In an extended interview conducted over the phone from
SCI Mahanoy Prison in Frackville, Pennsylvania, journalist and former Black Panther
Mumia Abu-Jamal
responds to a new Pennsylvania law that authorizes the censoring of
public addresses of prisoners or former offenders if judges agree that
allowing them to speak would cause "mental anguish" to the victim.
Critics say the "Revictimization Relief Act," passed on October 21,
will trample the free speech rights of prisoners. It was introduced
after Abu-Jamal delivered a pretaped commencement address for graduating
students at Vermont’s Goddard College earlier this month. The speech
was opposed by the widow of Daniel Faulkner, the police officer whom
Abu-Jamal was convicted of killing. The American Civil Liberties Union
of Pennsylvania has criticized the new Pennsylvania measure, calling it
"overbroad and vague," and unable to "pass constitutional muster under
the First Amendment."
AMY GOODMAN: This is
Democracy Now!, democracynow.org,
The War and Peace Report.
I’m Amy Goodman, as we turn to Pennsylvania, where Republican Governor
Tom Corbett has just signed into law a bill critics say will trample the
free speech rights of prisoners. The Revictimization Relief Act, as
it’s called, authorizes the censoring of public addresses of prisoners
or former offenders if judges agree that allowing them to speak would
cause "mental anguish" to the victim—the measure introduced after one of
the state’s most famous prisoners, journalist and former Black Panther
Mumia Abu-Jamal, delivered a pretaped commencement address for
graduating students at Vermont’s Goddard College earlier this month, the
speech opposed by the widow of Daniel Faulkner, the police officer whom
Mumia Abu-Jamal was convicted of killing. The American Civil Liberties
Union of Pennsylvania has criticized the new Pennsylvania measure,
calling it "overbroad and vague" unable to "pass constitutional muster
under the First Amendment."
Mumia Abu-Jamal joins us now on the phone from
SCI Mahanoy in Frackville, Pennsylvania.
Mumia Abu-Jamal, welcome to
Democracy Now!
MUMIA ABU-JAMAL: How are you, Amy?
AMY GOODMAN:
It’s good to be with you. Can you talk about where you are right now?
Describe your surroundings, as you speak on the phone to us.
MUMIA ABU-JAMAL:
I am right now, as you hear in the background, in the open area of half
of a block on B Block in Mahanoy. There are about 45 men sitting around
playing cards, playing dominoes, playing chess, talking, some reading,
some watching television at a distant corner. This is population, at
least the block-in phase, or block-out phase, where you’re out of your
cell.
AMY GOODMAN:
So, you are back in the news because of a bill that was just signed by
Pennsylvania Governor Corbett that would limit your ability to speak,
after you just gave a commencement address, a taped commencement
address, to Goddard. Can you respond to the signing of this bill?
MUMIA ABU-JAMAL:
I think it’s really quite extraordinary that unconstitutional Tom
Corbett, a former attorney general of the state of Pennsylvania, as
governor, would sign into law a law that he knows is unconstitutional.
OPERATOR: This call is from the State Correctional Institution at Mahanoy and is subject to monitoring and recording.
MUMIA ABU-JAMAL:
Moreover, as a governor and as an attorney, right, and a member of the
bar, he had to take a sworn oath for both offices, and that oath was to
protect and defend the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania
and the Constitution of the United States of America. By signing that
bill into law, he has violated both of his oaths as governor and as an
attorney. As I said, he knows what the law is. He knows about
Snyder v. Phelps.
I’m sure you covered the case of the church that went around to
funerals and, let’s say, harassed people’s families. They were burying
their veterans, and they would have signs, within earsight and eyesight
of the families burying their dead. Well, it went to the Supreme Court,
because there was a similar law passed against them. And every court
they went into found it a violation of the First Amendment, including
the United States Supreme Court, which ruled eight to one that the First
Amendment free speech protection shielded these church members from
tort liability for intentional infliction of emotional distress. This is
something that I know unconstitutional Tom knows about. So, it gives
you a sense when these officials, these legislators, these governors,
these elected officials, swear on a Bible to uphold their oath and
office, and violate it with such—such freedom.
AMY GOODMAN: This is what Governor Corbett said in expressing his support for the new law.
