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Award-winning Investigative Journalist Robert Parry (1949-2018)

Award-winning investigative journalist and founder/editor of ConsortiumNews.com, Robert Parry has passed away. His ground-breaking work uncovering Reagan-era dirty wars in Central America and many other illegal and immoral policies conducted by successive administrations and U.S. intelligence agencies, stands as an inspiration to all in journalists working in the public interest.

Robert had been a regular guest on our Between The Lines and Counterpoint radio shows -- and many other progressive outlets across the U.S. over four decades.

His penetrating analysis of U.S. foreign policy and international conflicts will be sorely missed, and not easily replaced. His son Nat Parry writes a tribute to his father: Robert Parry’s Legacy and the Future of Consortiumnews.



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The Resistance Starts Now!

Between The Lines' coverage and resource compilation of the Resistance Movement



SPECIAL REPORT: "The Resistance - Women's March 2018 - Hartford, Connecticut" Jan. 20, 2018

Selected speeches from the Women's March in Hartford, Connecticut 2018, recorded and produced by Scott Harris




SPECIAL REPORT: "No Fracking Waste in CT!" Jan. 14, 2018



SPECIAL REPORT: "Resistance Round Table: The Unraveling Continues..." Jan. 13, 2018




SPECIAL REPORT: "Capitalism to the ash heap?" Richard Wolff, Jan. 2, 2018




SPECIAL REPORT: Maryn McKenna, author of "Big Chicken", Dec. 7, 2017






SPECIAL REPORT: Nina Turner's address, Working Families Party Awards Banquet, Dec. 14, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Dec. 12, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Dec. 9, 2017




SPECIAL REPORT: On Tyranny - one year later, Nov. 28, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Nov. 12, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Nov. 11, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Rainy Day Radio, Nov. 7, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Rainy Day Radio, Nov. 7, 2017




SPECIAL REPORT: Resisting U.S. JeJu Island military base in South Korea, Oct. 24, 2017




SPECIAL REPORT: John Allen, Out in New Haven



2017 Gandhi Peace Awards

Promoting Enduring Peace presented its Gandhi Peace Award jointly to renowned consumer advocate Ralph Nader and BDS founder Omar Barghouti on April 23, 2017.


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THANK YOU TO EVERYONE...

who helped make our 25th anniversary with Jeremy Scahill a success!

For those who missed the event, or were there and really wanted to fully absorb its import, here it is in video

Jeremy Scahill keynote speech, part 1 from PROUDEYEMEDIA on Vimeo.

Jeremy Scahill keynote speech, part 2 from PROUDEYEMEDIA on Vimeo.


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Between The Lines Presentation at the Left Forum 2016

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"How Do We Build A Mass Movement to Reverse Runaway Inequality?" with Les Leopold, author of "Runaway Inequality: An Activist's Guide to Economic Justice,"May 22, 2016, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York, 860 11th Ave. (Between 58th and 59th), New York City. Between The Lines' Scott Harris and Richard Hill moderated this workshop. Listen to the audio/slideshows and more from this workshop.





Listen to audio of the plenary sessions from the weekend.


JEREMY SCAHILL: Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker "Dirty Wars"

Listen to the full interview (30:33) with Jeremy Scahill, an award-winning investigative journalist with the Nation Magazine, correspondent for Democracy Now! and author of the bestselling book, "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army," about America's outsourcing of its military. In an exclusive interview with Counterpoint's Scott Harris on Sept. 16, 2013, Scahill talks about his latest book, "Dirty Wars, The World is a Battlefield," also made into a documentary film under the same title, and was nominated Dec. 5, 2013 for an Academy Award in the Best Documentary Feature category.

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Between The Lines' Executive Producer Scott Harris hosts a live, weekly talk show, Counterpoint, from which some of Between The Lines' interviews are excerpted. Listen every Monday evening from 8 to 10 p.m. EDT at www.WPKN.org (Follows the 5-7 minute White Rose Calendar.)

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Advocacy Groups Challenge Latest ICE Immigrant Deportations

Posted Jan. 13, 2016

MP3 Interview with Swapna Reddy, Yale Law School student at Workers and Immigrants Rights Advocacy Clinic, conducted by Melinda Tuhus

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At the beginning of January, 150 immigrants who arrived in the U.S. over the past two years fleeing violence in several Central American countries were arrested after being declared eligible for deportation. These were mostly mothers and children who turned themselves in at the U.S. border, were sent to immigration jails for processing and were released to the community while awaiting hearings in immigration court to determine if their stories were credible and they would thus be eligible to remain in the U.S. In almost all cases, those picked up did not have legal representation.

Rallies to protest the raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, a division of Homeland Security, have been held around the country. On Jan. 5 and again on Jan. 11, a notice signed by a total of 240 groups was sent to both the U.S. attorney general and the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, stating that many of the immigrants are disabled as defined by the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 because they suffer from severe trauma. The notice requests that the government suspend ongoing raids pending a review to determine whether the asylum and immigration proceedings that led to these families' removal orders complied with federal disability law.

