Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Criminalizing Dissent, Gaza, genocide, Right To Dissent, U.S. Militarism, Whistleblowers
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Strange People on the Hill: How Extremism Tore Apart a Small Town
Investigative reporter Michael Edison Hayden has spent years on the front lines documenting extremism in America. In his new book, Strange People on the Hill: How Extremism Tore Apart a Small Town, Hayden tells the story of a quiet West Virginia town thrust into turmoil when a white nationalist organization moves its headquarters to a nearby 19th century castle.
At the center of the story are the neighbors who suddenly find their community reshaped by a VDARE, a group promoting conspiracy theories like the so-called “great replacement.” Hayden’s book provides a close look at how extremism is lived, contested, and resisted in real communities. As he embeds with locals, the line between observer and participant begins to blur, with personal and professional consequences. Our conversation comes as the Southern Poverty Law Center faces 11 federal fraud charges, including wire fraud and conspiracy. To money launder. The Justice Department alleges the SPLC secretly paid over $3 million dollars to informants tied to white supremacist groups like the KKK and Aryan Nations—while telling donors the funds were being used to fight those groups. The SPLC denies wrongdoing, saying the informant program was used to monitor threats.
Guest – Michael Hayden has worked as a politics writer for Newsweek and covered crime for VICE. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Foreign Policy, ABC News, and the Wall Street Journal, among others. He co-hosts the podcast Posting Though It, and is a three-time grantee of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
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Defending Rights And Dissent
Donald Trump’s wholesale attack on the American democracy, in general, and on freedom of speech and the right to dissent, in particular has reached epidemic proportions. We could literally spend the next half hour simply listing all of the unconstitutional Executive Orders he has issued and the unlawful steps his co-conspirators have taken to implement his dangerous policies of punishing free speech, muzzling the free press, and destroying academic freedom.
Resistance to Trump and his MAGA ideology has been widespread. More than 700 lawsuits have been filed against the Trump administration in his second term, resulting in over 150 TROs, preliminary injunctions, and final judgments against the administration. And the response from the American people has been equally admirable, with a series of nationwide – indeed worldwide – protests, culminating in No Kings Day on March 28, with 3300 events in all 50 states, with an unprecedented 8 million people participating, making it the largest single day of protest in American history.
The resistance has been driven by scores of large and small pro-democracy organizations across the country. One of those is Defending Rights & Dissent, a national civil liberties organization that defends the American people’s right to know and freedom to act through grassroots mobilization, public education, policy expertise, and advocacy journalism.
Guest – Nathan Fuller is Communications Manager for Defending Rights & Dissent and former Executive Director of the Courage Foundation, a whistleblower and journalist defense organization, where he campaigned on behalf of Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Daniel Hale, Lauri Love, and several others. Nathan also led Assange Defense, the U.S. campaign to free WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, who was released from prison in 2024. Previously, Nathan was the courtroom reporter and press liaison for the Chelsea Manning Support Network, covering Manning’s entire court-martial in Fort Meade. Youtube Channel
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Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Human Rights, Prison Industry, Right To Dissent, Supreme Court, Torture, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister, Whistleblowers
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Remembering Michael Ratner
Hosts Heidi Boghosian and Michael Smith interviewed some of Michael Ratner’s closest friends and colleagues as part of a special broadcast highlighting Michael Ratner’s legal work and mentorship. The special also marked the upcoming release of Michael Ratner’s autobiography Moving The Bar: My Life As A Radical Lawyer published by OR Books. We hear from attorneys including Eleanor Stein, Richard Levy, Ray Brescia and David Cole.
Michael Ratner’s pathbreaking legal and political work is unmatched. He provided crucial support for the Cuban Revolution and won the seminal case in the Supreme Court guaranteeing the right of habeas corpus to Guantanamo detainees. Michael also challenged U.S. policy in Iraq, Haiti, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Puerto Rico and Israel-Palestine. This book is a testament to his unflagging efforts on behalf of the poor and oppressed around the world.
