HERMES America English

In Trump’s America, Your Privacy Is for Sale By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Unless you’re reading this column in a good old newspaper, odds are your internet service provider (ISP) knows what you’re up to. ISPs are the on-ramp to the internet; it is through these gatekeepers that we all access the internet. They set the price and the speed of your connection, but were legally prevented from sharing or selling details about your personal internet usage without your permission–until now. Through a resolution that narrowly passed both the House and the Senate on partisan lines, internet privacy protections implemented by the Obama administration will be entirely eliminated. Companies like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon now can sift through your personal information, your web browsing history, where and when you access the internet and what you do while online, and peddle that private data to whomever is willing to pay. President Donald Trump, while obsessed with the imagined invasion of his own privacy (as indicated by his tweeted charge that President Barack Obama wiretapped him during his campaign), is expected to sign this bill into law, stripping privacy away from hundreds of millions of Americans. “Americans pay for [internet] service. They don’t expect that information to be shared or used for other purposes or sold without their permission,” Laura Moy said on the “Democracy Now!” news hour. Moy is the deputy director of the Center on Privacy and Technology at the Georgetown University Law Center. “Americans absolutely need internet connectivity in today’s modern era,” Moy continued. “You need to go online to search for a job. You need to go online to complete your education. You need to go online often to communicate with your health care provider or conduct your banking.” All of this communication, all of this internet use, can be conducted from the privacy of your home. But don’t think it is going to remain private. Your ISP can vacuum up your searches, your interests, what movies you watch online, your age, weight, Social Security number, medical conditions, financial troubles ... if you start searching online for a bankruptcy lawyer or for treatment for addiction, your ISP will add that to your profile. “We want people to use the internet, to view it as a safe space to communicate with others, to express their political viewpoints, to carry out these vitally important everyday activities, and to do so without fear that the information that they share with their internet service provider will be used to harm them in some way,” Laura Moy concluded. That was the hope. The internet privacy rules that are being eliminated fill 219 pages, and were worked on at the Federal Communications Commission for over a year, supported by over 275,000 comments from citizens and advocacy organizations. They were published in the Federal Register last December. The effort to eliminate them was championed by Tennessee Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn, who chairs the subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee that oversees the FCC. As reported in Vocativ, Blackburn, during her 14 years in Congress, has received at least $693,000 in campaign contributions from companies and individuals from AT&T, Comcast, Verizon and other industry members that stand to profit from the rules change. Blackburn’s willing partner in the repeal of the rules is the FCC’s new commissioner, Ajit Pai, who used to serve as associate general counsel for Verizon. He was one of the two Republicans on the five-seat FCC during Obama’s second term, and was promoted to FCC chair by President Donald Trump. According to the Los Angeles Times, Pai gave a speech last December in which he promised to “take a weed wacker” to another hard-won progressive victory, net neutrality. Immediately after the House voted to repeal the privacy rules, Free Press, the national media policy advocacy and activist organization, stated, “The broadband-privacy fight is the Trump administration’s first attack on the open internet. And now that it has a win on its hands, it’ll be pushing for another.” It is absolutely shocking that Donald Trump, in the midst of his accusations that his own privacy was invaded by illegal wiretaps, is signing into law permission to invade, sell, trade and monetize the most private, intimate details of every internet-connected American. This law is the ultimate hack: allowing corporations to take all of our information and sell it for profit. In Donald Trump’s America, the information isn’t stolen by hackers in the dark of night. It is taken with the government’s blessing. Unless people organize and fight back, the promises of the open internet will fade away.

The U.S. Rejected Refugee Anne Frank—Let’s Not Make the Same Mistake Again By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Anne Frank would be 87 years old had she not perished in Bergen-Belsen, a Nazi concentration camp in Germany. What words of wisdom might she offer the Trump administration as it crafts its latest iteration of its Muslim and refugee ban? Anne Frank is known for her famous diary, written while she and her family hid from the Gestapo in a “secret annex” of a house in Amsterdam from 1942 to 1944. Long before the family went into hiding, Anne’s father, Otto Frank, desperately sought visas to bring his family to the United States. Like tens of thousands of other European Jews at the time, they were repeatedly denied. Anne Frank and her family were betrayed and sent to the concentration camps. Only her father, Otto Frank, survived. He went on to publish her writing as “The Diary of a Young Girl,” which has entered the canon of resistance literature. It should be required reading as Donald Trump and his coterie of xenophobes attempt to ban Muslims and refugees from gaining the same safe haven that the Frank family was denied 75 years ago. “Anne Frank was denied immigration at least twice. Otto Frank, her father, appealed to the Franklin Roosevelt administration, roughly between the periods of 1939 to 1941,” Stephen Goldstein told us on the “Democracy Now!” news hour. He is the executive director of the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect. “Otto Frank ... was able to get communications very high up in the Roosevelt administration, saying, ‘Please, save my family. Save the Frank family.’ It didn’t work. FDR refused refugee Anne Frank.” This aspect of Anne Frank’s story was unknown until papers were discovered decades later and made public in 2007. The 81 pages document Otto Frank’s attempts to gain visas for his family for travel to the United States. Fanning flames of fear that Nazi Germany would be sending agents and saboteurs amidst the potential flood of refugees, anti-Semites in the State Department blocked as many refugees as they could, condemning tens of thousands to their deaths at the hands of the Nazis. “Whether this kind of evil prejudice against refugees was perpetrated by a Democrat like Franklin Roosevelt or a Republican like Donald Trump, it is an unconscionable blot on the American national conscience,” Goldstein added. “That’s why, in the name of Anne Frank, we have an obligation to stand with Muslim refugees and to stand with all refugees to help them come into this nation.” Since President Trump took office, there has been a surge in threats and attacks against both Jews and Muslims. At least 69 bomb threats have been directed at 54 Jewish Community Centers across the United States since the inauguration. On Wednesday morning, the Anti-Defamation League, which tracks these threats, received a bomb threat at its New York City offices. In University Hills, Missouri, just outside of St. Louis, more than 100 headstones at a Jewish cemetery were overturned. As images of the anti-Semitic vandalism emerged, two Muslim activists—Linda Sarsour, co-chair of the Women’s March on Washington, and Tarek El-Messidi—launched a crowdsourced campaign to raise funds to repair the damage. They hoped to raise $20,000. Within 24 hours, they had raised more than $90,000. “Any remaining funds after the cemetery is restored,” they wrote, “will be allocated to repair any other vandalized Jewish centers.” Two weeks earlier, on Saturday, Jan. 28, the Islamic Center in Victoria, Texas, was burnt to the ground. The local Jewish community gave the Muslim worshippers the keys to their synagogue, saying there was room for them all to pray there. An online campaign was launched to rebuild the mosque. Within weeks, more than $1.1 million was raised. Construction is already underway. Jan. 27 was International Holocaust Remembrance Day. President Trump issued a statement that was widely criticized for failing to mention Jews at all. Then, at a press conference held with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, when asked by an Israeli reporter about the rise of anti-Semitism since his election, Trump responded by gloating about his election victory. When questioned several days later by a Hasidic Jewish reporter, again about the rise of anti-Semitism, Trump scolded the reporter, telling him to sit down, saying, “Quiet, quiet, quiet.” After widespread criticism over his failure to condemn the waves of bomb threats against Jewish Community Centers, President Trump finally called anti-Semitism “horrible” and “painful.” Then Vice President Mike Pence visited the Missouri cemetery that had been vandalized.

Movements Matter as Andrew Puzder and Michael Flynn Are Forced Out By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan “When the people lead, the leaders will follow” are the oft-quoted words attributed to Gandhi. This week, massive grass-roots organizing helped defeat the nomination of Andrew Puzder, a multimillionaire fast-food CEO, as Donald Trump’s secretary of labor. He was widely accused of running companies rife with wage theft and sexual harassment. His personal life was marred by accusations of hiring an undocumented immigrant, tax evasion and domestic violence. The push for his defeat was led by some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in our society, and serves as a lesson in the importance and power of movements. Chaos and confusion have marked the first month of the Trump administration, Puzder’s withdrawal came in the same week as the forced resignation of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn as national security adviser. Leaks of classified intelligence revealed that Flynn had engaged in talks with the Russian ambassador to the United States during the transition period, while Barack Obama was still president. If Flynn was engaging in negotiations around the Russian sanctions with the ambassador, as is alleged, then his actions may well have been illegal. Flynn then reportedly lied about the conversations to Vice President Mike Pence. The Justice Department informed Trump in early January, but it was not until the media reported on Flynn’s behavior that Trump forced him out. Flynn is a well-known Islamophobe, who notoriously referred to Islam as “a cancer.” As soon as he was named as the national security adviser, protests erupted. However, that position is one of those that the president can fill without Senate confirmation, so Flynn was in the Oval Office on Day One. While the media firestorm around his Russian intrigue was the instant reason for his ouster, we cannot discount the impact the ongoing, vigorous protests against his overt bigotry had on the decision to fire him. For the past 16 years, Puzder has been the CEO of CKE Restaurants, which owns the fast-food chains Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. As CEO, Puzder has campaigned against the very labor laws and regulations that he would be trusted to enforce as labor secretary. Under Puzder, CKE was a poster child of fast-food-restaurant labor-law violations, with workers regularly suffering wage theft and sexual harassment. Carl’s Jr. advertisements employed hypersexualized imagery and the objectification of women, which many felt contributed to the persistent harassment at his restaurants. Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC) conducted a survey of CKE employees immediately after Puzder’s nomination in December. ROC was founded by restaurant workers in New York City following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The group fights for better wages and working conditions for restaurant employees, and has grown to 18,000 members in 15 states. The survey found: 66 percent of women at CKE Restaurants reported experiencing unwanted sexual behaviors at work, compared with 40 percent of women in the fast-food industry overall. Twenty-eight percent of respondents worked off the clock, and approximately one-third reported wage-theft violations, including not receiving required breaks and overtime pay. Seventy-nine percent of CKE Restaurants workers also reported that they have prepared or served food while sick, the highest rate that ROC has ever encountered. Puzder is opposed to the minimum wage, the fight for $15/hour, paid sick leave and the Affordable Care Act. He told Business Insider almost a year ago that he favored replacing workers with robots: “They’re always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there’s never a slip-and-fall, or an age-, sex- or race-discrimination case.” Puzder also admitted to hiring an undocumented immigrant as a domestic worker in his home, and, further, didn’t pay the required taxes while she was employed. This has been enough to torpedo Cabinet-level nominations in the past, most notably with President Bill Clinton’s attorney-general nominees, Kimba Wood and Zoe Baird. Puzder also was accused of domestic violence by his ex-wife. Lisa Fierstein appeared in disguise in a 1990 episode of “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” describing the abuse she suffered. She said he told her: “I will see you in the gutter. This will never be over. You will pay for this.” Fierstein later recanted her accusations. The video was provided to the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, and was seen by other senators as well. By Wednesday, between four and 12 Republican senators indicated they would be unlikely to support Puzder, tanking his chances. Puzder then dropped out. The mainstream media credits a Republican revolt with the defeat of Andrew Puzder as labor secretary. In the case of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the media says it was leaks from the intelligence community that took him down. But the engine driving both ousters are movements of thousands upon thousands of people across the country, saying “no” to hate, bigotry and injustice.

Silenced Twice by the Senate, Coretta Scott King’s Words Live On By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., was interrupted while reading the words of Coretta Scott King on the Senate floor this week. Warren was reading a 1986 letter King wrote in opposition to the confirmation of Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, then a U.S. attorney in Alabama, to a federal district judgeship. In a rare decision, the Senate Judiciary Committee rejected Sessions. Now, as the Senate debated a new confirmation of Sen. Sessions for the position of U.S. attorney general, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., silenced Warren shortly after she read Coretta Scott King’s words, invoking an obscure Senate rule against impugning colleagues. She was told to sit down and was barred from speaking further during the ongoing debate on Sessions. King sent the letter to Senate Judiciary Chairman Strom Thurmond, a fierce segregationist. She asked him to make the letter a part of the hearing’s formal record, but he didn’t. The 10-page letter was essentially lost until last month, when The Washington Post obtained and published a copy of it. “The irony of Mr. Sessions’ nomination is that, if confirmed, he will be given a life tenure for doing with a federal prosecution what the local sheriffs accomplished twenty years ago with clubs and cattle prods,” King wrote in her testimony, adding, “I believe his confirmation would have a devastating effect on not only the judicial system in Alabama, but also on the progress we have made toward fulfilling my husband’s dream.” She wrote at length about Sessions’ record as a U.S. attorney in Alabama, aggressively prosecuting African-American voting-rights activists on charges of voter fraud in the case of “The Marion Three.” In that case, Albert Turner, an aide to Martin Luther King Jr., Turner’s wife, Evelyn, and Spencer Hogue were all members of the Perry County Civic League in rural Alabama. Sessions prosecuted them, alleging they tampered with ballots of elderly African-American voters. The Marion Three faced well over 100 years in prison if convicted. Sessions was accused of selectively seeking cases to prosecute in “Black Belt” counties of Alabama, like Perry County, where a rising number of African-American registered voters threatened to eliminate the long-held political domination by whites. A federal judge threw out most of the charges, and a jury acquitted the three on the remaining charges. “Civil rights leaders, including my husband and Albert Turner, have fought long and hard to achieve free and unfettered access to the ballot box,” Coretta Scott King continued. “Mr. Sessions has used the awesome power of his office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens in the district he now seeks to serve as federal judge.” By reading King’s words, Elizabeth Warren was accused of imputing “conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a senator.” After McConnell forced her to stop speaking, Warren replied, from the floor, “I am surprised that the words of Coretta Scott King are not suitable for debate in the United States Senate. ... I ask leave of the Senate to continue my remarks.” After her request was denied, she was instructed to leave. She immediately exited, and, just outside the doors to the Senate chamber, read the entire King letter, broadcasting via Facebook Live. After 20 hours online, the 15-minute video had close to 10 million views. McConnell, speaking from the Senate floor, said of his decision to silence Warren: “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.” His words created a firestorm across social media, with posts of solidarity with Warren marked by the hashtag “#ShePersisted.” Back on the Senate floor, several of Warren’s male colleagues read King’s letter aloud. None of them were rebuked by McConnell. In fact, in 2015, when fellow Republican Ted Cruz accused McConnell himself of being a liar, McConnell did not invoke the same Senate rule to bar Cruz from speaking. On Wednesday evening, the Senate confirmed Jeff Sessions as the 84th attorney general of the United States, despite receiving more no votes—47—than any attorney general in U.S. history. What also made history was a woman: Sen. Elizabeth Warren, bringing to life the words of another historic woman, Coretta Scott King, whose words will inform and inspire the resistance to Sessions as he assumes one of the most powerful positions in the Trump administration.

Frederick Douglass: Power Concedes Nothing Without a Demand By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan The good news is that President Donald Trump opened Black History Month by mentioning the renowned abolitionist Frederick Douglass. The bad news is, he doesn’t seem to realize he’s dead. “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice,” Trump said at his “African-American History Month Listening Session,” which he hosted at the White House. Whether it was a misstatement or genuine ignorance of who Frederick Douglass was, or, perhaps, one of Trump’s notorious “alternative facts,” is not clear. What is clear is that the spirit of resistance for which Frederick Douglass is best remembered is alive and well, and is directed squarely against the Trump administration. Frederick Douglass was born in either 1817 or 1818. As he wrote in his bestselling 1845 autobiography, “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave,” he wasn’t sure which was the year of his birth, since “by far the larger part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs, and it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant.” Despite the uncertainty, the life of Frederick Douglass is well-documented, from the violence he suffered as a slave, to his courageous resistance, to his escape to the North and work as an abolitionist leader and orator. He died on Feb. 20, 1895, at the age of 77. Protests against Donald Trump have been raging since his inauguration. Outside the ceremony itself, scores of people were arrested. A contingent of Black Lives Matter activists successfully blockaded an inauguration security checkpoint. The next day, one of President Trump’s first public acts was to denounce the indisputable fact that crowds at Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration dwarfed attendance at Trump’s. Then, later that day, Insult to Trump’s ego only worsened, as attendance at the historic Women’s March on Washington was at least three times larger than at his inauguration the day before. More than 600 solidarity marches also happened around the world, with massive turnout stunning march organizers everywhere. Throughout Trump’s first week in office, protests continued, with disruptions of the ongoing confirmation hearings for his many controversial cabinet picks, to emergency mobilizations against a flurry of executive orders and memoranda intended to revive and expedite the building of both the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines. On Friday, Trump issued an executive order, “Protecting The Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into The United States,” popularly known as Trump’s “Muslim ban.” The order prohibits entry to the U.S. of all refugees, and further excludes travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. Customs agents began detaining people at airports almost immediately, provoking demonstrations at airports from coast to coast. By Saturday night, U.S. District Judge Ann Donnelly in Brooklyn issued a nationwide stay against the executive order. Soon after, federal judges in California, Massachusetts, Virginia and Washington followed with similar rulings. On Monday night, in a stunning development, acting U.S. Attorney General Sally Yates, instructed Justice Department attorneys not to defend the executive order in court. Within hours, Trump fired her. It was the first time since President Richard Nixon, in the midst of the Watergate scandal, that a president fired a U.S. attorney general. In a historic protest, more than 1,000 State Department officials have signed on to a “Dissent Channel” cable, expressing opposition to the order. Continuing protests and a slew of lawsuits have forced the Trump administration to backpedal, specifying that green-card holders are exempt. The broad resistance to Trump and his policies also has reached the congressional corridors of power. Democratic senators have boycotted key committee votes on several of Trump’s cabinet picks, delaying committee approvals for Secretary of Health and Human Services nominee Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga., Secretary of the Treasury nominee Steven Mnuchin and EPA Administrator nominee Scott Pruitt. Even two Republican senators, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, stated that they will vote against Trump’s Department of Education nominee, billionaire school privatization activist Betsy DeVos—threatening her confirmation in the narrowly divided Senate. Despite presidential misconceptions, Frederick Douglass is dead. But he continues to inspire people around the world. Douglass worked on the front lines of resistance against oppression as an early practitioner of intersectional organizing, fighting slavery, but also advocating for women’s rights, and for liberation struggles outside the U.S. “If there is no struggle there is no progress,” he said in 1857. “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

