a piece-meal basis.
- You most often find that torture does not lead to information that is useful. In the situation here it is to punish African American people.
- It’s a very racist type of torture in this city. There’s linkage here in what happened in Guantanamo, what happened in Abu Ghraib.
- The Fraternal Order of Police: They’re a very reactionary force when reforming the police department generally. In the early nineties when they fired Burge, the FOP stood up and paid for his defense.
- In case that has gotten him to prison now, the FOP paid a million dollars for 3 lawyers of his choice. Now, the same lawyers have switched hats, and the city is now paying them in the civil cases that we talked about.
- When it gets to a point where the city can’t pay for his defense, the FOP steps in.
- Burge deposition: I set up a series of questions for 3 hours where he consistently took the fifth amendment to all questions that would have implicated him if he answered truthfully.
Guest – Attorney Flint Taylor, a graduate of Brown University and Northwestern University School of Law and a founding partner of the Peoples Law Office. More bio
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California Inmate Reductions
Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling had ordered California to release 46,000 of its 143,435 inmates which has the state trying to figure out what happens next. The SCOTUS ruling affirmed a lower court order that required California to reduce its inmate population to 137% capacity. The state’s prisons are now at about 180% capacity and one cause of overcrowding problems is the state’s “three strikes law” which puts third time offenders in jail for life. Meanwhile, under Governor Brown’s current “re-alignment” program, the tens of thousands convicted of non violent, non-serious, non-sex crimes will serve sentences under county instead of state supervision. Our guest Professor Ruth Gilmore said to one media source, quote – “County jail expansion does not solve the underlying problems,” – -These are goals we can achieve now if we take this opportunity to shrink prisons and jails. Building bigger jails to ease prison numbers is the same as rearranging the deck-chairs on the Titanic: wasting the same dollars in different jurisdictions.
Professor Ruth Wilson Gilmore:
- California is out of line with the rest of country when it comes to parole policy. California sends twice the number of people back to prisons than other jurisdictions, when the person has committed a technical violation, late for a meeting, that kind of thing.
- For that reason, California prisons have been bulging.
- We see that numbers are kept up by this one category, parole violation return to custody. They have to start over and over and over again.
- The Supreme Court ordered the Department of Corrections to reduce the number of people in its custody in its current physical plant. In the 33 prisons, prison camps and dozens of facilities.
- One method to thin the prison population is shipping about 10 thousand prisoners out of the state of California, renting space in other jurisdictions. They’ve been shipping prisoners out of California for 2 and a half years.
- Cost does not seem to have an important effect on the kinds of political decisions, that have been made about prison expansion throughout the United States for the last 30 years.
- A year and a half ago the state presented a plan to the Ninth District court saying here are the changes that we will make to meet the 3 judges’ order that we reduce the number of people in the California State Authority Physical Plant.
- Then, the 3 judges agreed to let California delay in implementing the plan, while they appealed to the Supreme Court.
- California is the proving ground for a new relationship between the state and society. California is a place that started turning its back on public education.
- For some time, the union of California prison guards were a political force and continue to be quite powerful.
- There are many alternatives to locking somebody in a cage for part or all of their life. We should be cautious in thinking GPS tracking is the answer, because one of the huge barriers, that people convicted of a felony face in their lives, is the impossibility of them reintegrating into society.
- My colleague Michelle Alexander has put out a call in a campaign to end The New Jim Crow.
- Criticalresistance.org / Curbprisonspending.org
Guest – Professor Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Professor Gilmore has examined how political and economic forces produced California’s prison boom in Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (University of California Press, 2007), which was recognized by ASA with its Lora Romero First Book Award. Gilmore’s wide-ranging research interests also include race and gender, labor and social movements, uneven development, and the African diaspora. She comes to the Graduate Center from the University of Southern California, where she taught courses in race and ethnicity, economic geography, and political geography, was the founding chair of the department of American studies and ethnicity, and won the USC-Mellon Award for Excellence in Graduate Student Mentoring. She also works regularly with community groups and grassroots organizations and is known for the broad accessibility of her research. She holds a Ph.D. in economic geography and social theory from Rutgers University.
