Welcome to Law and Disorder Radio
Law and Disorder is a weekly independent civil liberties radio program airing on more than 150 stations and on Apple podcast. Law and Disorder provides timely legal perspectives on issues concerning civil liberties, privacy, right to dissent and practices of torture exercised by the US government and private corporations.
Law and Disorder July 1, 2013
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
US State Department’s Office of Guantanamo Closure
The US State Department’s Office of Guantanamo Closure was shut down in January and is now in the process of reopening. President Obama recently appointed Clifford Sloan, a Washington lawyer to run the special envoy. Meanwhile attorney Pardiss Kebriaei has recently returned from the military-run prison in Guantanamo Bay Cuba, and joins us to discuss the conditions there, including the hunger strike. Attorney Pardiss Kebriaei has represented men detained at Guantanamo in habaes corpus challenges.
- CCR represents 8 men still detained at the base right now. We’ve represented dozens, we’ve coordinated the representation of dozens. Some men who’ve been cleared by the Obama Administration, who were cleared in 2009, and 2010, they include men who’ve never been charged, that’s the group we represent.
- There are 166 people who remain, more than half of them 86 have been told by President Obama and his people that they don’t need to be there.
- I met with 3 men, all Yemeni. 2 have been cleared. All of them are on hunger strike.
- It’s shocking to think of how much things have regressed since the strike has progressed.
- In 2008 when I started going down to the base, most people were held in solitary confinement. That is what conditions are again now in 2013. Right now in Camp 6 there are at least 76 men who are sitting in 22 hour a day isolation.
- Recreation time is 2 hours in a cage outside.
- There is also an access to council issue right now. Searches are humiliating, equivalent to being sexually assaulted when they’re moved out of their cells.
- The practice of force feeding is unequivocally a violation of international medical, ethical standards.
- The United States is alone in thinking this in its position that this is a humane and acceptable practice.
- Out of 800 held at Guantanamo, fewer than 2 dozen charged. The rest have all been held without charge.
- Obama pointed the finger at Congress and said Congress determined it would not allow me to close Guantanamo.
- Congress did pass the NDAA in 2011 that would make transfers more difficult but it didn’t take power away from the president.
- It specifically provided a national security waiver provision. Yet Obama has been saying for years because of the NDAA he has been effectively prohibited from transferring anyone and that’s is just not true.
Guest – Attorney Pardiss Kebriaei, she joined the Center Constitutional Rights in July 2007. Since then, her work has focused on representing men detained at Guantánamo Bay in their habeas corpus challenges, before international human rights tribunals, in diplomatic advocacy with foreign governments to secure resettlement for men who cannot return home, and in post-release reintegration efforts. Her clients have included men from Yemen, Syria, Algeria, and Afghanistan. Her work includes seeking accountability for torture and arbitrary detention at Guantánamo.
Past Law and Disorder Interview With Pardiss Kebriaei.
—-
Why Does The City of Detroit Plan To Cut 9 Billion In Retiree Pensions and Healthcare?
The emergency manager of Detroit Kevyn Orr recently announced a plan that would wipe out the pensions and health benefits of all current and retired city workers. The plan eliminates 9 billion dollars in worker benefits, effectively condeming nearly 20 thousand retirees to poverty. Orr is a wealthy Wall Street lawyer who played a key role in restructuring the auto industry carried out by the Obama Administration. Many see this plan as part of the worldwide assault on working class people. How are workers responding to these aggressive cuts? We also listen to Dianne’s presentation at the Left Forum 2013 in New York City.
Dianne Feeley:
- He is attempting shock therapy. Basically he wants to take all of the resources that can be used in Detroit and outsource them and do away with them as in the case of the pensions and health care benefits.
- He suggested to make the city owned art work from the Detroit Institute of Arts available to also be used for this debt which grows by the day. They were talking about 15 billion dollars, now they’re talking about 20 billion.
