The leadership of the Catholic Church has launched what amounts to a holy war against President Barack Obama. Archbishop Timothy Dolan appealed to church members, “Let your elected leaders know that you want religious liberty and rights of conscience restored and that you want the administration’s contraceptive mandate rescinded,” he said. Obama is now under pressure to reverse a healthcare regulation that requires Catholic hospitals and universities, like all employers, to provide contraception to insured women covered by their health plans.

Bill Donohue of the Catholic League said, “This is going to be fought out with lawsuits, with court decisions, and, dare I say it, maybe even in the streets.” In the wake of the successful pushback against the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure’s decision to defund Planned Parenthood, the Obama administration should listen to the majority of Americans: The United States, including Catholics, is strongly pro-choice.

Rick Santorum most likely benefited from the 24-hour news cycle this week with his three-state win. Exactly one week before the caucus/primary voting, on Jan. 31, The Associated Press broke the story that Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure, a $2 billion-per-year breast-cancer fundraising and advocacy organization, had enacted policies that would effectively lead it to deny funding to Planned Parenthood clinics to conduct breast-cancer screenings and mammograms, especially for women with no health insurance. Linked to the decision was a recently hired Komen vice president, Karen Handel, who, as a candidate for governor of Georgia in 2010, ran on a platform to defund Planned Parenthood. The backlash was immediate, broad-based and unrelenting. By Feb. 3, Komen reversed its decision. On Feb. 7, Handel resigned from Komen.

Adding fuel to the ire was news that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services had issued the regulation requiring employer insurance plans to provide contraception. The coup de grace, on primary/caucus day, was the decision handed down by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturning California’s controversial Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriages.

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Click here for Part 1 of this interview.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re speaking with Michael Ratner and Michael Steven Smith. They are the co-authors of Who Killed Che? How the CIA Got Away with Murder.

Michael Ratner, we continue this conversation where you were talking about how we now know that the CIA was involved with Che Guevara’s murder in Bolivia. Explain exactly how it happened. Explain those last days of Che Guevara.

MICHAEL RATNER: Well, Che is captured on October 8th in a valley near a town called La Higuera. He is wounded, wounded—shot, actually. His gun is hot out of his hand. He is taken—he is taken to La Higuera, he’s put into a room, and he’s interrogated at various times or talked to by various agents, including, supposedly, the U.S. CIA guy on the ground, Félix Rodríguez. At some point in the next day—there’s different stories, of course.

AMY GOODMAN: And Félix Rodríguez is someone we come to know later in the Iran-Contra scandal.

MICHAEL RATNER: Iran-Contra scandal and against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. He was a—he was a CIA operative.

MICHAEL STEVEN SMITH: Not just "was," is. He’s living in retirement on our tax dollars in Miami.

MICHAEL RATNER: Right. It’s true. So he’s in this room in La Higuera on October 9th. And there’s different stories, of course. And the stories that came out, until we came out with this book, was that—was the one that was mostly believed was Félix Rodríguez said, "I had orders not to have Che killed. I got a call from the Bolivian high command to kill him. And they gave me a code, and I couldn’t countermand the code. And the killing went ahead, and there was nothing I could do about it." I mean, if you believe that story, if anybody believed that story—but they did, for 20-some years—you’ll buy their—or 30-some years—they’ll buy the Brooklyn Bridge from you. I mean, it’s crazy.

But what came out in the documents was that Félix Rodríguez very—I mean, it seems like he was not telling the truth about that, that he is not the one who got the order to kill Che, that he actually was most likely just a plausible deniability point, that he’s trying to say we tried to save him but we couldn’t, because the U.S. at that point—and I think that’s an important point—the U.S. at that point would have still been embarrassed by murdering a prisoner who they had in their custody or murdering—assassinating anybody, that was public. They were assassinating a lot of people at that point, I mean, from Lumumba to everybody else.

AMY GOODMAN: But explain where Che was in Bolivia, how he ended up in captivity.

