Law and Disorder August 29, 2011

Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, FBI Intrusion, Human Rights, Surveillance, Truth to Power, War Resister

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The Truth About the Situation in Libya Cutting Through the Government Propaganda and Media Lies

Libya, a country of 6 million people possesses the largest of Africa’s oil reserves. It’s oil is of a particular high quality. Since March 19 2011 the Air Force of Britain, France and the United States have conducted nearly 7500 bombing attacks. Meanwhile,  ground forces made up of special operations and commando units are NATO led and direct the military operations of the so called rebel forces.  In his recent article titled The Truth About the Situation in Libya Cutting Through the Government Propaganda and Media Lies, Answer Coalition National Coordinator  Brian Becker lays out the history and facts about the ongoing Libya invasion.  See Partial Interview Transcript

Brian Becker:

  • Unfortunately there’s a large number of people who have accommodated themselves to a full scale demonization to the targeted government, the government in this case Qaddafi and Libya.
  • Targeted comprehensively by the corporate sponsored media in the United States, in Britain and France.  The United States, Britain and France the former colonizers and slave traders of Africa, always assigned their bombing missions, invasions a noble cause.
  • They characterized the targeted government as having threatened a full scale massacre in Benghazi. There was no proof offered of that.  The propaganda campaign is always part of the overall war effort.
  • Qaddafi came to power in 1969, he immediately evicted the (US)Air Force base and the two British bases that were the dominant powers inside of Libya.
  • The National Transition Council, the group that is fighting Qaddafi, and is sponsored by NATO,  their first act when they formed a government coming into being was to invite those same powers to begin bombing the country.
  • In 2004 after the invasion of Iraq, George W Bush and the European powers there ended the sanctions on Libya.
  • Libya attempted to accommodate itself to the western powers.
  • He was a player, they don’t want players, they want puppets.
  • He let the companies come in but he kept irritating and annoying them.
  • In the recent months we’ve seen demonstrations of hundreds and thousands of Libyans, maybe as many as a million gathering in Green Square against the bombing of Tripoli.
  • Not all of them were with Qaddafi, some of them were but they nonetheless were against the bombing of their city by a foreign power.
  • In the last days, there’s been a psychological war to over throw the government in Tripoli.
  • What we don’t see is NATO carried out 7,500 bombing missions many of them against military formations of the Qaddafi government, many against civilian and communication centers.
  • Why don’t they start bombing Saudi Arabia? There’s no elections in Saudi Arabia, women can’t drive cars in Saudi Arabia, the punishment for women committing adultery is stoning to death.  There’s no protest in Saudi Arabia because they’re met with torture, imprisonment and execution.
  • Why because the Saudi government functions a proxy, puppet client regime of the United States.
  • If you watch TV or read US media you’d think there was 40 years of dark grim dictatorship with nothing good, the nightmare is finally ending.
  • There was mass illiteracy in 1969, today 92 percent of the people are literate.  Life expectancy of Libyans today is 77 years old.  The entire operation is a NATO operation.
  • The slogan of self determination has no credibility except in that struggle against imperialism.
  • In World War I when that war was about to end, there was a secret treaty called the The Sykes–Picot Treaty.  What that treaty showed was despite the utterances of self determination at that time by Woodrow Wilson and the other western leaders, that these powers were secretly dividing the spoils of war.
  • If this operation in Libya succeeds, the use of foreign military forces and intelligence forces, and drone aircraft and military operations, the same tactics will be applied to countries deemed to independent of the dictates in Washington.
  • Because its Obama and not the Republicans, too many progressive anti-war normally active people are sitting on the sidelines, watching, wondering rather than building the kind of militant anti-war movement in the United States that says to the people of the world

Guest – Brian Becker, National Coordinator for the Answer Coalition, he’s also been a central organizer of the mass anti-war demonstrations that have taken place in Washington, D.C. over the past decade.

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Better This World: Katie Galloway

In recent shows we’ve talked about the cases involving the FBI’s targeting of protesters, over-zealous prosecutors, and their collective impact on domestic dissent. These topics are just part of a riveting story in the documentary titled Better This World, directed and produced by Katie Galloway and Kelly Duane dela Vega, produced also by Mike Nicholson.

