Latest News

Updates:

• Lynne Stewart Compassionate Release Petition
  
• Please Also Write to: Charles E Samuels Jr. / Federal Bureau of Prisons /
• 320 1st Street Northwest / Washington DC 20534

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Court Upholds Broad Injunction to Remedy FDNY Discrimination

We talk today about recent developments in the New York City Fire Department discrimination case known as the US and Vulcan Society v. City of New York. Last week, a three-judge panel of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals held that, in light of the City’s “distressing pattern of limited FDNY minority hiring,” broad relief ordered by the district judge to end discrimination in the FDNY was “entirely warranted.”

This decision includes an independent monitor in order to “oversee the FDNY’s long awaited progress toward ending discrimination.”  The Court also ruled that the plaintiffs’ intentional discrimination claim should proceed to a trial.  The district court had found that the evidence of intentional discrimination was so overwhelming that no trial was necessary. The Court of Appeals also reinstated the plaintiffs’ claim that former FDNY Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta is individually liable for intentional discrimination.

Attorney  Dana Lossia:

• The Vulcan Society which is our client, a fraternity of black fire fighters sued the city of New York and said that the reason why the fire department back in the 60s and 70s was virtually all white was because of the hiring process that the city was using, it was discriminatory, it was unlawful.
• A federal judge agreed back in 1973 and ordered the city to hire one minority firefighter for every 3 white firefighters that was hired.
• Decades went on, we get up to the 90s and you look at the FDNY and it’s still 3 percent African American.
• It instituted the quota that was required for the bare minimum amount of time that was required and then it reverted to the all white club that the fire department has been its entire history in New York City.
• In a city that is 25 percent African American or more and 25 percent Latino.
• We made the case that not only was the city using these exams but they were continuing to use them with the knowledge and intent to perpetuate the fire department as it has existed.
• So that fathers could bring their sons and their nephews into the force and it would stay the way it had always been which is virtually all white, more than 90 percent white.
• The District Court Judge in Brooklyn agreed with us he said this was clearly intentional discrimination. He issued a remedial order requiring broad oversight  of the FDNY hiring process.
• The city didn’t like that, they appealed to the Court of Appeals. The Court of Appeals came down with a decision that largely upheld this very broad and deep oversight on everything the city does to hire firefighters.
• Every other fire department in a big city across the country is more racially diverse than in New York City.
• Back in the 80s women came into the fire department and face horrible harassment and retaliation.
• One of the things we learned is that fire fighting is less dangerous than construction work, its far less dangerous job than being a police officer, a roofer.
• Fire fighters are revered wherever they go and the job is much much more safe than sanitation work.

Guest – Attorney Dana Lossia (Northwestern University, B.A., summa cum laude 2001, Harvard Law School, J.D., 2005) joined Levy Ratner in December 2005. She represents unions in New York and New Jersey in arbitrations, administrative proceedings, NLRB cases and federal and state court litigation. She also represents plaintiffs in complex employment discrimination actions, including a challenge to racially discriminatory hiring practices at the NYC Fire Department. Lossia has also litigated on behalf of tenants in land use and zoning appeals before the NYC Board of Standards and Appeals.

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Lawyers You’ll Like: Anne O’Berry 

As part of our Lawyers You’ll Like series we’re joined by attorney Anne O’Berry, she’s the Vice President of the Southern Region of the National Lawyers Guild and the author of The Law Only As An Enemy:  The Legitimization of Racial Powerlessness Through the Colonial and Antebellum Criminal Laws of Virginia. While in law school, she served as Director of the Women in Prison Project at Rikers Island, where she taught incarcerated women how to prevent termination of their parental rights. In the last 12 years, Anne has served as counsel at a Florida law firm that specializes in class action litigation, particularly in the areas of securities, consumer and economic fraud, as well as some environmental and privacy rights litigation.

Attorney Anne O’Berry:

• We did a lot of historical research in terms of racism and the law back in pre-civil war Virginia.
• We focused on Virginia because it was a paradigm for slavery basically in the slave laws that were in place.
• We wrote an article for publication, it was published in the University of North Carolina law review. The Law Only As An Enemy:’ The Legitimization of Racial Powerlessness Through the Colonial and Antebellum Criminal Laws of Virginia.
• Depending on your status, if you were a free white person or a slave, you were treated differently by the law.
• As an overall theme, depending on the race of the victim was that would effect what your sentence would be.
• For example, if a black woman was raped, that was not considered a crime.  If you were a black person and you stole something, you would be put to death.
• It was ironic for the slave owner because if their slave was put to death, they would have to be compensated by the state.
• If the victim was black, the crime was treated less seriously than if the victim was white.
• I started out working at a firm in New York, a large prominent, Wall Street type.
• Among some people I was known as the pro-bono queen.
• I was there for 2 and a half years and the first pro-bono case was a death penalty case.
• The court ruled back then (1990s) that it was ok to execute the mentally retarded.
• I was so moved by that experience that I gave up my cushy job in New York and go do death penalty work full time.
• I ended up at the Federal Resource Center doing death penalty work in Tallahassee Florida.
• I worked for the Battered Women’s Clemency Project in Florida.
• More recently the Supreme Court did rule that it is unconstitutional to execute people who were juveniles at the time of the offense and unconstitutional to execute people who are mentally retarded.
• I believe in my lifetime we will see the end of the death penalty in this country.
• It’s just an amazing system that we have where the courts will say – yes you’ve got compelling evidence of innocence but we’re not going to hear your case.
• I would say what got me through was the victories.
• Presently,  I’m working with an attorney Jim Green, who’s a prominent civil rights attorney in West Palm Beach,  kind of a legend down here.
• I also some volunteer work with El Sol. It’s a day laborer center in Jupiter, Florida.

Guest – Anne O’Berry, National Lawyers Guild’s Regional Vice President for the Southern Region and a member of the Guild’s South Florida chapter.  She obtained her undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1983 and her law degree from New York University Law School in 1986.  While in law school, she served as Director of the Women in Prison Project at Rikers Island, where she taught incarcerated women how to prevent termination of their parental rights.  She was a member of the law school’s civil rights clinic and an editor on one of the law school’s journals, and authored a law review article on prisoners’ rights.

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Guatemalan Ex Dictator Found Guilty of Genocide

After weeks of powerful testimony the trial of former Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt and his intelligence chief José Rodríguez Sánchez ended with a guilty conviction on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. The verdict marked the first time a former head of state had been found guilty of genocide in his or her own country.The government’s lead prosecutor, Orlando López, gave more than two hours of summation based heavily on the Guatemalan military plans, manuals, and operational records entered as evidence. During the months of General Ríos Montt’s rule, the army used a scorched-earth policy to flush out leftist guerrillas fighting in the hills. The villages of the Mayan highlands suffered the worst of the army’s brutality in the early 1980s, during Guatemala’s 36-year civil war.

Kate Doyle:

• I’m one of a couple of analysts that look at foreign policy in Latin America. My specialty is Central America and Mexico and I’m the director of something called the Evidence Project at the Archive, which is a way of connecting the right to information, right the truth with human rights and justice struggles around the region.
• We’ve worked very closely with truth commissions, with prosecutors and judges to try to get some of the classified US documents and sometimes even the national documents from their countries in to their hands when they’ve got a human rights investigation underway.
• The impetus for this case really came from the affected communities themselves that is in this case, the community of the Mayan Ixil.
• In the Northwestern part of the country, which worked for decades to identify exhumation sites. Sites where they knew there were clandestine mass graves of their own mothers, fathers, children who had massacred during the scorched earth operations of Rios Montt in 1982 and 1983.
• In March of 1982, Rios Montt headed a trio of military officers that overthrew the previous president. There was a guerrilla armed insurgency underway in Guatemala and had been since the 1960s. Rios Montt decided he was going to launch a series of counterinsurgency operations not only to target the armed insurgents in the highlands but also to destroy or eliminate their social base.
• That meant going after communities of mostly Mayan peoples that lived in the same area where the insurgents operated. It’s one of the most brutal acts of what used to be called low intensity warfare.
• The officials that carried out those operations were left to enjoy total impunity after the regime ended some 17 months later.
• Prosecutors and both the government prosecutors and civil prosecutors who represent the victims who also get to sit at the table ask questions and participate in the investigation pulled together a real interesting case for genocide and crimes against humanity.
• I’ve been working with those prosecutors for years to help them incorporate both declassified US documents as evidence in the case but also those Guatemalan military archives.
• Because of the very tight relationship between the United States and the Guatemalan regime of Rios Montt and predecessor regimes, we knew these agencies would have countless records of the operations themselves of the Guatemalan military structure of command and control.
• Some of the most extraordinary testimony for me came from women because the Guatemalan military like many militaries in these irregular wars used sexual abuse and violation as a part of their counterinsurgency tactics and they actually talk about the destruction of the “semia” the seed.
• The day the verdict came down, the court that seats about 500 people, was absolutely packed to the gills, so every seat was full. When the mood in the room began to feel tense, because of the intensity of the verdict and what that meant for Guatemala. Everybody began to stand up and sing this beautiful song, this poem that was set to music by a Guatemalan musician, over and over again and brought the tension down slowly slowly, it was one of the most beautiful moments I’ve ever witnessed in a court room.
• The Guatemalans were focused on legally convicting the authors of genocide, and they did it.

Guest – Kate Doyle,  a Senior Analyst of U.S. policy in Latin America at the National Security Archive. She directs several major research projects, including the Guatemala Project, which collects declassified U.S. and Guatemalan government documents on the countries’ shared history from 1954, and the Evidence Project, connecting the right to truth and access to information with human rights and justice struggles in Latin America. Since 1992, Doyle has worked with Latin American human rights groups, truth commissions, prosecutors and judges to obtain government files from secret archives that shed light on state violence. She has testified as an expert witness in numerous human rights legal proceedings, including the 2008 trial of former President Alberto Fujimori of Peru for his role in overseeing military death squads; the case before the Spanish National Court on the 1989 assassination of the Jesuit priests in El Salvador; and the 2010 trial of two former policemen in Guatemala for the forced disappearance of labor leader Edgar Fernando García in 1984

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Updates:

• Guantanamo Hunger Strike Update:
• Lynne Stewart Petition For Compassionate Release
• Michael Ratner Visits Julian Assange: Kissinger Documents
• Chris Hedges: The Death of Truth

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MOVE Bombing: 28th Anniversary

This week marks the 28th anniversary of an armed police mission in Philadelphia that ended in a helicopter bombing of the headquarters of the group known as MOVE. The fire commissioner in that city allowed a fire to rage unabated at 6221 Osage Avenue in West Philadelphia, killing six adults and five children, destroying 65 homes and leaving more than 200 people homeless. Despite two Grand Jury investigations, and a commission finding that top officials were grossly negligent, no one from city government was ever criminally charged. A recent film called Let the Fire Burn, chronicles the events leading up to the conflagration.

