Amy Goodman's Blog, page 17
June 26, 2013
The Supreme Court Makes History: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back
By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan
The U.S. Supreme Court announced three historic 5-to-4 decisions this week. In the first, a core component of the Voting Rights Act was gutted, enabling Southern states to enact regressive voting laws that will likely disenfranchise the ever-growing number of voters of color. The second pair of cases threw out the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), the legal travesty that defined marriage in federal law as only between a man and a woman, and effectively overturned California’s Prop 8, which bans same-sex marriage. For those who struggle for equality and civil rights, these three decisions mark one brutal defeat and two stunning victories.
“What the court did ... is stab the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in its very heart,” Georgia Congressman John Lewis said of Tuesday’s decision. “It is a major setback. We may not have people being beaten today. Maybe they’re not being denied the right to participate or to register to vote. They’re not being chased by police dogs or trampled by horses. But in the 11 states of the old Confederacy, and even in some of the states outside of the South, there’s been a systematic, deliberate attempt to take us back to another period.”
Lewis is the 73-year-old dean of the Georgia congressional delegation. As a young man, he led the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and was the youngest speaker to address the March on Washington 50 years ago. He recently recalled a signal moment in that struggle, appearing on the “Democracy Now!” news hour:
“On March 7, 1965, a group of us attempted to march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, to dramatize to the nation that people wanted to register to vote. ... In Selma, Alabama, in 1965, only 2.1 percent of blacks of voting age were registered to vote. The only place you could attempt to register was to go down to the courthouse. You had to pass a so-called literacy test. And they would tell people over and over again that they didn’t or couldn’t pass the literacy test.”
June 20, 2013
Dead Man Walking, 20 Years On
By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan
Thirty years ago, a Catholic nun working in a poor neighborhood of New Orleans was asked if she would be a pen pal to a death-row prisoner. Sister Helen Prejean agreed, forever changing her life, as well as the debate on capital punishment in this country.
Her experiences inspired her first book, “Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States,” which has just been republished on its 20th anniversary. She was a pen pal with Patrick Sonnier, a convicted murderer on death row in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison. In her distinctive Southern accent, she told me of her first visit to Sonnier: “It was scary as all get-out. I had never been in a prison before. ... I was scared to meet him personally. When I saw his face, it was so human, it blew me away. I got a realization then, no matter what he had done ... he is worth more than the worst thing he ever did. And the journey began from there.”
Sister Helen became Sonnier’s spiritual adviser, conversing with him as his execution approached. She spent his final hours with him, and witnessed his execution on April 5, 1984. She also was a spiritual advisor to another Angola death row prisoner, Robert Lee Willie, who was executed the same year. The book was made into a film, directed by Tim Robbins and starring Susan Sarandon as Prejean and Sean Penn as the character Matthew Poncelet, an amalgam of Sonnier and Williams. Sarandon won the Oscar for Best Actress, and the film’s success further intensified the national debate on the death penalty.
The United States is the only industrialized country in the world still using the death penalty. There are currently 3,125 people on death row in the U.S., although death-penalty opponents continue to make progress. Maryland is the most recent state to abolish capital punishment. After passage of the law, Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley wrote: “Evidence shows that the death penalty is not a deterrent, it cannot be administered without racial bias, and it costs three times as much as life in prison without parole. What’s more, there is no way to reverse a mistake if an innocent person is put to death.”
Click to read the rest of the column posted on Truthdig.
June 13, 2013
Terror Bytes: Edward Snowden and the Architecture of Oppression
By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan
Edward Snowden revealed himself this week as the whistleblower responsible for perhaps the most significant release of secret government documents in U.S. history. The former CIA staffer and analyst for the private intelligence consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton spoke to journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Barton Gellman in Hong Kong, providing convincing evidence that the U.S. government, primarily the National Security Agency, is conducting massive, unconstitutional surveillance globally, and perhaps most controversially, on almost all, if not all, U.S. citizens.
The chorus of establishment condemnation was swift and unrelenting. Jeffrey Toobin, legal pundit, quickly blogged that Snowden is “a grandiose narcissist who deserves to be in prison.” New York Times columnists chimed in, with Thomas Friedman writing, “I don’t believe that Edward Snowden, the leaker of all this secret material, is some heroic whistle-blower.” His colleague David Brooks engaged in speculative psychoanalysis of Snowden, opining, “[t]hough obviously terrifically bright, he could not successfully work his way through the institution of high school. Then he failed to navigate his way through community college.”
Snowden’s educational path has attracted significant attention. U.S. senators oh-so-gently questioned NSA Director Gen. Keith B. Alexander and others at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing, including liberal Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, echoing Brooks’ incredulity that someone with a GED could possibly hoodwink the entire U.S. intelligence apparatus. Alexander confessed, “In the IT arena, in the cyber arena, some of these people have skills to operate networks. That was his job for the most part; he had great skills in the area. The rest of it you’ve hit on the head. We do need to go back and look at the processes–where we went wrong.”