– Marjorie Cohn, Professor Emerita, Thomas Jefferson School of Law
Michael Ratner personified lawyering that brought both radical and human values into challenges to the use of governmental power to violate the essence of the Bill of Rights. From the torture of prisoners after 911 to the massive racial profiling by the New York Police Department, Michael’s voice and vision continue to resonate. This book provides a powerful testament to the spirit of this extraordinary man.
– Attorney Bill Goodman
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In Memory of Attorney Peter Weiss
Attorney Peter Weiss was a frequent guest here on Law and Disorder. He was a guest several times to discuss pressing issues of nuclear policy, International Human Rights Law and the Royal Dutch Shell Settlement and in 2007, Peter was a Lawyers You’ll Like guest.
We go now to hear that 2007 interview co-hosted by Michael Ratner and Michael Smith. Peter Weiss died one month short of his 100th birthday on November 3, 2025. Peter was the founder and head of the Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy. His field was international law. He won the historic case for universal jurisdiction which allowed foreign war criminals to be tried in the United States under certain circumstances.
Mr. Weiss is a graduate of Yale Law School and was the principle author of the draft brief on the illegality of threat or use of nuclear weapons used by many countries in making written submissions to the International Court of Justice in the 1996 nuclear weapons advisory opinion. Mr Weiss served as counsel to Malaysia at those hearings. He has published several articles on the ICJ opinion, including in the fall 1997 issue of Transnational Law and Contemporary Problems. Mr. Weiss litigated the seminal case establishing the right of victims of torture to sue their torturers in US courts (Filartiga v. Pena-Irala).
Since his retirement in 1996 from Weiss Dawid Fross Zelnick & Lehrman, a leading trademark firm, he has been Senior Intellectual Property Counsel to The Chanel Company Limited. He is also a founder and former President of the American Committee on Africa and former Chairman of the Board of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington. He has also long been an activist for peace in the Middle East and is currently a member of the Arab-Jewish Peace Group in New York and of the Executive Committee of Americans for Peace Now, which supports the Peace Now movement in Israel.
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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 Rights, Gaza, genocide, Human Rights, U.S. Militarism, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister, Whistleblowers
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Freedom For Julian Assange!
After serving 1901 days in solitary confinement in a tiny cell in the infamous Belmarsh prison in London, journalist and publisher Julian Assange is free at last.
Julian gained his freedom pursuit to a plea bargain with the government of the United States which had sought to extradite him and try him under the 1917 Espionage Act. He faced a certain conviction in a hostile Virginia court and 175 years in prison on 17 counts of conspiracy to commit espionage for receiving and publishing information damaging to the United States government.
Julian Assange was forced to plead guilty to one count of espionage in return for the time he has served in prison. Prior to that he was confined for seven years in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he had sought and received political asylum.
The alleged crime he was accused of committing was the receipt and publication in 2010 of the so-called Iraq and Afghanistan war logs which document American government guilt in torture and murder including the 11 civilians and two Reuters journalists.
Julian Assange was sentenced to time served by an American federal court judge on an island in the Pacific Ocean 2000 miles from Australia. Julian Assange will now be living as a free man in Australia with his wife and two children.
Until Julian Assange Is Pardoned Press Freedom Remains At Risk – article by co-host attorney Stephen Rohde
Guest – Randy Credico, a steadfast supporter of Julian Assange. Mr. Credico. hosted the program “ Countdown to Freedom” in support of Julian for many years. He had visited him in Belmarsh prison.
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War Crimes, Dictators and the ICC
The International Criminal Court (ICC) along with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) were set up in 1998 in order to help prevent wars and crimes against humanity with the profound understanding that without a system of international law. a future World War III might eliminate humanity.
The United States of America, under Bill Clinton, was one of seven countries that voted against the Rome statute which set up the International Criminal Court. Clinton did eventually sign the statute but George Bush “unsigned“ it and the United States has had a testy relationship with the court. Indeed under Trump, the US imposed sanctions on the court and its prosecutor.
