Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Human Rights, Right To Dissent, Truth to Power, U.S. Militarism, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister, Whistleblowers, worker's rights
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
How The United States Took Out The Nordstream Pipeline
The war in Ukraine is illegal. It’s a violation of international law. Peace forces in the United States are demanding a ceasefire and negotiations and the recognition of Russia’s legitimate security concerns. At the same time, we recognize that the Russians were provoked by the United States and NATO in to invading Ukraine, having placed so many military bases and bombs on Russia’s border.
The latest development of enormous economic and political consequences is the American blowing up of the two pipelines that provided cheap Russian natural gas to Europe. The great investigative journalist, Seymour Hersh, has recently discovered and published a hugely significant investigative article on Substack, proving that the United States,despite its vehement denials, was in fact, responsible for the blowing up the pipelines.
This was done to prevent the integration of Russia into the European economy. Because now the United States and Norway sell liquefied natural gas and natural gas, to Western Europe at four or five times the price of Russian gas.
Guest – Seymour Hersh, has won a Pulitzer Prize and five Polk awards, beginning with his expose of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam where American troops killed 500 women, children and old men. His important articles were published in the New York Times, the New Yorker, and other mainstream media outlets. But his article on the US blowing up of the two pipelines had to be self-published on his Substack platform.
—-
Denouncing The Horrors Of Socialism
On February 2nd of this year, the now Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution “ denouncing the horrors of socialism.” It passed overwhelmingly in a 328–86–14 vote. More than half of the Democrats voted for it, while 86 voted against it and 14 voted “present“. The resolution is made up of lies and half truths. We urge listeners to read it for themselves. It is online. The resolution is three pages in length and 99% of it consists of a series of whereas clauses pointing out with the Republican authors of the resolution believe are examples of the “horribles” of Socialism.
What is socialism? Socialism has never really existed anywhere yet there have been attempts starting with the great Russian revolution of 1917 which effectively ended the slaughter of World War I. It was overthrown in 1991 when the USA and others successfully restored capitalism. What would a socialist society be like? First of all it would be democratic politically and economically and it would not be run by the one percent.
America has a rich history of electing people with a socialist vision. Socialism would illuminate racism and economic want. It would provide for education and healthcare, housing and employment for everybody. Production would be for human needs, not for profit. It would clean up the environment and eliminate the threat of catastrophic man-made climate change.
Guest – Jeff Mackler is the National Secretary of Socialist Action and was their candidate for president in 2016 and in 2020. Mr. Mackler also serves on the Administrative Committee of the United National Anti-war Coalition, or “UNAC”. He is the Director of the Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal and a steering committee member of the National Julian Assange Defense Committee. A lifelong activist, Jeff Mackler is the author of 25 books and pamphlets and political, economic, and anti-US imperial war movements.
Hosted by attorneys Michael Smith and Jim Lafferty
——————————
Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Political Prisoner, Right To Dissent, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister, Whistleblowers
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Black History Month And Racist Police Violence
February is Black History Month in America. And on the very first day of Black History Month this year, Tyre Nichols, a young Black man, was laid to rest in Memphis, Tennessee, having been murdered by police officers of the Memphis police department, as he simply tried to get home.
I find it almost impossible to keep track of all the hundreds of cases of racist police violence against innocent Black and brown men and women in America. At the moment our nation is transfixed and in a state of great anger and anguish over the brutal murder of Tyre Nickols in Memphis, Tennessee. And the killings keep coming. In my city, Los Angeles, we’re outraged by the police murder of Keenan Anderson, the cousin of Black Lives Matter co-founder, Patrice Cullers. Both murders were filmed, and so once again the American people saw with their own eyes just how violent and despicable the police can be; and how indifferent the offending police officers are to the fact that what they are doing is being captured on film for all the world to see.
Now, the overwhelming percentage of victims of police assaults are people of color who’ve been murdered, or otherwise brutalized by white cops. But as the Nichols case demonstrates, police violence is so ingrained in policing in America that Black cops, too, often do not hesitate to employ gross violence in the course of their policing.
