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Silent Coup
In the past 4 years 22 universities across the U.S. have quietly taken the CIA’s dollars and agreed to become spy-factories for student spooks. David Price breaks the story, identifies the campuses, details secret faculty protests and charts the strategy for resistance. The U.S.’s warlord clients in Afghanistan now produce 90 per cent of the world’s opium. Peter Lee reports how the U.S. sponsors widening drug plagues in Iran and Russia. Get your new edition today by subscribing online or calling 1-800-840-3683 Contributions to CounterPunch are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! CounterPunch books and t-shirts make great presents.
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Today's Stories February 9, 2010 Bill Quigley February 8, 2010 Pam Martens Heather Gray Paul Craig Roberts Franklin Spinney Ralph Nader Ellen Brown Sasha Kramer Richard Morse Fred Gardner Binoy Kampmark Michael Winship David Michael Green Charles R. Larson Website of the Day February 5 - 7, 2010 Alexander Cockburn Paul Craig Roberts Forrest Hylton Joanne Mariner Bill Quigley Jeffrey St. Clair Todd Gordon / Jeffrey R. Webber Consolidating the Coup in Honduras Joseph Nevins Mike Miller Mark Weisbrot Alison Weir David Swanson Missy Beattie Jonathan Cook Richard Morse David Ker Thomson Benjamin Dangl Cal Winslow Jim Goodman Michael Dickinson Bouthaina Shaaban Don Monkerud Ananya Mukherjee-Reed Doug Bevington Stephen Martin Charles R. Larson David Yearsley Kim Nicolini Poets' Basement Website of the Day February 4, 2010 Barbara Rhine Barry Lando David Macaray Shamus Cooke P. Sainath Christopher Brauchli Ramzy Baroud Suzan Mazur Harry Clark Andy Worthington Website of the Day February 3, 2010 Paul Craig Roberts Kathleen Christison Franklin Spinney Dean Baker Marc Levy Kathy Kelly Gareth Porter Joshua Frank Rannie Amiri Gregory Vickrey Website of the Day February 2, 2010 Michael Hudson Boadiba Chris Floyd Paul A. Passavant Mike Whitney John Ross Jonathan Cook Susan Galleymore Dave Lindorff Tolu Olorunda Ron Jacobs Website of the Day February 1, 2010 Michael Hudson Stan Goff Patrick Cockburn Saul Landau Dr. Carol Paris, MD Marshall Auerback Harvey Wasserman Johanna Berrigan Peter Gelderloos David Michael Green Martha Rosenberg Kevin Zeese Alan Farago Website of the Day January 29 - 31, 2010 Alexander Cockburn Daniel Ellsberg Bill Quigley Franklin Spinney Jeffrey St. Clair Steve Early Joe Bageant P. Sainath Jordan Flaherty Joshua Frank Winslow T. Wheeler Brian M. Downing Wajahat Ali William Loren Katz Dave Lindorff Jim Goodman Judith Scherr Kerry Kennedy / Monika Kalra Varma Anthony Papa David Macaray Roger Burbach Belén Fernández Nikolas Kozloff Dr. Susan Block Windy Cooler Charles R. Larson Mikita Brottman David Yearsley Lorenzo Wolff David Rovics Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend January 28, 2010 Bill Quigley Peter Hallward Tanya Golash-Boza Shamus Cooke Dave Lindorff Ray McGovern Uri Weiss Thomas M. Power Cecil Brown Wajahat Ali Harvey Wasserman Website of the Day January 27, 2010 Daniel Kovalik Paul Craig Roberts Dean Baker Uri Avnery Sasha Kramer Vijay Prashad Nikolas Kozloff Mark Weisbrot Jonathan Cook Bob Fitrakis / Binoy Kampmark Website of the Day January 26, 2010 Michael Hudson Joan Roelofs Patrick Cockburn Mike Roselle Brian M. Downing David Macaray Bouthaina Shaaban Kevin Zeese Richard Morse Fidel Castro Farzana Versey Jonathan Cook Website of the Day January 25, 2010 Michael Hudson Anthony DiMaggio JoAnn Wypijewski Nadia Hijab Robert Jensen John Maxwell Richard Morse Marilyn Langlois Dan Bacher James L. Secor Jayne Lyn Stahl Website of the Day January 22/24, 2010 Alexander Cockburn Russell Feingold Ralph Nader Christopher Ketcham Manuel Garcia, Jr Paul Craig Roberts Jeffrey St. Clair Nikolas Kozloff Jean Damu Mitchel Cohen Paul Buccheit Conn Hallinan Steven Higgs Rob Stone, MD Saul Landau / Ron Jacobs Vijay Prashad P. Sainath M. Shahid Alam George Wuerthner Missy Comley Beattie Jean Sabaté Shamus Cooke Stephen Fleischman Michael Donnelly David Michael Green Michael Dickinson Charles R. Larson David Yearsley Lorenzo Wolff Poets' Basement Website of the Day
