Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Extraordinary Rendition, FBI Intrusion, Guantanamo, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Supreme Court, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Updates:
- Judge Leon Rules That NSA Meta Data Collection Is Likely Unconstitutional.
- Michael Ratner: It Could Be The Deathknell For This Kind Of MetaData Collection
- Ed Snowden’s Response To Judge Leon’s Decision
- Ed Snowden’s Open Letter To The People Of Brasil
- A Christmas Card From Chelsea Manning
- Guantánamo Five: Military Commissions – Their Torture Memories Are . . Classified.
- First Commander Lenhardt: Guantánamo Should Never Have Opened
- American Studies Association Supports Boycott Of Israeli Academic Institutions
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Over Policing of America: The Criminalization of Everyday Life
In his recent article titled Over Policing of America, attorney Chase Madar outlines a familiar narrative such as the militarization of police, stop and frisk, and how students get swept into the school to prison pipeline. The pattern is clear and who benefits is obvious in the list of over policing examples compiled by our returning guest, such as criminalizing immigration and how simple economic transactions are closely scrutinized by under-cover police.
Attorney Chase Madar:
- I’m hoping this new term will enter the national lingo; over-policing.
- What I wrote about is how the police paradigm has entered the DNA of social policy across the board in the United States in matters that a generation ago would not require police or prosecutors or criminal law, now suddenly do.
- That’s in education, in immigration, in family law, even how we regulate the economy.
- All of these spheres, domains of everyday life are increasingly regulated by police and prosecutors.
- A creeping police state. We need to take a very sobering look at how we’re governing ourselves and how criminal law is displacing and devouring all other kinds of social regulation.
- You see this more and more disciplinary matters in schools get outsourced to police departments.
- Police people are trained to respond to crimes, and to respond to everything as a crime. That’s the nature of police.
- When you send police into a school, the crime is going to sky rocket.
- Even the way we regulate our economy is suffering from an overdose of criminal law and police powers.
- What we have frequently is white collar work getting criminalized by a mare’s nest of criminal laws that are very complex, very difficult to understand.
- It’s not like we have a great financial system that was abused by a few bad apples. We have a really crappy system that’s legal because these people write the laws.
- Immigration law was mostly under the domain of administrative law with milder penalties, civil penalties.
- We’re kidding ourselves if we pretend that’s somehow aberrational.
- Although our political class seems incapable of doing anything constructive about it, they are very adept at channeling all fears about security in any sense into criminal law crack downs and ratcheting up the police state.
- Our incarceration rate is three times higher than the old East Germany.
- I think we need to switch very swiftly to alternative ways of social policy in holding our society together other than throwing cops and prosecutors at it.
Guest – Attorney Chase Madar , a TomDispatch regular and author of a new book, The Passion of Bradley Manning (OR Books). Madar tweets @ChMadar. He’s a contributor to the London Review of Books and Le Monde diplomatique and the author of a new book, The Passion of Bradley Manning (OR Books).
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Books From Law and Disorder Hosts
Afghanistan War, CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, FBI Intrusion, Guantanamo, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Supreme Court, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, Torture, War Resister
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Judge Ruling Allows Detroit Bankruptcy To Move Forward
This summer we spoke with retired auto worker and activist Dianne Feeley about the plans to wipe out the pensions and health benefits of all current and retired city workers by emergency manager of Detroit, Kevyn Orr. We also looked at the history of workers in Detroit from the perspective of black workers and the broader pattern of oppression. Last week, a ruling by Judge Stevens W. Rhodes of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court allows the city of Detroit to move forward in the bankruptcy process. The cradle of the American auto industry will now be allowed to pay off debts and restore essential services.
Professor Laura Bartell:
- It is the first time that a bankruptcy judge that pension obligations constitute contractual obligations that are subject to diminution in bankruptcy.
- Although its rattled pensioners nationwide, its really not that extraordinary.
- The healthcare was never protected by the Michigan Constitution. Everyone has always known that healthcare was subject to modification by the city.
- The cuts in health care are going into effect I believe in February for city employees.
