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In a separate report, Human Rights Watch criticized U.S. drone strikes in Yemen that have killed civilians.

On Tuesday, White House spokesperson Jay Carney defended the legality of the U.S. drone program.

PRESS SECRETARY JAY CARNEY: To the extent these reports claim that the U.S. has acted contrary to international law, we would strongly disagree. The administration has repeatedly emphasized the extraordinary care that we take to make sure counterterrorism actions are in accordance with all applicable law.

PRIME MINISTER NAWAZ SHARIF: There is, however, the matter of drone strikes, which have deeply disturbed and agitated our people. In my first statement to the Parliament, I had reiterated our strong commitment to ensuring an end to the drone attacks. More recently, our political parties in a national conference had declared that the use of drones is not only a continued violation of our territorial integrity, but also detrimental to our resolve and efforts at eliminating terrorism from our country. This issue has become a major irritant in our bilateral relationship, as well. I would therefore stress the need for an end to drone attacks.

In its report, Amnesty documented the case of a 68-year-old grandmother, Mamana Bibi, who was killed in a strike that appeared to be aimed directly at her. She was picking okra while surrounded by her grandchildren when she was blasted to pieces. Her son and granddaughter described the attack.

RAFIQ UR-REHMAN: [translated] The children were also with her. She was hit in the first attack, and her body parts were lying scattered.

NABEELA: [translated] First it whistled. Then I heard a "dhummm." The first hit us, and the second, my cousin. There was an explosion. We were scared, and I ran home. It was dark in front of our house. They brought me to the doctor in the village who gave me first aid. I was not scared before, but now, when the drone is flying, I am scared of it.

Well, to find out more, we go to Washington, D.C., to talk with Mustafa Qadri, the author of the Amnesty International report, "'Will I be Next?' US Drone Strikes in Pakistan." He is Pakistan researcher at Amnesty International.

Welcome to Democracy Now! You talk about these drone strikes in Pakistan as possible war crimes that the U.S. is engaged in. Lay out your case, Mustafa.

Now, that's a very big claim. There's a very high threshold for proving that. With the secrecy surrounding the program, the remoteness of this area, we can only get the truth once the U.S., as a start, comes clean and explains what is the justification for these killings.

But, you know, I should be really clear: We're not just talking about these cases of war crimes; we're talking about, as you mentioned before, you know, Mamana Bibi, a grandmother, killed in front of her grandchildren. You know, the U.S. has to explain these kind of killings. We think they're unlawful, too. You know, how does it explain making the U.S. safer by killing these sorts of people?

Her kids, some of them, are injured in that initial strike from shrapnel. Their house is damaged from the reverberation of the strike. As some of them venture to see what has happened to their grandmother, a few minutes later another strike happens about nine feet away from where the grandmother was killed, and that injures more of her grandchildren. After that, there's incredible panic, you know, as we saw in the video clip. And up 'til this-today, the family has not received even an acknowledgment from the U.S. authorities that she was killed by a drone.

You know, I should be very clear here that we researched this case, you know, very thoroughly. We even actually analyzed missile fragments from experts who said that this appears to be a Hellfire missile. You know, we fact-checked everything. You can see it in the report. We really just have a very simple message to the U.S.: How do you justify killing a grandmother? How does that make anyone safer?

What we're also saying is that people living there face the threats from the Taliban, al-Qaeda. The Pakistani military often threatens and intimates people. When the Pakistan army gets attacked by the Taliban itself in that area, they will unleash indiscriminate bombings by mortar shells or helicopters. So people already there live a really harrowing life. It's a very undeveloped area. The indicators are very low in terms of literacy, maternal mortality, women's rights. For women, it's a very difficult environment to live. Girls' access to education is very low. So, the drones really are adding insult to the already many injuries that people face living there. What we're saying is that this has to be a key part of that step towards bringing law and order and protecting the rights of people living there.

Yeah, no, it's a good point. I mean, so, the only kind of acknowledgment we received was a letter from the CIA saying, you know, speak to the White House and look at the-you know, the policy guidelines released when President Obama made his speech in May this year about counterterrorism and the drone policy. So, in short, we have not received any information, really, from the U.S. authorities about this case.

NORTH WAZIRISTAN VILLAGER: [translated] Would it not hurt you if they kill your brother for no reason? The drone struck in our area. It hit the chromite extractors who were gathered in a tent slaughtering a sheep for feast. All of them were killed. When the villagers arrived to rescue them, missiles were fired again. They were also killed. What other could it have been? Some of the corpses had been badly burned and were beyond recognition. We could only identify them because we knew who had come there to work and we knew their names and the names of their tribes. They were laborers extracting chromite in the mountains.

When you look at people living there, already facing so many threats, curfew, living a very difficult life, the idea that in the skies, the skies are no longer safe, and then when these strikes happen-you know, it could be very close to you, could be your neighbors, could be your loved ones involved-obviously you want to help them, and now people are so scared even to do that, it's really quite shocking.

In terms of the law, that-we see that as unlawful. We can't see a justification for that. We really call on the U.S., as we saw with Jay Carney claiming this is a legal program-well, fine, show us the legal justification for it and ensure those justifications and the facts are given to a genuinely independent, impartial investigator. That's the key thing. We are saying now to the U.S. government: Come clean, show us what is your evidence in law and fact for justifying rescuer attacks and the other unlawful killings we've documented in the report.

PRESS SECRETARY JAY CARNEY: By narrowly targeting our action against those who want to kill us, and not the people they hide among, we are choosing the course of action least likely to result in the loss of innocent life. U.S. counterterrorism operations are precise, they are lawful, and they are effective. And the United States does not take lethal strikes when we or our partners have the ability to capture individual terrorist-terrorists. Our preference is always to detain, interrogate and prosecute. We take extraordinary care to make sure that our counterterrorism actions are in accordance with all applicable domestic and international law and that they are consistent with U.S. values and U.S. policy. Of particular note, before we take any counterterrorism strike outside areas of active hostilities, there must be near certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured. And that is the highest standard we can set.

And let's be very clear about this. You know, most of the information we have received, all of us collectively, is through leaks to the media. It's through anonymous official sources talking to the media. It's not been directly from the government. At the moment, they're basically telling us, "Look, trust us. You know, we know what we're doing. We are very reliable, professional people." And, you know, the reality is, because these killings are happening in lawless areas like Pakistan's tribal areas, like remote Yemen or Somalia, the U.S. knows it, you know, can get away with murder, because it's very hard for people to verify claims. Now, how long will this administration merely just say, "Look, we do things lawfully"? We need to see the facts. We need to at least, at the very minimum, have an explanation for how you can justify killing a grandmother.

The point is that, you know, we're not talking about the whole program is impossible for it to be lawful. There is the capacity with the U.S. You know, the-administration officials have assured us there's a whole range of infrastructure experts, people involved in this program. So, really, the U.S.-it's obligation on them to make sure the program abides by international law.

I think the other thing that's really key-and again, Jay Carney sort of hit on this, as well-is this idea of trying to arrest or incapacitate people wherever possible. Well, the U.S. has to work with its Pakistani counterparts to improve that capacity. It has to ensure that Pakistan does its job in actually trying to bring these perpetrators to justice before a court in a fair trial. You know, we've documented that, you know, the Pakistani authorities have a very poor record of bringing these perpetrators to justice in fair trials. The legal setup in these tribal areas is incredibly poor. Pakistan still applies these anachronistic laws from the British era, which allows it to collectively punish tribes that are considered, you know, pro-Taliban. That has to change. Now, these are big problems, but there are solutions. And we really say, again, to the U.S. that it needs to make sure its drones are lawful, rather than retrospectively, after doing a strike, saying, firstly, "We'll check to see if any civilians are killed," and, secondarily, when information comes out, just assuring us, "Look, don't worry, it's all legal; everything is fine. You can all go home now."

You know, one of the problems of the drone debate up 'til now is that because it's been so polarized and because the issues are so complicated, there's been a tendency to sort of reduce things down to either drones are good or bad. What we're saying is that, you know, have to look at the local context. The current secrecy and the potential unlawfulness of the U.S. program, firstly, incenses Pakistanis, is used as a political football amongst those hard-liners in Pakistan who want to hide the abuses by the Taliban and other groups. And what Pakistan really needs to do is to move on. It needs to address the fact that even within Pakistan there's a huge problem with intolerance. There's a huge problem of a lack of quality education for most people. I mean, 2 percent, or less than that, of the GDP is spent on education. Women's access to education, you know, it's not universally bad, but it's very bad in the northwest, where Malala is from, where the Taliban are based. You know, these issues need to be addressed.

The fact that the U.S. carries out drones so secretively, it-you know, yes, it sparks anti-American sentiments, but also it creates all sorts of ideas about, you know, secret plots and this and that. What has to happen is more honesty in the discussion about, firstly, what is the problems in that region and the relation between the U.S. and Pakistan. When the U.S. government basically is secretive in the way that the Taliban is secretive or that al-Qaeda is secretive, when its drones are used in a way that causes fear in the hearts of people the way Taliban and al-Qaeda causes fear in people's hearts, that shows you what a big, serious problem we're dealing with.

Well, we want to thank you very much for much for being with us, Mustafa Qadri, author of the Amnesty International report. We will link to that report called "'Will I be Next?' US Drone Strikes in Pakistan." Mustafa Qadri is the Pakistan researcher at Amnesty International. On Friday, we'll be joined by Ben Emmerson, the U.N. special rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights. The U.N. has also put out a report on drones, as has Human Rights Watch. This is Democracy Now! We'll be back in a minute.

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"How Do You Justify Killing a Grandmother?" Amnesty Says U.S. Drone Strikes May Be War Crimes

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Amnesty International has released a major new report on how U.S. drone strikes kill civilians in Pakistan, where it says some deaths may amount to war crimes. The group reviewed 45 drone strikes that have occurred in North Waziristan since January 2012.

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Some of the young people sentenced under their watch were jailed over the objections of their probation officers. In 2009, Democracy Now! spoke with one of the young people who spent almost a year in one of the juvenile detention centers after being sentenced by Judge Ciavarella as a first-time offender. This is Jamie Quinn.

JAMIE QUINN: I was about 14 years old, and I got into an argument with one of my friends. And all that happened was just a basic fight. She slapped me in the face, and I did the same thing back. There was no marks, no witnesses, nothing. It was just her word against my word. My only charges were simple assault and harassment. And I didn't even know that charges were pressed against me until I had to go down to the intake and probation and fill out a whole bunch of paperwork.

JAMIE QUINN: It just makes me really question other authority figures and people that we're supposed to look up to and trust. I mean, Ciavarella has been a judge for a long time, from what I know, and a well-respected one, is what I thought. And obviously not. It just really makes me question and not trust other people. I mean, if someone like Judge Ciavarella could do this, then it makes me believe that anyone can betray the law and-I don't know.

For more, let's go to Philadelphia to Marsha Levick, chief counsel of the Juvenile Law Center, which helped expose the corrupt judges and represented the families' class action suit.

Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Marsha. Just lay out this latest settlement, which follows an earlier one a few years ago, and just the horror of this. These two judges who were found guilty of bribing are in prison now?

And I would add, I think, really listening to the story leading up to this about the private for-profit centers elsewhere, it's really important, I think, for us as a country, I think, for your listeners, to know that while we can talk about what happens in private centers, some of which, frankly, are not-for-profit, the same kinds of abuses can occur in state-run facilities, as well.

In Pennsylvania, I think that by exposing what happened with the judges scandal, we've also had an opportunity to achieve great reforms. We have really changed statutory policies in Pennsylvania with respect to children's right to counsel, with their ability to obtain appointed counsel on their own, presuming that they in fact don't have financial resources to do that. We have eliminated, for the most part, shackling in Pennsylvania courtrooms. We have provided and required that judges give a statement of reasons. So when judges in Pennsylvania commit children to public or private-run centers, they need to have an explanation for why they're doing that. And I think the kinds of stories that we're hearing about what might be happening in Florida or California, for example, we don't have the same kinds of protections. We don't have the same kind of transparency in place.

SANDY FONZO: My kid's not here! He's dead, because of him! He ruined my [bleep] life! I'd like him to go to hell and rot there forever!

SANDY FONZO: No! You know what he told everybody in court? They need to be held accountable for their actions. You need to be! Do you remember me? Do you remember me? Do you remember my son? An all-star wrestler? He's gone! He shot himself in the heart! You scumbag!

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"Cash for Kids": Firms Behind Juvenile Prison Bribes Reach $2.5 Million Settlement in Civil Suit

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We turn to the latest news in the so-called "kids-for-cash" scandal in Pennsylvania, in which judges took money in exchange for sending juvenile offenders to for-profit youth jails. In 2011, former Luzerne County Judge Mark Ciavarella was convicted of accepting bribes for putting juveniles into detention centers operated by the companies PA Child Care and a sister company, Western Pennsylvania Child Care.

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JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We end today's show with a new documentary that looks at those who have quietly slipped into poverty and now live on the margins of society. The film is called Redemption, and it's nominated for an Academy Award in the documentary shorts category this year. It's about New York City's canners, the largely invisible people who survive by redeeming bottles and cans they collect from curbs, garbage cans and apartment complexes. This is a clip from the film.

CANNER: I'm not against the rich; I'm against injustice, greed and injustice. That's what I'm against. There are more people here than ever before. They're all over the place, all over the place, trying to make a dollar, you know? This is like everybody is down on their luck, man, just about, you know?

Well, for more, we're joined by the film's directors, our colleagues, Jon Alpert and Matt O'Neill. In 2010, they were nominated for an Academy Award for their film China's Unnatural Disaster. They won four Emmys for the 2006 film Baghdad ER and were on the Oscar short list last year for In Tahrir Square. They work together at Downtown Community Television Center; that's DCTV, a community media center based in New York City's Chinatown, where Democracy Now! used to broadcast. Jon Alpert is the founder and executive director of the organization, which has won 15 Emmys, three Columbia-duPont Awards and a Peabody Award, among many other accolades.

Jon Alpert and Matt O'Neill, both, welcome to Democracy Now! Tell us about Redemption, Jon.

Well, you live in New York City. I think we all tend to walk on the street, and the people who are going through our garbage sort of blend in, and we don't look them in the eye, we don't talk to them. And one day, Sheila Nevins of HBO was walking past her garbage and saw-really early in the morning, and saw somebody who was up earlier than she was, working harder than she was, and she wondered who these people were.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, you know, it is amazing, because where the Daily News used to be on 33rd Street, it's almost like a-around 11th Avenue, is a Grand Central for the redeemers. They all get together. There's huge numbers of people every day are there. And it's-you're right: Most New Yorkers never really pay much attention at all to the lives of the people involved or how they got there.

SUSAN: I'm slow at this. When I first started, I hoped that nobody saw me that I knew.

Hey, how you doing?

In this area, there's a lot of young people, young people with good jobs. They're the guys with the money. I received a bachelor of science, and then I got into the computer industry. I've worked with Microsoft. I've worked with Compaq. I won what was considered the most prestigious award in the industry at the time. In 1990, I won the-I was one of the winners of the IBM Winner's Circle, which was given to 20 of the top sales and marketing people in the country. And now I'm helping keep the city clean.

A clip from Redemption, an Oscar-nominated short documentary. Matt O'Neill, tell us where Susan is today and some of the other people you profile?

MATTHEW O'NEILL: Sure. Most of the redeemers are still working on the street collecting cans. Susan is lucky enough to be living in Atlantic City right now. She's in housing down there. That was her goal. She just got priced out of New York, a New Yorker all her life. And without some sort of subsidy, she wasn't able to afford to stay here.

You know, you earlier played a clip from President Obama saying, "Before we were "us," we were "them," and I think that's something we have to pay attention to in this film, is recognizing that the men and women collecting bottles and cans are just like you and me. And they slip through the cracks. Juan, you said they were invisible. As we were making this film, and you see it, the men and women on the street who aren't collecting cans never make eye contact with the men and women collecting cans, walk right by, time after time, in every shot. They never engage. And these are our fellow New Yorkers. These are our fellow citizens. And it's not just happening here; it's happening all around the country. And we have to pay attention to it.

MATTHEW O'NEILL: So, when I started this, I thought that it was mostly going to be homeless people who were working on the streets. And it turns out that most of our can collectors have homes. They are the working poor. So you have Nuve, who is supporting four kids in Sunnyside, Queens, with her can collecting. And she's dropping the kids off at school before she heads out to collect cans, picking them up, and then spending the entire night sorting cans with her husband.

You have Lilly, who used to have a job in Chinatown. And Chinatown is still suffering from the effects of the World Trade Center. All those restaurant jobs are still gone. Lilly used to work in a restaurant. Now Lilly is on the street 20 hours a day working. I think that you couldn't find a boss in this country who wouldn't love to have an employee like Lilly who's willing to put in that sort of work ethic and those sorts of hours. I mean, she never stops. She outran Jon and I consistently when we were trying to film her.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And the-and their viewpoint of how the rest of the city treats them, especially the owners of these buildings, and when they go into-in front of private-it's one thing, a public can, but when you go into the trash of a private building, sometimes you can end up with conflicts with the landowners or the supers.

You can, and so there's a diplomatic aspect, too. They have to be very friendly, especially with the supers, because if you can basically score a big building and get access to that before the other canners can, that's money in your pocket. So that's also part of their job. It's competitive, too. You have to protect your route. If they're collecting cans from Democracy Now!, and they're sick one day, somebody else is coming to take those cans away.

What was really surprising to me is that-as a documentary filmmaker, I've gone all over the world. And one of the first places-it's almost a cliché-where we go and where reporters go is you head to the dump. And there's the documentary, Garbage Dreams, that's been made about the dump in Egypt; it's a really great documentary. I went to Smokey Mountain in the Philippines, and those reports were part of the pushing of the Marcos regime out, because of inequities that they showed. And to see this in my own country shocked me, that we have an army of people who glean through the garbage. I still get chills when I think about them.

Jon Alpert and Matt O'Neill, we want to thank you very much for being with us, the award-winning directing duo. Their latest film, Redemption, is Academy Award-nominated in the documentary short division.

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Redemption: Oscar-Nominated Doc Follows the Working Poor Who Survive on Collecting Bottles and Cans

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The HBO documentary "Redemption" examines New York City's canners - the largely invisible people who survive by redeeming bottles and cans they collect from curbs, garbage cans and apartment complexes. Many have quietly slipped into poverty after losing their jobs, now living on the margins of society.

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JUAN GONZÁLEZ: A new study shows that income inequality in America is at a record high. According to an analysis of tax filings, the income gap between the richest 1 percent of Americans and the other 99 percent widened to unprecedented levels in 2012. The top 1 percent of U.S. earners collected over 19 percent of household income, breaking a record previously set in 1927. Income inequality in the U.S. has been growing for almost three decades.

We spend the rest of the hour with a journalist who has covered poverty in America for the last two decades. His name is Sasha Abramsky. His new book is The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives. It's written in the spirit of Michael Harrington's groundbreaking 1962 book, The Other America, in which he chronicled the lives of people excluded from "the age of affluence." Harrington's book went on to inspire President Johnson's subsequent war on poverty. This is an excerpt of Johnson's State of the Union address January 8th, 1964.

PRESIDENT LYNDON JOHNSON: The program I shall propose will emphasize this cooperative approach to help that one-fifth of all American families with incomes too small to even meet their basic needs. Our chief weapons in a more pinpointed attack will be better schools and better health and better homes and better training and better job opportunities to help more Americans, especially young Americans, escape from squalor and misery and unemployment.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, our next guest, Sasha Abramsky, chronicles the stories of those struggling with poverty in America today, much like Michael Harrington did 50 years ago. His new book is called The Other American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives. Abramsky's reporting on poverty is funded by a grant from the Open Society Foundation's Special Fund for Poverty Alleviation.

Sasha Abramsky, welcome to Democracy Now!

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Tell us about-we just, as I was mentioning, had a mayoral race where the main candidate on the Democratic side was talking about income inequality, the 47 percent of New Yorkers who live at or near the poverty level. Talk about what you found is going across the country.

Now, obviously, after 2008, all of those crises got magnified, because you suddenly had an unemployment crisis on top of everything else. You had people burning through their life savings trying just to survive, just to make sure they had a roof over their head. You had families routinely going into bankruptcy when they had a healthcare emergency. You had low-income workers in rural areas; when gas prices went up a dollar a gallon, as they did, that was enough to collapse their financial security. And I went around the country, and I started talking to people. And it seemed to me that much as with Harrington about half a century ago, there was a story that was being missed here, that we were talking about affluence before 2008, or we were talking about the struggling middle classes after 2008, but what we weren't talking about was poverty. We were leaving out of the American story tens of millions of Americans who on a daily basis just weren't making ends meet. And that's the story that I chronicle in my book.

MEGAN ROBERTS: I stressed, stressed out. The dollar pay raise knocked us off housing. We went from $612 rent to a $1,030 rent. Knocked us off food stamps, so we didn't get any food assistance whatsoever. We didn't qualify for any of that. We had no Medicaid at that point, because that dollar pay raise knocked us off that. Left us hanging. He was only going to get private health insurance through his work. It would have taken effect January 1st of '06, but I got sick December 10th of '05. So we were left with this bill, and we ended up having to eventually-I believe it was April 16th, we filed for bankruptcy.

Now, coming back to what I was saying about Obama, I-when he came in, I thought this is a man who understands the stories, like Megan Roberts' stories. I think he's got a very mixed record when it comes to implementing anti-poverty measures. I think his administration did a pretty good job of stemming the worst collapse, of stopping the worst hemorrhaging since the 1930s. They did a far less good job in thinking through creative, holistic anti-poverty approaches. And what they haven't done yet-and maybe Obama's speech a couple weeks ago at the Lincoln Memorial, maybe that marks a turning point. But so far, what they haven't done is put the podium of the president behind a war on poverty in the way that Lyndon Johnson did half a century ago. And that, I think, we're waiting still to see.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I'm a little less optimistic about what may happen in the next few years, because a report that came out just yesterday that said that we have-the stock market has doubled in value since the collapse of 2008. Businesses have cash, huge amounts of cash that they're holding in their bank accounts. And yet, this report says that 95 percent of all of the gain in income since 2008, since the collapse, has gone to 1 percent of the population.

I talk about major reforms in the way we fund education. I advocate something called an educational opportunity fund, which would essentially be a social insurance system, much like Social Security, to render higher education universally affordable.

I talk about things like the earned income tax credit-quite an effective anti-poverty measure. But a lot of states have resisted putting in place their own state versions of the policy. I talk about things like what Alaska did. Alaska, which is by no means a left-wing, radical state-

We want to thank you very much. Sasha Abramsky's book is called The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives.

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The American Way of Poverty: As Inequality Hits Record High, Sasha Abramsky on the Forgotten Poor

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A new study shows that income inequality in America is at a record high. According to an analysis of tax filings, the income gap between the richest 1 percent of Americans and the other 99 percent widened to unprecedented levels in 2012. The top 1 percent of U.S.

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A leaked Pakistani government report has bolstered claims civilian casualties from U.S. drone strikes are far higher than the Obama administration has been willing to admit. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has released figures from the Pakistani government's own research into casualties from drone attacks in Pakistan's tribal areas. The Pakistani report investigates 75 CIA drone strikes and five attacks by NATO between 2006 and 2009. It finds the attacks left at least 746 people dead, including at least 147 civilians, 94 of them children. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism says the figures are likely too low: A previous study based largely on media reports found the number of drone-related civilian casualties in Pakistan ranges between 411 and 890.

The high number of civilian casualties directly contradicts statements made by senior Obama administration officials and top lawmakers. During CIA Director John Brennan's confirmation hearing earlier this year, Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein said the number of civilians killed in drone strikes has been very small.

SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN: I have also been attempting to speak publicly about the very low number of civilian casualties that result from such strikes. I have been limited in my ability to do so. But for the past several years, this committee has done significant oversight of the government's conduct of targeted strikes, and the figures we have obtained from the executive branch, which we have done our utmost to verify, confirm that the number of civilian casualties that have resulted from such strikes each year has typically been in the single digits.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein speaking during the confirmation hearing for CIA Director John Brennan earlier this year.

Well, to discuss the newly released numbers, we go to London to Chris Woods, award-winning reporter working with the drones investigation team at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which released the report. The Bureau's drone team was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism last month.

I don't know, but we may be the only news organization in the United States who got a studio in London not to talk about the royal baby. I'm not sure. Can you confirm or deny, Chris?

I think this really important document that the Bureau has been able to obtain and publish, in full, which really does show the inner thinking of Pakistan's government about what was going on with the CIA drone strikes at one of the most intense periods. And as you say, Amy, the CIA has been claiming-we heard Dianne Feinstein there saying, you know, a tiny number of civilians killed over the entire nine years of CIA bombing in Pakistan. Well, this document says something entirely different. This says at least 147 civilians, perhaps as high as 220, just in a three-year period. This is a lot of civilians killed on the CIA's watch, and this flatly contradicts the claims by both the agency and by the U.S. administration.

Last month, we spoke to Jonathan Landay, the senior national security and intelligence reporter from McClatchy Newspapers, and we asked him to talk about the recent documents he had obtained about drone strikes in Pakistan.

What these documents showed was that in many cases the CIA actually wasn't sure or didn't know who they were targeting. They were targeting unknown, quote-unquote, "militants." They were going after, quote-unquote, "other militants," foreign extremists. But it was quite evident from their own estimates of the number of casualties that were being caused in these drone strikes that hundreds of people who they suspected of being militants were being killed in these drone strikes. And the documents that I concentrated on showed most-charted most of the drone strikes in the tribal areas over a period of a year that stretched from September of 2010 to September of 2011, which was the height of the drone strikes. And, you know, almost a quarter, I believe-and I'm reaching back now-of those drone strikes were targeted against non-al-Qaeda groups. And so, it showed that, as I said, that the administration had been not telling or fully disclosing who it was who was targeted, who were being targeted.

I think Jonathan's report was absolutely outstanding last month. And then, if you like, this Pakistan document is the opposite side of that same coin. You know, Jonathan is saying, "Who were these mystery people that the CIA was killing? It didn't know who they were." Well, even into 2010, 2011, the Bureau's work and the work of others has shown consistently that a lot of those people that the CIA was classified-classifying as unknown militants were civilians, a lot of them military-aged males, but they were civilians by everybody's definition, but many of them-many of them-women and children, particularly in the earlier stages of the campaign.

It's a real shame that Jonathan hasn't been able to yet publish in full the leaked documents that he was able to obtain. We're very, very keen to be able to cross-reference that material against the findings of the Bureau and others out there in the field, but I think that's something we're going to have to wait on in the present climate in the U.S., this concern around leaked documents and so on.

But, yeah, the two documents are the opposite sides of the same coin. On the one hand, you have CIA saying, "Well, we're killing militants. We don't know who they are." On the other hand, the Pakistan government is secretly saying, "Oh, they're killing a lot of civilians."