Paul Craig Roberts Alan Farago Richard Morse Stewart J. Lawrence Harvey Wasserman Carl Finamore Ramzy Baroud Marshall Auerback Fawzia Afzal-Khan Adam Federman Website of the Day January 20, 2010 Alexander Cockburn James Bovard Mary Lynn Cramer Dean Baker Uri Avnery Kathy Kelly Jeb Sprague Ron Jacobs John V. Walsh Bouthaina Shaaban Gail Dines Website of the Day January 19, 2010 Michael Hudson John Maxwell Stephen Soldz Richard Morse Björn Kumm Gary Leupp Eric Toussaint / Nikolas Kozloff Benjamin Dangl Dave Lindorff Robert Roth Website of the Day January 18, 2010 Petra Bartosiewicz Nelson P. Valdés Bill Quigley Richard Morse Tolu Olorunda John Ross Manuel Garcia, Jr. The Murder of Masoud Alimohammadi: Assassinating the Iranian H-Bomb Ralph Nader Franklin Lamb Frederick B. Hudson Website of the Day January 15-17, 2010 Alexander Cockburn Richard Morse Bill Quigley Patrick Cockburn Jeffrey St. Clair Anthony DiMaggio Tom Reeves Daniel Wolff Alan Nasser Saul Landau / Andrew Oxford Michael Donnelly Russell Mokhiber Darwin Bond-Graham Missy Beattie David Ker Thomson Gary Leupp Ron Jacobs Clifton Ross Jordan Flaherty Marshall Auerback Marjorie Cohn Joe Bageant Tariq Ali Jayne Lyn Stahl Charles R. Larson Kim Nicolini David Yearsley Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend January 14, 2010 Ashley Smith Harvey Wasserman Dean Baker Brian Cloughley Brock L. Bevan Don Monkerud Winslow T. Wheeler Gideon Levy Adam Federman James McEnteer Brian Concannon Jr Website of the Day January 13, 2010 Patrick Haenni / Jonathan Cook Cecil Brown Steven Higgs Paul de Rooij Richard Forno Dr. Trudy Bond Daniel Drennan Martha Rosenberg Brenda Baletti, Gilson Rego and Antonio Sena Website of the Day January 12, 2010 Bill Salganik Uri Avnery Dean Baker Dan Kovalik Raza Naeem George Wuerthner Dave Lindorff David Macaray Tolu Olorunda Patrick Bond Website of the Day January 11, 2010 Patrick Cockburn Gareth Porter John Ross Gregory V. Button Ralph Nader Tom Barry Mikita Brottman David Michael Green Lost in the White House David Swanson Kevin Zeese Website of the Day
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February 9, 2010 The Spisak PrecedentMumia Abu-Jamal's Case Stuck in LimboBy DAVE LINDORFF The recent decision by the US Supreme Court to send convicted police killer Mumia Abu-Jamal’s case back down to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, with instructions for a three-judge panel there to reconsider its decision to uphold the lifting of the prominent African-American journalist’s death penalty, is only the latest in a long string of examples of how courts at all levels have made special exceptions to precedent in order to try and kill this particular prisoner. The high court found on January 19, that Frank Spisak, a self-described Nazi and killer of three in Ohio, had been properly sentenced, because at the time the Ohio Supreme Court affirmed his death penalty on appeal, “settled law” was that the jury instructions given to his jury had been proper. And under the terms of the 1995 Effective Death Penalty Act, federal courts, including the Supreme Court, have to defer to the judgements of state courts unless those courts’ decisions are deemed “unreasonable.” Where it gets complicated though, is that subsequent to the conclusion of Spisak’s state appeals, the US Supreme Court, in a 1988 decision called Mills v. Maryland, ruled that ambiguously worded jury ballot forms and confusing or misleading jury instructions on sentencing by judges were grounds for reversing a death sentence. Mills was never made retroactive (one of the more repugnant features of many Supreme Court decisions), but Abu-Jamal’s state appeals didn’t even properly begin until after his 1995-96 Post-Conviction Relief Act hearing, and so the same finding made by the Supreme Court majority in Spisak’s case--that the confusing jury instruction standards were “settled law” at the time--cannot be made in Abu-Jamal’s case. But the Supreme Court order sending Abu-Jamal’s case back down to the Third Circuit, right or