CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Rights, genocide, Human Rights, Targeting Muslims, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister
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Special Report: Global Threats To Freedom Of Expression Arising From Gaza Conflict
On top of the devastating humanitarian crisis and the issues of genocide and violations of human rights in Gaza and the West Bank, there has been an unprecedented attack on freedom of the press and freedom of expression globally prompted by that war.
In August, Irene Khan the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression issued an alarming report examining the impact of the conflict in Gaza on freedom of expression throughout the world. The report highlighted “attacks on journalists and media restrictions, endangering access to information about the conflict globally; suppression of protests and dissent and undermining of academic and artistic freedoms in polarized political environment; and restrictions on legitimate political expression in the name of fighting terrorism and antisemitism.”
The Special Rapporteur assessed the compliance of States, social media companies and other private actors with international human rights standards, online and offline, and she found “an extensive pattern of unlawful, discriminatory and disproportionate restrictions on advocacy for the rights of Palestinian people.”
The report emphasized “the importance of freedom of opinion and expression – enjoyed on an equal basis by all sides – as an invaluable tool for fighting hate and encouraging mutual respect and dialogue.” Based on her detailed findings, the Special Rapporteur called on States, social media companies and other private actors to reject double standards on human rights and made concrete recommendations for them to uphold the right to freedom of opinion and expression equally for all.
Guest – Irene Khan, the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression. Appointed on August 1, 2020, Ms Khan is the first woman to hold this position since the establishment of the mandate in 1993. UN Special Rapporteurs are independent human rights experts with a mandate to report and advise on human rights from a thematic perspective. As part of her role, Ms Khan conducts country visits, acts on individual cases and sends official communications to governments, and presents thematic reports to the UN General Assembly.
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A History Of Anti-Black Racism
National chauvinism and racism are essential features of fascism. The practice of white racism in the United States during the Jim Crow era was something that Hitler’s party in Germany studied and emulated. This kind of anti-black racism went on in the United States from shortly after the Civil War up until the 1960s. It has never really gone away as the mass mobilizations of the Black Lives Matter movement has recently demonstrated. This Black resistance, this fight back, will be a central aspect of anti-fascist activity in the future.
Guest – Bill Mullen is professor emeritus of American studies at Purdue University and the co-founder of The Campus Anti-fascist Network. He’s also co-author of The Black Antifascist Tradition and his new book published last month We Charge Genocide: American Ashes and the Rule of Law.
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Freedom Of Speech, Gaza, Human Rights, Targeting Muslims, U.S. Militarism, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister
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Journalists Under Fire In Israel-Gaza Conflict
Today we turn to the status of press freedom in Israel. Since the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, and during the ensuing war in Gaza ever since, which is now moving into the West Bank, the pressure on journalists who are trying to cover what’s been happening there is increasing… and more dangerous.
According to the New York-based Committee To Protect Journalists, the Israel-Gaza war has claimed the lives of more journalists over the course of a year than in any other conflict the organization has documented. They estimate 128 journalists killed and 69 imprisoned.
The foreign and Israeli journalists who are bold enough to enter Gaza to report on what’s happening can only do so if they are accompanied by Israeli forces… and under strict surveillance. And the Israeli military has no qualms about shutting down news outlets like Al Jazeera – even its bureau in Ramallah, in the West Bank, which is an area supposedly under Palestinian control.
And just last week, Israeli Occupational Forces arrested a US citizen, journalist Jeremy Loffredo, charging him with endangering national security for his reporting on Iranian strikes. Reporters Without Borders condemns what it calls Israel’s climate of intimidation, and has called on the Israeli authorities to stop obstructing the work of journalists covering the war.
Guest – Kevin Gosztola is a journalist and editor of The Dissenter Newsletter, which regularly covers whistleblowing, press freedom, and government secrecy. He is the author of Guilty of Journalism: The Political Case Against Julian Assange and known for his work reporting on the extradition proceedings against Assange and the court-martial against Chelsea Manning. Both were prosecuted and convicted under the Espionage Act.
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Back From The Brink 2024
One issue from the Cold War topic stills looms large today: the growing threat of nuclear war. While many hoped the end of the Cold War would signal a retreat from the nuclear arms race, recent developments suggest otherwise. Tensions between amid U.S., Russia, and China have escalated, and key nuclear arms control treaties, such as the INF Treaty have eroded, with the future of the New START agreement uncertain.