It’s a story of two boyhood friends from Texas who travel to the 2008 Republican National Convention in Minnesota and find themselves embroiled in an FBI case involving multiple domestic terrorism counts. Better This World gets right to the heart of the so called War on Terror, its impact on civil liberties and protest activities.  One review described the film as “Riveting. Structured like a taut thriller, it delivers a chilling depiction of loyalty, naivete, political zealotry and the post-9/11 security state — and it features one doozy of a kicker in the “where are they are now” category.”-

Katie Galloway:

  • It was early 2009 and we saw a headline in the New York Times about the arrest of two young activists at the Republican National Convention.  I didn’t hear about the story until David McKay was going to trial.
  • His co-defendant had taken a plea, that’s what most people do in the federal system for sure.
  • David had decided to roll the dice and he was going to federal trial. He was alleging that he had been entrapped.
  • David and Brad went to an informational meeting in Austin, Texas about protesting at the Republican National Convention. Anarchist collective.
  • While there they were approached by a well known activist Brandon Darby, who had gained some measure of fame after Hurricane Katrina and co-founded an organization called Common Ground.
  • Two years leading up to the convention, multiple law enforcement and federal agencies had been involved in pro-active investigations into activist groups who might be coming to the RNC.
  • David and Brad by coming to this meeting raised the suspicion of the government.
  • There’s a lot of love in both families for these two guys.
  • It’s a story about friendship and loyalty against the back drop of the post-9/11 domestic security apparatus with the full weight of the state on these guys trying to turn them against each other.
  • What I learned is that the “war on terror” is really an extension, a continuation of the “war on drugs.”  The rampant yet increased use of informants in the “war on terror.”
  • David who built Molotov cocktails but didn’t use them was facing 30 years. Our sentences are 5 to 12 times longer than other countries.  We get a strong sense of collateral damage of federal prosecutions, what it puts the families through. The tendency is to absolutely demonize the defense.
  • We’re trying to make sure this film becomes part of the national dialogue about life after 9/11, about the legal system, the tension between civil liberty and security.
  • When we got to Minneapolis we thought we would follow the legal cases as they unfolded. Our normal style is verite, letting things play out before the camera. We quickly realized that the heart of the story is what led to the six months leading up to the convention.

Guest – Katie Galloway,  director producer of the Better This World.  Katie has directed and produced numerous award winning films and series for PBS Frontline and POV, among others. Her feature documentary Prison Town, USA (POV 2007) called “documentary making at its best” by The San Francisco Chronicle and “intriguing” by The New York Times, was developed as a fiction series by IFC, for which she co-wrote the first 3 episodes. Her critically acclaimed film Better This World (POV 2011) has won 3 top doc awards on this year’s festival circuit.  Galloway taught documentary production at the Columbia Journalism School and now teaches Media Studies at U.C. Berkeley.

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Law and Disorder August 22, 2011

Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Death Penalty, Guantanamo, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Torture, Truth to Power

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Updates:

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Cruel Solitary Confinement In Pennsylvania Prisons

Earlier this year the National Lawyers Guild called on Superintendent Louis Folino to support the Program Review Board’s recommendation to release Russell Maroon Shoatz into the general prison population at SCI Greene in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania.

Jerome Coffey, a political prisoner currently being held in Pennsylvania’s SCI Forrest.  Jerome’s social work while in prison include sending clothes to villages in Uganda and to women prisoners in the Philippines. That work has labeled him an instigator and he’s been placed in solitary confinement for more than 5 and a half years.

Bret Grote:

  • The Human Rights Coalition was founded by state prisoners at the State Correctional Institution in Greene, Pennsylvania in 2000. The Pittsburgh chapter where I work was founded in 2006-2007.
  • The main mission of the Human Rights Coalition was to bring the voices of the most excluded from criminal, legal, criminal justice discussions, namely those of prisoners, their family members and effected communities.
  • We base our work in building relationships with prisoners and to bring support and advocacy to those most impacted by the prison system and that has led us straight into solitary confinements where people’s lives are being micro-managed down to the most minute details.
  • The justifications for solitary confinement shift from to another, it used to be based on escapes.  Now that Russell Maroon Shoatz is approaching his 70th birthday, they’re claiming its because of his past efforts of organizing hunger strikes, and they cite an incident where he was forced to defend himself against another prisoner.
  • In Maroon’s case he met with a prisoner mental health staff person because there was some movement towards releasing him from solitary confinement that ended up being blocked.
  • This staff person told him there was an allegation that he tried to organize an armed prison uprising in the 80’s. This has been following him around for over 25 years in his file, but he has not been able to challenge this because he was not informed of this at all.
  • He is not represented by legal counsel. He is ripe for representation under the 8th amendment clause of cruel and unusual punishment.
  • The prison authorities typical treatment for somebody who is the restrictive housing unit is a cursory interview at the cell, maybe once every 30 days with a staff worker, which is to say they’re not really giving them effective mental health treatment.
  • You spend 23 hours in the cell, maybe 24 if the guards don’t take you to yard or shower.
  • The things that one may witness on the whole are constant screaming, banging, and yelling and crying and cursing and talking to one’s self by prisoners who are psychologically disturbed.  According to the figures up to 2500 or 3000 prisoners can be in solitary confinement on any given day in Pennsylvania. The total prisoner population in Pennsylvania is 52 thousand.
  • We are constantly looking for serious and committed civil and human rights lawyers to work with us. We have a massive body of evidence.  The solitary confinement system is an invisible system inside of a larger invisible system of the prisons.

