Law and Disorder September 25, 2023

Assange: Journalism Is Not A Crime

Julian Assange is the greatest journalist of our time. By publishing the truth about secret government surveillance of American citizens and American war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan and other places the American government and the CIA have plotted to kidnap and kill him.

They initially smeared his name falsely, accusing him of being a rapist, forced him to get political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London where they videotaped conversations with his lawyers and stole the contents of their phones and computers. At his extradition hearing in London, where the British government did the bidding of the US, they kept him incommunicado in a glass box and the judge made her decisions before she heard the evidence.

They have had him imprisoned in torturous solitary in the notorious Belmarsh prison in London for four years. He could be extradited to the United States any minute from now to stand trial on the false accusation of espionage to which he answers “journalism is not a crime.“ He will certainly be convicted and entombed in what amounts to a death sentence.

The rule of law is crashing in our country. What is being done to Julian Assange is being done in the name of the law.

Guest – Craig Murray has written the most penetrating and eloquent accounts of Julian Assange’s predicament. Murray was the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan. He was fired for blowing the whistle on his country’s practice of torture. He himself has recently served four months of solitary confinement in prison, where he was put, he believes, to prevent him from testifying at the trial of David Morales – whose company contracted with the CIA to spy on Julian and his attorneys. This alone should’ve caused the case against Julian to be dismissed.

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UAW Organized Labor Strike 2023

It’s no secret that the size and strength of the union movement is not, today, what it has been in the past. Where once more than 30% of the U.S. private workforce was unionized, today it’s only about 5 or 6 percent, with another 33% of workers in unionized government jobs. Harsh, pro-employer labor laws are a big reason for the decline in unionized jobs, as is the change in the percentage of manufacturing jobs in the U.S.

But in the last few years, despite the harsh laws governing union organizing, we’ve witnessed a surge in militant and successful strikes by workers. Nurses, schoolteachers, more recently the UPS workers, and now the strike by the United Auto Workers. Today we examine the UAW strike, the new way it is being conducted, and to learn what it can tell us about this increased union militancy, why it’s happening now, and what it portends for the future.

And our guest for this topic could not be a better person to help us understand the UAW strike, and the increased militancy of workers and union actions across the United States, in general.

Guest – Dianne Feeley, a 60’s radical who started off working with the Catholic Worker movement in New York City. Ms. Feeley is, herself, a retired auto worker, and former member of the UAW Local 22 in Detroit, Michigan. She is currently a leader in the socialist, feminist organization Solidarity, and writes regularly for both the Jacobin Magazine and the magazine, Against the Current.

Hosted by attorney Jim Lafferty

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Law and Disorder February 20, 2023

Ending Structural Police Violence And Abuse

On January 7, after an unlawful traffic stop, several police officers in the SCORPION unit of the Memphis Police Department beat, kicked, punched and tased Tyre Nichols, who posed no threat to the public or the officers. He died in the hospital 3 days later. SCORPION, which was disbanded following Nichols’s death, stands for Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in our Neighborhoods. In reality, SCORPION’s targets – as with similar such units around the country — were primarily Black men. Far from restoring peace, these officers escalated the violence and killed Nichols. The officers later lied about stopping him for reckless driving and the police chief admitted there was no legal basis for stopping Nichols.

One month later, in his State of the Union address, President Joe Biden introduced Nichols’s parents who were in the audience and he called for police reforms. We all know that racist police violence is nothing new. It has shown itself over and over throughout our history, and has led to calls for reform of the police, and abolition. But structural and systemic racism and police violence persist nevertheless.

In spite of the worldwide outrage at the public execution of George Floyd in 2020, and several superficial reforms, police killings continue to increase, not decrease.

Guest – Jonathan Moore, civil rights attorney in New York City who, since the late 1970’s, has specialized in police and governmental misconduct, employment discrimination, First Amendment advocacy, and international human rights. Jonathan represents the family of Eric Garner, who was killed in broad daylight in 2014 by the New York City police for allegedly selling loose cigarettes. He was also the lead attorney in the New York “stop and frisk” case in 2013 that led to the historic ruling that banned the practice as unconstitutional. And he represented the Exonerated Five (formerly known as the Central Park Five) in their successful wrongful conviction case against the City of New York.