Ramona Africa:

• The government, through the media had mislead people to believe that what happened in May of 1985 was because of complaints from neighbors which is absolutely not true.
• What happened on May 13, 1985 happened because of our unrelenting fight for the release of our innocent sisters and brothers known as the MOVE 9 who were arrested in August 1978.
• After years of abuse, physical abuse, judicial abuse by this system, MOVE babies being killed through miscarriage and a 3 week old baby being trampled to death by police, after countless unprovoked beatings of MOVE men and women, children, even pregnant women, MOVE people took a stand and said listen, we are uncompromisingly opposed to violence, we’re a peaceful people. We’re not stupid and we’re not masochistic or suicidal.
• We do believe in self defense which is the law, the law of life. There is not a species on this Earth that doesn’t defend itself, when threatened, when attacked.
• When MOVE took that stand, the government became enraged.
• They alleged housing code violations, and they wanted MOVE to move out of the home based on housing code violations.
• MOVE people wouldn’t go along with that. A judge gave MOVE people til August 1 to get out.
• On August 2, 1985, a judge issued warrants on any MOVE people he knew of including people he knew were not in the house.
• After the warrants were issued, hundreds and hundreds of cops were sent out to our home.
• They shot thousands of bullets into that house. The fire department used deluge hoses to flood our home.
• The officer that was killed was standing on street level while everybody including the police acknowledged that all MOVE people were in the basement of our home.
• This policeman was shot from a bullet traveling on a downward angle.
• Hours after I was arrested on August 17, the city sent a demolition team out and completely demolished MOVE’s home which was the scene of the crime.
• The MOVE 9 trial was a bench trial, not a jury trial.
• They did it to silence our righteous protest and our unrelenting fight for the release of our family the MOVE 9.
• They came out to our home on Mother’s Day, May 12 1985, with warrants they obtained on May 11.
• The Fire Department as in 1978 was their first mode of attack.
• They came out there to kill, that’s the bottom line.
• When their ten thousand rounds of bullets didn’t kill us, the water hoses, the tear gas didn’t do the job, they concocted a bomb made from powerful military explosives, C4.
• They got the C4 from the federal government, from the FBI.
• The state police helicopter flew over our home without any warning, and two Philadelphia Police bomb squad police officers dropped that bomb on the roof our home. It ignited a fire. They made a conscious decision not to put the fire out.

Guest – Ramona Africa, the sole adult survivor of the 1985 police bombing of the home occupied by members of the MOVE organization. Email Ramona – onamovelleja (at) gmail.com

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Assata Shakur Placed On FBI Terror List

Last week, the FBI placed Assata Shakur on its Most Wanted Terrorists list, while the state of New Jersey raised the bounty on her head to 2 million dollars. These actions fall on the 40th anniversary of the 1973 shoot out in in which police allege Shakur killed a police officer during a traffic stop on the New Jersey turnpike.  Assata also known as JoAnne Deborah Byron is an African American activist was a member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army.    Assata Shakur: Understanding the politics behind the FBI’s new attack.

Eugene Puryear:

• I think why a 65 year old grandmother has been put on the FBI terrorist list is a reflection of the United States government’s fear of that which opposes it.
• Assata Shakur was part of the 60s movements . . . a movement that the Nixon administration attempted to criminalize, to say that political dissent and political opposition to the US government and its imperial moves around the world.
• She does fit the profile of what the US government has been trying to perpetuate for the last 30 years, in a sense an extension of COINTELPRO.
• One person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter.
• Assata Shakur, her actions and beliefs is certainly not something that is beyond the pale but the US government view her as a terrorist.
• By placing her on this terrorist list, it’s a way of criminalizing dissent.
• Assata’s trial was moved several times, it was placed in counties that were mostly wealthy, mostly white where pre-trial publicity around the case had biased people in a major way against Assata Shakur.
• When the government wants to put someone away and they know they don’t have the evidence they want to do everything possible to both manipulate the venue and also bring in people whose predisposition will make them more likely to believe the government’s version of events.
• Assata was in a position to be put in prison for the rest of her life in these human-breaking conditions.
• The day before this happened, the US government refused to remove Cuba from the state sponsors of terrorism list. This is used in part for keeping Cuba on that list.
• Also to give a chilling effect to progressive movements in the United States.
• The US seems to be redefining what are terrorist actions and what its responses are.
• The lock down of Boston, the reclassification of Assata Shakur, the issuing of the drone memo of what eminence actually means.
• The US is attempting to create enough ambiguity in the statutes.

Guest – Eugene Puryear, Eugene is a writer and on the editorial board of the Liberation,  Newspaper of the Party for Socialism and Liberations.

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CIW – Fair Food Program: Wendy’s

Last year Trader Joe’s and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers signed an agreement that formalized the ways in which Trader Joe’s support the CIW’s Fair Food Program, a hard won victory.. Since then efforts have turned to companies such as Publix supermarkets in Florida and the Wendy’s fast food chain. Recently, Fair Food activists across the country visited their local Wendy’s to deliver a message: It’s time to join the rest of the fast-food industry and support the Fair Food Program.

Emilio Faustino:
Translator Joe Parker:

• We’re farm workers who come from the town Immokalee, Florida that’s based in the Southwestern part of the state. Our community is a farm worker community and for many years we faced a number of different kinds of exploitation, poverty, wage theft, physical and verbal abuse as well as sexual harassment of many women working in the fields.
• We began our campaign focused on the big corporate buyers of the produce that we pick back in 2001 in an effort to improve wages and working conditions in the fields, we began with Taco Bell and from there had campaigns with McDonald’s, Burger King, until as you said 11 other companies came to the table to dialogue with farm workers and work to improving those wages and working conditions in their supply chains.
• We’re here in New York focused on Wendy’s fast food chain. For a number of years the coalition has been sending letters to the fast food chain asking them to join the Fair Food program. We launched a public campaign with them earlier this year but thus far they have ignored us.
• We want Wendy’s to do what most of these corporations have done, that’s pay one penny more for each tomato that they buy.
• We’re here for the Wendy’s shareholder action, and we’re going to be organizing an protest on Saturday, May 18, at 2PM at Union Square to send a message to company’s investors that this is something that farmworkers in Wendy’s supply chain really deserve. There will also be a number of actions taking place that day all over the country in a number of communities standing together with the CIW.
• Contact: www.ciw-online.org, email: workers@ciw-online.org, 239-657-8311

Guest – Emelio Faustino, farm worker, CIW activist living in Florida. He is among other workers picking tomatoes by hand for 10-12 hours per day, while getting paid 50 cents per bin, or about 200 to 283 dollars per week.

Guest – Joe Parker, CIW spokesman and translator.

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IRS Allows Private Prison Corporation Tax Exemption Status

Billboard companies, casinos and private prisons are among many American corporations declaring the status of special trusts in order to avoid paying federal taxes. The Corrections Corporation of America which owns and operates 44 prisons and detention centers in the United States has quietly received permission by the Internal Revenue Service to switch it’s status saving millions on taxes. These special trust structures however are usually reserved by funds holding real estate. As we’ve discussed on Law and Disorder handing over state related tasks such as running penal institutions to the private sector is often at the expense of the inmates’ welfare.

Max Wolff:

• REIT is increasingly popular these days as an investment choice by both some institutions and individuals.
• REIT’s by law have advantageous tax treatment, its a legal structure of ownership and it requires you to get a better tax structure to pay out 90 percent of your earnings in dividends.
• What you have is individuals and institutions, looking to get an income on their wealth and finding it difficult to find appealing incomes on that wealth.
• This drives them into the area of REIT, its a unit investment trust.
• The tax rates on dividends and capital gains are lower, than say the people who work for a living in standard jobs are then compensated then taxed.
• This was probably made famous in a comment by Warren Buffet who wrote a famous letter and proposed a solution now called the Buffet Rule.
• Tax based on labor income vs. investment income
• The real estate class of investments enjoys any number of special abilities to generate income and pay less taxes. One of them is ensconced in the law of Real Estate Investment.
• The Corrections Corporation of America, private prisons – - if they are a unit investment trust, and they do get their income from rents, from a variety or type, from a property or type, its a prison, then they can get tax exempt treatment.
• Once you have a popular with investors category that can also receive advantageous tax treatment, then teams of lawyers will go out and get to work with economists and accountants and figure out how to shove everything they possibly can into that bucket.
• The regulators are usually a bit behind, in the staffing and acumen of their various attorneys. We call it regulation arbitrage.
• Anytime you can take a series of assets and reduce the tax burden on those assets, it means the various state and local authorities depending or needing those tax revenues, will go without.
• We’ll see more regressive taxes, in terms of more lottery tickets sold, hitting the general public for more money or reducing services.
• Part of what we’re seeing here is privatization of public assets.
• The United States of America has a fairly high corporate tax rate, legal not effective. 35 percent corporate tax rate.
• Once you’re a multinational enterprise you will try to pay taxes in whatever jurisdiction has the lowest rate.
• At one point in the 50s and 60s corporations paid about 30 percent of their income to the federal government in taxes. As we sit and chat now in New York City, they pay about 8 percent of the taxes.
• Tax avoidance strategy, Dutch Double Irish, its done by most of the leading tech companies. Maybe most aggressively pursued by Apple.
• Hundreds of thousands of people make a good living helping people pay less taxes.
• We now know its hundreds of billions of dollars in money that the government didn’t collect.
• The middle, upper middle class American is paying virtually the entire tax bill.
• Very very affluent Americans are able to off-load significant portions of their tax liability and large corporations.

Guest – Max Wolff - teacher of economics in the New School University Graduate Program in International Affairs. He’s
Senior Analyst & Chief Economist at Greencrest Capital. Mr. Wolff is an economist specializing in international finance and macroeconomics. Before joining Greencrest Capital he spent four years as the senior hedge fund analyst at the Beryl Consulting Group, LLC. Mr. Wolff teaches finance and statistical research methods in the New School University’s Graduate Program in International Affairs. Mr. Wolff’s financial markets and macroeconomics work appears regularly in Seeking Alpha, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Bloomberg, The BBC, Russia Today TV, and Al Jazeera English.

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Bush Library Direct Action: We Will Not Be Silent

Late last month in Dallas, Texas,  four living presidents and countless dignitaries attended the opening of the Bush Library.  In response to the library opening, relegated to the so called free speech zone across the street were the members of the white masked group, March of the Dead. While George W. Bush was being celebrated a procession of We Will Not Be Silent marchers carried the names of many who lost their lives in Afghanistan, Iraq, Bagram, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons. The marchers also carried names of civilians, US military and detainees tortured to death because of war crimes committed by the Bush Administration. WeWillNotBeSilent.net

Laurie Arbieter:

• We made some signs just for this and the one we designed was The Bush Library: A Crime Against the Mind.
• Hearing that the library was opening, this was several years ago, I felt compelled that we had to be there.
• The organizing force behind this were people in Dallas.
• They organized something called the people’s response.
• We were invited to do something we did in Washington, the March of the Dead.
• So, the March of the Dead returned to the opening of the Bush Library.
• We searched names that lost their lives in prisons under the Bush regime.
• They call it a “free speech zone” which is really Orwellian, we call it a “no speech zone” where they try to render us invisible.
• We were across a highway, several lane highway. They even tried to take that away. They tried to use an old ordinance – you can’t hold a sign within 75 feet of a highway.
• A lot of people now know the truth about Iraq, that we shouldn’t have gone in there.
• There were no weapons of mass destruction, no imminent threat.
• Lawrence B. “Larry” Wilkerson is a retired United States Army Colonel and former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell says we invaded Iraq because of oil.
• We have a war criminal that is being honored by 4 other living presidents. I can understand his father showing up, but Barack Obama, Clinton, Carter, caught in pictures that the media showed, laughing and joking around . . ?
• This man gave orders to torture people and admitted with his vice president on a book tour.
• How do you follow, with having men admit publicly that they did water-board, water boarding is torture, torture is a crime and the law is not coming to prosecute them.
• That’s a crime against our mind too and our intelligence.
• I also look at Lynne Stewart as another casualty in Bush’s war on terror.
• Sign Lynne Stewart Petition For Her Compassionate Release
• We pulled up right to the prison (where Lynne Stewart is currently being held) and about 15 of us came together, 2 of us from New York carrying signs that said “release Lynne Stewart, compassion, the right to justice, “

Guest – Laurie Arbieter helped coordinate the direct action at the opening of the George W. Bush Library, Laurie is an artist/activist and creator of the “We Will Not Be Silent” collective.

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Updates:

• Public Safety Exception to Miranda
• Sign Lynne Stewart Petition For Her Compassionate Release

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The Federalist Society: How Conservatives Took the Law Back from Liberals

Has the Department of Justice been taken over by a conservative organization little known to the average citizen? In the recently published book titled The Federalist Society: How Conservatives Took the Law Back from Liberals authored by attorney Michael Avery and Danielle McLaughlin track the movements of a small group of conservative law students and their influence. The Federalist Society has lawyer chapters in every major city in the United States and student chapters in every accredited law school. Members include economic conservatives, social conservatives, Christian conservatives, and libertarians. They all differ with each other on significant issues, but cooperate in advancing a broad conservative agenda.