There are some really interesting omissions. So, there are some strikes that are just missing. So, for some reason, all of 2007 is missing. There were only four or five strikes that year. It's not a significant number, but it's a strange omission. They only start in 2006, so the very small number of strikes in 2004 and '05 are missing. Fascinatingly, there is no naming of individuals, whether civilian or militant. And some very big-name militant leaders were killed in some of these strikes. For example, Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the Pakistan Taliban, who was killed back in August 2009, you read the entry in this Pakistan document, which you can find online on the Bureau's website, by the way-we published it in full there-no reference at all to the fact that one of the most dangerous men in Pakistan at that time, an existential threat to the people of Pakistan, had been killed. It just says, "One woman killed, one man killed," and it leaves it at that. It's a very strange document, from that point of view.

Also missing-and this is where I think it gets really interesting, is when we get into Obama's first year, in 2009, civilian deaths disappear from the record. Now, partly that's because the document ends at the end of that year, and some of these investigations were clearly still ongoing. But we found examples where we know the civilian administration of the tribal areas in Pakistan knew that civilians had died. In fact, there are documents showing that. But somehow and for some reason, those records of civilian deaths under Obama just slide away from the record. So they're just not there for 2009, and we don't really have a good explanation as to why that is.

So, some really curious omissions, but otherwise, you know, I think a very important document. And it just adds to this growing canon of publicly available evidence that says, "You know what? This claim that CIA killed 50 to 60 civilians in Pakistan, it just doesn't add up. It doesn't add up at all." And really, all of the questioning needs, in my view, to be focusing back on CIA right now. They are the holders of the key information that we need to be hearing: Who did they kill? When did they kill them? Why did they kill them? And these are the answers I think we really need now.

We don't have an agenda, other than to try and bring some kind of transparency and accountability. The more we look at this story, the more we uncover, the more the claims of the U.S. and Pakistan governments are really shown wanting. You know, it's only a few weeks ago that John Brennan was standing in front of the Senate and saying that people making claims of high civilian deaths in Pakistan were deliberate falsehoods, lies. Now, how many leaked documents, how many field investigations have to take place consistently showing far higher civilian deaths in places like Pakistan for the claims of John Brennan himself to start getting taken on?

You know, the Bureau, I'm sure, is going to be continuing on this for a long time to come. There's a lot more that still needs to be uncovered about this war, this secret war. And, of course, it's an expanding war, as we know. It's in Yemen, in Somalia, and probably going to be going to other countries now, as well. Unless we understand who really gets killed and, you know, how a civilian is really defined by the CIA, which I suspect is a very different definition from one you or I would ever accept-until we understand that key stuff, how can we talk about the efficiency, the accuracy of this drone war, this secret drone war? I don't think we can.

Chris, let's turn to comments that CIA Director John Brennan made during his confirmation hearing earlier this year. The hearing had to be temporarily halted following repeated interruptions by protesters. Members of CodePink began standing up one by one to condemn Brennan's role in the drone war. He addressed the protesters as he defended the drone program.

JOHN BRENNAN: I think there is a misimpression on the part of some American people, who believe that we take strikes to punish terrorists for past transgressions. Nothing could be further from the truth. We only take such actions as a last resort to save lives when there's no other alternative to taking an action that's going to mitigate that threat. So, we need to make sure that there is understanding, and the people that were standing up here today, I think they really have a misunderstanding of what we do as a government and the care that we take and the agony that we go through to make sure that we do not have any collateral injuries or deaths. And as the chairman said earlier, the need to be able to go out and say that publicly and openly, I think, is critically important, because people are reacting to a lot of falsehoods that are out there.

That was CIA, well, nominee, director nominee, John Brennan, during his confirmation hearing. He's been confirmed. Chris Woods, your response to what he said?

And there you have that phrase, Amy, "falsehoods, lies," that the organizations like ours, credible researchers, academics, lawyers, all the people who are trying to do a good job understanding out there-we're lying? Really, the evidence just shows quite the opposite. Brennan has since said, by the way, that such claims of high civilian deaths are a deliberate misrepresentation. That was an interview he gave to GQ very recently.

But it's not just Brennan who's doing this. Dianne Feinstein, in the clip that you played earlier, said, you know, the Senate Intelligence Committee had gone to great lengths to get to the bottom of this question of high civilian deaths, claims of high civilian deaths in Pakistan. Well, I did some follow-up on that. I got got in touch with every single organization that had conducted significant field investigations in Pakistan into civilian deaths, regardless of the outcome. Every single organization came back to me with the same answer: "We have never been contacted by any member of any congressional oversight committee, intelligence oversight committee, of either House of Congress or their staffers." This idea that there's oversight, this idea that Congress is doing its job, is looking into claims and counterclaims around civilian deaths, just doesn't stack up. They're going to CIA and saying, "Show us your videos. Tell us what you did." And then they're making an assumption based on that. There's no independent investigating going on here. And there's no reaching outside the U.S. intelligence community. And I think until both Congress and the agency itself start to address some of these public concerns, I think we're going to have this huge gulf, this growing gulf, between public perception of what the drone war is about and this claim by the U.S. government that "It's fine. It only kills terrorists. And you know what? We don't ever kill any civilians. Or if we do, it's a tiny number."

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Leaks related to national security can put people at risk. They can put men and women in uniform that I've sent into the battlefield at risk. They can put some of our intelligence officers, who are in various dangerous situations that are easily compromised, at risk. I make no apologies, and I don't think the American people would expect me, as commander-in-chief, not to be concerned about information that might compromise their missions or might get them killed.

And, you know, the Snowden documents, they're uncomfortable for the United States and problematic. I get that. But, you know, out here in the wider world, the uproar about this revelation that the NSA spies on literally everyone is extraordinary. And as I'm sure you know, Amy, huge engagement from governments in Europe here, and possibly action by the European Union against the United States and about technology companies based in the U.S. for allowing these these kind of backdoor accesses and so on. So, I mean, do we really want a situation where journalists in the United States are afraid to publish leaks, which are of vital importance to the health of the body politic? Because that really seems to be where we're heading right now. I think that's a very, very worrying situation.

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First Leaked Pakistani Report on U.S. Drone War Undermines Claims of Low Civilian Toll

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A leaked Pakistani government report has bolstered claims that civilian casualties from U.S. drone strikes are far higher than the Obama administration has been willing to admit. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has released figures from the Pakistani government's own research into casualties from drone attacks in Pakistan's tribal areas.

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As part of ongoing debt negotiations, the White House has proposed slashing more than $4 trillion from annual budget deficits over the next decade-twice what Obama had proposed earlier. While much of the talk in Washington centers on taxes, Social Security and Medicare, far less attention is being paid to the growing cost of the U.S. wars overseas. A new report from Brown University has estimated the true cost of the U.S. wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan will end up costing approximately $4 trillion, far more than the Bush or Obama administrations have acknowledged. The authors of the study reveal that because the war has been financed almost entirely by borrowing, $185 billion in interest has already been paid on war spending, and another $1 trillion could accrue in interest alone through 2020. We speak with Neta Crawford, co-director of the Costs of War Project and a professor of political science at Boston University. [includes rush transcript]

Guests

Neta Crawford

co-director of the Costs of War Project and a professor of political science at Boston University.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

While much of the talk in Washington centers on taxes, Social Security and Medicare, far less attention is being paid to the growing cost of U.S. wars overseas.

Ah, OK, we just lost Sharif, but we will show the photographs that Sharif has been taking at Tahrir, and we will also re-tweet his tweets throughout the day at democracynow.org. Thanks so much to Sharif Abdel Kouddous, reporting to us from Tahrir, as we move from Egypt to what is happening now in the United States, these negotiations that are going on. Juan?

The significance of this report, even as they are debating the deficit in Washington and talking about agreeing on deep cuts to Social Security and Medicare, Neta Crawford, the costs that the United States is spending right now in the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and what you're pointing out in this report, equally in Pakistan, right now?

And then the other element of the cost is that future cost, which we must pay: the interest on the debt and veterans' medical and disability. Then there's another layer of costs which we weren't able to really fully calculate, which are the social costs to families and also the cost to state and local governments for veterans' care. And then there are many others, pockets of costs, if you look all over the U.S. government.

And I think another element here is that, again, the costs are sort of hidden from view and put in these different budgets, so it's hard, unless you take a more comprehensive view, to get a handle on the scale of the costs.

A third factor is perhaps the fact that these wars have been funded mostly through special appropriations or emergency appropriations, until recently. And then, those costs are not scrutinized as much by Congress as they ought to be.

Professor Crawford, we'll leave it there, but we'll link to your report at democracynow.org. It's called "Costs of War." Professor Crawford is professor of political science at Boston University.
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As Debt Talks Threaten Medicare, Social Security, Study Finds U.S. Spending $4 Trillion on War

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As part of ongoing debt negotiations, the White House has proposed slashing more than $4 trillion from annual budget deficits over the next decade-twice what Obama had proposed earlier. While much of the talk in Washington centers on taxes, Social Security and Medicare, far less attention is being paid to the growing cost of the U.S.

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This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. As we are broadcasting now, for our TV viewers, we are showing images of the courtroom where Ariel Castro is about to be arraigned-the suspect in the Cleveland kidnappings and rapes. He has been charged with four counts of kidnapping, three counts of rape, so far. I'm Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

To talk more about the Cleveland kidnappings, we're joined by Jaclyn Friedman, executive direction of Women, Action, and the Media and editor of the anthology, Yes Means Yes!: Visions of Female Sexual Power & A World Without Rape. Eric Sandy is still on the line with us from Cleveland. He's a staff writer at the Cleveland Scene, a weekly newspaper.

Jaclyn, talk about what you have been writing about right now.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Jaclyn Friedman, your response when you hear of the role of the police department previously in this case, or the law enforcement in-with Ariel Castro having severely beaten his former wife, never-never being brought to justice for that case?

I think it's really notable that both Ariel Castro and Charles Ramsey, the man who intervened to free these women, both have histories of domestic violence. And-but Charles Ramsey got domestic violence intervention after a charge, right? And so, he actually did the right thing: He intervened. In a situation that we're taught to see as private, as not my business, he stepped in, and he intervened. But I think the fact that they both have it in their history shows exactly how common gender-based violence is and how we really don't treat it like a big deal at all, and that we can do all the bystander intervention training in the world, right-and in fact numerous of these neighbors seem to have tried to intervene at different points-if we don't have structures that remove impunity for this violence, it's not going to get anywhere, if the police don't take these allegations seriously, if they look the other way, if they act with less force than they would if, say, he was-Ariel Castro was alleged to be dealing drugs, right? Can you imagine the SWAT team that would have descended on his house if they thought he was a drug dealer?

REPORTER: And did you know who that was when you-when she said that?

REPORTER: What was the reaction on the girls' faces? I can't imagine, to see the sunlight, to be around people.

REPORTER: Charles-Charles, thank you very much.

REPORTER: Thank you very much for your time.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And we're just hearing that the arraignment is over for Ariel Castro, and apparently he has been given a $2 million bail on each count, and I think there are eight counts-

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Seven counts, so that would be-

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, so that would be $14-

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: So that would be $14 million, $14 million bail for him. Eric Sandy, what are you going to be following up today in your coverage?

At the same time, the Cleveland Police Department is investigating their 911 call-taking process and the individual dispatchers who were taking the 911 calls from Charles Ramsey and Amanda Berry. That process and those employees are under investigation. And so, we are trying to look into what the process is at the Cleveland Police Department, how it works on a typical basis, outside of high-profile cases like this, and what perhaps went wrong, what perhaps went right Monday evening.

And until we end impunity-and I want to say something about that. We need to create police or other justice structures that communities trust, right? So, just saying more policing, better policing, absolutely, but you also have to think about: What about an undocumented immigrant who has been raped? What about communities and individuals, for great reasons, who don't trust the police? We need much better justice structures. We need to take this as a priority as a culture. If we prioritized women's safety as a culture, if we prioritized ending sexual violence, we would be pouring massive resources into this. We do into the drone program, right? So, where are the resources being poured into solving this problem?

I want to thank you both for being with us. Jaclyn Friedman, executive director of Women, Action, and the Media and editor of the anthology, Yes Means Yes!: Visions of Female Sexual Power & A World Without Rape. And also thanks so much to Eric Sandy, the staff writer of the Cleveland Scene, a weekly newspaper. We will link to all their reporting.

This is Democracy Now! When we come back, a new co-op is in town in Chicago. There's hope. Stay with us.

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Behind the Cleveland Kidnappings, A Culture of "Toxic Masculinity" & Gender-Based Violence

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Cleveland kidnap victims Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michele Knight were allegedly subjected to years of physical and sexual abuse at the hands of suspect Ariel Castro. Questions are now being raised why the police did not investigate Castro more closely earlier, especially since Castro was accused in 1993 and 2005 of attacking his ex-wife Grimilda Figueroa.

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AARON MATÉ: We begin with a historic ruling in federal court that the stop-and-frisk tactics used by New York police officers are unconstitutional. In a harshly critical decision, U.S. District Court Judge Shira Scheindlin said police had relied on what she called a "policy of indirect racial profiling" that led officers to routinely stop "blacks and Hispanics who would not have been stopped if they were white." Since 2002, the police department has conducted more than five million stop-and-frisks. According to the police department's own reports, nearly nine out of 10 New Yorkers [who] have been stopped and frisked have been innocent.

The ruling came after several months of testimony, much of it from eight plaintiffs who were all African American or Latino. Together they described a total 19 incidents in which they were stopped and, in some cases, searched and frisked unlawfully. Shortly after the decision was announced, the plaintiffs in the case held a news conference alongside their lawyers.

DAVID OURLICHT: When I got the call this morning, the first thing I did was cry. And it wasn't-wasn't because I was sad or necessarily happy, but because it was so-you know, I put everything to-you know, it's important, and to know that it was recognized is just-it's hard to explain. I think, actually, there is something else I have to say. I think it's a really good picture of what's going on in society. I mean, this is a big thing for New York, but as far as America as a whole, it shows the polarization of people of color in this country as how we're viewed, you know, and I think it-I think it just needs to be recognized.

NICHOLAS PEART: You know, our voices do count, and count toward something, you know, greater. And, you know, this has been a long time coming, this case, and all the time that has been put into it and the sacrifices, you know, just taking off work and coming here and giving our testimony to, you know, a big issue that has transcended beyond communities of black and brown people. You know, this is an issue that folks in Tribeca now understand and folks in Soho now understand and have a really, really accurate understanding of this. You know, so I'm grateful for that and the attention that it has received. And, you know, I think it's clear, you know, the psychological consequences of "stop and frisk" and it being a rites of passage for so many black and brown boys, and, you know, having this experience and being criminalized and, you know, how that carries on to their adult years. So I think we are taking some tremendous steps forward, and I'm definitely grateful for that.

DEVIN ALMONOR: I just feel glad that my-my lawyers, I commend them, and the judge, for doing an outstanding job on my behalf and the other plaintiffs'. And it's just the beginning of, like, reparations. And with my case, I could have, like-I could have been like Trayvon Martin, because each-it was just too unbearable, and I could have been in his same place. And my heart goes out to his family. And it's just-it's just very hard to get through this, but with the help of my parents and my friends and my lawyers, they've done all that they can for me, and I love them so very much.

LALIT CLARKSON: In thinking about it, the reason why I joined on to this case was because many of us, including myself, feel like "stop and frisk" is police abuse, and that that's the lowest level of police abuse. And once police abuse power when it comes to "stop and frisk," then they can do it in terms of falsely arresting people, then they can do it in terms of planting evidence. And at the most extreme cases, they can do it in terms of killing people. So I think, for many of us here, including myself, this is important, because if we can find remedies to stop officers from violating our constitutional rights, then maybe other forms of police abuse, as it relates to people in my community and other community members, maybe some of that begins to stop.

LEROY DOWNS: Just really thankful for the people that believed in us, you know, that we weren't making up these stories. We didn't fabricate anything. We came to the table and said, "This is our experiences, and we're speaking for millions of other people that are going through the same thing in this city." And I'm just hopeful that-I know it's premature, but I'm hopeful that the monitor-it's not too much bureaucracy with the other city-court-appointed monitors, that we can really have some teeth in the legislation and really make changes to stop-question-and-frisk, and that the policies can actually change, man, like not just talk about change, but really change, really make those adjustments so that people can walk down the street or can stand in front of their house on a cellphone and not have to worry about, you know, being accused of being a drug dealer or something like that. So, I'm thankful to that. Thank you.

AARON MATÉ: Those are the voices of LeRoy Downs, Lalit Clarkson, Devin Almonor, Nicholas Peart, David Ourlicht, all plaintiffs in the stop-and-frisk lawsuit. In her ruling, Judge Scheindlin found, quote, "the city's highest officials have turned a blind eye to the evidence that officers are conducting stops in a racially discriminatory manner." She also appointed a federal monitor to oversee reforms, with input from community members as well as police. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg reacted angrily to the ruling and accused the judge of denying the city a fair trial.

MAYOR MICHAEL BLOOMBERG: This is a very dangerous decision made by a judge that I think just does not understand how policing works and what is compliant with the U.S. Constitution as determined by the Supreme Court. We believe we have done exactly what the courts allow and the Constitution allow us to do, and we will continue to do everything we can to keep this city safe. Throughout the case, we didn't believe that we were getting a fair trial. And this decision confirms that suspicion. And we will be presenting evidence of that unfairness to the appeals court.

We welcome you to Democracy Now! Your response to Judge Shira Scheindlin's ruling?

AARON MATÉ: Can you explain what Judge Scheindlin ruled in determining that "stop and frisk" violates the Fourth and 14th Amendment? And also talk about the remedies that she's ordered.

Yes. In the Fourth Amendment claim, she's saying that-she said that the city has a practice, a widespread practice, of going out and stopping people without individualized suspicion that there is crime afoot, which is what is required by the Supreme Court law in Terry v. Ohio. In the 14th Amendment claim, she's saying that, look, many of these stops are not only based on-lack reasonable suspicion, but they're on the basis of race. The city and the New York Police Department is using race as a proxy for crime. Rather than looking at what is this person doing specifically that would allow the police to stop them, they're saying, "Because they're black or brown in this area, we're just going to stop them to try to prevent crime," which is not-is not constitutional, it's illegal.

And then, in terms of remedies, what she's done is she said that she's going to appoint a federal court monitor, which is very common in policing systemic reform cases to oversee the day-to-day activity of reforms. And she's also said she wants a second phase of the reform, where community members get to have a stake in what reforms are going to happen. And she's calling for a joint reform process that will have a facilitator, that allows-also allows the New York Police Department to have a seat at the table to say, "Hey, this is what we think would work. This is what we think wouldn't work." I mean, you know, this really should be seen as an opportunity by the police department.

What I find most disturbing and offensive about this decision is the notion that the NYPD engages in racial profiling. That simply is recklessly untrue. We do not engage in racial profiling. It is prohibited by law. It is prohibited by our own regulations. We train our officers that they need reasonable suspicion to make a stop, and I can assure you that race is never a reason to conduct a stop. The NYPD is the most racially and ethnically diverse police department in the world. In contrast with some societies, New York City and its police department have focused their crime-fighting efforts to protect the poorest members of our community, who are disproportionately the victims of murder and other violent crime-disturbingly so. To that point, last year 97 percent of all shooting victims were black or Hispanic and reside in low-income neighborhoods. Public housing, in just-with 5 percent of the city's population, resides-experiences 20 percent of the shootings. There were more stops for suspicious activity in neighborhoods with higher crime because that's where the crime is.

That's NYPD Police Commissioner Ray Kelly speaking Monday. President Obama has indicated he may consider appointing Kelly the new secretary of homeland security, to which Paul Butler, a law professor at Georgetown University and a former U.S. Department of Justice prosecutor, said, "Ray Kelly needs to be the Homeland Security secretary like Paula Deen needs to run the United Nations World Food Program." He wrote, "Commissioner Kelly is the poster child for the most racially insensitive police practice in the United States, stop and frisk. During his term in office, the number of times police stop people on the street for questioning increased from about 100,000, in 2002, to almost 700,000 in 2011." But Commissioner Kelly is saying that they are doing this in high crime communities and saving lives in those communities.

Well, you know, this is something that was analyzed ad nauseam by the court. We had two statistical experts that testified multiple times in the case, and she said, "This is just absolutely false." She gave very little weight to this argument, because, in reality, the number of times that officers actually check the box on the UF-250 form, that says that they're stopping someone based on a suspect description, is not that high. It's between 10 and 15 percent, depending on the year. Instead, they check this box that says "high crime area." And when our statistical expert analyzed each incident, from 2002 to June 2012, when that box was checked, you know, we found that when you control for all other factors, race is what is determinative, not-it's not actually the area and the crime rate.

AARON MATÉ: Now, the term itself, "stop and frisk," can sound kind of harmless, you know, a "stop and frisk" or-it implies a pat-down. But what is the reality of this practice, that you see from talking to your clients?

We're talking about something that is physically invasive and degrading. You know, this is an officer that's saying, "Hey, put your hands against the wall," and aggressively putting their hands over their bodies, down their waist, down their pant legs, both sides. And one of our plaintiffs-or one of our witnesses even testified about, you know, being grabbed in the groin area. And he felt-on his 18th birthday. And he just felt that this was so humiliating. He filed a complaint. And, you know, at that young age, to even-to bring that forward and to make that kind of claim and then feel that that was-that the officer was not held accountable, I mean, it really has a lasting detrimental impact on the relationship between the police and the community.

I want to thank you very much, Sunita, for joining us. Sunita Patel is a staff attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, co-counsel on the stop-and-frisk federal action lawsuit. This is Democracy Now! When we come back, a Democracy Now! exclusive. Stay with us.

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Judge Rules NYPD "Stop and Frisk" Unconstitutional, Cites "Indirect Racial Profiling"

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In a historic ruling, a federal court has ruled the controversial "stop-and-frisk" tactics used by New York City Police officers are unconstitutional. In a harshly critical decision, U.S. District Court Judge Shira Scheindlin said police had relied on what she called a "policy of indirect racial profiling" that led officers to routinely stop "blacks and Hispanics who would not have been stopped if they were white."

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This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. Our guest is Anjali Kamat, now a correspondent for Al Jazeera Fault Lines, a weekly investigative news program on Al Jazeera English and Al Jazeera America, which launched in the United States and is on cable channels across the United States.

Anjali, the first piece that you did, before Egypt, was Bangladesh, Made in Bangladesh. We watched you in this documentary as you sifted through the fire looking for U.S. labels. Can you talk about what happened there in Tazreen?

ANJALI KAMAT: Yeah, so, you know, there have been a series of disasters in garment factories in Bangladesh over the past several years, but there's been a lot of attention to it in the past year. We went to Bangladesh in June to look at what was happening with Wal-Mart's supply chain in Bangladesh. And we were interested in a pair of shorts, part of Wal-Mart's Faded Glory line, that had been found in the ruins of Tazreen, which was a factory that burned down last November, killing at least 112 workers. So we spoke to workers. We spoke to activists. We also spoke to different people along the supply chain.

And one of the things we found, very clearly, was that it is very convenient for large corporations and large retailers like Wal-Mart to not know very much about their supply chain and to remain in the dark about that, because it gives them plausible deniability when there's an accident. And this is something that an auditor who used to work for Wal-Mart told us. It's something that advocates in the U.S., like Scott Nova from the Worker Rights Consortium, told us. And it was played out by what we saw in the supply chain in Bangladesh. I mean, at the very bottom of the supply chain, what we found is that there's very little oversight, and you have factories that are basically in people's backyards, in their apartments. And large corporations pretend to know nothing about these operations. But this is where-this is the building blocks of the garments that we all buy. And it's not just Wal-Mart.

What we found is we ended up in a small finishing house, where garments are finished. They're sort of trimmed, and the buttons are put on, the elastic band is put on. It's the final step before the garments are shipped out. And we found this small finishing house with, you know, one small window, bars on the windows, no fire extinguisher, just a thatched roof, about 25 young girls and boys working there on Old Navy jeans. And we found children as young as 12 putting in elastic bands into Old Navy jeans. When we took our findings to Gap Inc., they denied-

AMY GOODMAN: Which owns Old Navy.

ANJALI KAMAT: Which owns Old Navy. They denied any connection to this finishing house, said they didn't know about it, and claimed that the products were either counterfeit or had been improperly acquired. But we collected tags, Old Navy tags, at the finishing house, and we matched the barcodes from these tags to products that were being sold at Old Navy stores in the U.S. So, you know, Gap's claim that these are counterfeit are really-should be called into question.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what about the attempts, or the publicized attempts, especially by European manufacturers, to institute new standards for the factories in Bangladesh? What were you able to see in terms of whether there's any real progress or change in the way that the manufacturing end of this worldwide garment industry, so much of it centered in countries like Bangladesh-what's happening there?

ANJALI KAMAT: Right. I mean, so the garment industry is a backbone of the economy in Bangladesh, and, you know, everybody wants a job in the garment industry. And, you know, that's something that needs to be said.

With respect to the brands, I mean, you've got two different safety accords now. The Europeans, European retailers, signed onto one safety accord. Wal-Mart, Gap and other American retailers refused to sign onto that and came up with their own accord saying that this was the best guarantee of worker safety and building safety in Bangladesh and that they're going to begin all these inspections of factories in Bangladesh.

Now, just earlier this month, there was another fire at a unit that had clothes linked to Wal-Mart, and 10 people-at least 10 people were killed in this factory fire. And Wal-Mart claimed that this particular unit-I think it was a dying unit-wouldn't fall under their inspections. So there's a lot of gaps that are still, you know, not being-not going to be included in these new safety accords. And they don't really say very much about paying workers more, about treating workers with more respect.

You know, I think it's important to remember that it's been almost a year since the Tazreen factory fire. At least 112 workers were killed. Wal-Mart shorts were found in the rubble of the factory. There's been no compensation paid by Wal-Mart to any of the survivors, to any of the victims' families. And they're still living in the shadow of this factory.

Anjali Kamat, we want to thank you very much for being with us, as you continue to do your investigations. And you can check out Fault Lines at Al Jazeera America on your local cable company, as it broadcasts now all over the country on the former channel of Current, which Al Jazeera bought.

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Journalists Find 12-Year-Old Girls Making Old Navy Jeans for Gap in Bangladeshi Factory

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Al Jazeera's Anjali Kamat discusses her recent investigation into the state of Bangladeshi sweatshops following the November 2012 fire at the Tazreen factory that killed at least 112 people. Al Jazeera uncovered factories where Old Navy pants are being worked on by children as young as 12.

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Black Issues/News

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Home Page | DefenderNetwork.com | Houston Defender

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Houston's Leading Black News & Information Source.