Standing Rock Sioux to Trump: ‘Creating a Second Flint Does Not Make America Great Again’ By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan No longer just tweeting, President Donald J. Trump has been issuing a stream of executive orders and memoranda since his inauguration. On Tuesday, his pronouncements involved the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines. Both projects were denied or delayed by the Obama administration, each after massive public protests. Now, with the Trump administration’s actions, buttressed by a servile Congress under Republican control, fossil-fuel megaprojects are getting the green light. But it will take more than the stroke of Trump’s pen to quash the vigorous resistance to these two pipelines, or the growing global demand for urgent action to combat climate change. The Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) is the 1,100-mile long, $3.8 billion pipeline that would carry fracked oil from the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota, through South Dakota and Iowa to Illinois, where it would connect with another pipeline to carry the crude to the Gulf of Mexico. Opponents of DAPL fear a pipeline rupture could poison the Missouri River, which provides fresh water for 17 million people. The center of opposition has been at protest camps on and around the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, where the pipeline is slated to cross the river. The proposed Keystone XL (KXL) pipeline would carry the world’s filthiest fossil fuels, tar sand bitumen, from Alberta, Canada, across the border into the U.S., also down to the Gulf. On Nov. 6, 2015, after five years of protest against the KXL, President Barack Obama stated that it “would not serve the national interest of the United States,” effectively killing the project. On Dec. 5, 2016, in a second victory for grass-roots environmental activists, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers denied the easement for DAPL to tunnel underneath the Missouri River, stopping that pipeline. “Trump’s executive order on DAPL violates the law and tribal treaties. We will be taking legal action,” Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Chairman David Archambault II said in a press release after Trump’s actions. “Creating a second Flint does not make America great again.” Trump’s presidential memorandum on DAPL instructs the secretary of the Army to “review and approve in an expedited manner ... requests for approvals to construct and operate the DAPL.” The same language in the memo about the Keystone XL pipeline is addressed to the secretary of the Army, as well as to the secretary of state and the secretary of the interior. Trump’s secretary of state nominee, Rex Tillerson, was formerly the CEO of ExxonMobil, a company that would reap enormous profit from exploitation of Canadian tar sands oil. Trump’s energy secretary nominee, Rick Perry, was until recently on the board of Energy Transfer Partners, the owner of DAPL. Trump’s executive order, “Expediting Environmental Reviews and Approvals For High Priority Infrastructure Projects,” released alongside the two memoranda, includes the claim that “too often, infrastructure projects in the United States have been routinely and excessively delayed by agency processes and procedures.” Along with a fourth memo demanding—without the force of law—that pipeline construction and repair projects “use materials and equipment produced in the United States,” this flurry of fiats sets the stage for the fast-tracked revival of both pipelines. “It is pretty much a declaration of war against us all out here, not just against Native people, but against anybody who wants to drink water,” Winona LaDuke, Native American activist and executive director of the group Honor the Earth, told us on the “Democracy Now!” news hour. “He definitely wants to shove those pipelines down our throats.” Bobbi Jean Three Legs, a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Nation, began protesting DAPL before the first resistance camp was set up last April. She helped lead a 2,000-mile relay run for native youth, from the Sacred Stone Camp in Cannon Ball, N.D., to Washington, D.C., to draw attention to their struggle against the pipeline. “Water is Life” is their guiding principle, “Mni Wiconi” [minny wah-chonee] in the Lakota language. “He is waking up a lot of people. A lot of people are really paying attention to the climate change now,” Bobbi told us on “Democracy Now!.” “We’re never going to back down.” Bobbi Jean Three Legs and Winona LaDuke worry about increased violence from the police and National Guard. Bobbi described the situation: “There’s still police brutality going on. People are still getting maced. They’re getting shot. ... There’s over 600 people that have been arrested so far, and it just keeps going up.” Her eyes welled up. “Right now I’m just asking all the youth around the country to stand up. I’m asking everyone around the world to stand up with us, wherever you are ... I’m afraid that they’re out to kill.”

Democracy Now! broadcast our daily show live from WHUT on the campus of the historically black university, Howard University in Washington, D.C., less than four hours before Donald Trump became the nation’s 45th president. Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by almost 3 million votes, but he managed to win the Electoral College. He takes office as the least popular incoming president in at least a generation. We get an update from protests in Washington, D.C., and hear the speech Academy Award-winning filmmaker Michael Moore gave Thursday night, when nearly 25,000 people gathered in New York City to protest outside Trump International Hotel and Tower near Central Park. We are also joined live by Naomi Klein, journalist and best-selling author, whose most recent book is "This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate," and Lee Fang, reporter with The Intercept who covers the intersection of money and politics.

The Long Ordeal of Whistleblower Chelsea Manning By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan In April 2010, a classified U.S. military video was released through the website WikiLeaks, recorded from a camera aboard an Apache helicopter. It shows the massacre of civilians on a street in Baghdad, Iraq. The video, which WikiLeaks called “Collateral Murder,” documented in graphic, grainy black-and-white detail a helicopter gunship attack on July 12, 2007. The helicopter opens fire with machine guns on a group of men, including Reuters news agency photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen and his driver, Saeed Chmagh. Most of the men are killed instantly. Noor-Eldeen runs away, and the crosshairs follow him, shooting nonstop, until he falls dead. The radio transmission embedded in the video records the soldiers’ voices: “All right, hahaha, I hit ’em.” And then: “Yeah, we got one guy crawling around down there.” Chmagh, seriously wounded, can be seen dragging himself away from the other bodies. A voice in the helicopter, seeking a rationale to shoot, says: “Come on, buddy. All you gotta do is pick up a weapon. ... If we see a weapon, we’re gonna engage.” A van pulls up, and several men, clearly unarmed, come out and lift Chmagh to carry him to medical care. The soldiers on the Apache seek and receive permission to “engage” the van and opened fire, tearing apart the front of the vehicle and killing the men. With everyone in sight apparently dead, U.S. armored vehicles move in. When a vehicle drives over Noor-Eldeen’s corpse, an observer in the helicopter says, laughing, “I think they just drove over a body.” Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, a Marine veteran who trained soldiers on the laws of war, told us on the “Democracy Now!” news hour: “Helicopter gunners hunting down and shooting an unarmed man in civilian clothes, clearly wounded ... that shooting was murder. It was a war crime.” For years, Reuters sought access to the video, but was denied. It was a young U.S. Army intelligence analyst stationed in Iraq who got ahold of it and released it to WikiLeaks. In addition to the video, the analyst also leaked hundreds of thousands of text-based records, from logs of military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan to U.S. State Department cables. Eventually, the analyst was betrayed by an online confidant and arrested. That soldier was known at the time as Bradley Manning. Manning was held in harsh solitary confinement at the Quantico Marine Corps Base in Virginia for close to a year, in conditions that prompted an investigation by Juan Mendez, who was then the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture. Mendez concluded, “I believe Bradley Manning was subjected to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in the excessive and prolonged isolation he was put in during the eight months he was in Quantico.” Pvt. Manning was court-martialed, sentenced to 35 years in prison and transferred to the U.S. military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Immediately after the verdict was announced, Manning stated publicly that she had begun a transgender transition and changed her name to Chelsea Manning. Manning has now served seven years of her sentence, experiencing extraordinary hardship as a person seeking gender-reassignment treatment while imprisoned by the U.S. military. She has fought for medical care, for transfer out of the men’s prison, and has attempted suicide twice. At Leavenworth, the punishment for attempted suicide is more solitary. A worldwide campaign grew, petitioning President Barack Obama to grant clemency to Manning, the longest-held whistleblower in U.S. history. Obama has issued more commutations and pardons than any president, mostly to nonviolent drug offenders. On Tuesday, he granted over 209 commutations and 64 pardons. Commutations reduce or eliminate the balance of a convicted person’s prison sentence, while a pardon wipes clean the individual’s record, removing the guilty verdict entirely. Presidential pardons and commutations cannot be reversed. Among those commutations granted Tuesday was one for Chelsea Manning. With just two days remaining as president, Barack Obama held his final news conference at the White House. The first question was about his decision to free Manning. It was posed by a Reuters reporter. Obama replied, “Chelsea Manning has served a tough prison sentence. ... It has been my view that given she went to trial; that due process was carried out; that she took responsibility for her crime; that the sentence that she received was very disproportionate relative to what other leakers had received; and that she had served a significant amount of time; that it made sense to commute and not pardon her sentence. ... I feel very comfortable that justice has been served.” Chelsea Manning is expected to be released on May 17.

By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan The arc of U.S. history is on full display as the peaceful transition of power takes place from the administration of President Barack Obama to that of incoming President-elect Donald Trump. The first African-American president is about to hand the reins of power to the very man who led the racist “birther” campaign to delegitimize his presidency. As Trump continues to shock the world with his middle-of-the-night tweets, the flurry of Senate confirmation hearings exposed the hollow rhetoric of Trump’s pledge to “drain the swamp.” Among the controversial and divisive cabinet nominees is his pick for attorney general: Jeff Sessions, the junior senator from Alabama. President Obama delivered his farewell address Tuesday night. “Race remains a potent and often divisive force in our society,” Obama said. “For white Americans, it means acknowledging that the effects of slavery and Jim Crow didn’t suddenly vanish in the ’60s.” Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III is named after his father and grandfather, but his first and middle names are steeped in the Confederacy: Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, and P.G.T. Beauregard, the Confederate general who, after resigning his post in the U.S. Army at West Point, oversaw the bombardment of Fort Sumter in 1861, starting the U.S. Civil War. It wouldn’t be fair to hold Sessions accountable for his namesakes, the long-dead heroes of the Confederacy. But Senate confirmation hearings are an appropriate forum to hold nominees accountable for their own words and deeds. Opposition to Sessions is broad and intense, and goes back decades. Sessions was appointed U.S. Attorney in Alabama in 1981, where he prosecuted legendary voting-rights activists, who were ultimately acquitted. Then, in 1986, President Ronald Reagan nominated him to a federal judgeship. At that Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., said: “Mr. Sessions is a throwback to a shameful era, which I know both black and white Americans thought was in our past. It’s inconceivable to me that a person of this attitude is qualified to be a U.S. attorney, let alone a United States federal judge.” At the time, Sessions was one of the only people in the previous half-century to be denied an appointment as a federal judge by the Senate Judiciary Committee. He later used Sen. Kennedy’s damning words to help him win election in 1994 as the Alabama attorney general. In just two years in that position, he aggressively defended Alabama’s execution of more than 40 prisoners convicted, according to The New York Times, “in trials riddled with instances of prosecutorial misconduct, racial discrimination and grossly inadequate defense lawyering.” As U.S. senator, he voted against reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, and opposes comprehensive immigration reform, marriage equality and hate-crime protections for LGBTQ victims. He also is a fierce critic of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. On the second day of Sessions’ current confirmation hearings, members of the Congressional Black Caucus packed the hearing room. For the first time in Senate history, a sitting senator testified against another sitting senator’s confirmation. Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., said, “Senator Sessions has not demonstrated a commitment to a central requirement of the job: to aggressively pursue the congressional mandate of civil rights, equal rights and justice for all.” Revered civil-rights activist and member of Congress John Lewis spoke eloquently of his youth in Alabama: “I was born in rural Alabama — not very far from where Senator Sessions was raised. There was no way to escape or deny the chokehold of discrimination and racial hate that surrounded us. I saw the signs that said ‘White Waiting, Colored Waiting.’... I tasted the bitter fruits of segregation and racial discrimination.” Lewis spoke at the 1963 March on Washington, and was an organizer of the march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965 to register African-Americans to vote. Lewis and the other marchers were savagely beaten by Alabama State Police on what became known as “Bloody Sunday,” March 7, 1965. He represents the living history of the struggle for racial and economic equality. His words have weight. “The attorney general is expected to be a champion of justice for all people — not just the rich and the powerful,” Lewis closed. “It doesn’t matter whether Sen. Sessions may smile or how friendly he may be, whether he may speak to you. We need someone who will stand up and speak up and speak out for the people who need help, for people who are being discriminated against. And it doesn’t matter whether they are black or white, Latino, Asian or Native American, whether they are straight or gay, Muslim, Christian or Jews. We all live in the same house, the American house. We need someone as attorney general who is going to look for all of us, not just some of us.” Sen. Sessions has been consistent throughout his career. The Senate Judiciary Committee should be equally consistent and reject Sessions as attorney general, as it rejected him for a judgeship 30 years ago.

Trump Homeland Security Choice: Even More Mass Arrests, Deportations? On today's episode of Loud & Clear, Brian Becker is joined by Juan Jose Gutierrez, the director of the Full Rights for Immigrants Coalition, to discuss Donald Trump's pick to lead the Department of Homeland Security. 00:00 / 00:00 Trump has selected retired General John Kelly, a role that would have him oversee the building of Trump’s proposed wall on the Mexico border. What does his selection mean for the struggle for immigrants’ rights? Trump looked to score a public relations victory this week when he took credit for persuading the Carrier corporation not to outsource 1,100 jobs. Chuck Jones, the President of United Steelworkers 1999 who represents workers at the plant, says this isn’t exactly true. The fightback against neoliberalism continues in Brazil as the country’s Supreme Court blocks the suspension of the President of the Senate who was accused of embezzlement. Brazilian-British journalist and activist Victor Fraga joins Becker to talk about the latest.

John Pilger: "The Coming War On China" Loud & Clear On today's episode of Loud & Clear, Brian Becker speaks with John Pilger, a prolific filmmaker whose new documentary is "The Coming War on China". As Donald Trump doubles down on his anti-China rhetoric following President Obama's so-called pivot to Asia, could a coming escalation between the US and China actually lead to a war? The Syrian Army advances in Aleppo with the vast majority of the city now under its control. Opposition forces in the city all but acknowledged defeat as they propose a 5-day ceasefire — will they ever recover? Brian discusses these developments with Syrian journalist Kevork Almassian. Fidel Castro was buried over the weekend, but his legacy continues to live on in the Cuban Revolution. Yanela Gonzalez joins the show to look at how the revolution brought about tremendous progress for Cuba's Black population and the country’s contribution to Africa's liberation struggles.

Dripping With Hypocrisy: Obama Brags About Eight Years of War On today's episode of Loud & Clear, Brian Becker is joined by political commentator Catherine Shakdam; by Jeremy Kuzmarov, an Assistant Professor for the Henry Kendall College of Arts & Sciences at The University of Tulsa; and by former CIA agent turned political activist Ray McGovern. President Obama gave his final major National Security speech at Central Command in Tampa, Florida last night in which he outlined his administration’s counterterrorism approach, or as he explained it “how he's worked to keep the American people safe at home and abroad”. But is the Obama legacy of endless war and drone strikes really about keeping Americans safe or about maintaining the dominant position of the U.S. Empire? Read more: https://sputniknews.com/radio_loud_and_clear/201612071048257392-dripping-with-hypocrisy-obama-brags-about-eight-years-of-war/

Trump Doubles Down on Anti-China Rhetoric After Taiwan On today's episode of Loud & Clear, Walter Smolarek fills in for Brian Becker and is joined by writer and columnist Patrick Lawrence to discuss the controversy surrounding Donald Trump's phone call with the President of Taiwan. Donald Trump's phone call with the President of Taiwan. 00:00 / 00:00 Donald Trump talks tough against China days after a historic phone call with the President of Taiwan that marked the first direct communication between leaders of the two countries since 1979. Is Trump set to inflame tensions with China further after taking office? Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has resigned after being trounced in a referendum on political reforms. The turbulence in Europe continues with this vote, as well as controversy over the Austrian election and debt relief for Greece. Smolarek talks to John Wight, host of Radio Sputnik's Hard Facts. Donald Trump said that “almost all” of his cabinet positions will be filled this week. However, his picks so far are starkly at odds with much of the populist rhetoric he campaigned on. Anoa Changa, host of the weekly radio show The Way with Anoa, talks about the significance of Carson's appointment and the administration Trump is building. Read more: https://sputniknews.com/radio_loud_and_clear/201612061048204647-trump-doubles-down-on-anti-china-rhetoric-after-taiwan-phone-call/

Are Miami Cubans as Anti-Castro as Mainstream Media's Portrayal? Brian Becker From the streets of Havana, Cuba, Loud & Clear talks with Andres Gomez, a leader of Cuban-Americans in Miami who have defied the mainstream media's caricature of their community by opposing the US blockade of Cuba. Read more: https://sputniknews.com/radio_loud_and_clear/

Dakota Access Pipeline CEO Kelcy Warren Should Face the Music By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan President Barack Obama foreshadowed more complications for the Dakota Access pipeline this week, as he told an interviewer that “right now the Army Corps is examining whether there are ways to reroute this pipeline.” With hundreds arrested in recent weeks at the Standoff at Standing Rock, North Dakota, the movement to halt construction of this 1,200-mile, $3.8 billion oil pipeline only builds. Musicians are increasingly joining the fray, striking an unexpected chord: pressuring oil billionaire Kelcy Warren, CEO of Energy Transfer Partners, which owns the pipeline. Warren also owns a small music label and recording company, and is the founder and driving force behind the Cherokee Creek Music Festival in Texas. Many musicians, including folk/rock legend Jackson Browne, are banding together to confront Warren and help stop the pipeline. In a statement published in September by Indian Country Today Media Network, Jackson Browne wrote: “I met Kelcy Warren on one occasion, when I played at the Cherokee Creek Music Festival, held at his ranch. Later his company, Music Road Records, produced an album of my songs. Though I was honored by the ‘tribute’ and think highly of the versions—which were done by some of my favorite singers and songwriters, I had nothing to do with producing the recordings or deciding who would be on it.” Jackson continued: “I do not support the Dakota Access pipeline. I will be donating all of the money I have received from this album to date, and any money received in the future, to the tribes who are opposing the pipeline.” The album Browne referenced is titled, “Looking Into You: A Tribute to Jackson Browne.” Emily Saliers and Amy Ray, better known as the folk duo the Indigo Girls, have been to the Standing Rock resistance camps, where thousands have been facing off against an increasingly violent, militarized police force that is facing down the Native American water protectors with attack dogs, armored personnel carriers, pepper spray, concussion grenades and deafening acoustic cannons. In addition to raising awareness and funds for the land and water protectors at Standing Rock, the Indigo Girls are organizing musicians to challenge Kelcy Warren directly. “Kelcy Warren also happens to be a passionate music lover and owns a festival, Cherokee Creek music festival,” they wrote in a recent Facebook post. “Indigo Girls have played the festival and had a song on the [Jackson Browne] tribute record. When we participated in those events, we had no idea about Kelcy Warren’s connection to big oil and its imminent threat to the Standing Rock Sioux. Now we know.” They wrote a letter to Warren, which was co-signed by Jackson Browne, Shawn Colvin, Joan Osborne, Keb’ Mo’ and others. It read, in part, “We realize the bucolic setting of your festival and the image it projects is in direct conflict with the Dakota Access pipeline ... this pipeline violates the Standing Rock Sioux Nations’ treaty rights, endangers the vital Missouri River, and continues the trajectory of genocide against Native Peoples.” The letter concluded, “We will no longer play your festival or participate in Music Road Records recordings. We implore you to stop construction of the Dakota Access pipeline.” Kelcy Warren is a Texas oil billionaire several times over, and might not be easily deterred by a threatened boycott. In fact, when global oil prices began dropping, “Nobody was happier about the crash than Energy Transfer Chairman and CEO Kelcy Warren,” Bloomberg Markets reported. All his competition, Warren gloated, “vaporized.” He, like many analysts, anticipates that oil prices will rise, fracking in the Bakken shale region will boom again, and his Dakota Access Pipeline will be the only conduit to carry the crude oil to the Texas Gulf Coast for refining and export. “You must grow until you die,” Warren told Bloomberg. Jackson Browne also wrote in his statement: “I intend to support public resistance to the Dakota Access pipeline as much as I can. To quote a song of mine: ‘Which side? “—the corporations attacking the natural world, drilling and fracking, who do it with the backing of the craven and corrupt? “—Or the ones who fight for the earth with all their might, and in the name of all that’s right, “Confront and disrupt?’” In the press release about the Jackson Browne tribute album from Music Road Records, Kelcy Warren wrote, “I don’t know of anybody that admires Jackson more than me.” As Browne and other musicians rally with the land and water protectors at Standing Rock, and as President Obama signals post-election action on the pipeline, it’s time for Kelcy Warren to face the music.