The war in Ukraine, punctuated by Russia’s nuclear saber-rattling, has revived fears of potential nuclear escalation. At the same time, huge sums are being funneled into expanding and modernizing nuclear arsenals. In several decades, it is estimated that the total cost of modernizing and maintaining the U.S. nuclear arsenal amounts to approximately $1.7 trillion. Emerging technologies, like hypersonic missiles and Artificial Intelligence in military decision-making, further complicate the stability of nuclear deterrence, raising new questions about global security.
Guest – Dr. Ira Helfand is a member of the International Steering Group of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, or ICAN, which was awarded the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize. Dr. Helfand is also the immediate past president of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, or IPPNW, a founding partner of ICAN and itself the recipient of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize. He co-founded and served as past president of Physicians for Social Responsibility, the US affiliate of IPPNW. Dr. Helfand is also co-founder of the Back from the Brink campaign, the key vehicle for people in the U.S. who want to get involved in this issue.
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genocide, Human Rights, Targeting Muslims, U.S. Militarism, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister
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Fascism on Trial: Education, and the Possibility of Democracy
Fascist Germany’s industrial murder of Jews in Europe 80 years ago has been seared into the consciousness of humankind. Today its a great irony of history that the Israeli government, which claims to be the moral legatee of the holocaust, is carrying out a genocide against millions of Palestinians in Gaza.
This is being done with the full support of the American government which supplies political, diplomatic, and propaganda cover for what Israel is doing. It supplies the bombs, planes, artillery shells, tanks and bulldozers to physically destroy the buildings and infrastructure of the Gaza strip. The people who live there have been systematically starved, as the Nazis starved the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto.
The response of American students and college campuses across the country was magnificent. Tent encampments sprung up in several hundred places. They became the focal point for a full-throated discussion of the realities in Gaza and American complicity in the ongoing genocide. Demands for cease-fire were raised. Demands that the universities divest themselves of investments in Israel and American arms manufactures were put forward.
Sadly, this manifestation of critical thinking came to a crashing end. The wealthy and their servants in Congress, and in the mass media, accused the students of being antisemitic and of supporting terrorism. Congressional hearings were held. University presidents were fired. Professors lost their jobs. Students were expelled from schools. The great campus uprising was closed down. And new and much more restrictive rules for protest have been imposed in campuses all across the United States.
Guest – Professor Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies department and is the Pablo Frère, Distinguished Scholar in Creative Pedagogy. Henry Giroux has authored many books, most recently with Anthony DiMaggio, titled, Fascism on Trial: Education, and the Possibility of Democracy.
Sending a another big thank you to a generous donor from Wisconsin bringing us closer to our fundraiser goal. Please consider helping us reach our fundraiser goal by sending us a donation of any amount.
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War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of its Military Machine
The United States is engaged in constant, if often invisible, wars. Or, if not invisible, at least not accurately and fully reported on in the corporate media. Thereby leaving the people of the United States far from fully informed as to what and where U.S. military troops are stationed or engaged in military action. For example, while there has been a great deal of media coverage of the U.S. supported Israeli war in Palestine, one would have needed to pay extra close attention to that coverage to know that the U.S., even before that war began, had 40,000 U.S. troops stationed in the area. Or that the Biden Administration has just recently sent at least 1,500 more to join them. And how many of us know that late last year retired Israeli Major General Yitzhak Brick, said that, and I quote: “All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the U.S. Everyone understands that we (Israel) can’t fight this war without the United States.
So last year, Norman Solomon, our guest today, wrote a much noted and much-admired book titled, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of its Military Machine. And that book has just been reissued with an up-dated afterword about the Gaza War, by the author. Naomi Klein, best-selling author of The Shock Doctrine, says the book is “A Staggeringly Important Intervention”. Noam Chomsky, says Solomon’s book is a “gripping and painful study of the mechanisms behind our invisible, but perpetual, national state of war.”
Guest – Norman Solomon is the co-founder of RootsAction.org and Executive Director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, and is, in fact, the author or co-author, of 12 books, most touching on today’s topic in either close or tangential ways. His books include War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.
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Gaza, genocide, Human Rights, Targeting Muslims, Truth to Power, War Resister
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The Power Of Labor And A Workers’ Party
The forces of the gathering authoritarian storm in our country are evident in many ways. It is manifesting itself in powerful and continuing nationalism, in disdain for human rights, in the entwinement of government and religion, in a controlled mass media, in the protection of corporate power and the suppression of labor power and in the encouragement of violence.