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PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: But, once again, I want to thank the leadership for coming together and getting this done. Hopefully next time it won't be in the 11th hour. One of the things that I said throughout this process is, we've got to get out of the habit of governing by crisis.

We go now to Washington, D.C. We're joined by longtime Democratic Congressmember John Conyers of Michigan, ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, has served more than 48 years in Congress, longer than any other African-American lawmaker, one of the longest-serving lawmakers in Congress.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Congressmember Conyers. Talk about the significance of this crisis for the moment being averted and what it cost the country.

We finally, after 16 days, at the last hours, were able to get to some agreement that is really very short-lived. The continuing resolution only lasts 'til the middle of January-on Martin Luther King's birthday, ironically-and the debt ceiling expires on February 7th. So, this is merely kicking the can down the road, as they say.

I think it's important, but I'm still trying to rationalize how the non-tea-party Republicans in the House can let the tea-party-oriented members in their caucus control everything. And it's really kind of disappointing, because you can't negotiate whether-over a dispute over one measure, which creates healthcare for millions of Americans that can't afford it, that we would close down the funding of the entire government. This is a tactic that is so obviously out of place and makes the legislative process literally unworkable. And so it's my hope that we can figure out a way to get this rolling again.

Speaker Boehner is in an incredible position, and his legacy is going to be determined by whether he continues to cave in to the ultra-conservatives in his caucus or not. To his credit, it seemed to me that he wanted to be more cooperative, but he was afraid of even being dismissed from the speakership. I think he's over that kind of a hump, but it's at a cost of $24 billion, 800,000 people out of work. And then the government, after we signed it late last night, they say, "All government workers, please come to work the very next day."

And to think that you would have so many members, 144 in the House and 18 in the Senate, who would say, "Well, there's nothing wrong with shutting down the whole government, not raising the debt ceiling, and really hurting the credit rating of the largest, most powerful country in civilization." And it's just unimaginable, the actions that they would turn to to get their way on a very small and modest bill, "Obamacare." We're talking about universal healthcare for everybody, single-payer. That's what the new direction is. And yet, this kind of "everything or nothing, and we're going to get our way on any bill," that kind of an attitude destroys, really, or compromises the democratic legislative process-

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Rep. John Conyers Pushes for a "Full Employment" Bill as Congress Votes to End Shutdown

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Congress approved an 11th-hour deal late last night to end the 16-day partial government shutdown and pull the nation back from the brink of an historic debt default. The spending measure passed the Senate and House of Representatives after Republicans dropped efforts to use the legislation to force changes in President Obama's signature healthcare law.

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The partial shutdown of the federal government has entered its 16th day, and the nation is now on the brink of a default as the government's borrowing authority ends tomorrow. On Tuesday, Fitch Ratings warned it could cut the U.S. government's AAA debt rating if a deal to raise the debt limit isn't reached. In a statement, Fitch said, quote, "The prolonged negotiations over raising the debt ceiling ... risks undermining confidence in the role of the U.S. dollar as the preeminent global reserve currency, by casting doubt over the full faith and credit of the U.S."

The Senate appears to move closer to a deal to reopen the government and raise the debt limit, but the Republican-controlled House of Representatives failed twice Tuesday to produce its own plan. This is House Speaker John Boehner.

To talk more about the government shutdown and the possible default, we're joined by two guests. Robert Borosage is the founder and president of the Institute for America's Future and co-director of its sister organization, the Campaign for America's Future. He recently wrote a piece for Reuters called "Tea Party Zealots Hold the Public Debate Hostage." We're also joined by Amanda Terkel, senior political reporter and politics managing editor at The Huffington Post.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Bob Borosage, let's begin with you. What has this shutdown meant?

Amanda Terkel, you wrote a really interesting piece for The Huffington Post about what gets shut down and what remains open. Can you give us some of the examples?

Congress has kept its gym open, the gym for members. The gym for staff has been closed, but the gym for members is open. And then even there's a little subway in the bottom of the Capitol so that members don't have to walk a few hundred feet to get from the Capitol to the House and Senate office buildings, and that little train takes someone to run it. That train is still running.

And so, I think, you know, it's important that this isn't just affecting people who work for government or who rely on government services, which is pretty much every American, but it's also affecting many private businesses. Businesses who rely on tourism and who are around national parks are seeing a drop-restaurants, shops, you know, if you run a canoeing service in a national park. So this is really rippling all across all sectors of society.

Bloomberg has a piece, "Troops Forage for Food While Golfers Play On in Shutdown." "Grocery stores on Army bases in the U.S. are closed. The golf course at Andrews Air Force base is open." Yes, so who is essential, and who isn't? Now, the way the tea party congressmembers are talking about it is each thing that's essential, they can vote on, if you want that particular thing to be open. This is certainly a way of, you know, shrinking the government to the size of a bathtub. Your thoughts on that, Bob Borosage, and then what it means moving from the partial shutdown to the deadline tomorrow, October 17th?

It's important for people to understand, these are debts that every Republican member in the House, including the tea party members, voted for as part of their budget resolution. So we're talking about lifting the debt ceiling to cover debts that they supported, to pay the debts that they ran up, and they're refusing to do that. And we really don't know what happens if America defaults on its debt. The entire global financial system depends on the security of American bonds. And if they become less secure, if interest rates spike, as they are likely to do, if investors can't count on them as the equivalent of cash, then you're talking not about a small slowdown, you're talking about a multitrillion-dollar house of financial cards that is going to be shaken at its root.

We're going to break and then come back to this discussion. We're talking to Bob Borosage and to Amanda Terkel-Amanda Terkel of The Huffington Post, Bob Borosage with Institute for America's Future. Stay with us.

[break]

A big date, I think, you know, you can-this default isn't going to be something that suddenly the lights turn off tomorrow, and the Treasury can continue to try to scramble a bit. But on November 1st, a big set of payments to veterans and to Social-and Social Security to seniors have to be paid or postponed. And I think if there's a D-date on this, where the rubber hits the road, where real pain is going to be felt, beyond the financial system, it will be that.

In terms of the financial system, no one knows. Interest rates are-on short-term notes are already spiking. They could spike at any time, when investors decide they've just got to bail out of these instruments because they can't-they can't afford to risk what the decline in their value will be. If we get our ratings diminished by the rating agencies, there's a whole set of investments that pension funds make in Treasury bills that they can't sustain if they're not rated AAA. And so, the consequences here are literally incalculable. And how they hit, we don't know. But they will grow with each moment. You know, Boehner started your show by saying, "I always thought a debt default was wrong, and we shouldn't get near it." Well, we're not only near it, we're beginning it.

And the District of Columbia will be in a lot of trouble. It has been working off emergency funds. And little things that you wouldn't even think about-

Yes, yes, Congress runs the District of Columbia's budget, because D.C. here, we are not a state, so we are reliant upon Congress. And with the government shutdown, the District of Columbia is not getting money from the federal government, but it has some emergency funds that it has been using. But little things will stop, things you don't even realize. For example, there's basically two groups that do the rape kits. When a person comes into the hospital and they have been the victim of sexual assault, a rape kit is performed to try to get the DNA and help get the victim justice. Those rape kits will stop if the government remains shut down, because right now they have emergency funds from the District of Columbia, but those will stop unless the government opens.

SEN. JOHN McCAIN: Let's have a little straight talk, Martha. They wouldn't have had the opportunity to handle it that way if we had not shut down the government on a fool's errand that we were not going to accomplish. The whole premise of shutting down the government was the repeal of "Obamacare." I fought against "Obamacare" harder than any of the people who wanted to shut down the government. I campaigned all over this country in 2012 saying, "Elect Mitt Romney, and we'll repeal and replace 'Obamacare.'" We weren't going to defund "Obamacare," and so we shut down the government, and then that gave the opportunity for this to be terribly, awfully mismanaged and mishandled by the White House. If we hadn't shut down the government, this wouldn't have happened.

SEN. JOHN McCAIN: First of all, Martha, please, he is not representing us there.

And now what you have in both-in both houses now is you have this very small minority holding back any agreement. So, in the Senate, we're going to have a bipartisan agreement today to reopen the government and to lift the debt ceiling for a period of time. And it can come to a vote immediately if there's unanimous consent to allow that vote. But if Ted Cruz and Mike Lee, his ally from Utah, decide-alone-to not allow that vote, the Senate can't even vote on it until after we default tomorrow and until Saturday. In the House, the House yesterday, Republicans met to do a proposal that they would send to the Senate, and the small minority of 40 or so tea party members stopped them from having any agreement on a measure that they could even present on the floor of the House. So you have the minority, you know, very small minorities of the House and the Senate, stopping progress, stopping a settlement that could be made and be supported by the vast majority of both houses.

I mean, it's just baffled me that all along Republicans have said, "Look, a clean bill to continue funding the government and to reopen the government, it just couldn't pass the House." Well, if it can't pass the House, bring it up for a vote, let it fail, and Democrats will lose that very valuable talking point. But clearly they are afraid that it will pass the House with enough Democratic votes-probably all Democrats-and enough Republicans, who are just fed up with all of this and would come together and would pass it. And quite frankly, I'm sort of confused what House Speaker John Boehner is afraid of, because this would give him an out, saying, "Look, we tried, but the votes were there."

And more and more moderates, I think, in the Republican Party are getting frustrated. Last night [Congresswoman] Jaime Herrera Beutler from Washington, a more moderate member, put out a statement telling her party, "It's time to face reality. I'm not going to vote for any poison pills trying to block 'Obamacare.' You guys need to move on. We need to reopen the government. It's hurting my constituents. So just, you know, sort of get with it, guys."

On Tuesday, Democratic Congressmember Charles Rangel of New York attempted to explain to CNN host Ashleigh Banfield why he believes it's impossible to work with House Republicans in good faith.

It's worth understanding the position that Boehner is in, the speaker of the House, the Republican speaker of the House. He can pass at any moment a bill, with 200 Democratic votes and a couple dozen Republican votes, to reopen the government and lift the debt ceiling. But if he he did that, he would face the opposition of probably a majority of his caucus voting against that. And that obviously puts his speakership at risk. The next day, somebody would challenge him for the speakership and collect those votes and try to dislodge him. So he has to make a very personal decision: Is he the adult in the room, or is he continuing to try to cater to and placate the crazies? And he's got to put-if we're going to reopen this government at the end of the day, Boehner is going to have to put before the House a measure that will come out of the Senate with bipartisan support, that will be passed with Democratic votes in the House and put his speakership at risk. And if he doesn't step up to do that-actually, it's not-he must step up to do that, because it is unimaginable that we will actually default on our debt for any length of time.

And, basically, the argument is, our long-term-we don't have a short-term debt problem. In fact, the debts are coming down too fast and hurting the economy. We don't have a mid-term debt problem. But over the long term, America's broken healthcare system and its rising costs do raise concerns about how we're going to balance our books. And so, that puts Medicare, Medicaid, and then the Social Security-because of the rising number of seniors, is kind of thrown into that, even though it's not a problem long-term in terms of our debt-and the president, in previous negotiations with Boehner and in his own budget at the beginning of the year, has put into his proposals cuts that would actually cut benefits in those programs.

So he has supported what's called the chained CPI, which basically changes the inflation adjust-the adjustment for inflation for Social Security benefits, to lower that adjustment, so that over time, as inflation rises, Social Security benefits will not keep pace with it, and so people will in fact lose the real value of their benefits over time. And the perverse part of that reform is the older you get and the more vulnerable you are, the more your benefits will be cut or will lose ground to rising inflation.

On Medicare, the president has, in different guises, supported means-testing Medicare, meaning make people who have more retirement income pay more for their Medicare. The problem with that-that sounds OK if we ask millionaires to pay more-they won't miss it. But to get any resources, in fact, revenue from that, you've got to ask people who are making-who have retirement income of $40,000, $50,000 to pay more for their Medicare, and they will feel that. And then, he's also talked about, but walked away from, lifting the retirement age on Medicare.

So, where we're headed out of this contrived crisis, where the crazies drove the bus, is, three months from now, to a negotiation in which basic security programs of Americans will be on the table, and the gun will still be at the president's head.

On Medicare, it's more difficult, because in fact we have to get rising Medicare costs-and healthcare costs, generally-under control. The Obama healthcare reforms has helped to do that. So, the costs have been rising less quickly, less-you know, less than they had previously before the reforms. But we have more to do there. The question is, do you cut the costs by cutting benefits, or do you cut them by taking on the entrenched interests-the drug companies, the insurance companies, the hospital complexes-that make American healthcare cost twice as much per capita as any other industrialized countries? And, you know, you can start by cutting the cost of Medicare by simply allowing Medicare to negotiate bulk discounts in prescription drugs, which would save hundreds of billions of dollars over 10 years. And that would be a good start. It would take on-

Bob Borosage and Amanda Terkel, I want to thank you for being with us-Bob Borosage of the Institute for America's Future, Amanda Terkel with The Huffington Post. This is Democracy Now! We'll be back in a minute.

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"Totally Self-Inflicted Damage": U.S. on Verge of Default as Pain from 16-Day Shutdown Spreads

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The partial shutdown of the federal government has entered its 16th day, and the nation is now on the brink of a default as the government's borrowing authority ends tomorrow. On Tuesday, Fitch Ratings warned it could cut the the U.S. government's AAA debt rating if a deal to raise the debt limit is not reached.

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For more, we go to Washington, D.C., where we're joined by Stuart Gaffney and John Lewis, a married couple from California deeply involved in the struggle to legalize same-sex marriage. They've been together for 26 years. They married in 2008 before Prop 8 passed. Both work at Marriage Equality USA. Stuart is the media director, and John, the legal director.

Stuart and John, we welcome you both to Democracy Now! First, as you sat in the Supreme Court yesterday, watching the arguments, can you talk about how you felt, as a married couple, also as two people deeply involved in the effort to overturn this proposition that the Supreme Court justices were considering yesterday? John, let's begin with you.

We've come to Washington at several other historic junctures to protest the Bowers v. Hardwick decision in 1986 upholding sodomy laws, to celebrate the Lawrence v. Texas decision in 2003, which overturned sodomy laws. And we came back in 2004 after we exchanged vows in San Francisco City Hall. We came here on a bus tour across the country with other same-sex couples married in city hall and our friends and loved ones and allies and supporters to rally in Washington. And at that point, we really thought this is going to happen in our lifetimes. But now we're here, and we know it's happening in our lifetimes. In fact, it's happening as we speak. And these justices really need to decide what side of history they want to be on.

Attorney Charles Cooper represented ProtectMarriage.com and defended Prop 8 before the Supreme Court. He and Justice Anthony Kennedy sparred over the welfare of children of same-sex couples.

I think, in looking at the broadest context of the case, when we heard questions from the justices over all sorts of issues, from the procedural standing issues to questions about the particular circumstances in California and Proposition 8, to some of the broader questions about the freedom to marry as a right of every American, it's very difficult to predict where any of the justices are actually going to come out in the end. I'm very hopeful that when it's all said and done, that through one route or another Proposition 8 will no longer be enforceable after this case is decided.

You've led me right into a question I was going to ask. The California Supreme Court decides what the law is. That's what we decide, right? We don't prescribe law for the future. We decide what the law is. I'm curious: When did-when did it become unconstitutional to exclude homosexual couples from marriage? 1791? 1868, when the 14th Amendment was adopted? Sometimes-sometime after Baker, where we said it didn't even raise a substantial federal question? When-

Well, Justice Scalia represents the minority view on the court. And in fact, Justice Kennedy wrote the majority view, which is the law of the land with respect to this issue, and quite eloquently, at the conclusion of Lawrence v. Texas. Justice Kennedy articulated how the basic guarantees of freedom and equality contained in our Constitution are stated as general propositions by the founders, by those who wrote the amendments to the Bill of Rights, because they recognized that as our nation evolves, that later generations that come after the 14th and the Fifth Amendment were drafted-that later generations will see that laws once thought necessary and appropriate only serve to oppress, and that later generations will invoke these basic, time-honored principles of the Constitution of liberty and equality for their generation in what is an ever-increasing notion of liberty and equality.

And I think that's exactly what is at issue with the freedom to marry. Lesbian and gay people have been having loving, committed relationships for centuries. It's just the truth. But we've had to have those relationships in hiding because of the real threat to our lives, our very safety. And it's only in the last, you know, 50 years that brave men and women started coming out and we started living our lives openly and proudly. And now, through the marriage equality movement, we are coming out fully about the truth of our loving, committed relationships and our families. So, those basic guarantees of liberty and equality have always been there. And what we're seeing now is those laws, that maybe were once thought appropriate, actually just serve to oppress people.

Yeah, I was moved by Theodore Olson's response there in talking about the rights of interracial couples, because-thinking of another married couple. That's my own mom and dad, who were an interracial couple facing barriers just like John and I face today. My mom is Chinese American; my dad is English and Irish American. They were only able to marry legally in California because our state Supreme Court led the way in overturning a law banning interracial marriage as unconstitutional. But after they married, they moved around the country, and our family had different legal status in every state they lived in. They moved to Missouri and were told that they had an illegal marriage. And that is something that I never wanted to have in common with them. But unfortunately, same-sex couples now face that same patchwork-legal in some states, illegal in others, and unrecognized federally. My parents were only legal in all 50 states when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1967 in Loving v. Virginia that all remaining state bans for interracial couples were unconstitutional. And they fulfilled the promise that's written on the front of the U.S. Supreme Court: equal justice under law. Our family is now waiting for that promise to be fulfilled for the next generation. And for my mom and dad, they want nothing more than for me and John to be able to be legally married in all 50 states, just as they were.

Well, I want to thank you both for being with us. We're going to continue on this issue in the next break. Stuart Gaffney and John Lewis have been our first guests today, married for-well, together for 26 years, married in 2008 before Prop 8 passed. Both work at Marriage Equality USA, Stuart the media director, John is the legal director. When we come back, we'll be joined by the widower of the late Congressmember Gerry Studds, openly gay congressmember. His widower is not able to get the normal pensions that other widows or widowers of congressmembers get. And we'll talk to him about today's Supreme Court arguments. Stay with us.

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"A Historic Moment": California Couple on Decades-Long Legal Struggle for Marriage Equality

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Stuart Gaffney and John Lewis have been deeply involved in the struggle to legalize same-sex marriage. They were two of the plaintiffs in the historic 2008 lawsuit that held California's ban on same-sex marriage violated the state constitution. They have been together for 26 years and married in 2008 before Prop 8 passed.

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JUAN GONZÁLEZ: In a resounding victory for marriage equality, the Supreme Court ruled that married same-sex couples were entitled to federal benefits, as it struck down the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act. In addition, the court paved the way for same-sex marriages to resume in California. When the five-to-four decision on was announced, an enormous cheer went up outside the courtroom, and the crowd started chanting, "DOMA is dead!" as couples hugged and cried.

The lead plaintiff in the case was an 84-year-old lesbian named Edith Windsor. She sued the federal government after she was forced to pay additional estate taxes because it did not recognize her marriage to her wife, Thea Spyer. At a press conference, Windsor reacted to the ruling.

All you guys now know that the Supreme Court has announced its decision in Windsor v. The United States. And we won everything we asked and hoped for. Wow. I'm honored and humbled and overjoyed to be here today to represent not only the thousands of Americans whose lives-whose lives have been adversely impacted by the Defense of Marriage Act, but those whose hopes and dreams have been constricted by the same discriminatory law. Children born today will grow up in a world without DOMA, and those same children who happen to be gay will be free to love and get married as Thea and I did, but with the same federal benefits, protections and dignity as everyone else. If I had to survive Thea, what a glorious way to do it. And she would be so pleased.

That was Edith Windsor. In his majority opinion in the DOMA case, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote, quote, "The federal statute is invalid, for no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and injure those whom the State, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity. By seeking to displace this protection and treating those persons as living in marriages less respected than others, the federal statute is in violation of the Fifth Amendment," he said.

Meanwhile, in his dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote, quote, "Even setting aside traditional moral disapproval of same-sex marriage (or indeed same-sex sex), there are many perfectly valid-indeed, downright boring-justifying rationales for this legislation."

KRIS PERRY: Today is a great day for American children and families. Sandy and I want to say how happy we are, not only to be able to return to California and finally get married, but to be able to say to the children in California, "No matter where you live, no matter who your parents are, no matter what family you're in, you are equal, you are as good as your friends' parents and as your friends." We believe, from the very beginning, that the importance of this case was to send a message to the children of this country that you are just as good as everybody else, no matter who you love, no matter who your parents love.

JEFFREY ZARRILLO: Today, the court said that I am more equal, that we are more equal, our love is just like our parents' and our grandparents', and that any children that we may have in the future will be more secure.

PAUL KATAMI: So, today is a good day. It's the day I finally get to look at the man that I love and finally say, "Will you please marry me?"

Well, for more, we go to San Francisco, where we're joined by Stuart Gaffney and John Lewis. They were two of the plaintiffs in the California marriage cases that established the freedom to marry before Prop 8 went into effect. They were married, surrounded by friends and family, June of 2008, on the first full day that marriages were legalized in California. Both work at Marriage Equality USA. Stuart's the media director, and John is the legal director.

Stuart Gaffney and John Lewis, welcome to Democracy Now! Stuart, your response to what happened? Because after you were married, well, there was a ban placed on marriages in California-until, well, yesterday, when it looks like they will soon resume.

Well, what I thought was bone-striking about both DOMA decision was how much the court talked about the dignity and respect that should be due loving, committed same-sex couples. And in that case, they were talking about couples who are legally married already. And they said that this so-called Defense of Marriage Act, which injures loving, committed same-sex couples, that it demeans their dignity and that it is a humiliation for their children. So, in these terms that the court talked about, about how important laws that hurt lesbian and gay people are to our basic humanity, I think this case is going to serve as a very important precedent as the movement continues, with of course the eventual goal of having a ruling from the United States Supreme Court that says every American, regardless of who you are, who you love, that you have a fundamental right to marry in whatever state you live in this nation.

Justice Antonin Scalia used his dissent in DOMA to rail against the court's 2003 decision in the Lawrence v. Texas case that struck down the sodomy law in Texas. Scalia wrote, quote, "When the Court declared a constitutional right to homosexual sodomy, we were assured [that] the case had nothing, nothing at all to do with 'whether the government must give formal recognition to any relationship that homosexual persons seek to enter.' [unquote] Now we are told [that] DOMA is invalid because it 'demeans the couple, whose moral and sexual choices the Constitution protects,' with an accompanying citation of Lawrence," he wrote. What exactly does this mean, John?

Well, I think Justice Scalia mischaracterizes these cases. For hundreds of years now, the United States Supreme Court has built case law based on precedent. And what Lawrence did was it recognized that laws that actually criminalize the physical expression of love between two people of the same gender, they violate the Constitution, because the physical relationship between two people of the same gender is indicative of a relationship of an emotional bond that is far deeper. And what the court did today was it built upon that precedent, and it applied Lawrence to our loving, committed same-sex couples' marriages. And so, it was building on precedent just like the Supreme Court does today. And that's exactly what we expect the Supreme Court to do. I would note Justice Scalia is in dissent. A majority of the Supreme Court believes that laws that openly discriminate against same-sex couples, under the federal laws, they do violate the constitutional rights of lesbian and gay people.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I want to turn to a clip from an interview by conservative radio show host Glenn Beck. He was interviewing Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky following Wednesday's Supreme Court decisions. Glenn Beck speaks first.

GLENN BECK: I am very concerned. I don't-I mean, I really don't care. You get married, you don't get married. You-you, you know, have homosexual marriage or whatever. First problem with this is if you change one variable-man and a woman to man and man and woman and woman-you cannot then tell me that you can't logically change the other variable-one man, three women; one woman, four men. You can't do that. And who are you to say that if I am a devout Muslim and I come over here and I have three wives-who are you to say, if I'm an American citizen, that I can't have multiple marriages?

SEN. RAND PAUL: And I think this is a conundrum and gets back to what you were saying in the opening, whether or not churches should decide this. But it is difficult, because if we have no laws on this, people take it to one extension further: Does it have to be humans? You know, I mean, so there really are-the question is: What social mores-can some social mores be part of legislation? Historically, we did at the state legislative level. We did allow for some social mores to be part of it. Some of them were said to be for health reasons and otherwise. But I'm kind of with you. I see the thousands-of-year tradition of the nucleus of the family unit. I also see that, economically, if you just look without any kind of moral periscope and you say, "What is it that is a leading cause of poverty in our country?" it's having kids without marriage. The stability of the marriage unit is enormous, and we should not just say, "Oh, we're punting on it, and marriage can be anything."

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Stuart Gaffney, your response to them raising the possibility, one, that this opens the floodgates for polygamy as well as the disintegration of the family?

And the reality is that the Supreme Court has moved forward the law in a tremendous way with these two cases decided yesterday, but it's also moved forward the dialogue. In the oral argument, Justice Kennedy asked, "What about the children?" But he asked about it on the-emphasizing the importance of the freedom to marry. He said, "In California, there are 40,000 kids being raised by same-sex couples. What about their rights? Aren't their voices critical to this case?" And we saw in the decision that it's not just right in the matter of law, but it's right as a matter of love and, again, the love between two people. So, just as making my parents' marriage legal in all 50 states didn't lead to polygamy, making our marriage legal only resulted in my mom and dad being able to witness our wedding day, which was, for all of us, was one of the happiest days of our lives.

Also, people have sometimes said, "Aren't you actually a little bit disappointed in some of these rulings? That why don't we have a 50-state solution coming out of the Supreme Court?" I think the reality-and, as you're pointing out-is, this is actually the best we could have gotten out of these particular nine justices. Of all the scenarios that were likely to be able to get us five votes from this court, this was the best possible outcome, which is why we're seeing so much joy in our community, as we now plan our next steps.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I want to ask about a piece by Kevin Drum of Mother Jones, an article yesterday titled "The Big Problem With the Supreme Court's Prop. 8 Decision." He wrote, quote, "With today's decision, the Supreme Court is basically gutting the people's right to pass initiatives that elected officials don't like and then to defend them all the way to the highest court in the land.

"To me, this has neither the flavor of justice nor of democratic governance, regardless of whether I like the outcome." John, I'm wondering if you could respond to that?

This is Democracy Now! When we come back, the fight for same-sex marriage in Maryland. We'll be speaking with filmmaker Yoruba Richen about her film called The New Black. Stay with us.

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LGBT Movement Wins Defeat of DOMA & Prop 8, Fueling Momentum for Next Steps in Fight for Equality

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In a historic victory for marriage equality, the U.S. Supreme Court has struck down the Defense of Marriage Act and paved the way for same-sex marriages to resume in California. In a 5-to-4 decision, the court ruled the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act - or DOMA - signed by President Clinton into law is unconstitutional.

