CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, War Resister
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U.S. Pressed on Israeli Settlement Tax Breaks
The U.S. Treasury has long turned a blind eye to as many as 150 nonprofits that funnel up to $1 billion a year to Israeli settlements, according to a federal complaint filed in December. It now finds itself as a defendant in a just filed a lawsuit by Washington DC attorney Mark McMahon. Rather than engaging in “charitable activities,” these nonprofits—supported by US donations—are allegedly fueling land theft, forcible expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their land, demolition of homes and paramilitary activities carried out by armed Israeli settlers against Palestinian civilians. Some of the tax-exempt entities include the Hebron Fund, the Gush Etzion Foundation, American Friends of Ariel and Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces.
Pro bono attorney for the plaintiffs in the case, Martin McMahon, claims that huge tax deductions are being taken that support ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Proving the allegations could lead the U.S. to designate these entities as “special designated global terrorists,” stripping them of their tax-exempt status and freezing their assets, he says. In addition to entrenching Israel’s occupation of Palestine, the complaint alleges that these organizations have undermined U.S. foreign policy in support of a Palestinian state and helped breed the conditions from which Palestinian violent resistance emerges. It alleges that the Treasury’s “double standard” in enforcing its own regulations has led to the proliferation of the Israeli settlement enterprise, resulting in up to $1 trillion in lost U.S. tax revenue.
Guest – Attorney Martin McMahon, the founding member and managing partner of Martin F. McMahon & Associates. He has extensive experience in the securities industry, civil rights litigation, and has argued in over 10 appellate cases before the D.C. Court of Appeals and Maryland Court of Appeals.
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Islamophobia 2016
After 9/11, and now in response to recent events around the globe, thousands of innocent Muslims continue to be monitored, entrapped, and arrested in the name of subverting radicalized terrorism. Hateful rhetoric from presidential candidate Donald Trump and others have inflamed anti-Muslim stereotypes and led to numerous instances of hate crimes.
Joining us to discuss law enforcement ideologies and strategies, as well as the general public’s perceptions of Muslims, is Arun Kundnani, author of the 2014 book The Muslims Are Coming! Islamophobia, extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror.
Guest – Arun Kundani – Born and bred in London, Arun moved to New York in 2010 on a fellowship with the Open Society Foundations. He lives in Harlem. He is also the author of The End of Tolerance: Racism in 21st Century Britain, selected as a New Statesman book of the year in 2007. A former editor of the journal Race & Class, he attended Cambridge University, holds a PhD from London Metropolitan University, and teaches at New York University.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Surveillance, Torture, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Updates:
- Co-host Attorney Michael Smith Reflects On The Anti-Union Oppression In Detroit And Wisconsin In The Late 50s
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Trumbo
In the late 1930s and early 40s, many artists, writers, and intellectuals who sympathized with the poor, the labor movement, and the fights against racism and fascism aligned themselves with the Communist Party – which was then following the Stalinist policy of the “popular front”. Hence, when the governments anti-Communist witch-hunt got underway soon after the end of the second world war in 1946, many in Hollywood were placed under suspicion. Lists of names were drawn up, and those named were subpoenaed by the house committee on un-American activities (HUAC). Novelist and screenwriter Dalton Trumbo had joined the Communist Party in 1943, and he was on that list. In 1947, when called to testify before the HUAC, Trumbo refused to testify on the basis of freedom of association and freedom of thought, both supposedly guaranteed by the First Amendment to the constitution known as the Bill of Rights. Trumbo spent 11 months in federal prison in Kentucky. He was blacklisted and couldn’t get a job in Hollywood for 13 years, but won Oscars is for two movies that came out under other names. The movie Trumbo starring Bryan Cranston does an effective job of showing the fear of communism that was generated in those dark times and how it decimated Hollywood and was used for thought control.
Guest – Zachary Sklar, Oscar-nominated co-screenwriter of Oliver Stone’s film JFK, and author of the book JFK: The Book of the Film. He’s a journalist, and a professor at the Columbia School of Journalism. He was also a contributor to The Lies of Our Times, a monthly journal dedicated to exposing the truth behind the mainstream media. Zach collaborated with director Oliver Stone on the screenplay of the movie “JFK” and was editor of Jim Garrison’s book “On the Trail of the Assassins.”
Outgoing song – “Nothing” by the Fugs, performed by the Down Hill Strugglers
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Climate Change Conference COP21
The meeting on controlling climate change by reducing greenhouse gases produced by fossil fuels concluded in Paris last week and involved representatives from every nation in the world. The agreement that came out a Paris is widely believed by climate change activists to be not nearly enough; That we need more reductions or our very existence is threatened. Critics of the talks say that it fell short because there were no timetables and no targets and no binding commitments.