Last month Imran Khan, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, issued arrest warrants for Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Galant, the Israeli Minister of Defense for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The ICC also issued arrest warrants for three top leaders of Hamas.
Guest – Attorney Reed Brody, was a friend, colleague, and mentee of our late cohost Michael Ratner. Reed Brody is the author of the recently published book To Catch a Dictator: The Pursuit and Trial of Hissene Habre. He has worked for many years with Human Rights Watch. Reed Brody has helped pursue the dictators Augusto Pinochet of Chile and Jean-Claude “ Baby Doc” Duvalier of Haiti. He has uncovered atrocities by US backed Contras in Nicaragua, led United Nations missions in El Salvador and the Congo, and exposed Bush administration torture.
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Academic Freedom, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Gaza, genocide, Human Rights, Targeting Muslims, U.S. Militarism, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister, Whistleblowers
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Nationwide Peaceful Protests Against Genocide In Palestine
Around the nation, peaceful campus protests against the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza are spreading. And they’re meeting with a rash of arrests by local police departments, dozens of school suspensions, and evictions from student dormitories. Many of those evicted have been students of colors, students with disabilities, and first-generation students. In New York, the NYPD arrested 108 students at Columbia University, and gave them 14 minutes to gather their belongings and leave their dormitories. New York University erected a plywood wall around Gould Plaza, an outdoor campus space in Greenwich Village, where police had earlier arrested protesting students.
All this because they took part at the large protest. Officials at Harvard University closed Harvard Yard in anticipation of possible protests and suspended the student group Palestine Solidarity Committee. Police arrested 9 students at the University of Minnesota for their refusal to dismantle a pro-Palestinian encampment. The California campus of Cal Poly Humboldt was shut down after students occupied a building. Shutitdown4Palestine.org
In an April 23 letter to the New York Times, nearly 60parents of students at Columbia and Barnard, from a variety of religious faiths ad social backgrounds wrote that they “find the actions taken by the administration deeply troubling and contrary to the principles of liberty, justice and academic freedom that are fundamental to the mission of higher education.”
Guest – Brian Becker is the director of the Answer Coalition, a founder of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and host of The Socialist Program.
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Julian Assange Extradition Case Update
Regarded by many as the greatest journalist of our generation for exposing American war crimes Julian Assange is about to be extradited at America’s request to a federal criminal court in Virginia to be tried for his journalistic activities which exposed extensive murderous American crimes and embarrassed US government particularly the CIA.
Julian was a young computer genius in Australia. He figured out a way to receive information from whistleblowers anonymously. This was done in order to protect them when his publication company WikiLeaks revealed to the world the activities of the CIA, the American military and U. S. diplomats.
As published by WikiLeaks the Vault Seven revelations exposed the CIA had developed technologies to turn our cell phone into listening devices, even when turned off and tap our personal computers, and even control our automobiles. WikiLeaks exposed American torture in Afghanistan. They published a video of an American gunship helicopter murdering Iraqi civilians, even children, and two Reuters journalists on the streets of Baghdad.
Julian was given political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he holed up for seven years. Then five years ago the British police at America’s request removed him from the embassy and put him into solitary confinement in the notorious Belmarsh Prison.
Now the United States has succeeded in getting a compliant British court to extradite Julian , despite the law, preventing extradition of political prisoners, especially to a country that has the death penalty, and no guarantee of free speech for foreigners.
Guest – Vincent De Stefano is the National Organizing Director of the U.S. Julian Assange Defense Committee. Mr. De Stefano is on the Southern California ACLU board of directors and executive committee and he has worked with Amnesty International for more than four decades.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, FBI Intrusion, U.S. Militarism, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister, Whistleblowers
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The World Supports Julian Assange
In the past few days, the case of imprisoned journalist Julian Assange, the co-founder of WikiLeaks, who published the truth about the multitude of war crimes committed by United States and its allies, in the course of their wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, was back in court in London, where Assange is fighting extradition back to the United States. He is charged in the U.S. under an obscure section of the 1917 U.S. Espionage Act. As Megan Specia, writing in the New York Times put it, the two-day hearing “will determine whether he has exhausted his right to appeal within the U.K. and whether he could be one step closer to being sent back to the United States.” And she added, “and whether or not the people of the United States are one step closer to losing what is left of a free press in America, and with it what is left of our democracy.”
