Amy Goodman's Blog, page 13

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

“What keeps me up at night, candidly, is another attack against the United States,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein said last month in what was, then, her routine defense of the mass global surveillance being conducted by the National Security Agency and other U.S. intelligence agencies. All that has changed now that she believes that the staff of the committee she chairs, the powerful, secretive Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, was spied on and lied to by the CIA. The committee was formed after the Watergate scandal engulfed the Nixon administration. The Church Committee, led by Idaho Democratic Sen. Frank Church, conducted a comprehensive investigation of abuses by U.S. intelligence agencies, of everything from spying on anti-war protesters to the assassination of foreign leaders. Thus began the modern era of congressional and judicial oversight of U.S. intelligence.

This week’s public spat between CIA-loyalist Feinstein and that agency might briefly upset the status quo, but they will make up. Sadly, it obscures a graver problem: the untold story of the United States’ secret policy of torture and rendition (the latter is White House lingo for “kidnapping”).

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By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

“What keeps me up at night, candidly, is another attack against the United States,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein said last month in what was, then, her routine defense of the mass global surveillance being conducted by the National Security Agency and other U.S. intelligence agencies. All that has changed now that she believes that the staff of the committee she chairs, the powerful, secretive Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, was spied on and lied to by the CIA. The committee was formed after the Watergate scandal engulfed the Nixon administration. The Church Committee, led by Idaho Democratic Sen. Frank Church, conducted a comprehensive investigation of abuses by U.S. intelligence agencies, of everything from spying on anti-war protesters to the assassination of foreign leaders. Thus began the modern era of congressional and judicial oversight of U.S. intelligence.

This week’s public spat between CIA-loyalist Feinstein and that agency might briefly upset the status quo, but they will make up. Sadly, it obscures a graver problem: the untold story of the United States’ secret policy of torture and rendition (the latter is White House lingo for “kidnapping”).

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By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

Marshall “Eddie” Conway walked free from prison this week, just one month shy of 44 years behind bars. He was convicted of the April 1970 killing of a Baltimore police officer. Conway has always maintained his innocence. At the time of his arrest and trial, he was a prominent member of the Baltimore chapter of the Black Panther Party, the militant black-rights organization that was the principal focus of COINTELPRO, the FBI’s illegal “counterintelligence program.” The FBI, under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover, surveilled and infiltrated Black Panther chapters from coast to coast, disrupting their organizing activities, often with violence.

The prosecution alleged Conway was behind the fatal shooting of Baltimore police officer Donald Sager. The case hinged on the testimony of a police officer and a jailhouse informant, who claimed Conway described the crime while they were sharing a cell. Former Baltimore NAACP President Marvin “Doc” Cheatham, a longtime supporter of Conway’s, told The Baltimore Sun: “This was when the COINTEL program was at its height. ... They did not have a witness who saw him there. They had no fingerprints or evidence there. They basically convicted him on the basis of what we now call an informant.” A global movement grew calling for Conway’s release. In 2001, the Baltimore City Council passed a resolution asking the Maryland governor to pardon him.

Conway’s arrest happened a full year before a group of anti-war activists broke into the FBI field office in Media, Pa., and took thousands of pages of classified FBI documents and released them to the press. The word “COINTELPRO” was exposed for the first time.

One of Conway’s attorneys for more than 20 years, Bob Boyle, explained: “Mr. Conway’s trial took place in January of 1971. The break-in at the office in Media, Pennsylvania, which led to the disclosures concerning COINTELPRO, did not occur until April of 1971. So Eddie went to trial at a time when COINTELPRO was still active and the jury did not know that there was this campaign to neutralize the leadership and the organization of the Black Panther Party.”

It was in this environment that the Baltimore chapter of the Black Panther Party was created. Conway had been in the U.S. Army in Germany and was bound for Vietnam. Then, in the summer of 1967, he saw a photo of the riots in Newark, N.J. He told me, “They put armored personnel carriers in the center of the black community, and they pointed .50 caliber machine guns at about 25 or 30 black women standing on a corner ... something was wrong with that picture, and I could probably come home and help join some efforts to reform that.”

