Welcome to Law and Disorder Radio
Law and Disorder is a weekly independent civil liberties radio program airing on more than 100 stations across the United States and podcasting on the web. 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 September 23, 2024
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The Center for Climate Integrity
Today, we’re delving into a legacy of deception and destruction. For more than 50 years, Big Oil companies like ExxonMobil, Chevron, and BP have known that burning fossil fuels would raise global temperatures. Yet, instead of taking responsibility or warning the public, they have orchestrated campaigns of denial, disinformation, and delay.
As a result, we are living with unprecedented climate disasters. Following the hottest year on record in 2023, extreme weather events have intensified, from record-breaking wildfires scorching California and Canada, to catastrophic hurricanes pounding the Gulf Coast. During this past June, nearly 5 billion people globally faced intense heat over nine days, with more than 60% of the world’s population encountering temperatures made at least three times more likely by climate change. These events not only devastate ecosystems and communities, but they also cost taxpayers billions of dollars in damage and recovery.
Guest – Corey Riday-White, Managing Attorney at the Center for Climate Integrity, an organization that is fighting to hold Big Oil accountable for its deceit. The Center is supporting litigation efforts in several states, aiming to force fossil fuel companies to pay for the damage they’ve caused. Let’s hear more about their approach, and how the legal system might be used to confront this ongoing climate crisis.
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Surveillance Dragnet: Geofence Warrants
Recently, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals handed down a landmark decision in U.S. v. Jamarr Smith, holding that geofence warrants are “categorically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment.” What is a Geofence Warrant? They compel companies such as Google to hand over data on every device in a particular geographical area over a set period of time. Not surprisingly they are a controversial tool in law enforcement’s investigative arsenal.
Privacy experts argue they amount to a dragnet search that violates the privacy of countless innocent individuals. Proponents, on the other hand, see them as necessary for solving crimes in our digital world. The Fifth Circuit ruling is a major development in the ongoing debate over privacy and mass surveillance.
Guest – Alan Butler, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center or EPIC, in Washington, DC. EPIC has been at the forefront of legal battles to improve data protection standards to protect individual rights in the rapidly advancing surveillance state. Alan Butler is Chair of the Privacy and Information Protection Committee of the American Bar Association Section on civil Rights and Social Justice. He has authored briefs on behalf of EPIC in significant privacy cases, including an amicus brief in Riley v. California that was cited in the Supreme Court’s unanimous landmark ruling that the warrantless search and content seizure of cell phones during an arrest is unconstitutional.
Music out: The Down Hill Strugglers – Abandoned Orchards That Grow
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Law and Disorder September 16, 2024
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Understanding Capitalism
The great German playwright, and political figure, Berthold Brecht, observed that to understand fascism you have to understand capitalism, from whence it springs. Today, it is also helpful for us to understand that the rise of fascism in Germany 100 years ago, has parallels we can see now with the rise of fascism in the United States.
Prior to World War I, which began in 1914, the German working class and middle class were relatively prosperous. The German unions were strong and influential. Prior to World War I, Germany also had the largest and strongest socialist party in the world, and it was the second largest political party in the German Parliament. The German economy was booming. And German culture was the jewel of Europe.
This all came to a crashing end in 1917, when Germany was defeated in what was an inter-imperial war against the United States, France, Great Britain and Russia. The consequences of that defeat brought us fascism and World War II, 20 years later. In the 1920’s, inflation wiped out the savings of the German people. When the depression hit in 1929, the German working class was desperate. The ground was fertile for the rise of Adolf Hitler, a ruthless, cunning and violent demagogue.
Here in the United States, our economy boomed for 100 years, from the end of the Civil War until the 1970s. But since then, American workers have not made any progress. Their wages, in real terms, have not risen in 50 years! “Neo- liberalism”, which is just another word for aggressive capitalism, has wiped out 30 million industrial jobs in the US, starting in the 1980s. Women were driven back into the workforce. People had to work two jobs just to keep up.
In Germany, it was the Jews who were blamed. Here in the US, it is immigrants and people of color who are scapegoated. The demagogue Trump, like Hitler before him, is a captivating speaker and a very effective cult leader, who is now poised to take the power of the government and turn it against “we the people.”
Guest – Richard Wolff is Professor Emeritus from the University of Massachusetts, and the author of the forthcoming book, “Understanding Capitalism”. According to New York Times, Richard Wolff is, probably America’s most prominent Marxist economist. He is the founder of Democracy at Work and host of their national syndicated show Economic Update. Professor Wolff has authorized numerous books on capitalism and socialism, including most recently “The Sickness is the System: When Capitalism Fails to Save Us From Pandemics or Itself“, “Understanding Socialism“; and “Understanding Marxism”, which can be found at democracyatwork.info.
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Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism
Instead of the socialist ideal of universal human emancipation, that many European Jews supported, Zionist Israel is the outcome of a very different political ideology…an ideology that a relatively small number of middle and upper class European Jews advanced unsuccessfully until after World War II.
The founders of Zionism promoted it as a Jewish solution to the “Jewish problem.” Communists and socialists rejected this self-segregating reliance on Western colonial powers. And the current increasingly pariah status of Israel and its imperial backer, the United States, has proven the fallacy of the Zionist solution.
Israel is the product of a colonial settler ideology that has its roots in the racist and imperialist practices of the European powers of the 19th century. Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, an Austrian /Hungarian journalist, was a great admirer of Cecil Rhodes, the British imperial figure who founded the mineral settler colony of Rhodesia in what became apartheid South Africa.
From its inception, the goal of the Zionists was to overwhelm and displace the indigenous native Arabs in Palestine. As a result, despite its own self-promotion, Israel is not the moral legatee of the victims of the holocaust, much less of the prophets of the Hebrew people who propounded the 10 Commandments.
The horrific slaughter since last October 7th of the Palestinians in Gaza, has been live streamed for people all over the world to see.
Guest – Emmaia Gelman is a professor at Sarah Lawrence College in New York and the founder of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. Her book on the powerful Zionist organization the Anti-Defamation League is about to be published by the University of California press.
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Law and Disorder September 9, 2024
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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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