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Free Audio Download http://jasirix.bandcamp.com/track/i-am-troy-davis-t-r-o-y Jasiri X uses Pete Rock's classic beat, "They Reminisce Over You" to shed light on the case of Troy Davis. The state of Georgia plans to execute Troy Davis on September 21, 2011. There is still serious doubt as to Troy Davis' guilt, and by putting him to death Georgia runs the risk of killing an innocent man.

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This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. We're on the road in Madison, Wisconsin. But we're going to Washington, D.C., to be joined by our guests, three people who were there on the night of the Troy Davis execution and have since continued to work on the death penalty. Kimberly Davis is Troy Davis's sister, and an anti-death penalty activist. Ben Jealous is president of the NAACP. And we're joined by Laura Moye, Amnesty International USA's death penalty abolition campaign director.

We welcome all of you back to Democracy Now! Kim Davis, I know it's a hard day for you today, the first anniversary of Troy's death. Can you share your thoughts on this year later?

Ben Jealous, the NAACP, your organization, has long taken up the issue of Troy Davis but also the death penalty. So, on this day, what-think back to what happened a year ago, to tell us your thoughts and then where you're going with this.

That was probably the hardest thing that I've been through in 20 years of organizing. We knew that Troy was-that he had not done this. I mean, the former head of George Bush's FBI said there was too much doubt to execute-can't get much better than that. We had switched one of the votes of the folks who said that they were going to vote for his execution on the Board of Pardons and Paroles. They came with us to vote for clemency. And then we were betrayed by the chairman of that board, who had said that his vote was with us and had voted with us in the past, a black former general, who gave us his word and then switched his vote. And it was absolutely heartbreaking.

Where we go from here is we do exactly what Kim said Troy wanted us to do: we push forward, and we end this death penalty, because we know that Troy Davis was not the first person who had not killed anybody to be put to death in this country, and he won't be the last. And we-right now it's on the ballot in California. We're somewhat optimistic that we can pass Proposition 34 there. We'd ask folks to vote for that, if they are in California. And then on to states like Ohio and to Maryland, where it will be debated next year, and we hope to repeat the sort of victory we saw in Connecticut this year.

You know, when folks take a hard look at this punishment-and that's what this case has really forced the country to do-again, they tend to run into the fact that our country has killed innocents before, and we will do it again. They also tend to run into the fact that, no matter how they feel about the death penalty as a theory, that practically every time a prosecutor seeks the death penalty, they pull hundreds of thousands of dollars out of our local criminal justice system, dollars that therefore cannot be spent, say, on the homicide unit and getting uncaught killers off the street. And given that we have counties in this country where 50 percent of the killings can go unsolved each year, we are much better off spending our dollars on catching uncaught killers than killing the killers we've already caught and put in cages. And so, our hope, our prayer, is that the country will continue to take a hard look at the death penalty and realize this is the moral thing to do and it's also the thing that will make us safer. Abolishing the death penalty will put our country in line with the rest of Western democracies, but it will also make it safer because we can spend those resources on catching uncaught killers.

Well, this is a day filled with a lot of emotion, mixed emotions. Troy Davis made the death penalty personal to people. His case turned people on to this issue who hadn't been paying attention before. And to his family and him, we are eternally grateful. I think when the chapter-when the book on how we ended the death penalty in the United States is written, there will probably be a chapter about Troy Davis. When the state of Georgia executed Troy Davis amidst this cloud of tremendous doubt, it in many ways did more than we could do at Amnesty International or NAACP or any other organization to prove the point that governments ought not to have this power. But there's good news in the year since Troy Davis was executed. There has been progress, and there continues to be progress and signs that show that we are ending the death penalty in the United States.

The week after Troy Davis was executed, the Gallup poll measuring support for the death penalty in the United States was at a 40-year low. We are in a different era than we were 10, 20 years ago with this issue. We're seeing tremendous progress, because people are coming to understand the reality of the death penalty, the ugly reality of the death penalty, how it doesn't deter crime; it costs far more than incarceration; it is a distraction from effective means of dealing with crime; it is riddled with bias, racial and economic bias. And the list goes on.

So, you know, the state has a real interest. And the state of course doesn't want to look at this case; they just want to forget about it. But when the former head of George W. Bush's FBI said that there was not enough evidence, that there was too much doubt to execute Troy Davis, what that's also saying is that there's reason to believe that the killer is still on the street. The state of Georgia has two interests in taking a hard look at this case. One is to make sure that they don't make this sort of mistake again, and the other is to get the actual killer off the street.

Now, what happened up in Connecticut, a state that I had been traveling back and forth to for years, where we had seen prior-prior governors veto the bill when it was put on their desk, was two things. Two important things happened. One, we saw public support for the death penalty fall to an all-time low there, as well. But we also saw a new governor, who is a former prosecutor, stand up and say, "Look, you know, I used to support the death penalty. Then I became a prosecutor, and I saw what actually happened in these cases. And I'm proud to sign this bill."

And, you know, the-we're seeing a similar thing in California, where the former district attorney of Los Angeles and the current state attorney general and the current governor are all saying, "We've looked hard at this, and we-you know, we may have used to support it, but we can't support it going forward." And so, that's what I think gives us hope, is that it's not just sort of lefties or activists; it's prosecutors, it's attorneys general, it's governors, who have to be very involved in the machinery of death in this country, looking hard and saying there's too much bias, there's too much doubt, we waste too much money, and as a result, we don't solve enough homicides. So let's get rid of this, and let's get on with justice in this country and getting the uncaught killers off the street.

Yes, ma'am, I am hopeful, and I know we will bring the death penalty down one state at a time. And we're just asking everyone to join in on the fight with us, with our-we have elections coming up, and we need to look hard into the things-into people that are our elected officials, because they are just that: elected officials. We all need to reach out and let people know what we want. If we want to end the death penalty, stand on your word. We need everyone to stand together with the NAACP and Amnesty International as we continue to fight to end this death penalty.

What gives me hope is you see women like Kamala Harris, who has become the attorney general in California, saying explicitly she's against the death penalty. Karl Rove targeted her in her campaign, thought that her opposition for the death penalty would take her out of the race and serious contention. And she won despite that. And that's what we need. We need more people in this country who truly have the courage of their convictions to run for office. Be like the governor of Connecticut. Be like Ms. Harris in California. Stand up for what they believe and do the right thing, because the reality is that people in this country don't lose faith in you when you take a hard stand on something that they may feel different about. They lose faith in you when they see you blowing in the wind.

Finally, on another issue, the news this week in the Trayvon Martin case, Ben, about the DNA on the gun testing coming back, and it only has the DNA of George Zimmerman. The significance of this and where this case is today?

You know, the same group of folks who are speaking here today, we're all part of a group of people who have abolished it for juveniles in this country. We've also abolished the death penalty for the group that the court refers to quite bluntly as the "mentally retarded." We've used the same strategy there that we're going to use here. We got a majority of states to outlaw those practices, and then we went to the Supreme Court. We said, "Not only is this cruel, but because it's now only practiced by a minority of states, it is also unusual, and therefore ban it for the entire country." And they did in both cases. And so, we're hoping here that if we can get rid of it in California, if we can get rid of it in Ohio, if we can get rid of it in just seven more states beyond that, then we can finally go into the Supreme Court and get rid of it in Georgia and get rid of it in Texas and Mississippi and all these places that, when it comes to their practice of the death penalty, are truly godforsaken.

MARTINA CORREIA: And they're probably looking down on us, asking us what our next move is, but I think he already knows, because this weekend has been such a powerful weekend, to see so many people come together and want to stand and fight and want to change the laws. And we're going to go to the Georgia State Capitol, and we're going to start working on that gold dome. And they're going to have to listen to us, because we're their constituents, and we voted them in, and we can vote them out. And I know that's one thing that we've had to learn, that we have to make people accountable who are speaking on our behalfs. And Troy made us all look within ourselves, and he made us see that there's goodness in all of us and that all of us have to continue to fight.

Martina Correia, speaking on October 1st of last year. She died two months later of breast cancer. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. Back in a minute.

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Troy Davis One Year Later: Execution Fuels National Movement to Abolish Death Penalty

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We speak with three people who joined us for our special live broadcast on the night Troy Davis was executed in Jackson, Georgia, including his sister, Kimberly Davis. "This is a tough time both for me and my family, but as my brother said, he always wanted us to continue the fight and to keep the faith, and that's what we've been doing," Kimberly Davis says.

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Bill Pelke and Sister Helen Prejean, we welcome you both to Democracy Now! Let's go first to Bill in Chicago right now. You traveled from Anchorage to Indiana to see Paula Cooper when she was released. You have yet to see her. But explain this case and why you got so involved, coming out on behalf of Paula Cooper, the woman, the teenager, who killed your grandmother, Bill.

I learned the most important lesson of my life that night, and it was about the healing power of forgiveness, because when my heart was touched with compassion, the forgiveness became automatic. And when it happened, it brought a tremendous healing. It had been a year and a half since my grandmother's death, and whenever I thought about my grandmother during that period of time, I pictured her butchered on the dining room floor, where our family went for Christmas and Easter and Thanksgiving, happy, joyous occasions. And it was too painful to even think about. But I knew immediately-when my heart was touched with that compassion and forgiveness took place, I knew, from that moment on, whenever I would think about my grandmother again, I would no longer picture how she died, but I would picture how she lived, what she stood for, what she believed in, the beautiful, wonderful person she was. And I knew it wasn't something that happened just so I'd feel good for a period of time, but it was something to be shared with other people.

And that night, I made God two promises. One is, any success that came into my life as a result of forgiving her, I'd give God the honor and glory, because it wasn't something I had done; it was because God had touched my heart. And the second promise, I'd go through any door that opened up as a result of forgiving her. And it's just been amazing, the doors that have opened. That was November 2nd, 1986, over 25 years ago. And to this day, I've kept those two promises.

It does. It does. We were at his home in Indiana getting ready to go march on the road for a week or two weeks, and the box arrived from Random House, and I had never laid my eyes on the real book. And I opened up the box, and there's the book, Dead Man Walking. I had never written a book before. I went, "Bill, this is it! We get to share this moment together." He still remembers it, too, right, Bill?

Yeah. No, it's really important. I just stand behind my publisher, Vintage. It's very rare to republish a book, a new edition, because there's a whole new generation of readers. I didn't know the power of a book when I wrote Dead Man Walking, because, see, I'm from the South, and we do a lot of talking and storytelling. I didn't know that a book, you know, could have such power, that you open it up, and if you-and when you take people on a journey in a book, like I did in Dead Man, they don't have to debate with anybody. In their imagination, they're going there intimately to the perpetrator-Patrick Sonnier, the man who had killed two teenage kids-and then they're over on the side of the victims' families and going through their rage and their-and me, thrown in the middle of it. That's the way Susan likes to talk about the film, said, "This nun was in over her head; she didn't know what she was doing."

And then, when I found out the crime, that riptide inside me emotionally. And I understand the journey that people make, because you're so outraged over the death of innocent people. And then there's a part in all of us that said, "Well, whoever did this unspeakable act needs to pay with their own life. They shouldn't live. They're dead." And that's the journey. And that's the journey of the book, Dead Man Walking, and it's the journey of all the talks I give around the United States, in really taking people through the story and helping people navigate those waters inside, of outrage, on the one hand, and then, on the other, recognizing that people are worth more than one terrible act of their life.

SISTER HELEN PREJEAN: [played by Susan Sarandon] Do you take responsibility for both their deaths?

SISTER HELEN PREJEAN: Oh, Matt. There are spaces of sorrow only God can touch. You did a terrible thing, Matt, a terrible thing. But you have a dignity now. Nobody can take that from you. You are a son of God, Matthew Poncelet.

SISTER HELEN PREJEAN: Well, maybe it's the best thing you can give to the Percys and the Delacroixs, is a wish for their peace.

It led to a direct dialogue with Pope John Paul, where I asked him to, please, to shore up Catholic teaching. I said, "Does the Catholic Church only protect or stand for the dignity of the innocent? What about the guilty?" And when I'm walking with a man who's shackled hand and foot, and he's being led to being killed in this room, and he says, "Sister, please pray God holds up my legs," I said, "Where is the dignity, Your Holiness, in this death? We need you to stand strong to help Catholics."

And through the dialogue and education that's gone on over these years-in '96, when the film came out, 78 percent of Americans supported the death penalty, and 80 percent of Catholics. It was a terrible statistic in the '80s. The more people went to church, the more they supported the death penalty. And in 2011, that had dropped to 63 percent of the American public saying, on the up-down question, "Are you for the death penalty?" and 59 percent of Catholics. So the dialogue is making a difference, educations, and that's why I'm so glad about this book getting out afresh.

Sister Helen Prejean and Bill Pelke, we're going to break, then come back to this discussion. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. Back in a minute.

[break]

DONALD: My name is Donald. I'm 42 years old, recently just came back to society from doing, oh, quite a few years in prison. My first three weeks out, I put in seven applications. I haven't got a call back once from anything, no feedback whatsoever from any of the applications I put in. I get up in the morning. I'm headed to my destination, which is advanced employment class. OK, this is something I've been looking forward to doing. When I say I want to be whole, I want to be a whole person. I want to wake up in the morning, knowing I got a place in society, I'm accepted.

And so, on Thanksgiving Day of 1994, we had our first visit. When I went into the prison, I knew you could give the person a hug when you went in. And one of the statements Paula Cooper had made on that video was, "I would like to look him in his eyes and know that he has forgiven me." And I gave her a hug. I stepped back. I looked her in the eyes. I told her that I loved her and I had forgiven her. I've never talked to her about the crime. We've talked about other things that we have in common.

Because when I did meet them, it was the most polarized situation you can imagine. It was a pardon board hearing, the last before Pat was to be executed a week later. And you sign the book when you go in for a clemency board hearing in Louisiana. If you're for life or death, literally-I think it's the closest you come, like, to be in a Roman amphitheater. You put your thumb up for person to live and your thumb down for them to die. And everybody in the room, except me and a lawyer and one psychiatrist, was there to see Patrick Sonnier die. And the victim's family was caught in the current, too, because they're told, "This is the way you honor your dead child. This is the way you get justice." And it's a very societal thing, and victims' families were caught in it.

I met them outside the building while the pardon board was voting. And one of the families, the girl's parents furious at me. And I deserved their anger. But I was unprepared for the father. He's the hero of Dead Man Walking, Lloyd LeBlanc, who had lost David, his only son. His family name died with the death of David. And he said, "Sister Helen, all this time, you've been visiting with those two brothers, and you never once came to see us. You can't believe the pressure on us to be for the death penalty." And I didn't know. I said, "Oh, Mr. LeBlanc, I'm so sorry." He said, "My wife and I even go to different masses on Sunday to see if we could hear some priest talk about the message of Jesus, because I know Jesus calls us to forgiveness." And he said, "Come pray with me. Come be in our shoes." And it was his gracious invitation that led me over to the victim's side. And his story, just like Bill Pelke's story, of this-all human beings have this tremendous spiritual depth to them, whether they follow institutionalized religion or not. But in Lloyd LeBlanc, it was-he said, "I was listening to the people around me. I said they're right, I wish I could be there to pull the switch." And then he said, "I didn't like what was happening to me," because, he said, "I'm a kind person. I love to help people. And all this hatred and bitterness is coming into me. And finally, I just said, 'Nuh-uh.'" He put his hand like this. "No, they killed our boy, but I'm not going to let them kill me, and I'm going to go down the path of forgiveness that Jesus taught us to do."

And he was the first victim's family I met. Now I've met hundreds, hundreds of people over these years, victims' families. He was the first one to teach me, though, that what forgiveness is is not first and foremost what you do for the one that-who's hurt you to lift their burden. It's a way of saving your own life. It's a way of preserving wholeness, as we can see in Bill Pelke, because then when-and Lloyd LeBlanc said, he said, "People think forgiveness is weak, like you're condoning what they did." He said, "It kills you to not to forgive. It was killing me." And he said, "Because who I am is to be a person who loves people and helps people." And so, it was a way of preserving your own life. And it gave you an insight. When Jesus said, "Love your enemies," it doesn't mean condone what enemies do. Or, it's gotten to be like a cliché. You know, the people say, "Oh, yeah, forgive and forget." But it's not letting the love and integrity of our life be damaged forever by the hate.

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Sister Helen Prejean & Bill Pelke on Freeing the Death Row Prisoner Who Killed Pelke's Grandmother

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In a remarkable story on the journey from grief to forgiveness, Bill Pelke joins us along with renowned activist and "Dead Man Walking" author Sister Helen Prejean to discuss the latest victory for the movement against the death penalty.

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JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We turn now to the look at the outcome of the historic votes in Colorado and Washington state to legalize the recreational use of marijuana. Even before this, 18 states and the District of Columbia allowed the medical use of marijuana. Now, many are asking whether the passage of these latest measures could be the beginning of the end for marijuana prohibition.

All of this comes as the federal government continues to consider marijuana an illegal drug, and the Obama administration has supported police crackdowns even on medical marijuana. Meanwhile, it has ignored studies that show the plant can be useful in treating everything from depression to cancerous tumors.

For more on what will happen now that Colorado and Washington have made history by legalizing marijuana for adult use, we're joined by Martin Lee, longtime investigative reporter and author of several books, his most recent, the newly published Smoke Signals: A Social History of Marijuana-Medical, Recreational, and Scientific, and also wrote Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond.

Martin, thanks so much for being with us. He's co-founder of FAIR, the national media watch group. In these last few minutes of the show-and then we'll do part two right after the show-talk about the significance of what is happening in Colorado and Washington. Washington state, next Thursday, the law will go into effect.

MARTIN LEE: Well, the take-home message from the votes is significant. America woke up after the elections and looked itself in the mirror and realized two states had voted to legalize marijuana for adult use.

But there's caveats in the proposition, the ballot measure that passed in Washington state, in particular, that are quite troubling. And it has to do with driving under the influence of drugs. There are stipulations in the ballot measure that's passed that state that a person who has over a certain amount of metabolites, marijuana metabolites, in their body, can be charged with driving under the influence of drugs. The problem here is that the metabolites for marijuana can stay in the body for many weeks after one uses it. One can take a few puffs of a marijuana cigarette four to six weeks ago, and it'll still turn up in a drug driving test. So I don't know how this will hold up in a court of law. The science is very clear on this. The fact that metabolites are in the body is not an indication necessarily of one driving-has been driving impaired.

What's most troubling of all, however, is for people under 21, drivers under 21 in the state of Washington, there's a zero tolerance for any indication of marijuana use, so that if a person is pulled over, a 17-year-old driver, and is given a drug test and is found to have marijuana metabolites in their body, they can lose their license, and they could be severely penalized for having any level of the metabolites in their system. And the reason why that's so troubling is because there's been a long history of racist law enforcement patterns with respect to marijuana, not only in Washington state, but throughout the United States. And there's really nothing in the law that would prevent the selective targeting of-particularly for black and Latino youth, for continuing for arrest and harassment by law enforcement. In fact, if anything, the new law might encourage that. And other-officials from other states are already saying that Washington may be a model for the law they'd like to see in their states for marijuana to be legalized. So this is troubling. If the past is any prologue for the future, there's no reason to be-feel confident that these racist law enforcement patterns won't continue. And that's not to say that definitely will continue; it remains to be seen.

What we saw in California in 1996 after Californians passed a law legalizing medical marijuana, that law enforcement was essentially given a free hand to basically respond to Proposition 215 in the way they saw fit from county to county. So in certain areas, like San Francisco or Sacramento or-and particularly Santa Cruz, Oakland, they had more lenient policies. Law enforcement took a hands-off attitude. But in other counties, particularly in what we call "red state California," the rural counties, the law enforcement were very vicious with respect to medical marijuana usage after 19-after 215 was passed.

Martin Lee, we want to thank you very much for being with us-we're going to do part two online at democracynow.org-author of Smoke Signals. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

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Smoke Signals: Martin Lee on Growing U.S. Movement to Legalize Marijuana

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We turn now to look at the outcome of this month's historic votes in Colorado and Washington state to legalize the recreational use of marijuana. Even before this, 18 states and the District of Columbia allowed the medical use of marijuana.

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JUAN GONZÁLEZ: After 75 years of federal laws prohibiting marijuana use, the Justice Department has announced it will not prevent states from legalizing the use, production, distribution and sale of recreational marijuana. The changes apply to 20 states and the District of Columbia. They were prompted by pot legalization votes last fall in Colorado and Washington state, and were announced in a memo from U.S. Deputy Attorney General James Cole, who also cited "limited prosecutorial resources" as the reason for the decision. He stressed that marijuana remains illegal under federal law, and made clear that the Justice Department still expects states to regulate marijuana sales to minors, interstate trafficking, and accidents involving drivers under the influence of the drug. The memo notes that, quote, "If state enforcement efforts are not sufficiently robust ... the federal government may seek to challenge the regulatory structure itself."

For more, we're joined by Martin Lee, longtime investigative reporter and author of several books, including Smoke Signals: A Social History of Marijuana-Medical, Recreational, and Scientific, which was just released in paperback. He also wrote Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond. Martin Lee is co-founder of FAIR, the national media watch group.

Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Martin. Talk about the significance of what the Justice Department has just announced.

How this plays out in the future remains to be seen. But I think the statement-the guidance issued by the Department of Justice yesterday is kind of littered with caveats and red flags. The notion that the prosecutors will still be encouraged to take action with respect to marijuana sales to minors, for example, or diversion from states where it is grown legally now-Washington and Colorado-to other states, this could be a problem, because this will continue. I mean, people in the United States-the average age of turning onto marijuana is just below 15 years old. That will continue regardless of what the laws say. Diversion to other states is bound to continue, irrespective of the laws or the Justice Department's policy. So at any time in the future, a future administration can lower the boom on this.

I have apologized for some of the earlier reporting, because I think, you know, we've been terribly and systematically misled in this country for some time. And I-I was-I did part of that misleading. I didn't look far enough. I didn't look deep enough. I didn't look at labs in other countries that are doing some incredible research. I didn't listen to the chorus of patients who said, "Not only does marijuana work for me, it's the only thing that works for me." I took the DEA at their word when they said it is a Schedule I substance and has no medical applications. There was no scientific basis for them to say that.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: That was Dr. Sanjay Gupta. Your response, Martin Lee?

Well, marijuana prohibition is built on a mountain of lies. The Sanjay Gupta report on CNN a couple of weeks ago was quite significant. He focused in particular on a strain of marijuana that's not actually psychoactive, that doesn't get you high, and it underscores how in a lot of ways the public has been misled and it doesn't know a lot about what the potential are medically. The program-the segment before on Democracy Now! focused on traumatic brain injuries. Well, marijuana compounds have neuroprotective properties that have been scientifically documented.

So we're in kind of a contradictory transition period with respect to marijuana. The official federal line remains that marijuana is a substance that's dangerous and has no medical value, and that is tantamount to saying the moon is made of green cheese. You know, that's the policy coming from on high. So, unfortunately, even on the Gupta show, there were myths that were promoted, carryover from the drug war, the myths about marijuana being dangerous to youth with respect to lowering IQs and so forth. There's no scientific basis for this.

So it's still going to be a debate that's ongoing in the culture. But when you have a celebrity like Sanjay Gupta changing his mind and apologizing, it does carry weight. But he, again, is trailing behind the public. Eighty percent of the public is pro-choice with respect to medical marijuana, that there should be the choice, if the doctor recommends it, that people can avail themselves of that choice.

So, you know, what took him so long, on the one hand? But I appreciate the fact that he's intellectually honest enough-

It loses credibility when it says things about marijuana that is obviously untrue, and people can experience that when they try the drug. Or if you're a Christian conservative going to church and you hear from your Republican neighbors how a child in their family was helped by a marijuana cookie for their violent ADD or ADHD, when nothing else helped, you know, that really means something. You have a direct experience of a different reality from what the government says. So that kind of cognitive dissonance that the marijuana laws engender are problematic from the point of view of social control. But, you know, when we talk about marijuana, it's not a frivolous issue.

Martin Lee, we want to thank you for being with us, longtime investigative reporter, author of several books, including Smoke Signals: A Social History of Marijuana-Medical, Recreational, and Scientific.

And that does it for our show. Our Labor Day special, we'll bring you Questlove, Ahmir Thompson of The Roots. Tune in to that hour special.

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Feds Say They Won't Try to Reverse State Laws That Legalize Medical and Recreational Marijuana Use

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After 75 years of federal laws prohibiting marijuana use, the Justice Department has announced it will not prevent states from legalizing the use, production, distribution and sale of recreational marijuana. The changes were prompted by marijuana legalization votes last year in Colorado and Washington state, and were announced in a memo from U.S.

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The commission is comprised of 19 members, including several former heads of state and the current prime minister of Greece. Former Colombian President César Gaviria, also a member of the commission, urged the United States to begin debate on legalization.

CÉSAR GAVIRIA: We want the U.S. society to make a debate on these matters. That has not been done because political leaders are a little fearful of the association between crime and narcotrafficking, and it's very difficult to distinguish from consumers to users. But this society needs a debate. This society is spending $40 billion a year in fighting drugs. That is a lot of money. Has more than 500,000 people in jail. But they are spending that money in a way that is not effective. The consumption has not been reduced.

To discuss the findings of the report, we're joined by Dr. Gabor Maté, physician, bestselling author of a number of books, including his latest, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction. Dr. Gabor Maté works at a drug addiction clinic in Vancouver, the only legal injection site in North America.

Welcome to Democracy Now!

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Pleasure.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: The significance is that the recommendations don't come from the usual advocacy groups or from physicians like myself. It comes from sterling establishment figures, including in the United States, people such as George Shultz, former secretary of state, and Paul Volcker, former head of the - former chairman of the Federal Reserve.

And the conclusion that they've come to is that the U.S.-led war on drugs is an utter failure in its own terms. And they very carefully and rigorously lay out the costs of the war economically and also in terms of human suffering, and they lay out a set of principles and policies that would lead to very different results.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, first of all, they point out the cost, which is economically huge: apparently, federally, $25 billion, and double that by the states in this country, apparently. And that's only the direct cost of fighting the war. That doesn't include the healthcare costs that are incurred as a result of it. It doesn't include the crime that is caused by the criminalization of drugs. So they point out those costs. And they say that despite the jailing of tens of millions of people over the decades, nothing has been done to reduce drug use or the power of the criminal organizations. As a matter of fact, they point out, statistically, between 1998 and 2008, heroin use around the world has gone up by a factor of nearly 30 percent, cocaine use by 25 percent, and marijuana use by 8.5 percent, so that on any level you care to name, the thing is a failure, the war on drugs is a failure.

And therefore, what they recommend is an evidence-based approach, through the social, legal and medical attitudes towards drug use and drug treatment and drug prevention. And they call for what they call is the ending of the criminalization, marginalization and stigmatization of drug users, and they point out, as I have in previous interviews, that most heavy drug users actually are that way because of early childhood trauma.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: The Obama administration, in this and in other areas, as well, their original promises and in the hints of a different direction have not materialized. And unfortunately, they've gone on board with the previously long-instituted and completely failed policies of previous administrations.