MICHAEL RATNER: How he ended up—well, he was—he had gone to Bolivia to begin the revolution in Bolivia with other people in Bolivia and with other Cubans. He had fought almost—I mean, almost for a year, I think. He had lost a lot of men. It didn’t work out the way he expected. As Che said, you never know when you begin these; you either try and make a revolution, or you die, and so there’s no going back. He eventually, because the U.S.—that’s an important part. The U.S.—the Bolivians saw Che as an early threat. Once it was discovered that he was there, they went to the U.S., and they begged for support. The U.S. was obviously willing to give it. They entered a joint defense agreement with the—

AMY GOODMAN: I remember the part—I mean, very interesting, in reading your book—about Philip Agee, who became a dissident CIA agent. But he was in Uruguay, right? And he was charged with getting Che in Bolivia, preventing him from coming in. And yet, Che Guevara defied them and actually came in disguised as a businessman at the airport.

MICHAEL RATNER: There’s a great picture of Che coming into Bolivia. And Phil said—in his writings, Phil Agee said, "Well, I distributed leaflets of what Che looked like all over Uruguay, all over—you know, all over Bolivia.

AMY GOODMAN: Bolivia and the airport.

MICHAEL RATNER: And the airport, everywhere. And Che just walked through, on a—obviously not using his name. And—

AMY GOODMAN: With thick glasses.

MICHAEL RATNER: With thick glasses. You know, it looks like, I guess, an Argentinian businessman. And apparently, when he came to his house to say goodbye to his wife and his children, the children did not recognize him. So that’s how he got in.

This was not a—you know, people talk about: was there a split between Fidel and Che, and is that why he went to Bolivia? But this was a planned operation for many years. The Cubans had—there had been people planted in La Paz, who had been training there and setting up the underground network for five years. Fidel followed Che’s goings-on in Bolivia every single day on the radio. When they didn’t—on their two-way radio they used to talk to Cuba. I actually had once heard about a guy who left—I met a guy who had fought with Che. He left Bolivia to get Che a new radio after the radio went down. He never came back, because Che had been killed. But the idea that there was a split is ridiculous.

I mean, in fact, vis-à-vis, I think, Mike, it was Kosygin, right? That the Russians wanted the Cubans to stop trying to foment revolutions in Latin America. And they visited Fidel, and they said, "Stop. This is not acceptable." You know, the Russians, at that point, were much more interested in the Communist parties and cooperating with them in some way that was considered a non-revolutionary way. And Fidel stood up and said, "No, we support Che and what he does." So it was clear that there was no split.

In any case, maybe Mike wants to take over where we left Che, somewhere in Bolivia.

MICHAEL STEVEN SMITH: Well, the book documents how everything went awry. When he landed in Bolivia, they set up a training camp. The training camp was immediately discovered. In fact, his medicine was captured. Of the initial group they had there, they split up to do some training. They never got back together. A peasant turned half the group in, and they were all ambushed in a river. That’s where Tania was killed.

AMY GOODMAN: And who was Tania?

MICHAEL STEVEN SMITH: Tania was an East German revolutionary. Parents were Communists. Che met her in East Berlin when he was there traveling on behalf of the government. And she agreed to go to Bolivia and begin setting up the underground network. And against Che’s wishes, she came to his camp in a jeep. And the Bolivian army found the jeep, found the documents in the jeep, and they began to figure out what was going on. And that’s when they got the United States Army and the CIA involved. The U.S.—and we published the memorandum of understanding where the U.S. said, "We’ll send you Green Berets with Vietnam experience to train the Bolivian Rangers, because we don’t want to be looking like we’re doing this."

AMY GOODMAN: So this is Johnson. As they’re escalating Vietnam, they’re talking about Bolivia, as well?

MICHAEL STEVEN SMITH: Absolutely. Not just Bolivia, but Bolivia was very vulnerable. The president of Bolivian, democratic president, was—like Michael had mentioned earlier, Bolivia, Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, Argentina—any government that supported Cuba, all these democratic governments in Latin America, were overthrown. The only one that was able to withstand the pressure was Mexico. And Che thought, if we’re going to survive in Cuba against this tremendous pressure we’re under, the revolution has to extend. And they had thought that Bolivia, of all the countries, was the most promising venue. And that’s why Che went there. But like I said, nothing went right. And this book really catalogs, in a tragic way, how Che was ultimately surrounded, disarmed, captured and executed.