AT&T, Time Warner and the Death of Privacy By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan It has been 140 years since Alexander Graham Bell uttered the first words through his experimental telephone, to his lab assistant: “Mr. Watson—come here—I want to see you.” His invention transformed human communication, and the world. The company he started grew into a massive monopoly, AT&T. The federal government eventually deemed it too powerful, and broke up the telecom giant in 1982. Well, AT&T is back and some would say on track to become bigger and more powerful than before, announcing plans to acquire Time Warner, the media company, to create one of the largest entertainment and communications conglomerates on the planet. Beyond the threat to competition, the proposed merger—which still must pass regulatory scrutiny—poses significant threats to privacy and the basic freedom to communicate. AT&T is currently No. 10 on the Forbes 500 list of the U.S.‘s highest-grossing companies. If it is allowed to buy Time Warner, No. 99 on the list, it will form an enormous, “vertically integrated” company that controls a vast pool of content and how people access that content. Free Press, the national media policy and activism group, is mobilizing the public to oppose the deal. “This merger would create a media powerhouse unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. AT&T would control mobile and wired internet access, cable channels, movie franchises, a film studio and more,” Candace Clement of Free Press wrote. “That means AT&T would control internet access for hundreds of millions of people and the content they view, enabling it to prioritize its own offerings and use sneaky tricks to undermine net neutrality.” Net neutrality is that essential quality of the internet that makes it so powerful. Columbia University law professor Tim Wu coined the term “net neutrality.” After the Federal Communications Commission approved strong net neutrality rules last year, Wu told us on the Democracy Now! News hour, “There need to be basic rules of the road for the internet, and we’re not going to trust cable and telephone companies to respect freedom of speech or respect new innovators, because of their poor track record.” Millions of citizens weighed in with public comments to the FCC in support of net neutrality, along with groups like Free Press and The Electronic Frontier Foundation. They were joined by titans of the internet like Google, Amazon and Microsoft. Arrayed against this coalition were the telecom and cable companies, the oligopoly of internet service providers that sell internet access to hundreds of millions of Americans. It remains to be seen if AT&T doesn’t in practice break net neutrality rules and create a fast lane for its content and slow down content from its competitors, including the noncommercial sector. Another problem that AT&T presents, that would only be exacerbated by the merger, is the potential to invade the privacy of its millions of customers. In 2006, AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein revealed that the company was secretly sharing all of its customers’ metadata with the National Security Agency. Klein, who installed the fiber-splitting hardware in a secret room at the main AT&T facility in San Francisco, had his whistleblowing allegations confirmed several years later by Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks. While that dragnet surveillance program was supposedly shut down in 2011, a similar surveillance program still exists. It’s called “Project Hemisphere.” It was exposed by The New York Times in 2013, with substantiating documents just revealed this week in The Daily Beast. In “Project Hemisphere,” AT&T sells metadata to law enforcement, under the aegis of the so-called war on drugs. A police agency sends in a request for all the data related to a particular person or telephone number, and, for a major fee and without a subpoena, AT&T delivers a sophisticated data set, that can, according to The Daily Beast, “determine where a target is located, with whom he speaks, and potentially why.” Where you go, what you watch, text and share, with whom you speak, all your internet searches and preferences, all gathered and “vertically integrated,” sold to police and perhaps, in the future, to any number of AT&T’s corporate customers. We can’t know if Alexander Graham Bell envisioned this brave new digital world when he invented the telephone. But this is the future that is fast approaching, unless people rise up and stop this merger.

On Strip Searches and Press Freedom in North Dakota By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Monday was a cold, windy, autumnal day in North Dakota. We arrived outside the Morton County Courthouse in Mandan to produce a live broadcast of the “Democracy Now!” news hour. Originally, the location was dictated by the schedule imposed upon us by the local authorities; one of us (Amy) had been charged with criminal trespass for Democracy Now!’s reporting on the Dakota Access Pipeline company’s violent attack on Native Americans who were attempting to block the destruction of sacred sites, including ancestral burial grounds, just north of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. Pipeline guards unleashed pepper spray and dogs on the land and water defenders. Democracy Now! video showed one of the attack dogs with blood dripping from its nose and mouth. The video went viral, attracting more than 14 million views on Facebook alone. Five days later, North Dakota issued the arrest warrant. When responding to an arrest warrant, one must surrender to the jail by about 8 a.m. if one hopes to see a judge that day and avoid a night in jail. So we planned to broadcast live from 7-8 a.m., then head to the jail promptly at 8 a.m. to get processed through the jail and fight the trespass charge in court. To our surprise, as we landed in Bismarck on Friday, we learned that the prosecutor, Ladd Erickson, had dropped the trespass charge, but filed a new one: “riot.” We were stunned. In an email to both the prosecutor and our defense attorney, Tom Dickson, Judge John Grinsteiner wrote, “The new complaints, affidavits, and summons are quite lengthy and I will review those for probable cause on Monday when I get back into the office.” We were told by several lawyers familiar with North Dakota criminal law that judges almost never reject a prosecutor’s complaint. The arraignment was set for 1:30 p.m. local time, Monday. We spent the weekend reporting on the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline, with the threat of the riot charge never far from our minds. The 1,100-mile-long, $3.8 billion pipeline is designed to carry almost 500,000 barrels of crude oil from the fracking oil fields of North Dakota to Illinois, then onward to the Gulf of Mexico. That is why thousands of people have been at the resistance camps where the Dakota Access Pipeline is slated to cross under the Missouri River. If the pipeline leaks there, the fresh-water supply for millions of people downstream will be polluted. Morton County Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier runs the jail in Mandan and is responsible for how people are processed there. As the protests have mounted during the past six months, Kirchmeier and the local prosecutors have been leveling more and more serious charges against the land and water protectors, with an increasing number of felony charges. More than 140 people have been arrested so far. Those we spoke to told us a shocking detail: When getting booked at the jail, they were all strip searched, forced to “squat and cough” to demonstrate they had nothing hidden in their rectums, then were put in orange jumpsuits. The treatment was the same for Chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Dave Archambault, to a pediatrician from the reservation, Dr. Sara Jumping Eagle, to actress Shailene Woodley, star of the films “Divergent” and “Snowden,” among others. I asked Chairman Archambault if strip searching was common for low-level misdemeanors. “I wouldn’t know, because that was the first time I ever got arrested,” he replied. Dr. Jumping Eagle remarked, “It made me think about my ancestors, and what they had gone through.” Shailene Woodley told us, “Never did it cross my mind that while trying to protect clean water, trying to ensure a future where our children have access to an element essential for human survival, would I be strip searched. I was just shocked.” As we prepared to enter the courthouse for the 1:30 p.m. arraignment on Monday, 200 people rallied in support of a free press, demanding the charges be dropped. A row of close to 60 riot police were lined up in a needless display of force in front of a peaceful gathering, threatening to arrest anyone who stepped off the curb. Then word came from our lawyer: The judge had refused to sign off on the riot charge. The case was dismissed, and we marked an important victory for a free press. The free press should now focus a fierce spotlight on the standoff at Standing Rock—a critical front in the global struggle to combat global warming and fight for climate justice. Indigenous people and their non-native allies are confronting corporate power, backed up by the state with an increasingly militarized police force. Attempts to criminalize nonviolent land and water defenders, humiliate them and arrest journalists should not pave the way for this pipeline.

Putting Their Bodies on the (Pipe)line By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Hurricane Matthew has come and gone, leaving devastation in its wake. So far, at least 1,000 people are reported to have died in Haiti, and at least 39 have died throughout the southeastern United States. In North Carolina, the rivers are still rising. In this election year, given the destruction, you would think climate change would be a major issue. In the presidential debates, which tens of millions watch, there has hardly been a mention. It is what is happening outside, at the grass roots around the country, that gives us hope. The movement to combat climate change is growing dynamically and unpredictably, and is facing increasing repression from the fossil-fuel industry and government authorities. There is perhaps no better example of this than the Standing Rock Sioux tribe’s resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline. The tribe has made treaties with the United States for more than a century and a half, and every one of them has been broken by the federal government. So it should come as no surprise that a panel of federal judges ruled against the Standing Rock Sioux, allowing construction of the controversial $3.8 billion oil pipeline to continue. To add insult to injury, the decision came, surprisingly, on a Sunday, on the eve of Columbus Day, which many indigenous people view as a day celebrating the start of the genocide against native peoples in the Western Hemisphere. “The Standing Rock Sioux tribe is not backing down from this fight,” Dave Archambault II, chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, said in a statement. “We are guided by prayer, and we will continue to fight for our people. We will not rest until our lands, people, waters and sacred places are permanently protected from this destructive pipeline.” In a break with history, though, and despite the court’s order, the U.S. Army, along with the departments of Justice and the Interior, issued a statement as well, saying: “The Army will not authorize constructing the Dakota Access Pipeline on Corps land bordering or under Lake Oahe. We repeat our request that the pipeline company voluntarily pause all construction activity within 20 miles east or west of Lake Oahe. We also look forward to a serious discussion during a series of consultations ... on whether there should be nationwide reform on the Tribal consultation process for these types of infrastructure projects.” It is on that Army Corps of Engineers land that the main resistance camps have been set up, where thousands, mostly indigenous people from more than 200 tribes from across the U.S., Canada and Latin America, have gathered to protect land and water from the pipeline. This is Lakota-Dakota ancestral land, taken without tribal consent by the U.S. Army. In August, these protectors — they don’t call themselves “protesters” — put out a call for international prayers and solidarity. Each day, creative acts of nonviolent direct action are happening, up and down the 1,200-mile length of the proposed pipeline. On Wednesday, in Keokuk, Iowa, 31-year-old Krissana Mara locked herself to an excavator at the site where the Dakota Access Pipeline is slated to cross the Mississippi River. The growing resistance there, called #MississippiStand, seeks to block the pipeline from traversing that river, as the Standing Rock actions are blocking the pipeline from going under the Missouri River. Meanwhile, in a stunning coordinated action, nine climate activists were arrested Tuesday for attempting to shut down all tar-sands oil coming into the United States from Canada by manually turning off pipelines in Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota and Washington state. One of the protesters, Leonard Higgins, said on a video later posted online from the pipeline site in Coal Banks, Montana: “We’re in a state of emergency to protect our loved ones and our families, our communities. We need to step up as citizens and take action where our leaders are not. That’s what I’m prepared to do when I close the valve.” Also among the nine arrested was Ken Ward. In 2013, Ward and Jay O’Hara anchored a small lobster boat off the coast of Massachusetts, blocking a ship from delivering 40,000 tons of coal to the Brayton Point power plant, one of the region’s largest contributors to greenhouse gases. In a remarkable turn of events, their prosecutor, local District Attorney Samuel Sutter, dropped the criminal charges against the men, saying: “Climate change is one of the gravest crises our planet has ever faced. In my humble opinion, the political leadership on this issue has been gravely lacking.” Perhaps leadership from the top has been lacking. But from a small boat bobbing in the ocean to the growing resistance camps in North Dakota, the climate movement is on the rise.

Where is Climate Change in the Debates? By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan President Barack Obama made a brief statement in the Rose Garden Wednesday, announcing that the global accord to combat climate change, the Paris Agreement, had achieved enough signatories to enter into force. “This gives us the best possible shot to save the one planet we’ve got,” Obama said. At that moment, about 1,200 miles due south, Hurricane Matthew, as reported by Weather Underground, was “reorganizing” and “restrengthening” over the Bahamas, after pounding Haiti and Cuba. Millions along Florida’s east coast and many more in South Carolina were battening down their homes and evacuating. Nature’s fury raged onward, unmoved by the diplomatic efforts to tame her. The Paris Agreement is a clear measure of the limits of diplomacy. Facing a global threat of almost unimaginable proportions, the best the world’s nations could muster was a voluntary agreement. In pursuit of the goal of limiting the average planetary temperature increase to 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F) over preindustrial levels, or, failing that, to limit the increase to 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F), the agreement includes, Obama said, “a strong system of transparency that allows each nation to evaluate the progress of all other nations.” The voluntary emission reduction pledges that each nation makes will allow countries to “carbon shame” those that don’t behave. Last week, Robert Watson, the former chair of the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, along with a group of climate scientists, released a paper titled, “The Truth About Climate Change.” The scientists state that “current pledges ... are far from sufficient to put the world on a pathway to meet the 2 degrees C target,” adding, “the 1.5 degrees C target has almost certainly already been missed because of the lack of action to stop the increase in global GHG emissions for the last 20 years.” What are the consequences of this rapid warming of the planet? The severe impacts can be seen everywhere. “Climate change is happening now, and much faster than anticipated,” Watson and his colleagues write. “The evidence is what most have been experiencing as unusual weather events, such as changes in average rain patterns leading to floods or droughts, more intense storms, heat waves and wildfires, among other daily examples.” It is not just natural disasters that we have to worry about either. Many have traced the roots of the civil war in Syria, in part, to a persistent drought there. Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, meanwhile, have found that “warming trends since 1980 elevated conflict risk in Africa by 11 percent.” Climate activist Bill McKibben writes in the New Republic: “A World at War: We’re under attack from climate change — and our only hope is to mobilize like we did in WWII.” He is the co-founder of the group 350.org, named after the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, in parts per million (ppm), that many feel is the highest safe level. Last year, as reported by the Mauna Loa Observatory, “the annual average carbon dioxide concentration was 400.8 [ppm] — a new record, and a new milestone.” McKibben told us on the “Democracy Now!” news hour: “If you look at how America mobilized during World War II, the industrial might that we brought to bear, and then you do the calculations, it’s at the outside edge of possible that we could, in the short time that we have, build enough solar panels and wind turbines. But it’s going to take the same kind of focused effort.” Following the only U.S. vice-presidential debate on Tuesday, May Boeve, executive director of 350.org, said: “Yet again, tonight’s debate moderator dropped the ball on climate change. Silence is another form of denial, and the TV networks are doing the public a great disservice by ignoring the issue, especially when there are such clear differences between the candidates.” Her point could not have been more timely. The VP debate was held in Virginia. Governors throughout the Southeast were declaring states of emergency in preparation for Hurricane Matthew. “While Donald Trump has received all the climate-denying attention recently, Governor Mike Pence is equally guilty of attempts to refute the science on climate change,” Annie Leonard, executive director of Greenpeace USA, said in a statement. “From refusing to implement the Clean Power Plan as Indiana governor to claiming global warming is a myth, Governor Pence’s aggressive attacks on science should be nowhere near the White House. A Trump-Pence combination would be catastrophic for this country, and for its critical role in making global progress on climate change.” Robert Watson’s paper opens with a quote by Albert Einstein: “We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.” Climate change is real, and it is worsening. That it should play a central role in the U.S. elections is undebatable.

Solidarity From Solitary: The National Prison Strike Amy Goodman Grass-roots organizing, the hard work of building movements, can be grueling. Pay is often low or nonexistent. Success is never assured. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But it doesn’t bend itself. Right now, under some of the most repressive circumstances that exist in the United States, a national movement is growing for prisoners’ rights. The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population and almost 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. This movement is rippling out from a solitary-confinement cell inside the Holman Correctional Facility in rural Atmore, Alabama. “These strikes are our method for challenging mass incarceration. The prison system is a continuation of the slave system,” a man named Kinetik Justice told us on the “Democracy Now!” news hour last May. He was using a contraband cellphone from inside solitary confinement in Holman, where he was being held as punishment for his organizing. He and fellow prisoners around Alabama launched a 10-day strike on May 1, International Workers’ Day, refusing to engage in prison labor. “The reform and changes that we’ve been fighting for in Alabama, we’ve tried petitioning through the courts. We’ve tried to get in touch with our legislators. ... We understood that our incarceration was pretty much about our labor and the money that was being generated through the prison system.” Kinetik Justice co-founded the Free Alabama Movement (FAM), to organize prisoners against exploitative prison-labor programs. Despite having no access to the internet, they have a website with a downloadable book by FAM co-founder Melvin Ray that details their plight in the Alabama prison system and how they are organizing. Ray, also incarcerated, opens the book with the lines: “FREEDOM ... Make no mistake about it ... That’s the business of Free Alabama Movement. At some point, we (prisoners) have got to get to the point where not only have we had enough of the inhumane and unconstitutional living conditions that we are confined in, but we also have got to get to the point where we are ready, willing, and able to do something about it. This ‘something’ is a statewide shutdown on Free Labor in the form of a Non-Violent and Peaceful Protest for Civil and Human Rights.” Their organizing continued after the May Day strike, and went national. On Sept. 9, prisoners in at least 24 states participated in a coordinated strike, marking the 45th anniversary of the 1971 prison uprising at New York state’s infamous Attica prison. Today’s striking prisoners are protesting long-term isolation, inadequate health care, overcrowding, violent attacks and slave labor. Pastor Kenneth Glasgow of Alabama founded T.O.P.S., The Ordinary People Society, which supports prisoners and ex-convicts. An ex-prisoner himself, he told us: “Those who are incarcerated are looking at the fact that people that have paid taxes for them to be rehabilitated, for them to be educated, for them to be trained, in order to come out into society — because 98 percent of the people in prison are coming out, and in order for them to come out and be able to be productive citizens, they need to have these skills and education and all. ... And yet, the taxpayers are paying anywhere from $31,000 to $80,000 per year, depending on what state you’re in, for them to get this rehabilitation and education, and they’re not getting it. What they’re getting is being used for free prison labor.” Last Saturday night, the Holman prisoners were joined in their strike by some unlikely allies: the prison guards themselves. Almost all the guards refused to show up for their 12-hour shift. On Sept. 1, Alabama Corrections Officer Kenneth Bettis, 44, was stabbed at Holman. He died two weeks later. Kinetic Justice spoke out on “Democracy Now!” again this week, and explained: “For weeks we’ve been communicating back and forth. This administration really has no regard for human life. And [the guards] are beginning to see that it’s not just directed at the men that are incarcerated here, that the violence that they’ve created actually spills over to the officers, as well. And a lot of them are terrified of what’s going on.” The national scope of the prisoner strike, with actions in 40 to 50 prisons around the U.S., is truly historic, as is the solidarity demonstrated between the prisoners and the guards at Holman this week. Shut behind walls, denied access to the internet and even telephones, and prevented from easily communicating with media outlets, these prisoners are leading their own movement, with solidarity from thousands outside. “Slavery dies hard in the South,” Melvin Ray writes in his book. Through their organizing, though, these striking prisoners are bending that arc of the moral universe, ever closer to justice.

