Afghanistan War, Civil Liberties, Human Rights, Truth to Power
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Mass Deception: Moral Panic and the U.S War on Iraq – Dr. Scott Bonn
The attacks of 9/11 led to a war on Iraq, although there was neither tangible evidence that the nation’s leader, Saddam Hussein, was linked to Osama bin Laden nor proof of weapons of mass destruction. How then was propaganda and distortion used to garner support for the invasion of Iraq? Dr. Scott Bonn has a few theories, in his new book, Mass Deception: Moral Panic and US War on Iraq. Bonn introduces a unique, integrated and interdisciplinary theory called “critical communication.” We talk more with Scott A. Bonn, assistant professor of sociology at Drew University. Dr Bonn teaches courses in criminology, deviance and research methods.
Professor Scott Bonn:
- Moral Panic: a criminological concept established by Stan Cohen. An exaggerated public response and policy initiative, the media go along for the ride.
- The crux of it is that the people become almost dependent on the elites.
- I was listening to the war drums pounding in 2001, 2002 and early 2003. “Timing is everything, from a marketing view you don’t introduce new products over the summer.” – President Bush, White House Chief of Staff
- Terminology entered the public airwaves, mad men, mad dog, evil doers, tied to imagery of 9/11.
- I looked at the rhetoric of the Bush Administration, and then I looked at public opinion polls. Public opinion mirrored the rhetoric.
- “Critical communication” has its foundation in Chomsky’s notion of manufacturing consent, and looking at the research of during the dawn of the Nazi party.
- In the modern world, oppression can seem subtle, attractive and entertaining. Music, film and poetry actually can be forms of oppression if there are lies being disseminated.
- Part of my book is that we don’t get fooled again. Let’s be critical consumers.
- Let’s not drink the tainted kool-aid of hatred and fear without questioning what the motives of the server are.
- 90 percent of the world’s media outlets are controlled by six conglomerates.
- There’s ample evidence that “they” knew there were no stockpiles of mass destruction.
- I worked in advertising, I worked at NBC, I was actually vice president at NBC. It was exactly that experience that gave me a first hand view of exactly how news is created. It’s only news because some who has the power decides that it is.
- As a society were not critical, scrutinizing and intellectual. There’s a tendency to passively accept what we’re told. Axis of Evil was reducing something that was highly complex, making it a lie.
- The next time we’re told we must respond to an iminent threat and we must act on it, we must ask why?
- Is there any objective indication that there is a threat?
Guest – Dr. Scott Bonn, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. He combines the knowledge and skills of an academic scholar with more than twenty years of senior-level corporate experience as an advertising and media executive. Bonn has developed a unique, integrated, and interdisciplinary theory called “critical communication” to explain how and why political elites and the news media periodically create public panics that benefit both parties. Facebook link
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A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the l960s
A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the l960s” is the title of Stephanie Coontz’s new book. It’s based on postwar gender roles and nearly 200 interviews with women and men who read Betty Friendan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963. The Feminine Mystique is a passionate account of “the problem with no name” the malaise, emptiness and frustration afflicting white middle class wives and mothers in a time of post war abundance.
Stephanie Coontz:
- There were so many myths of who Betty Friedan was and she contributed to it herself.
- Daniel Horowitz did a book her own political history. She was a star psychology student at Smith.
- She has already developed her critique of Freudiasim which was so prevalent those days.
- She didn’t invent the “feminine mystique.” Physicians had a name for it, the housewives syndrome.
- You have been denied access of any sort of meaning in your own life.
- The Feminine Mystique sold 3 million copies.
- I have 188 interviews with men and women who read the book. I had to winnow it down to 188 because I kept getting calls and emails from people who swore that they read the book.
- When you went to college in the 1920s you were already defined in your role as a woman.
- What’s wrong with me that I don’t feel more grateful for my priviledges?
- Telling yourself that you don’t have the right to be unhappy, doesn’t solve it, it turns it in to that kind of depression. Incredible discrimination against working women. You could get fired if you got married, turned 30 or were in the airline industry.
- Stay at home housewives didn’t have rights either, there were only 8 states that recognized a wife’s interest in the property or earnings that her husband accumulated.
- One of the big triumphs of feminism is that much of Friedan’s book is so dated.
- Today, young women in their twenties in metropolitan areas out earn men because they have more education.
- Young men as you know are falling behind. Cross cutting currents of inequality that are much more complex.
- The women that are having the most difficult time are the women that would prefer to be homemakers but have had to take a low quality job and whose husbands do not help out at home.
- The happiest women are the ones that prefer to work, have a high quality job and a husband that helps out at home.