Guest – Eleanor Stein, teaches a course called the Law of Climate Change: Domestic and Transnational at Albany Law School and SUNY Albany, in conjunction with the Environmental and Atmospheric Sciences Department at SUNY. Eleanor Stein is teaching transnational environmental law with a focus on catastrophic climate change. For ten years she served as an Administrative Law Judge at the New York State Public Service Commission in Albany, New York, where she presided over and mediated New York’s Renewable Portfolio Standard proceeding, a collaboration and litigation of over 150 parties, authoring in June 2004 a comprehensive decision recommending a landmark state environmental initiative to combat global warming with incentives for renewable resource-fueled power generation.
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Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Drug Policy Alliance Looking Forward
In slow yet incremental steps, progress is being made toward establishing more sensible and humane drug policies in the United States.
The past half century has been characterized by politically-motivated hysteria around the so-called War on Drugs, resulting in harsh sentencing laws, and a subsequent soaring of mass incarceration rates. Half of the federal prison population is in for drug offenses, and the result has been highly detrimental to families and communities.
Two years ago former Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Justice Department would begin to reassess the draconian mandatory minimum sentences on non-violent drug offenders that disproportionately target young African American and Latino males. Such public pronouncements, along with continued grassroots organizing, and heightened public awareness that the War on Drugs has been an abysmal failure, are helping to shift the tide in drug policies. The Drug Policy Alliance has made measurable strides in criminal justice reforms such as in helping to decriminalize marijuana in Colorado and Washington.
Guest – Ethan Nadelmann, founder and executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, the leading organization in the United States promoting alternatives to the war on drugs. Nadelmann received his B.A., J.D., and Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard as well as a Masters’ degree in International Relations from the London School of Economics, and taught at Princeton University for seven years. He has authored two books – Cops Across Borders and (with Peter Andreas) Policing The Globe – and his writings have appeared in most major media outlets in the U.S. as well as top academic journals.
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Radicals In America: The US Left Since The Second World War
Radicals in the United States, often controversial and frequently dismissed by the status quo, have nonetheless played a significant role in mobilizing social justice movements. In the recently published book “Radicals in America: The U.S. Left since the Second World War,” authors Christopher Phelps and Howard Brick have compiled
a comprehensive history of radicalism that includes the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle through the Occupy Wall Street movement.
The list of accomplishments by the Left is significant, including: racial integration, desegregation of the armed forces, the maintenance of labor unions for nearly 50 years until the election of President Ronald Reagan, the rise of feminism, abortion-rights, and the American withdrawal from Vietnam. The authors of Radicals in America explain how successive generations join movements of dissent, face political setbacks and repression and yet still have succeeded in sparking the imagination among mass movements.
Guest – Christopher Phelps, historian of modern American political and intellectual life. Born near Washington, D.C., he has taught at universities in five countries: Britain, the United States, Poland, Hungary, and Canada. He is author of the intellectual biography Young Sidney Hook (Cornell, 1997; 2d ed., Michigan, 2005) and Radicals in America (Cambridge, 2015), a comprehensive history of the American left since the Second World War co-authored with Howard Brick.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, FBI Intrusion, NSA Spying, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, War Resister
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Lawyers You’ll Like – Attorney Carol Sobel
As part of our Lawyers You’ll Like series, we’re joined today by civil rights attorney Carol Sobel. Attorney Sobel has spent more than 2 decades working in various positions for the ACLU, including as Senior Staff Attorney. She also chaired the National Lawyers Guild mass defense committee for many years helping coordinate a nationwide defense of Occupy protesters and marshaling legal defense at several Democratic and Republican National conventions.
Carol has been involved in numerous significant cases in federal and state courts including on behalf of homeless individuals on Los Angeles’ skid row. She has been involved in numerous significant cases in federal and state courts. She served as local counsel for the Center for Constitutional Rights in Humanitarian Law Project v. Ashcroft and served on the Rampart Blue Ribbon Panel investigating police corruption in California. A graduate of the Peoples College of Law, since 2002, Carol has been named as one of Los Angeles’ Super Lawyers for Civil Rights.
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The War ISIS Wants: Nafees Hamid
Today we take a look into the psychology of terrorist recruitment and mindset in the wake of the coordinated attacks in Paris carried out by the Islamic state. We also look at the profound allure of the propaganda bringing young Muslims in to join ISIS and become a Mujahid. The transition from regular person to a warrior willing to die for the revolution happens quickly. In the article titled Paris: The War ISIS Wants by Scott Atran and Nafees Hamid, the ISIS movement is described as a trans-national movement, a sub state that doesn’t depend on an infrastructure of a state system. That and ISIS’s unitary message and appeal has created a big problem for the west using military action and ramped up mass surveillance to combat and intercept terrorist acts.