- When we’re talking about the pensions we’re talking about the retirees both the firefighters and policemen unions retirees.
- The city maintains that the plans are underfunded by 3.5 billion dollars.
- The union believes that number is vastly inflated based on projected returns that are too low. Whatever the number is its somewhere between 800 million and 3.5 billion.
- The policemen and firefighters don’t have the benefit of social security.
- You’re not talking about a lot of money going to any individual so if you cut the pension to any particular individual its obviously going to be a major cut for that individual.
- The major problem that Detroit has suffered was a vast decline in population.
- It used to be a much larger city. It’s footprint is still a very large city but the number of people living in that footprint is much smaller than it used to be.
- Among that small population there’s an even smaller number of people actually working and paying taxes.
- So the money coming in to meet the obligations of Detroit has been constantly shrinking.
- Detroit’s obligation to retirees in terms of pensions and healthcare is up at 38 percent and rising constantly. – and in addition we had severe mismanagement of city government including criminality. I’m sure everyone knows our former mayor is now in prison.
- My guess is the pensioners will be hit far less severely than the bond holders. Bond holders are making an investment and taking a risk.
- That’s what bankruptcy is about is all people who have done something to become creditors to the city and they’re not going to get what they deserve.
- That’s the problem, everybody is deserving, everybody should get paid.
- The problem is not that the governor has suddenly taken away the democratic rights of Detroit. We’ve had an emergency manager law for many years in the state of Michigan.
- Detroit is the latest and the biggest to have that happen.
- The next stage is a presentation of a plan of adjustment which he will present to creditors at the end of this month and file with the court at the beginning of January.
Guest – Professor Laura Bartell, after graduating from Harvard Law School, where she was an officer on the Harvard Law Review, she clerked for Judge Alvin B. Rubin of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in New Orleans. She then entered practice in New York where she became a partner in Shearman & Sterling, specializing in bank financing and bankruptcy work. She is a member of the American Law Institute and American Bankruptcy Institute and has published articles on bankruptcy topics, federal court-awarded attorneys’ fees and costs, and the attorney/client privilege and work-product doctrine. She teaches Property, Secured Transactions, Bankruptcy and Creditors’ Rights and Effective Oral Communication for Lawyers.
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Terrorist Watch Lists and No Fly Lists Cases
How do governments compile lists called no-fly lists of individuals often placed on terrorist watch lists? As we’ve seen, the predictions about individual behavior of Muslims, Communists or Japanese-Americans have often been wildly inaccurate and cause a great deal of harm to these communities. Today to discuss the no-fly list and a recent case proceeding through the courts is returning guest Shane Kadidal senior managing attorney of the Guantánamo Global Justice Initiative at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City.
Attorney Shane Kadidal:
- There are broad watch lists and there are lists that people are more familiar with in concept and that’s what being litigated out in California, somebody placed on the no-fly list.
- There are two kinds of no-fly lists, there’s the selectee list where some where on the order of tens of thousands of people are designated for additional security checks when they go through the TSA.
- Then there’s the smaller list which contains several thousand names that sometimes you hear referred to as the no transport list. That’s people who can’t board a flight under any circumstances.
- The US shares its list at times with other countries. We don’t know how much sharing exists.
- The case in California is super interesting because the person who got stopped doesn’t seem like the kind of person that would get stopped except for the fact that she wears a hijab.
- The Terrorism Screening Center is responsible for putting people on the list.
- The interesting thing about this case is that daughter that was put on the list was 14, eight or nine years ago and is now a lawyer in Malaysia and was supposed to testify and was told by Malaysian airlines you are on the no-fly list.
- She’s seeking damages because she couldn’t fly back. This is really the first case to get to trial basically.
- The ACLU has a challenge to which kind of a pure due process challenge case in a case called Lateef v Holder.
- You got put on a list and there’s no real process for challenging those facts.
- If its an accidental match, somebody has the same name as you, or close to you. You can go through this challenge procedure called TRIPP.
- If you win your challenge, they’ll give you a number that you can enter in when you buy your plane ticket.