- There are things in Betty Friedan’s book I find repellent. I find her failure to deal with her own elitism very disconcerting, but she is not a me-first individualist.
Guest – Stephanie Coontz, teaches history and family studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA. She also serves as Co-Chair and Director of Public Education at the Council on Contemporary Families, a non-profit, nonpartisan association of family researchers and practitioners based at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work has been featured in many newspapers such as The New York Times, as well as scholarly journals such as Journal of Marriage and Family.
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Civil Liberties, Human Rights, Targeting Muslims, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Mexico’s Revolution Then and Now
Mexico’s Revolution Then and Now is the title of Jim Cockcroft’s new book. It’s described as the perfect introductory text to the subject, providing readers the historic context within which the Mexican revolution occurred, how the process played out in the past ten decades and where it is today among Mexico’s workers. Jim examines the tensions between the rulers and the ruled inside the country while also exploring tensions with the United States. The prospect of Mexico’s disenfranchised rising up is kept alive and we discuss those possibilities with the author today. A historian and activist, Jim has written 45 books on Latin America. He’s a professor at the State University of New York and is a member of the International Committee for the Freedom of the Cuban Five.
Dr James D Cockcroft:
- You should understand Michael, that Mexico has had a long history of the US meddling in its internal affairs.
- Direct military intervention, direct military conquest of half the country.
- There’s a record of the US sponsoring torture and training torturers that goes all the back to the US torturers that goes all the way back to the US-Mexico War of 1846-48.
- What’s really involved is oil, water, natural resources, and cheap labor power.
- What does the US do about it? It first of all gets rid of the old government, the longest ruling single party in the history of human kind, the PRI in 2000 by supporting the more conservative option to that government.
- the PAN, the Party of National Action which has governed Mexico from 2000 to the present.
- A government by, of and for big business. US imperialism has a very direct goal to annex Mexico economically which is partially done already and if need be militarily occupy it.
- Propaganda: Mexico is a failed state and that there are these narco gangs cutting off people’s heads and killing civilians.
- It’s a state of failed law. It’s a very successful state as a puppet of US goals.
- The Narco gangs, some of them are actually integrated in the Mexican government.
- The vast majority of the 34 thousand killed, civilians mostly, in four years of this current illegitimate government. Feminicide and youthicide, to be female or young in Mexico is to be criminal.
- It’s a fake war (war on drugs) always has been for about 30 or 40 years.
- Follow the dollar. Where does the laundered money end up? In the hands of the 6th largest banks in America.
- The bailout of the banks is chicken feed compared to what’s really saving the banks, drug money.
- Obama was wrong in his State of the Union speech, the United States is only number one militarily.
- That’s why you have a return to dirty wars, militarization, military coups in Latin America.
- Mexican 1917 Constitution establishes that oil and other natural resources belong to the nation, not the private corporations. We have to take the banks out of the hands of the bankers, and take the factories out of the hands of the industrialists and let the people run them.
- The Mexico state is a fascist state in the broad sense of the word. The first thing a fascist does is crush labor.
- But labor is resisting and that’s what is so dynamic about Mexico today. The movement’s alive but it’s being repressed.
- I’m a member of 2 civil society international tribunals. Trade Union Freedom, the Conscience of the Movement of People.
- Mexico is the key to the future of Latin America.
Guest – Dr. James D. Cockcroft – A bilingual award-winning author of 45 books on Latin America, US hidden history, culture, migration, and human rights, (Ph.D., Stanford University) is Internet professor for the State University of New York. A bilingual poet, three-time Fulbright Scholar, and Honorary Editor of Latin American Perspectives, he serves on the Coordinadora Internacional de Redes en Defensa de la Humanidad, the International Committee for the Freedom of the Cuban Five, and civil society’s Benito Juárez Tribunal (vice-president, 2005) that judged U.S. terrorism against Cuba and International Tribunal of Trade Union Freedom (2009-10) that judged Mexico for its violations of labor and human rights. A Canadian immigrant, he is a member of the UNESCO-sponsored World Council of the José Martí World Solidarity Project, la Table de Concertation de Solidarité Québec-Cuba, la Société Bolivarienne du Québec, la Base de Paix Montréal, le Comité Fabio Di Celmo pour les 5, and the Canada-Cuba Literary Alliance.
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Gaza In Crisis: Reflections on Israel’s War Against the Palestinians, by Ilan Pappé
We listen to excerpts from a speech plus question and answers from acclaimed Israeli New Historian Ilan Pappe. Ilan Pappé surveys the fallout from Israel’s conduct in Gaza and places it in the context of Israel’s longstanding occupation of Palestine. Israel’s Operation Cast Lead thrust the humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip into the center of the debate about the Israel/Palestine conflict.