Attorney Michael Avery:

• I saw how much power and influence the Federalist Society had during the years George W. Bush was president and at the same time I realized most people don’t know very much about them.
• They remained under the radar, I thought it was important to tell their story.
• They came along just at the right time for them, it was really kind of a perfect storm for them. Ronald Reagan was in the White House, you had a general renaissance of conservative thought that was promoted by people like Bill Buckley in the National Review, you had resistance to school integration and forced bussing. So there was a backlash waiting to happen against some of the things that happened in the law.
• It’s very important to recognize the role Ed Meese played. First he was counselor to the president then he was attorney general, later he became a principle figure at the Heritage Society.
• Many people are open members of the Federalist Society, others not so much but through a variety of sources I think we’re very confident that the people in that appendix either are members or very close to the society and sometimes I call that list the 100 most powerful people in the country and most of them you never heard of.
• About half the members that George W. Bush appointed to the Federal Court of Appeals were members of the Federalist Society.
• This battle over whether the government is able regulate private property has been one of the principle ideological battles of American Constitutional law since the end of the 19th century.
• They argue that property rights are a natural right that everybody is entitled to.
• It’s better to tolerate disagreement than to try to be 100 percent correct all the time.

Attorney Danielle McLaughlin:

• The substantive areas of law that we’re seeing this test cases brought in are very much reflective of the core values of the society. Those are notions of small government in particular small federal government. The idea that the state exists to preserve freedom.
• Many are involved in public interest law firms who go out and find plaintiffs and challenge regulation at the state level and in many cases have been successful in challenging laws in opposition to their world view all the way up to the Supreme Court.
• They really worked this very large network that they developed.
• Olen Foundation says here’s some money go out and build an institution.
• The Federalist Society today is not handicapped by having to report back or meet short term goals. The conservative funders believed in long term institution building.
• There are Federalist Society student groups on the campus of every single accredited and some unaccredited law schools. There are lawyer chapters in every single major city. There are affiliated Federalist Society groups outside the country.

Guest – Civil rights lawyer Michael Avery,  professor at Suffolk University Law School and former president of the National Lawyers Guild from 2003 to 2006.

Guest – Co-author and attorney Danielle McLauglin, member of the Litigation and Dispute resolution group.

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The Stalinist Legacy: Its Impact on Twentieth Century World Politics

We go now to hear a presentation by internationally acclaimed Pakistani writer and film maker Tariq Ali during a New York City book launch of his new book The Stalinist Legacy: Its Impact on Twentieth Century World Politics. Karl Marx’s often quoted observation “History weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living” is so true. Even 20 years after the Soviet Union’s collapse, activists are still confronted by the legacy of Stalinism at the same time capitalism has failed millions of working people in the United States and across the world.

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Please Sign Petition To Help Lynne Stewart

Long time literary agent Francis Golden has for years visited inmates on death row.  She’s recently returned from visiting Lynne Stewart in the Carswell Medical Facility in Texas. She joins hosts to talk about her visit.

Francis Golden:

• We were there for 4 days and most of the time we were in the prison with her.
• If we kissed more than once, or hugged more than once she would be fined.
• That’s how they become correctional by denying kissing and hugging and loving.
• We were only there for about 70 hours, we didn’t have enough time to talk.
• The day we left, all the plans were changed, no more 4 day visits, only Saturday and Sunday. The inmates were heart broken.
• The breast cancer has moved to her lungs. The reason she has it in her lungs is because they didn’t treat her when they should have.
• It’s tremendously important to go to LynneStewart.org and sign on for this release.
• When you sign on, email every person on your list whether its 10 or 500.
• It’s really important that we send a million signatures.
• I visited Maroon for 27 years, every 3 months. I was there for 2 whole days.
•  Lynne Stewart Compassionate Release Petition
  
• Please Also Write to: Charles E Samuels Jr. / Federal Bureau of Prisons /
• 320 1st Street Northwest / Washington DC 20534

Guest – Francis Golden,

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Maroon The Implacable

We welcome back Teresa Shoatz, daughter of political prisoner Russell Maroon Shoatz who has spent 39 years in the US prison system. As many listeners may know, Russell Shoatz has been held under intense lock down spending no more than one hour a day outside of his cell for the past 21 of those years. He was locked up in 1972 for his activity as a member of the Black Liberation Army.

Meanwhile, Theresa Shoatz is on book tour promoting her father’s book titled Maroon The Implacable. We catch up with her in Chicago while on tour. Maroon The Implacable is the first published collection of his accumulated written works analyzing the prison system, imperialism, the drug war. He also writes with great insight about the Maroon communities throughout America. Newer essays examine current political movements including eco-feminism and matriarchy

Theresa Shoatz:

• Maroon had been told that he would die at SCI Greene. For him to be free from prison in general, would be when I would say we have won.
• We’ve been fortunate to have Bret Grote, assistant to the legal team. Dan Kovalic and we just got a major commitment from a big law firm.
• Maroon has been writing since the eighties. In the nineties, some anarchists took his writings and put them in a zine, and took them throughout the United States and into Canada. They were used for education.
• So you get Maroon’s span from the eighties, to the present day.
• His view now on women is so incredible because he stressed how important women are to the movement throughout the sixties and the seventies.
• At that time he didn’t recognize how important the women were. The women, I would say are really the back bone of any community.
• On his second escape we was returned to prison an inmate said to him, they had a hell of a manhunt on you, you were chased down like a “Maroon.”
• He didn’t know anything about the Maroons. He dug in deep about their history and how they came about.
• The Maroons were slaves who had escaped from plantations, some went deep into the woods and joined with Native Americans and some poor whites who were totally against this slave thing.
• His digging into the history of the Maroons, he also involved me and my siblings. They were so awesome because they were fighting off attacks, also in the Caribbean areas, even into Mexico.
• Maroon has endured such torture, just outrageous treatment. Twenty plus years of no-contact visits. The impact of this really does control mindsets.
• Maroon doesn’t have computers nor has he seen one up close. He does everything long hand, and through snail-mail.
• Right now, I’m at the University of Texas. I’m presently with the dean and a professor in a writing class.
• If they haven’t heard of him, they want to know more.
• We have to step over what this government has thrown at us.
• They have more a hand on these youth than some these youths own parents.
• When you can punch right through that wall that’s candy coated reality system that our youth are mixed up in, its not only uplifting for me but for them.

Guest – Theresa Shoatz,  a Philadelphia-based prison justice activist and the daughter of Russell “Maroon” Shoatz.

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Shadow Lives: How the War on Terror in England Became a War on Women and Children

It’s obvious and yet an unfortunate reality, war, prisoners of war and the prison industrial complex tear apart families. Very seldom are the voices of family members heard that were left behind by the tragedies of war.  In the book Shadow Lives: How the War on Terror in England Became a War on Women and Children, author Victoria Brittain brings the reader close to these individuals who’s lives were capsized by war. They’re usually socially invisible and their civil liberties are often trampled by the state under the guise of the “war on terror.”

Victoria Brittain:

• I got involved way back when people began disappearing and they were described as the worst of the worst by Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush. Some of those people came from Britain and we didn’t know anything about them.
• A friend of mine had a project to do verbatim plays about the families, and he asked me to be the person to interview the families to try to find out who these people were and what had brought them together in Guantanamo Bay.
• I find complete confusion. Nobody in the families knew anything about why their son or their brother had ended up in Guantanamo Bay. In the course of that I got to know some of the families.
• I was particularly curious about one family that didn’ t want to cooperate in the play which was a Palestinian woman with five children, living alone and not speaking much English.
• I wrote to her about the play and told her how ashamed I was of my country from the research that I’ve done.
• We became close friends. Through her and her children, I met other women.
• Over these past ten years its been a rich experience, and sobering experience about injustice.
• I think she was suppressing the agony and loneliness and fear that she was in, course she was so desperate to have her children approach something of a normal life.
• It was only when other people began to come back to Britain from Guantanamo, that we began to get a picture the conditions in which people were.
• Her husband had gone off to west Africa with 3 or 4 other men to try and start a peanut business. This was his idea as a refugee Palestinian in Britain. He wanted to find a way of making a life for his family.
• When she found out he was taken from Afghanistan to Guantanamo, she was completely, . . there was no explanation.
• There was absolutely no recourse for her for a long time.
• It’s so sad, the Obama administration, he said he was going to close Guantanamo, here we are years down the road, these innocent people are still there and in the last 3 months, these people have become so desperate, because Congress is blocking them from getting out.
• Again and again, every legal victory from CCR has been overturned by a higher court.
• For these men, they really feel they’re at the end of the road.
• The horror of this has been so well laid out by so many lawyers. I find it astounding that there isn’t an uproar in Congress.
• Thank goodness Sami-Al-Arien is no longer in prison, but he’s under house arrest.
• Most of their friends turned away from them.
• He spent about five years in about a dozen maximum security prisons.
• FreeSamiAlArian
• The British and American intelligences work so closely together.

Guest – Victoria Brittain has lived and worked as a journalist in Washington, Nairobi, Saigon and London. She worked at the Guardian for 20 years and is the author of Death of Dignity: Angola’s Civil War, and Enemy Combatant.

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Political Prisoner Russell Maroon Shoatz Update

We welcome back Bret Grote, a member of Russell Maroon Shoatz’s legal team. Political prisoner Russell Maroon Shoatz who has spent 39 years in the US prison system. As many listeners may know, Russell Shoatz has been held under intense lock down spending no more than one hour a day outside of his cell for the past 21 of those years. He was locked up in 1972 for his activity as a member of the Black Liberation Army.  Bret gives us an update in recent developments of the case.

Bret Grote:

• Almost 2 weeks ago, I went to SCI Greene with a member of the legal team and Maroon’s son, Russell Shoatz III, and when we went into the visitor’s lobby we were informed that he was no longer there.
• After 18 years at SCI Greene which has the largest restrictive housing units which is the solitary confinement units, he had been transferred to SCI Mahanoy which is where Mumia Abu-Jamal is currently located in the general prison population.
• He was transferred there Thursday March 28, 2013, we put in calls the next day to inquire what was going on.
• We actually know this move is in response to the growing pressure campaign that is being waged. The growing support around the country and the legal team having increasing visits.
• The legal team is Dan Kovalic who represented Maroon in his due process based challenge in solitary confinement in the late 90s. There are also 2 attorneys from a large international litigation firm.
• There’s Dustin McDaniel, who along with myself has formed an organization called the Abolitionist Law Center and five students working on his case.
• There was a letter sent to Secretary Wetzel’s office stating that if he’s not released into the general prison population within 30 days a civil action will be filed.
• The major one is the 8th Amendment on prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. The law on solitary confinement is not very good but its also emerging in response to the 30 year emergence of this type of supermax style long term lock down as an affirmative policy of prison management.
• The basic rule of law is that solitary confinement is not unconstitutional per say, but there needs to be a fact specific inquiry into conditions of confinement and also the degree of harm that is imposed upon the prisoner.
• The prison officials need to demonstrate indifference to the deprivation of basic human needs.
• There are some other grounds that are being put forward to challenge solitary confinement. One of these is happening in the state of New York right now, where the NYCLU has begun representing an individual who was bringing a case pro se.
• Duration is one of the considerations that’s supposed to be taken into account by the court.
• The Supreme Court has been clear that the duration of deprivation is very significant for constitutional purposes.
• Maroon escaped from prison twice. After solitary confinement he was released in the general prison population at the state correctional institution in Pittsburgh in 1982.
• At this point Maroon had made a political decision. He had become part of the Pennsylvania Association of Lifers. This was a group approved by the prison authorities. After Maroon became involved and other lifers became involved to take more active role in their interest, more than 100 people began attending meetings there.
• They put him in solitary confinement based on participation in unauthorized meetings even though all the meeting spaces had to be opened by staff.
• Since 1989 he’s had only one disciplinary infraction while in the prison.
• Covering the vent in his cell, it was blowing cold air – SCI Greene.
• Maroon was constantly engaging all the other prisoners in educational seminars, studying lessons on geography, on history on working with people to transform their criminal consciousness into community oriented activist consciousness.

