 Hi, I'm Joe Laurier, editor-in-chief of Consorting News, the oldest independent news site on the web. In 25 years, we've brought you groundbreaking journals on many of the most significant issues of the day, including national security, farm policy, and the environment. And today, I'm happy to tell you about a new development at CN Live. We will be adding a new member of the team. John Kiriakou is joining us on a regular guest host basis. John is a former CIA analyst who blew the whistle on the agency's use of torture. He was convicted under the Espionage Act and condemned to prison for two years. In 2012, John received the Joe A. Calloway Award for civil courage given to those who advanced truth and justice despite personal risk. John is the former co-host of Loud and Clear. John, welcome to the team. We can't wait to have you on the show. Hi, everybody, and welcome to season three, episode five of CN Live. We're calling it Loud and Clear, seeking justice in Gaza and the U.S. prison system. I'm your co-host, John Kiriakou. And I'm Elizabeth Boss. We have a fun and a timely show for you this evening. We're going to be joined by activist and podcaster. Actually, we were going to be joined by activist and podcaster, Brian Becker. But a scheduling conflict came up and his brother, Richard, agreed to fill in for him. Richard Becker is the Western Region Coordinator of the Answer Coalition and the author of the book, Palestine, Israel and the U.S. Empire. You can find that at www.palastinebook.com. And then later in the show, we'll be joined by journalist, Kevin Gestala, who has written extensively about the case of drone whistleblower, Daniel Hale, and he'll give us an update on the latest involving Daniel's surprise incarceration. And then we'll be joined nearer the end of the show by Paul Wright. He's the founder of the Human Rights Defense Center and the editor of Prison Legal News and Criminal Legal News magazines. Paul's going to talk about the spread of COVID-19 throughout the U.S. prison system and prospects for prison reform and sentencing reform in the Biden administration. So stay tuned, Elizabeth. Looks like it's going to be a great show. I think we're going to have a lot of fun and I'm very happy to have Richard Becker join us. Richard, there's so much to talk about. So first off, welcome. Thanks for joining us. Thank you. Richard, you are a longtime activist like your brother, Brian, and you have focused largely on the Middle East and U.S. policy. You've written the book that I mentioned a moment ago about U.S. influence, U.S. hegemony in the region. And there's so much to ask. Let's start by getting your thoughts on the recent ceasefire. Why a ceasefire after BB Netanyahu specifically told Joe Biden that there wouldn't be one? Well, they can say what they want, but the relationship is dominated by the United States. I think there's a lot of confusion about that in the United States and in the world. But if they bring the pressure, the real pressure to bear, then Israel cannot ignore that. No Israeli leader can ignore that. And I think that the reason we're seeing that happen, why the U.S. and why Biden has stepped up the pressure and pushed for the ceasefire to take place is that this is really a very dangerous situation for the U.S. and you talked about the hegemony in the region. And this threatens the hegemony because something new has happened, something different. I mean, is that altogether new? But what is different is that the level of participation of Palestinians inside of the 1948 borders of Israel in the Palestinian cities and what they call the mixed cities. And so there are really today four segments of what was the British mandate of Palestine. There's the West Bank, there's East Jerusalem, there's Gaza, and there's what is now the 1948 borders. Israel, one of Israel's main objectives has been to keep those different parts of Palestine separated and also to separate them from the five million or so Palestinians who live in the diaspora. You can see that something has changed. They can see that there's been a coming together and because Palestine is really so central, not only in a geographic sense, but so central to the hearts and the minds of Arab people everywhere and all people in the Middle East, any big development in the Middle East, particularly a mass upsurge, threatens the interests of the United States potentially throughout the entire region. So we're going to see the Secretary of State flying over to the region to try to protect US interests there. But this is a big development. You know, everybody seems to be pleased with this development. At least, you know, the two sides aren't firing rockets at each other, but nothing's actually been solved. There haven't been any talks or negotiations. There was a piece in Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper today, saying that now all eyes are going to be on Jerusalem because people are still angry. Palestinians are angry and they haven't been given anything. So what next? Well, that's a very good question and in a certain way we really don't know, but you can see that that is true. What you said is that there's great anger about this long-term project that Israel has of de-arabizing or de-Palestinizing East Jerusalem. And so, you know, just five blacks from where I'm sitting right now in San Francisco is members of one of the families that's been forced out, a big family called the Al Qord family. Many families have been forced out under these completely false and falsified deeds and pretenses and so forth. They who have lived there for so long don't have a right to be there. So this is really, I think, what's set in motion the current situation. We had that. We had, surprisingly, I think, huge participation in supporting Sheikh Jarrah and in the Al Aqsa Mas Ramadan undertakings in the last days. 90,000 people came to Al Aqsa Mas and they were attacked and they were brutally attacked. And on May 9th, there were at least 200 people wounded on May 10th, 400, and most of those had to get hospital treatment. It was then that the Hamas government in Gaza said to the Israeli government, you must stop doing this. And then when the Israeli government, the police and the army kept going, the rockets were