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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 August 8, 2011
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A People’s History of the Egyptian Revolution
Egypt’s revolution didn’t suddenly happen overnight, there was long important history. Beginning with Egypt and Israel signing the Camp David Accords in 1979 Egypt was rewarded with billions in US military aid that paved the way for neo-liberal style policies under Hosni Mubarak. By 2000, the first signs of widespread opposition started in solidarity with the Palestinian Intifada. The protests centered around poverty, corruption and need for democracy. A second wave of mass opposition ignited in 2003 in response to the US invasion of Iraq and Egypt’s support for the war. Then the April 6 movement rose in 2008, protesting against rising food costs and low wages. By 2010 social media and blogs were outlets for organizing and dissent.
Guest – Co-writer of the article and founder of Left Turn Magazine Rami El-Amine.
Guest – Activist Mostafa Henaway who also contributed to the article A People’s History of the Egyptian Revolution.
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Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark on War of Aggression in Libya
As many listeners know, the military operation in Libya is not a humanitarian intervention, it is part of the global war and effort to militarize North Africa. The Chinese have sizable interests in Libya in the battle for oil. Meanwhile, the Gaddafi leadership has continued to function despite the NATO bombing campaign in the last four months and the loss of significant parts of the the country. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney had recently returned from a fact finding mission in Tripoli during a time of intense bombing. She has organized speakers to discuss how billions are spent in this military operation while we’re being told there are no funds available for jobs, health care and education. Former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark was among the speakers, he’s been following the US and NATO involvement in brutal attempts to overthrow the Gaddafi government.
- The reality is that its a war of aggression, which the Nuremberg charter and judgement defined as a supreme international crime.
- What we’ve done is used the appearance of a civil war, people rising up against their own government, to wage a massive assault. – really unrelated to their activities, the first place we hit was Tripoli, they were no where near Tripoli and we bombed the daylights out of it.
- The bombing is spreading away from the compound, its hitting areas outside of the city. Interesting to note, people are still fleeing from Iraq to Syria. It’s safer in Syria, we read in our newspapers it’s violent in Syria.
- If you go back to Rwanda, and remember how everybody was outraged afterward but nobody intervened.
- A clearer illustration is what’s happening in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where hundreds of thousands of people have died and are dying by armed troops. Nobody bothers to intervene.
- What you do is, you want to go in anyway, you use humanitarian intervention as justification.
- The poor Congress is defaulting on its responsibility. The military budget exceeds all of the civilian budget. They can gloss over it but until we address the issue of US military expenditures, our country will be a threat to peace in the world.
- We spend more on the military then the rest of the world combined. It’s almost impossible to think that the United States will curtail its foreign aggressions, while the military expenditures are at what they are.
- We’ve got in the Pacific Ocean today, 8 Trident nuclear submarines, the cost is enormous each one carries 140-145 nuclear warheads, anyone of which can destroy the biggest city in the country and go beyond it, their largest warhead will leave a crater with a 25 mile diameter.
- Hard to sleep in Tripoli and other places that are under direct attack by us.
- We tolerated him for 40 years while he created the highest standard of living in all of Africa. Highest per capita income, highest levels of education. Health care and more public housing then they can use for their own citizens. – almost enough for their foreign labor. He doesn’t submit to the will of the United States.
- Sub-Sahara Africa primarily, all the places on Earth are dying. It’s not just the conditions of weather in East Africa, but everyplace you go, structure’s crumbling. The chaos seems to be spreading and we seem to prefer it.
- Rebel Forces: It’s a group that doesn’t always know each other and doesn’t always like each other.
- We took out all of Gaddafi’s planes which was easy to do. It’s easy to hit his armor.
- They’ve held their own against the might of West Europe and the United States for months and months.
- We (U.S.Government) agreed to pay without admitting liability 300 million dollars for the people killed in 1986 by our bombing.
- People have to organize and rise up. I don’t think we’re going to get anything accomplished as far as peace and reduction of US militarization except by an enormous demand by the people.
- We can cut 90 percent of the military spending in my opinion and be safer, and not be engages in all these interventions – which we can’t handle anymore.
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.