- CCR along with the Clear Clinic at CUNY Law School filed a case at the beginning of October. The gist of it is that people will end up on the no-fly list and if you complaint about it the FBI will say, if you talk to us you can be taken off the list if you agree to work as an informant on the Muslim community.
- What’s interesting about the couple thousand names (no-fly list) which is much smaller than the number which are on these lists intended to intercept terrorism finance like the list the treasury department maintains like a 500 plus page phone book.
- You can imagine that there might be some logical rationale behind having a short list of people who get a little scrutiny and hope it has more due process than the selectee list has now.
- But the fact that there are some people who are not allowed to fly under any circumstances with any level of search scrutiny that doesn’t seem to make any sense and seems to fit very neatly into our complaint.
- I question if this list can make rational sense.
- Typically if you’re on the no-fly list you get turned away. Typically you don’t get arrested.
- OFAC list, is sort of a list of parties you’re not allowed to do business with. It combines not only sanctions directed at whole countries but also the variety of sanctions directed at terrorism finance.
- This is just like other cases where secrecy is at the core of the defense of the program.
Guest – Shane Kadidal, senior managing attorney of the Guantánamo Global Justice Initiative at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City. He is a graduate of the Yale Law School and a former law clerk to Judge Kermit Lipez of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. In his eight years at the Center, he has worked on a number of significant cases in the wake of 9/11, including the Center’s challenges to the detention of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay (among them torture victim Mohammed al Qahtani and former CIA ghost detainee Majid Khan), which have twice reached the Supreme Court, and several cases arising out of the post-9/11 domestic immigration sweeps. He is also counsel in CCR’s legal challenges to the “material support” statute (decided by the Supreme Court last term), to the low rates of black firefighter hiring in New York City, and to the NSA’s warrantless surveillance program.
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Afghanistan War, CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Supreme Court, Surveillance, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Updates:
- Jeremy Hammond Sentenced to 10 Years With 3 Additional Years of Supervised Probation
- Jeremy Hammond and Barrett Brown Were Outspoken In Exposing Corporate Collusion With The Government In Conducting Intelligence
- Sarah Kunstler Argument On Behalf Of Jeremy Hammond
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The Cuban Five Case Update: Attorney Martin Garbus
We’re joined today by prominent First Amendment attorney Martin Garbus to get an update on the Cuban Five case. Martin joined the case of the Cuban Five last year and had concentrated his efforts to expose how U.S. government paid journalists in Miami received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the office of Cuba broadcasting to slant the story against the Cuban Five. There’s a lot going on with the case lately such as a habeas corpus appeal, and a NSA / FISA related motion.
Attorney Martin Garbus:
- In 1996, 4 planes from Cuba shot down Brothers to the Rescue planes that’s a right wing group that operates in Miami and has over the years made intrusions to Cuban air space.
- After years of negotiations with the Cuban government and the American government where the American government said they would everything they could to stop these flights.
- Washington intended to do that but by the time it got down to Miami, the orders were ignored.
- So these planes went up in Feb 1996 and were shot down over Cuban air space.
- At the trial the jury concluded that the planes were shot down over international waters. They also concluded that the defendants in this case played some kind of role in the shoot down.
- Both administrations at the time (Bush / Clinton) wanted to be very hard on left wing Cubans or Cuba itself by pressing this prosecution.
- Although the shoot down was 1996, and the government had all the information it needed, it didn’t arrest these defendants until 2 and half years later.
- There was a conviction, at first the appellate court set aside the conviction. Lenny Weinglass argued that brilliantly in that a motion for change of venue should’ve been granted.
- Ultimately, that’s rejected, the Supreme Court denies cert, I get involved in the habaes corpus petition and that’s what we’re talking about now.
- We’re about to file other papers about NSA surveillance which has been revealed recently arising out of Snowden’s revelations.
- What I’m now telling you has not yet appeared anywhere else.
- The defense lawyers in the case, as they prepared the case itself, from the time they were appointed in 1998, to the time of the conviction, and now, Lenny Weinglass leading the defense, – these lawyers traveled back and forth to Cuba.