For Future Summer Olympics, Climate Change is No Game By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan The first marathon, legend has it, occurred in ancient Greece in 490 B.C. The Athenians had repelled an invasion by the Persians, and a messenger was dispatched to run from the scene of the battle, the city of Marathon, to the capital at Athens, with news of the victory. He ran the distance, about 26 miles, delivered his message and collapsed, dying on the spot. Scholars question the accuracy of the legend, but it persists as a founding myth of the popular event. The future of the marathon, and of the Summer Olympics in general, may be at risk. A report just published in the British medical journal The Lancet suggests that by the year 2085, almost all of the cities that could host the Summer Games will be too hot for outdoor events. "The marathon is the most demanding endurance event, and thus provides a fair indication of whether conditions are likely to be safe for any other Olympic event," wrote the scientists, led by Kirk Smith, professor of global environmental health at the University of California, Berkeley. They noted that extreme high temperatures have already caused marathons to be canceled, like the 2007 Chicago Marathon. At the U.S. Olympic marathon trials held in Los Angeles to choose the team for the Rio Olympic Games this year, 30 percent of the runners dropped out of the race due to the heat. "By 2085, only eight (1.5 percent) of 543 cities outside of western Europe would meet the low-risk category," they wrote. The Lancet researchers made use of the global attention being paid to the Olympics to make a bigger point: "The world beyond 2050 poses increasingly difficult challenges ... because the extent and speed of change might exceed society’s ability to adapt." Half the world’s workers work outdoors, they note, and, increasingly, the outdoors, and indoor spaces without cooling, are becoming unsafe. They warn that "exertional heat stroke and its negative outcomes, including mortality, will become a large part of outdoor work around the world." Drawing from another sports example, thousands of workers are toiling in extreme heat in Qatar, building the stadiums for the 2022 World Cup soccer championships. The International Trade Union Confederation estimates that "more than 7,000 workers will die before a ball is kicked in the 2022 World Cup." These dire conditions stress the urgent need to address the threat of climate disruption. The Paris Agreement reached last December aspires to limit the global average temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, at the most 2 degrees C (2.7-3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). The science increasingly suggests that the climate is changing faster than predicted, and that urgent action is needed now. With each passing day of debate and half-measures, the problem gets harder — if not impossible — to solve. Historically, the world’s greatest emitter of greenhouse gases has been the United States. We have been burning fossil fuels with abandon for centuries. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, "Three fossil fuels — petroleum, natural gas, and coal — have provided more than 80 percent of total U.S. energy consumption for more than 100 years." While renewable sources, primarily wind and solar, are increasing, these are still a fraction of where they need to be in order to meet the pledges made in Paris at the "COP 21" climate summit. President Barack Obama just announced what will likely be his final order on vehicle fuel-efficiency standards. His climate legacy is now set, and is remarkably limited (noting, of course, the staunch opposition of the climate-change deniers in the Republican Party leadership). What of Obama’s two most likely successors, though? Hillary Clinton acknowledges that climate change is an urgent issue, but signaled otherwise when, this week, she announced that her transition team will be led by Ken Salazar, former interior secretary and former U.S. senator from Colorado. Salazar has enthusiastically pushed fracking and is a proponent of both the Keystone XL pipeline and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Donald Trump, meanwhile, has described climate change as a "hoax." As Trump received his first classified U.S. national-security briefing this week, the Gulf Coast is suffering from sustained rain and flooding, with at least 11 people killed and more than 20,000 people evacuated from their homes in and around Baton Rouge. In Southern California, wildfires rage, spurred by severe, climate-change-induced drought, forcing more than 82,000 people from their homes. July was also the hottest month in recorded history. As part of his classified briefing, Trump should be shown the Pentagon’s findings, which for years now have identified climate change as one of the most serious threats to our national security.

Donald Trump’s Implied Assassination Threat, Fox News and the NRA By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan Donald Trump is giving new meaning to “bully pulpit,” ratcheting his irrational campaign rhetoric to new and dangerous lows. In North Carolina Tuesday, he said: “Hillary wants to abolish—essentially, abolish—the Second Amendment. By the way, and if she gets to pick—if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is.” Trump’s suggestion that his supporters could assassinate Hillary Clinton or the judges she might appoint provoked outrage, not only nationally, but around the globe. His virulent, demagogic language did not alienate everyone, though; as more and more Republicans denounce Trump, he still enjoys fervid support from some personalities at Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Channel and the National Rifle Association. This unholy trinity of Trump, Fox and the NRA could easily provoke political violence during this campaign season. Hours after his remarks, Trump made his first news appearance on Fox’s “Hannity” show. Sean Hannity pre-empted Trump, offering his own twisted logic to help blunt the deepening catastrophe: “So, obviously you are saying that there’s a strong political movement within the Second Amendment and if people mobilize and vote they can stop Hillary from having this impact on the court.” Trump obligingly concurred with that revisionist version of his call to arms. But the ploy fails on its face. Trump was not advocating for a political movement to stop Hillary Clinton from gaining office; he was suggesting that “Second Amendment people” could take action after the fact, if she wins. The NRA also quickly rallied to Trump’s defense, tweeting: “Donald Trump is right. If Hillary Clinton gets to pick her anti-2A SCOTUS judges, there’s nothing we can do.” As the backlash against Trump grew, the NRA added, anticipating Hannity’s spin, “But there IS something we will do on Election Day: Show up and vote for the 2A! Defend the Second. Never Hillary.” Within hours, the NRA announced a $3 million national advertising campaign to support Trump, featuring a video ad attacking Hillary Clinton as a hypocrite for traveling with armed Secret Service protection. The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence immediately condemned Trump’s comment, adding that “this is a point of view that has been mainstreamed by the National Rifle Association and parroted by candidates for political office in the past.” The gun-control advocacy group maintains a comprehensive online database of comments from NRA leadership, called “NRA on the Record.” Search the site for “Political Violence” or “Vigilantism” and you easily see countless, impeccably sourced justifications for gun violence. NRA board member and aging rock guitarist Ted Nugent, a Trump supporter and vitriolic gun-rights advocate, is extensively quoted on the site. Referring to Hillary Clinton, Nugent commented on Facebook last May, “I got your gun control right here bitch!” next to a satirical video showing Bernie Sanders shooting and killing Hillary Clinton during a CNN debate exchange on gun control. Embedded in much of the bombast against Clinton is a deep-seated misogyny that is evident in many mass shootings, from Orlando shooter Omar Mateen, who beat his wife, to Adam Lanza, who killed his mother at home before the Sandy Hook massacre. In 2010, Glenn Beck, who was then a host on the Fox News Channel, waged a campaign to vilify the progressive philanthropy Tides foundation as well as the ACLU. In July of that year, Byron Williams, who said he was inspired by Beck, set out with a car full of weapons, ammunition and body armor, intent on killing at least 11 people at Tides. Journalist John Hamilton, in a jailhouse interview, asked Williams if Beck explicitly encouraged violence. Williams said: “Beck is going to deny everything about violent approach, deny everything about conspiracies, but he’ll give you every reason to believe in it. He is protecting himself, and you can’t blame him for that.” “Words matter,” Hillary Clinton said at a campaign rally in Des Moines, Iowa, Wednesday. “If you are running to be president, or if you are president of the United States, words can have tremendous consequences.” Donald Trump has pledged to pay the legal fees for people who physically assault protesters at his rallies. He has insulted women, Muslims, Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. He mocked a disabled reporter. He has predicted that if he loses, it will be due to a “rigged” election. One of his closest advisers predicts such a loss will provoke a “bloodbath.” Trump is a dangerous demagogue who is inciting violence, and the time for it to stop is now.

The Liberty Bell and the Democratic Party: A Tale of Two Fractures in Philadelphia Amy Goodman y Denis Moynihan PHILADELPHIA–The Liberty Bell, on permanent display here at Philadelphia’s Independence Mall, is known for its famous fracture. The bell was cast in London in 1751, and cracked on its first test ring. The bell was molten down and recast in Philadelphia, and rang from the Pennsylvania State House, now known as Independence Hall, for close to 100 years. A second crack formed years later, and the bell eventually was decommissioned, taking on the symbolic significance it has today, inspiring movements to abolish slavery, for women’s suffrage and others. The Democratic National Convention here this week also is inspiring many, in movements for LGBTQ rights, gun control, and racial and economic justice and beyond. But as the first woman in U.S. history is nominated to be the presidential candidate of a major party, a deep split in the Democratic Party has emerged. Sen. Bernie Sanders conceded to Hillary Clinton and endorsed her candidacy, but many of his supporters have not. Hundreds of them walked out of the convention as Clinton’s nomination was formalized Tuesday night. The nomination of Hillary Clinton is historic. She has a significant chance to be the first woman president of the United States. During the roll call at the DNC, the delegation from Vermont, Sanders’ home state, passed, and was thus called on as the last state to report, after Wyoming. The Vermont spokesperson stated the delegate votes, then Bernie Sanders, whose insurgent campaign rocked the Clinton juggernaut to its core, stood and took the microphone: “Madam Chair, I move that the convention suspend the procedural rules. I move that all votes, all votes cast by delegates be reflected in the official record, and I move that Hillary Clinton be selected as the nominee of the Democratic Party of the United States.” The actual delegate counts of Clinton versus Sanders were dispensed with, and Clinton was nominated “by acclamation.” Cheers and applause filled the Wells Fargo Center. While thousands went wild, several hundred, well, just went. Chanting “Walk out, walk out” and “This is what democracy looks like,” 300 Sanders delegates, including many from Vermont who were standing with Sanders moments before, marched out of the arena and proceeded to the media tent to demonstrate their disagreement with the process and announce the “No Voice, No Unity” campaign. “We were never welcome here, we were never wanted here,” Sanders delegate Felicia Teter told the “Democracy Now!” news hour as she walked out. “The people’s voices are not being heard, and still the people’s votes are not being counted. We are going to show the Democratic Party that if they will not have us and they will not welcome us into their party, then we will leave, and they will lose to Trump. And it will not be our fault. It will be their fault, because they did not listen to the people. ... They simply ignored us. They shut us down.” Many Sanders delegates cited issues on which they strongly differ with Hillary Clinton, from her earlier support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and not knowing where she stands on it today, to her coziness with Wall Street, to her consistent support for ever-widening wars in the Middle East. The walkout also was fueled by leaked Democratic National Committee emails that were posted online by WikiLeaks just days before the convention. Some of the emails proved that the DNC, and its chairperson, Congressmember Debbie Wasserman Schultz, actively worked to disparage Sanders and his campaign. The emails led the headlines all weekend; by Monday, Wasserman Schultz had announced her resignation as DNC chairperson. Bernie Sanders had for months accused the Democratic National Committee of bias in favor of Clinton throughout the campaign. Now his supporters had proof, and many carried signs that read “Rigged” as they walked out. The Liberty Bell was decommissioned because of a barely visible hairline fracture. The famous crack in the bell was actually made on purpose, in an attempt to repair it. The Democratic Party has an enormous challenge now, to unify its members to defeat one of the most bigoted and divisive, some say fascistic, presidential candidates in modern U.S. history, Donald Trump. The party has a very deep and visible fracture. The question remains whether they can repair the crack in time to defeat Trump.

Terror, Tennis Balls and Tamir Rice CLEVELAND—Welcome to Cleveland, where the Republican National Convention (RNC) is underway. The RNC is a highly scripted, elaborately staged and lavishly publicly funded private party. Here, credentialed Republican delegates, most of them party activists from around the country, circulate within a militarized perimeter of what authorities have designated a “national special security event.” As such, the U.S. Secret Service is handed complete control of an area, in this case downtown Cleveland. The area is ringed with a temporary but imposing black steel fence, patrolled by the full spectrum of law enforcement, from local police to federal SWAT teams. Yet because Ohio has extremely lenient gun laws, people can “open carry” here. And they do. Scores of Trump supporters have proudly shown up with their guns at their sides, including semi-automatic AR-15s, walking the downtown streets. It is not a total free-for-all, however. Many things are banned: tennis balls, sleeping bags, selfie sticks and canned goods. To highlight the absurdity of the situation, the women’s peace organization Code Pink staged a demonstration at the security checkpoint to enter the RNC. In their bags, the dozen or so pink-clad women carried 500 pink and green tennis balls with the phrase “Ban Guns, Not Balls” written on them. They began tossing them to each other. A line of Cleveland police officers quickly formed and tried to encircle the protest. They started to confiscate the tennis balls. There was confusion, as one officer asked a superior, “What do we do with the balls?” “Put them in your pocket,” came the exasperated reply. The police aggressively expanded their line, pushing observers, and us journalists, farther away. We managed to dodge them and got in close to ask Code Pink member Chelsea Byers what was going on: “We’re here saying that it’s ridiculous that the RNC has banned tennis balls, and yet they continue to let open carry happen in these streets. If they’re concerned about safety, they should be taking the guns off of these streets, not banning toys.” To reinforce the Cleveland police, a large contingent of Indiana State Police showed up, then riot police were deployed. Finally, a phalanx of police on horseback arrived. All this for about 15 women and one man from Code Pink and their 500 tennis balls. The second evening of the RNC was about to begin. Thousands were packing into the Quicken Loans Arena. For the first time ever, an official from the National Rifle Association was invited to address the convention. Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin told us at the protest, “We think that the NRA has, unfortunately, been setting the agenda for this entire nation, especially the Republican Party. It’s unfortunate that the NRA has so much power in this country. That’s why we see guns on our streets and people being shot every single day, every single hour of every single day.” Eventually, with all the tennis balls safely confiscated, the police marched away. Ninety blocks from the RNC, in the largely African-American Cudell neighborhood of Cleveland, a memorial of stuffed animals and crosses adorns a picnic area under a gazebo in a neighborhood playground. On Nov. 22, 2014, 12-year-old Tamir Rice was playing with a toy gun in his hand. Someone called 911, reporting the gun, while noting on the call that it could be a fake. Two Cleveland police officers sped to the scene. They zoomed onto the grass and, within seconds, had flung open their doors and shot Tamir in the stomach. Tamir Rice’s death at the hands of police fanned the flames of protest that had been raging since the police killings of Eric Garner in Staten Island and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, just months earlier. While covering the RNC, we took a side trip to the scene of Tamir’s fatal shooting. Our guide: former Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner. As an African-American mother, she has had that all-too-familiar conversation with her son, about how to respond to police ... when he is out of uniform. Her son is a police officer, as was her husband, now retired. As she stood on the site of Tamir’s shooting, on the day that officers were killed in Baton Rouge, and the week after others were shot dead in Dallas, she offered her unique perspective: “The biggest gap that we have in this country is a value gap, the fact that African-American lives really are not as valued as the lives of our white sisters and brothers in this country,” she told us as we stood by Tamir’s memorial. “We really need to come to grips with this.” In Cleveland, the Republican Party has nominated Donald Trump to be its presidential candidate. Outside, his supporters are free to parade with assault rifles. Tamir Rice would have turned 14 last month, if police had simply given him a chance to drop his toy gun. This fatal inequality will continue to terrorize this nation until we genuinely commit to confronting racism and gun violence.

Videotaping a Crime Is Not a Crime By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Protests against police brutality have rocked the country in the aftermath of the police killings of two African-American men, Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota. Videos of their deaths were shared on the internet, horrifying millions around the globe. Yet increasingly, people who record police violence are themselves being targeted, harassed, arrested and even imprisoned. On July 5, 2016, Alton Sterling was selling CDs in front of his friend’s convenience store in Baton Rouge, La., when he was tackled by police and shot to death. Abdullah Muflahi, the store owner, recorded the shooting on his phone. He described the scene on the Democracy Now! news hour: “I started recording ... the whole time, he was asking them, ‘What did I do wrong? What’s going on? I didn’t do nothing wrong.’ ” Muflahi continued, “By the time I got out of the store, they were already slamming him on top of a car and were tasering him. That’s when another officer ran and tackled him onto an SUV, then both cops slammed him on the floor.” Alton Sterling was on his back, on the pavement, with two large, white Baton Rouge police officers pinning him down. The officers shot Alton Sterling at point-blank range, killing him. Muflahi explained: “After the shooting, one of the officers that was there, I’m not sure what he said, but the other officer that was close to me had said, ‘Just f—him. Just let him lay there,” talking about Mr. Sterling. “That’s when they grabbed me and put me in the back of a cop car.” Muflahi was held for six hours, his phone was confiscated, and the police, without showing a warrant, confiscated the store’s security surveillance video, along with the recording equipment itself. Abdullah Muflahi is suing the police. A couple in a nearby car also video recorded the encounter. Chris LeDay, an Air Force veteran from Baton Rouge now living in Atlanta, got hold of the video. He is a musician who has built a significant social-media following. “When I got the video, the main thing I wanted to do was just put it out there, because it was a cold-blooded case of murder, clear-cut,” LeDay told us on Democracy Now! “I wanted to put that on display for everyone to see, so these cops could stop getting away with this type of ordeal.” The video did go viral, and soon after, Chris LeDay was arrested. He works at a U.S. Air Force Reserve facility in Dunwoody, Georgia. As he was entering the base, he was detained. When he asked what he was being arrested for, they said he “fit the profile.” When he asked what profile, they wouldn’t say. This 6-foot-3-inch, 270-pound African-American Air Force veteran was scared. He told us on Democracy Now!: “After about 30 minutes passed, I see all these extra cops coming up. There’s more and more cops showing up. So I decided to take action into my own hands, and I put it on Facebook. I tagged my mother and my father, and I let them know. I said, ‘Hey, you know, I’m surrounded by cops right now, both city and military. I’m not really sure what’s going on. But I want to let you guys know that if anything happens, I’m not resisting.” Chris LeDay was handcuffed, then shackled, put in an orange jumpsuit and held for 26 hours. The charge? Unpaid past traffic fines. This week marks the second anniversary of the police killing of Eric Garner in Staten Island, N.Y. On July 17, 2014, after a police officer put him in a chokehold and others piled on top of him, Eric Garner managed to say “I can’t breathe” 11 times before he died. We know all this only because a bystander, Ramsey Orta, recorded the entire attack on his cellphone. The video went viral. None of the NYPD officers involved has been charged with his death. Ramsey Orta told us that police targeted and harassed him immediately after his video went public. During one of his arrests, he said they told him, “You filmed us, now we’re filming you.” Ramsey Orta has just agreed to a plea deal that will send him to prison for four years on unrelated charges—making him the only person at the scene of Garner’s killing who will serve jail time. Videotaping a crime is not a crime. It’s a public service. Police harassment of citizens who provide video evidence of police brutality has to stop.