Everything that I would call for is actually called for in this report. They call for public health measures to prevent drug abuse, and more - better attitudes towards looking after children and young people, rather than simply useless programs that tell people not to use drugs, the "just say no" kind of Nancy Reagan-type programs, which have been shown to fail over and over again. So they're calling for real prevention.

Then they're calling for harm reduction. They point out that financially, $1 spent on needle - providing clean needles saves $4 in healthcare costs and $27 in general costs to society. They point out that in Australia, where they have instituted such programs at the cost of about $120 million, the savings have been in the billions of dollars when it comes to overall costs. They point out that in countries which have instituted harm reduction measures, the rate of HIV infection amongst drug users is about less than five percent, as opposed to the countries which have totally resisted those measures, where it's up to over 50 percent in some cases. So, you know, again, what they've done is they've taken the evidence and they've made recommendations based on science and on findings rather than on prejudice.

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: In terms of the legalization of drugs, I think that the battle - the war on drugs has been an utter failure, and I think that we need to rethink and decriminalize our marijuana laws. But I'm not somebody - but I'm somebody who believes in a legalization of marijuana. What I do believe is that we need to rethink how we are operating in the drug wars. And I think that currently we are not doing a good job.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: It's not the only issue on which Obama has a different line now than he may have had before he was elected. But it's a very tragic one.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: If you legalize something, you make it like cigarettes and alcohol, which you can buy in corner stores. If you decriminalize it, you don't necessarily permit it to be sold publicly or freely, but you no longer jail people for their personal use of the drug. You might still make it illegal to traffic in it, although this recommendations - these recommendations by this commission actually call for the easier attitude towards people who - small criminals who sell only to support their own habits, for example, and also for growers around the world that are just trying to do it to support their families. So, they're not calling for decriminalizing, except for cannabis, but they're certainly calling for - sorry, they're not calling for legalization, but they're calling for decriminalizing the drugs, so that, for example, in Portugal, it's no longer a criminal offense to have drugs for personal use.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: The evidence is that it doesn't make any significant difference. Portugal has gone up slightly over the last 10 years, but no more so than in the rest of Europe where it's completely illegal. And they found the same thing in Australia. And when they compared Amsterdam to San Francisco, being a second place where the laws are draconian, and Amsterdam, where they're - or Holland, where they're - it's not illegal to possess marijuana, there's no difference, in effect, so that there's absolutely no evidence whatsoever that decriminalization, or even legalization, leads to more use.

We're going to leave it there right now, but we'll continue the conversation. You can go to democracynow.org to our web exclusive and to our previous conversations with Dr. Gabor Maté, Vancouver-based physician and bestselling author. Among his books, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction.

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Dr. Gabor Maté: Obama Admin Should Heed Global Panel's Call to End "Failed" U.S.-Led Drug War

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A high-level international panel has concluded the so-called "war on drugs" has failed and that governments should consider legalizing substances, including marijuana. The Global Commission on Drug Policy is comprised of 19 members, including several former heads of state. The Office of National Drug Control Policy at the White House has refuted the findings of the commission's report.

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Today, a Democracy Now! special with the Canadian physician and bestselling author Gabor Maté. From disease to addiction, parenting to attention deficit disorder, Dr. Maté's work focuses on the centrality of early childhood experiences to the development of the brain, and how those experiences can impact everything from behavioral patterns to physical and mental illness. While the relationship between emotional stress and disease, and mental and physical health more broadly, is often considered controversial within medical orthodoxy, Dr. Maté argues too many doctors seem to have forgotten what was once a commonplace assumption, that emotions are deeply implicated in both the development of illness, addictions and disorders, and in their healing.

Dr. Maté is the bestselling author of four books: When the Body Says No: Understanding the Stress-Disease Connection; Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do about It; and, with Dr. Gordon Neufeld, Hold on to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More than Peers; his latest is called In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction.

Today we bring you all three of our interviews with Dr. Maté in 2010. In our first conversation, Dr. Maté talked about his work as the staff physician at the Portland Hotel in Vancouver, Canada, a residence and harm reduction facility in Downtown Eastside, a neighborhood with one the densest concentrations of drug addicts in North America. The Portland hosts the only legal injection site in North America, a center that's come under fire from Canada's Conservative government. I asked Dr. Maté to talk about his patients.

And that's what sets up the brain biology of addiction. In other words, the addiction is related both psychologically, in terms of emotional pain relief, and neurobiological development to early adversity.

What does the title of your book mean, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts?

Now, the hungry ghost realm, the creatures in it are depicted as people with large empty bellies, small mouths and scrawny thin necks. They can never get enough satisfaction. They can never fill their bellies. They're always hungry, always empty, always seeking it from the outside. That speaks to a part of us that I have and everybody in our society has, where we want satisfaction from the outside, where we're empty, where we want to be soothed by something in the short term, but we can never feel that or fulfill that insatiety from the outside. The addicts are in that realm all the time. Most of us are in that realm some of the time. And my point really is, is that there's no clear distinction between the identified addict and the rest of us. There's just a continuum in which we all may be found. They're on it, because they've suffered a lot more than most of us.

Now, that circuitry in addicts doesn't function very well, as the circuitry of incentive and motivation, which involves the chemical dopamine, also doesn't function very well. Stimulant drugs like cocaine and crystal meth, nicotine and caffeine, all elevate dopamine levels in the brain, as does sexual acting out, as does extreme sports, as does workaholism and so on.

Now, the issue is, why do these circuits not work so well in some people, because the drugs in themselves are not surprisingly addictive. And what I mean by that is, is that most people who try most drugs never become addicted to them. And so, there has to be susceptibility there. And the susceptible people are the ones with these impaired brain circuits, and the impairment is caused by early adversity, rather than by genetics.

When people are mistreated, stressed or abused, their brains don't develop the way they ought to. It's that simple. And unfortunately, my profession, the medical profession, puts all the emphasis on genetics rather than on the environment, which, of course, is a simple explanation. It also takes everybody off the hook.

And so, if it's all caused by genetics, we don't have to look at those social policies; we don't have to look at our politics that disadvantage certain minority groups, so cause them more stress, cause them more pain, in other words, more predisposition for addictions; we don't have to look at economic inequalities. If it's all genes, it's all - we're all innocent, and society doesn't have to take a hard look at its own attitudes and policies.

The second point is, is that the research clearly shows that the biggest driver of addictive relapse and addictive behavior is actually stress. In North America right now, because of the economic crisis, a lot of people are eating junk food, because junk foods release endorphins and dopamine in the brain. So that stress drives addiction.

Now imagine a situation where we're trying to figure out how to help addicts. Would we come up with a system that stresses them to the max? Who would design a system that ostracizes, marginalizes, impoverishes and ensures the disease of the addict, and hope, through that system, to rehabilitate large numbers? It can't be done. In other words, the so-called "war on drugs," which, as the new drug czar points out, is a war on people, actually entrenches addiction deeply. Furthermore, it institutionalizes people in facilities where the care is very - there's no care. We call it a "correctional" system, but it doesn't correct anything. It's a punitive system. So people suffer more, and then they come out, and of course they're more entrenched in their addiction than they were when they went in.

Now infants don't know anything about Nazis and genocide or war or Hitler. They're picking up on the stresses of their parents. And, of course, my mother was an intensely stressed person, her husband being away in forced labor, her parents shortly thereafter being departed and killed in Auschwitz. Under those conditions, I don't have the kind of conditions that I need for the proper development of my brain circuits. And particularly, how does an infant deal with that much stress? By tuning it out. That's the only way the brain can deal with it. And when you do that, that becomes programmed into the brain.

And so, if you look at the preponderance of ADD in North America now and the three millions of kids in the States that are on stimulant medication and the half-a-million who are on anti-psychotics, what they're really exhibiting is the effects of extreme stress, increasing stress in our society, on the parenting environment. Not bad parenting. Extremely stressed parenting, because of social and economic conditions. And that's why we're seeing such a preponderance.

So, in my case, that also set up this sense of never being soothed, of never having enough, because I was a starving infant. And that means, all my life, I have this propensity to soothe myself. How do I do that? Well, one way is to work a lot and to gets lots of admiration and lots of respect and people wanting me. If you get the impression early in life that the world doesn't want you, then you're going to make yourself wanted and indispensable. And people do that through work. I did it through being a medical doctor. I also have this propensity to soothe myself through shopping, especially when I'm stressed, and I happen to shop for classical compact music. But it goes back to this insatiable need of the infant who is not soothed, and they have to develop, or their brain develop, these self-soothing strategies.

That's also, by the way, what the addict needs. So instead of a punitive approach, we need to have a much more compassionate, caring approach that would allow these people to develop, because the development is stuck at a very early age.

Dr. Gabor Maté, author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction. He's a bestselling author. He's a physician in Canada.

In that first interview, we touched briefly on his work on attention deficit disorder, the subject of his book Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do about It. Well, just about a month ago, we had Dr. Maté back on Democracy Now! to talk more about ADD, as well as parenting, bullying, the education system, and how a litany of stresses on the family environment is leading to what he calls the "destruction of the American childhood."

And I know that Canadians statistics just last week showed that within last five years, 43 - there's been a 43 percent increase in the rate of dispensing of stimulant prescriptions for ADD or ADHD, and most of these are going to boys. In other words, what we're seeing is an unprecedented burgeoning of the diagnosis. And I should say, really, I'm talking about, more broadly speaking, what I would call the destruction of American childhood, because ADD is just a template, or it's just an example of what's going on. In fact, according to a recent study published in the States, nearly half of American adolescents now meet some criteria or criteria for mental health disorders. So we're talking about a massive impact on our children of something in our culture that's just not being recognized.

But again, please notice that the impulse control problem is general amongst kids these days. In other words, it's not just the kids diagnosed with ADD, but a lot of kids. And there's a whole lot of new diagnoses now. And children are being diagnosed with all kinds of things. ADD is just one example. There's a new diagnosis called oppositional defiant disorder, which again has to do with behaviors and poor impulse control, so that impulse control now has become a problem amongst children, in general, not just the specific ones diagnosed with ADD.

The second criteria for ADD is physical hyperactivity. So the part of the brain, again, that's supposed to regulate physical activity and keep you still just, again, doesn't work.

And then, finally, in the third criteria is poor attention skills - tuning out; not paying attention; mind being somewhere else; absent-mindedness; not being able to focus; beginning to work on something, five minutes later the mind goes somewhere else. So, kind of a mental restlessness and the lack of being still, lack of being focused, lack of being present. These are the three major criteria of ADD.

So what's really going on here now is that the developmental conditions for healthy childhood psychological and brain development are less and less available, so that the issue of ADD is only a small part of the general issue that children are no longer having the support for the way they need to develop.

As I made the point in my book about addiction, as well, the human brain does not develop on its own, does not develop according to a genetic program, depends very much on the environment. And the essential condition for the physiological development of these brain circuits that regulate human behavior, that give us empathy, that give us a social sense, that give us a connection with other people, that give us a connection with ourselves, that allows us to mature - the essential condition for those circuits, for their physiological development, is the presence of emotionally available, consistently available, non-stressed, attuned parenting caregivers.

Now, what do you have in a country where the average maternity leave is six weeks? These kids don't have emotional caregivers available to them. What do you have in a country where poor women, nearly 50 percent of them, suffer from postpartum depression? And when a woman has postpartum depression, she can't be attuned to the child.

What we have to understand here is that human beings are not discrete, individual entities, contrary to the free enterprise myth that people are competitive, individualistic, private entities. What people actually are are social creatures, very much dependent on one another and very much programmed to cooperate with one another when the circumstances are right. When that's not available, if the support is not available for women, that's when they get depressed. When the fathers are stressed, they're not supporting the women in that really important, crucial bonding role in the beginning. In fact, they get stressed and depressed themselves.

The child's brain development depends on the presence of non-stressed, emotionally available parents. In this country, that's less and less available. Hence, you've got burgeoning rates of autism in this country. It's going up like 20- or 30-fold in the last 30 or 40 years.

And there's many, many more kids in this country now, several-fold increase, 20-fold increase in the last 30 years. The rates of anxiety amongst children is increasing. The numbers of kids on antidepressant medications has increased tremendously. The number of kids being diagnosed with bipolar disorder has gone up. And then not to mention all the behavioral issues, the bullying that I've already mentioned, the precocious sexuality, the teenage pregnancies. There's now a program, a so-called "reality show," that just focuses on teenage mothers.

You know, in other words - see, it never used to be that children grew up in a stressed nuclear family. That wasn't the normal basis for child development. The normal basis for child development has always been the clan, the tribe, the community, the neighborhood, the extended family. Essentially, post-industrial capitalism has completely destroyed those conditions. People no longer live in communities which are still connected to one another. People don't work where they live. They don't shop where they live. The kids don't go to school, necessarily, where they live. The parents are away most of the day. For the first time in history, children are not spending most of their time around the nurturing adults in their lives. And they're spending their lives away from the nurturing adults, which is what they need for healthy brain development.

Canadian physician Dr. Gabor Maté, his book, Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do about It. We're going to go back to this discussion in a minute.

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We return to our hour-long special with the Canadian physician and bestselling author, Gabor Maté. His books include Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do about It and, with Dr. Gordon Neufeld, Hold on to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More than Peers.

However, the assumption underneath giving these kids medications is that what we're dealing with here is a genetic disorder, and the only way to deal with it is pharmacologically. And if you actually look at how the dopamine levels in a brain develop, if you look at infant monkeys and you measure their dopamine levels, and they're normal when they're with their mothers, and when you separate them from mothers, the dopamine levels go down within two or three days.

So, in other words, what we're doing is we're correcting a massive social problem that has to do with disconnection in a society and the loss of nurturing, non-stressed parenting, and we're replacing that chemically. Now, the drugs - the stimulant drugs do seem to work, and a lot of kids are helped by it. The problem is not so much whether they should be used or not; the problem is that 80 percent of the time a kid is prescribed a medication, that's all that happens. Nobody talks to the family about the family environment. The school makes no attempt to change the school environment. Nobody connects with these kids emotionally. In other words, it's seen simply as a medical or a behavioral problem, but not as a problem of development.

My point is that, yes, a lot of children are acting out, but it's not bad behavior. It's a representation of emotional losses and emotional lacks in their lives. And whether it's, again, bullying or a whole set of other behaviors, what we're dealing with here is childhood stunted emotional development - in some cases, stunted pain development. And rather than trying to control these behaviors through punishments, or even just exclusively through medications, we need to help these kids develop.

What never made sense to me right from the beginning, though, is the idea of ADD as a genetic disease. And not even after a couple of my kids were diagnosed with it, I still didn't buy the idea that it's genetic, because it isn't. Again, it has to do with, in my case, very stressed circumstances as an infant, which I talked about on a previous program. In the case of my children, it's because their father was a workaholic doctor who wasn't emotionally available to them. And under those circumstances, children are stressed. I mean, if children are stressed when their brains are developing, one way to deal with the stress is to tune out.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Amy, in 1998, there was a book that was on the New York Times best book of the year and nearly won the Pulitzer Prize, and it was called The Nurture Assumption, in which this researcher argued that parents don't make any difference anymore, because she looked at the - to the extent that Newsweek actually had a cover article that year entitled "Do Parents Matter?" Now, if you want to get the full stupidity of that question, you have to imagine a veterinarian magazine asking, "Does the mother cat make any difference?" or "Does the mother bear matter?" But the research showed that children are being more influenced now, in their tastes, in their attitudes, in their behaviors, by peers than by parents. This poor researcher concluded that this is somehow natural. And what she mistook was that what is the norm in North America, she actually thought that was natural and healthy. In fact, it isn't.

So, our book, Hold on to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More than Peers, is about showing why it is true that children are being more influenced by other kids in these days than by their parents, but just what an aberration that is, and what a distortion it is of normal human development, because normal human development demands, as normal mammalian development demands, the presence of nurturing parents. You know, even birds - birds don't develop properly unless the mother and father bird are there. Bears, cats, rats, mice. Although, most of all, human beings, because human beings are the least mature and the most dependent for the longest period of time.

You co-wrote this book, and you both found, in your experience, Hold on to Your Kids, that your kids were becoming increasingly secretive and unreachable.

Now, here's what happens. Caring about something and being curious about something and recognizing that something doesn't work, you have to have a certain degree of emotional security. You have to be able to be open and vulnerable. Children who become peer-oriented - because the peer world is so dangerous and so fraught with bullying and ostracization and dissing and exclusion and negative talk, how does a child protect himself or herself from all that negativity in the peer world? Because children are not committed to each others' unconditional loving acceptance. Even adults have a hard time giving that. Children can't do it. Those children become very insecure, and emotionally, to protect themselves, they shut down. They become hardened, so they become cool. Nothing matters. Cool is the ethic. You see that in the rock videos. It's all about cool. It's all about aggression and cool and no real emotion. Now, when that happens, curiosity goes, because curiosity is vulnerable, because you care about something and you're admitting that you don't know. You won't try anything, because if you fail, again, your vulnerability is exposed. So, you're not willing to have trial and error.

And in terms of who you're learning from, as long as kids were attaching to adults, they were looking to the adults to be modeling themselves on, to learn from, and to get their cues from. Now, kids are still learning from the people they're attached to, but now it's other kids. So you have whole generations of kids that are looking to other kids now to be their main cue-givers. So teachers have an almost impossible problem on their hands. And unfortunately, in North America again, education is seen as a question of academic pedagogy, hence these terrible standardized tests. And the very teachers who work with the most difficult kids are the ones who are most penalized.

Canadian physician and bestselling author, Gabor Maté. Among his books, Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do about It. When we come back, a third interview with Gabor Maté about, well, When the Body Says No. Stay with us.

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We return to the last part of our hour-long special with Dr. Gabor Maté, Canadian physician and writer. Dr. Maté came on Democracy Now! this year to discuss his book When the Body Says No: Understanding the Stress-Disease Connection. Based on medical studies and his own experience with chronically ill patients at the Palliative Care Unit at Vancouver Hospital, where he was the medical coordinator for seven years, Dr. Maté argues that stress and individual emotional makeup play critical roles in an array of diseases, including cancer, heart disease, diabetes, multiple sclerosis and arthritis. Speaking to us this time from Vancouver - it was actually during the Vancouver Olympics - Dr. Maté began by explaining his analysis of the mind-body connection.

The point now is that the emotional centers of the brain, which regulate our behaviors and our responses and our reactions, are physiologically connected with - and we know exactly how they're connected - with the immune system, the nervous system and the hormonal apparatus. In fact, it's no longer possible, scientifically, to speak of these as separate systems, as if immunity was separate from emotions, as if the nervous system was separate from the hormonal apparatus. There's one system, and they're wired together by the nervous system itself and joined together by chemical messengers that they all secrete, and so that whatever happens emotionally has an impact immunologically, and vice versa. So, for example, we know now that the white cells in the circulation of our - of the blood can manufacture every hormone that the brain can manufacture, and vice versa, so that the brain and the immune system are always talking to one another.

So, in short, we have one system. The science that studies it is called psychoneuroimmunology. And scientifically, it's not even controversial, but it's completely lacking from medical practice.

Now, you would think that study would send every physician in North America trying to figure out the mind-body connection. But these studies get published, and they sink without a trace. There was a study two years ago that showed that children of mothers who are stressed and depressed are themselves, the children, are more likely to have asthma. Again, the mind-body connection. You'd think that study alone would send every physician running to figure out the mind-body connection. But again, these studies are done; they disappear without a trace, and they have no impact on medical practice. And that's what I mean by the Bermuda Triangle, is that we have the research; we just don't pay attention to it, as like if it never happened.

Now, if you look at the role of healthy assertion of boundaries and anger, for example, it's actually there to protect you. I'm talking about healthy anger. It's not there to attack anybody; it's just there to protect your boundaries. That's the same role as the immune system have. The immune system also functions like a brain. It has memory, it has reactive capacity, and it has learning capacity. In fact, the immune system has been called the "floating brain." And it's in interaction with the brain up in our heads.

Now, women, for example, with breast cancer, who don't know how to express anger, they've been shown to have diminished activity of a group of immune cells called natural killer cells. Natural killer cells attack foreign bacteria, virus and also malignant cells. have been able to increase the natural killer cells. In other words, they protect our boundaries. Women who don't know how to express their boundaries emotionally, they suppress their boundaries immunologically, and therefore they're more likely to develop disease. The same is true, of course, of men, so that the immune system is in constant interaction with our emotional responses.

In another study with the immune system, medical students under the stress of examination were found to have diminished activity of their natural killer cells, these immune cells. But those students who were emotionally isolated were most likely to have diminished activity of their immune system. In other words, another fact that's important is our relationship with other people. And the Los Angeles UCLA psychiatrist, Dr. Daniel Siegel, has coined a phrase "interpersonal neurobiology," to indicate that our biology of our brains, but indeed of our whole bodies, is in interaction with our personal relationships. So how we express ourselves in those relationships, or how we suppress ourselves, has a lot to do with our health.

Well, she never finished the meal. Her body said no. She came down with severe inflammation in all her joints, and she was rushed to the hospital with her first malignant outbreak of rheumatoid arthritis. And that self-suppression is typical for people that develop rheumatoid arthritis.

It's also typical for people that develop ALS, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. I talk about the example of Lou Gehrig, if I may tell you about that. Lou Gehrig was this great baseball player, a teammate of Babe Ruth's on the New York Yankees. And he set a record for consecutive games played that stood for nearly sixty years. Now, Gehrig wasn't just a great athlete. He was also dutiful. He - it's not that he was never hurt. At one point, his hands were x-rayed. It turns out his fingers had been fractured seventeen separate times. And his teammates described him as grimacing like a mad monkey in agony when he fielded the ball. But he never took himself out of a game, because he was too dutiful to his own self-image and also to the fans and to the owners. Now, that sense of responsibility, and not looking after yourself, is totally typical of everybody who develops ALS.

And it goes back to their childhoods. Lou Gehrig's father was an alcoholic, and Gehrig learned very early in life that he had to take care of others, as the children of alcoholics often do. And that then became his pattern until he could no longer drag himself around the baseball diamond because of the ALS, which in North America, of course, is known as Lou Gehrig's disease.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, again, in the book When the Body Says No, I give the example of my visiting my mother one day in a nursing home. My mother had muscular dystrophy, which is a degenerative disease of the muscles. It's hereditary, runs in our family. And so, she could no longer walk, get out of bed, even feed herself very well, so she was in a nursing home, mentally completely with it and emotionally very strong.

So I'm walking down the hall of the nursing home that day, and I'm limping a little bit. And why am I limping? Because that morning I had arthroscopic surgery on my knee, which I had to have because I tore up cartilage in my knee jogging on cement. So I have a little bit of a limp that afternoon. When I get to my mother's room, I suppress the limp. The limp disappears. I walk to her bed nonchalantly, greet her, we have a lovely visit. I walk out of the room with a perfectly normal gait, and when I shut the door behind me, my limp begins again.

And only later on did I think, "What am I doing here?" It wasn't conscious. I didn't do it deliberately. Of course, clearly, I was trying to protect my mom from the awareness of my pain. Now, my mother, at age 78, did not need to be protected from the fact that her middle-age son had to be with a limp the day of surgery. It was a childhood-ingrained mechanism going back, again, to my first year of life in the ghetto of Budapest, when, as I mentioned in my first visit to your program, we lived under Nazi occupation, a Jewish family. My father was away in forced labor. My mother was a highly stressed woman, trying to do her best to ensure my and her survival, which she was barely able to do. I learned as an infant to suppress my pain to protect her from it, because she already had too much, in order to protect my relationship with her. Now, those emotional patterns are ingrained in children from early on. And although I have no recollection of that time in my life, the memory of it lives in my cells and lives in my brain and shows up in my interactions with people, including in that example of trying to protect my mother.

So, the point is that human beings are shaped very early by what happens to them in life. As a matter of fact, they're shaped already by what happens in uterus. After 9/11, after the World Trade disasters in those terrorist attacks, some women who were pregnant suffered PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. And depending on what stage of pregnancy they suffered the PTSD, when they measured their children's cortisol levels - cortisol being a body stress hormone - at one year of age, those kids had abnormal cortisol levels. In other words, their stress apparatus had been negatively affected by the mother's stress during pregnancy. Similarly, for example, when I looked at the stress hormone levels of the children of Holocaust survivors with PTSD, the greater the degree of PTSD of the parent, the higher the stress hormone level of the child.

So, how we see the world, whether the world is a hostile or friendly place, whether we have to always do for ourselves and look after others or whether we can actually expect and receive help from the world, whether or not the world is hostile or friendly, and indeed our stress physiology, is very much shaped by those early experiences. And that's then what we act out much of our lives, and that's then what interferes and affects our health later on.

The implication of this, Amy, for treatment is that when somebody comes in with a first episode of rheumatoid arthritis or multiple sclerosis, or even a diagnosis of cancer, it's not enough to give them pills. It's not enough to give them radiation or offer them surgery. They should also be talked to and invited to and encouraged to investigate how they live their lives and how they stress themselves, because I can tell you from personal experience and observation that people who do that, who take a broader approach to their own health, they actually do a lot better.

And I know people who have survived supposedly terminal diagnoses simply because they've taken their own mind-body unity, and I would say spiritual unity, as well, seriously, and they've gone beyond a narrow medical model of treatment. And I'm not here to disparage the value of the medical approach in which I was trained. I'm just saying that it's hopelessly narrow, and it leaves many people without appropriate treatment and appropriate support.

- and their connection also to addiction, this latest book that you have written, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts.

When it comes to addiction, these effects are addictive, so that if a child has a number of these adverse childhood experiences, his chance of becoming a drug addict later on, or any kind of an addict, go up exponentially. So a male child with six such adverse childhood experiences has a 4,600 percent increase in the risk of him becoming an injection-using substance addict than a male child with no such experiences - in other words, a 46-fold increase in the risk.

And interestingly enough, those adverse childhood experiences also exponentially increase the risk of cancer and high blood pressure and heart disease and a whole range of other diseases, as well as suicide, of course, and early death. In other words, there's a real connection between early childhood adversity and how a person lives their lives and a later appearance of addiction and diseases, physical and of course mental illnesses at the same time.

And if we don't take this into account in medicine - most of the time, people are not asked about these things in doctors' offices, and they're not explored. They're not encouraged to explore their childhoods and the kind of impact that the childhood has on their adult behaviors.

We need to, first of all, to say and pay attention to what the body is saying to us. So if we have a symptom, don't just go to the doctor and say, "Take this symptom away from me" - yeah, ask for help - but also explore what the body is saying no to. Usually you'll find that in your life you've taken on too much, you're suppressing yourself, you're trying to please others too much. You're living life along patterns that don't express who you really are. So the symptom or the disease ought to be not just something that you want to get rid of; it ought to be the beginning of an exploration and investigation of how you live your life and how you might possibly live your life differently, in a more healthy fashion.