- We now understand and this applies to you, this applies to anyone who goes to Cuba.
- Anytime you go to Cuba, you’re picked up by NSA surveillance.
- The NSA listening post, the prime one was in Puerto Rico and it was made up largely of US Navy personnel, assigned to the Naval Security Group which is an NSA component.
- When I got back to the United States (from Cuba) they would continue to monitor me. If I were a defense lawyer, my communications with my client would gathered and sent to the FBI and Department of Justice.
- That’s the motion we’re about to file in the next 2 weeks.
- The Solicitor General, on October about 6 weeks ago, admitted there had been surveillance of cases where there had been convictions.
- Our case presents unique problems, Cuba at that time was designated a terrorist state.
- I’ve got the details in the way information was intercepted.
- A large part of the NSA budget last year I think was 52 billion dollars. 25 percent of it is for the CIA.
- What the CIA was doing under the umbrella of the NSA was exactly what the Church Committee said they couldn’t do.
- Journalists that worked for the Miami Herald or CBS, or local Spanish stations . . on the government payroll.
- The stations or newspapers that hired these journalists, didn’t know that they were also getting monies from the government. In 2006, the Miami Herald found out about it.
- One journalist got 286 thousand dollars.
- If you look at the Radio Marti stories, and you look at the Miami Herald stories, you have the same sentences, same paragraphs and its clear its coming out of a central cookie cutter.
- The Radio Marti budget was 15 million dollars a year.
Guest – Attorney Martin Garbus, one of the country’s leading trial lawyers. He has appeared before the United States Supreme Court and the highest state and federal courts in the nation. Time Magazine has named him “legendary . . . one of the best trial lawyers in the country.” He’s also known as the most prominent First Amendment lawyer.
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Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya: Lessons for Africa in the Forging of African Unity
The course of events that led to NATO’s intervention in Libya is outlined in our guests Horace Campbell’s recently published book Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya: Lessons for Africa in the Forging of African Unity. He traces the origin of the Libya conflict in the context of the Arab Spring uprisings and argues how NATO is used by the North American and European capitalist class to impose its political will on the rest of the world. It’s a new model, he explains, of bombing campaigns, militias, terrorist campaigns and private contractors. This NATO campaign caused many civilian deaths and destroyed Libya’s infrastructure. We talk about the broader attacks on the African continent and the investigations into the US embassy killings.
Professor Horace Campbell:
- The revolutionary upheavals that took place in Tunisia and Egypt have had great implication for all societies in this region.
- Libya which has been underdeveloped politically was a place where the western powers manipulated which was supposed to be an insipient uprising in Benghazi, militarized it and turned it into a base for the destabilization for all of North Africa.
- Today as we speak they continue to manipulate what is going on in the Libyan society.
- The book is called Global NATO because the governments of the North Atlantic region, namely the United States and its western European allies to internationalize the basis for military intervention by this NATO.
- NATO was created by this cold war instrument with a mandate to defend western Europe.
- NATO is in alliance with the most conservative countries in the Middle East called the Gulf Cooperation Council.
- We’ve had an attempt by the Wall Street elements to use NATO as an instrument for the United States military management of the international system.
- Why was NATO intervening? To control the resources of Libya, to destabilize North Africa, to stop the African Union project and to create confusion by supporting the same al-Qaeda elements that they’re supposed to be fighting in the “war on terror.”
- These are the reasons why the Left and the peace movement should have opposed the NATO intervention.
- Just like in Syria and Iran, there’s confusion among the Left and progressive forces about what’s going on.
- We need a resolution with responsibility to protect inside of Libya. To protect from the forces of NATO and to protect the Libyan people from the militias that have been unleashed by al-Qaeda, supported by the CIA and NATO.
- President Obama exercised intense pressure on the South African presidents and other presidents. I think he telephoned directly for them to vote for this resolution.
- The matter of Libya is not over.
- The same NATO that created the problem in Libya, the same United States, France and Britain is now seeking the support of Congress to go into Libya, into the same place that they created the problem.