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Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Gaza, Human Rights, Targeting Muslims, Truth to Power
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Middle East Update: Egypt, Israel and the United States
Labor strikes continue in Egypt as tourism declines and the crime rate increases. There have been many strikes including Egyptian police unions who are demanding higher wages. We’re joined by writer and Middle East activist Phyllis Bennis. She is the director at the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. Phyllis has recently returned from Egypt and she joins us today for an update and analysis. Update on Egypt Gaza Border
Phyllis Bennis:
- The trip to Egypt merged my work with the Israel-Palestine issue and my broader work in the region of US policy towards the Arab Spring.
- There are no guarantees that the incredible accomplishments of the Arab Spring will lead to the new democratic opening in Egyptian society let alone the Egyptian economy, that people are working for.
- Everybody agrees that the wall of fear that made possible the kind of Mubarak dictatorship, that led to the collaboration of Egypt and Israel, under US auspices in repressing Palestinians and imposing the siege on Gaza, that that’s no longer going to be possible.
- The widespread use of arrests and torture, torture was far more prevalent and routine in Egypt. I’ve studied the region for years, and I didn’t know how ordinary it was.
- Every sector in society in Egypt, were engaged in meetings. Women’s organizations, privacy rights groups, trade unions, the labor movement.
- There’s a lot of fear, but also a sense of excitement in the ability for people to fight back and new levels of unity across sectarian lines, across generational lines, across class.
- The question of the role of the US remains very key. Egypt’s new foreign minister Nabil al-Arabi, says the siege of Gaza must end. Permanently opening the border to Gaza.
- Egypt’s military will play a role in the border to Gaza. Now the foreign minister position is up for grabs again.
- The media in Egypt is overwhelmingly in Arabic. Al-Aron, the flagship daily newspaper in Egypt, longest state run newspaper, now reflects the interest and approach of the new government.
- Regarding elections, I don’t think there was a unified left position and a right.
- If the elections were held soon, there is a sense that Mubarak’s NDP, National Democratic Party and the Muslim Brotherhood, those existing parties would trounce everyone else.
- Many support quick elections which are due to be held next month.
- Anytime you have a progressive revolutionary process underway that’s being guaranteed by the old military, you’re kind of in trouble.
- I heard one Egyptian commentator exalted about one of Mubarak’s son being in the same jail cell that he spent many months in. This has not been a economic revolution, we have not seen an overturning of the neo-liberal economic policies.
- Israel and Palestine: The code for land swaps is that Israel gets to keep the 3 main settlement blocks as a starting point.
- We’re talking 40 percent of the land in the West Bank. Obama’s soaring rhetoric, “we stand with the impoverished fruit seller in the streets of Tunisia, rather than with the dictator”
- Obama’s main challenge was how do we position ourselves to be a friend of democracy while maintaining our strategic alliances with the existing dictators.
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.
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Resistance Maintains In Wisconsin
Protests continue in Wisconsin against the union busting bill signed by Governor Scott Walker in March. The demonstrations are also aimed at the anti-people measures contained in the budget proposal that would cut more than 3.5 billion dollars from services that help the poor and working class. There is still a chance that this bill will not become law. An injunction is in place because of the people’s massive resistance. The movement demands are full legalization for immigrants, oppose budget cuts, keep in state tuition for immigrant students and oppose any legislation that targets immigrants in Wisconsin.
Professor Paul Buhle:
- The new governor announced drastic changes under the “budget repair” bill. Virtually a bargaining rights of public union employees would be rescinded.
- Basic environmental laws would be repealed, and communities that came up with a minus budget would fall under the control of political appointees who could replace them.
- As this was attempted to being passed in the Senate, 14 Democrats fled the state and remained sequestered for a couple of weeks.
- While in Madison, crowds ranging from 1000, to 100 thousand, circled the Capitol on an almost daily basis, and sat in, slept in on the Capitol rotunda for 2-3 weeks.
- As in other states and in Congress, the Republicans insist that pay and benefits of public workers were greater than those in private sector, factories have fled and private sector workers are doing so much worse,
- The idea of public unions was illogical and needed to be cut back because they were a powerful voting block.
- The response from the unions was if belt tightening is necessary we expect everyone to do it, but don’t take away our bargaining rights and our basis for dignified labor.
- Not when huge tax benefits are being delivered to corporations. Its not a mystery that the Koch Brothers from Kansas were the major backers of Scott Walker’s campaign. They set up an office only a block from the Capitol. They are very likely the architects of the ideas and the plans.