What accounts for this epidemic of cop killings of people of color in America? Is it connected to America’s history of Black enslavement? And, if requiring the police to be filmed while making arrests has not ended police violence, what will it take to finally end this epidemic of racist policing?
Guest – Attorney Carl Douglas is a partner in the law firm, Douglas/Hicks, one of Keenan Anderson’s family attorneys who’ve just filed a $50 million dollar claim against the City of Los Angeles for what the LAPD did in the Keenan Anderson case. Attorney Douglas, after working 6 years as a Public Defender, then spent 12 years in the Los Angeles law firm of famed, and now deceased, anti-police abuse attorney Johnnie Cochran. And now, his own law firm, the Douglas/Hicks law firm, specializes in police misconduct and other civil rights cases, criminal defense work, as well as personal injury and employment discrimination cases. In short, he is a true “lawyer for the people”.
—-
CIA Spied On Julian Assange Embassy Visitors: Lawsuit Update
We speak today with New York City attorney Deborah Hrbek who along with her law partner Margaret Ratner Kunstler are suing the CIA, its former Director Mike Pompeo, and the Company they contracted with to spy for them on Julian Assange and his visitors including attorneys at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Assange lived there for seven years having been granted political asylum by the Ecuadorian government. The CIA contract employee DC Global copied information off of their cell phones and computers when they visited their client Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.
They are demanding an injunction forbidding the CIA to use the private information they stole from their devices. The CIA says that it has every right to do what it did because the plaintiffs had no right to expect privacy.
Julian Assange is one the greatest journalist of our time. His exposures of American war crimes, corruption in the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, and CIA spying on us using our cell phones and smart TVs was the most embarrassing revelations ever revealed about the American war machine and it’s diplomatic corps.
In retaliation the US establishment and its institutions including both political parties and the intelligence agencies took their revenge on Julian by first smearing him, according to a Defense Department directive, and then threatening him with being charged as a spy under the Espionage Act so that he had to take refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy.
Then former President Donald Trump indicted Assange for espionage and had their British collaborators remove him from the Ecuadorian Embassy and put him in London’s Belmarsh, a notorious maximum-security prison, where he has been tortured daily for the last three years by being held in solitary confinement and denied adequate medical care.
The United States and its servant the British Crown Prosecutorial Service trashed the rule of law throughout the entire extradition proceeding. They lied about the conditions of confinement Assange would face in United States. Even the trial judge thought he might kill himself. The extradition order is eminent.
AssangeDefense
Guest – Deborah Hrbek is a founding partner at Hrbek Kunstler, a Manhattan entertainment law firm that has represented WikiLeaks in media law matters since 2015. In the course of her work with WikiLeaks journalist and filmmakers she has visited Julian Assange many times, both at the Ecuadorian Embassy at London where he was there as a political Ashlee and in recent years in Belmarsh prison, a maximum-security prison where he has been incarcerated since April 2019. Hrbek is one of the plaintiffs in “Kunstler versus the CIA”, an action that seeks to hold the US government accountable for its illegal activities in connection with its prosecution of Julian Assange.
Hosted by attorneys Michael Smith and Jim Lafferty
——————————————-
Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Cuba, Gaza, Guantanamo, Human Rights, Prison Industry, Racist Police Violence, Supreme Court, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power, U.S. Militarism, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister, Whistleblowers
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
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.
—-
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
——————————
Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, U.S. Militarism, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
The Greatest Evil is War
United States has been at war almost continuously over the last 80 years. Chris Hedges has titled his latest book, The Greatest Evil is War. He is our guest today. What is the driving force behind this nearly a century of war? Who is responsible? What are the institutions in United States that carry it on? What is to be done about it?
What forces in our country can stop the slaughter and the constant waste of resources that is consuming us and threatening us with the possibility of nuclear war, which would wipe out all life on our planet. Today we will explore the economic, institutional, and ideological underpinnings of the American war machine. We will talk about the military industrial complex about which Eisenhower warned us. We will talk about its handmaidens, the media, Congress, the universities and the think tanks which advocate for war.