GOV. TOM CORBETT:
While law-abiding citizens are entitled to an array of rights, from
free travel to free speech, convicted felons in prison are in prison
because they abused and surrendered their rights. And nobody has a right
to continually taunt the victims of their violent crimes in the public
square.
AMY GOODMAN: Your response, Mumia Abu-Jamal?
MUMIA ABU-JAMAL:
My response is, he knows that’s ridiculous, both in law and in fact.
I’ve never taunted anybody. As you know, as a journalist, I’ve rarely
talked about the events of December 9, 1981. I’ve talked about all kinds
of other issues. I didn’t talk about that when I was at Goddard. Most
of the people who voted for this bill, whether they were legislators or
senators or the governor themselves, they never heard that speech. I
invite them to hear it and then say that that madness that Tom said—I
called him unconstitutional. Here’s proof of that. Again, the United
States Supreme Court, in
Simon & Schuster v. New York Crime Victims Board,
held the acts of that state agency, and the legislation that enabled
them, unconstitutional. And this was, I believe, the full court, ’91.
This was in 1991. In my own civil history, you remember me calling you
and them coming up and pulling a wire out of the wall.
AMY GOODMAN: Who pulled that wire out of the wall?
MUMIA ABU-JAMAL: It was a guard. I was talking to you. I believe it was '96, or around that time. We were having a
discussion.
It was live. And all of a sudden, the phone went dead. And I saw, out
of the corner of my eye, a correctional officer walk down to where my
line was plugged into the wall, and he pulled it out. I couldn't believe
what I was looking at. You know, I was like, "Hello, Amy? Hello?"
because it just didn’t make sense, to me, that he did that. He did that.
But, of course, that was shortly after the publication of
Live from Death Row, and the Department of Corrections sanctioned me, gave me a write-up, and we went to court about it. The case is preserved as
Abu-Jamal v. Price.
In that ruling, the Third Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals
said I have a constitutional right to write. If I have a constitutional
right to write under the First Amendment, then don’t I have a
constitutional right to read writings?
AMY GOODMAN:
Mumia Abu-Jamal, Maureen Faulkner is quoted in the paper, after
Governor Corbett signed the bill, what’s being called the Mumia bill,
saying, "To be in your car, driving along in California, only to hear
him doing a commencement speech on the radio, it rips open a scab."
MUMIA ABU-JAMAL:
Well, I feel sorry for her, because, you know, when most people hear
things that disturbs them, they change the channel, you know, and she
could change the channel. They wrote a bill, right, for one man, and
they admit that, I’m told, in their discussions in committee. They wrote
a bill based on a false reporting of what was discussed at a school
that I am a alumni of. I attended and graduated from that college. I was
invited by the staff and the students and the administrators to talk to
my college about what it meant to get an education from Goddard. I did
that. And if the Constitution doesn’t protect that, then it protects
nothing. If the Constitution can be used against one, it can be used
against all. I didn’t take an oath or an affirmation to support, protect
and defend the Constitution of Pennsylvania or the United States. I
don’t have to. But of the many people who did, they know they are
violating it by signing this law.
AMY GOODMAN:
Mumia, Debo Adegbile was nominated to be the head of the Civil Rights
Division in the Justice Department, but because of the case he was
involved with at the
NAACP Legal Defense Fund, a case that the
NAACP Legal Defense Fund brought and won, he was barred, senators citing your name. Explain what happened and your response to it.