- Public resources are being sold off with no bid contracts.
- Both sides are geared up around current and ongoing legal processes that are beyond the ken of the ordinary Wisconsinites.
- Some members of the Democratic party were not happy with the mass demonstrations.
- Wisconsin protests effected most emphatically Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, Maine.
- There has been an occupation at the Capitol of Washington State It was incumbent to us to show up once a day, some of us twice a day, to march around the Capitol. There’s a deep ambiguity here, on the one hand the Republicans have to be smashed.
- The Obama signs all went down from the yards a long time ago. There’s an ambivalence here, and its reflected nationally.
Guest – Paul Buhle, senior lecturer at Brown University, a historian of American radicals, a former member of Students for a Democratic Society and author of many books including images of American Radicalism, Che, A Graphic Biography, and Isordore Duncan, a graphic biography by Sabrina Jones.
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Civil Liberties, Gaza, Human Rights, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Egypt’s Aftermath and Continued Arab Protests
Civil rights lawyer and former president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Abdeen Jabara joins co-host Michael Smith in the studio. Jabara gives an update and analysis on the current political and economic shifts in Egypt. Meanwhile Israel recently celebrated the day it declared independence on May 14, 1948, the Nakba. More than 60 years later, Palestinian descendants remain the central issue within the Israeli Palestinian conflict. Last week a wave of coordinated Arab protests hit Israel on 4 of its borders. Protesters were shot and killed when they clashed with Israeli forces at the Lebanon, Syrian, West Bank and Gaza borders.
Abdeen Jabara:
- There’s been a break down of law and order in Egypt, there’s been a rise in the crime rate.
- There’s been a huge drop in income from lack of tourism. There have been various strikes, and even the police went on strike demanding higher wages. People have broken out of various prisons. The situation is very much in flux.
- Two sections of an Egyptian elite maintain control over popular forces.
- There were those that were the nouveau riche, that were being promoted by Gamal Mubarak.
- Many of them have been arrested and are in jail for ill-gotten gains.
- One of the most serious problems in Egypt have been, this neo-liberal development where they were trying to sell off state owned business.
- Open Door Policy, wanting Egypt to become part of the Western camp.
- Will there only be change in a cosmetic fashion where there is no change in the basic relationship with the people. That is the real issue.
- I think a lot depends upon the Army. Egypt is a very poor country and its main sources of income other tourism is the Suez Canal, finished clothes and canned goods.
- Under the Mubarak leadership in order to go on strike you had to get permission from the executive council of the trade union movement. Since the fall of Mubarak, you’ve seen much more labor activism.
- We will be seeing Europe and the United States pouring money into the various formations in the country.
- Israel and Palestine: I think we’re going to see something new now, with all this turmoil.
- We have to understand that the Europeans have been developing some distance on the Middle East issue. The United States and Israel are becoming more isolated in the world. The United States has never been an honest broker in this situation.
- Flotilla will leave in latter part of June, will have ten boats from different European and North American countries. Wednesday May 25, Flotilla Fund Raiser – UStoGaza.org
Guest – Abdeen Jabara, civil rights lawyer and former president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.
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The American Dream As We Know It Is Obsolete
Will the Wisconsin and other state union protests be a catalyst for a general strike? Right now, the Wisconsin demonstrations are aimed at restoring collective bargaining rights for public servants, the goal to a middle class. Reject the opiate of the middle class idealism says our next guest. The revolution must be carefully thought out and be modeled on the ground breaking uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa. How could unions prepare their strategy to include a broader support base? Unions could build alliances with single mothers, the poor, immigrants, the elderly and a wide range of groups.
Arun Gupta:
- It bugged me as all these progressives defended the middle class. I’ve been studying the Tea Party lately. Is the middle class really under attack? The core of the Tea Party is middle class, very entrepreneurial, than more management supervisory.
- There’s a duel movement going on with the Republican attack. Social welfare and public sector jobs.
- In Wisconsin, a population of 5 million, there are 200 thousand public sector jobs
- We should expand our notion of who are defending and what are we fighting for?
- I think Krugman is the most egregious, he says the 1950s was era without great extremes of wealth and poverty.
