blog

August 23, 2022

Israeli Raid on Seven Human Rights Groups Is Attack on Palestinian Civil Society

On August 18, Israel conducted armed raids in the occupied West Bank, ransacking and shuttering the offices of seven leading Palestinian human rights organizations. Three days later, the directors of two of those groups were summoned for interrogation by the Israeli Occupying Forces.

The raids began more than a week after the Israel Defense Forces had killed dozens of Palestinians, including 17 children, during airstrikes on Gaza.

Most of the Palestinian human rights groups that were ransacked on August 18 have been in Israel’s crosshairs since last October, when Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz baselessly declared that Israel had designated six of those groups under its 2016 Counter Terrorism Law as “terrorist organizations” — with links to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a leftist Palestinian political party with a military wing. On November 3, 2021, the six groups were declared “unlawful associations” by the Israeli military commander in the occupied West Bank. But in the 10 months since the “terrorist” designations, the Israeli government has failed to provide competent evidence linking the six groups to the PFLP. A classified CIA report says it could not find any evidence to support the designations.

Read more
August 21, 2022

Mike Pompeo and CIA Sued for Illegal Surveillance of Assange’s Visitors

Attorneys and journalists whom the CIA spied on when they visited WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London have filed a lawsuit against the CIA, its former director Mike Pompeo, UC Global and its director, David Morales, in U.S. District Court.

Assange is in a London prison fighting extradition to the United States. He is charged with violating the Espionage Act for exposing U.S. war crimes and faces 175 years imprisonment. During the seven years he lived in the Ecuadorian Embassy under a grant of asylum, Assange was visited by more than 100 attorneys, journalists and doctors. They included Assange’s criminal defense attorneys in the United States, international human rights lawyers, national security journalists whose sources could be jeopardized if exposed, and physicians and medical professionals.

The CIA commissioned Undercover Global (UC Global), a private Spanish security company, to send images from Assange’s visitors’ cellphones and laptops as well as video streamed from their meetings to the CIA.

Read more
August 16, 2022

Police Lied to Get the Warrant to Search Breonna Taylor’s Home

The March 2020 killing of Breonna Taylor, which caused widespread protest around the country, was the result of police lies to obtain a warrant and racist police violence after officers forced their way into her apartment.

On August 4, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced the federal grand jury indictments of four Louisville Metro Police officers involved in the raid that resulted in Taylor’s death.

Three of the officers were accused of violating Taylor’s Fourth Amendment rights to be free from unreasonable search and seizure by lying to secure a no-knock warrant. The officers who sought the warrant “knew that the affidavit used to obtain the warrant to search Taylor’s home contained information that was false, misleading, and out-of-date; that the affidavit omitted material information; and that the officers lacked probable cause for the search,” the indictment reads.

Read more
August 7, 2022

Biden’s Assassination of al-Qaeda Leader Ayman al-Zawahiri Was Illegal

President Joe Biden’s assassination of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in Afghanistan was illegal under both U.S. and international law. After the CIA drone strike killed Zawahiri on August 2, Biden declared, “People around the world no longer need to fear the vicious and determined killer.” What we should fear instead is the dangerous precedent set by Biden’s unlawful extrajudicial execution.

In addition to being illegal, the killing of Zawahiri also occurred in a moment when the United Nations had already determined that people in the U.S. had little to fear from him. As a United Nations report released in July concluded, “Al Qaeda is not viewed as posing an immediate international threat from its safe haven in Afghanistan because it lacks an external operational capability and does not currently wish to cause the Taliban international difficulty or embarrassment.”

Read more
July 26, 2022

January 6 Committee Has Provided Sufficient Evidence for Garland to Indict Trump

More than two years after Donald Trump orchestrated a massive criminal conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, including directing an armed and violent mob to attack the U.S. Capitol, Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice (DOJ) has still not indicted the former president.