We will talk about the political consequences of permanent war and the fascist direction America is increasingly going in. Most profoundly we will talk about capitalism and fascism from which it springs. And finally we will talk about the social forces necessary to stop and reverse war.
Guest – Chris Hedges spent two decades as a foreign correspondent, 15 of them with The New York Times, covering conflicts in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the former Yugoslavia. He learned overseas that the evils of empire are the external expression of white supremacy, just as mass incarceration, which he describes as the civil rights issue of our age, is the most brutal internal expression of white supremacy. Prisons , he writes, are the modern iteration of slave plantations. Hedges is the author of 14 books, The winner of a Pulitzer Prize for journalism, a graduate of Harvard Divinity school, and an ordained Presbyterian minister. chrishedges.substack.com
—-
American political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal has served 40 years Is Pennsylvania’s harshest prisons-16 of them on death row -for the murder of a Philadelphia police officer which he did not commit
The judge who convicted him was overheard promising“I’m going to help fry the N-word“.
Mumia is an important figure in African-American history. Before his conviction he was a nationally broadcast award winning radio journalist and the head of the Philadelphia Association of Black journalists. He reported on the murderous racial violence of the Philadelphia police department and it’s notorious Police Chief and then Mayor Frank Rizzo.
He had been a member of the Philadelphia chapter of the Black Panther Party. While in prison Mumia has written 13 books and had a weekly radio show “ Live from Death Row“. He holds a masters degree and is working on a PhD in history.
On October 26, 2022 Mumia’s attorneys appeared in court in an effort to get him a new trial. His defense petition included newly discovered evidence that had been buried in the prosecutor’s files. This evidence documented a key witness receiving promises of money for their testimony and evidence of favorable treatment of another in a criminal case. The petition also documented the unconstitutional practice of striking Black jurors during Mumia’s original trial.
Judge Lucretia Clemons preliminarily denied his constitutional right to present this information. She is likely to finalize this ruling on his upcoming court date in Philadelphia on December 9, 2022.
Guest – Noelle Hanrahan is the director of Prison Radio, a multimedia production studio that brings to the public the voices of incarcerated women, men and children. She seeks to honor the agency and humanity of prisoners by bringing their uncensored essays into mainstream discourse. She has produced over 3,500 multimedia recordings from over 100 prison radio correspondents, including the critically acclaimed work of Mumia Abu-Jamal. In 1995, she brought out of prison his first book, Live From Death Row (Harper Perennial), which became a best seller. In 2013, she co-produced the theatrically released feature documentary Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary (Street Legal Cinema/First Run Features). She received her BA in Gender, Race and Class in the 19th and 20th Centuries from Stanford University, and an MA in Criminal Justice from Boston University. She also holds private investigator licenses in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.
————————————–
Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Human Rights, U.S. Militarism, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict
Since February 24, 2022, the day that Russia illegally invaded Ukraine, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians have been killed or otherwise become casualties. Eight million Ukrainians have been forced to flee their homes, and hundreds of thousands of Russians have fled conscription. Millions of people in Ukraine have no heat, electricity or water and temperatures are below freezing. The war has devastated 35% of Ukraine’s economy.
Western sanctions on Russia have led to skyrocketing inflation in Europe, and a dangerous squeeze on energy supplies is crippling manufacturing. The war has also devastated infrastructure, reducing electrical grids, railways, apartment buildings and oil depots to rubble. It has filled the air with pollutants and toxic waste that is contaminating rivers and groundwater.
The war is also exacerbating the climate crisis. The fossil fuel industry is profiting from the sanctions which provide it with an excuse to increase dirty energy exploration and production.
