Amy Goodman's Blog, page 3

TRAPping Access to Safe, Legal Abortions

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.

A Tale of Two Grandmothers

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

On a recent snowy January night in upstate New York, a grandmother turned herself in to the Jamesville Correctional Facility, to serve a six-month sentence. Her crime? Taking photos. Mary Anne Grady Flores was photographing eight others protesting at the gates of Hancock Field Air National Guard Base outside Syracuse, N.Y. The group, the Upstate Coalition to Ground the Drones and End the Wars, gathered there on Ash Wednesday, Feb. 13, 2013, protesting the weaponized drones used in the Obama administration���s targeted killing program. It was only one of many of the group���s peaceful vigils.

“It was Ash Wednesday, it���s a day of atonement in our tradition ... as Catholic workers,��� Grady Flores told me on the ""Democracy Now! news program, hours before turning herself in. "It���s really important to get the word out of what���s going on at the base, which are war crimes." Hancock Field is the home of the 174th Attack Wing of the Air National Guard, which operates a fleet of MQ-9 Reaper drones, "a persistent hunter-killer of emerging targets," in the U.S. Air Force���s own words.

Grady Flores stood away from the vigil, taking photos, in part because a judge had issued an "order of protection" against her and other protesters as the result of a 2012 protest, when the group managed to block three entrances to the base for an hour. The order was issued at the request of the 174th Attack Wing���s Mission Support Group commander, Col. Earl A. Evans. Violation of the order to stay away from Evans��� home, school or "business" is considered a felony punishable by up to seven years in prison. Grady Flores learned upon her arrest that the base���s property reached well beyond the gate, across the road to where she was standing.

"Taking photographs, of course, is a First Amendment-protected activity. Demonstrating is a First Amendment-protected activity," Jonathan Wallace told us, appearing with Grady Flores on our program. Wallace is an attorney who has worked extensively with the drone resistance movement. "These orders of protection are a pre-printed form with blanks that police and prosecutors fill out every day to protect battered spouses and witnesses who are assaulted."

Another colonel weighed in on the case. Col. Ann Wright served in the military for 29 years, then as a high-level State Department official. In 1997, she was given the State Department Award for Heroism for helping evacuate thousands during the civil war in Sierra Leone. She was deputy chief of mission when the U.S. embassy reopened in Afghanistan in 2001. In 2003, she resigned her post to protest the war in Iraq. ���I find it quite embarrassing and ludicrous that a U.S. military commander decided that his personal security is so threatened by peaceful, nonviolent protesters of the drone policies of the U.S.,��� Wright wrote in support of Grady Flores. ���I would have expected a U.S. commander to have had the courage to meet with the group of concerned citizens rather than obtaining a cowardly order of protection.���

Two months after the Ash Wednesday protest where Grady Flores was charged with violating the order, on May 23, 2013, President Barack Obama delivered a speech at the National Defense University defending his drone program: ���Before any strike is taken, there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured���the highest standard we can set.��� Despite his pledges, the civilian death toll from U.S. drone strikes continues to climb.

We all too rarely learn the names of these victims. On Oct. 24, 2012, for example, the CIA launched a drone strike in North Waziristan, Pakistan. Mamana Bibi, a 67-year-old grandmother who was picking okra, was killed. Bibi���s grandson, 12-year-old Zubair Rehman, and his 8-year-old sister, Nabila, were among the injured. After multiple surgeries, Zubair and Nabila came to the United States with their father, Rafiq, a schoolteacher, to testify before Congress. After they testified, they made their way to our studios in New York City, where we interviewed them. In his congressional testimony, little Zubair said: "I no longer love blue skies. In fact, I now prefer gray skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are gray. ... When the skies brighten, though, the drones return, and so, too, does the fear."

Mary Anne Grady Flores was wearing a scarf on the day she went to prison���but not for protection from the snow. "I���m wearing a blue scarf today, and the kids from Afghanistan were the ones that sent this bolt of cloth," she told us, so "that someday we could live with the vision of the future of blue skies, of peace."

The Stateless and the State of the Union

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.

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

Climate Change and the Road Through Paris

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

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.'"