fired, then this massive, massive attack by Israel on Gaza once again. I wanna ask you too about the way these conflicts are carried out now. In 1967, the Israelis famously defeated every Arab country in its, along its borders in the Six Day War. After a surprise in 73, the Israelis regrouped and defeated Arab armies again. But it seems like things began to change around 1982 when the Israelis had trouble fighting in Lebanon and were largely pushed back by Hezbollah or groups allied with Hezbollah. Well, now we see these skirmishes every five, six, seven years against the Palestinians, usually against Hamas. And the Israelis can't seem to deliver a knockout blow anymore. We see an exchange of rocket fire, lots of Palestinian deaths, but it's like the Israelis just don't really know how to approach Hamas. Now, if Hezbollah were to jump in in the North at the same time that the Israelis are fighting in Gaza, it seems like the Israelis might have a tough time. What do you think about their strategy? Well, their strategy, they have an overall strategy, which is to drive out as much of the Palestinian population as possible from all parts of Palestine. They've had to pull back on that somewhat and adopt different methods, I would say different methods to try to achieve that. I think that the reason that Hezbollah didn't enter this conflict is because of the extreme crisis in Lebanon right now. And so I don't think they believe they're in a position to do so. But I think we can see from this that what Israel is trying to do is not working, where their attempt, and there was for the first time last week, an actual debate in the House of Representatives about Palestine and Israel. I don't think that's ever happened before. And Representative Rashida Tlaib from Detroit, the first Palestinian American in Congress, said in it, you can send Israel all the money you want, the Palestinians aren't going anywhere. And I think that's a conclusion. So that the US government has also come to, they have really not been the honest broker by any means. And in the book I wrote, I documented this, how much they have not been the honest broker and how much they have given to Israel, hundreds of billions of dollars, all modern weaponry and everything. But it's not working, the Palestinians are not leaving. And I think that it'll be very interesting to see what Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken's, the outcome of his trip is what he's gonna, or at least what he's gonna try to do now. Because obviously there's gotta be something different than what's been going on. I wanna ask you about that specifically, about US policy and politics and the way politics plays a role in policy. We've seen Bernie Sanders come out with his amendment to delay the sale of advanced weaponry to the Israelis and a large, rather large contingent of Democrats in the House of Representatives laying down a marker led by Rashida Tlaib. Do you think that things are changing in Congress, that the outlook, the viewpoint toward Israel is changing in Congress? Or are these moves specific to this incident? I don't think they're just specific to this incident. I think that there is a shift that's going on because there's a shift in the population. There's a big shift in the population. You know, it's very interesting that the former ambassador to the United States from Israel ran dermar a couple of weeks ago before this all broke out. He said, Israel should stop worrying about the Jewish community in the United States and just focus on the evangelicals. I mean, that's an amazing statement. That's an amazing statement and really indicating that the state of Israel and particularly in its most repressive policies has lost a lot of support, especially among young Jewish people who have joined the movement in solidarity and have really said they're forsaking Zionism altogether that they consider it to be reactionary, reactionary form of nationalism. It's not a unique form of nationalism. It's another form of nationalism that arose in Europe, and all of which have had extreme tendencies that developed tendencies toward fascism. We see the same thing happening today in Israel. Let's get over to you. Yeah, I just wanted to ask you about the US media and the way that it's covered this issue. We've seen them basically do the same old, same old, and yet as you say, the perception of this subject has really shifted in the populace. Would you say that there is any difference in the mainstream media's coverage or is it more an expression of the public kind of escaping the hold of corporate news? Most of the mainstream media has been disgusting and awful. I mean, really sickening the way that it's covered this. And even when you read these headlines, like conflict over, what do they say? Conflict over housing or something. I mean, not talking about what's really going on here. This is like the displacement, the forced displacement of the population that's taking place. And that population, the indigenous population of the region is fighting back and is continuing to fight back. And of course, that's not the way it's put. That's not the way people read it. But more and more people, I would say this, more and more people are looking elsewhere for their sources because they come to learn that the mainstream media is so, so deficient and awful. And one of the subjects that is not covered by mainstream press and hasn't been raised yet by progressive politicians that I've seen is the issue of Israel's possession of nuclear weapons. How much do you think that could change the conversation if more people were really aware of that and the influence it has on US foreign policy and support of Israel? Yeah, I mean, it was way back, I think it was the Nixon administration when Nixon made an agreement with this, like it was kind of a don't ask, don't tell policy for nuclear weapons. We won't question you, don't talk about it. We won't talk about it and so forth. But I mean, the world generally knows this and people who are informed at all in the United States know that Israel is a nuclear weapons state. And it just also plays into this extreme hypocrisy that's going on about nuclear weapons. But I think a lot of people are understanding that, a lot more people are