Speaker – Ilan Pappé is professor of history at the University of Exeter in the UK, where he is also co-director of the Exeter Center for Ethno-Political studies, and director of the Palestine Studies Centre. He is author of the bestselling The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld), A History of Modern Palestine (Cambridge), The Israel/Palestine Question (Routledge). Ilan is also a long-time political activist.
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Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, FBI Intrusion, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Torture, Truth to Power
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Jon Burge, Former Chicago Police Commander Sentenced to 4 ½ Years
Here on Law and Disorder we’ve reported on the ongoing developments of the Chicago Torture case and former Chicago police commander Jon Burge. Burge has been sentenced to 4 and a half years in prison for obstruction of justice and lying about torturing prisoners to obtain coerced confessions. The People’s Law Office brought the case in 2005 and the city of Chicago refused to settle while pumping hundreds of thousands of dollars into the case. Attorney with the People’s Law Office Flint Taylor says the city has spent over the 10 million dollars in aiding the defense of former Commander Jon Burge. Mr. Burge, who is 63 and in ill health, was fired from the Chicago Police Department in 1993. Attorney Flint Taylor’s Statement on Burge sentencing.
Attorney Flint Taylor:
- Burge did not do this alone. Many people working under him or with him, those people are under investigation.
- The city pours millions of dollars into the defense of Burge with private lawyers.
- There needs to compensation and treatment for all the men that were tortured that number is in the hundreds.
- We have a mayoral race here, with 3 Daley clones, none of them have addressed what the judge has said.
- The judge cited the city and the police department as well as the state’s attorneys office under Richard Daley has a dismal failure of leadership with regard to these cases.
- To be in the court room and hear a judge adopt our view that we fought so hard for, that was very rewarding.
- People look at the sentence, it’s a little less than five years, of course you should do much more than that for torture. The judge had her hands tied in some degree and she went as high as she could, going double on the guidelines that were recommended.
- We’ve been raising for decades why Richard Daley didn’t prosecute for torture when he was states attorney.
- The Obama Administration’s failure or refusal to prosecute admitted torturers, I’m talking about Bush who in his book admitted that he authorized water boarding.
- Chicago is a beacon of light in the fight against torture.
- We fought for decades here to get the prosecutions, to get the convictions, to get the sentence.
Guest – Attorney Flint Taylor, a graduate of Brown University and Northwestern University School of Law and a founding partner of the Peoples Law Office. More bio
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State of Democratic Rights – Bill Goodman
We’re joined today by attorney Bill Goodman former legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights. Bill has been an extraordinary public interest lawyer for more than 30 years he’s served as counsel on issues including post-Katrina social justice, public housing, voting rights, the death penalty, living wage and human rights work in Haiti. Bill delivered a speech recently titled the State of Democratic Rights, defining democracy as we now understand it. Everyone of these defining points has been attacked or undermined and very little has been done to repair them under the Obama Administration.
Attorney Bill Goodman:
- If you want to define or crystallize what American democracy looks like in maybe 7 concepts you can break down pretty well.
- People can’t be detained without good cause and without being charged with a crime in front of an independent magistrate.
- They can’t be tortured or punished in ways that are extreme.
- They’re allowed to protest publicly. First Amendment rights.
- People can’t be discriminated against based upon religion.
- Separation of powers, so that no single branch of government becomes overly important or overreaches.
- Right to privacy. The government can’t break into our houses, unreasonable search and seizure.
- The right to free and fair elections and have our votes counted.
- From a lawyers perspective, what I see is an unwillingness of the courts.
- It’s shameful that these judges don’t step up to the plate and say that this should not happen and will not happen.
- Humanitarian Law v. Holder. There’s a very serious attempt to extend the concepts of terrorism to protesters right here in the United States.
- People who work on behalf of the environment, animal rights.
- The United States Supreme Court is happy to say that huge corporations can spend as much money as they possibly want to shift and tilt the electoral playing field right here in the United States.
- In order to strengthen the Constitution we need active aggressive organized movements.
- Within the end of a generation we can see the end of public education in the United States.
Guest – Bill Goodman, former legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights has been an extraordinary public interest lawyer for over 30 years, and has served as counsel on issues including post-Katrina social justice, public housing, voting rights, the death penalty, living wage, civil liberties, educational reform, constitutional rights, human rights work in Haiti, and civil disobedience.