Guest – Bret Grote, law student and volunteer with the Human Rights Coalition, an organization bringing the voices of the most excluded from criminal, legal, criminal justice discussions, namely those of prisoners, their family members and effected communities.  The HRC works to build relationships with prisoners and  bring support and advocacy to those most impacted by the prison system.
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Andre Jacobs

Andre Jacobs is another Pennsylvania state prisoner in solitary confinement. Andre, a 27 year-old jailhouse lawyer, has been held in retaliatory solitary confinement for more than 8 years. In 2009, Andre was awarded 185 thousand dollars in a case against the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, an action that has resulted in his being singled him out for abuse within the prison system. In January of this year, he was physically abused, issued death threats and denied medical treatment.

Liz Springer:

  • It’s been rough, there had been days where I thought he wasn’t going to make it. I thought I was going to get a call saying he was dead. I send him inspiration cards, and support him, send him some Bible verses to keep him strong.
  • There have been times he said to me, I can’t do it no longer, I can’t do it.
  • They were beatin’ him in the court room. They said he had an attitude and when he was leaving the court room, I witnessed them beating him, and I said, “I love you Andre.” He turned around and said “I love you too.”
  • They started beating him because they said he wasn’t supposed to speak to me.
  • He lost that case because the guards got on the stand and said he hurt one of the guard’s wrist.
  • He ended up with 18 years because of that. Lately he has a little hope.
  • He was strapped to a chair for 12 hours not being able to move anything but his head. Didn’t eat, had to go the bathroom and he just went.

Guest – Liz Springer, activist and the grandmother of Andre Jacobs.
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Russell Maroon Shoatz

As many listeners may know, former Black Panther Russell Shoatz has been in prison since 1972, and the past 21 of those years has been spent in solitary confinement.  He’s 67, his spirit unbroken and in addition to his record of good conduct, members of the Pennsylvania Prison Society who visit Mr. Shoatz regularly attest to his peaceful disposition.  Earlier this year the National Lawyers Guild called on Superintendent Louis Folino to support the Program Review Board’s recommendation to release Russell Maroon Shoatz into the general prison population at SCI Greene in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania. His daughter Theresa Shoatz joins us talk more about his advocacy work and life as a political prisoner.

Theresa Shoatz:

  • The solitary confinement has had the worst effect on us. Within the 39 years we was able to have contact visits.
  • The unit he’s in now, there’s no contact, you’re behind a glass when you visit.
  • He’s had grandchildren since that time, and he hasn’t touched the grandchildren either. Our family is dedicated to visiting him, every 3 months.
  • Russell Shoatz being known throughout the country.  I notice now, his conversations are laid back, he’s not as upbeat as he used to be.
  • He keeps stressing almost on our weekly calls, you gotta get me outta here.
  • They told me Daddy’s a leader, I said no, he’s a grandfather.  The Panthers didn’t say we want to battle the police. They said, we want to educate our youth, we want to feed them, we want to take control of our community. When it became war, and the Panthers were under attack, they said we got to protect ourselves.
  • That’s what happened, and of course, Daddy’s a political prisoner. He took a stand and stood on the front line for his people and his community.
  • I had a little attitude with him, I said why would you leave us, this was some years ago. He said,  (I did it for my people. How could I allow you to be raised in that type of system?) It hit me like a ton of bricks.
  • The guards, they called themselves the “wolfpack” when you’d see them comin, they would roll one pants leg all the up to the knee.
  • I went to Governor’s office, the Governor of Pennsylvania. I was on trains, back and forth.
  • It’s the same thing, when our people get in the streets and march, you really can’t do one march.
  • At SCI Greene, over 20 young men in their 20’s hung themselves there (lynching) within a short time of solitary confinement.
  • Daddy was constantly yelling to the guys, what to do. They come in strollin. Strollin down the solitary unit.
  • This prison bubble is going to burst. There are people fighting on all levels, this prison bubble is going to burst.
  • It’s going to end, we’re going to make sure of that.