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The Secret Files: Bill de Blasio, the NYPD, and the Broken Promises of Police Reform

The issue of police reform looms large across the nation, with daily reports and images of lethal police violence against Black and Brown persons striking a collective raw nerve. A new book by journalist Michael Hayes reads like both an investigative report and a gripping saga of the nation’s largest police department. Its protagonists are the New York City Police Department (NYPD), its powerful union, Black and Latino New Yorkers, and the Mayor. The book is “The Secret Files: Bill de Blasio, the NYPD, and the Broken Promises of Police Reform.”

Bill de Blasio, mayor from 2014 to 2021, focused his campaign on making the NYPD more accountable to the public. Previously, while serving on the City Council, he introduced legislation to expand the purview and clout of the watchdog agency, the Civilian Complaint Review Board. While in office, de Blasio tried to end the NYPD’s long-standing “stop and frisk” policy, among other pernicious practices. But from the beginning of his tenure, after two officers were fatally shot in Brooklyn in December 2014, the police department and its union doubled down in opposition to reform. One example was to effectively prevent public disclosure of internal investigation files or the identities of police officers known to be the subjects of those investigations.

Guest – Michael Hayes, in addition to his recently released book, Michael has long reported on the policies and practices of U.S. police departments and covered major criminal trials across the country.

Hosted by Attorneys Heidi Boghosian, Marjorie Cohn and Julie Hurwitz

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Law and Disorder January 2, 2023

Cars and Jails: Freedom, Dreams, Debt and Carcerality

What is the connection between cars and jails? Every day more than 50,000 Americans are pulled over by police officers while driving. Most of them will come away from this encounter owing money to the municipality or county in which they were stopped. Some will be arrested. They will join the nearly 9,000,000 Americans to cycle through our countries’ jails each year.

Police can choose from hundreds of traffic code violations to make a pretext stop and conduct a vehicle search. This may result in a fine or or an arrest.

American consumer lore has long held the automobile to be “freedom machine” consecrating the mobility of a free people. Yet paradoxically, the car also functions at the crossroads of two great systems of unfreedom and immobility – the credit economy and the American carceral system.

Guest – Andrew Ross who along with his co-author Julie Livingston has investigated this paradox and written the book “Cars and Jails: Freedom, Dreams, Debt and Carcerality”. It was just published by OR Books. The book shows how the long arms of debt and the carceral state operate in tandem in the daily life of car use and ownership. Andrew Ross is a professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University, and a social activist and analyst. He has authored and edited numerous books and has written for the New York Times, the Guardian, The Nation, and Al Jazeera.

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Remembering Michael Ratner

Hosts Heidi Boghosian and Michael Smith remember Michael Ratner as cohost, activist, radical attorney, author and close friend. In this show, hosts reflect on Michael’s work and listen back to several monologue updates. They include his work as co-counsel for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, the Dahiya Doctrine, SNAP- Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, NSA survelliance in the Bahamas and Guantanamo Bay prisoner exchange.

Michael Ratner (1943-2016) was president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights and author of Guantanamo: What the World Should Know. Michael worked for decades, as a crusader for human rights both at home and abroad litigating many cases against international human rights violators resulting in millions of dollars in judgments for abuse victims and expanding the possibilities of international law. He acted as a principal counsel in the successful suit to close the camp for HIV-positive Haitian refugees on Guantanamo Base, Cuba. Michael Ratner has litigated a dozen cases challenging a President’s authority to go to war, without congressional approval. In the wake of the September 11 attacks, the Center has focused its efforts on the constitutionality of indefinite detention and the restrictions on civil liberties as defined by the unfolding terms of a permanent war. Among his many honors were: Trial Lawyer of the Year from the Trial lawyers for Public Justice, The Columbia Law School Public Interest Law Foundation Award, and the North Star Community Frederick Douglass Award.

Hosted by Attorneys Michael Smith and Heidi Boghosian

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Law and Disorder December 5, 2022

Books Unbanned

Authoritarian institutions and regimes ban books. They tell people what they can and cannot read. The Catholic Church once banned the book by mathematician Johannes Kepler which demonstrated that the earth travels around the sun and not vice versa.