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Post Coup Aftermath – Honduras: Sarah Hogarth
Today we are joined by legal worker Sarah Hogarth who has recently returned from a human rights delegation to Honduras through the Friendship Office of the Americas. We talk with her about her observations on the post coup human rights crisis in that country. As listeners may know On June 28, 2009, the Honduran military ousted the democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya. Former Parliamentary speaker Roberto Micheletti was sworn in as Zelaya’s replacement. Repressive tactics were used immediately after the coup–people on the front lines who oppose this regime have been beaten and illegally detained by the state. Journalists and LGBT activists were among the first to be targeted and killed. Dr James Cockcroft joins interview.
Sarah Hogarth/ James Cockcroft:
- The purpose was to meet with the movement leaders and the human rights organizations there.
- Honduras elections broadly considered to be illegitimate. The president who was overthrown, brought Honduras into ALBA.
- The outgoing president was flown out of a US military base in Honduras. The whole world knew this, but the United States said it wasn’t a coup. Now wikileaks shows that the ambassador was already telling Washington, it’s a coup.
- Zelaya was not the most radical of political leaders by any stretch.
- The resistance movement there is truly an inspiration. The new Honduran regime has instituted anti-terrorism legislation.
- The community radio movement in Honduras is the primary means, to disseminate real news about what’s happening.
- There was a time after the coup the radio equipment was not only shut down by the military but the equipment destroyed.
- Withing 48 hours, community radio stations from other Latin American countries rushed to the borders of Honduras to keep communications going into Honduras among the resistors.
- The people want the money flow to stop funding the new regime.
- Six thousand Marines were just sent to Costa Rica. Two military bases in Honduras, 6 in Columbia.
- The whole foreign policy of the United States has been and extension of the Bush policy of militarization of the world.
- This is being pitched in the context of the war on drugs. Disguise the imperial intervention with the war on drugs.
- There is an extremely small amount of arable land in Honduras.
- The level of unity among all these people is truly impressive.
- Another thing that is discouraging is the extreme privatization that has happened over the past year.
- They have given away the farm to these large corporations.
Guest – Sarah Hogarth, human rights activist in New York City. She is a freelance legal worker and writer and has recently returned from a human rights delegation to Honduras through the Friendship Office of the Americas. The delegation met with activists to learn about the human rights situation in Honduras in the one year since the elections in November 2009. In June 2009, democratically elected President of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, was removed in a military coup d’etat.
Guest – Dr. James Cockcroft, historian and activist, Jim has written 45 books on Latin America. He’s a professor at the State University of New York and is a member of the International Committee for the Freedom of the Cuban Five.
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Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Gaza, Human Rights, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power, War Resister
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The Goldstone Report: The Legacy of the Landmark Investigation of the Gaza Conflict.
It’s been more than 2 years since Israel’s Operation Cast Lead, a massive surprise air strike against the Gaza Strip. In its aftermath, researchers began to unearth and document evidence of war crimes, human rights violations. Among those investigations was the Goldstone Report officially titled the Report of the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza. The report is based on a course of investigations that include 188 interviews, the review of 10 thousand pages of documents and the inspection of 1200 photographs. While most war crimes reports fade into the night, The Goldstone Report is kept alive in a recent book titled The Goldstone Report: The Legacy of the Landmark Investigation of the Gaza Conflict.
The authors Lizzy Ratner, Adam Horowitz and Philip Weiss have reprinted the central findings of the report and include 11 essays chronicling the report’s ongoing impact. The introduction is written by author Naomi Klein with a forward by Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
The Goldstone Report:
- LR: Operation Cast Lead: I remember thinking, can this just happen? Is there some kind of law that says this can’t happen? Judge Goldstone is South African, he was a member of the Constitutional Court in South Africa. He is seen as someone who really advanced international law.
- He’s a big Zionist. He’s a committed Zionist. In Israel, they loved him before this report.
- He was fast friends with the head of the Supreme Court in Israel.
- He goes to Gaza in 2009. It’s interesting he remark that thought that he would be kidnapped by Hamas. I think what happened, he went and he saw what life was like in Gaza, and had a bit of a conversion.
- This is not somebody you would expect to come out and issue a report like this.
- Our mission was there’s this report out there, it’s controversial, thunderous, it’s convulsive. Not many people have read it. Once we read it, it became clear, it’s contents were extraordinary.
- It lays out the events of Gaza in minute and devastating detail. We wanted to abridge the report and that really forms the core of the book.
- We have a series of 11 different essays. Each take for the Goldstone Report with a different perspective.
- PW: The first and last essays are from Gazans.
- It’s explained in very vivid terms what it’s like to be under assault, to see white phosphorous raining down on this strip, which is tiny, it’s the size of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket put together. 1.5 million people.