The power of labor has been channeled into the Democratic and Republican Party, the twin parties of capitalism. We need a workers ‘ party, but we don’t even have the nucleus of one. Race and gender are formative in the building of authoritarian regimes. We see this in the United States. Haitians, who are Black, have been accused of eating cats and dogs. Women’s right to control their own bodies is under attack from the Supreme Court on down and women are marked as “childless cat ladies” and told to stay home and bear children.
Guest – Dianne Feeley is an editor of the magazine Against the Current. She is a leader of Solidarity, a socialist feminist organization. Dianne lives in Detroit where she has been an activist for many years in the United Automobile Workers union.
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Complicity In Genocide: CCR Case Against The Biden Administration Update
Last fall, the internationally acclaimed Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City filed a lawsuit in federal court on behalf of several Palestinian groups and individuals against President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, alleging that Israel’s actions in Gaza have amounted to genocide and that Biden, Austin, and Blinken have failed their obligation under international law to prevent Israel from committing genocide in Gaza.
The lawsuit claimed that the 1948 International Convention Against Genocide requires the US and other countries to use their power and influence to stop the killing. and the lawsuit asked the court to bar the US from providing weapons, money, and support to Israel. At the time of the filing of that lawsuit here on Law and Disorder, we spoke with an attorney from CCR about the case. Since that time there have been a number of developments in the case.
Guest – Attorney Maria LaHood, the Deputy Legal Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, or CCR, to join us to bring us up to date on where the lawsuit now stands. Much of Maria LaHood’s own work at CCR is on behalf of defending the constitutional rights of Palestinian advocates in the United States, such as in the case of Davis v. Cox. She was involved in defending the Olympia Food Co-op board members for deciding to boycott Israeli goods and the case of Awad v. Fordham, compelling the university to recognize Students for Justice in Palestine as a student club.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Criminalizing Dissent, Extraordinary Rendition, Freedom Of Speech, Human Rights, Iraq War, Prosecution of the Bush Administration, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister, Whistleblowers
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September 11, 2001: Lessons Learned And Overlooked
It has been 23 years ago this week since the attacks on September 11, 2001 in New York City, the Pentagon, and Shanksville, PA, killing nearly 3,000 people and injuring more than 6,000. On that day, the United States had a choice: The George W Bush administration could have treated the attacks as a violation of US and international law, launched a criminal investigation, and brought the perpetrators to justice in accordance with the rule of law. Instead, President Bush waged endless wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, pushed through Congress the USA Patriot Act, opened the notorious detention center at Guantanamo Bay which remain to this day, rounded up Muslims and South Asians for indefinite detention, initiated a wave of civil liberties and human rights violations, and committed wholesale torture against detainees and others.
To assess the legacy of 9/11 and the lessons learned and the lessons overlooked, we’ve invited someone who was at the center of Bush’s War on Terror. John Kiriakou is a journalist, former CIA counterterrorism officer, former senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and former counterterrorism consultant for ABC News.
In 2007, Kiriakou blew the whistle on the CIA’s torture program, telling ABC News that the CIA tortured prisoners, that torture was official U.S. government policy, and that the policy had been approved by President George W. Bush. He knew what he was talking about. In 2002, he was responsible for the capture in Pakistan of Abu Zubaydah, then believed to be the third-ranking official in al-Qaeda.
He became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act of 1917 — a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his revelations.
In 2012, the Ralph Nader family honored Kiriakou with the Joe A. Callaway Award for Civic Courage, an award given to individuals who “advance truth and justice despite the personal risk it creates.” He won the PEN Center USA’s prestigious First Amendment Award in 2015, the first Blueprint International Whistleblowing Prize for Bravery and Integrity in the Public Interest in 2016, and also in 2016 the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence, given by retired CIA, FBI, and NSA officers.
Guest – John Kiriakou is the author of eight books, including The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA’s War on Terror; and The CIA Insider’s Guide to the Iran Crisis. I met John in 2017 and we collaborated on companion reviews or the Los Angeles Review of Books of the book with the euphemisitic title Enhanced Interrogation written by James E. Mitchell and Bill Harlow, the architects of the American torture system.
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COP 29 Held In Azerbaijan Dictatorship
This year the UN Climate Conference — known as COP29 — will be hosted by the petrol-dictatorship of Azerbaijan. As COP29 delegates prepare to attend talks in Baku, the international community has a chance to shine a spotlight on Azerbaijan’s abysmal human rights record, notably the blockade and ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh’s (Artsakh’s) Armenian population last year, and amid the government’s escalating domestic crackdown on freedom of speech, assembly and the press.