Between The Lines' Melinda Tuhus spoke with Swapna Reddy, a third-year student at Yale Law School and an intern with the Workers and Immigrants Rights Advocacy Clinic at Yale. Here, she describes the situation many of these recently arrived immigrants find themselves in, what assistance is being offered, and the government's response her group's request for suspensions of raids and deportation.

SWAPNA REDDY: Our clinic drafted the letter from the beginning; however, the idea really originated with the work we've been doing with these families with a large network of legal advocates across the country to assist refugee families who were detained in detention centers in Texas and Pennsylavia. And from working with these families, we became aware that many of these families had suffered enormous trauma and that many of these families needed psychological evaluations and psychological treatment in order to be able to tell their stories to the government and to succeed in their immigration cases. And we realized that the government needed to be doing more to make sure families had these resources and were not failing in their immigration cases for reasons outside of their control. For that reason, we drafted this letter to put the government on notice for a series of issues that the government should already have been aware of, which is that families who suffered extreme trauma are in need of reasonable modifications as required by civil rights law.

What the letter is saying is that these families who have suffered severe trauma and developed disabilities, including post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety disorders and depression, are disabled as defined under the Rehabilitation Act, and the government is required to make reasonable modifications for individuals who are disabled, due to this law. So what we're asking the government to do is to make sure that it identifies families that are disabled under the Rehabilitation Act, that it provides immigration proceedings that are trauma-informed, to ensure that these families have an ability to tell their stories, and that it provides counsel for refugee families who are unable to tell their stories because of the severe trauma that they've been exposed to. We are also asking the DHS and DOJ to take these disabilities into account before deciding which families to target in raids - raids which offer occur very early in the morning with armed guards coming into families' homes and taking children directly from their beds; they're obviously another source of significant trauma and can exacerbate symptoms, so we're asking the government to think carefully about the disabilities these families suffer from and to try to modify its procedures to make sure it's giving these families a fair chance at their cases.

BETWEEN THE LINES: So, what if the government doesn't respond or responds and says it disagrees with you and will proceed to arrest and deport these families? Is a lawsuit the next step?

SWAPNA REDDY: We hope this letter is the beginning of an ongoing process to receive modifications for these families to ensure that they are not deported back to dangerous situations for reasons outside of their control. We have not set in stone any ongoing plans because we are waiting to see how the government will respond to our request. In the past, we have brought suit against the government for situations in which we believe the government was acting in violation of the law; however, we have not made any substantive plans thus far.

BETWEEN THE LINES: So, Swapna Reddy, it seems like you had no trouble getting lots of groups – hundreds of groups – to sign on to your letter. It seems like it really touched a nerve.

SWAPNA REDDY: This really is a an issue that touches on a lot of problematic areas. We are talking about thousands of Central American families. The average profile is a very young single mother with young children. Many thousands of these families have been held in immigration detention centers, so, as refugees who came to the U.S. and presented themselves to border officials, they were then held in jail where they had limited access to medical care. Many of these women and even children are victims of severe sexual violence and gang and gender-based violence, so there really are a pretty large number of groups and issue areas that are really concerned about the treatment of these families, whether it is women's rights groups, disability rights groups, faith-based and labor groups – there's an enormous amount of intersectionality on the problems that are affecting these families.

BETWEEN THE LINES: So, is the government agnostic on whether or not these people have suffered what they say they've suffered, but the Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials say these immigrants just didn't follow the rules and therefore are eligible for deportation?

SWAPNA REDDY: Yes. Well, the government, either because they believe the families did not state a valid refugee claim or because the family simply didn't show up to court, or had an incompetent lawyer who didn't make their case fully, they are now saying that the families are eligible to be removed from the U.S. And we are arguing that without reasonable modifications and without allowing families to present their cases in a way that are trauma-informed, the families have not actually had a fair shot.

And just to provide two anecdotes about the strength of these families' cases if they do have competent counsel, there was a detention center in Artesia, New Mexico, that was opened up to incarcerate many of these families, and in that context, immigration advocates took on 15 cases, they followed them through to conclusion and they were able to win 14 of them and the 15th is on appeal. And in Texas, in the nation's largest family detention center which has 2,400 beds, another student, Conchita Cruz, a professor from Columbia Law School, Laura Mukajee, and I created a national system to ensure universal representation to every family that was forced to proceed through their entire immigration case while detained, and in that context we did not get to choose which cases to take on; we just took every case that the government forced to go to trial in jail, and we have been able to win every single one of those cases. So we believe that these families, with competent counsel, the vast majority of them have winning claims and would be able to win their refugee status in the U.S. The issue is that the procedures are not trauma-informed and that these families often have incompetent or no counsel.

For more information, visit Workers and Immigrants Rights Advocacy Clinic at Yale Law School's website.

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