- Really? There were no Rockefellers and sharecroppers in Mississippi?
- How do we understand the 1950s? We have to go back to the term corporatism. Corporatism doesn’t mean corporation, its derived from corpus meaning body. The government is a mediator between significant sectors of society.
- American capitalism had needed the domestic market. Corporations don’t need internal consumption anymore.
- Capitalism has unmoored itself from geography. For high speed rail in the US, who will build it? The companies that are the most advanced are in China, Germany and South Korea.
- If Obama wanted to spend billions on high speed rail, the US doesn’t have the base, the human intellectual base to compete with Germany and South Korea. We’d have to put tariffs on their goods then you raise the scenario of a trade war.
- Then we’re back in the 1930s which brought on the war. People are not really thinking about the hidden ideologies of green jobs and defending the middle class.
- I’ve seen hopeful potential, these movements pop up and recede so quickly. The immigrants rights movements.
- During revolutions, it is something wonderful, people want to become better people.
- What we don’t hear much about are the little Mubaraks in Egypt, in factories, the workplace, dictators all over the place, and they’re being ousted.
- The Right likes mass movements like the tea party, the Democrats hate mass movements.
Guest – Arun Gupta, Founding editor of the The Indypendent. He recently wrote The American Dream As We Know It Is Obsolete: Why progressives need to think beyond the mantra of creating a “middle class America.”
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Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Gaza, Human Rights, Targeting Muslims, Truth to Power, War Resister
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The Irvine 11 Case
In what appears to be a growing government trend of prosecuting outspoken supporters of Palestine, 11 Muslim students were arrested for disrupting a speech–in this case that of the ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren. The incident took place last year on the campus of the University of California at Irvine. The local District Attorney claims that the students had no right to disrupt the event, charging them with conspiracy to shut down the ambassador’s speech, even though he was able to complete the speech. Supporters claim that the Muslim students’ actions are protected by the first Amendment, and that are being charged for being vocal critics of Israel.
Defense attorneys claim that the District Attorney has acted irregularly, first by using an investigative grand jury to look into felony charges, even though the students were charged with two misdemeanors. Second, in the course of the investigation prosecutors obtained vast personal electronic records from Google and Hotmail; they then released some of these documents to the media in what appears to be an attempt to influence public opinion against the 11 students.
Attorney Daniel Mayfield:
- As far as disruptions go it was about the most peaceful you could imagine. Michael Oren is invited to speak on campus, it is a hybrid event. Partially sponsored by off campus organizations and off campus organizations.
- When Mr Oren begins to speak say for a minute or two, the first of the 11 defendants stands up to interrupt him to make a statement about Gaza.
- That person then walks to the edge of the auditorium and submits to an arrest and is removed from the auditorium.
- There are roughly five law enforcement groups present. Campus police, Irvine police, county sherrifs, secret service agents, Israeli agents.
- There’s a lot jeering and clapping on both sides. This happens 11 times.
- After the 11th student stands up, all of the students that are opposed to Mr Oren stand up, start a chant and they leave. Mr Oren then finishes his speech.
- The students are disciplined, the Muslim Student Association at Irvine is ordered off campus for 6 months. By June 2010, everyone thinks the case is over.
- In December of 2010, the District Attorney of Orange County, they convene a Grand Jury.
- Under California law you can only convene a Grand Jury when investigating a felony. They claim they’re investigating a felony. In the affidavits to the judge they swear under penalty of perjury that they’re investigating a felony.
- They call witnesses to this Grand Jury, when they’re challenged, they tell the judge they’re investigating a felony. Then the Grand Jury doesn’t issue an indictment.
- An investigative Grand Jury, not that different from what’s happened in Chicago.
- So the DA has amassed, all of this material, they’ve gotten phone records and email messages.
- They asked Google, Hotmail, Gmail, all of those to turn over the emails and they do. Thousands and thousands of emails, 10 CDs.
- I don’t believe the District Attorney is going to drop these charges. They’ve dumped roughly half a million dollars into this case.
- At this point they’ve assigned 3 deputy attorneys, including 2 of their primary homicide DAs. Pulled off of homicide to work on 2 misdemeanors.
- Our goal is to win this case on motions. Because that meeting was political because poltiical meetings are excluding from the penal code section that we’re interested in here.