Guest – Theresa Shoatz, daughter of political prisoner Russell Shoatz and activist with the Human Rights Coalition.

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Law and Disorder August 15, 2011

Civil Liberties, FBI Intrusion, Human Rights, Targeting Muslims, Truth to Power

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Updates:

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A Setback For Obama’s War On Whistleblowers

The Department of Justice’s campaign to stigmatize whistle blowers and force reporters to open up their notebooks under the Espionage Act is failing. Recently, Judge Leonie M. Brinkema in an opinion released a couple weeks ago, said prosecutors could not force author and New York Times reporter to testify about how he learned certain classified information for a book on the Central Intelligence Agency.  In another example, a former senior NSA official was charged under the Espionage Act and accused of leaking classified information to a newspaper. He recently walked out of court a free man, sentenced to a year’s probation and community service, after hearing the judge excoriate the government for its handling of the case.

Attorney Scott Horton:

  • Obama criticized the oppression of whistle blowers on the campaign trail.
  • He talked about how early in his career he had represented whistle blowers, and they play a part in our society and they need our protection.  When confronted now, he shoots back I was talking about whistle blowers in areas other than national security.
  • There have dozens of whistle blowers in the national security area, but I would say the pattern that unfolds, is there’s an internal investigation, the person is stripped of their security classification, they usually lose their job.
  • These prosecutions don’t lead to long prison terms.
  • I think what we see is a turn to the Espionage Act in order to justify far more serious terms and have a 10 or 20 year sentence.
  • The Espionage Act can be used to justify going after reporters. Access to their internet accounts, phone records, and compelling reporters to give evidence against their sources.
  • The Drake case and the Sterling case are two most important ones right now. The NSA took the position that Drake was disclosing secrets by revealing all of this.
  • At least half a dozen senior figures in the Obama Whitehouse provided extremely sensitive and classified information to Bob Woodward for that book. No investigation, no prosecution.
  • You can open the New York Times and the Washington Post everyday and find some national secret that’s been leaked by a member of the administration to help score a point for the administration. There’s never any investigation.
  • Nothing is more clear that only political motivations drive these cases. The cases that are most embarrassing are the cases that are most rigorously prosecuted.
  • The person prosecuted Thomas Drake was a selfless civil servant, spent his entire life serving the government, served in the Air Force, the Navy, the NSA and had sacrificed through his life to advance the interest of government.
  • He was being prosecuted because of his concern for taxpayers. He saw fraud and waste in contractor management he tried to stop. He went through every proper channel and then when he went to the press, he’s prosecuted for doing that.
  • The prosecutor William H Welch is the man known for having bungled the prosecution of Alaska Senator Ted Stevens.  The Washingtonian did a whole career profile on William Welch.
  • The Obama Administration came in, it made certain promises. You see inside the DOJ, they’ve assigned people to change the policy guidelines. And they have, if you go back and look at the policy guidelines for state secrets invocations and the policy guidelines, they’re there for these whistle blower cases and the guidelines have been changed.
  • What I hear from lawyers there (DOJ) is that the attitude they have now toward the CIA and the NSA are that these two agencies are their clients. They do the bidding of these agencies, they never question their characterizations or assessments.
  • I think that’s what we see in the prosecution decisions here. We see senior officials at the CIA and NSA who have been embarrassed by these disclosures and they want to get even with the people who have embarrassed them and the Justice Department is perfectly happy to go out there and do their bidding.

Guest – New York attorney Scott Horton, known for his work in human rights law and the law of armed conflict. Scott is also the contributing editor to Harper’s Magazine.

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BDS Movement Ignites Amid U.S. Food Co-ops

An emerging BDS movement is making waves at a Food Coop in Brooklyn, similar to the successful Boycott Divestment Sanction effort last summer in Olympia, Washington. The Olympia movement was pioneered by Nobel Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu in the home city of the Corrie family.  The Brooklyn BDS protest is causing backlash amid the Jewish community. Some Jewish leaders opposed to the movement say it reveals antisemitism and that the assumption of Israel’s right to exist isn’t shared.

The boycott, in this case urges people around the world to stop buying products that support Israeli infrastructure such as Loreal, Motorola, Caterpillar, and many more.  Sanctions, would target those companies exporting to Israel and applying tariffs or trade barriers. Divest or disinvestment, is the call to divest from companies, institutions and universities that support Israel’s occupation and lobby power.