- The neo-liberals plan is a 3 part plan. First to develop a cheaper and more flexible work force. Meaning reducing pensions, reducing the power of unions.
- The second is transferring public resources into private hands. The third is to appropriate profitable resources. For example we have a lighting department, which has been under funded for 40 years because DTE Energy has tried to prevent development of infrastructure. Now it’s in very bad shape.
- In many of these countries Greece, Portugal, Brazil, there’s a technocrat put in charge in our case its an Emergency Manager.
- More than 50 percent of the African Americans in Michigan have lost their vote through the imposition of Emergency Managers in our cities.
- It’s important to understand we only have 10 thousand city employees left. They’ve already had their pay cut 10 percent.
- Now what they’re trying to do is get rid of the medical care for the retirees.
Guest – Dianne Feeley, retired auto worker who currently serves as an editor of Against the Current, a socialist magazine. She is an advocate for auto workers and has written recently about the U.S. auto industry, arguing that the government should buy Chrysler and General Motors and turn them into a public trust.
——————————————————————–
Law and Disorder June 24, 2013
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Historic Vigil And Compassionate Release For Lynne Stewart
It’s been seven weeks since Warden Jody Upton of FMC Carswell approved Compassionate Release for Lynne Stewart. This decision was based on the medical findings of Stage 4 cancer that spread Lynne’s scapula, lymph nodes and lungs. A massive vigil was held last week for Lynne at Federal Bureau of Prisons Headquarters in Washington DC. We’re joined today by former Attorney General of the United States Ramsey Clark who is helping to get Lynne Stewart released from prison.
- The matter is now on the desk of the director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, it’s been there for about five or six weeks which is intolerably long because everyday counts.
- Lynne is in physical desperate condition, her cancer is spreading. She has appointments at Sloan Kettering when she gets out that may extend her life.
- It’s slipping away while the director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons who seems to be opposed of Compassionate Release or any broad application of it, sits on her application.
- Charles Samuels, seemed to have isolated himself from this issue. Any letters to Director Samuels would be helpful and important.
- He’s being bombarded but for some reason, he’s holding out because he wants an interpretation of the compassionate release statute that would enable the release of only those who are going to die in the very near future, have no hope of living longer.
- Right now we have an urgent human matter, a very wonderful human being, mother and grandmother is dying in prison.
- Please Write to: Charles E Samuels Jr. / Federal Bureau of Prisons / 320 1st Street Northwest / Washington DC 20534
Guest – Attorney Ramsey Clark was the former Attorney General of the United States, under President Lyndon B. Johnson. He was the first Attorney General at the Justice Department to call for the elimination of the death penalty and all electronic surveillance. After he left the Johnson administration, he became a important critic of the Vietnam War and continued defending the rights of people worldwide, from Palestinians to Iraqis, to anyone who found themselves at the repressive end of government action.
—-
Whistleblower Cases Update
- June 19th Anniversaries: Execution of the Rosenbergs. Julian Assange 1 year at the Ecuadorian embassy.
- Snowden, we don’t know where he is, massive revelations.
- The question you should be asking, is Dick Cheney a traitor? Is George Bush a traitor? Aren’t those the real traitors, the real people to be held accountable.
- We should look at what they told us. Ed Snowden told about a massive domestic surveillance operation.
- Their job is to tell the American people what they’re doing so we can debate it and discuss it and not put forward basically false stories of who they’ve purportedly stopped.
- This is about knowing where everyone of us is all the time.
- Freedom of the Press Foundation – Bradley Manning
- This is really a war on whistle-blowers and really a war on the United States trying to keep control on all of the information it can and control the internet from the top down.
