Gallery
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Amnesty International General Meeting 2006 |
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Lennon/Ono Grant For Peace Awarded to CCR in Iceland |
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Cuban Councils of State – Church of the Intercession |
Law and Disorder November 13, 2006
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Update – Donald Rumsfeld Resigns
Examining the Foundation of a Police State: Tracking the Disappeared
In this second part of this four-part series, we take a look through the eyes and experiences of our guest attorneys representing “enemy combatants” indefinitely detained in this country and abroad. You’ll hear their first hand accounts of deplorable conditions and torture techniques implemented under the umbrella of twisted legislation.
Rather than setting up a narrow intelligence-based effort to prosecute the perpetrators of a criminal action, the Bush administration exploited the tragic events of 9/11 as an excuse to cast a broad net used to justify the demonization of all Muslims. This, as the use of CIA torture techniques sent shock waves rippling through the conscience of all Americans. You will get the sense of how the US government has institutionalized racial profiling, detention prisons, and torture in its fervent effort to implement the so called war on terror.
In the third part of this series we’ll look at the crackdown of dissent in this country, including how the government has set up a “terrorist” database to categorize and target domestic activists. As attorneys on the front lines we bring you exclusive cases of domestic surveillance of protestors. Our final episode will be devoted to the unjust and illegal war in Iraq. We believe that taken together, the four-part series reveals how the plans for a police state and martial law are being cemented. Law and Disorder will call attention to this emergence by bringing you the voices of strength and opposition from activists, authors and attorneys who are well informed, not silent and standing up against the strangling of democracy.
Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States government has held hundreds of men at Guantanamo Bay as part of its ‘global war on terrorism.’ However, the secrecy and questions about the legality of the imprisonments have drawn concern from lawmakers, foreign governments and human rights groups. The indefinite detentions without trial are seen by many as violations of the Geneva Conventions, they inspire anti-Americanism, and infringe upon the very foundations of our civil rights.
Guest – Gita Guitierezz – attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights defending Guantanamo Bay detainees. Gita has made more than 10 visits to Guantanamo Bay and has represented prisoners such as Mohamed Mani Ahmad al-Kahtani.
Al-Marri, a 32-year-old father of three, and Qatar citizen. He was taken into custody during an early morning raid in Pakistan in December of 2001, just months after the U.S. attack on Afghanistan. He then spent the next several weeks at the US Air Force Base in Bagram, Afghanistan. Al-Marri has since spent four years in Guantanamo Bay military prison mostly in solitary confinement. For nearly two years his only human contact has been with interrogators, prison guards and our guest Jonathan Hafetz.
Guest – Jonathan Hafetz, associate counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. He is an expert on the history of habeas corpus. His articles and legal briefs on habeas corpus are widely cited by scholars and courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court. Mr. Hafetz’s legal practice focuses on the detention of enemy combatants and other issues of executive power.
Hafetz says Al-Marri interrogators slammed his head into a concrete wall, hit him with a 2-by-4 foot piece of wood, and forced him to remain in physically painful positions for long periods of time.
Jose Padilla was first detained in 2002 at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport after he returned from a trip to Pakistan. At the time Attorney General John Ashcroft warned the government had “disrupted an unfolding terrorist plot to attack the United States by exploding a radioactive “dirty bomb.” President Bush declared he was an enemy combatant who could be jailed in solitary confinement indefinitely without charges – even though he was a U.S. citizen. Only recently have the “dirty bomb” charges been dropped.
Guest – Andy Patel, one of the attorneys representing Jose Padilla.
Lynne Stewart Speech 2006
Brothers and Sisters, Comrades!
I had hoped to be able to speak with you all, and hug you all and argue with you all and do some fajitas and mega margaritas with you all, in person, but that is not to be this year. So I am sitting in Brooklyn and thinking of you all as both Ralph and I still float euphorically about 1 foot off the floor after a sentencing reprieve that was as welcome as it was unexpected.
However, rather than bask in the glow I want to seize the time before you to brandish some of the truths that have risen out of this four and a half year struggle with the Government.