Guest – Nafees Hamid, Social Psychologist Nafees Hamid of University College London, researcher, actor and author of many articles including The War ISIS Wants.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Gaza, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, NSA Spying, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, Truth to Power
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A Good American
Weeks before the September 11 attacks, newly-arrived NSA director General Michael Hayden nixed a highly-effective computer surveillance program called ThinThread. Hayden instead elected to award a $280 million contract to the private Science Applications International Corporation to develop Trailblazer, a program that ultimately cost billions of dollars and that was deemed by anonymous NSA sources as a “wasteful failure” before it was finally abandoned.
A new film by Austrian director Freidrich Moser, “A Good American,” tells the story of the mathematician many consider the best code-breaker the US ever had and how he and a small team within the NSA created ThinThread. It could pick up any electronic signal on Earth, filter for terrorist activity, and render results in real-time, avoiding data overload which has been an life-threatening impediment to national intelligence agencies. ThinThread protected American’s privacy by using an anonymizer so that identities were only revealed after obtaining a court warrant. In a secret test-run in early 2002 of the ThinThread against the pre-9/11-NSA database, the program quickly detected the terrorists’ plans.
Guest – Freidrich Moser, Friedrich holds a university degree (MA) in history and german studies from the University of Salzburg Austria. Friedrich started his professional career as a TV journalist and editor in Bolzano-Bozen Italy. In 2001 he founded blue+green communication. He has made over 20 documentaries most of them as producer director DoP. In 2008 he attended successfully the Documentary Campus, the European Masterschool for non-fiction filmmaking.
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Academic Freedom Case Victory Bittersweet: University of Illinois To Pay $875,000 Settlement To Professor Steven Salaita
University of Illinois trustees have voted to agree to a $875,000 financial settlement with Steven Salaita. Last year, his job offer for a tenured position at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was withdrawn after he posted tweets harshly critical of the 2014 Israeli assault on Gaza. Under the terms of the settlement, Salaita will not get his job back but will receive $600,000. The rest of the money will go to his legal team. “This settlement is a vindication for me, but more importantly, it is a victory for academic freedom and the First Amendment,” Salaita said in a statement. “The petitions, demonstrations, and investigations, as well as the legal case, have reinvigorated American higher education as a place of critical thinking and rigorous debate, and I am deeply grateful to all who have spoken out.” .
Guest – Maria LaHood – Deputy Legal Director at the Center for Constitutional Rights with expertise in constitutional rights and international human rights. She works to defend the constitutional rights of Palestinian human rights advocates in the United States in cases such as Davis v. Cox, defending Olympia Food Co-op board members for boycotting Israeli goods; Salaita v. Kennedy,representing Steven Salaita, who was terminated from a tenured position for tweets critical of Israel; and CCR v. DOD, seeking U.S. government records under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) regarding Israel’s 2010 attack on the flotilla to Gaza. She works closely with Palestine Legal to support students and others whose speech is being suppressed for their Palestine advocacy around the country. She also works on the Right to Heal initiative with Iraqi civil society and Iraq Veterans seeking accountability for the lasting health effects of the Iraq war.
Guest – Anan Swaminathan– joined Loevy & Loevy in 2010. Anand has worked on a broad range of constitutional and civil rights cases, and has worked extensively on False Claims Act litigation, where he has represented whistleblowers alleging defense/military and other government contractor fraud, bid-rigging, Medicare and Medicaid fraud, construction/contractor (MBE/DBE) fraud, and tax fraud. Anand has also represented whistleblowers in financial fraud cases under the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, and in complex fraud cases under other federal and state statutes.
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CIW Farmworkers Protest Wendy’s Board Chairman Nelson Peltz
We caught up with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers protest in front of the Wendy’s fast food restaurant in midtown Manhattan and spoke with Gerardo Reyes Chávez. Gerardo has worked in the fields since age 11, first as a peasant farmer in Zacatecas, Mexico, and then in the fields of Florida picking oranges, tomatoes, and watermelons. He joined the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a Florida-based human rights organization, shortly after his arrival in the United States in 2000, when his fellow farm worker roommates, who had previously escaped a violent slavery operation hidden in the swamp south of Immokalee, Florida, invited him to come to the CIW’s Wednesday evening community meetings.
We also spoke with a Rabbi Raphael Kohntraster with T’ruah, a major Jewish ally of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, inspiring Jewish communities around the country to join and support the human rights of farmworkers and call on grocery stores and restaurant chains to sign onto the Fair Food Program.
(photo credit: Jake Ratner)
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