MUMIA ABU-JAMAL: Well, I can’t really explain what happened, because—
OPERATOR: This call is from the State Correctional Institution at Mahanoy and is subject to monitoring and recording
MUMIA ABU-JAMAL:
—the truth of the matter is, I never met the man. I never discussed
anything with the man, because I never met the man. He was actually
acting head of the
NAACP LDF
after John Payton had died. And he was placed there so—because he was
acting head, he was on my brief. Right? But, you know, he never argued a
case. We never—I don’t know the man. I saw him in the newspapers. And
to be perfectly honest, I didn’t recognize his name, because, you know, I
knew lawyers that I knew. I didn’t know him. And I had never heard the
name until it got into the papers. This is a man who had his life
shredded because of the money and power of the
FOP
to buy and intimidate those people to do their bidding—and to violate,
again, their oaths. You can say he didn’t have a constitutional right to
become the head of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of
Justice, but he was the choice of the president, and I presume he had
good reasons to choose him. But to use my case to deny him that
opportunity is a tragedy to this man and to his family. And it’s based
on lies. Again, I never met the man. I don’t know who he is, other than
seeing him on TV or in a newspaper. And, you know, from what I’ve been
told and what I’ve heard, this was a fine and distinguished lawyer who
came from an impoverished background, fought hard to get into college,
fought very hard to get into law school, and devoted his expertise as a
lawyer to help people vote and to work for people’s civil rights all
across the country. You know, [inaudible]—
AMY GOODMAN:
Mumia Abu-Jamal, I know we only have a few minutes left before your
phone will cut off, with the 15-minute limit, but I wanted to ask you
about what it’s been like to move from death row to the general
population.
MUMIA ABU-JAMAL:
Well, there’s not a day go by that I don’t think about the brothers and
sisters—because there are women in Pennsylvania on death row—the
brothers and sisters who are still on death row. And this is so
profoundly different from their 24-hour experience that it’s hard to
connect the two.
Let me leave you with this. There’s a case out of the Eastern District of Virginia called
Prieto v.—and I can’t remember the name of the warden, but it’s P-R-I-E-T-O [
Prieto v. Clarke]. In the
Prieto case, the court in Virginia ruled that the conditions of death row were unconstitutional. Right? They ruled that locking—
OPERATOR: You have 60 seconds remaining.
MUMIA ABU-JAMAL:
Locking people up that long, holding them in confinement, just because
they have a death sentence, is a violation of the Constitution. I wish
that Pennsylvania would live up to the Constitution, not just in my
case, but in
Prieto and all the men and women who are on death row in Pennsylvania who should be in general population like everybody else.
AMY GOODMAN: You write many commentaries, among them, about war. What is it like to watch war from your jail cell?
OPERATOR: You have 30 seconds remaining.
MUMIA ABU-JAMAL:
It’s not that much different than it is—it’s horrifying and terrifying,
and it speaks to me of the kind of impending destruction of the empire.
You can’t bomb people to peace; you can only bomb them to death and to
war. And, you know, it’s painful. It’s terrifying. It’s all of those
things. And it could be better.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Mumia Abu-Jamal. He was speaking to us on the phone from
SCI Mahanoy in Frackville, Pennsylvania, where he is imprisoned for the rest of his life. This is
Democracy Now!, democracynow.org,
The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
Le
secrétaire général du Hezbollah sayyed Hassan Nasrallah a rencontré le
chef d’état-major de l’armée libanaise le général Jean Kahwaji, a révélé
le journal libanais al-Akhbar.
Selon
al-hadath News, la résistance est parvenue ces derniers jours à
éliminer un groupuscule de miliciens de la branche armée d’Al-Qaïda en
Syrie, le front al-Nosra, alors qu’ils se préparaient à se rendre à la
colline Tal-Moussa , la position stratégique qu’il occupe à une altitude
2.800 m dans les jurds Ra’a al-Maara qui surplombe l’ouest du jurd de
Aarsale. 
A
peine le groupuscule armé était arrivé non loin de sa destination, les
combattants de la résistance ont ouvert le feu, tuant et blessant tous
ses éléments.
le
village Assoune l’appartement habité par des Syriens et dans lequel
s’était caché le soldat déserteur Abdel Kader Al-Akoumi qui a annoncé il
y a une dizaine de jours avoir rallié la milice takfiriste Daesh (Etat
Islamique-EI). 
èrement. 
Ayant
participé en 1999 aux combats contre l’armee de sir-Donniyyé , il a
fait partie des auteurs de l’attaque contre les restaurant Mc Donalds
dans la ville de Tripoli et preparait des attentats contre des intérêts
étrangers et des sites diplomatiques. 
C’est
lui qui a envoyé son fils Omar pour rejoindre les rangs de Daesh en
Syrie, sachant que le fils de son frère, Bilal Mikati (photo) est celui
qui a égorgé le soldat libanais enlevé à Aarsale, Ali Sayyed, le mois
d’aout dernier.
Articles