‘We Are Human Beings; We Are Not Dogs’

By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan

On the outskirts of the northern French town of Calais, a massive, makeshift refugee camp called ���The Jungle��� grows daily, swelling with asylum-seekers fleeing war in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Sudan and beyond. Their countries of origin are a map of the targets of U.S. bombing campaigns. More than 6,000 people in this, France���s largest refugee camp, hope for a chance to make the last, dangerous leg of their journey through the nearby channel tunnel to England. Wind whips off the North Sea, blasting the shelters made of tarps, tents, plastic sheeting and scrap lumber in this sprawling, ramshackle end of the line. The roads in the camp are muddy; the portable toilets are filthy. The charity health clinic had been closed since mid-November. The main entrance to the camp is below a freeway, with several police vans parked with lights flashing and armed officers stationed above.

Most who arrive here have endured arduous journeys of thousands of miles, hoping to cross to the United Kingdom. The channel tunnel offers asylum-seekers a way to make it to the U.K. without risking a dangerous crossing of the English Channel, by stowing away on either a high-speed passenger train or a freight train. Accessing either type of train involves significant risk, and accidental deaths occur almost weekly when people leap onto moving trains or stumble under truck tires.

A few days before we visited the camp, a Sudanese man named Joseph was killed when he was run over by a car on the highway. Camp residents were protesting that the police had not stopped the driver, holding signs reading ���We are Humans, Not Dogs��� and ���Do survivors of war not have the right to live in peace?��� We asked a young man named Majd from Damascus, Syria, why he fled his country: ���I escaped from the war. I don���t want to die. This war is not my war.��� We asked him who was attacking his country. He said: ���Who? Everyone. Russia and America and Iran���everyone.���

Days before we met Majd, the British Parliament voted to attack Syria, and began bombing immediately. In the few months prior, the British government built multiple layers of high, razor-wire-topped fences in Calais, sealing off the tunnel entrance and the rail line for miles before the tunnel, as well as the staging area where freight trucks line up to drive onto the rail cars that will carry them through the tunnel. Each truck also is subjected to an infrared scan to look for stowaways. Before the enhanced security, scores of asylum-seekers might get through the tunnel nightly. Now, it is almost impossible. The more the West bombs their countries, the more it shuts out those who flee its wars.

In the Afghan section of the refugee camp, Sidiq Husain Khil was eager to speak about the 14-year-old U.S. war in Afghanistan���the longest war in U.S. history. Like many, he did not want his face to be filmed. We asked him about the effects of U.S. bombing and drone strikes on Afghanistan. He replied: ���If they are killing one person or 10 persons, 100 of them are joining the group of Taliban. ... The war is not the solution for finishing terrorism. They have to talk face to face.���

As we roamed the camp, pulling our coats tightly around us in the cold, we looked for a woman who would be willing to speak. We met Dur, an Afghan professor of English, who also did not want her face shown. She traveled more than 3,000 miles with her four children, by car, bus, horse, foot and boat. In almost perfect English, her 12-year-old daughter described their unimaginable route: ���First we go to Nimruz province of Afghanistan. Then we went to Pakistan. Then we walked to Saravan, Balochistan. Then Iranshahr, Kerman, Shiraz, Tehran, Kurdistan and Turkey. Then we start walking in mountains. Then we went to Istanbul, Izmir. Then we arrived to the sea.��� Dur hired a smuggler to take them in a leaky boat from Turkey to Greece. She told me, ���When I saw that boat ... I called all my children and I start to cry ... I spent all my money to buy them death.��� Miraculously, they survived. Whether they make it to their destination, Britain, is another question.

As we left the camp, Dur���s relative, Najibullah, raced up to us. An Afghan who worked with the U.S. Marines as a translator, he applied for a special visa for Afghans who put themselves at risk by working for the U.S. He said he was turned down because he hadn���t worked for the Marines for a full year. ���Working with the U.S. government ... just one day or a year ... it doesn���t matter to the Taliban,��� he told me. ���As long as you work with them just one hour, you���re condemned to death.���

���Today, Joseph. Tomorrow, who?��� read one of the many signs at the protest earlier that day. These refugees are the roadkill of war.