The House of Representatives Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol (“Select Committee”) presented overwhelming evidence — nearly all from Trump loyalists — that Trump committed at least two federal crimes, as well as criminal offenses in the state of Georgia. Although the Select Committee has no power to bring charges against Trump, it can make a criminal referral. The decision to prosecute, however, rests solely with the DOJ.

Read more
July 17, 2022

Palestinians Face Forced Expulsions as Biden Pledges Allegiance to Israel

President Joe Biden’s much-heralded visit to Jerusalem has confirmed that the United States remains Israel’s enabler-in-chief. Biden promised to continue providing Israel with $3.8 billion in annual military aid (more than the U.S. gives any other country) to maintain the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.

Pledging to “stand with the Jewish and democratic State of Israel,” Biden ignored the exclusion of the Palestinian people from Israel’s “democracy,” which extends only to Jewish people. Palestinians do not enjoy the same democratic rights as Jews. As Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem recently affirmed, Israel is an apartheid state.

Read more
July 3, 2022

SCOTUS EPA Ruling Signals Court Will Strike Down Rules Limiting Corporate Profit

On the last day of its term, the Supreme Court handed down a case no less impactful than its shameful ruling a week earlier that overturned Roe v. Wade. In West Virginia v. EPA, the court’s right-wing members confirmed they are in the pockets of the fossil fuel companies. The 6-3 majority sided with coal companies and Republican-led states to restrain the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) power to regulate carbon emissions.

“Capping carbon dioxide emissions at a level that will force a nationwide transition away from the use of coal to generate electricity may be a sensible ‘solution to the crisis of the day,’” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote on behalf of himself, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. But “it is not plausible that Congress gave EPA the authority to adopt on its own such a regulatory scheme.”

Read more
June 29, 2022

Self-Determination Has Been Wrenched Away From Half the US Population

For the first time in U.S. history, the Supreme Court has retracted a fundamental constitutional right. “We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” Samuel Alito wrote for the majority of five right-wing zealots on the court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. They held that “procuring an abortion is not a fundamental constitutional right because such a right has no basis in the Constitution’s text or in our Nation’s history.”

Since the day Roe v. Wade was decided nearly 50 years ago, its opponents have executed a methodical campaign to overturn it. There is no reason, in fact or in law, to erase the constitutional right to abortion. The Constitution still protects abortion, and there have been no factual changes since 1973 that would support abolishing it. The only thing that has changed is the composition of the court. It is now packed with radical Christian fanatics who have no qualms about imposing their religious beliefs on the bodies of women and trans people, notwithstanding the Constitution’s unequivocal separation of church and state.

Read more
June 23, 2022

Julian Assange Is Enduring Unbearable Persecution for Exposing US War Crimes

Ever since U.K. Home Secretary Priti Patel formally ordered the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the U.S. last week, press freedom advocates around the world have been mobilizing.

Assange Defense, on whose advisory board I serve, is organizing a national and international campaign to pressure U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland and President Joe Biden to drop the extradition request and dismiss the charges against Assange. The stakes could not be higher.

The charges, which include 17 counts under the infamous Espionage Act, could result in 175 years in prison for the journalist who exposed U.S. war crimes.

Read more
June 15, 2022

Torture Memo Lawyer John Yoo Devises Theory for Stealing Presidential Elections

John Yoo has teamed up with Robert Delahunty, his coauthor of some of the infamous torture memos during the George W. Bush administration, to devise a blueprint for the vice president to decide the outcome of presidential elections. This legal theory will be published in a forthcoming 82-page law review article in the Case Western Reserve Law Review.

In their article, the two radical right-wing law professors do not say that former Vice President Mike Pence should have refused to count the Electoral College votes and handed the 2020 election to Donald Trump. That is because no state had submitted competing slates of electors — for example, one slate from a Democratic governor for Joe Biden and another slate from a Republican legislature for Trump. If states had tendered more than one slate of electors, Yoo and Delahunty argue that Pence could have decided which slate to count.

Read more