Let’s Learn From Australia: Semi-Automatic Weapons Bans Work By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan “It’s a sweet little gun,” Martin Bryant said of his AR-15 semi-automatic assault rifle when being interrogated by police. Twenty years ago, on April 28, 1996, Martin took that gun and committed a massacre in the Australian state of Tasmania. Over 24 hours, in what became known as the Port Arthur Massacre, he killed 35 people and injured 23 more. The violence and senselessness of the act, the largest massacre in Australia’s post-colonial history, so shocked that nation that within 12 days, comprehensive gun-control legislation was agreed upon. There has not been another mass shooting in Australia since. Which brings us to Orlando, Florida, and another semi-automatic weapon. About 10 days before he committed the single largest shooting massacre in modern U.S. history, Omar Mateen walked into the St. Lucie Shooting Center, in Port St. Lucie, Florida, and bought an AR-style semi-automatic rifle and a 9 mm semi-automatic pistol. “He passed the background check that every single person that purchases a firearm in the state of Florida undergoes,” store owner Ed Henson told the press. Mateen was a U.S. citizen, with a state-issued Florida photo ID permitting him to carry guns. He walked into Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, on Latin Night, and opened fire. Forty-nine people were killed, and more than 50 were injured. “In America, the background check consists of, usually, looking at a computer to see if someone has a criminal conviction. That’s not a background check,” Rebecca Peters of the International Action Network on Small Arms told us on the “Democracy Now!” news hour. “In New York City, if you want to apply to rent an apartment, if you want to apply to go to university, there’s a background check. The authorities talk to people who know you. They ask their opinion of you. And similarly, in Australia and most other developed countries, a background check consists of asking for references—your family doctor, talking to your spouse or your previous spouse, asking, ‘Is there any concern?’” A more comprehensive background check on Omar Mateen might have exposed details, such as how he abused his first wife, Sitora Yusufiy, so severely that she left him after just four months of marriage. Or that Dan Gilroy, one of his co-workers at the security company Mateen worked at, G4S, felt that Mateen was “unhinged,” “unstable” and “full of rage,” a racist and a homophobe, as he told ABC News. Yet reports are that Mateen was seen at Pulse on numerous occasions, and used gay dating apps. Mateen, a New York-born U.S. citizen, the son of Afghan immigrants, was investigated twice by the FBI for potential terrorist sympathies or statements. Yet he bought two powerful semi-automatic weapons, with no problem. Advertisement In the wake of Australia’s Port Arthur massacre, Rebecca Peters led the national fight for gun control. “We had had a campaign for about 10 years at that time to reform the gun laws, which were weak in some states, and it was a patchwork across the country, as it is in the U.S.,” she told us. “In April of ‘96, this tragedy occurred ... at that moment, our prime minister said: ‘This is the time. After all this prevaricating, we’re going to do something.’” The Australian prime minister at the time was conservative John Howard. Peters went on: “A crucial part of the new laws is proper checking of the background of people who are applying to have guns. It’s not only domestic violence, it’s also depression and alcohol abuse, and many other factors can make a person at risk of violence, not to mention people who have—who are vehemently racist or resentful.” Guns are still legal in Australia, since, as Peters said, “the self-image of Australia is often sort of an outdoor guy on a horse with a gun type of thing, not too dissimilar from the traditional image of Americans.” In fact, iconic “Crocodile Dundee” Australian men supported the ban on semi-automatic weapons, arguing that “real men” didn’t need such weapons to survive in the Outback. Australia now has serious background checks, and semi-automatic weapons are illegal. When the law was passed, owners of guns like the AR-15 were legally compelled to sell them to the government, after which the weapons were destroyed. As this column goes to press, U.S. Sen. Christopher Murphy, D-Conn., has launched a filibuster, vowing to speak, he said, “for as long as I can” to force a debate on gun control. Four years ago, he was in the U.S. House. Twenty schoolchildren and six adults were massacred at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in his district. The killer, Adam Lanza, used an AR-style semi-automatic weapon there, as James Holmes did in his shooting spree in the Aurora movie theater in Colorado earlier that year. These weapons would have been illegal under an assault-weapons ban that Congress let expire over a decade ago. We need a ban on semi-automatic guns, which are no more than weapons of mass destruction designed to efficiently kill as many people as possible.

Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson Takes High-School Detention to a New Level By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan Thursday, Jan. 28, was a cold morning in Durham, North Carolina. Wildin David Guillen Acosta went outside to head to school, but never made it. He was thrown to the ground and arrested by agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). He has been in detention ever since. Wildin, now 19 years old, fled his home in Olancho, Honduras more than two years ago. He was detained when crossing the border, but, as he was a minor at the time, he was allowed to join his family in North Carolina. He started out at Riverside High School, and was set to graduate this June. He wanted to become an engineer. Instead, he has been locked up in the notorious Stewart Detention Center in rural Lumpkin, Georgia, which is run by the for-profit Corrections Corporation of America. Wildin is just one of hundreds of thousands of children who have fled the violence of Central America in recent years, either alone or, often, with their mothers. They come primarily from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. Honduras is now one of the world’s most violent countries, and Olancho has one of the highest murder rates there, causing many to flee. The U.S. Army and the Drug Enforcement Administration both have special-forces units permanently stationed there, joining in counternarcotics operations that have also killed Hondurans. Wildin was arrested in part of a series of immigration raids, dubbed “Operation Border Guardian.” Many believe its intent was to create fear among those still in Central America who might consider taking the perilous journey north to the U.S. “As I have said repeatedly, our borders are not open to illegal migration,” Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson said at the time. “If you come here illegally, we will send you back consistent with our laws and values.” Immediately after Wildin’s arrest, family, friends, classmates and teachers at Riverside High demonstrated their values, rallying to support him and five others who were similarly arrested. The group of imprisoned youth is often referred to as the “NC6.” Durham’s Human Relations Commission appealed to ICE to release him, as did the Durham City Council. “There is so much fear in our community, because, unfortunately, he is not the only child that they have detained,” said one of Wildin’s teachers, Ellen Holmes, in a support video. “It’s creating absences and dropouts in our schools. It’s creating just a huge feeling of fear inside our school and in our community.” While there is scant evidence that the mass arrests and deportations have slowed the flow of Central American refugees to the U.S., they have certainly scared students and families currently here, forcing them to keep their kids out of school lest they be swept up like Wildin. Wildin’s request for asylum was denied, and on March 19, an immigration judge denied his appeal to reopen his case. He was set for deportation back to Honduras on March 20. However, bowing to the enormous public pressure brought by this youth-led grass-roots organizing, ICE Director Sarah Saldana issued an order that morning, delaying his deportation. Wildin’s case for asylum is before the Board of Immigration Appeals, a process that could take months or even years to resolve. “He should be released. Ninety days, by any standard, is an egregious period of time to be spending in detention,” Paromita Shah told us on the “Democracy Now!” news hour. She is the associate director of the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild, and was in Washington, D.C., with several Riverside High students and teacher Ellen Holmes, visiting members of Congress and Education Secretary John B. King Jr., asking them to support Wildin. Axel Herrera was one of the students who went to Washington. Like Wildin, he was an undocumented immigrant from Honduras, but entered at the age of 7, and thus qualified for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. “We’ve talked to representatives. We’ve made calls. We’ve sent letters. We’ve gotten support from a few of our congressmen in North Carolina to ask for their release,” he told us. “But we haven’t had the response we’ve wanted, which is to have Wildin and have some of the other NC6 back at our schools.” Wildin Acosta remains locked up in ICE’s private prison in Georgia. His request that his schoolwork be sent to him was initially denied. After public outcry, the warden relented. Many high-school students get detention for refusing to study. Wildin is stuck in permanent detention, and he has to fight for his right to study. That is determination and commitment Jeh Johnson and everyone at ICE should agree is “consistent with our values.”

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan The White House announced this week that President Barack Obama will visit Hiroshima, the site of the world’s first atomic-bomb attack. He will be the first sitting president to go there, and only the second president ever, after former President Jimmy Carter visited in 1984. Obama’s pilgrimage to Hiroshima, where 140,000 people were killed and another 100,000 seriously injured on Aug. 6, 1945, will not be accompanied by a formal apology. White House press secretary Josh Earnest said the trip was to highlight Obama’s “continued commitment to pursuing the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” Yet the Obama administration also recently revealed its 30-year, $1 trillion plan to modernize the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal. With each passing year, fewer and fewer survivors of the horrific attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki remain to provide eyewitness accounts. These survivors are referred to with great respect in Japan as “hibakusha.” In 2014, we were given a tour of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park by a hibakusha, Koji Hosokawa. He was 17 in 1945. His sister was 13. “My biggest sorrow in my life is about my younger sister, who died in the atomic bomb,” he said. While in Japan, we also went to Tokyo to speak with the world-renowned writer Kenzaburo Oe in his publisher’s office. He won the 1994 Nobel Prize for literature. We asked him if President Obama should apologize for the two atomic bombings: “I am not seeking an apology, whether from the president or from any kind of person, in regards to this issue,” he told us. “I believe the fact that humanity did create these nuclear weapons is a crime that all of humanity is responsible for. And I believe this is an issue of a much greater scale than any individual politician could make an apology for.” Oe, 81, is not a hibakusha, but is a survivor of World War II, and the experience as a child deeply impacted him. As if anticipating the criticism that Obama is now receiving, accused of mounting an “apology tour,” Kenzaburo Oe said in 2014: “I believe that if Mr. Obama were to come to the memorial ceremonies in Hiroshima or Nagasaki, for example, what he could do is come together with the hibakusha, the survivors, and share that moment of silence, and also express considering the issue of nuclear weapons from the perspective of all humanity and how important nuclear abolition is. [This,] I think, would be the most important thing that any politician or representative could do at this time.” Since those two devastating bombings in 1945, on Aug. 6 in Hiroshima and Aug. 9 in Nagasaki, there have thankfully been no more military attacks with nuclear weapons. The U.S. and the Soviet Union came close, and nuclear warheads remain armed and aimed in both the U.S. and Russian arsenals. Kevin Martin of Peace Action, responding to the news of Obama’s planned trip to Hiroshima, also places little importance on an apology. Instead, he offers this brief list of to-do items for the president: “Taking our nuclear weapons off of hair-trigger alert, separating the warheads from their delivery systems, initiating negotiations for the elimination of nuclear weapons globally, initiating talks on a Middle East zone free of weapons of mass destruction. ... But even the current deployed nuclear weapons, we could go down to a thousand or fewer, as the Pentagon has suggested in the past. Those are just some of the steps that would be meaningful and worth a trip to Hiroshima.” The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park is a beautiful, haunting place. The most iconic landmark is the “A-bomb dome,” atop a large building that was not completely destroyed. As we left the memorial, Koji Hosokawa told us to stop. He looked us in the eye and told us not to forget the victims: “People lived here. They lived here.” President Obama should meet Koji Hosokawa and other hibakusha, and hear their stories.

BY AMY GOODMAN DENIS MOYNIHAN A prophet of peace has passed. Daniel Berrigan, a Catholic Jesuit priest, a protester, a poet, a dedicated uncle and brother, died last weekend at the age of 94. His near-century on Earth was marked by compassion and love for humanity, and an unflinching commitment to justice and peace. He spent years in prison for his courageous, peaceful actions against war, living and practising the gospel that he preached. He launched movements, inspired millions, wrote beautifully and, with a wry smile, shared his love of life with family, friends and those with whom he prayed and fought for peace. Dan’s brother Philip Berrigan and several others peacefully raided a draft board in 1967 and poured their own blood on the records to signify the blood being spilt in the war. A year later, on May 17, 1968, just weeks after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., they and seven others famously removed draft records from the Catonsville, Maryland draft board, and set fire to them with homemade napalm, singing a hymn around the pyre until they were arrested. "Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlour of the charnel house," Dan Berrigan wrote in the statement released by the group before the action, as they knew they would be arrested. "We could not, so help us God, do otherwise." The actions of the Catonsville Nine, as the group would come to be known, ratcheted up the intensity of anti-war actions everywhere. Some individuals had burned their draft cards before then, but after the Catonsville action, it became an iconic and increasingly common tactic to demonstrate actual and symbolic opposition to the war. "We have chosen to be powerless criminals in a time of criminal power. We have chosen to be branded as peace criminals by war criminals," he said. Daniel Berrigan was convicted and, before turning himself in to serve his prison sentence, went underground. Despite being placed on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, Berrigan popped up around the country, giving anti-war speeches. He spoke at a large rally at Cornell University, where he was the campus chaplain. Afterward, as the FBI and police closed in on him, Berrigan hid inside one of the Bread & Puppet political theatre troupe’s giant puppets. Thus disguised, he exited Cornell’s Barton Hall, eluding arrest. Authorities finally caught up to him on Block Island, off the coast of Rhode Island, and arrested him. A famous photo captured the moment, as a smiling Father Berrigan is shown being led, handcuffed, by two joyless FBI men who were on the island posing as bird-watchers. "Given the fact that the American machine is not working well, either in its inner gears, or in its meshing with the world, good men must take action," he wrote in his memoir, No Bars to Manhood. "Some of them ... must be willing to go to jail." In 1980, Berrigan, again with his brother Phil and others, broke into a General Electric missile plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. They hammered on missile nose cones, damaging them beyond repair, and poured their blood on the damaged parts. Their action that day launched the Plowshares Movement, which has grown into a global movement. Plowshares actions are inspired by a line from the Old Testament, Isaiah 2:4: "They will hammer their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will no longer fight against nation, nor train for war anymore." Dan Berrigan’s fight for peace challenged the U.S. government, the Pentagon and his own Catholic Church’s hierarchy. For that last sin, he was banished by the church from the United States. His exile included trips to Latin America and South Africa, which, far from curing him of his commitment to fight injustice, only strengthened it. We last saw Berrigan, who we and so many others affectionately called "Father Dan," two years ago in the retirement home for elderly Jesuits, at Fordham University in the Bronx. At 93, he was frail, but his eyes twinkled when we gave him his favorite food: ice cream. His devotion to ice cream and social justice earned him his own flavor of Ben & Jerry’s, as well as a lifetime supply of their ice cream for him and for the Catholic Worker movement that he so loved. Daniel J. Berrigan lived his life true to his calling, literally practising what he preached. Rest in peace, Dan Berrigan, just as you lived.

Amid Media Megamergers, A Mosaic of Community Media Thrives By Amy Goodman and Denis Moyhihan FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. — The business press is all atwitter with merger news, as federal regulators are set to approve a massive deal between cable giants Charter, Time Warner and Bright House Networks. The $78 billion transaction will create the second-largest cable TV/Internet company, dubbed “New Charter,” next to Comcast, and leave just three major cable providers in the U.S. Meanwhile, the Gannett Company, which owns more than 100 newspapers, including USA Today, is attempting to acquire Tribune Publishing, which owns several major newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune. This looming consolidation in the corporate media is happening as we celebrate “Democracy Now!” news hour’s 20th anniversary. We are on a 100-city tour of the United States, going from city to city, hosting fundraisers for community media outlets and broadcasting the news as we travel. Our travels confirm that a thriving, vibrant community media sector exists, serving the public interest, free from the demands to turn a profit at any cost. On Feb. 19, 1996, “Democracy Now!” began as the only daily election show in public broadcasting. President Bill Clinton was running for re-election against Kansas Sen. Bob Dole and third-party candidate Ross Perot. The plan was for the show to run through Election Day. Our hope was that the issues in the presidential race were important enough and the audience cared enough that they would tune in to daily coverage that brought them voices and ideas not normally heard in the corporate media. That’s how we started: giving a voice to the grass roots. When the election wrapped up, we thought that “Democracy Now!” would wrap up as well. But there was more demand for the show after the elections than before. Why? There is a hunger for authentic voices — not the same handful of pundits circulating through all the media networks who know so little about so much, explaining the world to us and getting it so wrong. The show began on just nine community radio stations in 1996. Today, it’s carried on more than 1,400 outlets, a remarkable constellation of community media organizations: PBS, NPR and Pacifica public radio and television broadcasters, college and community stations, public-access television facilities, low-power FM radio stations, as well as online news organizations and, of course, the many newspapers that carry this column. These outlets each serve their community uniquely, providing relevant, locally created and curated content. As we travel, we see the connection that local media institutions help forge, both within a community but also across traditional barriers of race, class and age. Take, for example, the new low-power FM (LPFM) radio station that is being built in Albuquerque, New Mexico. LPFM is a noncommercial radio service that recently got a boost from the Federal Communications Commission after activists spent years pushing the federal government to allow more stations. This new station in Albuquerque is licensed to a long-standing media nonprofit called Quote...Unquote, which provides training in digital-media creation, to empower people to tell their own stories. To launch the station, they have partnered with the Robert F. Kennedy High School, a remarkable school in the South Valley, one of the poorest neighborhoods of Albuquerque, with a population of students who are largely undocumented immigrants. “We serve students that traditional schools have given up on,” Robert Baade, RFK’s director, told us. “The radio station will be one more tool for them, to allow them to speak for themselves.” This is just one of hundreds of innovative community media institutions that we are supporting as we travel the country. They are largely nonprofit, supported by enthusiastic volunteers, and are hyperlocal, beloved by the communities they serve. Juxtapose this with increasingly consolidated major media corporations. “Thanks to this merger both Charter and Comcast now have unprecedented control over our cable and Internet connections,” Craig Aaron, of the media reform organization Free Press, said after the news broke that these two corporations will likely merge. “Their crushing monopoly power will mean fewer choices, higher prices, no accountability and no competition.” Even in this high-tech digital age, all we get is static: that veil of distortion, lies, misrepresentations and half-truths that obscure reality. We need the media to give us the dictionary definition of static: Criticism. Opposition. Unwanted interference. We need a media that covers power, not covers for power. We need a media that is the Fourth Estate, not for the state. And we need a media that covers the movements that create static and make history. That is the power of independent media. That is a media that will save us.