understanding that. But they're not getting it from the mainstream media. Sean. No, they're not getting it from the mainstream media. As the journalists here in the United States are forbidden from even raising it, every once in a while. And when I say once in a while, I mean, like every decade, there's a reference to what used to be Israeli cooperation with apartheid era of South Africa and that when the South Africans realized that the gig was up, they apparently gave their nuclear weapons to Israel, but nobody's supposed to talk about things like that. Right, right. Yeah. And as far as it goes also, they're kind of two apartheid regimes, of course. And one of the things that I think has been really a blow to Israel is that just in the last, what is it, four or five months, that's a LEM, which is a pro-Israeli organization, human rights organization inside Israel and human rights watch, which is moderate to say the least, have both come out with reports showing without beyond any doubt that Israel is an apartheid society. And that's one of the things that also was completely ignored that development of South Africa's nuclear weapon with the assistance of the state of Israel. Okay, we're gonna leave it there. Thank you very much, Richard Becker. Richard's the Western Region Coordinator of the Answer Coalition and the author of the book, Palestine, Israel, and the US Empire. You can find that book at www.palestinebook.com. Thanks for joining us. We are now pleased to introduce our friend, journalist, Kevin Gestola. Kevin is, Kevin, correct me if I'm wrong, but you're also the publisher at Shadow Proof, are you not? No, I have my partner, Brian Sonnstein, who I would probably classify as the publishing editor. Well, we share an amazing job, especially on these whistleblower issues. We always say that there's not a lot of money left anywhere in journalism for investigative journalism. Kevin and Brian Sonnstein do investigative journalism, and you're especially strong on whistleblower cases. Kevin has been covering the case of drone whistleblower, Daniel Hale, in depth, and he's gonna give us an update. On the latest with Daniel, Kevin, welcome. I wanna start by saying that I was very pleasantly surprised by a phone call from Daniel on Saturday. He called me from jail here in Alexandria, Virginia. And he said that he had been lied to, that he was told that he needed to go into the courthouse for a year analysis, a totally routine event for anybody awaiting some sort of federal, you know, legal situation. And so he went to the courthouse with a full bladder and was promptly arrested. And he was told that he was being arrested for his own safety, his own security, that they had heard from his therapist that he was suicidal. He said he was not suicidal. He might be now because he's in solitary confinement. And because of COVID, that solitary confinement is indefinite. What can you tell us about what he's going through right now? What are you hearing? What's the latest with his case? Well, this seems like what I've heard that the therapist that he had, who he was confiding in, essentially violated that patient confidentiality. That makes it so you are comfortable with talking to this person to get help. And the other thing I find alarming is if you look at the docket for what unfolded over the last month to a month and a half, it tells a story. It tells a story of someone who was willing to subject themselves to substance abuse. Testing was willing to turn to the court for help and then found that he was actually no longer going to be solely in the hands of Judge Leo Moe Grady because the person who made this decision to have a hearing and have his bail revoked was I believe her name is Judge Teresa Buchanan. And it's very unusual that somebody else other than Leo Moe Grady had this hearing after it came up for the court to deal with the fact that there was this arrest warrant. I don't know why Leo Moe Grady didn't stick with this. I don't know why someone else was brought into it but it seems like the government was assisted by Teresa Buchanan. It very much seems like the person who had been understanding, who had been in some ways fatherly, I listened to that plea hearing. I was able to call in remotely, mostly thanks to the normal in which we still find ourselves because of the pandemic. I was able to from Chicago call into the courtroom and hear the plea hearing when Daniel Hale decided that he was gonna plead guilty to the one single charge of violating the Espionage Act. And I could hear it in his voice, in Judge Leo Moe Grady's voice that he was actually concerned about the wellbeing of Daniel Hale. But he was not the only one involved. There's this person who was brought in and it seems completely extraordinary that they were able to call upon her and get Daniel Hale's bail ultimately revoked. It's as if he did sign off on this decision but it was if someone told him, this is what you're going to do. We have decided that this court system is going to put Daniel Hale in the Alexandria Detention Center. And Kevin, why would Daniel and his attorneys not have the opportunity to challenge something like this? Why was he taken by surprise like he was? Because that seems to me to be a due process violation. Yeah, it doesn't seem like there's much ability at all to challenge this decision. It's the court's word against Daniel's. It's the therapist's word against Daniel Hale's. I don't see why there isn't more of a hearing here in order to challenge what's ongoing. But I also don't understand how there's anything to be gained by putting somebody who we know is already going through substance abuse testing. We know is already seeing a therapist. I'm going to be careful about the words I use because I want to be sensitive to Daniel and I don't want to project or suggest that he has certain problems that he may or may not have. But just based on the court record alone, we know that there's a certain compassion that should have come from the justice system. And even though we know how it works in reality and even though you've spent quite a lot of time talking to me and Paul Wright about these issues, it would seem that there should be some kind of an action that is triggered. And it's really important that people