First, a” lenient” sentence of twenty eight months and the loss of my calling to be a lawyer is probably still more than enough to chill if not downright put on ice, the criminal defense bar. This was the government motive from the arrest onward and I have little doubt that lawyers in the trenches and our clients will suffer from this announced omnipresence of Big Brother at the counsel table and in the visiting rooms. So the fight continues to the Appeal and the significant Constititutional questions that we will raise and hope to be vindicated on. I believe that it is possible, even in Bush world and what may follow it, that Lynne Stewart will one day be able to walk into a Courtroom as a Counsellor at Law!
My second most important point is that I would not be sitting in Brooklyn writing this except for the most astounding outpouring of People Power- Not only the 1000+ letters, the 800 strong supporters attending at Riverside Church from every part of the fractious Left the night before the sentencing: the singing of the Battle Hymn (with Her Truth rather than His!) as we walked heads high into the Court on Monday. It was also anytime someone talked about the case, or staged a burning of the Constititution in Birmingham (thank you David Gespass!) It was Ian Head who kept us together via the web site and Haydee, who wrote and sweated the joint publication of the pamphlet that put the truth of the conviction to the public. Or those arranged a radio interview (Lafferty this one’s for you and all the others from the Hildes’ in Bellingham Washington to the folks in Chicago, San Diego, Portland, Tucson,Seattle, Long Island, San Francisco, Phoenix, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Maine and Washington DC who set up the meetings and put us up in style (that sauna in Minneapolis), those who played the DVDs on the campus and who wrote the letters!! Those letters and the outpouring of support enabled and enboldened a United States District Court Judge to state
“It is no exaggeration to say that Ms. Stewart has not only performed a public service to her clients but to the nation.”
It is a victory not only for me personally not to have to end my life in jail but to our brand of lawyering that centers on People, not the corporation.
I spoke to the Guild Convention at its closing in 2003, and I just want to repeat my personal vision expressed there about the renewal of our quests at these gatherings:
We now resume our everyday lives but we have been charged once again, with, and for, our quests, and like Hippolyta and her Amazons; like David going forth to meet Goliath, like Beowulf the dragon slayer, like Queen Zenobia, who made war on the Romans, like Sir Galahad seeking the holy grail. And modern heros, dare I mention? Ho and Mao and Lenin, Fidel and Nelson Mandela and John Brown, Che Guevara who reminds us “At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love.” Our quests like theirs are to shake the very foundations of the continents. We go out to stop police brutality – to rescue the imprisoned – To change the rules for those who have never ever been able to get to the starting line much less run the race, because of color, physical condition, gender, mental impairment.
We go forth to preserve the air and land and water and sky and all the beasts that crawl and fly.
We go forth to safeguard the right to speak and write, to join; to learn, to rest safe at home, to be secure, fed, healthy, sheltered, loved and loving, to be at peace with ones identity.
Until we meet again our quests are formidable. We have in Washington a poisonous government that spreads its venom to the body politic in all corners of the globe. We have war – big war in Iraq, big war in Afghanistan, smaller wars in Columbia, Central America, Southeast Asia. We have detainees and political prisoners at home…..
That was 2003 and now we face a landscape devoid of habeus corpus where our government admits and enjoys rendering and torturing. With all of that
We know we can win. We know we can win because we must win. Arundahti Roy says “WE BE MANY AND THEY BE FEW”
There is a time when History and Justice meet. Let us Dare to Struggle Dare to Win.
Law and Disorder October 16, 2006
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Law and Disorder would like to thank the listeners of WBAI for their support of listener sponsored radio!
Law and Disorder welcomes KWMD in Alaska to the affiliate list
Brecht Forum – If It’s Not Facism, What Is It? Who Benefits & Why Now?