Paris (and the World) Is Burning

By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan

PARIS���The candles still burn across this city at the massacre memorials to the more than 130 people killed by armed militants identified with the Islamic State (which, many Muslims point out, is neither Islamic nor a state), from the Bataclan theater to the restaurants attacked nearby and the national stadium. Flowers, messages, French flags, photos and mementos of the dead, reproductions of the now-iconic peace sign with the embedded Eiffel Tower���all are arranged in a heartfelt outpouring of grief where these acts of violence occurred.

It is in this context that one of the most significant global summits in history is happening: COP 21, the 21st ���Conference of Parties��� to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Here, almost every nation on the planet is represented as negotiators attempt to forge a treaty by Dec. 11 to stave off irreversible, catastrophic climate change.

COP 21 is supposed to be a culmination of more than two decades of work at the U.N. to transform society, ending the fossil-fuel era and shifting to renewable energy and drastically reduced greenhouse-gas emissions. A mass march was organized in Paris for Nov. 29, the day before the climate summit was to begin, with more than 400,000 people expected. But French President Francois Hollande declared a state of emergency after the attacks, banning all demonstrations. Many critics say that the warming planet is another state of emergency–and that dissent is the only thing that will save us.

Over the weekend, 10,000 Parisians and international activists formed a human chain stretching for blocks in Paris. After that action ended, they defied the French ban on protests and tried to march to the Place de la Republique, where thousands had placed candles and flowers in remembrance of the terror victims. While the French president blamed the protesters for destroying the memorial, ���Democracy Now!��� video footage showed protesters joining arms to protect the memorial from hundreds of riot police as they moved in with tear gas, concussion grenades and pepper spray.

The next day, inside the climate summit, we bumped into Yeb Sano, former chief climate negotiator for the Philippines. We last saw him in 2013 at the U.N. climate summit in Warsaw, while Typhoon Haiyan, one of the strongest cyclones in recorded history, devastated his country, killing thousands of people. At the time, Yeb made headlines with an emotional plea to the world body to take immediate action on climate change:

���Typhoons such as Haiyan and its impacts represent a sobering reminder to the international community that we cannot afford to delay climate action. ... It must be poetic justice that Typhoon Haiyan was so big that its diameter spanned the distance between Warsaw and Paris.��� He implored his fellow negotiators, ���If not us, then who? If not now, then when? If not here, then where?��� He had just learned that his brother, A.G. Sano, had narrowly survived the typhoon in his devastated town of Tacloban.

The following year, as yet another deadly storm battered the Philippines, Yeb Sano was unexpectedly absent from the U.N. Climate Summit in Lima, Peru, shocking many. He had been pulled from the delegation at the last minute, leading to speculation he had been targeted for his outspokenness amidst pressure from wealthier countries, like the United States. At the time, he tweeted: ���They can silence my mouth. But they cannot silence my soul.���

This year, Yeb Sano is back at the U.N. climate summit, not as the chief negotiator for the Philippines, but as a grass-roots activist. He had just walked 900 miles over 60 days from Rome to Paris on a People���s Pilgrimage for Climate Action. At his side was his brother, A.G. A street artist, along the way he painted six beautiful murals depicting pilgrims from around the world walking to Paris. Since he had no official credentials to access the summit, I interviewed him outside the secure zone. A.G Sano offered a tribute to a friend of his, killed in Typhoon Haiyan:

���I came here to bring the voice of my dead friend. I���d just like to tell the world the name of my friend, Agit Sustento. Climate change is as real as Agit Sustento. I was with him the night before, and the last thing that I told him was to take care of himself and his family because that���s the strongest typhoon in recorded history that we���re about to face, and that was the last time that I ever talked to him. He lost his wife, his little boy, his mom and dad. My promise to him is that I���ll tell the world about his name. His name is Agit Sustento, and he will never get to see the sun rise again.���

A fitting honor to those who died here in Paris, and to the countless victims of climate change, would be a fair, ambitious and binding agreement at the climate summit, to help make the world more safe, equitable and sustainable.

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.