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National Lawyers Guild Lawyers Victorious in Internet Free Speech Case
At a 2008, Sunday Service at the Mount Hope Baptist Church in Lansing, Michigan, members of the queer rights group Bash Back! disrupted the service to protest anti-gay policies. Months later, the church and the Alliance Defense Fund, a reactionary Christian nonprofit organization, sued Bash Back! and 15 named activists under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act. The church and Defense Fund subpoenaed identifying information in an attempt to find out the protesters’ identities; Risup.net, a provider of online communication tools for individuals and groups working for social change, was the only email provider to challenge the subpoenas. Federal judge Richard A. Jones ruled that Riseup.net did not have to turn over the records, finding that “the Users’ First Amendment right to speak anonymously online outweighs Mount Hope’s right to discovery.” National Lawyers Guild members Larry Hildes of Bellingham, Washington, Devin Theriot-Orr of Seattle, and Mark Sniderman of Indiana successfully defended several activists who received subpoenas from Mt. Hope Baptist Church demanding they turn over their internet account records. Once again, this shows how readily corporations share private personal data on activists with the government or other private entities.
- This church is particularly virulent with their ministry aimed at turning gay people straight.
- The group picketed outside and tried to pass out leaflets inside. Two women ran to the front of the sanctuary and kissed each other at the alter.
- Mount Hope Baptist Church called the police. The police showed up and said there’s no criminal activity here.
- The Alliance Defense Fund, a huge fundamentalist law firm and fund raising empire in Scottsdale, Arizona contacted the church and said we’ll take on your case.
- They sued the Bash Back folks under the “Faith Act” – Freedom To Access To Clinics Act. They sued them and settled for 2500.00 and a consent decree that they would never disrupt a religious service in the United States again.
- In the meantime they went to look for anyone connected with Bash Back in any way. They went to Yahoo and subpoenaed records from list-serves and Yahoo without telling anybody gave them what they wanted.
- Then they went after RiseUp and RiseUp prides themselves on two things, the internet voice of the left and privacy for their subscribers.
- Riseup attorney Devin Theriot-Orr outlined the internet case law, there is some good law.
- In order to engage in free speech you need to have some degree of security and safety that your privacy is going to be protected otherwise, it chills the climate so that very few people are going to be able to take that risk.
- The victory is that there is a first amendment right to be on a list-serve of a group, even a group whose actions can be seen as civil disobedience or illegal. Your information is still protected and private and the Freedom of Association Privilege goes to that.
- We were awarded by the court 28 thousand dollars in fees.
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Attorney Devin Theriot-Orr:
- I’m the pro-bono lawyer for RiseUp.net. The identity information of subscribers is protected by a longstanding precedent going back to 2001.
- Obviously the first amendment has its limits, you can’t speak anonymously about threatening to kill people.
- One of the caveats of the first amendment is that if you have a bona fide law suit and you’re trying to uncover the identity of the defendants there’s a whole balancing test to go through before you should be able to identify the defendants.
- They also provided identical subpoenas to Yahoo and Google, and even though these companies are located in silicon valley with very good federal benches, and they’re in the ninth circuit, its kind of amazing to me that other companies don’t take a stronger stance to protect their users privacy.
- We’re hoping this is a warning to overly zealous attorneys who are abusing discovery process.
Guest – Attorney Larry Hildes, National Lawyers Guild attorney in the case, Bellingham Washington.
Guest – Attorney Devin Theriot-Orr, National Lawyers Guild attorney in Seattle and pro-bono attorney for RiseUp.net.
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Law and Disorder August 1, 2011
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Updates:
- Tim DeChristopher Sentencing – Bidder # 70
- Aaron Schwartz, Anonymous Activists and Paypal
- Australian Government Seize Profits from David Hicks’ new book – Guantanamo, My Journey
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From Economic to Social Crisis: Deficits, Debt and a Little Class History
We welcome returning guest Rick Wolff, Professor of Economics. We talk with him about his latest article, From Economic to Social Crisis: Deficits, Debt and a Little Class History. Earlier this year Rick pointed out how the Democrats and Republicans debate over spending cuts at around 40 to 60 billion. Rick says the debate is inconsequential, when the federal budget’s projected deficit of $1.5 trillion will carry an annual interest cost of $40-60 billion. Now, as both parties are committed to a broken, corrupt system, Rick points out that historically transitioning to another economic system is not in the public discussion. He says, the tools used to recover from the 1930s economic collapse can’t be used today mainly because of the last 75 years of rising national debt and budget deficit.
- This is mostly theater, the people I talked to in the business of finance and government are quite clear that the United States will work this out.
