“This is not intended to be a mere discussion of violations of law that have occurred,” says convener Lawrence Velvel, dean and cofounder of the school. “It is, rather, intended to be a planning conference at which plans will be laid and necessary organizational structures set up, to pursue the guilty as long as necessary and, if need be, to the ends of the Earth.†related article
Velvel Interview Notes:
Conference will be held in undisclosed location for the time being.
Until people have the fear they will be brought to book if they violate the law in a very serious ways that cause tens of thousands of deaths, what will stop them from doing it in the future?
Unless there is something to look back on, like the Germans and the Japanese apparently know, don’t do it again because people swung.
Who’s to say it won’t happen 20 or 30 years in the future again.
Guest – Lawrence R. Velvel, Dean of Massachusetts School of Law and a professor of law. Mr. Velvel is a 1960 graduate of the University of Michigan and a 1963 graduate of the University of Michigan Law School, where he served on the law review and was elected to the Order of the Coif. He was a law professor from 1966-1978, first at the University of Kansas and then at Catholic University. He has been a partner in major law firms in Washington, D.C., and was the first chief counsel of an organization established to write United States Supreme Court briefs in support of state and local governments. read more.
A Justice Department proposal which could be made public in a month, has given the government even broader license to open terrorism investigations, without any evidence of wrongdoing, relying instead on racial or ethnic profiling. Currently, FBI agents need specific reasons, such as evidence or allegations that a law probably has been violated, to investigate US citizens and legal residents. Last month, The Council on American Islamic Relations decried the forthcoming plan as “unconstitutional and un-American.â€
This proposal is among other aggressive plans the Bush administration has put in place such as new wiretapping regulations and authorizing greater sharing of intelligence information with the local police. The Director of National Intelligence has set up – Information Sharing Environment – where certain police authorities will have access to information produced by the FBI, by the intelligence community and also by police departments around the country.
It is “one stop shopping” for all these different police agencies and even private companies to have access to this highly speculative, accusatory, fragmented and often erroneous information.
Intelligence Fusion Centers – which I think is a real problem, particularly since there’s very little oversight of these centers
there’s no way to correct these watch files, – a main problem with the closed system, where no one has an opportunity to go in and say you got this piece wrong.
Giving the FBI more authority to collect more information isn’t helping the FBI be more effective.
Gathering information about innocent people won’t help find guilty people.
There is no terrorism profile, people are drawn to terrorism for all sorts of reasons.
Terrorism watch list : 1 million individual records – clearly nobody believes there’s a million terrorists out there.
The FBI don’t know to this day, how many national security letters they’ve issued.
Guest – Mike German, attorney with the ACLU and former FBI agent. Mike German is a recognized expert in terrorist group behavior, counter-terrorist operations, and right-wing extremism. He has appeared on Dateline NBC, Paula Zahn Now, CNN, and MSNBC and his commentary has been published in the National Law Journal and the Washington Post. Mike served for sixteen years as a Special Agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and is one of the few agents credited with actually having prevented acts of terrorism before it became the FBI’s number one priority.
For nearly eight years, President Bush and Vice President Cheney have manipulated and lied to the U.S., and not without the help of Congress and the mainstream media. Here on Law and Disorder we’ve been with listeners during 4 of those 8 years, chronicling the injustices of the “global war on terror.” Now, in this late stage of the Bush/Cheney administration, Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich is pushing for impeachment. Last week the house voted 238 to 180 to send a single article of impeachment to the Judiciary Committee. The same committee that stopped Kucinich’s impeachment effort is allowing a hearing on Bush’s reasoning for taking the country to war in Iraq. In Kucinich’s words it is quote “deceiving Congress with fabricated threats of Iraq WMDs to fraudulently obtain support for an authorization of the use of military force against Iraq.” Kucinich: citizen petition.
If this article of impeachment is tabled, Kucinich says he would then begin to propose other articles. There are 35 articles of impeachment, among them are:
Misleading Congress and the American People About Threats from Iran, and Supporting Terrorist Organizations Within Iran, With the Goal of Overthrowing the Iranian Government
Falsifying Accounts of US Troop Deaths and Injuries for Political Purposes,
Illegal Detention: Detaining Indefinitely And Without Charge Persons Both U.S. Citizens and Foreign Captives, 4. Violation of the Posse Comitatus Act,
Rendition: Kidnapping People and Taking Them Against Their Will to “Black Sites” Located in Other Nations, Including Nations Known to Practice Torture
House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers Jr. told Congressional Quarterly, “We’re not doing impeachment, but he can talk about it.†Kucinich says holding George W. Bush and Dick Cheney accountable now, could prevent an attack on Iran.
Members of the Bush administration may soon be questioning if they will be prosecuted for war crimes. George W. Bush and other senior officials have enjoyed years of immunity from criminal lawsuits but, once out of office, they can be held accountable.
Bugliosi: Will U.S. State Attorney Generals and District Attorneys do the right thing?
In his latest book, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, Vincent Bugliosi lays out the legal framework of a meticulously researched case that puts George W. Bush on trial in an American courtroom for the murder of nearly 4,000 American soldiers fighting the war in Iraq.
One strategy in The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder is to establish jurisdiction in the cases for Attorney Generals in each state and also the approximately 900 district attorneys in the counties of those states. Bugliosi says it’s not unreasonable to believe that at least one prosecutor will be courageous enough to step up. Bugliois says, one of the key pieces of evidence to prosecute George W. Bush is the Manning Memo from January 31, 2003.