understand that the reason why Daniel Hale was not taken into custody when he pled guilty is the same reason why he should be free right now. Because everything that was said to the judge convinced him that it was better for Daniel to remain free from detention until his sentencing. And so I don't know, I think it's really on the justice system, it's also on the government to say what changed? Because everything that he told that therapist was true before he pled guilty and it wasn't enough to put him behind bars. Well, I'll tell you, when I was arrested, as you can imagine, as anybody would be, I was depressed to the point where, like anybody else, I considered taking the easy way out, facing 45 years in prison. And I went to a therapist who I had worked with at the CIA. He was a cleared CIA retiree. And the FBI went to him and said, what does John Kiriakou tell you when he's in here? And my therapist said, none of your damn business. And that was the end of it. That was the end of it. I was sickened when I heard that Daniel's therapist had essentially ratted him out. We don't know what he told the therapist, but I know what he told me. And what he told me has led me to conclude that there is absolutely no reason why he should not be home. And another thing too, it's almost impossible to work on your own defense from solitary confinement in prison. Now, during the Jeffrey Sterling case, the government was forced to build a skiff, a secure sensitive compartmented information, whatever facility, a secure conference room at the courthouse. It's been a decade since that thing was used. I don't even know if it still exists, but how is Daniel supposed to meet with his attorneys now and to plan his own defense when he's in solitary confinement and not able to have visitors and all of his phone calls are screened. Not just screened, they're recorded. And I don't think we can take the government's word for it that they're not listening in. So I think we need to take a moment to pull this back a bit and think of the Espionage Act prosecutions in general because as you're talking about your own experience, it really does seem like this was a way for the government to make sure that they could maintain a kind of standard that they seem to want to uphold. I don't really think they want those who are prosecuted for leaks to be out of jail any longer because reality winner was kept in jail and was no more a threat to the national security than Daniel Hale, no more a threat than you were, which is to say that she wasn't one at all. And I think there's this kind of new normal that they really want where people who are accused of these crimes are not allowed to be out on pretrial bond to be free and to participate in their defense. And that's contributed to organizations like the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press to point out in their amicus briefs that they're submitting that the punishment for these cases has become so draconian that it actually is a press freedom issue that has to be dealt with. And you're talking about the Alexandria detention center. It's really crucial here that I make this point that this jail is part of the reason why Julian Assange, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange won his extradition case and is not being extradited to the United States as we speak and the government still has to win their appeal. The conditions of this facility, which I imagine, I don't know exactly where Daniel is being held, but if he's in AdSeg, he's where Julian Assange would be detained. And so he hasn't been convicted, so he's a detainee. And these conditions were just detailed in the extradition trial and you actually have them in front of me. It's a windowless single occupancy cell. It's about 50 feet square. There's a sleeping area, small sink, a toilet, and you're there for 20 to 23 hours a day. You take your meals in your cell and there's no interaction with other inmates. Now, if you ask prosecutor Gordon Cromberg, he'll tell you some farcical line about how you can communicate, but these are steel, these are steel doors. They're thick metal. You cannot have a conversation with anyone. If your attorney comes to visit you, you would have to shout at the top of your lungs in order to have a conversation. It is not possible for you to do it unless you want to seem like you're actually clinically insane. So there's just no way you can treat this as anything other than solitary confinement. I'm so glad you brought up the Assange case as well because we know that from the Assange expedition hearing that the CIA is also involved in the administration of special administrative measures of SAMS. Did you care to comment on that at all? Well, yeah, so I don't really know that there's any type of special administrative measures being imposed on Daniel Hale, but let's just say Daniel knows a lot about the drone program. Daniel knows a lot about how the US military selects targets. He was involved. He was a contractor for a contractor that I'm not personally that familiar with, but it's called Litos. And they do a lot of sensitive work. If he was in prison and someone asked him what he was in jail for, he might start to talk about what he did and that might result in the leaking of more classified information. And so the government gets to use this pretense of keeping people in a combo of what they are probably represent to the court as protective custody, but what is really is it's solitary confinement and they get to do this on the justification that they're going to prevent unauthorized disclosures of information. Joshua Schult, who had a mistrial in his case, was the alleged Vault 7 leaker, but the government has been able to put forward no proof, is still being kept in horrendous conditions in MCC New York. And he's detailed it and quite extensively in submissions to the court system up there in New York. And so it's just important to recognize that these people who are accused of these leaks are basically targeted in such a way so that they are not able to speak. And I'll just, you know, I'll close what I'm saying here by highlighting this sentence from the submission by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press where they wrote, the Espionage Act is