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Anne Feeney, Pittsburgh-based activist, hellraiser & unionmaid, calls in an update from the ground at the Copenhagen Climate Summit.

• Click HERE to see Anne perform live @ the Copenhagen Climate Summit (short non-English intro).
• Go here to learn more about Anne’s work & her monthly Fellow Travellers’ Advisory.
• To find out when you can see Anne’s perform live go here

The Vietnam war and the Civil Rights Movement shaped my conscience and consciousness. I worked for a dozen years or so as a trial attorney, and served as President of the Pittsburgh Musicians’ Union. These days I am living my dream. I’m on the road 200+ days a year… all over the US and Canada, and more recently, Sweden and Denmark.
It’s my privilege to spend most of my waking hours with people who are trying to make a difference in this world… people on strike, or in a union or community organizing drive, or defending women’s rights, the environment, human rights … working to end poverty and racism … teaching peace.

At 4:30 PM MST Scott Horton returns!
What’s going on with Blackwater’s (Xe) Erik Prince?

Is Erik Prince ‘Graymailing‘ the US Government?

Jeremy Scahill, The Nation, 4.Dec.09
…“The only reason Prince would do this [interview] is that he feels he is in very serious jeopardy of criminal charges,” says Scott Horton, a prominent national security and military law expert. “He absolutely would not do these things otherwise.”
… “This is as old as the hills as a tactic and it has a long track record of being very effective against the government,” says Horton. “It’s basically a threat to the government that if you prosecute me, I’ll disclose all sorts of national security-sensitive information. The bottom line here is it’s like an act of extortion or a threat: you do X and this is what I’m going to do.”
Horton said that the Vanity Fair article was Prince “essentially putting out the warning to the Department of Justice: ‘You prosecute me and all this stuff will be out on the record.’” …

Scott is a Contributing Editor of Harper’s Magazine and writes No Comment for this website. A New York attorney known for his work in emerging markets and international law, especially human rights law and the law of armed conflict, Horton lectures at Columbia Law School. A life-long human rights advocate, Horton served as counsel to Andrei Sakharov and Elena Bonner, among other activists in the former Soviet Union. He is a co-founder of the American University in Central Asia, and has been involved in some of the most significant foreign investment projects in the Central Eurasian region. Horton recently led a number of studies of abuse issues associated with the conduct of the war on terror for the New York City Bar Association.
He is also a member of the board of the National Institute of Military Justice, the EurasiaGroup and the American Branch of the International Law Association and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He was a partner at Patterson, Belknap, Webb & Tyler until January 2007, when he left to write a book on private military contractors and to manage a project on that subject for Human Rights First. Since April 2007, he has also been a legal affairs and national security contributor to Harper’s magazine and the author of a regular opinion column for The American Lawyer.

The State Secrets Charade Enters a New Round
The Holder Justice Department continued its quest to keep the Bush Administration’s program of extraordinary renditions out of the public eye with oral argument before the en banc Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday. So far the district court bowed to the government’s request to toss the suit out of secrecy concerns, while an appeals court panel saw through the government’s threadbare arguments and reversed, ordering the case to go to trial. The government responded by asking for the entire court of appeals to look at the question.
The “state secrets” doctrine is legitimately invoked to protect military and diplomatic secrets essential to the nation’s security.
…
“Disappearings” have been viewed as a jus cogens crime at least since 1946, when the United States first adopted that view, bringing criminal charges against government officials who developed and implemented a program almost identical to the CIA’s extraordinary renditions program. Some of the authors of that system received the death sentence. Others got sentences in the range of 7 to 10 years imprisonment. That is to say, the crime is an extremely serious one. It is exempted from the application of statutes of limitation, and it is also a crime of universal jurisdiction, meaning that any nation may exercise criminal jurisdiction to prosecute the offenders.
So, yes, what Mr. Letter is attempting to do is radical. He is using the resources of the Justice Department to conceal a crime. That act may well be viewed by prosecutors in the future as an extension of the underlying crime itself …

At 5 PM MST – Ashley Merryman co-author of NURTURESHOCK: New Thinking about Children
Ashley Merryman is a writer and attorney living in Los Angeles. She previously served in the Clinton Administration in various positions, including as a speechwriter / researcher to then Vice-President Al Gore. Her play, Metanoia, has had staged readings in Los Angeles and Chicago, while her editorials appear in the National Catholic Reporter and other publications. She has a JD from Georgetown, a BFA from the University of Southern California, and a Certificate in Irish Studies, from Queen’s University, Belfast, Northern Ireland.
Check out their Blog

At 6 PM MST Rosina Kazi vocalist from the band LAL. They join us to discuss their brand new release

LAL is a musical ensemble that started in 1998. LAL is about music and social change.
We are a collective that represent Uganda, Bangladesh, Barbados, India and everything in-between.
We sound like everything, thus we sound like nothing.
We love all kinds of music from jazz, hip hop, dub, soul, international folk music, experimental music, you name it, we’ve probably listened to it at some point and if not then we’re eager to learn. At best we describe the sound of lal as international folk / electronic protest music.
We are not about egos or class but we are about vibe. We are instinctive musicians and people and community means a whole lot.
Some of us are activists, some of us are not, but we respect each other’s opinions and we love like Family. We believe in creating a strong independent music movement and we will continue to make music as long as we can..

Toronto’s politically charged, electronically driven LAL are touring the country [last] summer [2009]. LAL will be promoting their third studio album Deportation which was inspired by the events surrounding 9/11 and its fallout — the rise of a cloaked surveillance state, thicker lines drawn around who is “legal” and who is “not” and most particularly by the fate of several deported friends.
Deportation stands to be their most provocative and fully-realized album to date.
“We wanted people to sit up and think about this word [Deportation] and what it meant, to read it aloud. So much music doesn’t provoke you to think, so it was important that we named this CD something that get people thinking,” explains lead vocalist Rozina Kazi. Deportation also hosts some of Toronto’s finest including Zaki Ibrahim, Ian Kamau, Montreal’s Moonstarr and more. Post-tour, LAL will present their new media project ‘zero cluster’ with Faisal Anwar and Jose Garcia at the Art Gallery of Ontario (August 2009/January 2010) before heading to India in September to work on their 4th record due out September 2010.

We spoke earlier with Dahr Jamail about his recent article on Truthout.Dahr Jamail, an independent journalist, is the author of The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan (Haymarket Books, 2009), and Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq, (Haymarket Books, 2007). Jamail reported from occupied Iraq for nine months as well as from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Turkey over the last five years.

Veterans’ Group Calls On Soldiers to Refuse Orders to Deploy to Afghanistan and Iraq

Mon.14.Dec.09, Dahr Jamail, t r u t h o u t | Report

…After he separated from the Army in 2005, Prysner “understood that the occupation I was a part of was a crime against humanity. I understood that illegal conquering of Iraq was for profit, carried out by a system that serves a tiny class of super-rich whose endless drive for wealth is at the expense of working people in the United States and abroad.” …
Cohn and Gilberd argue that every US war since WWII has been illegal. Article 51 of the UN Charter only permits the “right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member … until the Security Council has taken measures to maintain international peace and security.”
…
Nevertheless, Raughter believes soldiers who are dissenting against the occupations should have never joined the ranks. “If they are ethically opposed to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I would say that most of these people have enlisted or reenlisted since the beginning of the war. These wars were occurring when they made this oath of enlistment. It should have come to their minds.”