CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Human Rights, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Project YANO, JROTC, and Textbook Project
The Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, or JROTC, is a federal program sponsored by the US Armed Forces in high schools and some middle schools across the nation and at US military bases globally. It currently teaches its lessons to more than half a million students in approximately 3,400 high schools nationwide.
In recent years, the military and its supporters have been promoting the idea of a significant increase in the number of high schools with JROTC—one proposal calls for expanding up to 6,000. Because of this, one nonprofit decided it was time to examine the textbooks used in JROTC classes to see what they are teaching.
The Project on Youth and Non-Military Opportunities, or Project YANO, is a counter-recruitment organization founded in 1984 and based in San Diego country. It released its findings in early July. Their reviewers have backgrounds in classroom teaching or education activists, or special knowledge of subjects JROTC claims to address, such as civil rights, violence prevention, leadership methods, and world history. Team members included current and retired high school teachers, military veterans, and a documentary film producer.
Guest – Rick Jahnkow, a co-founder and board member of Project YANO. Rick worked for 34 years as the organization’s full-time program coordinator. He has researched and organized around the issues of military recruiting, high school Jr. ROTC, and the general militarization of K-12 schools.
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Freedom House 2021 Report: Democracy Under Siege
What if you could assign a grade to countries based on how free they are? Freedom House, a nonprofit organization founded in 1941, does just that. In 1973, it began using social science analysis methods to assess the level of freedom by nation, attaching a numerical score and ranking them as Free, Partly Free, or Not Free.
The report, known generally as Freedom in the World, has been called the “Michelin Guide to democracy’s development” and “essential reading for policymakers and political leaders.”
The 2021 report, “Democracy Under Seige was written by Amy Slipowitz and Sarah Repucci. They noted that the pandemic, combined with economic and physical insecurity along with violent conflict, struck a heavy blow to defenders of democracy. It shifted the international balance in favor of tyranny.
Incumbent leaders, according to the report, increasingly resorted to force when dealing with opponents while “beleaguered activists—lacking effective international support—faced heavy jail sentences, torture, or murder in many settings.”
Guest – Sarah Repucci, Vice President of Research & Analysis at Freedom House. Sarah oversees Freedom House’s flagship publications Freedom in the World, Freedom on the Net, and Nations in Transit. She advises policymakers and business leaders on democracy and human rights around the world, and her commentary has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, the BBC, National Public Radio, Foreign Policy, and the Journal of Democracy. She previously worked for Transparency International and the Global Business Initiative on Human Rights, and as an independent consultant for several NGOs, and private businesses.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Supreme Court, Surveillance, Torture, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Charges Dropped Against Pipeline Activists
The climate movement won a significant victory on July 13 when all charges were dropped against 16 pipeline protesters and a journalist. The local district attorney in Saint Martinsville, Louisiana rejected all criminal charges and vowed not to prosecute them for alleged violations of Louisiana’s anti-protest amendments to their critical infrastructure law.
The Bayou Bridge pipeline is the tail end of the infamous 1172 mile long Dakota access pipeline which brings dirty oil from North Dakota to the Gulf of Mexico. The end of the pipeline runs from Texas to Louisiana.
In 2018, in the midst of fierce opposition to the Bainbridge Pipeline and at the urging of an industry association to Louisiana legislator added pipelines to the definition of critical infrastructure to significantly raise the penalties for people protesting pipeline project. Those found guilty could be punished with five years in prison with or without hard labor.
This critical infrastructure law is part of a national effort to crack down an environmental activists across the US. The law in Louisiana was adopted from model legislation put forward by ALEC, the corporate funded politically conservative group. Similar legislation aimed at pipeline protesters has been introduced more than 23 times in 18 states since 2017 and is in effect in 15.
Karen Savage, an independent journalist who was arrested, said that “the first amendment guarantees water protectors the right to protest and protects my right as a journalist to report those protest without fear of retribution.“
Guest – Anne White Hat, one of the people arrested and charged under the law. Whitehat Botanicals
Guest – Attorney Pam Spees, one of the team of attorneys that handled the criminal defense case. She’s also representing Anne White Hat in a case challenging the constitutionality of the Louisiana law. Whitehat v. Landry
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Continued Erosion Of Voting Rights In The United States
We are in the middle of a second great disenfranchisement in America. The first was after the Civil War reconstruction ended and Black people were stripped of their right to vote and their ability to hold office. This disenfranchisement lasted almost 100 years until the modern civil rights movement of the 1960s.