He joined the NAACP, and he joined CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality). He continued: “I looked at all the different organizations, and the Black Panther Party represented at least a serious attempt to start feeding the children, to start educating the population, to start organizing health care and stuff like that. So I joined and started working with them.”

What Conway didn’t know was that the Baltimore chapter of the Panthers was actually created by a police infiltrator. Conway became suspicious of one of the local Black Panther leaders. He told me: “There was a defense captain named Warren Hart, he worked for the National Security Agency. ... I was instrumental in exposing him after a lengthy investigation, and he fled the country.” Not long after exposing the agent, Conway was arrested for the charges that ultimately landed him in prison for close to 44 years.

Read the full column posted at Truthdig.

The world lost a visionary activist this week, with the death of Chokwe Lumumba, the newly elected mayor of Jackson, Miss. Lumumba died unexpectedly at the age of 66 of an apparent heart attack. Last June, he won the mayoral race in this capital of Mississippi, a city steeped in the history of racism and violence. He was a champion of human rights, a pioneering radical attorney, a proud Black Nationalist and a dedicated public servant. While his friends, family and allies mourn his death, there is much in his life to celebrate.

First, take a step back, and look at the history of Jackson, Miss. As my “Democracy Now!” news hour co-host, Juan Gonzalez, pointed out when we interviewed Lumumba the day after he was elected, Jackson was “a center of racism and racial oppression over centuries. The city was named after Andrew Jackson by the white settlers when Jackson, in 1820, was able, as Indian commissioner, to pressure the Choctaw Indians to give up 13 million acres of land ... in the Treaty of Doak’s Stand. That’s why the white settlers named the city after Jackson, because of his success at ethnic cleansing.” Jackson, Miss., where the NAACP’s first field secretary for Mississippi, Medgar Evers, was assassinated on the evening of June 12, 1963. This city is just 80 miles from Philadelphia, Miss., where Freedom Summer activists Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner were murdered, and 95 miles from Money, Miss., where 14-year-old Emmett Till was kidnapped, tortured and murdered in 1955, for allegedly “wolf-whistling” at a white woman. Jackson, Miss., is the political, economic and historic center of so much violence and racial hatred, which is why Lumumba’s victory in the mayoral race held such import.

Lumumba told me last June, “I attribute the victory that we had this last week to the people, the people of Jackson, who were more than ready to have leadership that was forward-looking and ready to raise Jackson to a different level of development, ready to embrace the ideas that all government should do the most to protect the human rights of the people.” He was dedicated to human rights, and was embarking on a progressive agenda for the city. His slogan read “One City, One Aim, One Destiny.”

Lumumba was born Edwin Finley Taliaferro, in Detroit. His parents involved him with civil-rights organizing at an early age. Lumumba’s explanation to the Jackson Free Press on how he changed his name is worth repeating. He said: “I picked the name Chokwe because in my African history class I learned that the Chokwe tribe, which is a tribe that still exists, was one of the last tribes to resist the slave trade successfully in northeast Angola. The name literally means ‘hunter.’ The second name, Lumumba, was the name of a great African leader who began to lead Africa to decolonize, to independence. He was from the Congo. Lumumba means ‘gifted.’ So literally, it means ‘gifted hunter.’”

Click here to read the rest of this column at Truthdig.org.

By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

Comcast has announced it intends to merge with Time Warner Cable, joining together the largest and second-largest cable and broadband providers in the country. The merger must be approved by both the Justice Department and the FCC. Given the financial and political power of Comcast, and the Obama administration’s miserable record of protecting the public interest, the time to speak out and organize is now.