Richard Falk, U.N. Rapporteur on Palestinian Rights, Calls for Close of UN Watch
——
Lakota Indians To File UN Genocide Charges Against US, South Dakota
There was a time in the mid 1800s when the territory of Lakota Indians reached 90 million acres, now they’re separated into tribal councils and relegated to reservations. Their children are seized and put into foster homes of white families. During Republican administrations, more than 700 Lakota children are taken annually by a private corporation called the South Dakota Children’s Home Services. In April, a grassroots movement led by Lakota grandmothers touring the country built support for a formal UN complaint of genocide against the United States government and constituent states.
- There’s basically a decade involved here during which the state of South Dakota engaged in a systematic program of the removal of Lakota children from their parents, from their extended families and from their entire tribe.
- Some 740 Lakota children a year during that period were taken from their families and tribes.
- Over half of them were never returned. 80-90 percent of those children were placed in white foster care.
- This is clear violation of the Indian Child Welfare Act which was the piece of legislation that mandated that if an Indian child were taken from the child’s parents they were required to be placed with Native American people.
- This is has been absolutely openly defied by the state of South Dakota.
- There has been an official notice of intent to file the complaint with the United Nations.
- We need to understand that there has been a longstanding policy in the Republican Party. When the Republican Party comes into power in Washington DC where they engage in this process to try and assimilate the native tribes.
- They’re constantly trying to eliminate the ownership of land and integrate them into society, basically to eliminate their culture.
- That was why the US Congress back in 1978 made the move to establish the American Indian Policy Review Commission and the Indian Child Welfare Act to stop the states from engaging in that type of activity of assimilation.
- What we’ve seen by William Janklow, a former South Dakota congressman, governor, and attorney general, is the process to attempt to take as many of the children away as they could possibly do and place them in huge group homes such as South Dakota Children Homes Services Inc.
- There is a subtext to this issue. We’ve discovered that during the Bush Administration from 2001 to 2009 there was systematic program of funneling federal funds into South Dakota to finance the seizure of these children and a substantial portion of that money from the Federal Government was transferred to the pharmaceutical corporations, who were in fact administering involuntarily to these children, pharmaceutical drugs Zoloft, and other psychoactive drugs to control their moods and attitudes.
- They refuse to give information about who the children are, where they’ve been taken, where they’ve been placed, some of them have been taken out of the state, we traced a number of them to Utah.
Guest – Daniel Sheehan is the lead attorney and general counsel for the Lakota People’s Law Project (LPLP). Currently, LPLP is working in South Dakota to stop violations of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) and rescue Lakota children from an abusive state care system. Award-winning journalist Laura Sullivan has just completed a hard-hitting investigative series on the situation in Lakota Country airing now on NPR. To learn more about Daniel Sheehan’s work with Lakota Indians, visit the Lakota People’s Law Project website. Sheehan traced the institutionalization of state kidnapping of Native children back to the late William Janklow, a former South Dakota congressman, governor, and attorney general notorious for his role in what the the Lakota refer to as the “Reign of Terror” on the Pine Ridge Reservation in the years following the American Indian Movement-led occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973. According to Sheehan, members of the George W. Bush administration tipped off Janklow on a Texas strategy to grab millions of dollars in federal subsidies by administering a psychological test devised by the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical corporation to children taken into protective custody. Replicating the strategy, South Dakota developed a mental health test failed by 98% of Native children, who then become “special needs” cases under federal law, with the state receiving up to $79,000 for each Indian child and the child being placed involuntarily on psychoactive drugs.
——————————————————————–
Law and Disorder June 17, 2013
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Hosts Discussion On Snowden and Manning Cases.
Attorney Michael Ratner:
- There’s a lot of support out there for what Snowden revealed.
- This big program of massive surveillance against all of us, internet surveillance, cyber wars, there’s a tremendous amount of support for him. Editorials in the times basically saying it’s not treason.
- NYTimes: Snowden not nearly as reckless as Bradley Manning (same position as Faiza Patel at Brennan Center)
- Protecting Snowden and throwing Bradley Manning and the war crimes he revealed, under the bus.