Many of us know about the bonfires of banned books by the “degenerate Jews” Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx that the Fascist Hitler regime lit with a frenzy.

Can this happen in America? It has already started. Many state legislatures have moved to ban books. Some 250 titles have been put on a list of books that cannot be assigned to grade schoolers and highschoolers including such classics in the American canon as “To Kill a Mockingbird”’ and even “ Catcher in the Rye”

The censors don’t want to encourage free spirits. They don’t like criticism. For them the ideal citizen does not think for himself or herself, keeps her mouth shut, and goes along.

The Brooklyn public library is fighting for the rights of teenagers and young adults to read what they like, discover themselves, and form their own opinions. The library launched a campaign called “Books Unbanned” in response to the increasingly coordinated and effective effort to remove books from shelves which tackle a wide range of topics.

There were 1597 individual book challenges last year, the highest of 20 years since the American Library Association has been keeping track.

The Brooklyn public library is the sixth largest in the country. It started defending the right to read last April by giving free library cards to young people in every state in the union. So far 5100 cards have been given out. 52,000 e-books or audiobooks have been checked out. The books that are most frequently challenged are those on sexuality and those on racism.

Guest – Nick Higgins, Chief Librarian at Brooklyn Public Library, leading the development of transformative library services and spaces for the borough’s residents at 61 sites. Along with providing traditional programs and experiences for Brooklynites, Nick and his team have expanded the Library’s reach by creating unique programs for older adults, individuals and families impacted by the justice system, immigrants, and people experiencing homelessness. Nick holds a BA in Literature from Hunter College and a MLS from the Pratt Institute. Booksunbanned@bklynlibrary.org

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Law and Disorder hosts Heidi Boghosian and Michael Smith remember New York City Attorney and publisher Bill Schaap.

Bill Schaap died in his home on February 25th after a long illness. He was 75.  After graduating from the University of Chicago Law school in 1964 Schaap worked for the Center for Constitutional Rights on its project in Japan representing antiwar GIs during the Vietnam war. For 20 years he and his companion the late Ellen Ray lived in Washington DC and published and wrote for the magazine “Covert Action Quarterly” which exposed the crimes of the CIA.  In its early years they named CIA agents, until a naming names act was passed by Congress making the exposure of agents a crime. In the early 80s they moved to New York City and founded Sheridan Square Press. They published books about the CIA by former CIA agents.  Most prominently they published New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison’s book “On the Trail of the Assassins” showing CIA involvement in the Kennedy assassination. The book became a New York Times bestseller and was the basis for the Oliver Stone movie “JFK”.  In the early 90s they founded the Institute For Media Analysis and began publishing the magazine “Lies of Our Times”, a magazine of media criticism. Bill Schaap was a recognized expert in government propaganda and wrote and spoke widely and frequently on the topic.

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Lawyers You’ll Like: Attorney Bill Schaap

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.

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Law and Disorder November 21, 2022

To Catch a Dictator: The Pursuit and Trial of Hissene Habre

Human rights attorney Reed Brody’s page turning book To Catch a Dictator: The Pursuit and Trial of Hissene Habre is being released in November 2022. Habre was the dictator of Chad, a landlocked country in central Africa from 1982 to 1990. He was deposed by a coup and exiled to nearby Senegal.

Attorney Reed Brody of Human Rights Watch led a coalition of human rights activists, lawyers, and victims which brought Habre to justice. The lead trial lawyer for the victims was African attorney Jacqueline Moudeina.

Habre was found guilty in a courtroom in Dakar, Senegal in May 2016 of rape, sexual slavery, torture, and the killing of over 40,000 citizens of Chad. He was the first former head of state to be convicted of crimes against humanity in the courts of another country.

We speak today with Reed Brody who worked for 18 years with Human Rights Watch alongside Hissene Habre’s victims.

Guest – Reed Brody has helped pursue dictators Augusto Pinochet of Chile, Jean Claude “baby doc” Duvalier of Haiti, and Yahya Jamaeh of Ghana. He also uncovered atrocities of US backed contras in Nicaragua, led UN missions in El Salvador, in the Congo, and exposed Bush – administration torture.