AMY GOODMAN: I’m just looking at your book, Who Killed Che? How the CIA Got Away with Murder. As you say, "As Rostow points out," the point man in the White House for the killing of Che, "Che’s death can now be added to the list of deaths of other [quote] 'romantic revolutionaries,' and [that] it will discourage other guerrillas. In other words," you write, "while there would have been some benefits to U.S. counterinsurgency policy just from Che’s capture, these were much stronger as a result of his death. There is simply no way that the United States government, including Rostow, wanted Che kept alive. It was against what they perceived as their best interests. They thought his death was a major blow to revolutionary movements and wanted the press to know it."

MICHAEL STEVEN SMITH: Well, the way they organized the press conference, Gustavo Villoldo—whose oil painting is here, but there’s a black-and-white photograph of Villoldo standing behind Che’s corpse. After Che was executed—

AMY GOODMAN: You’re pointing to the picture on the cover—

MICHAEL STEVEN SMITH: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: —of Who Killed Che?

MICHAEL RATNER: And Villoldo was the—

MICHAEL STEVEN SMITH: Villoldo was the son of a very rich Cuban. They guy owned a GM processing plant and a farm of 100,000 acres. He lost everything in the revolution.

MICHAEL RATNER: But he was CIA, is the point.

MICHAEL STEVEN SMITH: And Villoldo went to work for the CIA. And Villoldo directed the CIA operation there, with his underling being Félix Rodríguez.

AMY GOODMAN: In Bolivia.

MICHAEL STEVEN SMITH: In Bolivia. When Che was executed, they took his body, and they strapped it onto a strut of a helicopter, and they flew it to the bigger town of Vallegrande. And they put his body in the basement of a hospital on a cement slab. And they organized the press—and this is what this photo is—to come take photographs of dead Che. That was a big mistake. But Villoldo stood behind Che kind of triumphantly. Then, after the photographs were taken and the press release was made, they cut Che’s hands off, and they sent his hands to Langley, Virginia, to the CIA headquarters. We’ve got the documents in here about—get his fingerprints, when the hands were received, how they positively identified Che. And what happened, though, was that this operation of publicizing Che’s death utterly backfired. To this day, he remains a hero of people who are for radical social change.

MICHAEL RATNER: But when you go to Bolivia today, if you go up to El Alto, which is the main place where the indigenous people live, above La Paz, a million people—

AMY GOODMAN: Near the airport is.

MICHAEL RATNER: It’s near—it’s right where the airport. And I was there maybe a year ago. And you go up to El Alto, very tip—there’s one road—and there’s this nine-foot statue of Che, nine feet, because when you look at—and when Evo Morales gave his talk when he became president of Bolivia, he cited Che as a key influence of the Bolivarian revolution.

AMY GOODMAN: Where was Che Guevara buried?

MICHAEL RATNER: He was buried—well, this is an interesting question. I’ve actually been to where he is now. But they took his body, and they buried it somewhere that they wouldn’t tell anybody. They wouldn’t say where it was. And ultimately, it was paved over by a runway. And—

AMY GOODMAN: The airport.

MICHAEL RATNER: The air—not the airport in La Paz, but some runway, you know, in the heart of Bolivia.

AMY GOODMAN: Near where he was killed.

MICHAEL RATNER: Where he—right, oh, yeah, very close to where he was killed. And many years later, they found out—I guess they got some people—I don’t know. Maybe Michael recalls. But they got someone to tell them roughly where he was killed. And when the Bolivian government started getting a little more amenable to dealing with Cuba, they went back and they dug up Che’s bones. And they’re now buried under—there’s a huge statue in a town in Cuba called Santa Clara. Santa Clara, of course, is the place where really the Cuban Revolution was won, when Che and his forces, with Camilo Cienfuegos, cut the island in half, destroyed Batista’s troop train, and that was it. And actually, I was there, and you go into the monument underneath. It’s like a mausoleum with about—the remains of many of the people who fought with Che in Bolivia are in—are underneath that statue. It’s quite moving to go into Santa Clara to see that.

AMY GOODMAN: What surprised you most in doing research for this book, Michael Smith?

MICHAEL STEVEN SMITH: How utterly conscious counter-revolutionary this government is, how extremely well organized they are. They know exactly what their interests are. And they talk to each other, you know, very clearly about what they need to do. The documents are chilling, if you read them. Half the book are the documents. And I just want—

AMY GOODMAN: Do you have a favorite document?

MICHAEL STEVEN SMITH: Well, I have a—I have a favorite—

AMY GOODMAN: Part of the book.