Guest – Bret Grote, member of the Russell Maroon Shoatz legal team and member of the Abolitionist Law Center.
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Court Orders FDA to Remove All Restrictions on the Morning-After Pill

After a multi-year grassroots campaign and an equally long lawsuit, the morning after pill will finally be available to females of all ages on the pharmacy shelf, without a prescription or point of sale or age restriction. This is thanks to a recent federal court reversal of decisions from the FDA and DHHS, under both the Bush and Obama Administrations.  The US now joins at least 63 other countries including the UK, Denmark, France and Ghana in making the morning after pill available without a prescription.

Attorney Andrea Costello:

• The case was originally file in 2005 and this was after the FDA had really stalled out and delayed for years in its decision making in whether to put the morning after pill over the counter.
• Originally the morning after pill was prescription only and had to show identification in order to get it.
• In 2005, the government made a decision to make Plan B available for women over 18.
• Under President Bush, decisions were made by high level officials within the FDA to deny access to the morning after pill to women and girls. That was really an effort to appease the administration’s constituents.
• It was based on anti-birth control politics and not science.
• In 2011 for the first time in history, we saw Health and Human Services under the Obama Administration overruling a decision by the FDA when the FDA decided it wanted to put the morning after pill over the counter without an age restriction.
• The lawsuit has always asked for unrestricted access to the morning after pill and all forms of the morning after pill meaning emergency contraception for all women and girls in the United States regardless of age without any restriction on how its sold.
• In the history of our country no one has ever had to show their identification in order to get birth control.
• I think of this victory as building on the pioneering work of our feminist sisters in the National Lawyers Guild that I’ve had the opportunity and honor to work with.
• Catherine Roraback and Rhonda Copeland, Carol Sobel, Mara Verheyden-Hilliard
• We will be looking forward to seeing it in the grocery stores in 30 days.

Guest – Attorney Andrea Costello, Partnership for Civil Justice Fund Senior Staff Attorney representing the NWL Plaintiffs.

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It Was Genocide: Armenian Survivor Stories

99 years ago this month marks the beginning of the systematic implementation of a plan to exterminate the Armenian race. Carried out by the Young Turk government of the Ottoman Empire, over half of the Armenians living in the Empire were killed.

To commemorate this, the first genocide of the 20th century, Law and Disorder co-host Heidi Boghosian and producer Geoff Brady present part of the 90-minute program titled, It Was Genocide: Armenian Survivor Stories.

We wish to thank WBAI for their commitment to recognizing the Armenian genocide, and are grateful to the following individuals for opening their hearts and sharing the difficult memories of the past: Jennie Garabedian, Harry Mazadorian, Roxy Garabedian, Lucy Simonian, Roxie Maljanian, Mary Abrahamian, John Maljanian, Agnes Karanian, Ruth Swisher, and Artie Shahverdian.

For stations that want to air full 90 minute documentary

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Updates:

• Please Sign the Lynne Stewart Compassionate Release Petition
  
• Please Also Write to: Charles E Samuels Jr. / Federal Bureau of Prisons /
• 320 1st Street Northwest / Washington DC 20534
• Anniversary of Collateral Damage Video Release
• University Stadium Victory – GeoCorp Prisons

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Guantanamo Hunger Strike Update

Attorney Omar Farah speaks with Michael Ratner about a hunger strike at Guantanamo Bay Prison with more than half of prisoners from Camp 5 and 6f participating. Farah says the hunger strike was triggered by an arbitrary crackdown by the prison administration including cell searches and a search of the prisoner’s Qurans. This is viewed as out right desecration. More than half of the entire prison population has been cleared for release by every prominent national security and law enforcement agency in the US government, that includes the DOD, DHS.

Guest – Omar Farah joined the Center for Constitutional Rights in 2012 as a staff attorney in the Guantanamo Global Justice Initiative. Omar was previously in private practice, working mostly in the area of international commercial arbitration. Since 2008, he has represented several prisoners detained at Guantanamo Bay in habeas corpus litigation in federal court.
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Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East

While adviser to the Madrid and Washington Palestinian-Israeli negotiations, author and historian Rashid Khalidi collected documents, memos and meeting minutes as a research foundation for his recently published book Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East. The book focuses on 3 periods of opportunity for the United States to broker peace, one in the late seventies, the early nineties and 2010. This critical analysis addresses the basic distortions in language that has corrupted the peace processes. Rashid Khalidi is an American historian of the Middle East, the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, and director of the Middle East Institute of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, he joins us today to talk about his book and also the ongoing destabilizing hostility in Syria.

Professor Rashid Khalidi:

• Let me read to you what Orwell says, “the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. Bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even by people who should and do know better.”
• The argument I’m making in this book is much of the language used by pundits and politicians about the Middle East and the so called peace process, between the Palestinians and the Israelis is really corrupt language.
• One of the chapters in the book is devoted to the period when I was an adviser to the Palestinian delegation and negotiations from 1991-1993 starting in Madrid and continuing to Washington.
• If you go back to Madrid in October 1991, there were under 200 thousand Israelis living in the occupied West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem. Today, there are nearly 600 thousand of them.
• United States has been responsible for exacerbating the problem in effect by saying the only way to deal with this issue of occupation and settlement is through negotiations mediated by us.
• The United States in the meantime has put its big thumb on the scale in favor of the Israelis preventing a resolution of the problems.
• The first episode I talk about in the book has to do with the follow on to Camp David in the wake of the Lebanon War in 1982 when Israel invaded and 50 thousand Palestinians and Lebanese were killed and wounded.
• I site at great length a now declassified document by a CIA analyst which one of my students actually found.
• The idea of Palestinian self determination doesn’t exist anywhere in the Oslo Accords signed by the PLO and Israel in 1993 and afterward.
• Autonomy and self determination are used by people in American political parlance and Israeli political parlance in ways that do violence to the real meanings of these words.
• Obama fits the pattern of every president since President Carter, with the sole exception of George W. Bush.
• Obama has adopted wholesale and entire Israeli narrative as to the idea that Israel is the victim.
• There is a people in existential danger that’s the Palestinians, the people faced with elimination, extermination, not physically but as a collective.
• Oslo was a terrible deal for the Palestinians. As a result of Palestinian failures since the 90s, a situation has emerged where we have one state and one sovereign body between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River.

Guest – Professor Rashid Khalidi, is the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University. He received his B.A. from Yale University in 1970, and his D.Phil. from Oxford in 1974.  He is editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies, and was President of the Middle East Studies Association, and an advisor to the Palestinian delegation to the Madrid and Washington Arab-Israeli peace negotiations from October 1991 until June 1993.
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 Judge Oks Civilians Right to Sue Military For Spying On Peace Activists

In a recent ruling, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a lawyer’s challenge to military spying on peace activists can proceed. This ruling is the first time a court allowed civilians to sue the military for violating their First and Fourth Amendment rights. National Lawyers Guild attorney Larry Hildes brought the lawsuit Panagacos v Towery in 2009 on behalf of a group of Washington state antiwar activists who discovered they were infiltrated for 2 years by John Towery, an employee at a fusion center inside a local Army base. The antiwar activists group Port Militarization Resistance sought to oppose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through civil disobedience. The lawsuit also names, the Army, Navy, Air Force, FBI, CIA, Department of Homeland Security and other law enforcement agencies.

Attorney Larry Hildes:

• Brendan Dunn was activist in Olympia, he was arrested in Seattle basically for sitting while anarchist.
• The Olympia Police Department cracked down on the Wobblies and the IWW for having newspaper boxes for which they paid for and took all the papers.
• We got them back, but Brendan got curious about what was going on, did a state public records act request for all emails and all intelligence to the city of Olympia concerning anarchists or the IWW.
• What he got back instead was hundreds and hundreds of pages of what are called “force protection memos” and “threat assessments” from Ft. Lewis about Port Militarization Resistance, a group that he was involved with that did protest against the use of public ports for shipment of Striker Brigade equipment to the occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan.
• He started looking at them and every police department and every military agency from north of Seattle to Portland was on this list. The FBI was on this list, Homeland Security, every branch of the military.
• It was detailed discussions of what PMR was planning, what they were going to do, how to fight it. The author of a lot of this was John Towery.
• PMR looked Towery up on Facebook and there’s a picture on Towery’s FB page of John Jacob who had been coming to PMR meetings for several years. Very closely involved with PMR in fact he ran their list serve on Rise Up.
• So they did some more checking. They looked up his voter registration, they got an address and the address matched John Jacobs.
• He was 20 years older than everyone else. I don’t know how but he blended in. He went to events, he brought his kids. He was very very good at what he did.
• Brendan considered him a close friend. Brendan and another member confronted him at a cafe in Tacoma and he said “yes, I’ve been spying on you. I’m doing it for your own good, there are other spies watching you that mean you much more harm than I do.”
• We do know that the Army at least one more spy. We caught the Coast Guard spy. There were 2 officers from the Tacoma Police Department’s Homeland Security Committee.
• The police would show up at unannounced demonstrations. The MP’s, local police and state patrols would already be there and everyone would be arrested as they were getting out of their cars.
• The Portland Militarization Resistance was a few dozen people. They were very creative, they had figured out a choke point for the military.
• The equipment would go out 3 weeks before the troops. If they couldn’t get the equipment there. They couldn’t send the troops.
• If they couldn’t send the equipment and the troops then no war.
• The succeeded in scaring the heck out of the military by these very peaceful acts of civil disobediance.
• They can’t arrest them before they get to the demonstration or before they even do anything.
• They think dissent against their wars is the enemy which scares me a great deal.
• Where else are they doing this, how much are they doing this?

Guest – Attorney Larry Hildes, an NLG member and one of the attorneys involved in bringing the case Panagacos v Towery.

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Updates:

• MOMA Suggested Donation Lawsuit

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Michael Smith and Dennis James Discuss Cuba Trip

Co-host Michael Smith and attorney Dennis James recently returned from Cuba on a trip led by the Center for Cuban Studies. Dennis is a civil rights lawyer formerly of Detroit and former Executive Director of the National Lawyers Guild.  The trip was undertaken to appreciate the fundamental changes now going on in Cuban law with respect to travel, home, car and business ownership. The discussion leads into the possibilities of an economic rejuvenation in Cuba.

Attorney Dennis James:

• The people of Cuba had a strong identification with the revolution they made.
• Cuba is theirs and nobody else is going to tell them how to run it.
• They have a lot of complaints about shortages, but they’re very appreciative of the basic needs of life that are provided for.
• The Cuban government did a thorough and multi-level canvassing of the population through its national assembly and committees for the defense of the revolution.
• Talking to the people on the street, they remember this process that went on.
• The government watches which enterprises make sense, which ones are succeeding.
• The ones that are succeeding and paying taxes, employing people are encouraged.
• Book: The Man Who Loved Dogs
• Book: Cuba, What Everyone Needs To Know – Julia Sweig
• There’s a colony of people in Melia Cuba that practice what they call naive art.
• I think its naive in the sense that it’s self taught.
• They do wonderful paintings, these are doctors, lawyers, bakers, bus driver, cops, sugar mill workers.
• Their work is encouraged, given exhibits in Havana.
• Sandy Levinson – The Center for Cuban Studies.
• We’re not talking about the flag waving, hammer and sickle brandishing socialist realism of China and Russia, we’re talking about wonderful expressions of culture.

Guest – Dennis James, a civil rights lawyer formerly of Detroit and former Executive Director of the National Lawyers Guild.
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Supreme Court On Gay Marriage

Last week the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on two historic cases that could establish the constitutional right for gay marriage. The first case, Hollingsworth v. Perry is a challenge to California’s voter-approved ban of same-sex unions in 2008. Six months after the California Supreme Court endorsed gay marriage, voters passed Proposition 8 which amended the state’s constitution to only recognize marriages between a man and a woman. Lower courts had declared the gay marriage ban to be unconstitutional.  The second case the Supreme Court heard was a challenge to the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act. This act bars married gay couples from receiving federal marriage benefits such as Social Security and family medical leave.