- This whole claim that it was a data dump by Bradley Manning that he went into the documents and dumped everything not knowing what was in them is false. I know its false from sitting at the trial.
- I heard Bradley Manning testify as why he did each set of documents. The Iraq war logs, the Afghanistan war logs, the collateral murder video, the State Department cables.
- In each case he came with a moral and political reason for doing them.
- The fact that people are still accusing Bradley Manning of a data dump is outrageous and actually the prosecutors position.
- Snowden did something really important, we’ve all known or suspected we’re under massive surveillance. We now have it confirmed and its as bad or worse as we could imagine. It’s every phone call we make, everyone, every single phone call in this United States. It’s a surveillance program against us.
- What Bradley Manning revealed was the U.S. committing war crimes against others.
- I think its easier for American people to hear, “we’re being surveilled than to care about the fact that America is committing war crimes all over the world” because that actually goes to the heart of an imperialist country.
- Cypherpunks predicted exactly what happened: Surveillance is now cheap. You get decent quality storage of all German telephone calls on a certain type of computer for 30 million Euros including administrative overhead for pure storage.
—-
Attorney Heidi Boghosian:
- It really does away with the standards of reasonable suspicion or probable cause to open an investigation.
- It’s saying that we’ll open an investigation and this will be on information that hasn’t even happened.
- Stored Data: The government has access to that. There’s data out there that you can never really get rid of. Corporate intelligence firms or military contractors working with the government comprise about 70 percent what’s given to the intelligence budget.
- The government has to hire out contractors because they’re the only ones able to use this sophisticated technology. The data that is collected, stored and resold, contains a high rate of inaccuracy.
—
Attorney Michael Smith:
- Booze Allen which is the private contractor that Snowden worked for is part of the Carlyle Group.
- The Carlyle group is a private equity firm that’s worth a 158 billion dollars. The ruling class in this country own a chunk of the Carlyle Group.
- Clapper who’s know the head of national intelligence used to be a big executive with Booze Allan.
- The head of Booze Allan used to be one of the main guys at the National Security Agency.
- Privatizing Intelligence, the private sector has a duty to its share holders.
—————–
Pardon Ed Snowden
Pardon or Free Bradley Manning
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petitions
—
America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy
The United States war machine has been on auto pilot for the past 65 years says our guest William Blum he’s author of the recently published America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy – The Truth About U.S. Foreign Policy and Everything Else. This provocative book exposes the true motives of America’s foreign policy and outlines steps to take action.
- All this while I was looking to find reasons for it, to explain this weird record.
- What I was left with to believe that it’s world domination that the U.S. wants for various reasons.
- Once you understand that, many things become clearer, much less confusing.
- We’re dealing with a lifetime of indoctrination. It starts in kindergarten. People like you and I have a long battle on our hands to overcome this.
- We’re subjected to the indoctrination means well and its the most honorable and liberal government in the world.
- It’s reinforced in high school and college, on television, in the print media, it’s a major task for the likes of you and I to overcome this upbringing.
- It’s amazing the number of Americans that have seen through this upbringing despite this upbringing.
- I think the main to understand with this man called Barack Obama, is that there’s nothing that he strongly believes in except being President of the United States.
- The man doesn’t have any core beliefs. He’s not anti-empire, he’s not pro-empire, he likes being President.
- He’ll do and say whatever it takes to remain in that office. In my opinion, in Europe he’d be regarded as center-right.
- Look at the atrocities we carry out.
- Samantha Power is the author of a book on humanitarian intervention. Obama appointing these two women with that philosophy shows that he supports that philosophy. We have to assume they’re believers in humanitarian intervention.
Guest – William Blum, has been a freelance journalist in the United States, Europe and South America. His stay in Chile in 1972-3, writing about the Allende government’s “socialist experiment” and its tragic overthrow in a CIA-designed coup, instilled in him a personal involvement and an even more heightened interest in what his government was doing in various parts of the world. In the mid-1970’s, he worked in London with former CIA officer Philip Agee and his associates on their project of exposing CIA personnel and their misdeeds. His book on U.S. foreign policy, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, first published in 1995 and updated since, has received international acclaim.