But if I look at the profession as a whole, we're doing a dismal job. And we're spending billions of dollars on researches into cancer and so on that are never going to get us anywhere, because we ignore the life stresses that very often, if they don't by themselves cause, they certainly contribute in a major way to the onset of disease. But we're not looking at them. We're not dealing with them. And we're leaving people without the appropriate tools to restore their own health.

Dr. Gabor Maté, the Vancouver-based physician and bestselling author of four books: When the Body Says No: Understanding the Stress-Disease Connection; Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do about It; and, with Dr. Gordon Neufeld, Hold on to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More than Peers; oh, and there's his latest, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction.

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Dr. Gabor Maté on the Stress-Disease Connection, Addiction and the Destruction of American Childhood

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Today, a Democracy Now! special with the Canadian physician and bestselling author, Dr. Gabor Maté. From disease to addiction, parenting to attention deficit disorder, Maté's work focuses on the centrality of early childhood experiences to the development of the brain, and how those experiences can impact everything from behavioral patterns to physical and mental illness.

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This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. As the immigration reform bill makes its way through the mark-up process in the House and Senate, we turn now to the growing push to add harsher border security measures in order for the bill to pass. This week a key member of the so-called bipartisan Gang of Eight working on the bill, Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, said he himself may vote against the bill unless it includes an amendment that calls for full control of the border and 90 percent apprehension of illegal border crossings before immigrants can apply for legal status. The amendment would also require what it calls "situational awareness" of each one-mile segment of the southern border.

For more, we turn to two people working to introduce measures that protect human rights and civil liberties and to the bill, as well. Andrea Guerrero is the co-chair of Southern Border Communities Coalition and executive director of Alliance San Diego. Joining her is Shena Gutierrez, volunteer with Southern [Border Communities] Coalition. She has a very personal experience related to the border: her husband nearly killed in an encounter with Border Patrol agents. While still unconscious in the hospital, he was threatened with deportation. Andrea and Shena live in California but join us from Washington, D.C., where they've been meeting with members of Congress.

Let's go to Andrea Guerrero. If you can talk for a moment about what the so-called Gang of Eight immigration reform bill is and what you are calling for?

I get a call from the consulate in Arizona asking me, you know, "Is this Shena, who's his wife?" I said, "Yes." And I will never forget those words. She says, "Well, we have to inform you that there's been an accident." I had no idea what kind of accident she meant. After numerous phone calls, hours later, I find out he's in Phoenix, and they tell me he's unconscious. I get to the hospital, and in my mind I'm thinking, you know, "Unconscious: He's laying in a bed with maybe an IV in his arm, and that's it, at the most." And when I turn the corner and I see the two agents-because he was being protected, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, by agents at the door-they stand up, and I notice gun on one side and taser on the other side. And I just kind of peek into his room, and I fall, because he had staples ear to ear, black and blue all over his body. He had machines all over him. And he was in a straight-up coma.

I wasn't told immediately what happened, but eventually I was told that he became combative. And I didn't believe it. I know my husband. They told me he fell back and hit his head on a rock. Now, by looking at him, black and blue and staples-and five parts of his skull were removed. But it was brain-his brain was so swollen from the hemorrhaging. I just knew it was not from a fall to a rock. Border Patrol changed their story with me three times. They gave me three different versions of what had happened. They-it just kept changing and changing. So I started calling, you know, all these organizations and media and trying to get some kind of help. I didn't know what to do, really. I didn't know. Their-the hospital started telling me, "We're going to deport him." He was in a coma. He was on life support. And I said, "You can't do this to him. This happened here. This needs to be taken care of here." I don't even know what's really going on. I never got a report. I never got any answers. I never got anything. It was hear-you know, he said, she said, that type of thing.

So, we almost lost him a few times. He was in a coma for four weeks. And it was so difficult, so difficult, because I-you know, I'm away from my children for a whole month, and I'm trying to deal with the hospital. My husband's almost dying, and they want to deport him. And hospital's blaming Border Patrol; Border Patrol's blaming them. And finally, he got, after two weeks, a-he got granted a stay from the Ninth Circuit. And they told me, "We're going to deport him anyways." And so, here's my proof. I'm showing them he can stay. He can stay here. You know, I'm excited about it. But they're saying, "No." They told me, "He's illegal. He's a criminal. He has no room to be here. He can't pay his medical bills. He needs to go. He's a criminal." That's all they kept telling me. "He's a criminal. He's a criminal." So, he, all the while, is still in a coma. And, thank God, you know, they stopped it. He was able to stay. The agents were gone, finally, from the door, because he was being protected 24 hours a day. And, I mean, after three weeks, he started waking up from the coma. But there was a lot of complications with his trach tube, so they had to put him back into a medically induced coma, off and on.

Finally, he wakes up, and I'm able to bring him back to Los Angeles with me, which is-was the whole plan, to get him out of Arizona. They wanted him out, but they kept telling me, "He can't go home. He needs to go to Mexico." Finally, I brought him home, and, you know, it was rough. It was three months in a hospital. Finally, the swelling started coming down from his brain, and he had indentions in his head. I mean, it was just skin on brain. That's it. It was horrifying. It was horrifying to see that. They did this to him. He went from being perfectly healthy-never been hospitalized, never even had the flu-to your head, your skull is missing, and seizures are happening, and all these complications, pneumonia. And it was-it was very scary, very, very scary.

I don't know how. Border Patrol never gave me answers as to what happened. All they kept saying was, "Your husband was combative. He fell on a rock." He fell backwards first; then they said he fell forward. They told me, you know, they took him into an interrogation room. So I don't know what happened in that interrogation room or in second inspection or any other story they told me. I don't know what happened. And it's been over two years now, and to date, we don't have an answer as to what really happened. But we're left with a lot of questions. How did the-you know, this happen? Why did it happen? Who did this to him?

Well, Amy, unfortunately, this is a story that we hear about every other month. And we hear about somebody being killed by Border Patrol or seriously injured. And it's important to note that this is happening to U.S. citizens, as well as to immigrants. Of the 20 cases of those killed that we've tracked in the last two years, one-third are U.S. citizens. One-third are also teenagers. They are minors who were throwing rocks at agents, allegedly. And so, we are deeply concerned about what has been a trend in this agency, certainly since the-since the inception of the Department of Homeland Security, but really, this is a trend that predates the DHS formation.

And, you know, in the 100-year history of Border Patrol, rarely, if ever, has an agent been brought to justice for something that they've done in the community. And we're very concerned about that. So we've turned to the justice system. We've sought justice there for the more than 20 families now whose lives have been changed forever by Border Patrol use of force or excessive use of force. And now we're going to Congress, and we're asking Congress to take matters into their own hands, exercise the oversight authority that they have over this agency and provide a very concrete way for us to know what those agents are doing. And that's to use lapel cameras. And, you know, those are cameras that are placed on the agent's uniform and which records their interactions with the public every day. This is a technology that's used by police departments throughout the country. Within two years, we anticipate that all police departments will have such technology. They already use cameras on their vehicles, and they use it in specific settings, right? And so, we know this works. We know that in a police department near where we live, in Rialto, California, that when agents started wearing cameras, that the allegations of abuse dropped by 88 percent. And we also know that agents or officers that wore cameras were engaged in use-of-force incidents half as much as those without cameras. So it has a deterrence effect. It protects officers against false allegations. And, in general, it brings us transparency and openness to officers that are charged with protecting us, protecting the public welfare, making sure that they're doing their job, that they're not beating up people, that they're not, you know, engaged in sexual assaults or stalking of women, which is, you know, something that's happened recently in another part of California. You know, so, we need to make sure that the investment that Congress is about to make in enhanced border enforcement is-comes with some very meaningful and effective oversight and accountability. And, you know, while like a hearing is an effective way of getting a sense of what's going on in the agency every couple of months, what we need is a day-to-day oversight mechanism. If lapel cameras work for police, we think that they will work for Border Patrol.

In terms of, you know, enhanced border enforcement, the bill already provides sufficient-we believe, sufficient enhancements to border enforcement in such a way that allows us to move forward with a pathway to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented and protects the rights of border residents, because border enforcement-everyone has to remember that border enforcement in our communities affects not only those who would cross our border, but it affects the 15 million people who are living there who are subject to the roving patrols in our neighborhoods, agents standing outside of our churches, our schools and our grocery stores, asking us for papers, biking down our alleyways while we're taking out the trash, asking us for papers. I mean, this is a-what we consider a police state in the United States of America, where, you know, I myself recently was on a train to Los Angeles, 100 miles away from the border, and an agent boarded that train. I was alone, single and on that train at 6:00 a.m. in the morning, and that agent cornered me and asked me for my papers. I was terrified. And guess what? I wasn't carrying any proof of my citizenship. And who would be? So it was my word on whether I was a citizen or not, and it was up to the agent to determine what to do with me. I'm fair-skinned. I speak English without an accent. So he let me pass. But what if I didn't? You know, I know all too well, in the case of many others, who get wrapped up in the enforcement scheme by Border Patrol, which has extraordinary authority, which overruns our border community.

We do not need any more border enforcement than what we have. We already have operational control in most sectors of the border. Where we don't, there are mechanisms in the immigration reform bill that's been proposed that would address those. We would not ask a police department to ensure that we have 90 percent operation control of crime before we would allow children to go to school, before we would allow people to go to work, to earn a living, before we would allow a mother to come home to be with her children. We wouldn't do that. In the immigration context, we cannot continue to separate families and leave employment gaps unfilled, while we're trying to address, you know, an enforcement issue at the border. We need to do all things at the same time.

I want to turn to the case of Anastasio Hernández Rojas. In May 2010-I'm going to just take that again-I want to turn to the case of Anastasio Hernández Rojas. In May 2010, he was caught trying to enter the United States from Mexico near San Diego. He had previously lived in the United States for 25 years, from the age of 15. He was the father of five U.S.-born children. But instead of deportation, Hernández Rojas's detention ended in his death. A number of officers were seen beating him before one tasered him at least five times. During the attack, Hernández Rojas was handcuffed and hogtied. He died shortly after. The agents say they confronted him because he became-sorry, the agents say they confronted him because he became hostile and resisted arrest. But video recorded by eyewitnesses on their cellphones was released later and showed a very different story. The footage was obtained by reporter John Carlos Frey and appeared PBS last year.

ANASTASIO HERNÁNDEZ ROJAS: [translated] Please! Señores, help me!

JOHN LARSON: What U.S. border agents did not realize is that eyewitness videos of the incident caught the sounds of Hernández Rojas screaming and pleading for his life.

JOHN LARSON: And now, a never-before-seen eyewitness video of the incident raises new disturbing questions. The dark video reveals more than a dozen U.S. border agents standing over Hernández Rojas. It shows the firing of the taser. Was Hernández Rojas, as the police press release suggested, combative when he was killed? Or was he on the ground, handcuffed?

That was PBS Need to Know reporter John Larson. Democracy Now! spoke to Hernández Rojas's widow, María Puga, last April. She talked about her family's response to his sudden death.

MARÍA PUGA: [translated] It has been very painful for all of us, for his brothers, his parents, for me. But perhaps the ones who are suffering the most right now are our children. My kids ask me all the time, "Why did they kill my daddy? What happened to my daddy?" And it's a question that I, myself, have no answers to, because I don't know why they did this to him. It's clear now that they beat him severely on that video.

This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman.

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VIDEO: After Man Was Beaten into Coma by Border Patrol, His Wife Stops His Deportation from Hospital

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As the Senate begins its debate on the immigration reform bill, we speak to Shena Gutierrez, whose husband was nearly killed in an encounter with Border Patrol agents. While still unconscious in the hospital, he was threatened with deportation. She explains what happened. [includes rush transcript]

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JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We turn now to a story in the crosshairs of women's rights and gun control. Political analyst Zerlina Maxwell is refusing to be silent after receiving racially fueled death threats for speaking out against rape. Maxwell, who is a rape survivor, appeared on a Fox News segment with Sean Hannity last week about the possibility of arming women to prevent rape. She said the responsibility should lie instead with men.

Well, on Monday, she responded to the comments on MSNBC, saying, quote, "I'm certainly taking steps to protect my emotional health, but I will not be quiet because I refuse to be bullied into silence."

For more, we're joined in studio by Zerlina Maxwell herself, political analyst, contributor to Ebony.com.

Welcome to Democracy Now!

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, you've been a frequent guest on Fox News in the past. Have you ever gotten the kind of reaction that you've gotten on this particular issue?

Zerlina, you wrote a piece this week, "Five Ways We Can Teach Men Not to Rape." Talk about those ways.

One of the things you talk about and you raised on Fox and you talk about in your piece on the Steubenville case, which is headlined "Why Acquaintance Rape is Not a Myth" -

And I think the most important thing is that people understand that rape happens in this way, and not in the jump-out-of-the-bushes stranger rape type of way, the majority of times. That, of course, happens, but the majority of rapes are this other way, this acquaintance, date-rape type of way. And we have to acknowledge that this is a real thing. This is not-this is not something that we can pretend doesn't exist.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And this whole emphasis now, or this attempt to solve everything, all the major problems by arming yourself-

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: -whether it's the school shootings now and now-and Hannity discussing the issue of rape, what does it tell you about the problems we face as a society that we see-constantly see the need to, well, arm yourself to protect yourself against "evil" in the world?

UNIDENTIFIED RAPE SURVIVOR: The harsh reality, as a woman, is that a firearm is the one equalizing factor when met against an opponent much larger than me. The question of my life is, and will remain to be, what would have been different if I had been able to carry my firearm that night?

But I think that the response that-I didn't actually think that the lecture, mini lecture, she got from the Democratic representative in that, at the end of that clip, was necessary, either. I don't really want anyone to be lecturing rape survivors about anything, because many of them put it on themselves, they blame themselves. You're already going through that process. You don't need anybody else to put more on you. And so, you feel a deeper sense of guilt, as if you could have prevented it, when in reality you can't. I think that's the core of the issue.

Zerlina Maxwell, political analyst, contributor to Ebony.com. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report.

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Teaching Men Not to Rape: Survivor Zerlina Maxwell Defies Threats After Speaking Out on Fox News

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Over the past week, political analyst Zerlina Maxwell has received racially fueled death threats for speaking out against rape. Maxwell, who is a rape survivor, appeared on a Fox News segment with Sean Hannity last week about the possibility of arming women to prevent rape. She said the responsibility should lie instead with men.

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JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We begin our show in India, where six men have been formally charged with the gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old student on a moving bus. The woman, identified only by the Hindi word for "fearless," " Nirbhaya," died from her injuries on December 29th in a hospital in Singapore, where she was flown for special treatment. Police are likely to press murder charges and could seek a death penalty sentence for the five adults. On Tuesday, the woman's ashes were scattered in the Ganges River, and many New Year's celebrations were canceled as mourners honored her memory. The woman was mutilated so badly during the rape she needed a gut transplant, but ultimately succumbed to severe organ failure. In her memory, hundreds of thousands of people took part in a candlelight and called for perpetrators to be punished.

ANJALI: Being a woman, I feel it's not just about these six people who have been, you know, arrested. It's about everything that goes wrong against women. It's about child abuse. It's about domestic violence. It's about rape. It's about molestation, eve teasing. And a very simple thing to-a very simple thing that we can do, both men and women, is that we need to raise our voices.

FATHER OF GANG-RAPE VICTIM: [translated] My daughter was very adamant on what it was she wanted. When she used to go to school in class four, there was a sweet shop on the way. And if she made up her mind to have a sweet, even the shopkeeper had to relent.

The same happened in her higher education, and she was doing what she desired. I remember asking her once, "Who are all your friends?" And she replied, "Dad, it's only my books I am friends with." She always wanted to be a doctor and was sure about it. The reason why we moved from this rural place to capital Delhi was the need for a better future for our children.

When my daughter was a kid, she used to hold me tight and sleep for hours. After the incident, for the first two days she was unconscious. But when she regained her senses, she asked the doctor to offer her something to eat. As food was not allowed, she specifically asked for toffee. The doctor asked, "Will you mind a lollipop?" She replied, "Yes." She kept talking to her mother when in hospital-in bits, of course. And one day she held her mother and whispered, "Mommy, I am sorry. I am sorry."

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: The gang-rape case has shined a light on other instances of sexual violence in India, where one woman is raped every 20 minutes, according to the national crime registry. The registry also found 24,206 cases of rape were documented in the country in 2011, but three-fourths of the perpetrators are still at large. The conviction rates in the rape cases in India have decreased from 46 percent in 1971 to 26 percent in 2012.

Well, for more, we're joined right now by several guests. From India, via Democracy Now! videostream, we go directly to Kavita Krishnan, the secretary of the All India Progressive Women's Association, one of the main protest organizers. Last week, Krishnan led protesters outside the Delhi chief minister's residence, when the police charged at them with water canons.

We welcome you to Democracy Now! Can you begin by telling us what happened, why this particular horrific rape on a moving bus has sparked so much outcry in India?

And it all burst out in this, perhaps because this young woman was doing something so normal: She boarded a bus to go home after watching a film with her friend. And I think that somehow struck such a huge chord because everyone identified with her and felt that in their own situation. Delhi has a huge number of young people coming for-coming to study, coming to do a variety of courses, or coming to work in a number of casualized, contractualized jobs, insecure jobs. And I think they all-they all felt a deep connection with this nameless person.

You mentioned her name-I mean, the name that has been used for her, but I think that's just a name, a tag that was used by a couple of newspapers. But for many people, she was nameless, and they choose to refer to her without her name, without seeking to know her name or without seeking to personalize her by giving her some other name, because I think she was, in a sense, every woman, and she could have been any of them.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Could you talk also about the response of major leaders in the country and to what degree that had an impact on the size and the continuation of the protests?

And I think that in this case also, the apathy and indifference and the refusal to take responsibility and be accountable to what happened to this young woman, because it was deeply felt that this bus was a private bus, which had violated multiple rules and regulations, and yet it was being allowed to run amok on Delhi streets, picking up passengers, robbing them or indulging in violence against women. And the police knew of its existence. They had-they maintained a diary. The police-the traffic authorities in Delhi maintained a diary, and this bus was traced through a diary, which maintains records of bribes taken from private bus owners and so on. And that is how they traced this bus. So it goes to show that they knew this bus was plying. They knew this bus had no business to be on the streets in this way. They knew it was violating-it was behaving in a-it had gone rogue. And yet, they were taking bribes and allowing it to ply. So I think all that accumulated.

Since then, you know, what has added fuel to the fire is remarks, for instance, like the member of Parliament from the ruling party, the son of India's president. He made a remark about the protesters. He said, "Oh, these are dented and painted women, and these are not real students. I know what students are like. These are people who go to discotheques. These are beautiful, pretty, pretty women. And we should not take them seriously, because their protest is just something fashionable." And similarly, there were-there was another leader-

We actually have a secret recording of a policeman speaking. I want to turn to an exposé by Tehelka, the New Delhi-based online weekly news magazine. In April, the magazine's reporters secretly recorded conversations with 30 Delhi police officers who blamed women for being raped. The police named everything from fashionable clothes to having boyfriends, to visiting bars, to drinking alcohol, to working alongside men, as justifications for the rapes. Here's what one police officer was secretly recorded saying about a rape victim.

SUB-INSPECTOR ROOP LAL: [translated] If a girl asks for a birthday party and is alone with two or three boys and sees that they are drinking, she knows what is likely to happen. When she, herself, goes for such a party, she can't complain of rape. How can you call it rape when she is sitting there drinking with them?

So, I think what we are seeking is that-an acknowledgment of the deep-seated gender bias and-that is existing in the police force, in the laws, in the entire investigative mechanism, in the judiciary, and of course in society. And we want a comprehensive set of actions to correct these, because they're not even acknowledged now publicly. So what we are seeking is, to begin with, is that there are more than 100,000 pending rape or pending sexual violence cases in the country, many of them which have dragged on for years, for nearly, you know, more than a decade. So we want that these should be addressed on a priority basis, that they should be brought to court and heard speedily, and that some closure should be there here.

And in the police system, we are wanting that there should be a standard operating procedure, a protocol, for responding to crimes against women, not just sexual violence but the so-called "honor crimes" or domestic violence or other forms of violence against women, and that there should be a protocol and which is publicly displayed in all the police stations. And there should be some redressal, some way in which a woman who goes to a police station and finds that the police officer does not record her complaint or does not respond to her correct, she should have a way to complain and ensure that he does not remain in his post anymore, because his views, he may have private-he may have all these feudal and patriarchal views about women, but if he is a public officer, he has to be accountable to a public code of conduct, an accepted code of conduct, a democratic code of conduct. That's one.

We're speaking with Kavita Krishnan, secretary of the All India Progressive Women's Association, one of the lead organizers of the mass protests after the rape and now death of a young woman student on a moving bus. When we come back from break, we'll also be joined, in addition to Kavita, by Elora Chowdhury, who is a professor of women's studies at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. Then, a New York Times exposé on the factory in Bangladesh that killed at least 111 people, the factory that was contracted with Wal-Mart. This is Democracy Now! We'll come back in a minute.

[break]

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, I'd like to bring Elora Chowdhury into the conversation. Your reaction, not only to what-the massive protests in India, but also to the way the media in the West has been covering events there and the somewhat level of hypocrisy in terms of the fascination with the specifics of the terrible attack that occurred?

At the same time, however, I think that while the massive protests that have occurred in India around this particular case are very significant, and one can hope that it will lead to also significant changes in women's position, however, we-I think we also have to think about the particularities of this case and how embedded in these kinds of-the reporting in this case are also a certain class-based assumptions about the poor. So, one of the things that I have found striking is that how so many of the reports are referring to the slum colony, where I think at least four of the perpetrators live, as some kind of a breeding ground for criminals. Also, referring to poor men as illiterate and as violent somehow normalizes these kinds of violent attacks and associates them with poverty, and it ends up criminalizing the poor, whereas rape and sexual violence, of course, is pervasive, it's systematic, it's routine. And we have to also think about the ways in which rape attacks and violence against women reported in middle-class communities, in certain elite communities, are not exposed or talked about or do not elicit quite as much of a moral outrage. So I think the assumptions, the class-based assumptions here in this reporting, are also something that are quite striking.

And then I want to go to the broader issue: As protesters take to the streets in India, women's rights activists here at home are lamenting the news that House Republican leaders have stalled the 2012 reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, an embattled bill that would have extended domestic violence protections to 30 million LGBT individuals, undocumented immigrants, Native American women. Given the delay renewing gender equality bills at the federal level, some activists are ramping up their calls for the U.S. to, once and for all, ratify the U.N. Bill of Rights for Women. Only eight countries have failed to ratify the convention, leaving the U.S. in the company of Iran, Somalia and Sudan. And the public protests against sexual violence in India are leading some to question the United States' own track record, where only 24 percent of alleged rapes even result in arrest, never mind a conviction.

I am wondering, Kavita Krishnan, your thoughts on this issue, as a leading women's rights activist in Delhi who is leading the protests in the aftermath of this particular brutal rape and death?

But what you said about the U.S., I think that's very true. We should keep in mind, you know, the kind of victim blaming I described, obviously, that is not happening only in India. Those biases are not only in India. You had the SlutWalk protests all over the world, so obviously this is a larger phenomenon.

But I wanted to briefly tell you that we are also seeking changes in the laws, because the laws in India are-again, many of them are a colonial legacy, and we are continuing with investigative practices and laws which are a colonial legacy and are extremely biased towards women. For instance, a woman who goes through rape, who's a rape survivor, she is subjected to a medical test called "the two-finger test," in which the doctor puts two fingers in her body to make sure-to find out if she is habituated to sex. There have been court judgments in India against this practice, but it continues, and the government has yet to put an end to this practice. Then you have laws which refer to molestation as "outraging of modesty," sexual harassment as "eve teasing." So these are-these are usages and laws that trivialize the experience of sexual violence and are laws that have a very narrow definition of sexual violence that do not cover a whole range of types and varieties of sexual violence, including stalking, throwing of acid to disfigure the face, and stripping and sexual humiliation, and so on. So we are seeking changes in the law that actually recognize Indian women's experience of sexual violence.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I'd like to ask Elora Chowdhury also about the larger issue, obviously, as India has been rapidly industrializing in recent decades, and millions of people have been coming from the countryside into the cities, and women, of course, have been joining the industrial workforce and the city workforce in huge numbers. The larger social pressures and the impact on male supremacy and on oppression of women, that this movement is really sort of the tip of the iceberg of what's going on there?

I think we also need to look at the changes happening as a result of various social and economic and cultural forces that are underway-increasing globalization, movements of people, conspicuous consumption, the representation of all this in the media that is so easily available. All of these, I think, and just the changes happening in urban spaces as a result of all of these different kinds of forces and gender dynamics jostling with one another, create different kinds of changes in gender dynamics. We have to think about the particularities of this case, from what I have read, that the young woman was being punished for speaking out, for being out late so night-for being out so late at night with a male companion, that she dared to defy male authority on the bus, that all of these contributed to this horrific event. And we really need to look at sexual violence against women not only as an issue of men versus women, but also these other changes that are occurring in our societies and how those contribute to challenging male supremacy and-

This is Democracy Now! When we come back, New York Times has another exposé on the Bangladeshi factory making clothing for Wal-Mart, where there was a major fire, at least 111 deaths, many of them rural women who had come into the capital of Bangladesh for work. Stay with us.

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Indian Gang-Rape Victim's Attackers Charged with Murder, Protesters Push for Broader Women's Rights

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Five men have been formally charged in India with the kidnapping, gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old student on a moving bus. The woman was mutilated so badly during the rape on December 16 that she needed a gut transplant, but ultimately succumbed to severe organ failure.

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In a statement to The Guardian, Manning's family expressed thanks to his civilian lawyer, David Coombs, who worked on the case, which has now lasted three years. An unnamed aunt of Manning said, quote, "While we're obviously disappointed in today's verdicts, we're happy that Judge Lind agreed with us that Brad never intended to help America's enemies in any way. Brad loves his country and was proud to wear its uniform," she wrote.

Ben Wizner, director of the ACLU's Speech, Privacy & Technology Project, responded to the verdict Tuesday saying, quote, "It seems clear that the government was seeking to intimidate anyone who might consider revealing valuable information in the future."

Meanwhile, House Intelligence Committee Chair Mike Rogers and Democratic Ranking Member Dutch Ruppersberger issued a joint statement that, quote, "justice has been served," adding, "There is still much work to be done to reduce the ability of criminals like Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden to harm our national security."