- The U.S. designs on the continent of Africa is quite confused at the moment. It’s confused because of the assertiveness of the African Union and the African people.
- It turns out as we’ve seen in Libya, that it is the United States and the western forces that are supporting jihadists who are called terrorists. We’ve seen in a place like Somalia where the African people themselves through the African Union have been able to bring some stability to Somalia.
- There’s no military body that monitors the work of private military contractors.
- Now the peace movement should be calling for a reduction in the military budget.
- In the case of Libya, General Petraeus was using Benghazi as a base to recruit conservative Islamic fundamentalists from Libya to go to Syria to fight.
- Here’s a web of conspiracy of military, of Israel, Saudi Arabia and the CIA fomenting instability all across North Africa and the Middle East.
- There was no consulate in Benghazi, this was a CIA facility that was being used to support al-Qaeda elements.
- We have a situation in Libya where the country is in complete disarray. There’s no law, there’s no order. The people of Tripoli demonstrated two weeks ago against these militias and 40 people were killed.
Guest – Professor Horace Campbell is Professor of African American Studies and Political Science at Syracuse University. His recent book is Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya. He is author of: Rasta and Resistance From Marcus Garvey to Walter Rodney; Reclaiming Zimbabwe: The Exhaustion of the Patriarchal Model of Liberation; Pan Africanism, Pan Africanists and African Liberation in the 21st Century; and Barack Obama and 21st Century Politics.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, RFID
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Local Police Departments and Mass Surveillance Technology
As technology becomes more available to local police departments, mass surveillance, data collection and retention are now rapidly expanding. There are third parties involved profiting from collecting data and selling it back to various agencies and governments down the line. There are many concerns including the reasonable expectation of privacy in public and the build up of individual digital dossiers. We’re joined today by Assistant Professor Law Stephen Rushin at the University of Illinois College of Law. In his recently published paper The Legislative Response to Mass Police Surveillance, Rushin discusses the rise of expanding advanced police surveillance and public privacy.
Attorney Stephen Rushin:
- Traditionally law enforcement have utilized a bunch of different technological replacements for traditional behavior.
- Law enforcement in the past might have tried to say, isolate individuals that were speeding. Before the advent of radar, the ability to measure this in a technological way, they had ways of simply following people.
- So, once law enforcement had the ability to monitor speed electronically, that was a means of dramatically improving the efficiency on an otherwise lawful police activity.
- Initially these technological innovations seem to be a relative good thing but in recent years there’s been a movement in local law enforcement to utilize extreme data retention with things like Automatic License Plate Readers, security cameras with facial recognition.
- These tools allow law enforcement to monitor an entire community in a relatively invasive way without invading any legally protected areas of privacy.
- Local law enforcement is trying to share this data across jurisdictional lines.
- We have 18 thousand different local police departments.
- Once that data gets shared, its essentially out in the open.
- These private automatic license plate readers are put up all across the country to monitor the whereabouts of cars.
- Whenever someone is driving in public, you don’t expectation of privacy in your movements.
- What’s interesting is these private third parties are working with law enforcement and sharing that data.
- We are actually just starting to learn the dangers of big data collection by the state.
- If I collect years of data from automatic license plate readers, I’d have a pretty good digital dossier of where one individual person has been over the last two years.
- I know stuff about where that person goes during the day. I know about potentially their political affiliation.
- If you allow local law enforcement to collect copious amounts of data on an individuals’ whereabouts, then you potentially allow them to know a lot about their citizens.
- We need to distinguish between observational comparison and what I call indiscriminate data collection.
- The proposal I make is that we need to be concerned about the length of time local law enforcement retain data.
- The ACLU is doing terrific work, surveying police departments to see what kind of data they’re collecting via surveillance.
- There’s a lot of questions about how ALPR work has effected minority groups especially Muslims in the UK.
- Evidence has emerged that authorities used ALPR to surveil Muslims in the UK.