30 Seconds, 16 Shots, 400 Days: The Murder of Laquan McDonald

On the night of Oct. 20, 2014, Laquan McDonald, a 17-year-old African-American teenager in Chicago, was walking down the street when two police cruisers sped up to him. Officers jumped out, and at least one of them, Jason Van Dyke, began firing. Laquan fell to the ground, his final, painful moments caught on the dashboard video camera of a third police vehicle that had arrived just seconds before. Laquan spun as he was shot. Two bullets hit him in the back. As the video clearly shows, the bullets were pumped into him, evidenced by clouds of dust exploding off the pavement. This week, on the day the video was released to the public by court order, Officer Van Dyke was charged with first-degree murder — 400 days after he killed Laquan McDonald.

The official scenario that the Chicago Police Department (CPD) offered sounded like so many others: The teen was armed with a knife and lunged at Officer Van Dyke and his partner. Van Dyke, the official story holds, fired on the youth only to protect himself and his partner from a potentially lethal attack.

Independent media took that scenario and turned it on its head. Jamie Kalven is the founder of the Invisible Institute and a freelance journalist in Chicago. He uncovered the autopsy report showing that Laquan McDonald was shot 16 times and first reported on the existence of the video of the shooting. Many prominent news outlets sought the dashboard video footage through Illinois���s Freedom of Information Act laws, but were denied.

Brandon Smith is an award-winning independent reporter, based, as his biography on his blog states, ���wherever my suitcase sits.��� Smith challenged the CPD���s denial of the FOIA requests in Cook County Court. Judge Franklin Valderrama heard the case, and ordered the city to release the footage by Nov. 25.

The footage clearly debunks the official story. Just one day before the deadline to release it, Cook County State���s Attorney Anita Alvarez announced that Officer Van Dyke was being charged with first-degree murder. Within hours, the video was released.

Citizens have filed between 17 and 20 complaints against Van Dyke over the course of his 14 years with the CPD, for issues ranging from excessive force to improper use of a weapon to racial slurs. He was never disciplined. After the killing of Laquan McDonald, Officer Van Dyke was not indicted. Rather, he continued to be paid while assigned to desk duty until his arrest.

It also has been widely reported that additional video footage may have been destroyed. Police entered a nearby Burger King restaurant shortly after the shooting, asking for the password to their surveillance video system. They left after three hours. Eighty-six minutes of surveillance video had been deleted, it was later noticed, encompassing the time during which the shooting occurred. Burger King district manager Jay Darshane told NBC: ���We had no idea they were going to sit there and delete the files. I mean, we were just trying to help the police.���

Activists have been especially critical of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who has urged calm in the wake of the video���s release. Charlene Carruthers, national director of the Black Youth Project 100, told me on the Democracy Now! news hour: ���The city has very specific interests around what happened. And they���re very concerned with the city remaining peaceful. But unfortunately, the community, the target that is being told to remain peaceful, is not the Chicago Police Department.���

The shooting occurred just two weeks before Rahm Emanuel was facing a tight re-election race. Several months after he won re-election over a progressive challenger, Chicago offered a $5 million settlement to Laquan McDonald���s family, without them even filing suit.

Meanwhile, in Minneapolis, outrage over yet another police killing of a young, unarmed African-American male has led to a public occupation outside a police precinct. Hundreds have maintained a peaceful vigil demanding accountability and justice for the victim, Jamar Clark. The police have responded with a show of paramilitary force clearly intended to intimidate. Last Wednesday, an officer was photographed dressed in military fatigues, pointing his rifle at a protester with his hands in the air. The protester happens to be the son of Minneapolis Congressman Keith Ellison, the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and the first Muslim member of Congress in history.

Then, in a shocking escalation, several masked white men came to the protest Monday, and shot and injured five Black Lives Matter activists in what is being investigated as a hate crime. In response, close to 1,000 people marched in Minneapolis Tuesday night, the same night that hundreds marched in Chicago against police violence.

Despite the difficult circumstances, proud father and Congressman Keith Ellison is hopeful: ���There is a surge going on across this country among diverse populations craving justice, demanding fair treatment. ... We have to have a more just society.���