ill-equipped to distinguish between national defense information of high public interest, such as tasking orders showing a mistaken target or unvarnished civilian casualty counts versus that of low public interest, such as quotidian troop movement plans, speaks to its constitutional infirmity. And so basically to unpack that jargon, we're talking about the fact that issues involving drone warfare, we need to hear about those. We need to hear what people like drone whistleblower Daniel Hale has to tell us. And the government shouldn't be able to get in the way of deciding that we can't hear about it because it's too sensitive. I have one last question I'd like to ask you about. And that is about the additional charges that the government has not dropped against Daniel. And what that means about the extra time he could face even having pled guilty to one count. To me, this immediately stood out and I have no problem with sharing that I called John up right after I learned that they weren't going to drop these charges because I was very curious if this was anything that had ever happened in any Espionage Act case before. And it's very unusual. And so essentially what Daniel did was he threw himself into the lion's den, so to speak. He said, I'm gonna plead guilty to this one charge and I'm hopeful that you're going to dismiss these other charges and just be satisfied but this is enough. And the court even says this charge that he pled guilty to covers all the criminal conduct that you could possibly accuse Daniel Hale of committing. Again, we think that he's a whistleblower and he didn't do anything that deserves prosecution. But going by the government standard, everything they alleged in their indictment is covered by this single charge. His attorneys argued that the indictment against him was multiplicitous or duplicative in the sense that you're stacking charges. And so now the government is saying because they want to ensure that they get the best possible and in my view that would mean the harshest sentence on sentencing day in July, they are not going to dismiss these other four charges and they're gonna leave them hanging over Daniel Hale's head. And that's going to mean that he has to take a certain amount of responsibility. They're gonna be watching him closely when he speaks to the court. One of the things that I've noticed in these cases that you get to do when you plead guilty is you're now free to give some explanation for why you disclosed this material in the first place. What you're not able to do because there's no public interest defense in these trials if you were to go to trial. So he might've been thinking he was going to go in Leo Mogheri's courtroom in the Eastern District and tell people why he thought what he did was in the public interest and why we needed to know this material. But now maybe he's gonna hold back. Maybe he's afraid that he's going to be possibly taken to trial on these four other charges. So he's going to have to censor himself and be less of a whistleblower and instead be more of someone who shows contrition in order to try and get his sentence or keep his sentence low. I don't know, but certainly if they're not satisfied with the outcome in July they have said clearly to the court that the prosecutors may move forward with this trial. And that seems like an abuse of the justice system. Totally agree, totally agree. Daniel and I had this conversation a couple of weeks ago before he was snatched up. And he said that what he's doing is he's essentially throwing himself at the mercy of the court. And his lawyers were told that the prosecutors want to see what the sentence will be before they decide what to do with the other charges. Meaning if the sentence isn't long enough for their liking that they will go forward with these other charges. I've never heard of such a thing. And this to me is an abuse of the system. You know, if the guy's throwing himself at the mercy of the court then that ought to be the end of it. Now what could happen? And I'm just speculating I don't have any insight information here at all but he could plead guilty to all the charges and then the judge would not be bound by any recommendation from the prosecution. He could find Daniel guilty of all the charges and then have all of the penalties run concurrently. And so the attorneys are banding about the idea of five years. That seems harsh. That's very slightly less than what reality winner got and that was harsh. So fingers crossed that cooler heads prevail. But so far, I hate to say it, so far he's been screwed. And it's not for a lack of good attorneys. The public defenders in the Eastern District of Virginia are renowned for their experience especially in national security cases. He's got terrific attorneys. Of course, they're overworked and underpaid. It's just that the Justice Department's pulling a fast one here and it's something that we haven't seen before. Yeah, and I suppose in closing we should say to the audience that is tuned in here that you can go to standwithdanielhail.org and there are multiple ways listed at the bottom to support him. This is a bit outside what I do because mostly I can say I'm just focused on the journalism, I'm covering the developments in the case and then hopefully I'm able to inform you and if you feel so inclined to act, you could do something you could write to Daniel in jail and let him know that you're one of his supporters. There's also an address down there for the U.S. Marshals Service where they're encouraging people to write to them and let the U.S. Marshals Service know that you're concerned about their wellbeing that usually has some kind of an effect. It lets the authorities know that there are people watching. So no matter what, there's gonna be some leak or the public is gonna learn what you're doing if you try too much. That's what we use to protect you with the letters from Loretto. So it's important that we keep the lines of communication. We're gonna try to have his friends and journalists and family members, whoever can be his allies are gonna try to keep everyone informed so the public knows and hopefully that can keep him protected because we really, I mean, I think more than anything, we don't want anything terrible to happen