Professor Katherine Franke:

• On the Prop 8 case, I would certainly question the issue of standing which the court is from their argument also taking quite seriously.
• It’s actually an incredibly important issue in civil rights law where groups of people want to assert an interest in an overarching public issue like the right to marry.
• I’m of the view that this should never have been brought.
• The movement lawyers really argued for Boise and Olsen not to bring the case. Boise and Olsen lobbied quite hard to keep the movement lawyers out of the case.
• When the law gets out ahead, and the lawyers get out ahead of the movement that support them, often we do more damage than good when we get to the Supreme Court too soon.
• We have movement lawyers in the lesbian and gay community and of course they don’t all agree with each other, its a complicated movement. But there was a sense that they were going to go state by state, and build legal consensus around the issue of marriage rights and around a set of arguments that weren’t going to hurt gay and lesbian people who didn’t marry.
• Boise and Olsen thought they would do a better job raising the issue of marriage than the movement lawyers have. They’re carrying a brief for marriage, not a community who have a diverse set of interests, marriage being only one of them.
• DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act is a law that unfortunately President Clinton signed in 1996. It was basically a homophobic cry from the Congress to limit on the federal level any definition of a marriage to between a man and a woman.
• If you’re a federal employee, if you’re married you can put your spouse and dependent children on you health insurance.
• If you’re not married, you can’t.
• Edie Windsor is the plaintiff in the DOMA case but when her partner of many many years past away, Edie inherited under the will, her partner’s property they jointly owned together. Under federal tax law it says if they were strangers to one another, so Edie had to pay about 360 thousand dollars in inheritance taxes for the property she had owned with her partner.
• There was a coalition of large corporations that filed a brief and said actually
• The political alignment on this issue has really shifted at a rapid pace in the last year.
• I direct our center on gender and sexuality law.
• I’m actually now teaching for the first time a class on the law of occupation so we’re looking at Iraq and Palestine and the United States, Puerto Rico and Hawaii. To understand whether the law can be a force for good when military force is like the Israelis or like the Americans occupying other sovereign states.
• We’ve got a really great new project engaging tradition and thinking about arguments based in tradition, that have been used traditionally to undermine sexually based justice claims.
• Those issues come up in the marriage context all over the place.

Guest – Professor Katherine Franke,  the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law; Director, Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia Law School.

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Updates:

• New York Times Continues To Deceive About Iraq War

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New York City Stop and Frisk Trial Begins

Here on Law and Disorder, we’ve been covering the stop and frisk case known as Floyd v City of New York and the New York Police Department. This is a federal class action lawsuit challenging New York City Police Departments’ practice of stopping and frisking hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers each year. Some five million within the last few years. The high majority of which are Latino and African American. It’s taken the Center for Constitutional Rights along with its allies united with a group called Communities United for Police Reform many years to bring this case to trial.  It’s an historic moment for challenging these practices in New York and a precedent that will hopefully lead to ending this practice, not only here in New York but throughout the country.  The trial began last week in federal court in Manhattan. It will last some 4 to 6 weeks.

Annette Dickerson:

• In order to be legal the stops need to be based on reasonable suspicion of criminal activity and we’re challenging the city’s use of these illegal stops.
• They violate the 14 Amendment guarantee of equal protection because they are racially discriminatory.
• 87 percent of those stopped are black and Latino.
• The NYPD commissioner seemed to have dug in his heels deeper, as has the mayor in defending the program.
• There is no empirical data that “stop and frisk” has a role in reducing crime.
• It severely damages relationships between the police and the community.
• This is an historic moment in the lifelong struggle of members of the community and organizations like CCR. Our first case against the police department was Daniels which was filed in 1999 in the aftermath of the shooting of Amadu Diallo.
• David Floyd was actually helping someone who was locked out of their apartment, he had an extra set of keys.
• In 2011 685 thousand people stopped.
• There are many other people in the community who are stopped including members of the LGBT community, the immigrant community, people who are homeless, women.
• There is a presumption of criminality.
• On the first day of trial, the courtroom was packed, as was the overflow room.

Guest – Annette Warren-Dickerson,  the Director of Education and Outreach at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), is responsible for overseeing the development of CCR’s political and public education strategies as a companion to CCR’s litigation. Annette served as the Statewide Coordinator of the New York Campaign for Telephone Justice, which successfully ended the high collect call rates for the families of those incarcerated in New York State prisons.

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Cuban Five Case Update: Free The Cuban Five – Columbia University 2013

Fourteen years ago, the Cuban Five were convicted on conspiracy to commit espionage at some time in the future.  Recently, prominent First Amendment attorney Martin Garbus joined the case of the Cuban Five. He’s help expose how US government paid journalists in Miami who received hundreds and thousands of dollars of payments from the office of Cuba broadcasting. A fact unknown to the defense at the time of the trial. As listeners may know, those paid reporters covered the case in an almost hysterical and prejudicial fashion. This month, Martin Garbus and many others will be discussing the case of the Cuban Five during an event held at Columbia University March 29.

Attorney Martin Garbus:

• During the time the jury was deliberating, the television media bombarded the Miami area with pictures of the jurors. The judge barred any pictures of the jurors going out because she didn’t want the jurors intimidated by a public awareness of who they were.
• Because she was concerned pressure would be put on them.
• Unknown to the judge and defense lawyers at the time, the channels each day repeatedly showed the faces of the jurors, sometimes identifying them so that the entire community knew who they were.
• And they presented very slanted interpretations of the case.
• Television misuse: we found it not only for the time the jurors were deliberating but we’ve now traced it throughout the entire trial.
• Where are now is we’ve submitted our papers and the judge is sitting on it.
• Radio Marti was made to beam into Havana, it can most anything it wants. What happened hear is that Radio Marti beamed into the entire Miami area. You have a 38 million dollar budget beaming into Miami endless stories. Then you have the US government through Radio Marti and various democracy projects also paying the print media to write propaganda. Each one of these articles are a violation of the law.
• On March 29, at the Roone Arledge Auditorium, Lerner Hall, Columbia University, 116th Street and Broadway in Manhattan.

• Martin Garbus, Lead Attorney for the Cuban Five
  Ambassador Rodolfo Reyes, Cuban Ambassador to the United Nations
  Ambassador Julio Escalona, Venezuelan Deputy Ambassador to the United Nations
  Luis Rosa, Puerto Rican independence fighter, political prisoner for 19 years
  Imani Brown, Columbia University Caribbean Students Association

Guest – Attorney Martin Garbus, one of the country’s leading trial lawyers. He has appeared before the United States Supreme Court and the highest state and federal courts in the nation. Time Magazine has named him “legendary . . . one of the best trial lawyers in the country.” He’s also known as the most prominent First Amendment lawyer.

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Racism, Torture, and Impunity in Chicago

Here on Law and Disorder, we continue to follow up on the Chicago torture cases and since the conviction and sentencing of former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge in 2011, the Chicago criminal courts have become a model in seeking justice for crimes of torture. Last year we discussed with our guest attorney Flint Taylor how the city’s new administration will handle the hundreds of ongoing torture cases of African American men. The question is answered in Flint Taylor’s recently published article in the The Nation titled Racism, Torture and Impunity in Chicago.

In the article, Flint writes “Chicago City Council and Mayor Rahm Emanuel signed off on a settlement for another torture survivor, Michael Tillman, who was exonerated in 2010. It was the perfect chance for the mayor to apologize on behalf of the city to the African-American community that helped elect him. He chose not to do so. Instead, picking up where the Daley administration left off, the mayor has continued to fund Burge’s defense, paying private lawyers a total of $3.8 million to date in the Cannon and Kitchen cases alone.”

Attorney Flint Taylor:

• In the civil rights cases we are seeking the testimony of Richard Daley, the former mayor and former states attorney to question him in detail of his long standing and central role of the police torture scandal here in Chicago.
• Evidence was brought directly to Daley through the Chicago Police Superintendent of the torture of a specific man by the use of electric shock, bagging, beating and burning to get a confession.
• Daley decided not to investigate Jon Burge, not to prosecute Jon Burge and as a result of that over 75 African American men were tortured, gave confessions, many of them went to death row.
• At this point we’ve tried to negotiate with his lawyers (Daley) they are paid for by the tax payer. We moved in court to compel him to testify.
• It took a long time, very hard struggle by community groups, lawyers activists and of course the families of the victims themselves.
• The media (local) is interested when the name Daley comes up.
• The called the box that they electrocuted them with the “n*****” box.
• We see the attacks on the genitals again and again.
• It’s a remarkable racist conspiracy. We’re using the Civil Rights Act that was used during Reconstruction, right after the Civil War, which is called the Anti Klu Klux Klan Act.
• We’re trying to get a statute passed in Congress to make torture a Federal crime.

Guest – G. Flint Taylor, a graduate of Brown University and Northwestern Law School, is a  founding partner of the People’s Law Office in Chicago, an office which has been dedicated to litigating civil rights, police violence, government misconduct, and death penalty cases for more than 40 years.

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French-led Invasion of Mali, Africa

The Obama Administration has recently stepped up US military deployment within the French led military offensive to force out Islamist rebels in Mali, Africa. The U.S. Reaper drones are helping to provide targeting information for French aerial attacks. Those countries publicly supporting France include Canada, Belgium, Denmark and Germany. Meanwhile, human rights groups call for independent investigations into civilian deaths in Mali.

Ernie Harsch:

• The stakes are not so much Mali. Some of the insurgent forces, some have local grievances, like the Tuareg in Northern Mali.
• Others consider themselves Jihadists. They also target, US, French and other European in the region and elsewhere in the world.
• Whatever happens in Mali, could have wider implications. The situation in Mali is quite serious. There are lots of risks.
• Mali, Africa is a former French colony and after decolonization the French were active in intervening into the former colonies of Africa.
• There was a popular upsurge in the 90s, (in Mali) that regime was ousted by a military coup. That leader of the coup quickly transitioned to an elected leader of a civilian government.
• In Mali in particular you also had a series of rebellions in the North by an ethnic group called the Tuareg.
• The basic issues never got resolved. You didn’t have development up in the North, you didn’t have autonomy which is what they were pressing for.
• What happened in 2011, we had the Arab Spring, in like many periods of revolution or popular upsurge, old coercive states may collapse and you have opportunities for popular action but you also have other people who come in because states are fragmented.
• Some of the fighters that had been with Gaddafi, they were from Mali, and they had been Tuareg.
• Now its sort of dragging down into a protracted guerrilla phase.
• To be clear, the French intervention has gotten political backing from the African Union and from the economic community group, the Economic Community of West African States or ECOWAS.
• The French PR justification has worked fairly well.
• This is open terrain, this is semi-desert area. With air power and heavy equipment you can push far and very quickly. You can take cities and towns. The Islamists, there’s a few thousand. They’ve pulled back up into the mountains. They know the terrain better than the French actually.
• The chance of French mounting losses is there.
• Since 2005, the US has spent 1 billion dollars for counter-terror operations in the region.
• This isn’t all military by any means. A lot of it has to do with training local African military forces in counter-terrorism operations and coordinate and logistics support.
• Also, basically propaganda.
• They do humanitarian actions to curry favor with local populations.
• This isn’t well known, but the US has air bases all across Africa.
• Sometimes they’re simply a hangar operated in secret at some African military or civilian air base.
• They’re (U.S. Government) setting up an airbase in Niger, that’s openly acknowledged.
• They started out with surveillance drones in Somalia but then they used a few strikes against Islamists leaders there in Somalia.
• Everything is going to be framed in the language of the war on terror. That’s the justification. That’s a real concern for the US authorities.
• Also material resource interests. Not so much gold, but Mali does have gold in the northwest.
• Things that are very vital to the Western dominated global economy.
• There is a rivalry that’s developed with China, it’s not been terribly direct at the moment.
• It’s blowback.