Legendary whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg countered the criticism, writing, “In my estimation, there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden’s release of NSA material—and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago. Snowden’s whistleblowing gives us the possibility to roll back a key part of what has amounted to an ‘executive coup’ against the U.S. Constitution.”
Snowden’s historic leak revealed what he calls an “architecture of oppression”—a series of top-secret surveillance programs that go far beyond what has been publicly known to date. The first was an order from the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court requesting a division of the phone giant Verizon to hand over “all call detail records” for calls from the U.S. to locations abroad, or all calls within the U.S., including local calls. In other words, metadata for every phone call that Verizon Business Network Services processed was to be delivered to the NSA on a daily basis. Another document was a slide presentation revealing a program dubbed “PRISM,” which allegedly empowers NSA snoops access to all the private data stored by Internet giants like Microsoft, AOL, Skype, Google, Apple and Facebook, including email, video chats, photos, files transfers and more.
June 6, 2013
Time for a Raise in the Minimum Wage
By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan
The 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech is rapidly approaching, commemorating the historic Aug. 28, 1963, March on Washington.
But 45 years ago, 1968, the year of his assassination, King was waging the Poor People’s Campaign to eradicate poverty. He addressed the congregation at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., saying: “We are challenged to rid our nation and the world of poverty. Like a monstrous octopus, poverty spreads its nagging, prehensile tentacles into hamlets and villages all over our world. Two-thirds of the people of the world go to bed hungry tonight. They are ill-housed; they are ill-nourished; they are shabbily clad. I’ve seen it in Latin America; I’ve seen it in Africa; I’ve seen this poverty in Asia.”
That was March 31, 1968, four days before he was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn., where he had gone to march in solidarity with striking sanitation workers.
The minimum wage that year was at its historic high, in terms of real purchasing power. It was first established in 1938 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who said “Our nation so richly endowed with natural resources and with a capable and industrious population should be able to devise ways and means of insuring to all our able-bodied working men and women a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.”
Forty-five years after King launched his Poor People’s Campaign, poverty is again at crisis levels. That all-important bulwark against poverty, the minimum wage, is now $7.25 per hour, a result of a bill signed into law by President George W. Bush. President Barack Obama, when he was first elected, promised a minimum wage of $9.50 by 2011. In his 2013 State of the Union address, having failed to make that goal, he said: “Tonight, let’s declare that in the wealthiest nation on Earth, no one who works full time should have to live in poverty, and raise the federal minimum wage to $9 an hour. This single step would raise the incomes of millions of working families. It could mean the difference between groceries or the food bank; rent or eviction; scraping by or finally getting ahead.”
Consumer advocate Ralph Nader is not impressed by the president’s rhetoric.
May 30, 2013
Hammond, Manning, Assange and Obama’s Sledgehammer Against Dissent
By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan
One cyberactivist’s federal case wrapped up this week, and another’s is set to begin. While these two young men, Jeremy Hammond and Bradley Manning, are the two who were charged, it is the growing menace of government and corporate secrecy that should be on trial.
Hammond and Manning, facing years in prison, have in common their connection to WikiLeaks and its founder, Assange. Assange is wanted for questioning in Sweden about allegations of sexual misconduct—he has not been charged. After losing a fight against extradition in Britain, he was granted political asylum by the government of Ecuador, and has remained in Ecuador’s embassy in London since last June. It was a leaked Stratfor email that referenced a U.S. indictment against Assange, reading: “Not for Pub—We have a sealed indictment on Assange. Pls protect.”
This all happens amidst recent revelations about the Obama administration’s extraordinary invasion of journalists’ privacy and the right to protect sources.
Click to read the rest of the column posted on Truthdig.
May 23, 2013
Another Memorial Day in This Endless War
By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan
In a remarkable but little-noticed oversight hearing last week, the Senate Armed Services Committee looked at “The Law of Armed Conflict, the Use of Military Force, and the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force.” The 2001 AUMF is the act passed by Congress on Sept. 14, three days after the al-Qaida attacks on the United States.
Sen. Angus King, an independent from Maine, opened his questioning of the military officials before him by stating: “Gentlemen, I’ve only been here five months, but this is the most astounding and most astoundingly disturbing hearing that I’ve been to since I’ve been here. You guys have essentially rewritten the Constitution here today.”