to Daniel before he gets to sentencing day. And we really don't want anything terrible to happen while he is serving his sentence. And we hope, you know, we know that the system is not built for compassion, but the more people who do put pressure on the judge and the court and do demand that there is some kind of compassion. I mean, it can only help. I don't see how it can make anything worse. Yeah, that's right. Kevin Gestala, thank you very much. That site again is standwithdanielhale.org. Check it out. You know, you'd be surprised how much a simple letter can lift a person's spirits. So Kevin Gestala, thank you for joining us. You can find more of Kevin's work at shadowproof.com. Don't miss it. And now we're very pleased to have joining us from Florida. Paul Wright, Paul's the founder of the Human Rights Defense Center and the editor and publisher of Prison Legal News and Criminal Legal News magazines. I'm a subscriber to both. They're both amazing. Paul, welcome. Hi, welcome. Thanks for having me on the show, John. Thanks for joining us. We're very happy to have you. I wanna start by congratulating you. As I did in an email the other day on this latest issue of Prison Legal News Magazine. As you know, I've been reading it for years, for seven years now, I never miss an issue. This was a particularly strong issue because there was a very strong focus on COVID in the US prison system, not just the federal system where it's been a disaster, but at the state and local level too. And one of the things that I wanted to ask you, and maybe I should wait, maybe it would be more appropriate to wait a couple of minutes, but I'm gonna jump right into it because it's so important to me. I wrote about this recently in consortium news, and that is at the very tail end of the Trump administration, like within the last two weeks of the Trump administration, the Trump Justice Department very quietly decided to release thousands of prisoners who were at the minimum and low level and had relatively short times left on their sentences five, six years and less. They let them go home and converted their time into house arrest because of the crush of COVID. I thought that was an absolutely fantastic idea, but then for whatever reason that hasn't been explained, the Biden Justice Department has begun discussions on returning all those people back to prison. Can you tell us a little bit about that and why we see this role reversal between the Trump administration and the so-called Progressive Biden administration? Yeah, I think we've been reporting on this, we've been reporting on COVID obviously since it started and it's been a huge news story, both at the federal bureau of prisons level as well as the state and local level. And with varying degrees, generally speaking, the vast majority of states did not release convicted prisoners from prisons. A number of jails and other local jurisdictions did release pretrial detainees, people that have been convicted. And the bureau of prisons, I've seen varying numbers, but from the time the pandemic started until a couple months ago, they'd released somewhere between four and 6,000 prisoners who were minimum security and work release already and they released them to home confinement. And I think it's important to know that from a legal perspective, prisoners on home confinement are in the same legal position as if they're locked up in a federal penitentiary. They're technically still serving their sentence. Legally, there's no difference. And I think that one of the things that's interesting is some of the high profile cases like Michael Cohen, President Trump's former attorney who pleaded guilty to various charges. And he was one of the people that was released on to home confinement. I think he was serving, there was a three or four year sentence. And of course, the telling thing is that some of the newspaper tabloids in New York, like New York Post, they went kind of ballistic when they took pictures of Michael Cohen eating at an Italian restaurant in downtown Manhattan. And it's like, my God, the band's on home confinement. And the thing is, well, home confinement means, yes, he's serving his sentences at home, he has restrictions, that doesn't mean the guy can't go out to get a pizza or whatever he does. And I think that in some respects, that was part of the thing that may have started, that may have led the Justice Department to start thinking about bringing people back into prison. The first memo that I saw where they discussed bringing people back into prison was actually from December where it was still the Trump administration. It was like a 10 or 13 page memo where they described doing that. And I think that, I don't really think this is so much Biden administration versus a Trump administration thing. I think this is just a prosecutor thing. And prosecutors kind of trundle along regardless of who's nominally in office. And I think that what's happened in this country for the last 40 or 50 years, we've just gotten, our prosecutors have gone on a lock them up kick for so long that they just don't know what to do if they're not locking people up. And I think that kind of reading between the lines and the impression I have is that, okay, we released some people and again, four or 5,000 people out of a prison population of 170,000 is not, yes, it's a significant number but it's nowhere near what needed to be done. And I'll just put this into context. The Islamic Republic of Iran, which is no one's idea of a human rights model or anything, they released the third of their prison population on furlough, which was basically the same thing. They took a third of their prison population said, go home during COVID when the pandemic's over, we're gonna lock you back up to finish serving your sentence. And in essence, that seems to be what the Department of Justice in the United States has done is they took 4,000 or 5,000 prisoners and said, go home when the pandemic's over, we'll round you back up and you can come back and finish serving your sentence in prison. And to an extent, I think this kind of raises the question of what's the role of prison? How much of it is about punishing people? How much of it is about public safety and whatever. And I think it also, one of the things that the pandemic has I think really illustrated is the fact that our nation's prisons are dangerous places and not just because of the threat of violence, which especially at the minimum security facilities where many of these people were being held is minimal but the health risks. I mean, on any, even before the pandemic, the COVID pandemic struck, thousands of prisoners every year were dying in natural causes, ranging from easy to treat diseases. 