“This is just such a far-reaching deal, it should be dead on arrival when it gets to the Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission for approval,” Michael Copps told me days after the merger announcement. Copps was a commissioner on the FCC from 2001 to 2011, one of the longest-serving commissioners in the agency’s history. Now he leads the Media and Democracy Reform Initiative at Common Cause. “This is the whole shooting match,” he said. “It’s broadband. It’s broadcast. It’s content. It’s distribution. It’s the medium and the message. It’s telecom, and it’s media, too.” Back in 2011, when Comcast sought regulatory approval of its proposed acquisition of NBC Universal (NBCU), Copps was the sole “no” vote out of the five FCC commissioners.

Copps is not the only former FCC commissioner with an opinion on the merger. Meredith Attwell Baker served briefly there, from 2009 to 2011. President Barack Obama appointed Baker, a Republican, to maintain the traditional party balance on the FCC. Baker was a big supporter of the Comcast-NBCU merger. It surprised many, however, when she abruptly resigned her FCC commission seat to go work for—you guessed it—Comcast. She was named senior vice president for governmental affairs for NBCU, just four months after voting to approve the merger.

Click to read the full column published at Truthdig.

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

“I found myself standing in front of railroad tracks in South Florida. I was waiting on the train to come so I could jump in front of it and end my life.” So recounted Desmond Meade, describing his life nine years ago. He was homeless, unemployed, recently released from prison and addicted to drugs and alcohol. The train never came. He crossed the tracks and checked himself into a substance-abuse program. He went on to college, and now is just months away from receiving his law degree.

Meade, however, will not be able to practice law in Florida. As a former felon, he cannot join the bar. That is one of his rights that has been stripped, permanently, by Florida’s draconian laws. In a democracy, if one wants to change a law, you vote for lawmakers who will represent your views. Yet, as an ex-felon in Florida, Meade also has lost the right to vote for the rest of his life.

It’s called “felony disenfranchisement,” and is permanent in 11 states: Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, Tennessee, Virginia and Wyoming. It’s enforced in differing degrees, like a patchwork, across the U.S. In 13 states and the District of Columbia, you get your rights back upon release from prison. In others, you have to get through your probation or parole. In Maine and Vermont, prisoners retain the right to vote, even while incarcerated.

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By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

The Sochi Olympic Games are rightly highlighting the constellation of abuses that have become standard in Russia under Vladimir Putin. Most notably is intense, often violent homophobia, tacitly endorsed by the government with the recent passage of the law against “gay propaganda.” While Sochi shines a light on Russian human-rights violations, it affords an opportunity to expose the rampant corruption and abuse that accompanies the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

I first personally experienced the corrupting influence of the Olympics when attempting a routine entry into Canada, to give a talk at the Vancouver Public Library in November 2009. Two colleagues and I were ordered out of our car by the Canadian border guards. I was interrogated at length, as other guards busily rifled our car. They wanted to know the topics of my talk. I told them I would talk about the importance of an independent media, about the Obama administration’s war in Afghanistan, its efforts to derail to the U.N. climate negotiations and more.

“Are you planning on speaking about the upcoming Winter Games in Vancouver?” The thought hadn’t entered my mind, at least until the interrogation. My detention became a national story across Canada. In order to host the Olympics, cities have to buckle under the IOC’s strict rules, and governments have to provide enormous public subsidies, primarily for sports stadiums and other construction projects that are paid for but often unwanted by the local citizens. To force this boondoggle on the public, the IOC and host governments crack down on dissent.

In Putin’s increasingly totalitarian Russia, the repression is even greater, as is the plunder of the public coffers. The low estimates put the cost of the Sochi Games at $51 billion, more than four times the estimated cost and, remarkably, more than the cost of all previous Winter Olympics combined, as reported by Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad. Political sportswriter Dave Zirin told me: “One road from the Olympic Village to the top of the ski mountain is going to cost $8.7 billion. Not only is that more than the entire price tag for the Vancouver Games, but they could have paved the entire road in Beluga caviar, and it would have cost less.” Zirin reported that at least 25 workers were killed during the frantic race to finish the construction in Sochi. While workers suffer, Zirin says the beneficiaries of the largess are “a combination of the Russian state and the Russian plutocracy.”