Obama’s Trillion-Dollar Nuclear-Arms Train Wreck By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan STANFORD, Calif.—“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” These were the words from the Hindu religious text, the Bhagavad-Gita, that flashed through the mind of the man credited with creating the first atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, as the first nuclear explosion in history lit up the dark desert sky at the Trinity blast site in New Mexico on July 16, 1945. Weeks after that, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, then Nagasaki, killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, and thrust the world into the atomic age. Since then, humanity has lived with the terrible prospect of nuclear war and mass annihilation. Conventional wisdom holds that the likelihood that these unconventional weapons will be used has decreased since the end of the so-called Cold War. That perception has been challenged lately, especially since President Barack Obama announced a 30-year, $1 trillion program to modernize the U.S. nuclear-weapon arsenal. Secretary of State John Kerry visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum on Monday, the first sitting U.S. secretary of state to visit the site. Kerry was in Japan for a meeting of the G-7 nations. In his public remarks at the memorial, Kerry offered no apology for the nuclear attacks. He did say, though, that the museum “was a reminder of the depth of obligation that every single one of us in public life carries—in fact, every person in position of responsibility carries—to work for peace ... to create and pursue a world free from nuclear weapons.” Despite the lofty rhetoric, President Obama has launched what the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability calls the “Trillion Dollar Trainwreck.” That is the title of a new report on Obama’s massive plan to modernize the U.S. nuclear-weapons arsenal, to be released next Monday. Marylia Kelley is one of the report’s authors. She serves as executive director of Tri-Valley CAREs, or Communities Against a Radioactive Environment, a partner organization with the Alliance. Of Kerry’s visit to Hiroshima, Kelley said, on the “Democracy Now!” news hour, “Kerry went empty-handed. The United States needs to go with a concrete plan to roll back its own nuclear-weapons program. You cannot preach abstinence, in terms of nuclear weapons, from the biggest bar stool in the room.” “The United States is initiating a new nuclear arms race, because the other nuclear-armed states, of course, when they look at our ‘modernization program,’ are now beginning their own,” she told us. “We need this to be rolled back.” Kelley lives in Livermore, California, home to one of the U.S. government’s national laboratories dedicated to developing and manufacturing nuclear bombs. President Obama delivered his first address on the U.S. nuclear arsenal on April 5, 2009, in Prague: “Today, the Cold War has disappeared but thousands of those weapons have not. In a strange turn of history, the threat of global nuclear war has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up. More nations have acquired these weapons. Testing has continued. Black-market trade in nuclear secrets and nuclear materials abound,” he said. As with his pledge to close the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, his pledge to move the U.S. toward nuclear disarmament seems to have been abandoned. Grass-roots groups in the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability would like to see Obama make an historic trip to Hiroshima, as the first sitting U.S. president to do so. “If Obama goes to Hiroshima,” Marylia Kelley said, “he needs to use that as an opportunity, not to speak empty promises and rhetoric about an eventual world free of nuclear weapons, but to make concrete proposals about how the United States is going to take steps in that direction and how we’re going to change course, because right now we’re taking giant steps in the opposite direction.” The U.S. nuclear arsenal, and all the expense, nuclear waste and immense danger it continuously poses, has received almost no attention in the U.S. presidential debates. The day after he launched his campaign in late May 2015, Sen. Bernie Sanders was asked about the trillion-dollar nuclear-arsenal upgrade at a town hall in New Hampshire. “What all of this is about is our national priorities,” he replied. “Who are we as a people? Does Congress listen to the military-industrial complex, who has never seen a war that they didn’t like? Or do we listen to the people of this country who are hurting?” In 1946, the year after Trinity, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Albert Einstein, whose theory of relativity gave birth to the atomic bomb, offered a warning to the world that remains starkly relevant today: “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan When victims defend themselves, they put themselves at risk of becoming doubly victimized—first by their abusers, then by the criminal justice system. Cherelle Baldwin is lucky to be alive. She was repeatedly abused by her ex-partner. She was attacked by him in her own home and defended herself, for which she went to prison. Domestic violence, also referred to as intimate partner violence, afflicts millions of people annually, mostly, but not exclusively, women. When victims defend themselves, they put themselves at risk of becoming doubly victimized: first by their abuser, then at the hands of the criminal-justice system. Women of color are particularly vulnerable, as Cherelle Baldwin’s case so starkly demonstrates. Cherelle Baldwin met Jeffrey Brown in Connecticut in 2010, when she was 19 years old. Before long they had a baby boy together. Brown became abusive, and by 2013 the couple had split up. After that, according to court documents, Brown repeatedly threatened her, took her credit cards and money, and assaulted her during visits to see their son. She eventually got a court order barring threats, harassment and assaults during visits, but Brown continued sending threatening texts. On May 18, 2013, he sent over a dozen threats via text, two of which read “DOA on sight” (sic), indicating she would be Dead On Arrival. His car was parked down the street. Cherelle was awakened to find Brown in her room. He beat her, and strangled and whipped her with a belt. She fled the house in her nightgown, without her shoes or her glasses. She raced into her car. “She crashed her car into a cement wall,” her defense attorney, Miles Gerety, told us on the “Democracy Now!” news hour. “She wakes up next to the car, not really knowing what had happened, because she had retrograde amnesia.” What happened next is unclear. Baldwin suffered a broken leg in the crash. Police found Jeffrey Brown pinned between the car and the wall, dead. According to Gerety, he still had the belt that he had used to beat Baldwin wrapped around his hand. Despite her injuries, despite the order of protection, despite the slew of threatening text messages from Brown against her, Cherelle Baldwin was charged with first-degree murder and remanded to Connecticut’s maximum-security prison, with bail set at $1 million. After a six-week trial, 11 of the 12 jurors voted to acquit. One juror held out, so the judge declared a mistrial. The prosecutor sought a second trial, insisting on maintaining the impossibly high bail. Baldwin remained behind bars. Last week, at her second trial, Baldwin was acquitted of all charges. Yet she had spent close to three years in prison—her only crime being the inability to meet bail. The U.S. Department of Justice sent a letter to courts in March about the problem of jailing poor people who can’t pay fines or meet bail. It read, in part, “Bail that is set without regard to defendants’ financial capacity can result in the incarceration of individuals not because they pose a threat to public safety or a flight risk, but rather because they cannot afford the assigned bail amount.” Baldwin’s case parallels another that got far more media attention. In August 2010 in Florida, Marissa Alexander, also an African-American and a mother of three, defended herself against her abusive estranged husband. When he threatened her in her own home, she fired her licensed pistol into the ceiling as a warning. He fled, called the police, and she was arrested. She was charged with aggravated assault, convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison. Marissa Alexander tried to use Florida’s “stand your ground” law in her defense. The prosecutor, Angela Corey, also prosecuted white vigilante George Zimmerman for the killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida. Zimmerman succeeded in using the stand your ground defense. Alexander did not. Ohio State University law professor Michelle Alexander compared the cases of Marissa Alexander and George Zimmerman on “Democracy Now!,” calling Marissa’s case a “stark example of the discriminatory application of the stand your ground law itself. Here is a woman firing shots in the air to protect herself from what she believed is an abusive spouse, and she winds up getting 20 years, while George Zimmerman is released scot-free after pursuing someone based on racial stereotypes and assumptions of criminality.” Marissa Alexander eventually won an appeal, but, facing the potential of 60 years behind bars in a retrial, accepted a plea bargain for time served plus two years of house arrest. She is in her second year of that now. Back in Connecticut, Cherelle Baldwin is slowly but surely trying to put her life back together with her 4-year-old son. Cherelle and Marissa are just two of the 12.7 million people in the U.S. who are physically abused, raped or stalked by their partners annually. This national crisis, and related issues of mass incarceration and racial discrimination in the criminal-justice system, deserves a full public hearing, especially during this presidential election year.

No llores por mí Argentinamacri digital a oscuras Ha cobrado nueva actualidad la canción “No llores por mí Argentina”, de la popular obra del teatro musical “Evita”, con motivo de las drásticas medidas de ajustes económicos- mal llamadas de austeridad- que está tomando el nuevo Presidente derechista de la republica del Plata Maurico Macri. Aumento al doble del precio del transporte público en Buenos Aires y el entorno urbano comprendiendo trenes y autobuses, lo afecta al 40 % de la población nacional de Argentina .Aumento considerable de las tarifas de gas y el agua para todos los consumidores. La electricidad ha sido subida a un 253 por ciento lo que hace vislumbrar que todos los artículos de primera necesidad subirán por los cielos dejando una estela de angustia y desesperación a toda la población aegentina.Se acabaron los subsidios del Estado de los s tiempos del peronismo y el kichnerismo para dar paso al capitalismo salvaje de Macri y comparsa, dispuestos ellos a pagar con el sudor y la sangre del pueblo argentino a los voraces “Fondos Buitres” de la Banca internacional. Que se miren en ese espejo los pueblos de América Latina si les viene encima el Tsunami del capitalismo salvaje disfrazado de democracia y libertad. Hoy llora Argentina con Macri. Mañana podrían ser Ecuador, Venezuela o Brasil o cualquier otro país de América Latina que le de paso a un gobierno de extrema derecha disfrazado de campeones de la democracia. Aunque Cuba no, porque los cubanos saben decirle a los cantos de sirena del capitalismo salvaje : ¡A otro con ese cuento! Y hasta el próximo lunes amigos de El Duende que con mi gallo me voy cantando a mi tumba fría. Bambarambay.

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Islamic State militants attacked a European city this week, setting off three bombs in Brussels that killed 31 and injured 260. In the United States, the response was immediate, first with the outpouring of support from the public, then, unsurprisingly, with a flurry of bellicose pronouncements from most of the remaining major-party presidential candidates. The violence overshadowed what might well be one of the most enduring and significant accomplishments of the Obama presidency: the reopening of relations with Cuba, cemented when he became the first president in 88 years to visit the island nation. After the bombings in Brussels, Republican candidate Ted Cruz said, "We need to empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized." Donald Trump told NBC regarding Salah Abdeslam, the suspect in the November Paris massacre who was captured in Brussels last Friday, "If they could expand the laws, I would do a lot more than waterboarding." On CNN, Trump said, "He may be talking, but he’ll talk faster with the torture." Give Trump credit for calling it what it is, torture. But actually advocating for torture? Speaking from Brussels, writer Frank Barat, president of the Palestine Legal Action Network, told us on the "Democracy Now!" news hour, "We either continue the eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth war and more revenge-type of things that have led to nothing but more terrorism on the ground ... or we decide to stop and start to ask the tough questions that need to be answered." Barat continued: "It came out of radicalization through what’s happening in Syria, which is actually key to understand the creation of [Islamic State]. What’s happened in Syria in the last few years is a total betrayal, on the part of the Western world. People rising to fight its oppressor and the West sort of turning its back on them, allowing slaughter, this created so much anger, so much rancor." Barat went on, "When you put this on top of the failure of U.S. foreign policy and U.S. imperialism, when you put this on top of the sort of ambitions of the West in terms of oil, in terms of trade routes and in terms of supporting dictators and Israel, it creates a powerful and very dangerous mixture that then manifests in the form of [Islamic State] or al-Qaida or any other terrorist organizations." He suggested an alternate response: "In Norway, after the attacks of Anders Breivik in 2011, which killed more than 70 people, the prime minister of Norway said that Norway’s response to terror would be more openness, greater political participation and more democracy. It’s words we don’t hear nowadays." Across the Atlantic, President Barack Obama was making history with his state visit to Cuba. In a public address, he said, "I have come here to bury the last remnant of the Cold War in the Americas." Yet the official embargo against Cuba remains in place until the intransigent U.S. Congress votes to end it. President Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro held a joint news conference on Monday. "We continue, as President Castro indicated, to have some very serious differences, including on democracy and human rights," Obama said. What kind of alternative does the United States show Cubans on that corner of their island, Guantanamo Bay, that the U.S. controls? There, the U.S government maintains its hellish military prison beyond the reach of U.S. laws, where hundreds of men have been held, most without charge, and many beaten and tortured. Ninety-one remain there. Thirty-six have long been cleared for release. On Wednesday, the House Armed Services Committee held a hearing on the closure of the prison at Guantanamo Bay. Maj. Gen. Michael R. Lehnert, USMC (Ret.), submitted a statement. He was the officer tasked with building the current prison. He ran it for its first 100 days, and received its first prisoners. "Guantanamo was a mistake," Lehnert wrote. "History will reflect that. It was created in the early days as a consequence of fear, anger and political expediency. It ignored centuries of rule of law and international agreements. It does not make us safer, and it sullies who we are as a nation. That in over a decade we have failed to acknowledge the mistake and change course is unforgivable and ignorant." The horror in Brussels is unforgivable. Few can deny, though, that some of the worst policies of the U.S. and its allies serve as recruitment tools for [Islamic State] and other groups. We need a uniform standard of justice. We can start by closing Guantanamo, and ensuring that torture is permanently purged from the policy prescriptions of those who would be president.

El presidente de los Estados Unidos Barack Obama pronunció un discurso ante la sociedad civil cubana en el Gran Teatro de La Habana “Alicia Alonso”, una de las últimas actividades de su visita oficial a Cuba, que concluye este martes. El mandatario norteamericano valoró el avance en las relaciones bilaterales. Nuestro sitio web dio seguimiento en vivo, vía streaming y por Periscope. “Como Presidente de EEUU le solicitó al Congreso que levante el embargo”, dice Obama y recibe una ovación de pie en el Gran Teatro de La Habana. Reconoce el potente sistema educativo cubano. “Yo sé la historia”. Recuerda los apetitos estadounidenses antes y después de 1959, cuando triunfó la Revolución entre otras cosas por la injerencia norteamericana. “No no voy a estar atrapado por el pasado”, añade. Obama habla de los derechos universales bajo el prisma estadounidense -democracia, libertad de expresión, elecciones libre-, y cuenta su historia, que lo llevó de una familia de pocos recursos y una madre soltera, a la Presidencia. “Es una prueba de la libertad de mi país”, aunque reconoce que “no es fácil” y que la democracia en su país “no es perfecta”. “Nadie puede negar el servicio que miles de médicos cubanos han llevado a los pobres, a los que sufren”, y propone seguir la colaboración con Cuba, como la que se produjo durante la epidemia del ébola en Africa. Reconoce también el papel de Cuba como mediador en los esfuerzos de paz en Colombia, y recuerda que él y Raúl estuvieron juntos honrando a Nelson Mandela, en Johannesburgo. En su segundo y último día en la isla, Obama afirmó “Cultivo una rosa blanca”, citando al prócer José Martí en un poema dedicado a los amigos y la paz.”Yo creo en el pueblo cubano”, dijo el presidente entre aplausos. “No solo vamos a normalizar relaciones con el Gobierno de Cuba, sino con todo el pueblo cubano”, aseguró el mandatario en su discurso retransmitido en directo por la televisión y radio de Cuba. Obama llegó al Gran Teatro Alicia Alonso de La Habana, donde fue recibido a la entrada por el presidente Raúl y saludó también a la directora del Ballet Nacional de Cuba, la legendaria bailarina Alicia Alonso; así como al canciller cubano, Bruno Rodríguez. Obama ofreció su discurso desde el escenario del Gran Teatro donde lucían dos grandes banderas, la cubana y la estadounidense, en el telón de fondo, más otras dos detrás del atril. The President of the United States Barack Obama gave a speech to Cuban civil society in the great theatre of Havana "Alicia Alonso", one of the latest activities of his official visit to Cuba, which concludes Tuesday. The American President welcomed the progress in bilateral relations. "Our web site followed live via streaming and Periscope. " As US President he asked Congress to lift the embargo", says Obama and receives a standing ovation from standing in the Gran Teatro de La Habana. "Recognizes the powerful Cuban educational system. " I know the history." Remember the American appetites before and after 1959, when the revolution among other things triumphed by American interference. "No I won't be trapped by the past", adds. Obama speaks of universal rights under the American Prism - democracy, freedom of expression, free elections, and tells his story, which took him from a low-income family and a single mother, to the Presidency. ""It is a test for the freedom of my country", while acknowledging that"it is not easy"and that democracy in his country"is not perfect". " Nobody can deny that thousands of Cuban doctors have helped the poor, who suffer"and proposes to continue the collaboration with Cuba, as it occurred during the epidemic of ebola in Africa. Also recognizes the role of Cuba as a mediator in the peace efforts in Colombia, and recalls that he and Raul were together honoring Nelson Mandela, in Johannesburg. "In his second and last day on the island, Obama said"Growing a white rose,"quoting the hero José Martí in a poem dedicated to friends and peace." "I believe in the Cuban people," he said between applause. " Not only we will normalize relations with the Cuban Government, but with all the Cuban people", said the President in his speech broadcast live on Cuban radio and television. Obama arrived at the Grand Theatre Alicia Alonso of Havana, where he was greeted at the entrance by President Raul and also greeted the Director of the National Ballet of Cuba, the legendary ballerina Alicia Alonso; as well as to the Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez. Obama gave his speech from the stage of the Grand Theatre, where two large flags, the Cuban and the American, in the backdrop, shone more two others behind the lectern.

Fascism: Can It Happen Here? By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan "When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross," goes a saying that is widely attributed to the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Sinclair Lewis. In 1935, Lewis wrote a novel called "It Can’t Happen Here," positing fascism’s rise in the United States. We were taught that fascism was defeated in 1945, with the surrender of Germany and Japan in World War II. Yet the long shadows of that dark era are falling on the presidential campaign trail this year, with eruptions of violence, oaths of loyalty complete with Nazi salutes and, presiding over it all, Republican front-runner Donald Trump. "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," the 20th-century philosopher George Santayana wrote. He lived in Europe through both world wars, and witnessed Italian fascism firsthand. Fascism was the violent political movement founded by Benito Mussolini, who took control of Italy in 1922. Mussolini had his political opponents beaten, jailed, tortured and killed, and ruled with an iron fist until he was deposed as Italy surrendered to the Allies in 1943. He was known as "Il Duce," or "The Leader," and provided early support to the nascent Nazi movement in Germany as Adolf Hitler rose to power in the 1930s. Why is this relevant today? It was Donald Trump who recently retweeted one of Mussolini’s quotes: "It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep." When NBC confronted Trump for retweeting the fascist’s words, he replied, "Sure, it’s OK to know it’s Mussolini. Look, Mussolini was Mussolini. ... It’s a very good quote, it’s a very interesting quote." If only the fascist comparisons were limited to his tweets. His rallies have become hotbeds of violent confrontations, consistently fanned by Trump’s heated rhetoric from the podium. After a Black Lives Matter protester was kicked and punched at one of his rallies, Trump said, approvingly, "Maybe he should have been roughed up." At a rally in Las Vegas in February, after an anti-Trump protester disrupted the event and was escorted out, Trump bellowed: "You know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They’d be carried out on a stretcher, folks." He went on, "I’d like to punch him in the face, I’ll tell you that." Weeks later, a protester was punched in the face at a Trump rally. Rakeem Jones, a 26-year-old African-American man, was being led out of a stadium event by security guards in Fayetteville, North Carolina, when John McGraw, a white Trump supporter, sucker-punched Jones in the face. The local sheriff’s deputies then wrestled the man to the ground—not McGraw, who threw the punch, but Jones, the victim. The TV program "Inside Edition" interviewed McGraw immediately after the assault. "The next time we see him, we might have to kill him," McGraw said. He was arrested the next day. Trump has personally pledged to pay the legal defense bills for any rally supporter charged with violence against protesters, including those of McGraw’s. Trump also waffled when asked to disavow the support of the Ku Klux Klan and its onetime Grand Wizard, David Duke. "Donald Trump shows a rather alarming willingness to use fascist themes and fascist styles. The response this gets, the positive response, is alarming," said Robert Paxton on the "Democracy Now!" news hour. Considered the father of fascism studies, he is professor emeritus of social science at Columbia University. Paxton gave a short history of the rise of fascism in Germany: "In the election of 1924, [Hitler] did very poorly, for a marginal party. Then you have the Depression in 1929 and 1930. ... There’s this huge economic crisis with tens of millions unemployed, and there’s also a governmental deadlock. You cannot get any legislation passed." Paxton continued, "The German Weimar Republic really ceased to function as a republic in 1930, because nothing could be passed. ... So, between 1930 and 1933, President von Hindenburg ruled by decree. And the political elites are desperate to get out of that situation. And here’s Hitler, who has more votes by this time than anybody else. He’s up to 37 percent. He never gets a majority, but he’s up to 37 percent. And they want to bring that into their tent and get a solid mass backing. And so ... they bring him in." The partnership that the German elites forged with Hitler and his Nazi Party didn’t work out quite the way they hoped. He took power by subterfuge and by force, arrested and killed his opponents, and plunged Europe into the deadliest war in human history. Donald Trump is fanning the flames of bigotry and racism. He is exploiting the fears of masses of white, working-class voters who have seen their economic prospects disappear. Should the Republican nominating process end in a contested convention this summer in Cleveland, Trump told CNN Wednesday morning, "I think you’d have riots. I’m representing ... many, many millions of people."