wrong, hardly means Abu-Jamal’s battle is over, much less lost, despite his already having spent an astonishing 28 years in solitary confinement on Pennsylvania’s hellish death row. Even if the Third Circuit were to reverse itself, and decide against all logic that because of another Supreme Court decision made last month, reimposing the death penalty on Frank Spisak, the self-proclaimed Nazi killer of three men, Abu-Jamal should also die, it would not mean he can simply be marched off to a gurney for a lethal injection. As Hugh Burns, the assistant district attorney in Philadelphia who has been leading the effort by the DA’s office to have Abu-Jamal executed for the last decade and a half, noted in an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer, threre are at least three more avenues of appeal of Abu-Jamal’s death sentence that still need to be considered at the district Federal Court level (actually there are four). That’s because when Federal Judge William Yohn, way back in 2001, issued his historic ruling revoking Abu-Jamal’s death sentence on the grounds that the jury ballot form used to determine sentencing, and the instructions of trial judge Albert Sabo, had been confusing on the question of mitigating circumstances, he mooted those other avenues of appeal, saying that he didn’t need to rule on them. The sentence was already lifted. Now that Yohn has been reversed on that lifting of the death sentence, though, Abu-Jamal has a right to have Judge Yohn go back and look at the other three challenges to his sentence. And those challenges are very solid and serious. (Actually, I’ve always considered it a measure of how confident Judge Yohn was in the correctness of his decision on the jury instructions claim that he didn’t bother to deal with the other four appeals claims--something he could have done simultaneously.) The first unresolved appeal claim goes to the heart of a defendant’s right to representation and a fair trial. Abu-Jamal’s attorney, Anthony Jackson, testified under oath at a Post-Conviction Relief Act hearing in 1995 to the obvious truth that did absolutely nothing to prepare for the sentencing portion of the trial. He called no witnesses to testify to Abu-Jamal’s character, an astonishing lapse which left the prosecutor free and unchallenged in portraying Abu-Jamal as a cop-hating terrorist. Jackson prepared no witnesses, though Abu-Jamal’s siblings and mother were on hand and ready to testify, as were many others in the community. Jackson, astonishingly, didn’t even request a delay of a few days after the guilty verdict in order to prepare for the sentencing hearing. When the judge ordered the session to begin the next day, Jackson went along meekly. It didn’t help that on the morning of the sentencing hearing, Jackson was awoken first at 6 am by fire trucks at his home--the result of a “prank call”-- and that after he got to court, he received a frightened and frightening call from his 15-year-old son saying that someone had called his home telling the boy “You are the one we want. We’ll be coming over to get you!” (Any bets on who was making those calls?) Abu-Jamal in his 1999 habeas appeal the federal court claims his constitutional right to representation was denied by Jackson’s dismal performance at the sentencing hearing. A second line of appeal, also mooted and left unresolved by Judge Yohn, was a claim that Abu-Jamal’s first, fourth, fifth and fourteenth amendment rights were violated when Prosecutor Joseph McGill improperly used Abu-Jamal’s membership, as a 15-year-old boy, in the Black Panther organization, in trying to portray him as a vicious cop-hater. McGill came to court with a yellowed newspaper clipping from the Philadelphia Inquirer in which the young Abu-Jamal, quoting Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Tse-tung, had told reporters that “power flows from the barrel of a gun.” It didn’t matter that the article explained that Abu-Jamal had made that statement in the context of the murder days earlier of Panther leader Fred Hampton by Chicago Police, and that the context made it clear he was referring