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By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

Pete Seeger’s life, like the arc of the moral universe famously invoked by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., bent toward justice. He died this week at 94. Pete sang truth to power through the epic struggles of most of the last century, for social justice, for civil rights, for workers, for the environment and for peace. His songs, his wise words, his legacy will resonate for generations.

Pete’s parents were musicians. They traveled the U.S., exposing their children to the music of rural America. By 19, Pete was working for the acclaimed folklorist Alan Lomax, recording and cataloging folk songs for the Library of Congress. There he met Woody Guthrie, the legendary Depression-era troubadour of the working class, who was just a few years older. Seeger traveled with Guthrie, learned to hop freight trains and became inspired to unite his passion for the pursuit of justice with his musical talent. He, Woody and others formed the Almanac Singers in 1940. They lived communally in New York’s Greenwich Village, and eked out a living by performing. Then came World War II.

Pete was drafted into the Army. When I asked him in 2004 about his military service, he recalled: “I first wanted to be a mechanic in the Air Force. ... But then military intelligence got interested in my politics. My outfit went on to glory and death, and I stayed there in Keesler Field, Mississippi, picking up cigarette butts for six months.” He was later transferred to Saipan, in the Pacific, organizing entertainment for troops recuperating in the military hospital there. While on furlough in New York City, Pete proposed marriage to his sweetheart, Toshi Ohta. Toshi died last year at 91, just months shy of their 70th wedding anniversary.

After the war, Pete and three others formed a folk group called The Weavers. They became a national sensation. Then, Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunt against suspected communists blacklisted The Weavers off the radio. Seeger testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) on Aug. 18, 1955. He took a principled stand, politely admonishing his interrogators:

“I am not going to answer any questions as to my association, my philosophical or religious beliefs or my political beliefs, or how I voted in any election, or any of these private affairs. I think these are very improper questions for any American to be asked, especially under such compulsion as this.”

He was charged with contempt of Congress, found guilty at trial and sentenced to a year in prison. Though his conviction would later be overturned, his biographer, David King Dunaway, in the PBS documentary “Pete Seeger: The Power of Song,” described the FBI’s ongoing harassment of Seeger:

“The FBI basically pursued Pete Seeger to the point where he couldn’t get a job. The only people that he could sing for were kids, because they never thought there’d be a problem with Pete Seeger singing for 6-year-olds. Little did they know. Out of that came, not a subversive movement, but instead, an American folk-music revival that I think we have to give the FBI credit for helping to establish.”

Pete met another target of FBI surveillance and intimidation, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee in 1957. Seeger helped King and other civil-rights activists incorporate song into their organizing tactics. It was at Highlander that Seeger first sang for King what would become the anthem of the civil-rights movement, “We Shall Overcome.”

Like King, Seeger became an increasingly vocal critic of the U.S. war in Vietnam. He finally overcame the McCarthy-era blacklist with an appearance on the hit TV show “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” in 1967. Nevertheless, one of his songs, “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” was censored by CBS. The song allegorically described Vietnam as a quagmire, depicting President Lyndon B. Johnson as “the big fool” who “says to push on.” His performance of that song eventually aired on the show, months later, after a storm of protest against the network.

Pete Seeger continued singing, for peace, nuclear disarmament and, most notably, the environment. He founded the nonprofit Hudson River Sloop Clearwater. He and others built a sailing vessel, the Clearwater, and used it to educate and champion the cleanup of the Hudson River, which his home overlooked. “Now the Hudson is clean enough to swim in,” Pete told me when I interviewed him in August of last year. When I asked him to sing “We Shall Overcome,” he did, saying: “Yes, that is something the human race needs to be reminded of. Don’t give up.”

Click to read the full column posted at Truthdig.