Guest – Ernie Harsch, a 40 year journalist who has made numerous trips to Africa. He’s a former editor of the magazine Africa Renewal. He joins us today to discuss the conflicts in Mali and the big picture regarding the seizure of natural resources in Africa.

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Updates:

• Bradley Manning Plea Update:
• Freedom of the Press Foundation Bradley Manning Audio
• Michael Ratner On The Bill Keller’s Bradley Manning/Wikileaks NYT Op Ed
• Ten Years Later: Iraq US-led Invasion
• Remembering Hugo Chavez
• Free Lynn Stewart: Compassionate Release Petition

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The Search for Colonel James Steele: US Special Forces Veterans Links General Petraeus With Torture In Iraq

A 15-month investigation and documentary film by the Guardian and BBC Arabic has revealed how  US colonel James Steele, a veteran of American proxy wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, played a key role in training and overseeing US-funded special police commandos who ran a network of torture centers in Iraq. Steele and another special forces veteran retired Colonel James Coffman reported directly to General David Petraeus. Petraeus as listeners may know was tasked with organizing Iraqi security services.

Patrick Farrelly:

• The projections that they made about being welcome in Iraq were just not true.
• It looked like the insurgency at that point in 2004 was just getting off the ground.
• This is where they turned to General Petraeus, I know he’s seen in the think tanks in Washington as the scholar warrior.
• Rumsfeld called upon him to go back into Iraq and to organize a pretty massive police force in Iraq.
• He hooked up with 2 people there, Colonel James Coffman and Colonel James Steele.
• Mill Group is essentially a bunch of military advisers who are training the Salvadorian security forces to fight the guerrillas.
• Colonel James Steele was the guy in charge of the American advisers who were training these people and also directing these forces.
• Counter-insurgency force went from 400 to 17 thousand.
• What the United States needs really badly is intelligence, they need to know who the insurgence are and where they can get them.
• That’s Steele’s expertise, having these guys on the ground, they draw in thousands of people and basically torture them for information.
• It’s Steele’s job to collate that information so that they can then hand it over to the US military. The US can then go after the insurgence informed for the first time.
• Part of the Wikileaks discovery, in terms of the war-logs which was released by Bradley Manning to wikileaks, shows this entire pattern of US soldiers coming across these detention centers,
• - they’re giving consistent reports of seeing torture of seeing abuse.
• Frontline: The Gangs Of Iraq.
• It’s a production line. These young men come in, these people were hung up on ceilings, nails pulled out with pliers, it was water boarding.
• They turned the city library (in Iraq) into a torture center.
• It became this interrogation and torture mill, that no doubt produced a lot of information.
• For empire, people like James Steele are very very important.
• Empires tend to roam into other people’s countries, and you know.
• Where did the sectarian civil war come from? Who played a part in bringing this about?
• James Steele, lives in Texas, at one point he was Vice President of Enron.
• The public is not really aware of what’s being done in the name of US taxpayers in foreign lands.
• I think its clear that the Sunni community is completely disenfranchised. I think its still in a state of terror.

Guest – Patrick Farelly, a TV, radio and print journalist who has worked in the US and Ireland. Farrelly was producer of Michael Moore’s Emmy award-winning NBC/BBC2 series TV Nation and later Bravo/Channel 4 co-production Awful Truth. He was the founding editor of the New York based weekly newspaper Irish Voice and has also been features editor of the New York Post. He has also worked for HBO, Discovery, PBS and Irish broadcasters RTE and TG4.

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Updates:

• Police Dog Recovers Buried Weapon, Then Fires Weapon.
• Michael Ratner: Bradley Manning Case Update
• Read Transcript of Bradley Manning Statement

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Sequester As A Form Of Austerity In The United States

We welcome Economics Professor and radio host Rick Wolff back on the show to discuss the current billion dollar cuts known as the sequester. The sequester is a massive reduction in US military and domestic spending of up to 85 billion dollars. This is a massive austerity policy that will send ripple effects throughout the US economy. Meanwhile, our guest Professor Rick Wolff points to corporations continuing to use cheap labor that is substituted for “costly” workers in the US and Europe. Professor Rick Wolff has exposed the flawed system of modern capitalism for many years, he joins us today to discuss the new austerity, called sequester as the inequalities of wealth continue to widen. Rick Wolff and Bill Moyers Interview.

Professor Rick Wolff:

• We’ve had basically the same story for most of the last five years. This crisis technically started in the last quarter of 2007.
• If you are an employer, at least a big one, and if you are an owner of shares of stock, you’ve now come back, its taken six years to do it, you’ve now recovered where you were.
• No one predicted a crisis of this depth.
• They are a tiny portion of the American people, those employers and those share holders.
• The unemployment rate before this began averaged under five percent.
• At the worst moment of this crisis in 2009, 2010, unemployment hit 10 percent. Where are we today? Barely under 8 percent.
• Every single family in the United States on average has a person in it, that is going through this process (unemployment) and is therefore becoming a burden to the rest of the family.
• This is a stock market that seems to believe that it doesn’t have to worry about where the mass of people are, doesn’t have to worry about their diminished purchasing power.
• The United States is pursuing an austerity policy.
• Austerity is a very simple idea, it has 2 parts. You raise taxes on average (income) people. Part 2 is you cut government spending throughout the economy.
• That’s what they’ve been doing in Greece for the last 3 years. That’s what they’ve been doing in England and France, and Portugal and Italy and on and on and on.
• . . and we’re doing it too.
• Austerity has been agreed to by Republicans and Democrats alike. There is no debate in this country at least as far as the 2 parties are concerned about austerity.
• The only disagreement Republicans and Democrats have is about what tax increases and cutbacks are going to be done.
• This crazy behavior in which people who can’t agree, punish themselves by not agreeing by agreeing to do something they couldn’t agree to do.
• Fiscal Cliff: All couples that earn more than 450 thousand dollars a year, that was the cut off. Anybody earning less than 450 thousand is 99 percent of our people, were not affected by this “tax the rich” only those above 450. Here’s what happened to them, instead of the 35 percent rate they paid in 2012 under the deal that was struck it was raised to 39.6 percent.
• No rich person in that category will do anything but laugh all the way to the bank, that this was called an attack on the rich.
• You’re not taxing the rich, not even close.
• Payroll tax increase to 6.2 percent. Social Security tax.
• Sequester: All it meant was if the government didn’t reach an agreement, the way they did it the last minute for taxes, these automatic cuts that were automatically written in 2011 when this whole thing was set up,
• would kick in. Well they failed to reach an agreement, and this sequester went into effect on March 1.
• You should be aware that at any time, Congress can make an agreement which supercedes all of this.
• The military does not want or need a good bit of the spending geared up to be given to it.
• It’s not the military that wants it, its the Congressional representation from the companies with the military contracts who want it. So we have this bizarre display, we’ve had it for years, in which the military gives testimony, we don’t need this program.
• The Congress men and women sit their and listen and vote it in anyway. They want the jobs and prospects of the defense contractors who are funding their political campaigns to be protected.
• If you raise payroll taxes which they did, you are damaging the economy in a straight forward, obvious way.
• With more people unemployed, they don’t earn and income, they don’t pay an income tax.
• This is the policy that was followed in Greece, they’ve been collapsing ever since.
• Last weekend was the largest demonstrations in Lisbon, in the history of Portugal.
• Nobody on Wall Street knows what’s going to happen 3 months from now.
• We are not going to escape the turmoil, Occupy was the first sign of that.

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.

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Updates:

• FISA Court Surveillance: Supreme Court Allows, You Have No Standing
• Hosts Discuss CIA Sponsored Cinema

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Zero Tolerance Policy: School to Prison Pipeline?

As many listeners may know, zero-tolerance school policies will punish any infraction of a rule regardless of whether it was an accident, a violation out of ignorance or extenuating circumstances. Schools normally forbid cell phones, profanity etc, but with a zero tolerance policy, breaking these rules often result in an inordinately harsh punishment such as suspension or expulsion. These policies are promoted to prevent violence and drug abuse in schools but for years critics have pointed out the subjective nature of these decisions on certain students with disciplinary problems. Some difficult students could become targets of the zero tolerance policy, become less educated by multiple suspensions and expulsion which often lead them  into the criminal justice system

Professor Russ Skiba:

• Zero tolerance grew out of a philosophy of school discipline that really came out of the 1980s, a period where we believed because youth violence was accelerating in our communities, that we were in real danger of being overwhelmed by violence in school settings.
• Interestingly enough data since then has shown us that was never really the case.
• Rates of disruption in schools have remained constant in a 30 or 40 year period.
• Out of that fear grew a response that said the only way we’re going to defend against that and keep our school safe and our students and teachers safe will be by punishing harder and frequently minor incidences we can send a message to kids that certain behavior won’t be acceptable and that will deter other kids.
• Zero Tolerance came out of Broken Windows Theory.
• The Reagan administration used a program in the San Diego harbor where even trace amount of drugs would lead to confiscation of ones boat and an appearance in federal court.
• When there’s a fear response, there does tend to be a belief that we don’t have time to look at the data we just need to do anything necessary to protect out kids.
• Its a dangerous way to make policy.
• The case in Georgia where a girl has a Tweety Bird wallet attached to her backpack with a two inch chain. That was considered a weapon. We all react in horror to those extensions.
• But the more central question is. . . is it effective?
• The APA put together a Zero Tolerance Task Force and they found after a year of studying hundreds of documents that there was no evidence that Zero Tolerance made any contribution to school safety or improvements to student behavior.
• It’s often referred to as the school to prison pipeline. In the last few years there has been a lot of data accumulating that yes in fact that’s the case.
• It’s not a direct line, but there are a lot of links there that kids that are expelled are more likely to be disengaged.
• It has a negative correlation with school achievements.
• We’ve known for a long time that African American students are disproportionately represented.
• Race is still a contributor to disproportionality. Poor black kids are more likely to be suspended than poor white kids but so are middle class. . .
• More African Americans in the school tends to lead to harsher punishment.
• More teachers of color seems to result in reduced rates of disparities.
• We (need) to put programs in place like “conflict resolution” or “positive behavior support” that make clear the expectations for all kids.
• Or mentoring, we know a lot of these situations come from kids who are alienated from school.
• APA Zero Tolerance Task Force / Equity Project – Indiana University / Civil Rights Project – UCLA

Guest – Professor Russ Skiba, professor in Counseling and Educational Psychology at Indiana University, and directs the school outreach practicum in the School Psychology Program. He was a member and the lead author of the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on Zero Tolerance
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Pope’s Resignation May Make International Prosecution Easier

We continue to look at accountability within the church for widespread systematic sexual assault and violence against tens of thousands of victims, mainly children.  As many listeners may know, the church’s main priority has been to protect itself and its power instead of insuring the protection of the children in the church and others vulnerable to abuse by priests.  The pope is responsible for these criminal acts with direct involvement in covering them up. Now that Pope Benedict XVI is resigning, international prosecution will be easier for national systems of justice. The Center for Constitutional Rights has filed a case with the International Criminal Court on behalf of the organization Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) against the pope and other high-level Vatican officials for crimes against humanity in September 2011 and provided additional documentation in the case in April 2012. The prosecutor is currently reviewing the evidence

Mary Ward Caplan:

• SNAP is a network of survivors who try to help each other with the experience of being either raped, abused, or sodomized by authority figures.
• I think one of the wonderful things that have happened is there is more attention toward this.
• There was a time when print journalism wouldn’t touch the church. They were really able to act under secrecy.
• When I was abused it was the 60s and my father was dying and the priest suggested that if I did certain things a miracle might be wrought.
• After my father died and the miracle wasn’t wrought, I understood more of what was done and tried to go to pastor of the local church.
• There were no places I knew of to turn.
• Eventually I got therapy, I married, I got children.
• What happened in 2002 in Boston, was really the thing that made me become an activist.
• The court is looking at this very seriously, they met with us. This is a court that doesn’t have immunity.
• What I would like to see is accountability and some sort of change that this will not happen again.