Legislatures in Republican run states are imposing new voting restrictions particularly on non-white voters. The Brennan Center found that as of June 20th, 17 states enacted 28 new laws restricting the ability to vote since the start of the year.
Republican run states hastened to restrict voting by mail and in person, voting hours and locations, and the implementation of voter registration and voter ID requirements.
Georgia banned giving food or water to voters waiting in long lines, lines that were caused by reduced access to ballot casting locations in Black precincts. They get away with this by raising the imaginary problem of voter fraud.
The Supreme Court has six reactionary judges and three liberals. Three of the reactionaries were added to the court by Donald Trump. The reactionaries recent decision in Brnovich v Democratic National Committee delivered a huge hit to American democracy, such as it is. The decision makes the Court look like an obvious political institution where justices are simply partisan politicians with robes.
In the recent Brnovich decision, the court eviscerated the strongest remaining sections of the Voting Rights Act rights of 1965 which held that election laws and voting rules that actually had a racially discriminatory impact could be blocked.
The first major blow to the voting rights act was in 2013 when the court held in Shelby versus Holder that federal authorities could no longer block regressive new election laws or voting rules in jurisdictions with histories of discrimination.
“Effectively, most of the Voting Rights Act is now dead,” declared Hamlin University scholar David Schultz who specializes in elections.
Guest – Marjorie Cohn, professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law where she taught from 1991-2016, and a former president of the National Lawyers Guild. She lectures, writes, and provides commentary for local, regional, national and international media outlets. Professor Cohn has served as a news consultant for CBS News and a legal analyst for Court TV, and a legal and political commentator on the BBC, CNN, NPR, and other major stations.
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Civil Liberties, Human Rights, NSA Spying, Political Prisoner, Surveillance, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Source For The Intercept Outed, Faces 10 Years In Prison
In 2019 the Department of Justice indicted Daniel Hale—a former intelligence analyst for the U.S. Air Force and NSA—for giving classified national defense information to Jeremy Scahill for the online publication The Intercept. The events in question took place between 2013 and 2015. In late March, Daniel pleaded guilty to one count of violating the Espionage Act, punishable by up to 10 years in prison. He is scheduled to be sentenced by U.S. District Judge Liam O’Grady on July 27, 2021.
Hale was named as the source of several documents that revealed grave government wrong-doing, much related to the Obama administration’s expansion of the drone war and other counterterrorism programs that lacked adequate oversight and have brought about as yet unknown numbers of civilian deaths abroad. One document published in the Intercept in 2014 revealed that most of the individuals in the government’s terror suspect database had no affiliation with any terror group.
Many have criticized the Intercept for its failure of source protection. As we recently covered in an interview with Reality Winner’s attorney, The Intercept’s lapses resulted in her identifying information being shared by the Intercept with the government.
StandWithDaniel
Guest – William Neuheisel, the Development and Program Manager for the Whistleblower and Source Protection Program, (WHISPeR), at ExposeFacts. William brings nearly a decade of marketing, communications, and development experience to WHISPeR as well as an expertise and passion for privacy, civil liberties, and First Amendment advocacy.
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Aerial Investigation Research Pilot Program And Persistent Tracking
As the nation erupts in protests against racially-infused police violence, the Baltimore Police Department has just launched a six-month, day-time aerial surveillance experiment. A Texas billionaire has funded the project that is being operated by an Ohio-based company, Persistent Surveillance Systems. The plane flies overhead and records the movements of everyone in the city.
Michael Harrison, Baltimore Police Commissioner, has justified the nearly $4 million experiment by saying, “There is no expectation of privacy on a public street, a sidewalk.”
The Aerial Investigation Research Pilot Program is, by contract, limited to monitoring such felony crimes as robberies, car jackings, shootings and homicides. Images recorded are, in theory, to be used solely in criminal investigations and will be stored for 45 days. A first prong of the program was conducted covertly in 2016 under a different police commissioner.
The ACLU of Maryland calls this initiative the most comprehensive surveillance of a U.S. city in history. ACLU Senior Staff attorney David Rocah said, “It’s the virtual equivalent of having a police officer follow a resident every time they walk out the door, and if that happened in real life, all of us would understand the huge privacy implications in doing that.”