How About an Election Without Polls? By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan Sen. Bernie Sanders won the Democratic presidential primary in Michigan, defeating Hillary Clinton ... and all the pollsters. Election statistician Nate Silver wrote that Sanders’ Michigan victory “will count as among the greatest polling errors in primary history.” Imagine if we had an election season without polls. Instead, the energy, investigation and money should be spent delving into candidates’ records, whether they’re a businessman like Donald Trump or they’re politicians like Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders. This will lead to a better informed, more engaged electorate. Why should it matter who our neighbors are voting for, or people who live across the state? Let each person make his or her decision on how to vote not on polling numbers, but on the actual positions staked out by the candidates. Primaries, caucuses and Election Day are the ultimate polls. These are the reliable numbers, hard data, on how actual, hopefully well-informed citizens voted. Then the pundits, rather than speculating on how imaginary voters might act, can discuss reality. It is astounding that Bernie Sanders is where he is today. Look at the Tyndall Report’s summary of Campaign 2016 coverage. Andrew Tyndall has offered an independent daily analysis of the flagship evening news programs on CBS, NBC and ABC since the late 1980s. For the calendar year 2015, Tyndall writes, these networks produced more than 17 hours of reporting on the presidential campaigns. That’s over 1,000 minutes of national broadcast television airtime. Donald Trump received 327 minutes, or close to one-third of all the campaign coverage. Bernie Sanders received just 20 minutes. Hillary Clinton got 121 minutes of campaign coverage, six times the amount Sanders received. In one striking example of the disparate coverage, “ABC World News Tonight” aired 81 minutes of reports on Donald Trump, compared with just 20 seconds for Sanders. The commercial networks have an inherent conflict of interest as well. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent by the campaigns and by countless super PACs, buying advertising time to promote their candidate or issue. The more reporting the networks do, the less the candidates will feel the need to buy ad time to inform potential supporters of their positions. Since television remains the primary source of news for most Americans, this conflict of interest creates a major barrier to an informed public. The primaries determine the candidates of the two major parties. Put aside for the moment that the almost absolute blackout on reporting on third parties all but guarantees that these candidates, whether from the Green Party or from the Libertarian Party, for example, will have almost no traction in the national elections. Voter turnout in this year’s primary elections has been historically high but, in a real sense, dismally low. The Pew Research Center reports that, in this year’s first 12 primaries, Republicans have turned out 17.3 percent of eligible voters, while Democrats have turned out 11.7 percent. These are record-high numbers, according to Pew, but consider just how low they are: More than 82 percent of Republicans and more than 88 percent of Democrats didn’t vote. Certainly, new impediments to voting, like requirements to have specific forms of photo identification, decrease participation. Indeed, some argue, many new laws were designed specifically to deter participation of poor people and people of color in the electoral process, thus favoring Republican candidates. “We always do well when the voter turnout is high,” Sanders said at a large campaign rally on Tuesday night in Miami, before learning of his victory in Michigan, “and we do poorly when the voter turnout is low.” Networks generally have a policy of not releasing exit-polling data until polls close in order not to discourage voters from participating. Exit polls might indicate that a candidate is trailing or far ahead, and people might then feel that their vote wouldn’t make a difference. We should extend this policy to the entire election. We need a vigorous debate in the country about war and peace, the growing inequality between the rich and the rest of us, about immigration, education, mass incarceration, racism and so much more. And we need an engaged electorate, empowered by information and enabled to vote. Our democracy demands no less.

Race and the Crime of Felony Disenfranchisement By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Now that Super Tuesday is behind us and the field of presidential candidates is narrowing with the suspension of Dr. Ben Carson’s campaign, a potentially paradigm-shattering general election looms ever closer. "The stakes in this election have never been higher," Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton said in her speech after she had been declared the victor over Sen. Bernie Sanders in seven of 11 Super Tuesday states. As Donald Trump, piling victory upon victory on top of insult upon insult, edges closer to clinching the Republican nomination, the GOP is in chaos, with some predicting a historic split in the party. The presidential race to date has been well-characterized by a line of closed captioning text from a recent Republican debate: "unintelligible yelling." The circuslike atmosphere masks deeply troubling statements made by several candidates that fan the flames of racism, white supremacy and xenophobia. It also deflects attention from a critical, and worsening, deficit in our democracy: the attack on the right to vote, and in particular, the wholesale disenfranchisement of close to 5 million Americans, mostly people of color. Race has been a defining issue in the 2016 election season. On the Republican side, there are overtly racist statements by front-runner Donald Trump, railing against Mexicans as "rapists" and refusing to denounce the former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke after Duke endorsed him. Trump said of an African-American protester who was attacked by Trump supporters at one of his rallies, "Maybe he should have been roughed up." Trump also is a proud retweeter of the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. When asked by NBC’s Chuck Todd if he wanted to be associated with a fascist, Trump replied, "I want to be associated with interesting quotes." Republicans fear that a Donald Trump candidacy will cost their party not only a shot at the White House, but also control of the Senate and House of Representatives. That is where the torrent of restrictive voting laws comes in. The American Civil Liberties Union has noted that 10 states will be implementing new restrictive voting laws that will impact up to 80 million voters, and could decide the assignment of 129 electoral votes out of the 270 needed to win the election. Dale Ho of the ACLU writes, "These laws range from new hurdles to registration to cutbacks on early voting to strict voter identification requirements." Denial of the right to vote for those who have been convicted of felonies is another way that voter participation is suppressed on a massive scale. With only 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States holds 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. Laws vary from state to state. Maine and Vermont actually allow prisoners to vote, but, as of 2014, according to The Sentencing Project, every other state and the District of Columbia have some form of disenfranchisement as a consequence of a felony. In 12 states, the right to vote is stripped permanently. That means even when people have served their sentence and paid their debt to society, they can never vote again. These states are Alabama, Arizona, Delaware, Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, Tennessee, Virginia and Wyoming. According to a 2002 study by sociologists Christopher Uggen and Jeff Manza, "If disenfranchised felons in Florida had been permitted to vote, Democrat Gore would certainly have carried the state, and the election." The Sentencing Project, in a 2014 report, summarized, "Nationwide, one in every 13 black adults cannot vote as the result of a felony conviction, and in three states—Florida, Kentucky, and Virginia—more than one in five black adults is disenfranchised." Ari Berman, author of "Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America," said on the "Democracy Now!" news hour: "More than 5 million Americans can’t vote because of felon disenfranchisement laws. Voter disenfranchisement is another legacy of Jim Crow that we are still wrestling with today." This is just one of the many devastating impacts of mass incarceration in the United States. And Republicans aren’t the only ones responsible. That is why Black Lives Matter activists have been interrupting Democratic presidential campaign events. During a recent private fundraiser for Hillary Clinton in Charleston, South Carolina, Ashley Williams held up a banner reading "We have to bring them to heel," a reference to controversial statements Hillary Clinton made in 1996 about some youth, whom she called "superpredators." Williams confronted Clinton, saying, "I am not a superpredator." She was quickly whisked away. On Super Tuesday, a young Somali-American woman confronted Clinton in Minneapolis about those same comments. The struggle for racial justice and voting rights are inextricably linked. In this year’s race for the White House, race is indeed central.

Albert Woodfox, the Last of the Angola Three, Is Finally Free By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan Albert Woodfox turned 69 years old Friday. He also was released from prison that day after serving 43 years in solitary confinement, more time than anyone in U.S. history. “Quite a birthday gift,” Woodfox told us on the “Democracy Now!” news hour, in his first televised interview after gaining his freedom. Woodfox is a living testament to the resilience of the human spirit when subjected to the cruel and unusual punishment of solitary. His case also serves as a stark reminder of the injustice that pervades the American criminal-justice system. Woodfox was in his early 20s when he was imprisoned for armed robbery in 1971. He was sent to the notorious Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as Angola, a sprawling prison complex with 5,000 prisoners, located in rural Louisiana on the site of a former slave plantation. It gets its name, “Angola,” from the country of origin of many of those slaves. Conditions in Angola in 1971 were so violent and appalling that Woodfox, along with another prisoner, Herman Wallace, formed one of the first prison chapters of the Black Panther Party. In 1972, Woodfox and Wallace were charged with the murder of prison guard Brent Miller. No physical evidence linked the men to the crime. A bloody fingerprint at the murder scene, which matched neither Wallace’s nor Woodfox’s, was ignored by authorities. Robert King, another prisoner who joined their Black Panther chapter, was charged with a separate crime in the prison. The three were sent to solitary confinement, where they remained for decades, always maintaining they were innocent of the charges. Albert Woodfox recalled those early days of organizing inside of Angola when we spoke with him just days after his release: “The saddest thing in the world is to see a human spirit crushed. And that’s basically what happened with these young kids that was coming to Angola. And we decided that if we truly believed in what we were trying to do, then it was worth taking whatever measures necessary to try to stop this.” Even back then, the Angola 3, as they became known, were well-aware of the potential impacts of solitary confinement. Woodfox recalled during our interview, “When we were first put in CCR [closed cell restriction] in ‘72, myself, Herman Wallace and Robert King, we knew that if we had any chance of maintaining our sanity and not allowing the prison system to break us, that we had to keep our focus on society and not become institutionalized.” When I asked Woodfox what he read in prison, he told me, “History books, books on Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King, Frantz Fanon, James Baldwin.” A movement grew, globally, to free the Angola 3, with Amnesty International and other organizations calling for their release. Documentaries were made about the case. In one, the widow of Brent Miller joined the call, saying in 2010, “These men, I mean, if they did not do this—and I believe that they didn’t—they have been living a nightmare for 36 years.” Two major impediments to their freedom were prison warden Burl Cain and Louisiana Attorney General James “Buddy” Caldwell. Cain was the key decision-maker in keeping the men in solitary. In a 2008 deposition in Woodfox’s case, Cain admitted, “I still know that he is still trying to practice Black Pantherism.” And while Woodfox’s case was overturned on three separate occasions, with a federal judge ordering his release, Attorney General Caldwell insisted on repeatedly retrying the case. Cain resigned in December, facing state ethics violations and a criminal probe for business dealings during his reign as the longest-serving warden in Angola’s history. Caldwell lost re-election to fellow Republican Jeff Landry, who allowed Woodfox to leave prison on the condition that he plead “no contest” to manslaughter. Woodfox squinted into the camera lens as he spoke on “Democracy Now!.” The years of confinement in a 6 by 9 foot cell had damaged his vision. He is proud of his activism. “We’ve put this solitary-confinement issue before American people, before the people of the world, and it just started building,” he said. “It got to the point where it wasn’t just about the Angola 3, but it was about solitary confinement.” Robert King was released in 2001, his conviction overturned after serving 29 years in solitary confinement. Herman Wallace was freed in 2013, only after a federal judge threatened to jail Cain if he refused to release him. Wallace died one day later of liver cancer. On Monday, we asked Albert Woodfox about his future plans: “I’ve been locked up so long in a prison within a prison. So, for me, it’s just about learning how to live as a free person,” he told us. “I’m just trying to learn how to be free.”

The Terror of Flint’s Poisoned Water By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan Less than one month after the attacks of Sept. 11, a senior FBI official, Ronald Dick, told the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, “Due to the vital importance of water to all life forms ... the FBI considers all threats to attack the water supply as serious threats.” In 2003, a UPI article reported that an al-Qaida operative “(does not rule out) using Sarin gas and poisoning drinking water in U.S. and Western cities.’” Where the terrorists have failed to mount any attack on a water supply, the Michigan state government has succeeded. In the city of Flint, lead-poisoned water has been piped into homes and offices since 2014, causing widespread illness and potentially permanent brain damage among its youngest residents. Michigan has one of the most severe “emergency manager” laws in the country, allowing the governor to appoint an unelected agent to take over local governments when those locales or institutions have been deemed to be in a “financial emergency.” Republican Gov. Rick Snyder pushed for and obtained two bills that strengthened the law, and has used it aggressively to impose his version of fiscal austerity on cities like Detroit, Benton Harbor, several large school districts and, now most notoriously, on Flint. In every case but one, the emergency manager has taken over cities that are majority African-American. The emergency manager is granted sweeping powers to override local, democratically elected governments and to make cuts to budgets, sell public property, cancel or renegotiate labor contracts and essentially govern like a dictator. In April 2014, Darnell Earley, the fourth of five Flint emergency managers appointed by Snyder, unilaterally decided to switch Flint’s water source from Detroit’s water system, with water from Lake Huron that they had been using for 50 years, to the long-contaminated Flint River. Flint residents immediately noticed discoloration and bad smells from the water, and experienced an array of health impacts, like rashes and hair loss. In October 2014, General Motors decided it would no longer use Flint city water in its plants, as it was corroding metal car parts. Later, trihalomethanes, a toxic byproduct of water treatment, were found in the water. Despite that, the water was declared safe by officials. At the same time, as revealed in an email later obtained by Progress Michigan, the state began shipping coolers of clean, potable water to the state office building in Flint. This was more than a year before Gov. Snyder would admit that the water was contaminated. Ongoing activism by Flint residents whose children were sick attracted the involvement of water researchers from Virginia Tech, who found that 10,000 residents had been exposed to elevated lead levels. It took out-of-state researchers from Virginia to travel all the way to Michigan to conduct the comprehensive tests needed. Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha then got involved. She is the director of the pediatric residency program at Hurley Children’s Hospital and assistant professor of pediatrics at Michigan State University. She discovered an alarming connection between rising blood lead levels in Flint’s children with the switch to the Flint River as a water source. “The percentage of children with elevated lead levels doubled in the whole city, and in some neighborhoods, it tripled,” she told us on the “Democracy Now!” news hour. “And it directly correlated with where the water lead levels were the highest.” Rather than going after the problem she identified, the state went after her. “We were attacked,” she recalled. “I was called an ‘unfortunate researcher,’ that I was causing near hysteria, that I was splicing and dicing numbers, and that the state data was not consistent with my data. And as a scientist ... when the state, with a team of 50 epidemiologists, tells you you’re wrong, you second-guess yourself.” Within weeks, state authorities were forced to admit she was right. Soon after, she was standing at the governor’s side, and has just been appointed to run a new public health initiative to help those exposed to the contamination. A chorus of Flint residents and allies are demanding immediate action to ensure safe, clean water to the people of Flint. Many are calling for Gov. Snyder to resign, or even to be arrested. The FBI and the Justice Department are now investigating to see if any laws were broken. This week, the House held a hearing on the crisis, during which Houston Congressmember Sheila Jackson Lee compared the poisoning of Flint residents to the 1978 mass suicide and murder in Jonestown, Guyana. There, cult leader Jim Jones ordered his 900 followers, 300 of them children, to drink cyanide-laced Kool-Aid. Those victims died instantly. In Flint, the tragedy will unfold over decades. Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 1,300 stations. She is the co-author, with Denis Moynihan, of “The Silenced Majority,” a New York Times best-seller.

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan PARK CITY, Utah — This week, a Houston grand jury returned a surprise indictment. It was tasked with investigating videos that purported to expose Planned Parenthood for selling the body parts of aborted fetuses. The grand jury found no wrongdoing by Planned Parenthood, but instead charged the video producers David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt from the anti-abortion group The Center for Medical Progress, with tampering with a government record, a felony. Meanwhile, another video was released this week, this one an accurate depiction of the threat to women’s reproductive rights around the country. “TRAPPED” is a moving documentary that premiered Sunday night at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. It demonstrates how access to safe, legal abortions has come under assault in the U.S., as state after state passes restrictive “TRAP” laws, or “Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers.” These laws, which have proliferated since the Tea-Party sweep of state legislatures in 2010, purport to protect the health of women, but actually result in the closure of women’s health clinics. The film is being released nationally as a woman’s right to choose faces a crucial challenge before the U.S. Supreme Court on March 2. Dawn Porter is the award-winning filmmaker who wrote, directed and produced “TRAPPED.” While in Mississippi shooting an earlier film, she learned that the state had only one remaining clinic where abortions were available. She went there to meet Dr. Willie Parker, an obstetrician/gynecologist. Appearing on “Democracy Now!” early in the morning after the premiere of “TRAPPED,” Dr. Parker told me: “I’ve been an OB-GYN for 21 years, a doctor for 25. And when it became clear to me ... that one in three women need abortion care in their reproductive lives and that disproportionately poor women and women of color were not having those services, it became important to me to guarantee access to these very important health services by moving back to my hometown in Birmingham and to provide services in the South.” The film follows Dr. Parker and several other abortion providers in Alabama, where TRAP laws have been passed that mandate onerous changes to clinics where abortions are provided. Most of these laws are based on model legislation drafted by an anti-choice group called Americans United for Life. They force safe, legally functioning abortion service providers to make costly and unnecessary improvements to their facilities. In scores of cases, the clinics cannot afford to make the changes, and have to shut down. In one scene of the film “TRAPPED,” Dr. Parker is shown with a patient. He is relaying to her information that is required by Alabama’s TRAP law: “I’m required by law to tell you that by having an abortion, it can increase your risk for breast cancer. There is no scientific evidence to support that. Now, the state requires me to tell you that if you were having this procedure, there is the risk of complications. I think that’s a good thing to know, the risk. The state requires me to tell you that you can have heavy bleeding that can be life-threatening, and it could require you to be transferred to the hospital and need a blood transfusion. If you’re having a bleeding that can only be controlled with removing your uterus, you’d have to have a hysterectomy, and you’d lose your ability to have babies in the future. Those are all the risks associated, but guess what. Those are the exact same risks that’s associated with having a baby. It is to say that you’re not taking any extra health risk. So abortion is extremely safe.” In Texas, the TRAP law, known as HB2, passed in 2013. Before HB2 became law, there were 40 operating abortion clinics in Texas. Only 19 remain. A San Antonio clinic filed a lawsuit opposing HB2’s restrictions. That case, Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt (formerly v. Cole), will be argued before the U.S. Supreme Court on March 2, with a decision expected by June. The doctored videos that were created to take down Planned Parenthood failed in their goal; their creators face years in prison. While “TRAPPED” will be airing in June on the PBS documentary series “Independent Lens,” it also will be shown in movie theaters, with concurrent community screenings. Dawn Porter hopes her latest film will engage, persuade and mobilize people across the country as this critical health-care issue is decided by the Supreme Court.