to the power of police. McGill took the quote out of context and made it appear as though Abu-Jamal was advocating war on the cops. In any event, the quote had been made 12 years before, when Abu-Jamal was just a boy. The reality was that, far from being at war with police, Abu-Jamal as an adult had a sterling record or no arrests or convictions. Here is a case where the Pennsylvania courts and federal courts in the Third Circuit have repeatedly overturned death convictions where membership in allegedly anti-social organizations was cited by prosecutors in an effort to tarnish defendants before a jury, but where a special exception has been apparently been carved out for Abu-Jamal. Judge Yohn has yet to rule on this line of appeal. Third, there remains to be considered an appeal on the grounds that prosecutor McGill improperly sought, in his final argument to the jury in the sentencing hearing, to diminish the jurors’ sense of responsibility for their decision. McGill told the jury,
Again, the courts at all levels--in Pennsylvania, in the Third Circuit, and the US Supreme Court itself--have all overturned death penalty sentences based upon just such statements having been made to juries at trials. Indeed, another case prosecuted successfully by McGill himself was overturned because he made exactly the same statement to a jury, claiming jurors need not feel they are personally ordering a man’s death. So this appeal too needs to be considered in full by Judge Yohn. Finally, there is a fourth avenue of appeal which was also mooted and left unresolved by Judge Yohn. That is the claim that the prosecutor knowingly withheld evidence in police files which showed that Abu-Jamal had no criminal record and no propensity for violence. Specifically, Abu-Jamal, years after his trial, obtained his FBI file--largely composed of materials obtained by the FBI from Philadelphia Police and the Philadelphia Police Department’s so-called “Red Squad.” That file, 600 pages long, shows that surveillence of Abu-Jamal ended in 1973. A 1974 memo at the end of the file states, “In March 1973, per bureau instructions, captioned subject was deleted from ADEX [the list of people deemed subversive and slated as part of COINTELPRO to be rounded up and detained in the event of a national emergency] and no additionalinvestigation conducted concerning his activities. Sources, however, have continued to report periodically on COOK [Abu-Jamal’s family name] and, although he has not displayed a propensity for violence, has continued to associate himself with individuals and organizations engaged in Extremist activities.” Clearly this file, stating that Abu-Jamal did not appear to be a violent person, had been available to the prosecution, and should have been offered to the defense. This appeal of Abu-Jamal’s conviction based upon a claim of prosecutorial misconduct must also be considered by Judge Yohn. Once the Third Circuit has reconsidered its decision on the jury instruction issue--and the outcome there is by no means certain, with Abu-Jamal’s attorney Robert Bryan planning a spirited argument that Abu-Jamal’s case is substantively different from the Spisak case--and if it were to rule against Abu-Jamal, there would first of all be a new appeal of that decision back to the US Supreme Court. Only if the high court were to uphold such a decision would these four other issues finally go back before Judge Yohn. It appears that even if the courts continue to rule against this now world-renowned journalist who has spent more than half his life sitting confined in a small cell on death row, his controversial case, dogged as it is by charges of judicial misconduct, racial bias, prosecutorial misconduct, purjured prosecution witness testimony and political interference, will continue to drag on unresolved for years to come. Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. He is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation Into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu Jamal. He can be reached at dlindorff@mindspring.com |
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