The Western media portrays the war as a conflict between the evil empire Russia and the innocent Ukraine. Lost in the heartbreaking images, however, is a nuanced understanding of the context for the war, what caused it, and how it can be ended. The role of the United States in the historical backdrop to the war and the current U.S. resistance to a peaceful settlement are absent from the coverage in the corporate and even much of the alternative media.
Guest – CodePink co-founder Medea Benjamin, who has co-authored with Nicolas Davies the new book, “War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict.” Medea is one of the leading activists of our time. Wherever people are hurting, we can expect to see Medea and CodePink there.
—-
Disengaging from Violent Far Right Extremism
Since 2019, the number of white nationalist networks in the United States has been declining. More centralized ones, however, are supplanting them. An example of this, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, is how founders of the podcast platform The Right Stuff have switched from organizing “pool party” groups to focusing on building the racist and antisemitic National Justice Party.
Many prominent leaders in this new iteration of white nationalism say their primary goal is to challenge “Conservatism, Inc.” Live-streamer Nick Fuentes is one. He recently dined with Donald Trump and Kanye West at Mar-a-Lago and was present outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Fuentes seeks to harness the grievances of Trump supporters into an overtly ethno-nationalist political movement, forming the Republican party’s core.
Ideas once confined to the organized white power movement are now openly discussed within the broader political right. The so-called “great replacement” conspiracy, holding that white people are being systematically replaced across the Western world by “multiculturalists” and Jews, is routinely cited as a reality by some elected officials and media pundits.
Guest – Patrick Riccards is the CEO of Life After Hate, an organization that helps people leave the violent far right. Founded in 2011 by former violent extremists, it’s the only nationally recognized and federally funded nonprofit positioned to assist those wishing to disengage from violent far right extremism. An expert in education, Patrick also founded the Driving Force Institute for Public Engagement, an initiative aimed at transforming how U.S. history and civics are taught. An award-winning writer, Patrick serves on the boards of several nonprofits.
Hosted by attorneys Heidi Boghosian, Marjorie Cohn and Julie Hurwitz
—————————————————
Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Surveillance, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister, Whistleblowers
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Can A Lawsuit Against The CIA Affect U.S. Extradition Attempt of Julian Assange?
In August 2022, a group of U.S. citizen attorneys and journalists sued the CIA and its former director Mike Pompeo. They alleged that the CIA, during Pompeo’s tenure, spied on them during meetings with Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. The WikiLeaks founder sheltered there for 7 years in an effort to avoid extradition to the United States.. Assange is charged with 17 counts under the Espionage Act for revealing evidence of U.S. war crimes. If convicted, he faces 175 years in prison.
The lawsuit says that the CIA violated the privacy rights of those journalists and lawyers. Plaintiffs include journalists Charles Glass and John Goetz, and New York City attorneys Margaret Kunstler and Deborah Hrbek, who have represented Assange. The suit seeks compensatory and punitive damages for the plaintiffs for the violations of their rights. It also seeks the removal of any information held by the CIA which was collected from them during their visits to see Assange and prevention of the release of any this information to a third party.
The CIA, as listeners may know, is prohibited from collecting intelligence on U.S. citizens, although several lawmakers have alleged that the agency maintains a secret repository of Americans’ communications data. Richard Roth, the lead attorney in this case, had this to say: “The United States Constitution shields American citizens from U.S. government overreach even when the activities take place in a foreign embassy in a foreign country.”
Journalists and lawyers visiting Assange were required to surrender their electronic devices to Undercover Global before each visit. U.C. Global is a private security company which was providing security to the embassy. The lawsuit alleged that the company copied that information and handed it over to the CIA.
In early November, Deborah Hrbek and our own Marjorie Cohn discussed the lawsuit and the case against Assange, in a program sponsored by the First Unitarian Society of Milwaukee. For our show today, we’re delighted to bring you their remarks and answers to several audience questions. Deborah Hrbek starts off the event. In addition to being a member of the Assange defense team, her law practice focuses on entertainment and small business law. Marjorie is a member of the national advisory board of Assange Defense.
Hosted by Attorney Heidi Boghosian
—————————————–