Well, today we spend the hour on the Manning verdict and its implications. We begin with Julian Assange, founder and editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, which published the secret cables obtained by Bradley Manning. According to numerous press reports, the conviction of Manning makes it increasingly likely that the United States will prosecute Assange as a co-conspirator. During the trial, military prosecutors portrayed Assange as an information anarchist who encouraged Manning to leak hundreds of thousands of classified military and diplomatic documents.

Julian Assange joins us via Democracy Now! video stream from the Ecuadorean embassy in London. He took refugee in the embassy in June of 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he's wanted for questioning around sex assault allegations but has never been charged. He remains in the embassy there because the British government promises to arrest him if he steps foot on British soil. This is his first interview with a U.S. TV show since the Manning verdict.

We welcome you back to Democracy Now!, Julian Assange. What is your response to the verdict?

My reaction to the verdict yesterday, well, first of all, really one of surprise in relation to the timing. This is a case that has been going for three years, two months at trial, over 18 months of interlocutory motions, at least 40,000 pages of judgments and evidence that the judge was required to read. But she has made her decision on 21 separate counts over the weekend. We said at the very beginning of this process that this was a show trial. This is not a trial where any justice can come about, because the framing of what was possible to debate was set from the very beginning. It was not possible for Bradley Manning's team to say that he was well-intentioned. Motive was taken out of the case. The prosecution has not alleged that a single person came to harm as a result of Bradley Manning's alleged actions, not a single person. And, in fact, no evidence was presented that anyone was indeed harmed. The defense is not allowed to argue that that means that these charges should be thrown out.

And so what we are left with here is 20 convictions for Bradley Manning. Five of those are for espionage. This is a case where everyone agrees that Bradley Manning provided the media information about war crimes and politics, some of which was published by the media. There is no allegation that he worked with a foreign power, that he accepted any personal benefit for the disclosures that he engaged in. And yet, we see him being convicted for five charges of espionage. It is completely absurd. It cannot possibly be the case that a journalistic source, who is not communicating with a foreign power, who is simply working for the American public, can be convicted of five counts of espionage. That is a abuse, not merely of Bradley Manning's human rights, but it is an abuse of language, it's abuse of the U.S. Constitution, which says very clearly the Congress will make no law abridging the freedom of the press or of the right to speech. That's clearly been subjugated here.

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This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh. This is the broadcast on the day after the Bradley Manning verdict was announced, that he was acquitted of aiding the enemy but found guilty on a number of espionage-related and other charges. He faces 136 years in prison. The sentencing phase of the trial begins today 9:30 Eastern time at Fort Meade, where the court-martial has taken place. Just after the Bradley Manning verdict was announced Tuesday, Associated Press reporter Matt Lee asked State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki to comment on the verdict. Let's go to a clip of their exchange.

UNIDENTIFIED: State Department employees were [inaudible].

Well, look, this investigation against our organization is the largest investigation and prosecution against a publisher in United States history and, arguably, anywhere in-anywhere in the world. It involves over a dozen different government departments. The tender for the DOJ to manage the documents related to the prosecution-the broader prosecution against WikiLeaks and myself, and not just the Manning case-is $1 [million] to $2 million per year just to maintain the computer system that manages the prosecution's documents. So I assume those sort of statements by the State Department are a mechanism to reduce the perception of their involvement, which has been extensive over the last three years.

Yeah, I agree. We've been saying this for three years now. It's nice to see, finally, that in the past three months or so the mainstream press in the United States, at least McClatchy and The New York Times- Washington Post has been a bit more problematic-have woken up to the reality of what this case means for all national security reporters and, even more broadly, for publishers.

You know, the approach here has been to smash the insider and the outsider, as it was only one name on the table for an insider, and that was Bradley Manning; it was only one organization as the publisher, the outside force, that's WikiLeaks, and most prominently represented by me. So in order to regain a sense of authority, the United States government has tried to, rather conspicuously, smash Bradley Manning and also the WikiLeaks organization. At least for WikiLeaks, the organization, it has not succeeded. It will not succeed. It is bringing great discredit on itself. Its desire for authority or perception of authority is such that it is willing to be seen as an immoral actor that breaches the rule of law, that breaches its own laws, that engages in torture against its youngest and brightest. In the case of Bradley Manning, the U.N. formally found against the United States, special rapporteur formally finding that the United States government had engaged in cruel and abusive treatment-cruel and inhumane treatment of Bradley Manning.

Julian Assange, I also want to ask you about BSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, who remains, as you know, at the Moscow airport, who you're deeply involved with helping to try to find a place of asylum. In a letter sent last week to the Russian minister of justice, the U.S. attorney general, Eric Holder, assured Russia that Snowden will not be executed or tortured if he's sent back to the United States. Holder wrote, quote, "Mr. Snowden will not be tortured. Torture is unlawful in the United States." He went on to say, "If he returns to the United States, Mr. Snowden would promptly be brought before a civilian court convened under Article III of the United States Constitution and supervised by a United States District Judge." Holder also added, quote, "We believe [that] these assurances eliminate these asserted grounds for Mr. Snowden's claim that he should be treated as a refugee or granted asylum, temporary or otherwise." Can you tell us what you understand to be the latest situation for Snowden and what your involvement with Edward Snowden is, why he is so significant to you, what his actions have been?

U.S. guarantees about torture mean nothing. We all know that the United States government simply redefines its torturous and abusive treatment of prisoners-stress positions, restriction on diet, extreme heat, extreme cold, deprivation of basic things needed for living like glasses or the company of others-it simply redefines that as not being torture. So, its word is worth nothing, in this particular case. In relation to the death penalty, guarantees about the death penalty have more credence, but we wouldn't want Edward Snowden to be in a Jack Ruby-type situation. That's quite a possibility for him, that if he ended up in the United States prison system, that given the level of vitriol that exists against him by the administration, that he would not be safe from police, he would not be safe from prison guards, and he would not be safe from other prisoners. There's no question that he would not-there's no question that he would not receive a fair trial.

Similarly, the charges against him are political. There's only allegations on the table at the moment that he acted for a political purpose: to educate all of us. Those are the only allegations that exist. It is incorrect that extraditions should take place for a political purpose. He's clearly been exercising his political opinion. But we have seen amazing statements by the White House in relation to Edward Snowden's meeting with Human Rights Watch, based in New York, Amnesty International, based in London, that that should not have happened, that that was a propaganda platform for Edward Snowden. I mean, this is incredible to see Jay Carney, a White House spokesperson, denouncing Edward Snowden for speaking to human rights groups. Edward Snowden cannot possibly receive a fair judicial process in the United States. Under that basis, he has applied for asylum in a number of different countries. I believe that Russia will afford him asylum in this case, or at least on a temporary or interim basis. And a number of other countries have offered him asylum.

And we have a situation now where young people, like Edward Snowden, who have been exposed to the Internet, who have seen the world, who have a perspective, who have seen our work, the work of-allegedly of Bradley Manning and others, don't like that. They do not accept that. They do not accept that the U.S. Constitution can be violated, that international human rights law norms can be conspicuously violated, that this information apartheid exists. That system cannot continue. We even saw Michael Hayden acknowledge that in an interview in Australia recently, that in order to function, the National Security Agency, the CIA, and so on, has to recruit people between the ages of 20 and 30. Those people, if they're technical and they're exposed to the Internet, they have a certain view about what is just. And they find that they're-in their jobs, the agencies that they work for do not behave in a legal, ethical or moral manner. So the writing is on the wall for these agencies.

Based on conversations with the DOJ between my U.S. lawyers and the DOJ spokespersons, we know a lot. We know that Neil MacBride, the Virginia DA, has the grand jury process. My U.S. lawyers believe that it is more probable than not that there is a sealed indictment. It's the only explanation for the DA behavior. The DOJ has admitted that the investigation against me and WikiLeaks proceeds.

In relation to the Manning verdict, we will continue to fight that. We have a lot of people now in his coalition. Bradley Manning's support team has been great. The Center for Constitutional Rights also have been excellent, Michael Ratner, who's been on your own program. That team understands what is going on; has been deployed, to a degree, to defend Mr. Snowden in public; and presumably, when the time comes, will also defend us. I am completely confident that the U.S. will not succeed in extraditing me, because I have asylum at this embassy. In relation to the broader attack on the rest of our staff, that's still very much in the fight, but we're not going to go down easy.

This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. To read a transcript, listen to or watch this interview, you can go to our website at democracynow.org. When we come back from break, we're going to Fort Meade, where Bradley Manning has been court-martialed, the sentencing beginning today, the sentencing phase of his trial. We'll speak with one of the few reporters, independent reporters, to have spent every day in the courtroom, or the media center right next to it, to report to the rest of the world what was happening to Bradley Manning. We'll be joined by Alexa-we'll be joined as soon as we come back. Stay with us.

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EXCLUSIVE: "Bradley Manning Has Become a Martyr"-WikiLeaks' Julian Assange on Guilty Verdict

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The sentencing hearing for Army whistleblower Bradley Manning begins today following his acquittal on the most serious charge he faced, aiding the enemy, but conviction on 20 other counts. On Tuesday, Manning was found guilty of violating the Espionage Act and other charges for leaking hundreds of thousands of government documents to WikiLeaks.

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As the world watched to see whether Davis's final appeal for a stay of execution would be granted by the U.S. Supreme Court, Democracy Now! was the only news outlet to continuously broadcast live from the prison grounds in Jackson, Georgia. During our six-hour special report, we spoke with Davis's supporters and family members who held an all-day vigil, then heard from those who witnessed his death by lethal injection at 11:08 p.m. Eastern time.

Soon we'll be joined by some of the people who were there that night: his sister Kimberly, the NAACP's Ben Jealous, and Jen Marlowe, who has authored the book I Am Troy Davis. But first I want to turn to someone who can't be with us today, Troy's oldest sister, Martina Davis-Correia. She died in December of 2011 after a decade-long battle with breast cancer. She was 44 years old. This is Martina speaking two years ago, hours before her brother was executed.

CROWD: We are Troy Davis! We are Troy Davis! We are Troy Davis! We are Troy Davis! We are Troy Davis! We are Troy Davis!

[with crowd] I am Troy Davis! You are Troy Davis! We are Troy Davis!

Now let's get to work, and let's tell Georgia that we will not stand by, and we will defy them. And we need to start with that gold dome. Thank you.

As the scheduled time of Troy Davis's execution approached-it was September 21st, 2011-hundreds of his supporters rallied outside the death row prison in Jackson, Georgia. Around 7:00 p.m., the crowd erupted into thunderous cheers. For a moment, it appeared the Supreme Court had stayed the execution for a fourth time.

Minutes after the state of Georgia executed Troy Davis, a group of reporters who witnessed the execution walked out of the death chamber and onto the prison grounds. They described Troy Davis's final moments. Jon Lewis is a radio journalist at WSB.

As Troy Davis's death was announced, I turned to Ben Jealous, who was standing with the family of Troy Davis in the protest pen. Ben Jealous, the president of the NAACP.

And right now it goes out to the guards. You know, there was a moment the other day when my staff was in there and the family was in there, and a guard leaned over to Martina and asked her to hold it together, because, he said, "We're just barely holding it together." He said, "My mom's been praying for you guys for days." And there was a sense that if she started crying, the guards would start crying. And we have to remember that, you know, these are men, these are working-class men and women, you know, in a rural area, looking for a good-paying job to support their family. And this shouldn't be part of it. They know they may have to execute somebody, but having to execute somebody in the midst of so much doubt, when the former warden, who used to be the boss here, is saying, "Stay the execution," former head of the FBI is saying, "Stay the execution," Republicans, Democrats, conservatives, liberals, all saying, "Stay the execution," it's absolutely inhumane. It's not just a crime against Troy Davis. It's a crime against our democracy. It's a crime against those specific men and women who are called to hold down his leg or his right leg amidst so much doubt, when even their old boss is saying, "Stop this. Don't do it."

Some of the voices from Democracy Now!'s special broadcast, September 21st, 2011, two years ago, when Troy Anthony Davis was executed by the state of Georgia. You can go to our website to see much more of our coverage of the case of Troy Davis, as well as the full six-hour broadcast and an interactive video timelinetroy davis.

When we come back, we'll be joined by the three people who were there that night who continue to fight to abolish the death penalty today. We'll be joined by Ben Jealous, now the outgoing president of the NAACP; Kim Davis, the sister of Troy Davis; and Jen Marlowe, who has written a book about Troy Davis called _I Am Troy Davis." Stay with us.

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"Troy Davis Lives Forever" by Rebel Diaz. They're set to perform tonight at 7:00 p.m. here in New York City at St. Mary's Episcopal Church as part of an event to reflect on Troy Davis's legacy, the movement to end the death penalty, and launching the new book, I Am Troy Davis. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman.

For more on this second anniversary of the execution of Troy Davis, we're joined here in New York by three people who were there two years ago, September 21st, 2011, on the grounds of the prison where Troy Davis was executed. They continue to work on the death penalty. Kimberly Davis is Troy Davis's sister and an anti-death penalty activist. Ben Jealous is the president and CEO of the NAACP. Also with us, Jen Marlowe, who co-authored the new book, I Am Troy Davis, with Troy Davis's late sister and longtime advocate, Martina Davis-Correia. The book is just out this week on the second anniversary of Davis's execution. It's been released with a study and discussion guide about the death penalty developed by Equal Justice USA in partnership with Amnesty International and the NAACP. All three of our guests will be speaking at some of the events related to the book launch.

But first I want to go to Troy Davis in his own words. This was May 2009. Amnesty USA activists had a conference call about Troy Davis's case. Troy's sister, Martina Correia, patched Troy in from death row.

So, fast-forward about 13 years. I become president of the NAACP. She invites me down to meet with Troy on death row, and she has all the evidence. And she held me to my promise. That's just the way she was. But the-that really made the difference. And, you know, Savannah and the community where the Davis and Correia family is from is a relatively small community. So, a big family standing up and not forgetting and not letting folks get away with this makes a difference in the community.

The hard part was that the two people who didn't change their testimony, one of them was the primary alternative suspect, and the other one was somebody who claimed that on a dark night, in the middle of the night, from over a hundred yards away, they could recognize a dark-skinned black man standing under a tree in a shadow. You know, it just all just sort of defied reason. And then more witnesses came through. So, if he was put on death row by nine people, by the time the seven recanted, I think there were about six more or so, right? There's, you know-

Jen Marlowe, why did you write this book? And what does it mean that the book, I Am Troy Davis, is co-authored by Martina Davis-Correia, Troy's older sister, with Troy Anthony Davis himself?

Well, my process of coming to write the book, it actually started with your show, Amy. I had not ever heard about Troy. I had not heard about Troy's case until the day after Troy survived his first execution date. So it was July 17th, 2007. I was watching Democracy Now!, and you had Martina on talking about that narrow miss. And Martina also was talking about her own-her own struggle, the double struggle, fighting for Troy's life at the same time that she has been fighting for her own life with breast cancer.

And I immediately felt that this woman was a force of nature. That was clear. And I was curious to learn more about this brother who she was fighting to prove his innocence. So I began doing some research online, quickly came upon the report that Amnesty International had put out on February 1st, 2007. They had put out their report, "Where is the Justice for Me?" And that was what really galvanized Troy's case, in many ways, because they had assembled all of the points of the case that Ben was just talking about-the witness recantations, the police intimidation and coercion, the lack of physical evidence. They had distilled all of that into this report.

And once I read that and really realized what kind of travesty of justice we were dealing with, I just wrote a note to Troy in prison, just expressing, you know, solidarity. He wrote back. We started a friendship. He found out I was a documentary filmmaker, so he first planted the idea in my head. He said, "You should make a film about Martina." So that idea was in my head, and then about a year later, I met Martina. She came out to Seattle, where I live, and we ended up having dinner at a friend of Troy's house in Seattle, Megan Thomas, and in Megan Thomas's backyard, Martina mentioned offhand, you know, "People keep telling me I should write a book, but I-you know, I don't have time to do that. I'd need to work with someone on it." And what Troy had written in that letter just came back to my mind, suggesting that I might be a part of helping his family tell their story. And so I asked Martina if she would want me to be that person, and we started.

Now, I wanted to talk about Troy's conviction. He was convicted in '91 for the murder of the off-duty police officer, Mark MacPhail. The prosecution's case rested entirely on witness testimony, but seven of the nine non-police witnesses, as we've said, were-said they were coerced by police and have since recanted their testimony. Nine witnesses also implicated another man in the murder, one of the remaining witnesses who has not recanted, Sylvester "Redd" Coles, as the shooter. U.S. District Judge William T. Moore Jr. refused on a technicality to allow the testimony of the witnesses who claim that after Davis had been convicted, Coles admitted to shooting MacPhail. In a court order, Moore summarized, "Mr. Davis is not innocent." One of the jurors, Brenda Forrest, disagreed. She told CNN in 2009, recalling the trial of Davis, all the witnesses, they were able to ID him as the person who actually did it. Since the seven witnesses recanted, she says, "If I knew then what I know now, Troy Davis would not be on death row. The verdict would not be guilty." Talk about the significance of this. In fact, you live in the community of Sylvester Coles. You see him.

What happened that night, a man was being pistol-whipped in a parking lot. And Mark MacPhail was an off-duty police officer. He went to his aid, and he was killed. Someone shot him, and the question was, who shot him? Now, Jen Marlowe, you actually reached out to the MacPhail family, is that right, in writing the book, I Am Troy Davis?

I wanted to turn to Martina Correia's son, to De'Jaun, who is now at Morehouse College in Atlanta. During Democracy Now!'s special broadcast from the prison grounds in Jackson, Georgia, I spoke with De'Jaun Davis-Correia. He was 17 then. This is part of what he said the night of the execution.

We're going to break and then come back to this discussion. We're talking to Kim Davis, sister of Troy Davis; Jen Marlowe, author of the book I Am Troy Davis, which is out this week. Tonight, they will be holding an event here in New York at St. Mary's Church, where Martina also held an event when Troy Davis was alive, speaking to him on the phone and putting that phone call on a microphone. We're also joined by Ben Jealous, and want to find out from him what are his plans, as he prepares to leave the NAACP, and the projects that the NAACP is now working on. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. Back in a minute.

[break]

"State of Georgia" by State Radio, here on Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman, on this second anniversary of the execution of Troy Davis that took place September 21st, 2011, in Jackson, Georgia, at the death row prison there. Our guests are Ben Jealous, head of the NAACP; Kim Davis, Troy Davis's sister; and Jen Marlowe, who has just written a book about Troy Davis called I Am Troy Davis. Could you read a page from the book, Jen?

"Troy had never intended to make friends on death row, but there was something disarming about Chris Burger. Chris was tall, trim, strong, and gave off a tough demeanor, but he showed warmth and affection to his friends. He sketched beautifully with colored pencils, often sending his drawings to his mother, to whom he was devoted. He was older than Troy by more than ten years, but there was something vulnerable and childlike about him, perhaps stemming from his history of severe childhood abuse. Chris had been only seventeen years old when he had participated in the murder of Roger Honeycutt. When his execution date was set for December 7, 1993, he confessed to Troy how frightened he was.

"Troy saw the guards parading Chris sadistically in front of the other death row inmates on the evening of December 7 before leading him to the execution chamber to strap him into the electric chair. Troy sat in his cell, hunched over on his bed, waiting for the horrifying moment when the lights would flicker, indicating that a high-voltage current of electricity was coursing through Chris's body.

"Every man on the row twitched in silent agony when the flickering began at 9:50 p.m. Troy knelt on the hard floor, gripping the steel flame of his bed tightly, and prayed for his friend. Only later did he learn that Chris Burger's last words had been an apology to everyone he had ever hurt and a plea for forgiveness. One of the guards who had paraded Chris leaned against the bars of Troy's cell. 'Hey, Davis!' Troy heard the guard say.

"Troy looked up.

"'Yeah?'

"'How'd you like some fries to go with your Burger?"

"Troy resolved never to become quite so close to anyone else on death row again."

Jen Marlowe, reading from I Am Troy Davis.

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"I Am Troy Davis": Supporters, Family of Georgian Man Executed in 2011 Push to End Death Penalty

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Two years ago, on Sept. 21, 2011, the state of Georgia executed Troy Anthony Davis. The execution took place despite major doubts about evidence used to convict Davis of killing police officer Mark MacPhail, including the recantation of seven of the nine non-police witnesses. "The fight is not over.

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For more, we're joined by four former U.S. intelligence officials who met with Snowden to give him an award for integrity in intelligence. In Minneapolis, we're joined by Coleen Rowley. She was a special agent for the from 1981 to 2004. She was a division legal counsel for 13 years, taught constitutional rights to FBI agents and police. Rowley also testified before Congress about the FBI's failure to help prevent the 9/11 attacks. She was awarded Time Person of the Year.

In Washington, D.C., we're joined by Ray McGovern, the former senior CIA analyst whose duties included preparing the President's Daily Brief and chairing National Intelligence Estimates. He did that intelligence brief for former President George H.W. Bush.

We're also joined by Thomas Drake, National Security Agency whistleblower. In 2010, the Obama administration charged Drake with violating the Espionage Act after he was accused of leaking classified information to the press about waste and mismanagement at the agency. The charges were later dropped.

We're also joined by Jesselyn Radack, national security and human rights director at the Government Accountability Project, former ethics adviser to the United States Department of Justice.

We welcome you all back from Russia. I want to start with Thomas Drake, you yourself having worked for the National Security Agency. Tell us about this trip that you took to Russia to give Edward Snowden an award.

And so it is incredibly appropriate that this award for integrity in intelligence, given mostly to whistleblowers, but occasionally to people who do the job honestly in place-and that is Tom Fingar, for example, the last awardee last January, who shepherded the estimate in 2007 which said Iran stopped working on a nuclear weapon at the end of 2003-my arithmetic is right, that's 10 years ago-and has not resumed work on a nuclear weapon. That judgment has been reiterated, revalidated every year since. And in [2007, '08], it played a huge role in preventing Bush and Cheney from starting a war with Iran. And if you don't believe me, just read Bush's memoirs.

RAY McGOVERN: Well, Edward Snowden came by very sensitive information, which he recognized that he had a choice. He could sit around and say, "Well, you know, isn't that funny?" and draw his $100,000 salary, be very, very comfortable in Honolulu, but he decided, "Well, you know, I took a-I took a solemn oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. I see-look what Tom Drake has done. I see what happened to Bradley Manning, where Julian Assange is. If I want to get this information into the mainstream, I got to get out of Dodge, OK?" And very cleverly, he got in touch with Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitrus, met them in Hong Kong, gave them all the information that he wanted to get out, and then found himself kind of stranded there. To the rescue? WikiLeaks, in the person of Sarah Harrison, who arranged with the Russian consulate there his onward travel to Latin America. Latin America? Yeah, he was going to transit Moscow so he wouldn't have to go the other way, where he could be stopped.

Now, this thing is full of ironies, OK? Today is Columbus Day. I was thinking on the way in, my favorite history on the discovery of America, it started this way. Columbus-America was discovered by a man who was looking for something else, and the next two centuries were spent trying to find a way around or through it. History is like that, full of ironies, very chancy. Well, here's Edward Snowden. He's in Hong Kong. He wants to get to Latin America to a secure place. He's on his way to Moscow, in transit-he was ticketed forward to Latin America. And in the process, the U.S. revokes his passport. He's stranded. He spends the next month in the transit part of Sheremetyevo airport, and he seeks asylum in Russia. What's the end result? He ends up in the place which is by far the most secure place on the globe, because no SEAL Team 6 or fancy drone is going to violate Russian sovereignty by taking a shot at Edward Snowden.

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We're joined by the four former intelligence officials who went to Russia last week, and we believe they're the first Americans to meet with Edward Snowden who have come from the United States, and they came to give him an award for integrity in intelligence. Our guests are Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst; Thomas Drake, who worked for the NSA; Coleen Rowley, former FBI agent; and Jesselyn Radack, who we're going to turn to right now.

Jesselyn Radack is national security and human rights director of the Government Accountability Project. She was an attorney in the Justice Department's Professional Responsibility Advisory Office during the Bush administration, during the John Walker Lindh case. You may remember, he was found in Afghanistan. And she raised legal and ethical objections over the questioning of Lindh without his lawyer and revealed misconduct by the Department of Justice. She was eventually forced out.

So, Jesselyn Radack, talk about the actual journey the four of you took. You left from where in the United States? And how did you make your way to Moscow and then to see Edward Snowden?

But all four of us were greatly honored to be able to be the first Americans to see him since Hong Kong and to get over there and be greeted with open arms by the Russian government-Anatoly Kucherena, in particular-and actually be able to see Ed and Sarah Harrison and just give them a hug and let them know that we had complete solidarity with what they were doing. And I know it probably feels very isolating for them, given all the vitriol you hear coming from the U.S. government.

Yeah, I don't know the answer to that. You know, I couldn't tell you, even if I did. The security is a huge issue, obviously, especially as we have-you know, there's a lot of issues with security, especially considering the director of-the former director of NSA and CIA, Michael Hayden, and the House Intelligence Committee chair, Mike Rogers, joke about putting him on the kill list. And there's been a worldwide manhunt for Mr. Snowden-that's no secret.

So I think people should really look at the question behind why there would-he would be in any kind of hiding or in an undisclosed location, and why someone who tells the truth and blows the whistle on massive illegality by the U.S. government-why they would have to go to another country to do so and then seek asylum from yet another country in order to gain protection.

And I think, despite all that he's dealing with, he is incredibly focused on whistleblower protection, on surveillance reform and on journalist-source confidentiality. So even though he has all of these other things going on, for him, he is incredibly focused on surveillance reform and that it be meaningful. And while there are a number of bills before Congress right now, most of them focus on the PATRIOT Act Section 215 and very little on FISA Section 702.

So he was very well versed, very centered, very balanced and very engaging, and has a wicked sense of humor, which was very, very fun. So I think, you know, we both felt mutually supported, and he knows that he's not alone and that he has a lot of people in the United States and around the world who are supporting his endeavors.

You mention Benjamin Franklin, and I wanted to turn to Coleen Rowley, a former FBI agent, in Minneapolis, was awarded Time Person of the Year for her work around 9/11. She was a division legal counsel for 13 years and taught constitutional rights to FBI and police, also testified before Congress about the FBI's failure to help prevent the 9/11 attacks. Coleen, what does Ben Franklin have to do with Edward Snowden?

EDWARD SNOWDEN: When your in positions of privileged access, like a systems administrator for these sort of the intelligence community agencies, you're exposed to a lot more information on a broader scale than the average employee, and because of that, you see things that may be disturbing. But over the course of a normal person's career, you'd only see one or two of these instances. When you see everything, you see them on a more frequent basis, and you recognize that some of these things are actually abuses. And when you talk to people about them in a place like this, where this is the normal state of business, people tend not to take them very seriously and, you know, move on from them. But over time that awareness of wrongdoing sort of builds up, and you feel compelled to talk about it. And the more you talk about it, the more you're ignored, the more you're told it's not a problem, until eventually you realize that these things need to be determined by the public, not by somebody who was simply hired by the government.