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan President Barack Obama delivered his final State of the Union address Tuesday night before an almost-full joint session of Congress. Almost full because of the empty seat next to first lady Michelle Obama. The White House stated, "We leave one seat empty in the First Lady’s State of the Union Guest Box for the victims of gun violence who no longer have a voice—because they need the rest of us to speak for them. To tell their stories. To honor their memory." That symbol, the empty chair, creates a moment to reflect on who else wasn’t seated in that august gallery in the Capitol, like the undocumented immigrants rounded up in the New Year’s raids by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Hundreds, if not thousands (the number is not known), of people, mostly from the Central American nations of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, have been arrested in raids across the country. Entire families, single mothers with children and individuals, many of whom fled for their lives from violence in their home countries, now are being swept up by armed federal agents and prepared for deportation. I asked Maryland Congresswoman Donna Edwards, now running for the Senate, about the ICE raids. "I think it’s irresponsible," she told me. "this sort of extreme enforcement in communities that, in the congressional district that I represent, is causing so much great fear–children not going to school, people not going to work, being afraid to be seen and visible in their communities." Her sentiments have been echoed on the campaign trail by both Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The raids have provoked protests across the country. Last Friday, seven people were arrested in New York City in front of the local ICE headquarters, chaining themselves together and blocking traffic. Among those arrested was Claudia Palacios. Her story is remarkable. She was born in Texas and served for five years in the U.S. Marines, with two years in Okinawa and several years around the world deployed with a Marine Expeditionary Unit. Even though she served her country honorably, this U.S.-born military veteran has documentation issues of her own. Her mother was undocumented. Like many pregnant women in her situation, she was afraid to go to the hospital. Claudia was born with the help of a midwife in a trailer park. It was the midwife who signed her birth certificate. "That birth certificate was recognized by the military in order for me to join the service," she told us on the "Democracy Now!" news hour. "Once I was an active-duty service member, I applied with the Department of State for a passport, and they failed to recognize my birth certificate." Now, out of the Marines without her U.S. military I.D. badge and no passport, "I’m basically stateless," she explained. "I can’t leave my country." The empty chair was on the first lady’s right. On her left sat decorated war veteran Oscar Vazquez. The same White House press statement that described the symbolism of the chair said that Vasquez "came to the United States as a child in search of a better life. From age 12 when he moved from Mexico to Phoenix, Arizona, Oscar excelled in the classroom. ... But without legal status, he couldn’t secure a job to provide for his new wife and newborn child." After receiving a green card, his biography continued, "Oscar enlisted in the Army to serve the country he loves and calls home. Oscar served one tour in Afghanistan and is now a proud U.S. citizen." Claudia Palacios was not satisfied: "I think it’s a mockery to have him be a guest, an honored guest, at the State of the Union," she explained, "and then not even initiate the conversation of immigration and how we are going to deal with this or how we’re going to create sanctuaries for people that are being targeted." The victims of gun violence deserve a seat, they deserve to have their stories told, and the president is to be commended for taking that stand. But the people in this country who have fled gun violence, whether from Central America, or Syria or Afghanistan or Iraq, they, too, deserve a seat and a place of sanctuary. That will make the state of the union strong.

Report on the Black Radical Tradition conference Listen now: Eugene Puryear, the PSL’s 2016 vice-presidential candidate, reports back on the Black Radical Tradition conference that took place this past weekend in Philadelphia, Penn. The discussions and deliberations at the conference focused on what is needed to go forward in the fight for Black liberation and the liberation of all. Native activist tells the history of the lands held by Oregon militia Listen now: Jacqueline Keeler, a writer and activist of Diné (Navajo) and Yankton Dakota heritage, speaks on the occupation of Native land by an Oregon militia. She tells the history of the Native lands that these fascist groups are claiming as their own. These colonized lands belonging to the Yakima and Kayute Nations were stolen through genocide by the U.S. Army. This fascist takeover is another offense in a long history of attacks on Native sovereignty that all people who believe in justice must stand against.

An Act of Terror: Deporting a Kurdish Activist Back to Turkey By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan In the quaint tourist town of Harbert, Michigan sits an unassuming restaurant that has been owned and operated by a man who is considered a pillar of his community. Cafe Gulistan is owned by Ibrahim Parlak. He is, by almost all appearances, a classic example of the immigrant success story. There is just one problem: The U.S. government is trying to deport him to Turkey, where he has a well-founded fear of imprisonment, torture and possibly death. After a quarter of a century here in the United States, he now has about 75 days left to fight deportation. Parlak is Kurdish, born in the region of Turkey called Anatolia, in 1962. His childhood was marred by increasing government repression of Turkey’s Kurdish ethnic minority. Turkey banned the Kurdish language, Kurdish cultural expression, and attempted to forcibly assimilate the Kurdish people to destroy their heritage. Resistance to that assimilation included protests and grass-roots organizing, but also, by the 1980s, armed resistance from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK. In the late 1970s, Parlak, as a teenager, was jailed for three months for engaging in peaceful protests. He then moved to Germany to avoid further repression from the Turkish government. He remained active in the movement for Kurdish autonomy, hosting cultural events and raising funds for the political, nonmilitary wing of the PKK, known as the National Front for the Liberation of Kurdistan. After seven years in Germany, Parlak decided he could better support the Kurdish cause back home. He decided to cross back into his Kurdish homeland, he said, to "[g]o back to people, go to my family, go back where I [was] born and where I grow up, just reunite with my own." Turkey had revoked his passport, so he decided to sneak into the Kurdish region of Turkey directly from Syria. As the group he was with was crossing the border, they were fired on. In the ensuing firefight, two Turkish soldiers were killed. Months later, he was arrested by Turkish authorities and charged with "separatism," although he was never charged with killing the two soldiers. Turkish authorities confirm that he did not shoot that night. "I was captured and put in jail, for a month, mistreated, tortured. And it’s just-you know, it’s not a memory you want to revisit," Ibrahim Parlak told us on the "Democracy Now!" news hour. It visibly pains him to recall the experience. A description that appears in a federal appeals court filing here in the U.S. from 2007 is chilling: "the Turkish gendarme shocked him with electrodes, beat his genitalia, hung him by the arms, blindfolded him and deprived him of sleep, food, water and clothing, and anally raped him with a truncheon over the course of almost a month." Ultimately, he was imprisoned for close to a year and a half. Parlak eventually fled to the United States, where he received asylum and began the long process of building a life. He received his green card, and in 1999 applied for citizenship. By this time, the PKK had been designated a terrorist organization by the US State Department, so the mention of the group in his file delayed his application. After Sept. 11, 2001, the process for gaining citizenship transformed. Eager bureaucrats from the newly minted Department of Homeland Security were looking for terrorists in mosques, parks, schools, you name it. Ibrahim Parlak fit their bill just fine, and the American dream he had built came crashing down. He was arrested and jailed while awaiting deportation. Community support for Parlak was incredible. A former FBI counterterrorism lawyer volunteered to represent him. People he had worked with for years and even local police testified to his character. After 10 months in a county jail, a federal judge ordered his release, stating, "He has been a model immigrant. ... He is not a threat to anyone nor a risk of flight. He has strong ties to the community." Since then, he has been on "deferred action" for deportation, meaning he can be grabbed at any time and deported to Turkey. He has support from Republican Congressman Fred Upton, and had the support of Sen. Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, until Levin retired last year. His supporters are asking Sens. Debbie Stabenow and Gary Peters, both Democrats, to file a bill protecting Parlak, but to date, neither has. The dean of the University of Chicago Law School has asked for President Barack Obama to pardon Parlak. Turkey, meanwhile, has escalated its military assault on the Kurds, and has imposed harsh curfews and intense censorship of any dissent. Many are concerned of the grave danger that Parlak faces if he is deported to Turkey. His lawyer, Rob Carpenter, told us that Parlak has received "private Facebook threats of modes of torture that were never made public before, indicating it must be one of several guards who tortured him during those seventeen months before he fled to the United States." Ibrahim Parlak is back at his Cafe Gulistan, his future uncertain. The U.S. government contends he is a terrorist, although he has never been found guilty of committing a violent act. Deporting him, however, would be an act of terror in itself. Amy Goodman is the host of "Democracy Now!," a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 1,300 stations. She is the co-author, with Denis Moynihan, of "The Silenced Majority," a New York Times best-seller. (c) 2015 Amy Goodman Distributed by King Features Syndicate

A Most Unhappy New Year at Guantanamo By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan As the clock counts down to the New Year and the world welcomes 2016, another clock will continue ticking, counting the days, hours, minutes and seconds since May 23, 2013, the day President Barack Obama promised to free all those prisoners at the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay who have been cleared for release. That clock was created by independent journalist Andy Worthington, and is on the Internet at gtmoclock.com. Jan. 22, will mark the seventh anniversary of the day Obama signed Executive Order 13492, ordering the closure of the Guantanamo Bay prison within one year. As Obama’s time in the White House winds down, the prospects of closing the notorious gulag grow bleaker. Currently there are 107 men imprisoned there, 48 of whom have been cleared for release for almost six years. While the Republican-led Congress has long thwarted efforts to close the island prison, Reuters recently reported that the Pentagon itself, which is supposed to be under the civilian control of Commander-in-Chief Obama, may be resisting the order to close Guantanamo. Obama’s executive order in 2009 created the Guantanamo Review Task Force, chaired by then Attorney General Eric Holder. It included representatives from the departments of Justice, Defense, State, Homeland Security, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. All prisoners cleared for release have received unanimous consent from those authorities. While some of those prisoners have been released, it shocks the conscience to think that scores of men are suffering indefinite detention with no charges against them, many held for more than a decade. Tariq Ba Odah is one of those men who was cleared for release. “He was assigned to Guantanamo in February of 2002. He’s nearing the 14-year mark of indefinite detention, nearly nine years of that time on hunger strike and detained in solitary confinement,” his attorney, Omar Farah of the Center for Constitutional Rights, told us on the Democracy Now! news hour. “The president has to insist that the Department of Defense and all other agencies fall in line behind what he says is his objective and ensure that Mr. Ba Odah is released immediately.” The hunger strike Farah described has reduced Tariq Ba Odah to a shadow of his former self. “I visited Mr. Ba Odah in March and April of this year and found him in utterly disastrous physical condition,” Omar Farah said. “According to the government, not me, Mr. Ba Odah is just 74 and a half pounds, and that’s 56 percent of his safe body weight.” Ba Odah is forcibly fed twice daily through a nose tube. The force with which the U.S. military jailers insert the tube causes extreme pain, and has been deemed torture by the United Nations Human Rights Commission. Tariq Ba Odah is from Yemen, but, because of the civil war there, the Obama administration will not release Yemenis directly to their home nation. Farah told us: “There is a foreign country, a third country, ready to accept him and help provide him medical care and rehabilitate him. This is a person who’s desperately, desperately ill. And the last step of that negotiated release, it seems, is the simple task of forwarding his medical records.” The Pentagon refuses to release his medical records, citing privacy rules. “That’s a lie. And it’s a bad lie,” Farah told us. “I sat with Mr. Ba Odah while he provided his informed written consent to release his medical records to me as his counsel and also for the specific purpose of negotiating his release.” Reuters reporters Charles Levinson and David Rohde (the former New York Times reporter who was held captive by the Taliban in Afghanistan for seven months, until he escaped) cite Ba Odah’s case in their latest article, writing, “Pentagon officials have been throwing up bureaucratic obstacles to thwart the president’s plan to close Guantanamo.” While the Pentagon says it will release the first of 17 prisoners in January, you never know. However, what you can be sure of, like clockwork, peace activists from Witness Against Torture, wearing orange jumpsuits like the Guantanamo prisoners, will vigil as they do every Jan. 22 to mark the anniversary of Obama’s executive order to close Guantanamo. Last Thanksgiving, a delegation from Witness Against Torture went to Cuba, within view of the U.S. base, to hold a symbolic “Forced-Feeding, Not Feasting at Guantanamo.” They described their action: “Twelve persons, all fasting for the day, sat at a table in front of empty plates to represent the terrible pain endured by hunger strikers, past and present, at Guantanamo. At the head of the table, one member dressed as a detained man sat in front of the terrible apparatus of forced feeding.” They also wore orange jumpsuits, and each spoke about their reasons for coming. After each speaker, the group sang: “Courage, Muslim brother You do not walk alone We will walk with you And sing your spirit home.”

When a Dream Becomes Someone Else’s Nightmare: Clarence Moses-EL’s 28 Years Behind Bars By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan As dusk settled over Denver on Dec. 22, the first day of winter, Clarence Moses-EL walked out of the county jail, free for the first time in 28 years. The shortest day of the year would be the end of the longest nightmare of his life. It was all because of a dream. Moses-EL was charged with rape in 1987. Initially, the rape victim named the three men she had been drinking with as her possible attackers. Then, a day and a half later, she dreamed that her neighbor, Clarence Moses-EL, was the attacker. She told the police, and they arrested him. The three men she first named were never investigated. There was no physical evidence linking Moses-EL to the crime. The dream was the only piece of "evidence" offered against him. There was, however, real evidence available to the prosecution: the victim’s rape kit, along with bedsheets and the victim’s clothing. These items were never tested for DNA. In 1995, after years in prison, Moses-EL won a court order mandating the forensic analysis of the evidence, which could have freed him. He managed to raise $1,000 from fellow inmates to pay for the tests. The judge instructed the Denver Police to turn over the evidence. The police marked the evidence box "Do Not Destroy," then, inexplicably, threw it into a dumpster. "I literally broke down in the cell," he said. "I was blown away. Broken," Moses-EL told Denver Post investigative journalists Susan Greene and Miles Moffeit in 2007. "They broke their own rules and threw out the only key to my freedom." Greene and Moffeit wrote about Moses-EL and other prisoners across the U.S. who had potentially exculpatory DNA evidence destroyed. They were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for their series "Trashing the Truth." Greene has since become the editor of The Colorado Independent news website, and has never stopped reporting on Moses-EL’s case. Clarence Moses-EL languished in prison until, in 2012, he received a handwritten letter from another Colorado prisoner, L.C. Jackson. Jackson was one of the three men initially named as a suspect by the rape victim, until she gave Moses-EL’s name following her dream. Jackson wrote: "I really don’t know what to say to you. But let’s start by bringing what was done in the dark into the light. I have a lot on my heart. I don’t know who’s working on this. But have them come up and see me. It’s time. I’ll be waiting." Jackson is serving two life sentences for a double rape of a mother and her 9-year-old daughter, a crime which bore many similarities to the rape for which Moses-EL was convicted. Denver District Attorney Mitch Morrissey sat on Jackson’s confession for close to two years. Moses-EL and his legal team were eventually able to obtain a court hearing to introduce Jackson’s confession and other new evidence. Two weeks ago, a Colorado judge vacated Moses-EL’s convictions, ordering the DA to either retry the case or drop the charges. At a bond hearing on Tuesday, the DA asked for a trial date, which the judge set for June. Several hours later, Moses-EL walked out of prison, no longer incarcerated, but still not truly free. Mitch Morrissey is stepping down as district attorney after 10 years in office. So far, two of the candidates who are running to replace him, Beth McCann and Michael Carrigan, have said they would drop all charges against Moses-EL, should either win the November election. As he walked out of the Denver jail, Moses-EL told the gathered media: "It’s wonderful. I waited a long time for this." When asked what kept him going all those years in prison, he replied, "My spirituality, and my innocence." Clarence Moses-EL expresses no vindictiveness. At a small celebration at a supporter’s home that followed his release, Moses-EL said: "There’s still some days in front of me. I know things are going to turn out in my favor. I never doubted, even though I felt like at times I was under a ton of bricks, couldn’t breathe." Clarence Moses-EL is eager to get to work, to give back. "I want to be instrumental in the community, in programs, wherever I could be to share my experience, my wisdom, my talent, my creativity." Denver District Attorney Mitch Morrissey says he represents the people. Now is the time for the people of Denver to demand that the charges be dropped against Clarence Moses-EL. Amy Goodman is the host of "Democracy Now!," a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 1,300 stations. She is the co-author, with Denis Moynihan, of "The Silenced Majority," a New York Times best-seller. (c) 2015 Amy Goodman Distributed by King Features Syndicate

On Dec. 12, nearly 200 nations approved the "Paris Agreement." The 32-page document spells out humanity’s new, official plan to confront the crisis of climate change. The accord was negotiated in a secure facility in the Paris suburb of Le Bourget. Public demonstrations across France were banned under the "state of emergency" imposed after the Nov. 13 terrorist attacks in Paris that killed 130 people. Activists defied the ban, saying that same phrase, "state of emergency," describes the planet’s climate. Protests, at times violently repressed by police, occurred throughout the two-week United Nations summit, as people from around the world demanded a fair, ambitious and binding climate treaty to avert the worst consequences of global warming. "What I see is an agreement with no timetables, no targets, with vague, wild aspirations," British journalist George Monbiot told me two days after the talks ended. "I see a lot of back-slapping, a lot of self-congratulation, and I see very little in terms of the actual substance that is required to avert climate breakdown." Monbiot’s position contrasts with many in the environmental movement, who see the negotiation results as a positive development. "Just about every country in the world made a commitment to either cut their own carbon or to peak the growth in their emissions," Michael Brune, the executive director of the Sierra Club, countered. "There was also an explicit acknowledgment that what was committed to is not nearly enough, and so there was a process that was established to take stock of the progress that’s being made and then to commit to continuous reductions in the years ahead." The conference opened with the largest gathering of heads of state in history. Dr. Hoesung Lee, chair of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a group of almost 2,000 scientists that publishes the world’s scientific consensus on climate change, addressed the leaders, saying: "The climate is already changing, and we know it’s due to human activity. If we carry on like this, we risk increasingly severe and irreversible impacts: rising seas, increasingly severe droughts and floods, food and water shortages, increased immigration from climate refugees, to name just a few." Just about everywhere on the planet, climate science is accepted as fact. It is only in the United States, the largest polluter in world history and home to some of the wealthiest and most politically influential fossil-fuel corporations, that climate-science deniers are given credence. Climate scientists at the IPCC have provided different global-warming scenarios, describing what the world might look like if the planet warms to varying temperatures. We have already warmed 1 degree Celsius over preindustrial levels, with devastating impacts. The Paris Agreement’s central tenet is the pledge to hold "the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) above preindustrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F) above preindustrial levels." These seemingly small differences matter. With a rapid decarbonization of the global economy, with a rapid shift to nonpolluting renewable energy, we could limit the temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. In this scenario, small island nations can survive the expected sea-level rise. At 2 degrees Celsius, polar ice melts, water warms and thus expands, and global sea levels rise more than 3 feet. Several small island nations, like the Maldives or the Marshall Islands, will be completely submerged and will disappear. The 1.5 degree goal was included in the Paris Agreement, but, as George Monbiot noted, "it’s almost as if it’s now safe to adopt 1.5 degrees centigrade as their aspirational target now that it is pretty well impossible to reach." Author and activist Naomi Klein said the deal will "steamroll over crucial scientific red lines ... it is also going to steamroll over equity red lines." She added, "We know, from doing the math and adding up the targets that the major economies have brought to Paris, that those targets lead us to a very dangerous future. They lead us to a future between 3 and 4 degrees Celsius warming." Asad Rehman, of Friends of the Earth, explained that equity red line as "support for the most vulnerable, the poorest people, who are really losing their lives and livelihoods and who are going to deal with ever-increasing climate impacts, mostly because of the responsibility of rich, developed countries who have grown fat and rich from carbon pollution." In the Paris Agreement, this support is called "loss and damage," meaning financial payments from the rich countries to poor countries suffering severe impacts of climate change. "Rich countries, who are responsible for this crisis ... now want to shift the burden of responsibility from the rich to the poor,” Rehman added. "Unfortunately, the legacy President Barack Obama will leave here is a poison chalice to the poor, to actually make them pay for the impacts of climate change." A broad coalition of climate action organizations has promised an aggressive year of direct action to hasten the end of the fossil-fuel era. As Kumi Naidoo of Greenpeace told me, "Most of us in civil society never said ‘the road to Paris,’ we always said ‘the road through Paris.’"

Hermes report from Miami America joint realization of Radio Miami and Hermes America with news and commentary from Radio Havana Cuba

Hermes Radio Habana Cuba and America together in a news release in English for the world from Havana

Programs 2015-09-12 Identification of broadcasts in English, on the HERMES America channel Voice: Lorenzo Gonzálo Radio Miami