Guest – ACLU Senior Staff attorney David Rocah has worked on a number of significant cases involving free speech, police misconduct, privacy, election law and more. In 2011 he was an inaugural recipient of the James Baldwin Medal for Civil Rights. David previously worked as a Senior Trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division at the US Dept of Justice, focusing on police misconduct and conditions in prisons, jails and other state institutions.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Crony Capitalism, Gaza, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, NSA Spying, Political Prisoner, Supreme Court, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Public Intellectual: The Life of a Citizen Pilgrim by Professor Richard Falk
If we are ever to have a world not threatened by catastrophic climate change and devastating nuclear war we will need a world governed by respect for the rule of law, democracy, and the democratic right of peoples to self- determination. After the World War II, the United Nations was established in 1945 in an effort to prevent future wars. In this it has failed. The United States of America has been at war almost every year since its beginning and almost every year since the 50’s starting with Korea, then Vietnam, then Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya.
Today the United States has 800 bases abroad in 80 countries. It spends $753 billion a year on the military, which is 53 cents out of every tax dollar.
Michael Ratner, a founder of Law And Disorder Radio and who practiced human rights law internationally, used to say that you cannot have imperialism abroad and democracy at home. He said it was a truth established by the decline of both the Greek and Roman empires thousands of years ago.
Guest – International Law Professor Richard Falk who is still teaching and going strong at age 90. He has recently had published his magnificent memoir titled Public Intellectual: The Life of a Citizen Pilgrim. Professor Falk is a leading international law professor, prominent activist, public author, and a pioneer thinker dedicated to peace and justice. He taught at Princeton University for 40 years and was active in seeking an end to the Vietnam war, a better understanding of Iran, a just solution for Israel/Palestine, and improved democracy everywhere. He also served as the UN Special Rapporteur for Occupied Palestine. He has written 50 books. Since 2009 he has been nominated annually for the Nobel Peace Prize.
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In Defense of Whistleblowers: Attorney Sarah Alexander
James Glenn was working for NetDesign, a Cisco Systems reseller in Denmark when he came across a vulnerability in software made for a line of Cisco’s video surveillance cameras. The flaw made it easy for would-be hackers to access the systems running the devices and to penetrate the systems on a deeper level after gaining entry. Glenn made the discovery after taking part in his company’s “own medicine” initiative, where staffers test equipment and software for security holes. In 2008 he reported the issue to his employer and to Cisco, assuming that he’d be praised for finding the problem. Instead, he was fired.
Cisco Systems is one of the world’s leading information technology and networking companies. With a market cap of close to $195 billion, Cisco dominates the networking and communications devices industry. Glenn notes that he learned the cameras and software were still being used by the Los Angeles International Airport, and in 2010 he spoke with law enforcement personnel about his concerns regarding LAX. According to court filings cited by Glenn’s attorneys, Cisco failed to fix the vulnerability until an updated version of the software was released in 2012. It then took the company 3 more years to release a security advisory to companies using the previous, flawed version of the software.
Stories like this are all too common. Whistleblowers frequently lose their jobs and suffer significant personal hardships as a result of coming forward on behalf of the public’s interest.
Guest – Attorney Sarah Poppy Alexander of the law firm Constantine, Cannon. Poppy represents whistleblowers and government entities in so called “qui tam” lawsuits in both federal and state court, as well as under the IRS and Securities and Exchange Commission’s whistleblower programs. Poppy has been selected to the Northern California Super Lawyers Rising Stars list every year since 2016. Before joining Constantine Cannon, Poppy was an associate attorney at Rosen, Bien, Galvan & Grunfeld LLP, where she worked to ensure prisoners received appropriate medical and mental health care and adequate accommodations for disabilities in jails and prisons. Poppy graduated from Harvard Law School and holds an M.A. in Political Theory from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.A. from Yale College.
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Civil Liberties, Gaza, Human Rights, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Palestine Legal Director Speaks On Recent Israel-Palestine Conflict
Zionism, the idea of creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine, was and is a settler colonial project that started 100 years ago. But Zionism had a problem. It’s illustrated by the story of an early Zionist Congress in Vienna sending three rabbis to Palestine to report on what they saw. The rabbis went and reported back that “the bride is beautiful but she’s married to another man.” Palestine was densely populated and had been for thousands of years. It was not, as Zionist propaganda would have it, a land without a people for a people without a land.
The Zionist goal then and now was to get rid of the Arabs. In this they have almost succeeded. But not quite.
The recent 11 day horrific slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, approved in advance by the Biden administration and conducted by Israel with American supplied weapons started when Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in an effort to consolidate right wing support evicted Palestinians from their homes in a Palestinian neighborhood in Jerusalem. The Prime Minister also had his military invade and shoot up the Al-Asqua mosque in Jerusalem while 300 Palestinians were there praying on the last day of Ramadan. In response on May 18th the Palestinians staged a general strike in Israel proper, the West Bank, and Gaza. This was the first time a general strike had been conducted by the Palestinians against their Zionist and British oppressors since 1936 which which was broken by the British and the Zionists.