25% of the nation's population that's HIV positive has a criminal justice facility interaction. They're locked up in a jail, they're locked up in prison at some point and 25%, any given year of our HIV positive population has some type of carcerial experience. Depending on the state, we're between 40 to 60% of our prison population is infected with hepatitis C even though it's a curable disease and prison and jail officials refuse to spend the money to cure it. So just from a lot of different perspectives, mocking a lot of people up is not a very good idea yet. We seem to be kind of wedded to it. Well, it's been particularly disastrous in places like Alabama, Mississippi, Alaska. I followed this closely in the magazine where Department of Corrections leaders just had no policy when the pandemic hit. They didn't know what to do and so in many cases, they didn't do anything. We saw prisons in Alaska for example where there was a 100% infection rate. We see death rates in Alabama prisons that are far higher than the national death rates for COVID. Is there any system in the country where things have actually worked? No, I mean, we've been reporting on this extensively since it started and around the country and pretty much all of the state facilities, all the state and federal prisons, it's been an abysmal response. And I think that at the end of the day, you just have to figure that it's just a factor where the prison officials and the government officials that are responsible for these facilities just don't care about human life. In general, they don't care about the lives of the prisoners or their staff. I mean, that's also the thing too, is some of the latest numbers I've seen is that they're reporting at least 400,000 prisoners and 120,000 prison employees have gotten sick with COVID, thousands of both have died. And at the end of the day, that's just viewed as an expendable population. And it wasn't just Alaska, but I mean, I've read some of the facilities, number of prisons in California as well, were 100% infection rates. And I'm reading this and I'm thinking to myself, how do you get 100% of your population infected? It's almost like you have to really try at it because I think almost the only other places I can think of outside of the prison in jail context where they've had such high infection rates were the Navy aircraft carrier, the Theodore Roosevelt, I believe, where something like 4,000 out of 4,500 sailors got infected with COVID and the diamond princess, the cruise ship at the very beginning of the pandemic where a great majority of the passengers and the crew got sick. But that happened at the very beginning of the pandemic when no one knew what COVID was, no one really knew how infectious it was, how it was being spread or anything like that. But then when you fast forward to what's happened in the course of the pandemic of prisons and jails, by this point, the government officials, they know what COVID is, they know how it's being spread, they know what can be done to stop it, and then they just don't do anything. And I think that earlier, I think, you mentioned about the Progressive Bided Administration. I really don't think that politics has anything to do with it because California gets a lot of attention to supposedly being some liberal or progressive panacea. Yeah, California is one of the states that has the 100% infection rate. And then places like New York State, they release virtually no one from prison, you know, while Andrew Cuomo, the governor, is on TV every night touting their COVID responses. He's got these massive casualties in nursing homes and prisons. There are two institutionalized populations that are helpless, that are vulnerable, and the government showed, I mean, this epitomizes the term deliberate indifference. They really don't care if you're elderly or if you're a prisoner, they do not care if you live or die. You're totally expendable as far as they're concerned. Paul, I think I read something in Prison Legal News Magazine too, about the very high number of prison guards around the country who are refusing to be vaccinated. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, depending on the state, I mean, I find it amazing that there's anywhere between, depending on the state between 40 and 60% of prison guards, not just prison guards, but also police and first responders with the fire department's paramedics are refusing to get vaccinated. And I'm really kind of surprised by this. And I haven't really heard or read much of anything in terms of why. And I think as far as when I hear that there's a lot of prisoners that are refusing to get vaccinated, I can kind of understand that there's been a long history in this country of the government using prisoners as guinea pigs to experiment on them with experimental drugs. And I know a lot of people may not know this, but before the mid-70s, every drug and cosmetic that went to market in this country was tested on prisoners. I did not know that. Yeah, and so there's that. A great book on the subject is by a friend of mine named Alan Hornblum. It's called Acres of Skin. And he documents this history of prisoner experimentation. And then of course, for a lot of black people and people of color, they remember the Tuskegee experiment where a couple of hundred black men were infected with syphilis and they were not treated, but they were observed for decades by government doctors to see what untreated syphilis would do to people. So I kind of get it when prisoners in general and prisoners of color in particular say, hey, I don't trust the government to give me some drug, some vaccine that I have no idea what it is. And at Prison Legal News, we got a lot of letters from prisoners and they're asking us, do you think we're being used as guinea pigs to experiment