Guest – Mary Ward Caplan, leader of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) in New York City.

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Attorney Pam Spees:

• In September 2011, we filed a complaint with the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, asking to investigate and prosecute 4 highest officials for their role in basically creating the policies and practices that church officials follow around the world, which serves to conceal the widespread sexual violence against children and vulnerable adults.
• Other than conceal, these policies and practices serve to perpetuate it.
• We filed these complaint along with 22 thousand pages of documentation and evidence that’s been gathered in different countries around the world – showing how the high level officials within the Vatican are involved. We’re asking for a criminal investigation and prosecution.
• His resignation does create more opportunity for holding him accountable, specifically in national levels where you have a sitting head of state could actually be a bar to a prosecution for a civil case.
• It’s important to understand we’re not talking about a few bad apples. It is the culture of sexual violence that has built up within the church.
• I think what we’re going to be seeing in the next months is more revelations.
• The committee has ordered the Holy See to report to it this year. This will be the first time an international body with any kind of oversight over the Holy See will be making the Holy See answer questions about the crisis of child sexual abuse in the Holy Church.

Guest – Pam Spees, senior staff attorney in the international human rights program at the Center for Constitutional Rights. She has a background in international criminal and human rights law with a gender focus, as well as criminal trial practice. She serves as lead counsel on several of CCR’s cases and initiatives including, Sexual Minorities Uganda v. Lively, a case brought against a U.S. based anti-gay extremist for his role in the persecution of LGBTI people in Uganda; Murillo v. Micheletti, a case brought by the parents of a youth killed by the coup regime in Honduras;  and in the legal effort to hold Vatican officials criminally responsible for the crimes against humanity of rape and sexual violence within the church.

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Updates:

Private Prison Corporation To Have Its Name on Florida Atlantic Football Stadium

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Priests of Our Democracy, The Supreme Court, Academic Freedom, and the Anti-Communist Purge

Priests of Our Democracy, The Supreme Court, Academic Freedom, and the Anti-Communist Purge is the title of the recently published book by attorney Marjorie Heins. The book examines a very dark period in academic freedom within New York City’s municipal colleges. In the early 1940s, faculty, students and staff were the target of massive investigations into their political beliefs and associations. They hauled before tribunals of the New York State legislature, dozens were stripped of their careers.

Author Marjorie Heinz shows historically, that academic freedom is nothing to take for granted and is always on shaky ground despite being protected by the First Amendment. The  backlash of controversy against Students for Justice in Palestine sponsoring a Boycott Divest Sanction event at Brooklyn College is recent example. This is a book for anyone working in education to understand the court battles that tried to preserve a right protected by the Constitution.

Attorney Marjorie Heins:

• Boards of Trustees which are dominated by corporate executives don’t like these new scholars in the field of social science who are also activists.
• It’s really an attempt of political purge of this national figure.
• The burgeoning forces of academic freedom rally round him, they see the danger.
• In those early days the main attacks on the activist professors really were on activities outside the classroom in support of labor organizing.
• A bunch of professors get together from around the country and form the AAUP, American Association of University Professors. They for the first time issue a declaration of principles on academic freedom.
• The first is freedom in the classroom. The second is freedom is your research and scholarship to pursue learning where it may lead, which means overturning conventional wisdom.
• The third is what they call extramural speech, outside the walls. That was the main target of repression in that period.
• We have to get all these leftists out of the school system because they’re going to indoctrinate the tender minds of our youth with Marxist ideas.
• Harry Keyishian starts the book, he’s one of the wonderful characters I discovered as I was working on it. The Keyishian v. Board of Regents case, 1967 Supreme Court case is famous among First Amendment lawyers because it reversed prior not so good decisions, strikes down the so called Feinberg law which had been passed in 1949 and upheld by the Supreme Court.
• Feinberg law creates a very sweeping program of loyalty investigations for teachers in the public schools.
• 1952 is the height of the witch-hunt at Queens College in New York City when the Senate Internal Security Sub-committee comes to town.
• The Senate Internal Security Sub-committee starts summoning teachers at city colleges.
• “Would you tell Pablo Picasso that he wasn’t qualified to teach art?”
• It’s obscene to see college administrators running around scared like keystone cops he said.
• Some of these investigations were very broad. What books they read, what magazines they subscribed to, did you have Paul Robeson records in your home?
• It’s not until the Keyishian case in 1967 that the Supreme Court says this whole system of loyalty investigations violates the First Amendment and the due process provisions of the Constitution.
• Marjorie Heins Book Events:  
  •  Revolution Books March 5 is sponsored by the New York Civil Liberties Union – 7PM
    
  • Harvard Bookstore, Cambridge, MA, Friday March 15, 3 pm.
  • Talking Leaves Bookstore, Buffalo, NY, Sat. March 23, 5 pm.
  • Politics & Prose Bookstore, Washington, DC, Sat. June 15, 1 pm.
    

Guest – Marjorie Heins, a civil liberties lawyer, writer, and teacher, and the founding director of the Free Expression Policy Project. Her previous book, Not in Front of the Children, won the American Library Association’s 2002 Eli Oboler Award for best published work in the field of intellectual freedom. Other books include Sex, Sin, and Blasphemy: A Guide to America’s Censorship Wars; Cutting the Mustard: Affirmative Action and the Nature of Excellence; and Strictly Ghetto Property: The Story of Los Siete de la Raza. She is a graduate of Harvard Law School.

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Encore Interview: New Vatican Rules On Handling Priest Sexual Abuse Cases

Earlier this year, the Vatican had revised its laws making it easier to discipline sex abuser priests. The new internal of the Vatican will use faster judicial procedures instead of full ecclesiastical trials. Critics of the revisions, say the Vatican merely tweaked the process and the new rules don’t hold bishops accountable for abuse by priests on their watch or require that they report the sexual abuse to the authorities. In the same report was the inclusion that attempting to ordain women as priests was comparable to heresy, apostasy and pedophilia. To many it was a comparison meant to resist any suggestion that pedophilia can be addressed by ending the requirement of celibacy.

Barbara Blaine:

• SNAP is now a worldwide movement of survivors. We invite supporters join us, we have approximately 10 thousand survivors.  Some are spouses and family members but most are survivors; survivors of sexual abuse by priests or other clergy members.  Sometimes by religious brothers, by nuns, deacons even bishops.
• We grew in 2002 and 2003 as the headlines were exploding of abuse by priests.
• We have support group meetings in the United States in about 65 different cities. We were extremely naive, not to mention wounded trying to figure out how to make it from day to day. Its empowering for us if we can protect someone who is 12 or 13 from being abused.
• Some documents was released in 2009 in Ireland. Those were the result of government investigations into the allegations of priests and other religious figures sexually abusing children.  Victims across Europe, in Germany and Belgium, Austria, Netherlands, England began speaking out and reporting their abuse. In Ireland at the end of 2009, four bishops were resigning their positions.
• From our perspective, what comes out of the Vatican is a lot of lofty words and empty promises. If you look for concrete action, you’ll see very little if any.  We as victims are devout Catholics and its really incredible for us to comprehend that someone in the position of authority in the church would not want us to be protected.
• It was heartbreaking and devastating to learn the policy of the church officials is to protect the predators and their assets and their reputations, not the children.
• They’re accountable to no one and its okay for them to continue and commit these crimes.
• The vast majority of victims still do not report. More than 5 thousand priests have been identified are sexual offenders who have abused children between 1950 and 2008.
• 5 percent of priests abusing children. When someone rapes a child they get fired, in the church they get promoted. SNAPnetwork.org / bishopaccountability.org

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Attorney Pam Spees:

• We joined a conversation with SNAP looking for ways to insure accountability for what’s going on.
• Is there a legal framework that gets at the widespread nature of this. There’s one book out that discusses the 2000 year old paper trail of sexual abuse in the church.
• You’ll hear things like a cardinal or a pope attempt to make an apology. They’re sorry for what happened to these folks. It didn’t just happen.
• It shows the lack of attention and lack of awareness of the gravity of what’s going on and a prioritization of the church protecting itself and its power, rather than insuring the protection of the kids in the church and others who are vulnerable to abuse by priests.
• It also looks like an attempt to decentralize the responsibility. There are key legal experts who have discussed this as crimes against humanity.
• These are acts that are committed as a widespread or systematic assault or attack on the civilian population.
• When you’re talking about the massive sustained harm that is being caused here and the lack of awareness and acknowledgment. . it’s really astonishing.
• The International Criminal Court is a possible venue that has jurisdiction on crimes against humanity.
• The Church can’t be trusted to police itself.

Guest – Pam Spees, senior staff attorney in the international human rights program at the Center for Constitutional Rights. She has a background in international criminal and human rights law with a gender focus, as well as criminal trial practice

Guest -  Barbara Blaine,  founder of  SNAP, Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, the nation’s oldest and largest self-help organization for victims of clergy sexual abuse.

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Updates:

• Pope’s Resignation May Make International Prosecution Easier
• All Charges Dropped For Occupy Protesters
• A Call for Drastic Changes in Educating New Lawyers

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Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

In the past 2 years, we’ve discussed in many interviews and updates, the attacks on whistle-blowers and hackers. The emerging movement of programmers, hackers, open source software, online communities has challenged and exposed corporate and government control and surveillance, making them targets of prosecution.  As many may know, our own Michael Ratner has represented whistle-blower Julian Assange, computer activist Jeremy Hammond, and has been a legal adviser to many others including the late Aaron Swartz.  Today we talk with author Gabriella Coleman about her recently published book Encoding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking.  It’s a good place to start for those learning about the political significance of free software, intellectual property and the morality of computer hacking.

Gabriella Coleman:

• When you utter the word hacker, usually the image that pops into people’s minds is nefarious criminal. That can be the case but really hackers are composed of an extremely lively group of individuals who tend to be computer programmers and network administrators, who actually are committed to a range of civil liberties such as free speech and privacy. Especially in the last decade they’ve been involved in political activities as well.
• They’re quite a bit of diversity among hackers, technically.
• Hackers – are keenly aware of the issues such as censorship, which impact the present and the future of the internet. Some hackers are committed to insuring internet freedoms for their own productive autonomy.
• Beyond productive autonomy they’re really starting to care about the broader issues relating to internet freedoms and how they relate to democracy at large.
• In order for software to be made, it must be written in a programming language such as C++, Python and Pearl and its written in source code. These are the underlying directions of software.
• A very prominent group of hackers who are committed to always having access to source code have actually reinvented the law to make sure that that source code is eternally available. They’re very much against copyrights and patents and have created something called a copyleft to make sure the source code that powers software is always accessible to them.
• Proprietary software such as the Microsoft Operating System is behind lock and key. We don’t have access to the underlying directions.
• There’s a contingent within the hacker world who believe that access is not only good for the sake of improving technology but is the morally right thing to do.
• That its a collaborative process, that everyone should have access to it. There are other hackers that are a little less concerned about the ethics of access and they’re more concerned about the pragmatics.
• I originally thought that these free software developers who were part of these large projects such as Debion, were raging Leftists. The project itself had collected people from all political orientations.
• Anonymous is a digital phenomena somewhat composed of hackers but not exclusively so, who has engaged in an enormous amount of political activities. They are innovating in the realm of direct action related to digital protest.
• Some will engage in hacking to get information about corporate corruption to leak to the world at large. They also engage in distributed denial of service attacks where a website is so overloaded with requests it comes off line.
• Free software, in order for it to be free speech is also like free beer, you have to make the source code available. But that doesn’t stop people from charging money for support or services.
• In the case of SOPA being passed, there was massive outcry, and massive organization to do something about it to stop it in its tracks. It came from different quarters of society, it came from corporate giants such as google, it came from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and there was a huge black out where people took down their websites. It had a massive effect and stopped it in its tracks.
• I’m currently working on a book on Anonymous. That should be definitely done by 2013.