- It is a sign of the political dysfunction that they can’t do it in a reasonable way.
- It is a normal procedure to periodically ask for the debt ceiling to be raised, so that they can borrow the amount of money stipulated by the budgets they have passed. The sitting president asks for the debt ceiling to be raised, Bush did it eight times. It’s normal.
- The only thing the Democrats have left, to not look defeated, is to make a big deal out of the cuts they’re willing to accept are smaller than the “draconian” version that the Republicans want.
- The Republicans don’t know, the Democrats don’t know (what will happen). They fundamentally don’t care, because they have long ago decided that their political needs and strategies are unhooked from the underlying economic situation.
- We’re spending 3.5 trillion dollars this year as a Federal Government. We’re raising 2 trillion. That means 1.5 trillion has to be borrowed otherwise its not going to happen.
- That’s money that will be used to help old people’s needs, help fight wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan, to help cities and states that need support, etc.
- The actual creditors in the immediate situation have nothing to fear.
- For the rest of the world you have a double whammy, which is what we should be thinking about.
- We have the driver of the world’s economy collapse in 2007/2008 and having been unable to recover since.
- The bottom line is this economy isn’t working well and isn’t solving its crisis. This is now a deeper, longer crisis than any since the Great Depression.
- That means every other player in the world, from a Chinese official, to a Spanish bank to an investor in Brazil has to rethink what he or she thought.
- A thousand small decisions are going to be made a little differently from now on.
- There is no proposal working its way through Congress to provide employment to the tens of millions of people who have no work.
- The president’s statement (is a bipartisan commitment to ignore the problem of unemployment.)
- The most extreme proposal is to cut 4 trillion dollars in the next ten years. This year alone the US deficit will run one thousand five hundred billion. 1.5 trillion.
- The debtors know that at a certain point there’s going to be trouble.
- You can’t continue to cut the masses’ standard of living to make money for big bankers, that’s not a political sustainable program. Not here, not in Greece, not anywhere else.
- The silence of the press here is stunning. There have been multiple general strikes across Europe.
- The greed of the corporations, they’ve had their way for 30 years. Republicans and Democrats alike, have basically gone in the direction they want. Corporate taxes have been cut, regulations relieved, money is everything, wealth is everything, consumption is where you are.
- The smaller business (corporations, etc) are late to party. They still want to get theirs. Those who already got theirs don’t want them to mess up the game. I believe you will see big splits emerging among the Right in America because these are different attitudes.
- They want a stable United States so that they can grow in the rest of the world, because that’s where they think growth is coming.
- They don’t need to maintain the roads like they did, they don’t need to maintain the education in this country.
- You can appeal to them, you need these workers, you need these consumers. No we don’t. We don’t need them as workers, and we don’t expect them to be much in the way of consumers, because they would have to borrow and we’re not going to lend to them.
- They would have to have higher wages, and we’re not going to give that to them. We have no reason to, we have cheaper better workers elsewhere.
- You are subjecting your working class to a major sustained attack on its standard of living. To believe this is all going to happen and they’re quietly going to sink some resignation with no consequence is nutty.
- The attempt to isolate, to freeze, to inoculate the population so they don’t fear what’s coming. It’s falling apart in Europe, but it will fall apart here too.
Guest – Richard D. Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst where he taught economics from 1973 to 2008. He is currently a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, New York City. He also teaches classes regularly at the Brecht Forum in Manhattan.
Law and Disorder July 25, 2011
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Ten Years after 9/11: War, Operation American Condor (Guantanamo) , Civil Liberties and Hope
We hear a talk from our own Michael Ratner who spoke at the James A Little Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was also in conversation with radio host Mary Charlotte Domandi. The event was titled – Ten Years after 9/11: War, Operation American Condor (Guantanamo) , Civil Liberties and Hope.” Michael is introduced by Mary-Charlotte Domandi producer and host of the Santa Fe Radio Cafe on KSFR 101.1 FM (Santa Fe, NM, Public Radio)
Michael Ratner is President of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in New York and the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) in Berlin. Both are non-profit human rights litigation organizations. He was part of the small group of lawyers that first took on representation of the Guantánamo detainees in January 2001, a case that resulted in a victory in the Supreme Court in 2004. CCR established a network of over 600 pro-bono lawyers to represent Guantánamo detainees and continues that work.