- Rogi’s thesis just itemizing this assault on Palestinian dignity, saying this is a basic human right, to live in dignity.
- Goldstone: Lack of discrimination between civilians and combatants. A deliberate attack on the civilian infrastructure on the means of life. Israel had several recourses before it launched an all out assault on civilian infrastructure.
- The Goldstone Report contradicts what Israel tends to say. One of things the report makes clear is there had been a cease fire for 6 months before the attack.
- United States – We’re not going to stop you Israel when you inflict collective punishment on 1.5 million people.
- This book really helps give a window into the current perception of the Israel, Palestinian conflict as a whole and how that perception is changing.
- AH: The anti-Goldstone report speeches were very uninformed. They treated him like a witch and ex-communicated him from the Jewish community. Goldstonereportbook.com
- The criminality, the complete selfishness, the utter indifference to other peoples lives.
- I realize how much I was made to hate Arab people and Palestinian people and to think that they were lesser.
- Everything you’ve heard was wrong about them.
- At the heart of it, the Goldstone Report tells the story of people who had to live through a horribly traumatic event. You won’t be able to dismiss 1300 people being killed as people that should have died.
- LR: Stop it Jewish people, you’re doing the wrong thing, you’re behaving in an immoral, unethical way and its wrong. Any human should be offended from what happens in Gaza and what still happens there.
Guests – Lizzy Ratner, Adam Horowitz and Philip Weiss
Lizzy Ratner a journalist here in New York City, her articles appear in many publications including The Nation and Alternet.
Adam Horowitz is an editor and journalist covering American foreign policy in the Middle East, he co-edits the blog Mondoweiss and is a founding member of Jews Against the Occupation.
Phil Weiss, founder of the blog Mondoweiss, is a longtime journalist and regular contributor to the Nation and a fellow at the Nation Institute He’s the author of two books a political novel, Cock-A-Doodle-Doo, and American Taboo, an investigative account of a 1976 murder in the Peace Corps in the Kingdom of Tonga.
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Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, FBI Intrusion, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, Truth to Power, War Resister
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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.
Chip Berlet :
- 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.
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Lawyers You’ll Like – Sally Frank
For our Lawyers You’ll Like series, we’re delighted to have with us attorney, activist and Drake University law professor Sally Frank. Sally specializes in family law and domestic violence. Her activism began when she was a student at Princeton University. She filed suit against the Cottage Club, the Ivy Club and the Tiger Inn because they refused to admit her as a member based on gender. 13 years later she won the case and the three eating clubs became coed. Now Sally Frank lectures on women in law and encourages law students to be activists.
Attorney Sally Frank:
- They (Princeton) had 13 eating clubs and 3 of them were all male.
- I sued three of the clubs and the University, it began when I was a 19 year old junior at Princeton in 1979.
- My problem with it was they were very important institutions on campus, they ratified discrimination. A couple of them were the most prestigious clubs, if the most prestigious people discriminated, that kinda made it ok and it radiated it back onto to the campus in other aspects of life.
- The question was whether they were public accommodations or not.
- When I was in 5th grade I watched Inherit The Wind five times.
- Seeing William Kunstler and the Chicago 8 and how he supported the protesters and the rights of the people, and how Clarence Darrow did, made me want to be a people’s lawyer. Clerk for Emily Goodman as first job out of law school. I learned so much from her, I learned how to make a record.
- The Joint Terrorism Task Force began to investigate the peace movement in Des Moines, Iowa.
- There was question that my email was being watched. They subpoenaed 4 peace activists to a grand jury. Drake University was subpoenaed for information on the National Lawyers Guild members.
- After I found out about the Drake subpoena, there was a gag order on the subpoena.
- Leading up to 2008 RNC in Minneapolis, FBI leaving cards with peace activists in Iowa. What was going on here was an intelligence gathering that we were able to stop.
- Do not talk to the FBI, NSA, ICE. It’s very hard for people who were brought up to be polite, not to answer a question.
- We lived in a condo on the 8th floor and Bush came to the senior citizens center next door. We unfurled a banner from the balcony, a half hour before Bush was expected and we got a knock on the door by the secret service.
- I checked with the ACLU and they couldn’t bust in. Exigent circumstances.
- Most of what I do are civil cases.
- There’s certainly more government resentment and government attitude.
Guest – Attorney Sally Frank, longtime activist and law professor at Drake University. As a lawyer and law professor, Sally Frank represents protesters, victims of discrimination and poor people in housing. In her teaching and practice, Sally has helped the disenfranchised in family law and domestic abuse cases. “This is the work of the public interest lawyer. We see the problems of the system and work with our clients and others to achieve justice for them and for society as a whole.”
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