Well, the first one is, no doubt, that-it was the dash-80 order, compelling Verizon, through, you know, a secret FISA court order, submitted by the FBI, to turn over every phone record that it has each and every day to NSA. That's the first one, on a-we're talking about a truly vast scale, well over 100 million phone numbers, without suspicion, without any-any probable cause, not tied to any kind of investigation of any sort, just simply being turned over to add to the haystack.

The second one that comes to mind would be the PRISM disclosures. This goes beyond just the metadata, which in itself is quite extraordinary, but gets to the heart of content of subscribers of U.S.-based Internet service providers hosting servers on which millions and millions of subscribers were determined, in terms of the definition of their foreignness, giving NSA extraordinary and unprecedented access to those accounts on a routine basis through various technical means, either direct access or being afforded access by these same providers.

And I think the third mechanism, actually, is beyond just the vast violations of the sovereignty of U.S. citizens, but also now the surveillance state going well beyond the borders and the boundaries of the United States and violating the sovereignty and integrity of nations, as well as individual citizens in other countries, through various arrangements, through telecommunication providers, as well as the internal secret services of respective host nations. I mean, this is-this is truly unprecedented in history. And what we're seeing is secrecy and surveillance are completely subverting security and liberty, not just in the United States, but for many, many citizens around the world.

Those are the three that stand out for me, although there are any number of other disclosures that were made that also talk-speak to economic espionage, you know, financial espionage, as well as other forms of misuse and abuse of access for the purpose of the United States gaining upper hand across any number of areas.

RAY McGOVERN: Well, Amy, it had to do with this red herring about the four laptops that he took with him to Hong Kong. You don't store a lot of information on laptops. You store information on other media. So, in a way, when I was asked that question by Mark Hosenball from Reuters, "What about the laptops?" I probably should have said, "What about the laptops?" Instead, I said, "You don't store information on laptops." Laptops were, in a sense, a diversion. What he gave to Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras in Hong Kong was a different matter altogether. The laptops were incidental to that. So, that was the only point that I made on that, and it seemed to be a sort of ancillary point that didn't make much significance. I noticed it's in the New York Daily News today.

Yeah. The secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has approved a request by the National Security Agency to extend its dragnet collection of U.S. phone records. The Office of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper disclosed the court's approval on Friday. Clapper has previously denied before Congress that the NSA collects such data, but the Obama administration has touted a policy of declassifying select information following leaks by NSA whistleblower Ed Snowden. I want to turn to that now-famous clip of Clapper in March telling Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon the National Security Agency does not wittingly collect data of millions of Americans.

Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?

JAMES CLAPPER: Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect, but not wittingly.

I want to go back to Coleen Rowley, former FBI, a special agent from 1981 to 2004, again, named Person of the Year by Time magazine after the 9/11 attacks. Coleen, you recently were at Congress to hear more testimony for officials. This moment where Clapper didn't tell the truth and now said he's trying to figure out what was going through his mind to lie to Congress, are these officials sworn in when they testify?

The New York Post published an article called "Rogues Go to Russia to Celebrate Snowden." In it, journalist S.A. Miller wrote, quote, "A fan club of US traitors went all the way to Russia to give an award to their hero, terror-watch secrets-spiller Edward Snowden." Jesselyn Radack, you worked in the Justice Department. You were an attorney there in the Justice Department's Professional Responsibility Advisory Office. Can you respond? "Rogues" to Russia-they're talking about you.

Yes, I understand that, despite the fact that I'm a legal ethicist and have served on the D.C. Bar Legal Ethics Committee. Tom Drake was completely vindicated. There's nothing traitorist about him. He went through all internal channels that he could have gone through as an NSA whistleblower-to his boss, to the NSA general counsel, to the Department of Defense inspector general, and to two 9/11 congressional committees-and they turned around and prosecuted him for espionage, which is one of the most serious charges you can level against an American. Now, if the New York Post bothered to do its homework, it would have realized that all 10 felony charges against Thomas Drake were dropped, and the case collapsed in spectacular fashion. It would realize that Coleen Rowley was never under any kind of criminal cloud, and instead, Time made her Person of the Year in 2003, the year of the whistleblower. And in my own case, I have been vindicated by the D.C. Bar and by the U.S. Attorney's Office in D.C. So, I suggest that the New York Post quit trying to do the government's work of turning patriots into traitors and confusing fear with freedom and confusing dissent with disloyalty. I am glad to be in the company of people who went over to see Ed. And Ed is part of that same group. And while history will remember Ed favorably, I am quite sure it is not going to remember New York Post headlines to the effect of the one you read.

... then come back to some interesting news that The Guardian is reporting on the editor of The New York Times, Jill Abramson, about what British officials wanted from her. We're talking with the four former intelligence officials in the United States who went to Russia to bestow upon Edward Snowden an Integrity in Intelligence Award: Coleen Rowley of the FBI; Jesselyn Radack of the State Department-of the Justice Department, rather; Ray McGovern of the CIA; and Thomas Drake of the NSA. Stay with us.

[break]

This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. The Guardian is reporting the editor of The New York Times, Jill Abramson, has confirmed that senior British officials attempted to persuade her to hand over secret documents leaked by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. Abramson said she was approached by the British embassy in Washington after it was announced that The New York Times was collaborating with The Guardian to explore some of the files disclosed by Snowden. Among the files are several relating to the activities of GCHQ, the agency responsible for signals interception in Britain. She said, quote, "They were hopeful [that] we would relinquish any material [that] we might be reporting on, relating to Edward Snowden. Needless to say I considered what they told me, and said no."

Thomas Drake, you worked for the National Security Agency. You were prosecuted by the U.S. government for attempting to leak information about what you were most disturbed by in the National Security Agency. Can you respond to this latest news of the British intelligence trying to get the head of The New York Times to hand over the NSA documents of Edward Snowden?

And so, I began a multi-year set of activities to blow the whistle on the secret surveillance programs that ultimately were the foundation, in those first years after 9/11, that became institutionalized. And then we have the prima facie evidence, the documented evidence, that Edward Snowden has disclosed, with extraordinary conviction of courage, to make it available in the public interest, because you cannot have governance in the United States, you know, without the consent of the governed, and what we have is a secret government who's governing without consent, and is doing so in secret coercion.

Are Snowden's disclosures changing the way the NSA works? I want to talk about legislation right now. A Republican congressmember who co-authored the PATRIOT Act is poised to introduce a new bill to curb spying by the National Security Agency. Congressmember Jim Sensenbrenner helped to expand spying powers under U.S. intelligence agencies under George W. Bush, but now says the programs have gone too far. Coleen Rowley, why don't you take this one, in Minneapolis? Former FBI agent, you know, Time whistleblower of the year, you worked for the agency for decades. What about what is being proposed now as a result of what Edward Snowden has revealed?

And, of course, the debate has begun. The Senate Judiciary has had hearings. They have heard, unfortunately, from Clapper and Alexander, who have not been truthful. For instance, Alexander has claimed that the NSA's massive spying has thwarted 54 incidents of terrorism affecting the United States. This was immediately debunked by-mostly by the press, and the FBI then later testified in hearings that, no, it's really only one example they can come up with, and it's actually a very flimsy example of a case involving giving a few thousand dollars to Shabab.

So, here's the problem. Senator Feinstein and others are able to, kind of in a very misleading way, revise history and claim that if NSA had been collecting the massive data before 9/11, these attacks would not have occurred. They can do this because many people have forgotten that the 9/11 Commission and the various inquiries concluded just the opposite of what Dianne Feinstein is saying. Back then, the rationale was that the dots were not connected, and the dots were not connected because there was too much intelligence flowing in. Officials claim that intelligence is like a firehose, and we can't get a sip from a firehose. That was the excuse for why they had all this information, specific clues including-including hijackers or terrorist suspects who came into California, and CIA Director Tenet never told the FBI; of course, the case in Minnesota, where the FBI did not itself act upon intelligence; and the amount of intelligence that was not even read, let alone appreciated, assessed and then acted upon. So this whole history is being revised and turned on its head now-

So this collection of data is actually hindering, hurting national security, because there is too much information pouring in, and it's hard for them to sift through this. I wanted to go to Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst. Earlier this month, during a cybersecurity panel hosted by The Washington Post, former National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden joked about putting Edward Snowden on a kill list after learning of his nomination for a European human rights award. Hayden said, quote, "I must admit, in my darker moments over the past several months, I'd also thought of nominating Mr. Snowden, but it was for a different list." Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Chair Mike Rogers, responded, "I can help you with that." Ray McGovern, can you comment on this? And how is-how is Edward Snowden getting by in Russia?

RAY McGOVERN: Well, I asked Ed whether he was aware of these suggestions, shall we say, that he be put on the kill list for assassination. He kind of winced and shook his head, as if to say, "My god, you know, what has our country become?" It's unconscionable that these people would joke about things like that, but it shows the poverty of thought and the determination to make this-I call him a patriot, not a hero. Heroes can be dismissed. Edward Snowden is a patriot, OK? And it's easier to dismiss this fellow if you frontally attack him personally, the way these folks have done.

I want to say one more thing. Tom Drake, when he was acquitted, the judge upbraided the Justice Department, saying, "You had no business persecuting this person for four years." Guess what? Tom had an experience in Moscow when he met Ed Snowden, and I'm sure Tom was thinking, "Wow! I guess some good can come out of this," because it was Ed Snowden who freely said, right upfront, that it was Tom's example, what happened to him by going through channels, that persuaded Ed Snowden to seek a more circuitous route, and now he is in total safety, at least for this year.

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"Edward Snowden is a Patriot": Ex-NSA CIA, FBI and Justice Whistleblowers Meet Leaker in Moscow

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In a Democracy Now! special, we spend the hour with four former U.S. intelligence officials - all whistleblowers themselves - who have just returned from visiting National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden in Russia. They are former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, former FBI agent Coleen Rowley, former National Security Agency senior executive Thomas Drake, and former U.S.

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We're joined by two guests in Washington, D.C. Charles Tiefer is a member of the Wartime Contracting Commission, a professor of government contracting at University of Baltimore Law School. And Sharon Weinberger, journalist and author of an investigative series for the Center for Public Integrity on the no-bid contracts called "Windfalls of War."

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Let's begin with Charles Tiefer of the Wartime Contracting Commission. What were your major findings?

Well, Amy, as you mentioned, we found that there had been between $31 billion and up to $60 billion of waste, that there was a lack of-shocking lack of competition, that we are-besides that waste, we are also building billions of dollars of unsustainable contracts that, after we withdraw, either we'll have to continue funding or will collapse, and that we have moved in the military and in State and AID to depending on contractors. There are as many contractors in the war zone as there are soldiers. But we haven't adjusted our thinking for it. We haven't adjusted our structure for it. We need to change a lot to deal with the new way war is conducted with contractors.

Well, you know, it's-there are some of the more well known contracts that are not necessarily what are called sole-source contracts, but are considered noncompetitive. I think the most famous one is the 2001 contract that went to KBR for basically-for base services, the LOGCAP contract, which over 10 years has grown to $37 billion. And it's basically $37 billion in 10 years of work that hasn't been competed. But, you know, it's less about the companies than about how the government-and in this case, the Pentagon-actually conducts its business.

Now, of course, KBR was owned by Halliburton, which was headed by Cheney before he was vice president.

Right. And the questions that were raised about that contract and similar sort of, you know, long-term umbrella contracts is, you know, how do you know that you're getting anything at the price you should? I mean, there were, I think, upwards of 37 referrals for possible fraud in the contract. It was almost unprecedented in the number of billing irregularities, in fraud referrals, and in just basically waste, fraud and abuse. And the company, KBR, comes back and says, "Well, why are you demonizing us?" And they may have a point there, that it's less about which company has the contract than basically the contract-the way the contract is set up that sort of sets itself up to fail and to waste money.

But no one actually ever really examined the logic. No one had an open competition. And between U.S. helicopters or Russian helicopters, somebody just made that decision and went forward. And in the meantime, even if you want to buy Russian helicopters, there are a number of companies that sell them. But instead, this year, the Pentagon basically gave a contract for $375 million to a Russian entity that was on a sanctions list for two years for selling to Iran and Syria. And it's not necessarily that there's evil intentions. There's just absolutely no-there's no oversight of it. And nobody really questions why people are doing the things they're doing.

Last year, the Government Accountability Office, GAO, looked into 95 major defense projects and found cost overruns that totaled $295 billion. Let me repeat. That's $295 billion in wasteful spending. And this wasteful spending has many sources. It comes from investments in unproven technologies. It comes from a lack of oversight. It comes from influence peddling and indefensible no-bid contracts that have cost American taxpayers billions of dollars.

We will stop outsourcing services that should be performed by the government and open up the contracting process to small businesses. We will end unnecessary no-bid and cost-plus contracts that run up a bill that is paid by the American people. And we will strengthen oversight to maximize transparency and accountability.

And the Pentagon probably didn't know, because this is, again-the contract to the Blackwater entity was awarded under a large sort of umbrella contract, meaning a company above them. In this case, I believe it was Raytheon had the main contract, and then, below them, there were subcontractors. So, you have all these levels of pass through, where you have one company that has an umbrella, that money then goes down to other subprimes working for the main company. And the Pentagon has a real problem with overseeing where is the money going, who is doing it, who is performing on it. And it took, you know, a Senate investigation to bring that out.

Well, the commission recommended that the Pentagon-and also the problem even goes further, State Department, Agency for International Development, but the Pentagon is the big one-should set goals to make real percentage increases in competition and meet them. And this would-it would take legislation to do-to make sure that this is done. But we also stated the specific methods that the Pentagon could use to do this. A lot of these no-bid arrangements have been done by a thing called "task orders." What Sharon was talking about with KBR's $36-$37 billion were task orders to provide increments, annual increments, for KBR of their services. And what we explain is that there should be requirements the task orders not be given out in a effectively noncompetitive way, but that if there's a situation where you're not seeing competition on some billion-dollar or $2 billion task order, that you require that competition occur, that you-that instead of just having it in a closed set of companies that one company or one or two that can make bids, that you open it up, and you get full and open competition on those.

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U.S. Wasting Billions While Tripling No-Bid Contracts After Decade of War in Iraq, Afghanistan

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As the war in Afghanistan approaches its 10th anniversary, a pair of new reports reveal how the Pentagon has squandered tens of billions of dollars while tripling the amount of no-bid contracts. The bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting concludes that between $31 billion and $60 billion spent on projects in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last 10 years has been lost to waste and fraud.

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Well, while the spy program has been intrusive, it's also been ineffective. The has even admitted that the Demographics Unit failed to yield a single terrorism investigation or even a single lead. In a deposition last year, the commanding officer of the Intelligence Division, Assistant NYPD Chief Thomas Galati, said, quote, "I could tell you [that] I have never made a lead from rhetoric that came from a Demographics report, and I'm here since 2006. I don't recall other ones prior to my arrival."

Well, the NYPD spy program was first exposed in a Pulitzer Prize-winning series by the Associated Press. Two lead reporters on the story have just come out with a new book that expands on their ground-breaking reporting. The book is called Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD's Secret Spying Unit and Bin Laden's Final Plot Against America. Co-authors Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman join us here in New York. They shared the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Matt, lay it out. Lay out this book for us-in a nutshell, how you got on this story and what you found.

Sure. Well, our book really goes a lot deeper and a lot broader than we were able to do even in all the many stories we wrote for the AP. What we really focused on is how, in the aftermath of 9/11, about how the NYPD, working hand in hand with the CIA, built an intelligence apparatus that focuses on American citizens like no other police department in the country. You know, this active-duty CIA officer and a retired CIA officer built an apparatus by which, you know, the sort of army of informants is out there, and we have these demographics officers who-their job is just hang out in neighborhoods and listen for what people are talking about.

Some of what we've seen in these files, it's a file that says, "We saw two men speaking at a cafe, and they were talking about what they thought about the president's State of the Union address, and here's what they thought." What do they think about drones? What do they think about foreign policy? What do they think about American policies toward civil liberties, you know, TSA? Are we too-are we too discriminatory against Muslims? I mean, all this stuff ends up in police files, and their justification is, well, we need to know what the sentiment of these communities are, so we can look for hotspots.

Sure. So, Ray Kelly comes on board as police commissioner after 9/11 and says, "You know, look, we can't rely solely on the federal government," and I think really smartly said, "We can't do business as usual. We need to start developing our own intelligence and have a better sense of what's going on in the city." So the guy he hired to do that is a man named Dave Cohen, who we profile really deeply in the book, who, you know, had made his career at the CIA, rose to the level of the deputy director for operations, basically our nation's top spy. So he retired as the head of the clandestine service, and he was basically recruited out of retirement to start what is basically a mini-CIA at the NYPD.

And one of Cohen's first thing is he then calls down to the CIA and says, "Hey, I need an active-duty guy who can be kind of my right-hand man." And George Tenet, the director of the CIA, sends Larry Sanchez to New York. And Larry is this very likeable guy, you know, skydiver, scuba diver, you know, a guy's guy, and he's active-duty, so he's got a blue CIA badge. So he can start the morning, early morning, at the CIA station in New York and then kind of go over to NYPD. And he's directing domestic operations for NYPD. I mean, he's telling officers how to do collection or where to focus their efforts. And he really was the architect of the Demographics Unit. So, this guy, active-duty for the CIA, was really the intellectual father of the Demographics Unit.

We're going to break and then come back to this discussion. We are speaking with the Puliltzer Prize-winning reporters Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman, who have written the book Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD's Secret Spying Unit and Bin Laden's Final Plot Against America. We'll be back with them in a moment.

[break]

Our guests are Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman, reporters for the Associated Press, co-authors of the brand-new book, Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD's Secret Spying Unit and Bin Laden's Final Plot Against America. We are also joined by Linda Sarsour. She is here in New York City, a leading Arab-American activist with the Arab American Association of New York, a national network for Arab-American communities. I'm Amy Goodman, with Aaron Maté.

Well, before break, we were talking about Larry Sanchez, who came to the NYPD from the CIA. And let's turn to part of a 2007 hearing before the Senate Committee-the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs that looked at the NYPD's counterterrorism efforts. This is then-Senator Joe Lieberman questioning New York City Assistant Police Commissioner Larry Sanchez, the analyst who came to the NYPD from the CIA.

I'm paraphrasing, but I think you said that the aim of this investigation and of the NYPD was not just to prevent terrorist attacks, obviously, post-9/11 in New York City, but to try to prevent-understand and then prevent the radicalization that leads to terrorist attacks. So, in the end of it, what are the steps that you come away with that you feel, in this very usual area, unremarkable people, not on the screen of law enforcement-how do you begin to try to prevent the radicalization that leads to terrorism?

LARRY SANCHEZ: Let me try to answer it this way. The key-the key to it was first to understand it and to start appreciating what most people would say would be non-criminal, would be innocuous, looking at behaviors that could easily be argued in a Western democracy, especially in the United States, to be protected by First and Fourth Amendment rights, but not to look at them in a vacuum, but to look across to them as potential precursors to terrorism. You know, New York City, of course, has created its own methods to be able to understand them better, to be able to identify them and to be able to make judgment calls if these are things that we need to worry about.

AARON MATÉ: That's Larry Sanchez testifying in 2007. Matt Apuzzo?

Well, there was enormous friction between the FBI and the NYPD, mainly the NYPD Intelligence Division. And these two outfits would sometimes not work in harmony, mainly because Dave Cohen thought that the Intelligence Division and his detectives should go on their own. He didn't want to be part of what they called groupthink. So, they said, "Look, we'll go out, and we're going to investigate, and if we find something, we'll bring it to you." But the problem with doing is that sometimes these investigations were in late stages, and the FBI had concerns about what the NY-how they had developed these cases. And it flared up in the newspaper. And, you know, in the end, the FBI felt like, "Look, you just can't go out and do your own thing. We're going to stop this. We've got to work as a team. And that's how you build-cooperation is how you build stronger cases."

AARON MATÉ: Matt, and then the spying, of course, also extended beyond the Muslim community. There's reports in your book about spying on left-wing activists-

AARON MATÉ: -on bicycle protests?

And what it does is it creates psychological warfare in our community. How am I supposed to know if the NYPD was successful in that endeavor? That's number one. Number two is, the community right now is in a position where, how do we even know the guy next to us that's praying at the mosque or the guy at the restaurant that's like trying to open a conversation with us about something that's happening in Egypt, for example-and for those people who know Arabs, particularly, we love to talk about politics. And a lot of us and a lot of our families came to the United States so we could have a place to practice our religion freely, to have our own political views. And now that we know that the NYPD wants to hear what our sentiment is, that's-people probably don't want to share their sentiment.

And the most disturbing of all is our Muslim student associations, who are calling us to consult about how political should their events be. Now, when I was in college, I wanted my events to be as political as possible. And if they weren't, I wanted to make the-I wanted to figure out how to make them controversial. And the fact that our students feel like they can't do that because there are going to be NYPD informants, because they can be taken out of context, and because they think something like what happened to Fahad Hashmi is going to happen to them, I think is a valid concern for them to have. So, I'm a New Yorker, and I hope other New Yorkers are outraged to know that the New York Police Department is spying on innocent Americans in their neighborhood.

And the last point I want to make is that these terrorist investigations, what happens is, is that if they open one, anyone who comes into that facility that's under investigation is subject to that investigation. So, if my organization had this terrorist enterprise investigation, that means every client, every staff member, every family member, every vendor that we work with, is a subject to this investigation by the New York Police Department.

What we learned later through secret documents is that the New York Police Department was using a sports league-now, imagine that your child is a part of this league and is being spied on by the New York Police Department. And what the New York Police Department did is they actually mapped out for you two different documents. One was, where do the South Asians play cricket and watch cricket, and where do the Arabs play soccer and watch soccer? For those of you that know soccer, Arabs are not the only ones that play soccer, definitely not in New York City anyway.

So I feel-I feel that the information just gets more outrageous, that, you know, even something as simple as sports, as playing soccer, is something that's under the terrain of the New York Police Department, that our kids were subject to intelligence gathering and spying by the New York Police Department, when all they wanted to do was beat some people or some other kids in another borough. And I think our kids right now are like-you know, their families are like, "What's this?" And I'm-you know, how am I supposed to explain to them that I didn't know, that I was not-you know, had no intention of subjecting their children to intelligence gathering by the New York Police Department? So I personally get put in a situation that Commissioner Kelly and his people put us in. And actually, the Arab officers who work in the Community Affairs Department, I don't know if they knew, but if they did know, shame on them for allowing us to be a part of something where they knew had other ulterior motives.

AARON MATÉ: Now, Linda, here in New York, there's obviously a lot of public protest against stop-and-frisk. How has it been to organize resistance to this spying on your community? What are you finding in terms of the public's reception to this program?

The problem with our movement is that it's framed in the sense of personal security, so people are like, "Well, if you're not doing anything wrong, what's the problem? What's this inconvenience of some guy that listens to, like, your conversations?" And I think that's where the fundamental principles of who we are as Americans and what our rights are, right to privacy-like, I don't-I shouldn't have to worry about working in an organization that has-that's infiltrated by the New York Police Department. I hope no one else has to worry about that. But it's been a little difficult for us to organize around this, but continue to do so.

JOE SCARBOROUGH: You do agree that entire mosques should not be labeled terrorist organizations, right?

Well, one of the things we tried to do with this book, that the NYPD doesn't do, is we tried to be incredibly transparent. If Ray Kelly gets the chance, he can read the book. He'll find that many people spoke on the record about what the NYPD was doing, named individuals, including Hector Berdecia who ran the Demographics Unit. Another thing we tried to do was endnote all these secret documents that were leaked to us, so the reader themselves can go and look at the endnote and then go to our website, enemieswithinbook.com, and read the secret files themself and come to their own conclusions. So we lay all that out and in an effort to be completely transparent. The book is-the book is, as The Wall Street Journal said, assiduously reported.

The other point I'd like to make about Ray's comments is that he-you know, he won't engage with us on the book, and he's never engaged with us, either on the book or our reporting. And Matt and I went to great lengths in the book to make a good case for why the NYPD felt like they needed these programs in the aftermath of 9/11.

AARON MATÉ: Matt, can you talk about the issue of oversight? Well, first of all, I mean, this raises a lot of civil rights issues. Has there been a response from the White House or from the Justice Department? And also, and then talk about what kind of oversight exists here in the city.

Yeah, everything that we talk about in the book, with the exception of a few sort of ancillary programs, but the core of the book, to our knowledge, is still happening now. It's fascinating, the issue of oversight. You know, the NYPD gets money from the City Council every year, obviously. The City Council never held a hearing to actually look into the Intelligence Division's programs. They were never-they've never been subjected to an audit. The Intelligence Division gets money from the White House under a drug-trafficking grant. The White House says, "We have no-we don't have any-we don't know what the money is used for. You can't hold us to account for what the NYPD does with our money." Congress has funded these programs. They don't know. They're not equipped to know. They don't ask. Homeland Security and the Department of Justice have spent, you know, a billion, $2 billion at the NYPD since 9/11. They say they don't know what goes on, and the way the grants are set up, they don't have the ability to know. There is essentially no outside oversight at the NYPD Intelligence Division.

The programs are opened in house. They don't have to be approved by a judge. They don't have to be approved by a prosecutor. Kelly likes to talk about how, you know, these-we have all the federal prosecutors and the district attorney, but they don't actually decide when the Intel Division can open a case. So, there isn't-there isn't the kind of outside review that you would see at the CIA or at the FBI. And, you know what? From our standpoint, the lack of-the lack of transparency, the fact that this is all done in secret, with no public airing, was really what drove us to write this book, because you can't-you know, people can't give their informed consent to a program that they don't know exists, they don't know what they're giving up, or they don't know what they're getting in exchange.

AARON MATÉ: They were in his neighborhood.

We're going to leave it there, but we will continue to talk to you, as you continue to uncover what is taking place. I want to thank you both for being with us, and congratulations on your Pulitzer for your series of articles. The new book is Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD's Secret Spying Unit and Bin Laden's Final Plot Against America, Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman. And thank you so much, Linda Sarsour, Arab American Association of New York and the National Network for Arab American Communities.

This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. When we come back, we look at a terrorist attack that occurred 50 years ago this past Sunday. It was September 15, 1963, and it happened in a Birmingham Baptist church. Four little girls were the fatalities. We're going to speak with the fifth, who didn't die but lost her eye. We'll go to Birmingham, Alabama. Stay with us.

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From Mosques to Soccer Leagues: Inside the NYPD's Secret Spy Unit Targeting Muslims, Activists

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Since 9/11, the New York City Police Department has established an intelligence operation that in some ways has been even more aggressive than the National Security Agency. At its core is a spying operation targeting Arab- and Muslim-Americans where they live, work and pray.