on this? Are they experimenting on prisoners to see if we get sick and die? And these are all valid, I think, questions, but then when it comes to the guards, why aren't they getting vaccinated? And I don't know. I'm not hearing, it could be that maybe, the irony could be that the very functionaries and officials of the police state are the ones who trusted the least. You know, just as an aside, Elizabeth, before I turn it over to you, when I was still in prison, there was a young man two cells down from me who was diagnosed with tuberculosis. And you know the threat of tuberculosis in the prison system. It's a nightmare. It's a disaster waiting to happen. And before COVID, that was the most contagious and infectious respiratory illness. Exactly, right. And nobody said anything. I mean, the doctors told this guy that he was positive for TB and then they sent him back to the cell. So I went up to one of the guards and I said, hey, the guys got TB. So what about the rest of us? And the guard said, don't let him cough on you. And that was it. And it seems to me that that's how they handled COVID in the beginning too. Just don't breathe it in. But I think that it's really telling those when you contrast their, compare and contrast the government's response to COVID in prisons and jails with how they've dealt with natural disasters. I mean, we've seen this going back to Hurricane Katrina and things like that where prisoners, you know, even as these level five hurricanes are bearing down on landfall. And, you know, I mean, I say this as the guy who lives in Florida. We know what a level five hurricane is. We know what a level five hurricane making landfall is going to do, whether it's Louisiana, Texas, Florida, any place around here. And the prison officials' response is, we're not gonna do anything. Let's just lock everyone up and hope for the best. And in some respects, you know, to be honest, I think that I'm almost surprised that the casualty levels for both COVID has been as low as they have in prisons and jails and when we have these natural disasters. I mean, you know, we saw this in New York City, I think it was in the Mayor Bloomberg when Hurricane Sandy was bearing down on Rikers Island. And they asked them, you know, what are your evacuation plans for New York, for Rikers Island and Bloomberg's responses? Oh, we don't have any. You know, we'll see, you know, we'll hope for the best. And you'd like to think that with the government supposedly of professional officials who are concerned about the lives of the citizenry incarcerated or not, would actually care about whether or not they're doing safe things, whether it's a hurricane, whether it's a natural disaster. We saw this last summer, wildfires in California and Oregon bearing down on prisons. Maybe building all these prisons or remote rural areas wasn't such a good idea after all. But here they are. And we see the government response, whether it's wildfires, hurricanes, COVID, they really don't care about the lives of the prisoners that are locked up in them. And conversely, they also don't care about the lives of the people that are working in them. Because, you know, it's not like they're evacuating the staff. I mean, if the prisoners are being locked to their own devices during hurricanes and during COVID, so are the staff. The staff are right in there with them in those cell blocks. As one last question before we let you go, I'd like to just ask you about where there is some pragmatic level of hope about prison reform in general, because it seems to be a subject where there isn't much progress being made. Can you tell our viewers about that? Yeah, there really isn't any. I mean, for all the talk about, you know, progressive criminal justice reform, that has not gone anywhere as far as prisons and jails go. We've also seen this just, the reality is just, you know, despite all the talk about police reform, we have seen nothing at the federal level and very little at the state or local level. But when it comes to prison reform, to doing anything to improve the lives of prisoners, more importantly, to give prisoners enforceable rights. And this is just the basic things, like, you know, an enforceable right to the physical safety, to medical care, to things like that. It's pretty much a deafening silence. It's interesting, I mean, when Black Lives Matter, they've issued several of their manifestos calling for police reform and criminal justice reform. But when you look at it, there's nothing in their published platform dealing with prisons or jails. And I've emailed them and asked them why this is and no one responds to me. So the fact that not even Black Lives Matter seems to be concerned about the lives and the health and safety of prisoners and people behind bars, I think is pretty alarming, but also, I think, symptomatic of where things are about the lives and wellbeing of people behind bars. There's just a total lack of interest or caring. Okay, we will leave it there. That was a fun, fast episode. Thank you to Paul Wright. Paul is the founder, the creator of the Human Rights Defense Center and the editor and publisher of Prison Legal News and Criminal Legal News magazines. Thank you for joining us, Paul. We were also happy to be joined by Kevin Gestala, an investigative journalist with shadowproof.com and earlier in the program with Richard Becker or by Richard Becker, the Western Regional Coordinator of the Answer Coalition and the author of the book, Palestine, Israel and the US Empire. Elizabeth, this was a lot of fun for my first time hosting CN Live. Absolutely, it was a pleasure. And we'd like to remind our viewers that if you would like to support our work at CN Live, we ask you to consider becoming our patron on Patreon. You can find us at Patreon.com slash CN Live. And we would like to thank you all again for watching this season three, episode five. And thank you, special thanks to our executive producer, Kathy Vogan. Obviously co-host John Kiriakou tonight and for CN Live, I'm Elizabeth Voss. Good night. Good night. If you are a consumer of independent news and the first place you should be going to is Consolidate News and please do try to support them when you can. 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