Guest – Gabriella Coleman, Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy in the Art History and Communication Studies Department at McGill University. Trained as an anthropologist, she researches, writes, and teaches on hackers and digital activism. Her first book on Free Software, “Coding Freedom: The Aesthetics and the Ethics of Hacking” has been published with Princeton University Press. It is available for purchase and you can download a copy on here.

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Long Distance Revolutionary: A Journey with Mumia Abu-Jamal

The new documentary, “Long Distance Revolutionary: A Journey with Mumia Abu-Jamal,” is premiering across the country.  The film includes interviews from Cornel West, Alice Walker, Ruby Dee, Dick Gregory, Amy Goodman, Michael Parenti, writers Tariq Ali, and Michelle Alexander. This film beautifully captures the importance of Mumia Abu-Jamal’s life as an American journalist, and radical. He published seven books in prison including the best selling “Live From Death Row.”

In Chris Hedges’ review he points out what Cornel West says in the film: “The state is very clever in terms of keeping track, especially [of] the courageous and visionary ones, the ones that are long-distance runners. You can keep track of them, absorb ’em, dilute ’em, or outright kill ’em—you don’t have to worry about opposition to ’em.”

Steve Vittoria:

• The arc of Mumia’s life and the body of his work which is remarkable under harsh and draconian conditions is much more than December 9, 1981. I’ve always seen his life as more than one moment.
• I wanted to tap into what I found was clearly a unique story. Here’s a young man who early on realized he was a revolutionary by the time he was 15 years old.
• He’s writing remarkable work for the Black Panther Party and their newspaper. By 26, he’s a vibrant radio broadcaster and journalist in Philadelphia, reaches NPR and All Things Considered.
• After incarceration, he publishes 7 or 8 books.
• I did from a creative standpoint and a very practical standpoint.
• I wanted to tell a really good story. Any filmmaker, that’s job number one. Mumia, you just have to turn the camera on and you can tell a great story.
• If the film starts to win awards and get fawned over then something’s wrong.
• My favorite interview in the film is Mumia’s sister Lydia Barashango who unfortunately passed away a few months after we interviewed her from her bout with cancer. She went to great lengths to secure her baby brother’s legacy.
• Trying to find what it was like as a young African-American kid growing up in one of the great racist northern cities of Philadelphia, what it was like
• I didn’t realize how funny he could be. He’s kind of a science fiction nerd. He calls himself a nerd.
• Mumia has a very strict schedule for work.

Guest – Steve Vittoria, the writer, director, producer and editor of Long Distance Revolutionary: A Journey with Mumia Abu-Jamal. The film premiered in theaters in New York City earlier this month.

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Updates:

• NLG-NYC Attorneys Challenge NYPD Surveillance of Muslim Communities
• Center for Constitutional Rights Responds to Newly Released Targeted Killing White Paper

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Senate Votes To Extend Warrantless Wiretaps For Five More Years: No Oversight, No Transparency

Days before 2012 drew to a close, the U.S. Senate voted 73-23 to reauthorize the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 for five more years. This is the unconstitutional spying bill that violates the Fourth Amendment and gives vast unmonitored authority to the National Security Agency to conduct dragnet surveillance of American’s’ international emails and phone calls.

Michelle Richardson:

• The Senate took up the FISA Reauthorization Bill right at the end of the year and they did consider a handful of very moderate amendments that wouldn’t have actually interfered with the collection of information but would make it more transparent to Congress.
• In an open and free democracy there should be no secret law.
• The original FISA was much more targeted. It required a more traditional probable cause, finding an individualized warrant before you could go up and tap a phone.
• After 911 Congress started systematically lowering the standard for obtaining this information.
• They made it easier so you could go around the court, and do it administratively.
• They lowered the standard so there’s no longer a probable cause. The FISA Amendment Act is probably the biggest change in the last decade.
• You no longer have to name who you’re going to tap, the phone number or stated facility.
• Instead we’re going to do these programmatic orders so the court is no longer involved in deciding who will be tapped.
• I’m not going to tap a specific American, but I want information about Yemen.
• Theoretically this isn’t turned into the United States at any specific person. We think its being used for bulk collection.
• The way the internet works now, sometimes your communication will travel around the world before landing next door.
• A lot of times the equipment is intentionally built so the government can tap directly into the system.
• FISA – Foreign intelligence which includes the undefined national defense of the United States.
• I think there is reason to believe this is a self correcting situation and that people will start looking at this technology and understand more about what’s out there.

Guest – Michelle Richardson is a Legislative Counsel with the ACLU Washington Legislative Office where she focuses on national security and government transparency issues such as the Patriot Act, FISA, cybersecurity, state secrets and the Freedom of Information Act. Before coming to the ACLU in 2006, Richardson served as counsel to the House Judiciary Committee where she specialized in national security, civil rights and constitutional issues for Democratic Ranking Member John Conyers.

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Boycott Divestment Sanction Controversy At Brooklyn College

Last month, a backlash of controversy erupted after the announcement of a student group at CUNY’s Brooklyn College, Students for Justice in Palestine will host two speakers who will discuss their views on the BDS movement. The BDS movement as many listeners may know calls for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel in protest of the government’s oppressive policies toward the Palestinian people. The speakers are Palestinian BDS advocate Omar Barghouti and University of California Berkeley philosopher and BDS supporter Judith Butler. The event was  co-sponsored by numerous student and community groups, as well as Brooklyn College’s political science department.

The backlash included a threat by New York City Council members and Congressman Jerry Nadler to defund Brooklyn College and opinion pieces by Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz who called the event a “propaganda hate orgy,” another daily newspaper labeled it “Israel-bashing.

Omar Barghouti:

• Specifically the BDS call said that Israel and institutions and corporations that are complicit in Israel’s violations of International Law should be boycotted, divested from and eventually sanctioned in order to achieve the 3 basic rights of the Palestinian people under International Law.
• Ending the occupation of 1967, which include the illegal colonies, the wall, ending the system of discrimination within Israel itself which meets the UN definition of apartheid, the third is the right of return for refugees which is their basic inalienable right under international law.
• In order to achieve these 3 basic rights, we absolutely need international solidarity as was done in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, we can’t do it alone.
• Your tax money is funding Israel occupation and apartheid. You have an obligation to question where your money is going to and how its being used to oppress us.
• I think that the New York Times editorial supported having a debate at Brooklyn College says it all. We could have never imagined such a thing, a year ago.
• The government of South Africa’s ruling party the ANC endorsed BDS this last December.
• Many Jewish groups have joined BDS campaigns and are leading BDS campaigns.
• Bullying is one thing and response from critics is another. We’re very open to debate but no one would debate us.
• They’re running scared of debate.
• Not every event, every talk has to be balanced.
• The balance is overall. Those accusing this panel of being imbalanced themselves like Dershowitz, always speak solo, unopposed, espousing the most extreme ideas like torture, a war crime.
• They’re twisting the very definition of academic freedom.
• Human rights are difficult. If you have a master slave relationship and the slave insists on freedom and nothing less than freedom that upsets the order.
• Did equality in Alabama delegitamize whites? It delegitamized apartheid in the South.
• We’re delegitamizing the Israel’s occupation, apartheid and denial of Palestinian rights. We’re insisting on our rights. We’re not delegitamizing any people.
• We’re delegitamizing an order that’s illegal by definition. Apartheid is illegal. Occupation is illegal. Building colonies on occupied territories is illegal. Ethnic cleansing is illegal.
• It’s not a blanket boycott against every company that’s complicit because that wouldn’t work.
• BDS is about context sensitivity, graduality and sustainability.
• You’ve got to address the most sinister companies as it were. The most seriously involved in human rights violations and move toward others, to teach others a lesson.
• There’s a big campaign against soda stream led by an Interfaith coalition because Soda Stream is manufactured in an illegal settlement in the occupied territories.
• We need coresistance, not coexistance until we end oppression.
• www.BDSMovement.net  / www.PACBI.org 
• www.WhoProfits.org
• Dissent and any argument against Israeli policies is almost becoming illegitimate in this country. It’s a new McCarthyism that the Israeli lobby is leading.

Guest – Omar Barghouti, the founding member of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel and the Palestinian Civil Society Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign.

Listen to Law and Disorder May 2011 Show with Guest Omar Barghouti

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Updates:

• Long Distance Revolutionary: A Journey With Mumia-Abu-Jamal
• Freedom 7 Case Challenging NDAA of 2013 – Pack the Courtroom: Wednesday February 6th, 2013, 10:00 AM – Room 1505, 40 Foley Square
• CCR and NLG Team Up To Provide Legal Support For Palestinian Activism: Palestinelegalsupport.org
• Obama Administration GTMO Office Vanishes
• Michael Ratner’s Sundance Film Festival Report: Occupy 99 Percent / CIA Propaganda Film: Manhunt

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Central Park Five Civil Suit

On April 19, 1989 a group of five black and Latino teenagers were arrested and convicted for the brutal rape of a white female jogger in Central Park, New York City. It was one of the highest profile criminal cases in the city. A New York court overturned the convictions of the five teenagers after a serial rapist confessed to the crimes. By this time of this confession, the five defendants had already served sentences of 7and 13 years. Now, the city of New York is refusing to settle a $250 million decade-long federal civil rights suit brought by the defendants.  Attorney Roger Wareham talks more about the case and the Ken Burns documentary on the Central Park Five that could provide footage for the federal civil lawsuit.

Attorney Roger Wareham:

• I’m part of a team of lawyers among five firms that represent the five defendants.
• She almost died. She lost 75 percent of the blood in her body that night.
• The police at some point arrested 30 youths who had allegedly been in the park earlier that night. Some of them were charged with attacking people jogging in the park.
• Most of them had been released, these five were in custody.
• Maybe four or five hours after they were arrested the police received word of this woman who was near death.
• So they held these five children for questioning which basically became and interrogation, which basically became a coerced false confession where each one of them implicated the other ones in the rape and attack of this woman.
• Even though none of them knew each other or what actually happened because they didn’t do it, they just wanted to go home.
• By the time the parents became part of the process, the false statements had already been elicited.
• Especially when a black man is a accused of touching, raping a white woman, logic, justice, objectivity, evidence goes out the window and there’s a presumption of guilt.
• They went to trial and were convicted even though there was no forensic evidence.
• Once they were released from prison they had to register as sexual predators.
• Thirteen years after their conviction, the person who actually committed the crime came forward and admitted he’d done it.
• He was arrested after a failed attempt at a rape. There was an m.o. that he employed with the rapes that he conducted.
• I’m part of a political organization called the December 12 Movement.
• Manhattan’s District Attorney’s office had done a very thorough investigation and this is the same office that had prosecuted them.
• They put forth a really damning affirmation in support of our motion basically admitting they had prosecuted the wrong people, errors had been made. It was clear that the one and only perpetrator was Mateas Raes and they were not going to retry the case.
• Their convictions were overturned 10 years ago, in December 2002.
• Why hasn’t it been settled? You look to Police Commissioner Kelly who endorsed the report.
• Subpoenaing the outtakes is a reflection of their desperation. See, they know the truth. They’re floundering around looking for different straws to grab at.
• Contact the December 12th Movement directly at 718-398-1766.

Guest – Attorney Roger Wareham is a lawyer and political activist of over four decades. He is a member of the December 12th Movement, an organization of African people which organizes in the Black and Latino community around human rights violations, particularly police terror. Wareham is also the International Secretary-General of the International Association Against Torture (AICT), a non-governmental organization that has consultative status before the United Nations.

Since 1989, he has annually presented evidence of human rights violations facing people of color in the United States and other parts of the world at assemblies of the United Nations’ Human Rights Council (formerly the Commission on Human Rights) and its other bodies that meet in Geneva, Switzerland. His work was instrumental in having Mr. Maurice Glele, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance; conduct the first U.N. investigation of the United States in history. Roger Wareham was an active organizer of and participant in the United Nations’ World Conference against Racism held from August 30 – September 7, 2001 in Durban, South Africa.

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