Manning Memo: In March 2003, Bush said that if Saddam Hussein did not give up his weapons of mass destruction, Iraq would face war. But earlier, in a January 31 closed-door meeting, Bush told his British buddy Tony Blair that the attack would take place even if no WMDs were found. Indeed, George and Tony candidly conceded that the discovery of such weapons was unlikely. This deliberate deception is revealed in a confidential five-page memo written by David Manning, Blair’s top foreign-policy advisor, who was at the meeting. Manning records that both Bush and Blair were uptight that the WMDs were not going to be found, so George W offered another fabrication to give them an excuse to attack. He suggested that the U.S. would paint one of our own surveillance planes in the colors of the United Nations and fly it over Iraq, hoping that Saddam would be provoked into shooting it down. Then the U.S. and Brits could invade, claiming that they were retaliating for Saddam’s attack on the UN.
Bugliosi: Points To Consider
While young soldiers age 18, 19, who never had a chance to live out their dreams, were getting blown to pieces in Iraq. Bush was having a lot of fun and enjoying life to the very fullest.
Juxtaposing Hussein with 9/11 – then saying later Hussein was involved in a terrorist relationship with Al-Qaeda. Al Qaeda was trained in Iraq in making bombs and poison.
The white paper that congress saw never had the intelligences of the 16 US agencies, that Hussein was not an imminent threat. Opinons were changed into facts while dissenting opinions deleted.
Law and Disorder hosts were live in the studio with Naomi Wolf. Naomi Wolf is a feminist, social critic and political activist. The New York Times called her book, The Beauty Myth, one of the most important books of the 20th century. Wolf is the co-founder of The Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership, teaching young women to become leaders and agents of change. Naomi Wolf blog in the Huffington Post
Her latest book The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot is a call to return to the beliefs of our founding fathers. Wolf’s new book illustrates ten steps historically taken by leaders who are attempting to dismantle a democracy. Wolf jokingly called it the The Greatest Hits of Facism.
In The End of America, Wolf gives voice to the cause of every American patriot: the preservation of the Constitution and the liberties it embodies and protects.
“Recent history has profound lessons for us in the U.S. today about how fascist, totalitarian, and other repressive leaders seize and maintain power, especially in what were once democracies. The secret is that these leaders all tend to take very similar, parallel steps. The Founders of this nation were so deeply familiar with tyranny and the habits and practices of tyrants that they set up our checks and balances precisely out of fear of what is unfolding today. We are seeing these same kinds of tactics now closing down freedoms in America, turning our nation into something that in the near future could be quite other than the open society in which we grew up and learned to love liberty,†stated Wolf.
“Freedom and democracy†are two words we’ve been hearing from the right wing in this country for 25 years. In their quest to shore up support for the politics of wealth and privilege, the Right has organized patiently and consistently by focusing on a core ideology to amass a formidable base. The Right’s commentary on world affairs, morality, the state, and the economy, though, has had an overarching focus, namely to eliminate social equality as a legitimate public policy goal. Its success has resulted in one of the most dramatic, undemocratic, and insidious transfers of wealth and power in recent American history.
Guest – John Ehrenberg, author of the book “Servants of Wealth: The Right’s Assault on Economic Justice.†A professor of political science at Long Island University, in this, his third book, critically analyzes the rise of an ideologically coherent Right. He dissects their themes of military weakness, moral decay, racial anxiety, and hostility to social welfare to reveal their central organizing objective of protecting wealth and assaulting equality.
Law and Disorder hosts talk with Daniel Ellsberg about his recent speech. Ellsberg, former Defense Department analyst who leaked the secret Pentagon Papers in 1971, describes to listeners a dire scenario if the Bush administration attacks Iran.
Excerpt from his speech – “If there’s another 9/11 under this regime it means that they switch on full extent all the apparatus of a police state that has been patiently constructed, largely secretly at first but eventually leaked out and known and accepted by the Democratic people in Congress, by the Republicans and so forth.
Guest – Daniel Ellsberg, served in the Pentagon in 1964 under Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. He then served for two years in Vietnam working for General Edward Lansdale as a civilian in the State Department, and became aware that the Vietnam War was unwinnable.
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The National Lawyers’ Guild Calls for Demonstrations in Solidarity with Lawyers in Pakistan
Co-hosts Heidi Boghosian and Michael Smith speak with lawyers and activists on the street. The National Lawyers Guild, NYC-NLG Chapter, Center for Constitutional Rights, SALT, Alliance for Justice, have called for demonstrations at Pakistani Consulates in New York City, Washington, D.C., Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles & Boston in solidarity with Lawyers in Pakistan.
Speakers include NLG NYC Chapter President Daniel L. Meyers; Michael Heflin, Amnesty International USA; Jeannie Mirer, Secretary General, International Association of Democratic Lawyers.
The National Lawyers Guild demands that President Musharraf immediately withdraw the emergency declaration of November 3, 2007, the Provisional Constitutional Order No. 1 of 2007 (PCO), which suspends Pakistan’s Constitution. This declaration includes suspension of the right to life and liberty, freedom of speech, assembly and association, and equal protection of the law, all of which are guaranteed by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890-1928 is meticulously and creatively researched. Palmer’s book situates American communism’s formative decade in the dynamics of a specific political and economic context, never losing sight of the mobilizations and militant strikes of the period. This study also locates this historical drama–to an unprecedented degree–alongside the personal life and particular experience of a native son of working-class radicalism. – University of Illinois Press
Guest – Bryan Palmer Canada Research Chair at Trent University and the editor of Labour/Le Travail. He is also the author of ten books, including Descent into Discourse and Cultures of Darkness.
I am writing this on November 13th. That day probably has little significance for most readers of this blog. But it is a day, as they say, that should live in infamy. On that date in 2001, two months after 9/11, President Bush issued Military Order Number 1.Read More . . . .