- Social Science Research Center
Guest – Attorney Stephen Rushin, research focuses on criminal law, criminal procedure, and policing. His ongoing research uses a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to examine the Justice Department’s implementation of structural reform litigation in American police departments. He has previously published articles on advanced surveillance technologies, police interrogation procedures, juvenile justice policy, and federal sentencing laws. Rushin holds a J.D. from Berkeley Law, where he served on the law review. He received a B.A. in government from the University of Texas, where he graduated with high honors. Rushin is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at Berkeley.
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JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters by Jim Douglass
JFK and the Unspeakable is the first book of 3 on the assassinations of the 1960s. Orbis Books has commissioned author James W. Douglass to write about the murders of JFK, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, and his the third will be on the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. The heart of JFK the Unthinkable, is not how Kennedy was killed or how Kennedy became a threat to the systemic war machine, but why DID Kennedy die? Author James Douglass says Kennedy knew that he would die and had the guts to stand up to the system and take the hit. This narrative was lost for decades, obscured by disinformation about Kennedy’s character and the conspiracy of his assassination. One review summarizes Douglass’s book in this way : JFK’s belated effort to turn America from an armed culture of victory to a member of an international peaceful world was shot down in Texas for a reason.
Jim Douglass:
- John F. Kennedy’s experience in WWII: He was in the South Pacific, he volunteered. He was on that PT boat.
- What happened on that PT boat, is that it got split into two by a Japanese destroyer. He lost brothers and friends at that time. An extraordinary experience being adrift on the ocean warning other PT boats. The experience create a distrust in military authority.
- He said that he wanted to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter to the winds.
- As Kennedy said to his friends, “they figured me all wrong.”
- The Unspeakable: the kind of evil and deceit that seems to go beyond the capacity of words to describe. The midst of war and nuclear arms race, the assassinations of Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcom X that the term was used.
- JFK’s vision is articulated in the address June 10, 1963, arising from the turnaround of the missile crisis and Bay of Pigs. He wanted to move step by step into a disarmed world.
- Nikita Khrushchev put that speech all over the Soviet Union. The Cuban Missile Crisis is a deeply misunderstood part of our history, because it’s usually portrayed as Kennedy going to war with Nikita Khrushchev and beating him.
- The truth was that Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev were in over their heads, the US generals wanted nuclear war, because they had more warheads than the Soviets.
- Nikita Khrushchev: We now have a common enemy from those pushing us toward war.
- At that point the Cold War turned upside down because Kennedy and Khrushchev became closer to each other than either was toward their own military power system.
- Vietnam: Kennedy’s military people would not give him an exit policy. He signed the withdrawal order from Vietnam before he was assassinated.
- His friends said that he had an obsession with death. It was not an obsession but a real assessment that he was going to die. If you try to turn around a national security state that is dominating the world,
- and you do so as president of the United States, of course you’re going to die. Kennedy knew that.
- The book is a story on the deliberate destruction of hope, the vision of change, a turning of this country all of which was happening and had to be stopped. US Agencies killed Dr. Martin Luther King – 1999 Verdict
- We’re in the same scene right now with Petraeus and McChrystal setting up Obama. They were dictating terms to Obama, unlike Kennedy, he did not face them down.
- We need to get out ahead of Obama so that he can do something.
Guest – James W. Douglass, author and a longtime peace activist and writer. James and his wife Shelley are co-founders of the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action in Poulsbo, Washington, and Mary’s House, a Catholic Worker house of hospitality in Birmingham, Alabama.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Military Tribunal, Supreme Court, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, Torture, War Resister
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Pan African Solidarity Hague Campaign to Delegitimize the ICC
In the month June last year, the Pan-African Solidarity Hague Committee delivered a petition to the International Criminal Court at the Hague, Netherlands demanding they prosecute the United States, Great Britain, France, Italy, Canada, and NATO for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Libya, Cote d’lvoire, Haiti and the US. This campaign began in May of 2011 when thousands gathered to protest the US/NATO bombing of Libya, attacks on Zimbabwe and the racist assault against African-Americans in the United States. 16 months after delivering the petition and sending follow up letters, the Pan African Solidarity Hague Committee haven’t received a response. The organization is now reaching out to National Lawyers Guild members and law students to help expose the International Criminal Court.