- We believe that we can win this case, by arguing on the law before the judge, that they don’t have the right to proceed. The speech by Michael Oren was thought of as a response to the organizing around the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions work.
Guest – Attorney Daniel Mayfield, one of the attorneys on the legal defense team and co-author of the motion and a National Lawyers Guild member.
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Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions – The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights by Omar Barghouti
The boycott, divest, sanction movement was launched in 2005. It calls upon conscientious citizens of the world to shoulder the load of responsibility of holding Israel accountable to international law and principles of human rights. The BDS movement urges those citizens to support 3 basic rights. UN sanctioned rights of the Palestinian people, ending the 1967 occupation, and ending the system of racial discrimination in Israel, the right of return of refugees in accordance with UN resolution 194.
In boycotting, corporations and countries around the world are urges to stop buying products that support Israeli infrastructure such as Loreal, Motorola, Caterpillar, and many more. Sanctions, would target those companies exporting to Israel and applying tariffs or trade barriers. Divest or disinvestment, a call to divest from companies, institutions and universities that support Israel’s occupation and lobby power. Co-host Michael Ratner interviewed independent Palestinian commentator and human rights activist Omar Barghouti in the middle of his book tour.
Omar Barghouti:
- The BDS movement was launched in 2005 which calls upon conscientious citizens of the world to shoulder the load of responsibility of holding Israel accountable to international law and principles of human rights.
- The BDS call urges to support 3 basic rights. UN sanctioned rights of the Palestinian people, ending the 1967 occupation, ending the system of racial discrimination in Israel, the right of return of refugees in accordance with UN resolution 194.
- 80 percent of Gazans are refugees. According to International law, they have the right to go back home.
- We look around and look at how International law is being applied in other situations.
- Jewish communities are reclaiming properties stolen by the Nazis or by their collaborators all over Europe.
- Only when it comes to Palestinian refugee rights does it become a demographic threat to Israel.
- There’s some divine right given to Israel to maintain an ethno-centric state, at the expense of applying International law.
- Palestinians of Israel are not considered nationals of Israel. Israel is the only country on Earth that has this two tiered system of nationality. You’re only a national if you’re Jewish.
- Any Jewish person from New York can go tomorrow and can become a national immediately.
- Palestinians in Israel, citizens of Israel, can’t buy, rent or live on about 93 percent of the land.
- Israel’s discrimination acts like a set of sieves, that have finer and finer holes as you move up towards college, filtering out more Palestinians so you have a very small percentage on top.
- Because Palestinians can vote becomes a form of tokenism, when you discrimination in land, jobs, everything.
- Israel is losing the veneer of sophistication and nuance. It’s becoming a brute form of apartheid.
- Loyalty Oath.
- Israel has lost the battle for hearts and minds and its resorting to bigger sticks.
- BDS, in less than six years we’ve achieved more than our comrades in South Africa that lasted 20 years.
- In a study of Israeli academics who had stood up against the occupation: hundreds of academics in a community of 9 thousand have done anything public against the occupation. BDS is not a political party, its not an ideology.
- Those who think they can decide for the Palestinians what our basic rights are, ignoring International law and basic principles of human rights, are racist. BDS is a living movement that is growing tremendously.
Guest – Omar Barghouti, the founding member of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel and the Palestinian Civil Society Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign.
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Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, FBI Intrusion, Green Scare, Guantanamo, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Iraq War, Military Tribunal, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power
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Updates:
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Guantánamo Leaks Must Be Met By Release of Obama Task Force Assessments
The 759 Guantanamo files that were classified “secret” cover nearly every inmate since the camp opened in 2002. The documents obtained by the New York Times and the Guardian last month, reveal how children, the elderly and mentally ill were wrongfully held. The documents also reveal that many prisoners were sent to Guantanamo for nearly nothing or to be interrogated. What did these documents reveal?
Attorney Shane Kadidal:
- These stories started on Monday morning, because administration officials gave out a briefing saying that the nickname of Osama’s couriers was given out by one of the detainees.
- Assuming information taken from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
- We do know it took eight months from the time they identified this compound to the point they decided to strike at it. I think its clear, they relied on a whole slew of information from a variety of sources.
- We already know the true name of the courier, which is more important than a nickname came from agents on the ground and electronic surveillance.