Attorney Dennis James:

  • I’m a co-op member and the co-op has been around since the seventies. It’s the oldest and largest food co-op in the United States, it’s got 16 thousand members and a waiting list.
  • In the past 2 or 3 years, there has been a running dispute reflected in the editors of the Linewaiters Gazette of counter charges and charges regarding the issue of handling Israeli produced goods.
  • There has developed a movement to try to resolve this. To do it in a democratic way that’s provided for by the procedures of the co-op which was founded in a political sense. It’s had about 11 boycotts.
  • The proposal made by the proponents of the boycott is that it should be by referendum of all 16 thousand members rather than at a general membership meeting in which 3 or 4 hundred people attend.
  • Where we are now, slogging our way through the procedures of the co-op is that there has been a meeting specified in the process is a pure discussion of whether or not there should be a referendum.
  • There’s the Hava products and people are doing research on what particular products there are.
  • There are certain fresh foods that come in off season. Two principle objectives come up, why Israel? – meaning while there’s this misery around the planet of the Chinese imposing on the Tibetans, Turks imposing on the Kurds and the other one is – it will destroy the co-op.
  • The elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about and that is US support for everything Israel does, which is not characteristic of almost any other conflict as bad as it might be of majorities vs minorities throughout the world.
  • We support this, we finance this. We back it up with a guaranteed veto in the U.N. whenever Israel wants it.
  • There is 81 Congressmen in Israel right now on vacation. Paid for by AIPAC. They give Netanyahu 29 standing ovations, no president gets that.  They’re shaking in their boots, whether AIPAC is going to come to their district.
  • The anti-boycott people (co-op) are saying we’re going to walk out, we’re going to destroy. (the very people who want to prevent the vote – referendum)
  • They don’t want to debate you, they want to destroy you. They want to shut you down to shut you up.
  • In Israel: People can lose their tax exempt status if they are of an organization like an NGO that has advocated boycotts of say settlement produced goods as do a number of Israeli NGOs.
  • They can be fined. There is a number of particular civil sanctions that are available to those who advocate a boycott.

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Attorney Barbara Harvey:

  • The BDS movement really took off after calls went out for a global BDS in 2005 from Palestinian Civil Society.
    176 of the major civil society Palestinian organizations issued a joint call for a global BDS. They asked for non-violent economic resistance to occupation.
  • The U.S. Zion organizations, AIPAC, the Jewish Federation, the JCRC and other Jewish organizations in this country would not have jointly created a six million dollar fund dedicated to defeating the BDS movement in the United States.
  • Something we should not allow ourselves to be distracted by in my opinion. It is an effort to revive, reenact anti-boycott provisions of an old export administration act. These anti-boycott provisions expired a decade ago, but they were continued by presidential emergency orders including one signed by President Obama.
  • They intend to prohibit collaboration by U.S. people that includes corporations, with the Arab League Boycott Against Israel. If intended to prevent exporters from cooperating with and supporting the Arab League Boycott. It is not directed against human rights campaigns such as BDSs.
  • The Olympia Food Co-op is actually an important story. Olympia, Washington is the hometown of Rachel Corrie who was the young Evergreen College student who was bulldozed to her death by the Caterpillar D9 weaponized bulldozer.
  • (The Olympia Food Co-op) adopted a boycott on the purchase for re-sale all goods from Israel, in accordance with the goals of the BDS movement a year ago.  It has been successful, it has been under the gun ever since. The fact is, it hasn’t hurt business and it hasn’t backed off.
  • This highlights the hysteria fomented by the opponents of the BDS that they’d like us to lose sight of. The majority of American Jews in this country, genuinely want a fair and peaceful resolution of the conflict.
  • The whole Netanyahu Administration has been a real trauma for American Jews.
  • TIAA-CREF is a retirement behemoth. It has more than 400 billion dollars assets. The goal is to persuade TIAA-CREF to divest its portfolios from the occupation.
  • WeDivest.org / WhoProfits.org / BDSMovement.net / Al-Shabaka.org

Guest –  National Lawyers Guild attorney Dennis James.  Dennis has been active in anti-war, civil rights, and social justice issues. He recently traveled to Gaza with a UN delegation in 2009.

Guest –  Attorney Barbara Harvey in Detroit who has worked with BDS activists and a former JVP Board Member

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Law and Disorder August 1, 2011

Civil Liberties, Crony Capitalism, Guantanamo, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Surveillance, Truth to Power

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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.

Professor Rick Wolff:

  • 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

Afghanistan War, Civil Liberties, Extraordinary Rendition, FBI Intrusion, Guantanamo, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power, War Resister

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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.

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.