Panelists: Mark Crispin Miller, Heidi Boghosian, Bertell Ollman, Moderated by Michael Steven Smith
There appears to be a major transformation in progress. Bourgeois democracy, however limited and constricted it has been, is being revamped. The separation of powers, first enunciated by the founders, hardly exists any more. The Executive branch has overpowered Congress and the Judiciary. Neither the corporate media, the two party system, nor the unions provide much of a countervailing force. With the defeat of the Soviet Union and the “Socialist Block” imperialism has launched wars to consolidate capitalism and oil control in Yugoslavia, Afganistan, Iraq and Lebanon. The standard of living for the American working class and middle class is being rolled back quickly; only profit margins of the large corporations and the top one per cent are expanding. Democracy is not an abstraction, but a tool and an aspect of the class struggle. Thus we are experiencing a consolidational of wealth and power that is historically qualitatively transformative. Understanding what is going on is the first step in fighting it.
This week we hear talks from:
Mark Crispin Miller NYU professor of media studies and author of Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Elections and Why They’ll Steal the Next One Too.
Bertel Ollman – We hear an excerpt from Bertel Ollman, professor of politics at NYU, and has written and edited over a dozen books, including Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society, Social and Sexual Revolution: Essays on Marx and Reich, Dialectical Investigations, How to Take an Exam and Remake the World, and most recently Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx’s Method. He is also founder of The International Endowment for Democracy
More on the Military Commissions Act of 2006 and the resulting demise of Habeas Corpus. During the WBAI fundraiser Michael Smith and Heidi Boghosian talked with attorney and incoming National Lawyer’s Guild president Marjorie Cohn.
Guest – Marjorie Cohn – attorney and incoming National Lawyer’s Guild president
Update on the Military Commissions Act – It allows over-arching executive power and is by definition a police state – “no meaningful distinction between the law and the exercise of political power by the executive.” Below are points highlighted from this CCR article.
- Shortly after September 11, 2001, hundreds of non-citizens were swept up in the United States and detained in connection to the terrorism investigation without any evidence to connect them to terrorism or crime.
- These men were arrested and detained based on their Muslim faith, their Arab or South Asian descent, and their immigration status, rather than any evidence to connect them to terrorism.
- The “9-11 detainees” were imprisoned in the United States until they were cleared of any connection to terrorism by the FBI. This clearance usually took months, and some detainees were held for over a year.
- During the detention period, many men were held in the most restrictive confinement that exists in the federal system. They were locked down 23 to 24 hours a day, hand-cuffed and shackled, deprived of sleep, beaten and verbally harassed, and denied the opportunity to practice their religion.
- Since the men were released, at least two federal court judges have ruled that the treatment of the detainees would constitute violations of the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution.
- This provision allows any one of them to be imprisoned indefinitely without their day in court. Now, they could be investigated, detained, interrogated, and tortured without judicial remedy. While U.S. law prohibits torture, this bill would deny access to the courts to bring a torture claim.
CENTER FOR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS CONDEMNS DEFEAT OF SPECTER AMENDMENT TO PRESERVE HABEAS
Black World Forum – Feb.4th, NYC
Institute of the Black World 21st Century
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At the national level Dr. Ron Daniels, President of the Institute of the Black World 21st
Century(IBW), said “IBW will respond to the ‘Black State of Emergency’ we have painfully observed in New Orleans by taking up the challenge to get City Councils across the country to pass resolutions in support of the struggle for equity, fairness and justice in the rebuilding and redevelopment process. We plan to invite Cynthia Willard-Lewis, Councilwoman for the Lower Ninth Ward and New Orleans East, to participate in IBW’s regular monthly State of the Black World Forum February 4th in New York to begin the process of encouraging our allies on the New York City Council, in the spirit of the 9/11 disaster, to lead the way in mobilizing national support for the recovery effort in New Orleans.”
Daniels also indicated that plans are underway to convene national leaders to support the fight for massive assistance for the rebuilding effort. He said, “now that the Sub-Committee on Housing and Community Opportunity has been to New Orleans to assess the situation first hand, we urge them to press the Congress of the United States to provide the resources needed to rebuild and redevelop the city in accordances with the wishes of the majority population to return to reclaim and restore their neighborhoods.” The Martin Luther King Weekend Initiative enjoyed the support of the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund.
For further information contact: Dr. Ron Daniels, 718-533-1624/917-690-7525
or Mtangulizi Sanyika, 713-393-8736.