Assange has been effectively incarcerated for years now, the last five of which in solitary confinement in a notoriously horrid British prison in London, where both his physical and mental health have been steadily deteriorating. Indeed, a lower court judge in his extradition case had ruled against extraditing him because of the strong likelihood he would die in an equally horrid U.S. prison.
A nationwide and world-wide movement to free Julian Assange has been fighting for Assange’s freedom for years now. Virtually all of the world’s leading associations of journalists, and human rights organizations have called for an end to the U.S. government’s prosecution and persecution of Assange. As have major U.S. and foreign newspapers. Assange is an Australian citizen, and the Australian government has called for his release; Australian Prime minister Albanese says he did so when he recently met with President Biden.
Well, why did the Trump Administration decide to prosecute Assange in the first place, and as we now know, at one point plot to murder him? Why did the Obama Administration decide not to continue with the prosecution, and why has the Biden Administration nevertheless continued to do so?
And if Julian Assange loses this his last appeal within the British courts, does he have any remaining legal remedy?
Guest – Chris Hedges, award-winning journalist and political writer. Chris Hedges reported for The New York Times from 1990 to 2005 and served as the Times’ Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief during the wars in the former Yugoslavia. In 2001 Hedges was one of the Times’ writers on an entry that received the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. Prior to his work for the Times, he worked as a freelance war correspondent in Central America for the Christian Science Monitor, NPR and the Dallas Morning News. His books include “Death of the Liberal Class”, “War on America”, “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt”, and his book “War Is a Force That Gives US Meaning”, which was a finalist for the national Book Critics Circle Award for Non-Fiction.
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Flint Taylor Representing Malcom X’s Family In Reinvestigation Case
An assassination is a political murder. Malcolm X was assassinated on February 22, 1965 when he was speaking in the afternoon at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City. The New York Police Department and the FBI were involved. J. Edgar Hoover, the Director of the FBI, said “. . . we must stop the rise of a new black messiah.”
Days before the murder the NYPD arrested two of Malcolm’s bodyguards who would’ve protected him that afternoon. Two of the men who were convicted of the murder and who each served over 20 years in prison have been exonerated and released. One person, the trigger man, was convicted and served 45 years. But others involved have gone free as a result of withholding information by the police and the FBI.
Civil rights lawyer Ben Crump, who represented the family of George Floyd, has been retained by Malcolm X’s daughters to pursue the matter. On his team are attorneys Flint Taylor, Ben Elson, and Roy Hamlin. The function of the FBI and police departments nationwide is to protect the status quo. Hoover and the NYPD recognized the threat Malcolm posed with his newly formed Organization of African -American Unity.
Malcolm X was rapidly evolving into a socialist revolutionary. He had said with respect to the capitalist order that it could not produce social justice, that a chicken cannot lay a duck egg and if it ever did, it would be a pretty revolutionary chicken. Malcolm was killed on February 22, 1965. The FBI had opened a file on him in 1953. Thereafter he was under constant surveillance. In 1964 the head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, commanded “do something about Malcolm X.“ Malcolm was assassinated the next year.
Malcolm X stood for Black consciousness, unity in action, solidarity with those struggling against imperialism worldwide, independence from the two capitalist political parties, and a deep sense of love for people.
Guest – Flint Taylor of the Peoples Law Office. Taylor is a nationally recognized civil rights attorney. He represented the family of Fred Hampton demonstrating that the Chicago Police Department and the FBI were responsible for the assassination of the young Black Panther leader. He’s written the book “The Killing Machine: Racism and Police Violence in Chicago”. He is one of the editors of the “Police Misconduct Law Reporter. He’s the author of The Torture Machine: Racism And Police Violence In Chicago.
Hosted by attorneys Michael Smith, Maria Hall and Jim Lafferty
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