- 172 detainees, 90 cleared from release, 2/3 of those from Yemen have been indefinitely suspended for repatriation because of the “underwear bomber.”
- The problem is so much of (media) attention is focused on the ones that will never be released.
- WikiLeaks – 2400 pages of documents almost all risk assessments of about 740 detainees who’ve been to Guantanamo
- They represent the Defense Departments best case for detaining someone.
- You have these long analysis of very shady facts, not detailing where allegations are coming from.
- If you look at the documents as a whole, it shows that most of the detainees were held on flimsy, unreliable information.
- The documents show that people were interrogated in GTMO about nothing to do with terrorist attacks in the United States. You had Samuel Hodge interrogated about the inner workings of Al-Jazzera
- Everyone ended up with the categorization of high or medium risk
- When you see a leak of this magnitude, the only corrective is to release more information and that’s what we’ve called for at CCR.
- The government quickly emailed us – They said consistent with the security clearances you signed on for, you have to treat this information as classified (leaked documents) even though its been scattered to the winds on every newspaper on Earth.
Guest – Attorney Shane Kadidal, senior managing attorney of the Guantánamo Global Justice Initiative at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City. He is a graduate of the Yale Law School and a former law clerk to Judge Kermit Lipez of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. In his eight years at the Center, he has worked on a number of significant cases in the wake of 9/11, including the Center’s challenges to the detention of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay (among them torture victim Mohammed al Qahtani and former CIA ghost detainee Majid Khan), which have twice reached the Supreme Court, and several cases arising out of the post-9/11 domestic immigration sweeps.
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Green Is The New Red: An Insiders Account of A Social Movement Under Siege
We welcome Will Potter award-winning independent journalist and now the leading authority on “eco-terrorism.” He’s the author of the new book ,Green Is the New Red: An Insider’s Account of a Social Movement Under Siege, and it reveals a complex environmental movement emerging amid police state pressure. As we’ve reported here on Law and Disorder, environmental activism have been labeled terrorism under certain interpretation of the Patriot Act, essentially criminalizing dissent and chilling free speech in this country at a critical time. Our guest was an FBI target for merely leafleting against animal testing, and he was threatened to be put on the domestic terrorist watch list if didn’t comply with FBI demands. We talk more about that, the environmentalist movements and his new book.
Will Potter:
- My background is in mainstream newspapers. As I was working as a reporter at the Chicago Tribune, about 9 months after 9/11. I was covering breaking news, blood and guts.
- I decided to go out leafleting on a campaign I became aware of against a controversial animal testing company.
- Couple weeks later the FBI knocks on my door telling me I need to become a government informant and help infiltrate animal rights and environmental groups and if I didn’t they’d put me on the domestic terrorist list.
- It scared the tar out of me. I wish I could say it didn’t.
- Afterward it really lit a fire under me to figure out what was going on.
- One of the reasons I started the website was because of this new law being considered called the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act.
- What I decided to do with the book is tell the personal stories of the people involved.
- I followed Daniel McGowan a few days before his sentence to how he ended up in this facility, his own journey as an activist. Daniel was convicted of serious crimes, two arsonists that didn’t harm anyone and he was labeled a terrorist.
- The book looks at the wide range of activity being labeled “eco-terrorism”
- The FBI has labeled the environmental and animal rights movement the number one domestic terrorism threat.
- These corporate campaigns were pushed for so long through the courts, politicians, and the press that over time they began to dovetail with government policy.
- The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act is so broad it can even wrap up non-violent civil disobedience as terrorism, only if its directed at what is called animal enterprises.
- The real power of this is fear.
- The activists who are really effective and pushing the boundary are the ones being labeled eco-terrorists.
- I recently wrote about 3 bills that are under consideration for the Huffington Post. What Is Big Ag Trying To Hide.
Guest – Will Potter, award-winning independent journalist based in Washington, D.C., who focuses on “eco-terrorism,” the animal rights and environmental movements, and civil liberties post-9/11. Will’s work has appeared in publications including the Chicago Tribune, the Huffington Post, and the Vermont Law Review, and he has testified before the U.S. Congress about his reporting. He is the author of Green Is The New Red: An insider’s account of a social movement under siege forthcoming from City Lights Books.