He has filed criminal complaints in the courts of Germany, France and Spain against former US officials including Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld seeking the initiation of criminal prosecutions against them for the Abu Ghraib abuse and torture as well as for their actions at Guantánamo. Recently, CCR and ECCHR prepared papers to file in Switzerland against George W. Bush for torture. As a result Bush canceled his trip. A major area of Mr. Ratner’s litigation and writing is the enforcement of the prohibition on torture and murder against various dictators and generals who travel to the United States. He has sued on behalf of victims in Guatemala, East Timor, Haiti, Argentina, among other countries. He has also litigated numerous suits to prevent or stop illegal US wars ranging from Central America to Iraq. A constant in his work has been litigation against government spying and surveillance of activists.
Michael Ratner’s books, authored or coauthored, include the soon to be published, Hell No: Your Right to Dissent in 21st-Century America (2011) and Killing Che: How the CIA Got Away with Murder (2011). Other books include International Human Rights Litigation in U.S. Courts, Second Edition (2008); Against War with Iraq (2003); Guantánamo: What the World Should Know (2004); and The Trial of Donald Rumsfeld: A Prosecution by Book (2008). Ratner has taught human rights litigation at Yale and Columbia Law Schools. A past president of the National Lawyers Guild, Ratner has received many awards including Trial Lawyer of the Year, the Columbia Law School Medal of Honor (2005), the North Star Community Frederick Douglass Award, Honorary Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School (2005), and The Nation Institute/Puffin Foundation Prize for Creative Citizenship (2007). In 2006, the National Law Journal named Ratner one of the 100 most influential lawyers in the United States.
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Right-Wing Firms Train Public Servants on Terror Threats
There is a sprawling hidden world of counter-terrorism organizations growing beyond control in the United States. Twenty-four of them were created by the end of 2001, including the Office of Homeland Security and the Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking Task Force. The next year, 37 more were created to track weapons of mass destruction and collect threat tips. By 2009, nearly 260 organizations were created as 854 thousand civil servants, military personnel and private contractors with top-secret security clearances monitor national security concerns. However, according to a report from the Public Research Associates, those same concerns have bolstered a class of self-proclaimed terrorism experts who decry Islam as an evil religion of terrorists and routinely brand Muslims as primitive, vengeful, duplicitous, and belligerent people who oppress women and gays, and have values irreconcilable with “western Judeo-Christian civilization.”
In fact, when PRA discovered earlier this year that the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) had contracted with Security Solutions International to conduct a training on radical Islam, they notified the Muslim American Society, ACLU, and our other advocacy partners, who used PRA’s research to compel the MBTA to cancel the agency’s training.
- As part of the Homeland Security Initiatives and working with the FBI in other aspects of the national security apparatus, there was a need to train thousands as part of a local state and federal counter-terrorism “experts.”
- Some of these trainings are quite good. The problem is that there are a handful of groups that train hundreds and hundreds of local, state and federal counter-terrorism experts, with rhetoric that is basically Islamophobic.
- In the late 1970s there was an attempt to restrain this illegal surveillance. I’d have to say right now it’s worse.
- What used to be done illegally and covertly is now done ostensibly legally and openly and in fact proudly by both Democrats and Republicans who should be ashamed.
- The whole strategic suspicious reporting initiative which basically is a pipeline for unverified rumor and innuendo through local police departments up through a chain of information agencies to the federal government. We know in Europe this kind of reporting is unconstitutional and bad for society.
- Now, everyone that was considered illegal and unconstitutional for which there were Congressional hearings and reforms under Jimmy Carter, now we do it.
- In proper training that is actually looking for criminal activity, not people of color who wear garb that we’re scared of. What’s going on here is untrained, badly trained officers are reporting the names of people up into a huge infrastructure of information data storage, based on bias they’ve not been trained to resist or confront within themselves.
- We described this whole process as a platform for prejudice in a report by Tom Cincotta
- Tom has on his wall a wall chart of all the agencies of this information reporting system and it has 150 dots so inter-connected, no one can control this.
- I’m urging people to form broad coalitions across the political spectrum.
Guest – Chip Berlet, (senior analyst) is a veteran freelance writer and photographer who specializes in investigating right-wing social movements, apocalyptic scapegoating and conspiracism, and authoritarianism. A PRA staffer since 1982, he has written, edited and co-authored numerous articles on right-wing activity and government repression for publications as varied as the Boston Globe, the New York Times, The Progressive, The Nation, The Humanist, and the St. Louis Journalism Review.