The Zionist apparatus in the United States is extremely strong. Through lawsuits and political pressure they have carved out what Michael Ratner called – the Palestine exception to the First Amendment. Telling the Palestine story is quite difficult. To counter this Michael Ratner set up the organization Palestine Legal in Chicago. It is headed by Palestinian American attorney Dima Khalidi. Before the cease-fire, 1700 people in Gaza were injured and 210 killed, including 65 children.
Guest – Dima Khalidi, founder and Director of Palestine Legal. Her work includes providing legal advice to activists, engaging in advocacy to protect their rights to speak out for Palestinian rights, and educating activists and the public about the repression of Palestine advocates. She most recently has an article published online in Truthout.
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The Dallas 6: Andre Jacobs
In 2014 and 2016, Law and Disorder covered the case of the Dallas 6. They’re a group of prisoners who in 2010 protested the ongoing abuse from prison guards while locked in solitary confinement at the SCI Dallas prison in Pennsylvania. Abuse there included tasering genitals, being hog tied, cutting off of clothes and leaving the men in cages for hours at a time.
They witnessed another prisoner, Isaac Sanchez, being strapped into a restraint chair for hours even overnight. When guards threatened to do the same to them, the men tried to cover their cell doors with their bedding and refused to leave their cell in an effort to protect themselves and gain the attention of authorities. Prison guards stormed the six cells, armed with batons and electrified equipment. They left the men beaten, bloody, naked, eyes burning, their flesh scorched with pepper spray.
The Dallas 6 are Andre Jacobs, Anthony Kelly, Anthony Locke, Dwayne Peters, Derek Stanley, and Carrington Keys. The six men were forced to remain in the Restrictive Housing Unit, or solitary confinement for up to ten years.
Guest – Andre Jacobs, Andre served more than two decades in prison, was the victim of prolonged and tortuous prison guard abuse, became a successful jailhouse lawyer, and has been released from prison. He started the business Supreme Network Global to help and guide young men and women who have been in similar circumstances.
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Civil Liberties, Gaza, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Truth to Power, War Resister
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- Commentary: Jim Lafferty On Israeli – Palestinian Conflict
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Steven Donziger Trial: Continuing Coverage Part 2
After five days in court and 650 days on house arrest, environmental lawyer Steven Donziger chose not to take the stand and testify in his own defense. As listeners will recall, Steven was on trial for criminal contempt of court charges. In August 2019, he refused to turn over his computer, cellphone and other electronic devices and he has been detained pretrial for a misdemeanor offense. If convicted, he faces six months in prison.
The attorney who won a multi-billion-dollar settlement against Chevron oil for polluting an area Ecuador the size of Rhode Island and causing the indigenous people thousands of injuries and deaths by cancer and other illnesses, told The Intercept about the decision: “My lawyers said you’d be crazy to testify, so we decided to cut the case short. No need to continue to legitimize what’s essentially a charade.”
Judge Loretta Preska denied Steven a trial by jury, and many contend that a jury of his own peers might have acquitted the human rights defender of all six counts. Attorney and Harvard Law School professor Charles Nesson agrees. “This is a story of the denial of jury trial,” Nesson said. “He’s been effectively convicted and disbarred and more or less bankrupted without any jury. And now he’s about to be convicted. And all of this without a jury.”
DonzigerDefense.com
ChevronToxico.com
ChevronInEcuador.com
Guest – Attorney Martin Garbus, one of three pro bono lawyers representing Donziger in an attempt to get his law license restored. Garbus has a long and distinguished career as a civil rights and first amendment litigator. Attorney Martin Garbus has represented Nelson Mandela, Daniel Ellsberg, and Cesar Chavez and worked in Rwanda, China, and the Soviet Union, among other countries.
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Take Me To Your Leader: The Rot of the American Ruling Class
We need to know our enemy because the task of changing society begins with understanding who holds power. In 1915 the great Irish socialist James Connolly said, “O, yes! The ruling class are worthy of study. The natural history of the ruling class is a fascinating interest. You begin with interest, you proceed with awe and admiration, you deepen into hatred, and you wind up with contempt for the nature of the beast. You realize that – the capitalist class is the meanest class that ever grasped the reins of power”. Jacobin magazine’s Spring 2021 issue is devoted entirely to an examination of the ruling class.
Guest – Doug Henwood who has an article in Jacobin titled Take Me To Your Leader: The Rot of the American Ruling Class. Doug Henwood is the editor of Left Business Review and the host of the radio program Behind the News.
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