PARK CITY, Utah—A year after Internet freedom activist Aaron Swartz’s suicide at the age of 26, a film about this remarkable young man has premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. The film, titled “The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz,” directed by Brian Knappenberger, follows the sadly short arc of Aaron’s life. He committed suicide while under the crushing weight of unbending, zealous federal prosecutors, who had Aaron snatched off the street near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, accusing him of computer crimes.

At the age of 14, Aaron helped develop RSS, “Really Simple Syndication,” which changed how people get online content. He co-founded one of the Internet’s most popular websites, Reddit. In the year before his death, he helped defeat a notorious bill before Congress, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which would have granted corporations sweeping powers of censorship over the Internet. Now, another fight for the freedom of the Internet has begun. This one will have to be waged without Aaron.

A coalition of Internet activists, technologists and policy experts are joining together on Feb. 11 for “The Day We Fight Back.” As they say on their website, reflecting on the victory against SOPA, “Today we face a different threat, one that undermines the Internet, and the notion that any of us live in a genuinely free society: mass surveillance. If Aaron were alive, he’d be on the front lines, fighting against a world in which governments observe, collect, and analyze our every digital action.” Before Edward Snowden made “NSA” and “mass surveillance” household terms, Aaron was speaking out against the National Security Agency’s bulk collection programs. His brother, Noah Swartz, told me, “I think Aaron’s message that we can all take with us is that ... we can see the change we want to see in the world by participating, rather than feeling helpless and useless.”

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TOKYO—“I write these facts as dispassionately as I can in the hope that they will act as a warning to the world,” wrote the journalist Wilfred Burchett from Hiroshima. His story, headlined, “The Atomic Plague” appeared in the London Daily Express on Sept. 5, 1945. Burchett violated the U.S. military blockade of Hiroshima, and was the first Western journalist to visit that devastated city. He wrote: “Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it out of existence.”

Jump ahead 66 years, to March 11, 2011, and 600 miles north, to Fukushima and the Great East Japan Earthquake, which caused the tsunami. As we now know, the initial onslaught that left 19,000 people dead or missing was just the beginning. What began as a natural disaster quickly cascaded into a man-made one, as system after system failed at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Three of the six reactors suffered meltdowns, releasing deadly radiation into the atmosphere and the ocean.

Three years later, Japan is still reeling from the impact of the disaster. More than 340,000 people became nuclear refugees, forced to abandon their homes and their livelihoods. Filmmaker Atsushi Funahashi directed the documentary “Nuclear Nation: The Fukushima Refugees Story.” In it, he follows refugees from the town of Futaba, where the Fukushima Daiichi plant is based, in the first year after the disaster. The government relocated them to an abandoned school near Tokyo, where they live in cramped, shared common areas, many families to a room, and are provided three box lunches per day. I asked Funahashi what prospects these 1,400 people had. “There’s none, pretty much. The only thing the government is saying is that [for] at least six years from the accident, you cannot go back to your own town,” he told me.

The refugees were given permits to return home to collect personal items, but only for two hours. Like Wilfred Burchett, Funahashi had to violate the government’s ban on travel to a nuclear-devastated area in order to catch the poignant moments of one family’s return on film. He explained how the family gave him one of their four permits to take the trip: “I tried to negotiate with the government, and they didn’t give me any permission to go inside there. And no other independent journalist or documentary filmmakers got permission to go inside. But I got along very well with this family from Futaba,” he explained, and sneaked back on their short trip.

The government’s refusal to grant Funahashi access is indicative of another significant problem that has emerged since the earthquake: secrecy. Japan’s conservative prime minister, Shinzo Abe, enacted a controversial state secrecy law early last December. Here in Tokyo, Sophia University Professor Koichi Nakano says of the new law, “Of course, it concerns primarily security issues and anti-terrorist measures. But ... it became increasingly clear that the interpretation of what actually constitutes state secret could be very arbitrary and rather freely defined by government leaders. For example, anti-nuclear citizen movements can come under surveillance without their knowledge, and arrests can be made.”

Read the full column posted at Truthdig.