May 16, 2013
The Three Heroines of Guatemala: The Judge, the Attorney General and the Nobel Peace Laureate
By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan
Former Guatemalan President Efraín Ríos Montt was hauled off to prison last Friday. It was a historic moment, the first time in history that a former leader of a country was tried for genocide in a national court. More than three decades after he seized power in a coup in Guatemala, unleashing a U.S.-backed campaign of slaughter against his own people, the 86-year-old stood trial, charged with genocide and crimes against humanity. He was given an 80-year prison sentence. The case was inspired and pursued by three brave Guatemalan women: the judge, the attorney general and the Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
May 9, 2013
Addressing the Epidemic of Military Sexual Assault
By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan
Rape is center stage this week after the dramatic rescue of three women from close to a decade of imprisonment in a house on a quiet street in Cleveland. The suspect, Ariel Castro, has been charged with kidnap and rape. These horrific allegations have shocked the nation, and demand a full investigation and a vigorous prosecution.
Also this week, the Pentagon released a shocking new report on rape and sexual assault in the U.S. military. According to the latest available figures, an estimated average of 70 sexual assaults are committed daily within the U.S. military, or 26,000 per year. The number of actually reported sexual assaults for the Pentagon’s fiscal year 2012 was 3,374. Of that number, only 190 were sent to a court-martial proceeding.
There is a growing epidemic of rape and sexual assault in the U.S. military, perpetrated against both women and men with almost complete impunity.
The situation blew up this week when the head of the U.S. Air Force’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office was himself arrested for sexual assault. Lt. Col. Jeff Krusinski, 41, was accused of sexually assaulting a woman in a parking lot outside an Arlington, Va., strip club. This comes after a recent case where a senior military officer overturned the sexual assault court-martial conviction of an officer under his command. Air Force Lt. Col. James Wilkerson was accused of sexually assaulting Kimberly Hanks at the Aviano Air Base in Italy. He was found guilty by a military jury, and sentenced to one year in jail and dismissal from military service. His conviction was overturned by Lt. Gen. Craig A. Franklin. Adding insult to the reversal, Wilkerson was transferred to an Air Force base in Tucson, Ariz., where many of Hanks’ family members live. They were joined by close to 50 people outside the base, protesting the overturning of his conviction and his transfer to their town. They are asking for his sentence and dismissal to be reinstated, and for Franklin to be fired.
President Barack Obama addressed the rape epidemic at a press conference this week, saying: “If we find out somebody is engaging in this stuff, they’ve got to be held accountable. Prosecuted. Stripped of their position. Court-martialed. Fired. Dishonorably discharged. Period. This is not acceptable.”
Anu Bhagwati is a former Marine officer, having served from 1999 to 2004, and is executive director and co-founder of Service Women’s Action Network. SWAN works to eliminate discrimination, harassment and assault from military culture, and to improve veterans’ benefits for those who have been assaulted. She told a Senate hearing last March: “During my five years as a Marine officer, I experienced daily discrimination and sexual harassment. I was exposed to a culture rife with sexism, rape jokes, pornography and widespread commercial sexual exploitation of women and girls, both in the United States and overseas.”
When she filed a career-ending complaint against a fellow officer, she said she “lived in fear of retaliation and violence from both the offender and my own chain of command, and then watched in horror as the offender was not only promoted but also given command of my company.”
I spoke with Bhagwati, who explained how the military prosecution of these cases has an inherent conflict of interest, which undermines the ability to obtain convictions: “Commanding officers—they’re called convening authorities—have authority from beginning to end of a trial. They determine whether or not a case even goes forward, whether or not the accused even sees the inside of a court-martial. That’s where a lot of the intimidation happens. That’s where a lot of victims feel the fear. They’re not supported. They don’t follow through with their cases.”
May 2, 2013
Pregnant Antiwar Soldier Sent to Prison
By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan
Amid the ongoing violence in Iraq, a young, pregnant soldier has been sent to prison this week for desertion. She refused to return to the war in Iraq back in 2007. Pfc. Kimberly Rivera first deployed to Iraq in 2006. She guarded the gate at Forward Operating Base Loyalty in eastern Baghdad at a time when the base was under constant attack. She said of the experience: “I had a huge awakening seeing the war as it truly is: People losing their lives for greed of a nation, and the effects on the soldiers who come back with new problems such as nightmares, anxieties, depression, anger, alcohol abuse, missing limbs and scars from burns. Some don’t come back at all.”
Pregnant Anti-War Soldier Sent to Prison
By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan
Amid the ongoing violence in Iraq, a young, pregnant soldier has been sent to prison this week for desertion. She refused to return to the war in Iraq back in 2007. Pfc. Kimberly Rivera first deployed to Iraq in 2006. She guarded the gate at Forward Operating Base Loyalty in eastern Baghdad at a time when the base was under constant attack. She said of the experience: “I had a huge awakening seeing the war as it truly is: People losing their lives for greed of a nation, and the effects on the soldiers who come back with new problems such as nightmares, anxieties, depression, anger, alcohol abuse, missing limbs and scars from burns. Some don’t come back at all.”
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