Attorney Roger Wareham:
- The International Criminal Court was established in 2001-2002, supposedly to replace the different ad-hoc international tribunals that had been set up to deal with war crimes and crimes against humanity.
- It’s supposed to be even handed, no double standard – everyone is held to the same level of accountability.
- The membership, you have to sign on to be a part of it. The United States was closely involved in the process of setting up the ICC.
- The U.S. insisted that it would not be subject to prosecution by the ICC, although under the Security Council of the United Nations could recommend cases for the ICC.
- Given the plethora of human rights violations and war crimes that have been committed around the world, the only people that the ICC is presently prosecuting are Africans.
- The only prosecutions have been of Africans.
- Our involvement in taking it to the ICC was in particular to expose its nature that its really not an international tribunal that would look at the question of war crimes across the board and that its really another instrument in the West’s arsenal of the exploitation of Africa.
- Ostensibly, dealing with human rights violations, the ICC has zeroed in on Africa.
- There’s been a response and rebellion among several of the African countries around this clear bias.
- Three of the five permanent members are not on the ICC, Russia, United States and China.
- I think what we want to do is we want a single standard or no ICC.
- Email: D12M@aol.com
- www.PASHC2012.blogspot.com
Guest – Attorney Roger Wareham, a member of the December 12th Movement, an organization of African people which organizes in the Black and Latino community around human rights violations, particularly police terror. Wareham is also the International Secretary-General of the International Association Against Torture (AICT), a non-governmental organization that has consultative status before the United Nations.
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Lawyers You’ll Like – Attorney Mel Wulf
We’re joined today by Attorney Mel Wulf, former legal director with the American Civil Liberties Union for 15 years. He was a law partner with former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark during the Kennedy Administration and much more. Wulf was part of some of the greatest contributions to the civil rights movement. He’s now retired after practicing law for 54 years. As part of our Lawyers You’ll Like series, we talk with Wulf about his work with the ACLU during the early 60s, and also about the forming of the Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee.
Attorney Mel Wulf:
- Phil Agee was a dissident CIA agent who spent decades working against the CIA, published a couple of books.
- He lost his passport because when the dissidents took over the embassy in Tehran in 1979, the New York Post carried a story accusing Phil of helping the students who’d invaded the embassy to put together all of that written material that had been shredded.
- It was another New York Post bald faced lie.
- The State Department, based upon that story revoked his passport.
- I had represented Phil Agee, I was his principle lawyer for 30 years.
- Agee was very widely disliked in Washington because he was well known to be a CIA dissident who disclosed the names of many CIA agents.
- If Snowden went the same route today, he would do even worse in this Supreme Court than I did. That’s why Snowden won’t get his passport, thanks to me.
- I was for the workers and not for the bosses and I’ve always been for the workers and not for the bosses, which I think is the distinguishing political factor in our world. Which side are you on?
- I got my Bachelors Degree in ’52 and I had a Navy Commission which I had gotten from the New York State Maritime Academy earlier on.
- The draft board sent me a 1A notice, I applied to Columbia and when I finished Columbia they sent me another 1A notice because the draft was still on. I spent 2 years in the Navy as a Liuetenant Junior Grade Officer in Southern California.
- I went to work at the ACLU in 1958 as the assistant legal director, in 1962 I was given the job of the legal director of the ACLU.
- I had actually been going down to Mississippi from 1961 to 1962, working with then one of the two black lawyers who were practicing in Mississippi.
- We tried a couple of capitol cases in Mississippi. I continued to argue the systematic exclusion of blacks from the jury.
- I finally got a case up to the Supreme Court on that issue.
- Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee: We had several hundred lawyers who went down to Mississippi for periods of a week or two. They were representing people being arrested during the Mississippi summer.
- Most of the judges allowed these lawyers to make some sort of presentation.
Guest – Attorney Mel Wulf, former legal director with the American Civil Liberties Union for 15 years. He was a law partner with former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark during the Kennedy Administration and much more. Wulf was part of some of the greatest contributions to the civil rights movement. He’s now retired after practicing law for 54 years.
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