—
Dirty Wars: The World Is A Battlefield
The new documentary “Dirty Wars: The World Is A Battlefield” is an unique look into the covert wars brought by the United States. The film follows investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill into Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen and analyzes expanded US drone warfare and the foreign policy that has allowed this destruction to take place. The film’s director Rick Rowley and Scahill went into these covert war zones to speak with families about the what they’ve seen and bring those stories back. As we’ve reported on Law and Disorder, the Obama Administration has continued to normalize the Bush Administration policies by empowering the Joint Special Operations Command and the use of drones.
- The film is about the global covert war on terror.
- Jeremy and I have war reporters for over a decade. I became a war reporter because I thought the global war on terror was the most important story of our generation – killed hundreds of thousands of people cost untold billions yet most of it was unfolding in the shadows.
- Around the world today there are dozens of wars being fought in our name but without our knowledge and meaningful oversight.
- When we started shooting this film we thought it was a film just about Afghanistan. What we were seeing is the covert war in Afghanistan was eclipsing the covert war.
- More Afghans are killed and captured by covert units than by the entire 100 thousand strong NATO force that’s there.
- So we began to film to see what was up behind that.
- This is a unit that initially amounted to a few hundred guys who’s supposed to the most high level strategic missions, hostage rescue missions. If a nuclear weapon is stolen from the Ukraine they’d go and recapture it. That’s what they’re supposed to do.
- They’re doing 15-20 raids a night across Afghanistan, thousands of raids a year, going after mid level Taliban field commanders.
- The entire war is being fought by this clandestine group that wasn’t really built for this operation.
- We started to trace where JSOC was operating, that brought us to Yemen, and Somalia. Under the AQNX order, JSOC was authorized to operate in 26 countries clandestinely. Now under Obama 78 countries.
- I was staggered by the massive scale of this, the wholesale assassination machine.
- Current kill lists: It’s a permanent cycle of violence that’s being managed around the world.
- We interview Ron Weiden from the Senate Intelligence Committee. He’s a guy who’s trying to push for more disclosure and transparency in the Senate, but the entire time there’s a lawyer an aide inside the office who has to keep stopping him.
- There are secret interpretations of laws that exist on the books but would be shocking to the American people if they knew about them.
- We knocked on so many doors of night raids in Afghanistan, families shared stories with us of the most painful time in their life.
- They think that if the American people could only hear their story and their story were proven to be true, that somehow it would matter and make a difference.
- When we started this film 3 years ago, WBAI was talking about drones and kill lists, but it took until 6 months ago for that to work its way to editorial page of the Times and the Post.
- I’ve been a war reporter for more than a decade.
- Jeremy got on camera a number of whistle-blowers who are former operators or parts of JSOC, CIA people who are saying these kinds of discussion about blow back are happening inside their institutions.
- A lot of them talk about this as “mowing the lawn” the jihadists, insurgency will rise up and you go and chop it off but the grass will rise again.
- That’s permanently managing a level of acceptable chaos and violence. This war remains secret for a reason, that if everyone knew about it there would be a popular outrage.
Guest — Rick Rowley, is a director and cinematographer. Over the course of fifteen years, Richard Rowley, co-founder of Big Noise Films, has made multiple award-winning documentary features including Fourth World War and This Is What Democracy Looks Like. His shorts and news reports are also regularly featured on and commissioned by leading outlets including Al Jazeera, BBC, CBC, CNN International, Democracy Now!, and PBS. Rowley is a co-founder of the Independent Media Center. Rowley has been a Pulitzer Fellow, Rockefeller Fellow, a Jerome Foundation Fellow, and a Sundance Documentary Film Program Fellow.
———————————————————-