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Fairness and Accuracy In Election Coverage

Virtually everyone agrees that the mainstream corporate media in the United States plays a major role in who wins elections. But on the right, a great many are convinced that what they characterize as the “liberal media” is not to be believed, thanks to Trump and his cries of “the lying media”, while on the left, most argue that since the mainstream media is corporate, it operates for the benefit of those candidates most likely to advance the interests of corporate America.

So today we examine the role played by the mainstream media in our elections. How truthful is its election reporting? What role does “social media” play in the electoral process? If, indeed, the mainstream media plays a role in our elections, is it, in fact, a decisive role? And if it is, how does it do that? Well, if you stay tuned, I truly believe you will be surprised by some of what you learn today. I say that because today we’ve got the perfect guest to help us examine this topic in all of its permutations. He is Norman Solomon, certainly one of America’s true champions of a free and honest press.

Guest – Norman Solomon is a longtime associate of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (“F.A.I.R.”), which has proved to be a powerful watchdog of the American media. Norman Solomon is the co-founder of the online activist organization RootsAction.org, and he is also the Executive Director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is, of course, the author of too many articles to recite here, as well as a number of books, including “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death;” also, the book “Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State.”

A Poem by Raymond Nat Turner About L.A. City Council

Hosted by Attorneys Michael Smith and Jim Lafferty

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Law and Disorder June 27, 2022

Extradition Of Journalist Julian Assange

On June 17, Priti Patel, the UK Home Secretary, ordered the extradition of journalist Julian Assange to the United States to stand trial on Espionage Act charges that could lead to 175 years in prison. The Obama administration, which prosecuted more whistleblowers than all prior presidents combined, decided not to file criminal charges against Assange. But Donald Trump’s regime indicted Assange for revealing evidence of U.S. war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo. And Joe Biden’s government is continuing to pursue the extradition of Assange to the United States.

Assange has been confined in the UK for more than a decade. If he is extradited to the United States, he will be tried in the Eastern District of Virginia, one of the most conservative districts in the country. The judge to whom his case has been assigned jailed Chelsea Manning for refusing to appear before a grand jury investigating Assange.

Assange will appeal Patel’s decision. But if he is ultimately extradited, tried and convicted, it will pose a major threat to investigative journalism. People around the world are supporting Assange but the Biden administration is continuing Trump’s campaign to extradite Assange and try him in the United States.

Guest – Kevin Gosztola, an American journalist who writes about whistleblowers, WikiLeaks, national security and civil liberties. Kevin is managing editor of Shadowproof and he curates The Dissenter. He is producer and host of the weekly podcast Unauthorized Disclosure and co-author of Truth and Consequences: The US vs. Bradley Manning. Kevin has covered the Assange case extensively.

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Chicago Torture Cases Cost Taxpayers 210 Million

Sixty years ago, the great social satirist and comedian Lenny Bruce quipped that “Chicago is so corrupt, it is thrilling.“ Today the corruption may not be so transparent but the amount of money spent to protect and defend cops who kill and torture people is staggering.

A few years ago, the city of Chicago sold its parking meters to a private corporation even as it was closing public schools and mental health clinics ostensibly for lack of funding. But as of now and for the last 15 years, Chicago, Cook County and the State of Illinois has spent at least $212 million of taxpayer money for expenses in torture cases involving the infamous Chicago torturing cop, Jon Burge, and his crew. They operated in Chicago’s brutal Area 2 where they extracted false confessions from more than 125 African-American men through the use of torture.

$37.5 million of the $212 million has gone to what has been called “pinstripe patronage lawyers,“ who defended the police torturers. $19-1/2 million has been spent on special prosecutors in Cook County where Chicago is located. At least $38.7 million has been applied to pension payments for the offending cops, $7.9 million has been spent on the state Torture Commission and Court of Claims payouts, and finally, $108.2 million has gone for settlements, verdicts, and reparations. And the cases, and the payments, continue to this day and will continue into the future.

Guest – Chicago civil rights attorney Flint Taylor who led the litigation against Jon Burge and his torture crew.  Taylor is a founding partner of the People’s Law Office in Chicago and has represented dozens of clients subjected to torture and other police misconduct. He is the author of The Torture Machine: Racism and Police Violence in Chicago.  His most recent case involves the police murder of Joseph Lopez in Greensboro, North Carolina.

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