The Jeff Farias Show

Thursday, March 12 2009

We spoke with Michelle Shephard the Toronto Star newspaper’s National Security reporter and has covered the story of Omar Khadr since his capture in July 2002. Her research took her throughout Canada, the U.S., Britain and Pakistan. She has traveled to the U.S. Naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba more than a dozen times. During her twelve years in journalism Shephard has won Canada’s top two newspaper awards: the National Newspaper Award for investigations; and the Governor General’s Michener Award for public service journalism. Guantanamo’s Child is sweeping narrative set against the backdrop of the September 11, 2001 attacks and the U.S.-led war on terror that followed, Guantanamo’s Child chronicles the life of Canadian Omar Khadr. He was just 15 when he was shot and captured in Afghanistan and became a prized Pentagon captive. Khadr has now spent almost than a third of his life in U.S. custody in the notorious Guantanamo Bay, where he has undergone hundreds of hours of interrogation and endured “coercive techniques” by his captors that many argue amount to torture. Khadr faces life in prison, charged with five war crimes including murder for the death of U.S. Delta Force soldier Christopher Speer. His case makes history as the first modern day war crimes trial of a juvenile and has drawn worldwide condemnation from legal, civil and human rights groups. Award winning journalist Michelle Shephard probes the Khadr case from every angle, with exclusive interviews with the soldiers and Speer’s widow Tabitha. The book reveals unknown details about Khadr’s life being shuttled back and forth between Canada, Pakistan and Afghanistan and his father’s alliance with al Qaeda’s elite. Shephard also probes how the political backroom negotiations between Washington and Ottawa have left Canada now as the only Western nation to support Guantanamo and its trials. http://www.michelleshephard.ca/index.html

We also spoke with Dan Spalding a longtime legal activist with the Midnight Special Law Collective. He started organizing for social justice at Oberlin College in the late 1990s. Upon graduating, he engaged in direct action at the 1999 Seattle/WTO protests, and began giving legal trainings to activists shortly thereafter. Today, Dan teaches English as a second language to adults in Oakland, and develops ESL curricula for janitors in the Service Employees International Union. He’s also active in his teachers’ union. The Midnight Special Law Collective is an Oakland-based non-profit dedicated to providing legal information and support in the pursuit of social justice. We have facilitated know your rights and other trainings for thousands of people, and helped provided legal support for over 4000 protesters arrested at demonstrations across the US over the last 9 years. We are a group of 6 non-lawyers who work to demystify the law. In addition to legal trainings and support, we also collaborate with other law collectives around the country, including those in New York, Minneapolis and Washington, DC. We make all our information and trainings available online, and for free, at our web site, www.midnightspecial.NET. We are currently working on a project to improve data security for non-profits, and facilitating legal support for folks arrested protesting the police killing of Oscar Grant.”

At 3:30 Rick Weissbourd, author of The Parents We Mean to Be: How Well-intentioned Adults Undermine Children¹s Moral and Emotional Development. Richard Weissbourd is a child and family psychologist on the faculty of Harvard’’s Kennedy School of Government and School of Education. He is the author of The Vulnerable Child, recently named by the American School Board Journal one of the top ten education books of all time. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Weissbourd upends received wisdom that the biggest threats to our children’’s moral development are bad peer influences, violence on television, or parents who fail to “teach values.” Never before have parents been so focussed on giving our children what we think they need morally and emotionally. And yet, he argues incisively, parents–the primary influence in children’’s lives–are eroding children’’s capacity for caring and responsibility. Weissbourd puts the focus, not on children, but on PARENTS'’–on the day-by-day obstacles parents face in being the moral mentors they want to be, and how these can be overcome. Weissbourd delivers the good news, based on compelling new research, that adults'’ moral qualities over the life span are not static–and that the intense, crisis-filled, and profoundly joyous process of raising a child can be a powerful force for our own moral development as parents. At 5:00 John Peterson is a Hands Off Venezuela activist in Minneapolis and was part of the Hands Off Venezuela delegation to the presidential election on December 3rd. His impressions were published in The Pulse of the Twin Cities. Venezuelan reactionary opposition had launched another attempt to overthrow the government of Hugo Chávez and put an end to the Bolivarian revolution. A group of reactionary military officers had gathered in the Altamira Square, in the rich and middle class areas of the East of Caracas and made an appeal for “disobedience”. At the same time, on December 3rd, the opposition had called for an “indefinite national strike”. In fact this was nothing else but a bosses’ lock out (see Venezuela: Opposition “strike” or bosses lock out?). The highly paid managers and directors of the state owned company PDVSA simultaneously organised the sabotage of the industry with the aim of paralysing the country. www.handsoffvenezuela.org http://www.handsoffvenezuela.org/about_us.htm

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