Ironically, Azerbaijan’s dictator Ilham Aliyev allocated $1 million to the UN Human Settlements Program, one day before a UN mission visited the Artsakh region who reported ‘no irregularities’ despite the territory being depopulated by Azerbaijan’s military invasion.
As one of the world’s top environmental and fossil fuel polluters, during its invasion of Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan used the outlawed, lethal and environmentally hazardous White Phosphorus as a chemical weapon on the native Armenian population and their highly forested environment. In that fatal siege, which liquidated all native Armenians, the Azeri government-sponsored blockaders posed as climate activists, while punishing true protesters of lethal pollution, in Azerbaijan, especially journalists and activists in advance of COP29.
Guest – Karnig Kerkonian, one of 23 legal advisors representing the Republic of Armenia at the ICJ (International Court of Justice) in 2021. Karnig’s team presented their case against Azerbaijan, calling on the Tribunal to take provisional measures “as a matter of extreme urgency” to “protect and preserve Armenia’s rights and the rights of Armenians from further harm.” Azerbaijan has ignored the ICJ’s November 2023 ruling to “take all necessary measures to prevent and punish acts of vandalism and desecration affecting Armenian cultural heritage, including but not limited to churches and other places of worship, monuments, landmarks, cemeteries and artifacts.” Attorney Kerkonian has also represented the Armenian community of Old Jerusalem in recent Israeli settler incursions upon the Armenian Quarter.
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Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Gaza, genocide, Human Rights, Targeting Muslims, U.S. Militarism, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister
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Separation of Powers And Project 2025
The US Constitution created the three branches of the federal government to serve as a check on one another. In particular, the judiciary was intended to ensure that the actions of the Executive and Legislative branches did not violate the Constitution.
But what happens when the Supreme Court is in the grip of a highly partisan, result-oriented super-majority half of whom were appointed by a President who has been convicted of 34 felonies and faces 57 more felony charges in three different criminal prosecutions, but claims absolute immunity for whatever he did while in office?
And on top of all that, this ex-President – Donald Trump – is a nominee for President of the United States and has promised to “terminate” the Constitution.
Meanwhile, in an almost 1000 page blueprint for the next conservative President titled Project 2025, a group of conservative organizations spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, has laid out a detailed plan under which the President would acquire almost dictatorial power over the entire federal government.
Guest – Marjorie Cohn is professor of law emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and former president of the National Lawyers Guild. She is also Dean of the People’s Academy of International Law and a member of the Bureau of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. She writes frequent articles about the Supreme Court for Truthout.
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Larry Hebert’s Hunger Strike Against US Weapons To Israel
Israel’s deadly and unrelenting assault on Gaza following Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel has had repercussions around the world. In Gaza itself the death toll is approaching 40,000 and the humanitarian crisis worsens every day. In the United States, as students are headed back to campus, colleges and universities are bracing for a new round of protests and counter protests. Israel’s war in Gaza is dividing the Democratic Party just as Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are seeking to unite their party to stop Donald Trump from returning to the White House. Recent surveys show that 48% of Americans oppose Israel’s military action in Gaza, while 42% support it.
Guest – Larry Hebert [pronounced eh-BEAR], a very unlikely candidate to become an outspoken protestor against US military support for Israel, who would gain nationwide and international attention. Larry Hebert is a 26-year old U.S. Air Force Senior Airman and avionics technician assigned to Naval Station Rota in Spain, having served for 6 years in the military. At 10:00 am on Easter Sunday, March 31, 2024 on Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House, Hebert began a hunger strike during an authorized leave from his post. Shortly before his hunger strike, he joined Veterans for Peace, an organization that opposes U.S. military actions.
The organization argues that U.S. weapons shipments to Israel is a violation of U.S. law. In a press release issued by Veterans for Peace, the purpose of Hebert’s hunger strike was described as highlighting “the plight of the starving children of Gaza.” Hebert wore a sign that read, “Active duty airman refuses to eat while Gaza starves,” with a photograph of an emaciated Palestinian infant. Hebert said he was inspired by the self-immolation of 25-year old serviceman Aaron Bushnell, who died on February 25, 2024 outside the Israeli embassy in Washington. Before he died, Bushnell declared he would “no longer be complicit in genocide” in Gaza. Hebert’s hunger strike lasted 9 days but ended abruptly on April 9, when he was ordered to report immediately to Andrews Air Force Base for a return flight to his post in Spain. Hebert is pursuing a release from active duty as a Conscientious Objector.
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