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January 17, 2017

President Barack Obama has commuted the sentences of two high-profile political prisoners.

Chelsea Manning, who released a trove of U.S. documents to WikiLeaks to incite "worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms," will be freed on May 17. Obama also commuted the sentence of Puerto Rican independence activist Oscar López Rivera, which will now also expire on May 17.

The two were among 200 who received commutations and pardons in what some analysts say will be Obama’s last such act as commander in chief. Missing from the list is 71-year-old Native American activist Leonard Peltier.

Obama has now commuted the sentences of 1,385 people, more than any other president in U.S. history. Check back for more details as the become available.

Manning has been held since 2010, and was sentenced in 2013 to 35 years in prison for leaking more than 700,000 classified files and videos to WikiLeaks about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and U.S. foreign policy. She has been subjected to long stretches of solitary confinement and denied medical treatment related to her gender identity.

Watch our coverage of Manning since 2010, including interviews with Glenn Greenwald, who noted Manning faced a life sentence, while criminals exposed by WikiLeaks suffered few consequences. We also spoke with Andrian Lamo, the former hacker who informed U.S. military authorities of his conversations with Manning, who claimed to have leaked a large body of classified documents. Wikileaks attorney, Michael Ratner joined us to discuss being in court the day Manning said they leaked the classified documents to the whistleblowing website in order to show the American public the "true costs of war."

See our coverage of Oscar López Rivera, who was convicted in 1981 on federal charges of seditious conspiracy and conspiring to oppose U.S. authority over Puerto Rico by force. He was also accused of being a member of the FALN, the Armed Forces of National Liberation, which claimed responsibility for more than a hundred bombings to call attention to the colonial case of Puerto Rico. In 1999, President Clinton commuted the sentences of 16 members of the FALN, but López refused to accept the deal because it did not include two fellow activists who have since been released.

“Calls are growing for a number of U.S. senators to resign, following reports they sold millions of dollars’ worth of stocks after receiving privileged briefings about the threat of coronavirus to the global economy. ProPublica reports Republican Richard Burr, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, unloaded as much as $1.7 million of his holdings on February 13 in 33 separate transactions. At the time, he had access to classified information about the coronavirus and was receiving daily intelligence briefings. The stock market began plummeting a week after Burr’s sales and has since lost about 30% of its value.

March 21, 2019

November 27, 2018

A major new Marshall Project investigation looks at the the mental health crisis in U.S. prisons by diving deep into the story of Karl Taylor, a prisoner who died at a maximum-security prison in the Catskills of New York after an altercation with prison guards in 2015. Karl Taylor was serving out a minimum 27-year sentence for a rape conviction when his life came to a sudden end at the Sullivan Correctional Facility in April of 2015. The African-American prisoner had been diagnosed with delusional disorder and paranoid personality disorder when he was taken into custody in 1995. By April of 2015, Taylor was housed in a special unit at Sullivan for prisoners classified as mentally ill. He had spent nearly ten years in solitary confinement. That’s when he got into what would turn out to be a fatal altercation with a prison guard. We speak with investigative reporter Tom Robbins, author of “Why Is Karl Taylor Dead?”

November 02, 2018

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, that, of course, immediately brings to mind the “axis of evil” speech of George Bush back in 2002, which was the precursor, laying the groundwork, for the invasion of Iraq, the worst crime of this century, with horrendous consequences for Iraq, eliciting ethnic conflicts that are tearing the region apart—a major atrocity. John Bolton was behind that. And his new troika—I doubt that the U.S. will dare to do something similar, but that’s what it brings to mind.

It’s kind of interesting to see this hysterical raving alongside of another astonishing propaganda campaign that Bolton and his colleagues are carrying out with regard to the caravan of poor and miserable people fleeing from severe oppression, violence, terror, extreme poverty from three countries: Honduras—mainly Honduras, secondarily Guatemala, thirdly El Salvador—not Nicaragua, incidentally—three countries that have been under harsh U.S. domination, way back, but particularly since the 1980s, when Reagan’s terror wars devastated particularly El Salvador and Guatemala, secondarily Honduras. Nicaragua was attacked by Reagan, of course, but Nicaragua was the one country which had an army to defend the population. In the other countries, the army were the state terrorists, backed by the United States.

The most extreme source of migrants right now is Honduras. Why Honduras? Well, it was always bitterly oppressed. But in 2009, Honduras had a mildly reformist president, Mel Zelaya. The Honduran powerful, rich elite couldn’t tolerate that. A military coup took place, expelled him from the country. It was harshly condemned all through the hemisphere, with one notable exception: the United States. The Obama administration refused to call it a military coup, because if they had, they would have been compelled by law to withdraw military funding from the military regime, which was imposing a regime of brutal terror. Honduras became the murder capital of the world. A fraudulent election took place under the military junta—again, harshly condemned all over the hemisphere, most of the world, but not by the United States. The Obama administration praised Honduras for carrying out an election, moving towards democracy and so on. Now people are fleeing from the misery and horrors for which we are responsible.

Across the developing world, former Cuban President Fidel Castro was viewed as a hero who stood up to the United States and assisted Marxist guerrillas and revolutionary governments around the world. In the 1970s, he sent Cuban troops to Angola to support a left-wing government over the initial objections of Russia. Cuba helped defeat South African insurgents in Angola and win Namibia’s independence from South Africa in 1990, adding pressure on the apartheid regime. After Nelson Mandela was freed from prison in 1990, he repeatedly thanked Castro. We feature excerpts of Castro speaking about Cuba’s role in Angola and South Africa, including a clip of his first meeting with anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela, and speak with Bill Fletcher, a founder of the Black Radical Congress, and Peter Kornbluh, director of the Cuba Documentation Project and co-author of “Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations Between Washington and Havana.”

Above is a synopsis of DemocracyNow’s news report and interview with Bill Fletcher Jr. focuses on Cuba’s support for African independence movements under Fidel Castro. The interview (with archival clips) broadcast from DemocracyNow’s news program last year (28/11/2016) is available to watch on video at the link above.