MICHAEL STEVEN SMITH: I have a—yeah, my favorite part of the book is actually the last piece of it, which is a poem by Victor Hugo about another revolutionary doctor called Jean-Paul Marat. And if you wouldn’t mind—it’s very short—could I read it?

AMY GOODMAN: Oh, yes, definitely.

MICHAEL STEVEN SMITH: Jean-Paul Marat was a leader of and spokesman for the Parisian poor during the French Revolution. And like Che, he was a doctor.

"They said Marat is dead. No. Marat is not dead. Put him in the Pantheon or throw him in the sewer; it doesn’t matter—he’s back the next day. He’s reborn in the man who has no job, in the woman who has no bread, in the girl who has to sell her body, in the child who hasn’t learned to read; he’s reborn in the unheated tenement, in the wretched mattress without blankets, in the unemployed, in the proletariat, in the brothel, in the jailhouse, in your laws that show no pity, in your schools that give no future, and he appears in all that is ignorance and he recreates himself from all that is darkness. Oh, beware, human society: you cannot kill Marat until you have killed the misery of poverty."

MICHAEL RATNER: You know, Amy, you asked about what was most surprising to me. And of course, I think, since I’ve been young, is never trusting my own government. I mean, I think what this shows me, every—almost every writer writing about Che accepted the Rodríguez story, that the U.S. wanted him kept alive, or at least said, "We’re not sure," or whatever. And, of course, they should have never accepted that, just like as your show today said, they shouldn’t accept the U.S. excuses for Syria or anywhere else. What it really gives you—what this book really gives you is that you have to be utterly skeptical of everything this government says around what it’s doing in the world and its reasons for it, whether it’s Syria, whether it’s Libya, or whether it was Allende in 1973, whether it’s the embargo that you played the clip from—Obama today saying here’s why we still need the embargo. I mean, and what we don’t have here, but we have here with you, is a media that unfortunately hasn’t learned that lesson yet. They just roll out—I mean, you talk to people on the street, they’ll think, "Syria, we got to go in."

AMY GOODMAN: I’m looking at your book, as you talk about Che being "wounded, captured [and,] soon after, executed. Bound and helpless, Che’s last words to his killer, a soldier in the Bolivian Army, are 'Remember, you are killing a man.'"

MICHAEL RATNER: I think what I—it’s hard to—you know, I wasn’t there, obviously. I don’t know what he exactly meant. But I think he said, "I am a human being like every other human being. And you are—and that’s what you are doing: you are killing a man." I think—that’s what I would say. "I’m human."

MICHAEL STEVEN SMITH: The Bolivian army sergeant who drew straws and got the tallest one and had the privilege of killing Che, of course, he couldn’t do it the first time. He went in, and he backed down. He was just too nervous. And—

AMY GOODMAN: He was—Che was laid out?

MICHAEL STEVEN SMITH: Che was—Che was sitting down. And the sergeant comes in, and Che stands up. And the guy says, "Sit down." And Che said, "I will remain standing for this," because he knew what was happening. And the sergeant lost his will and couldn’t do it and went back out and had some alcohol and came back in again. And Che, wanting to get it over with, said—to calm this guy, he said, "Remember: you’re killing a man." And the guy was so nervous—he was instructed not to shoot Che in the face, but he was so nervous, he shot him, and he kind of sprayed the bullets, and the bullets shot Che in the lungs. His lungs filled up with blood, and he died.

There’s an interesting story about this sergeant. He later developed cataracts and was blind and living in La Paz. And the Cubans had sent doctors to Bolivia. And they sent a team of eye surgeons. And they actually found this guy who was blind, and they performed surgery on him, and now he can see again.

AMY GOODMAN: He’s alive today?

MICHAEL STEVEN SMITH: Oh, yeah. And so—

MICHAEL RATNER: And Teran is his name. He’s alive. He went to the Cuban eye clinic in El Alto above La Paz, and they treated him, and they fixed his eyes. Amazing, right? I mean—

AMY GOODMAN: And his thoughts today?

MICHAEL RATNER: Well, I don’t know what Teran said about it. What did he say?

MICHAEL STEVEN SMITH: Well, I think he drinks too much. I think he really regrets what happened.

MICHAEL RATNER: Yeah.

MICHAEL STEVEN SMITH: And he’s really living in ignominy.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask, Michael Ratner and Michael Smith, the reaction of Fidel Castro to the assassination of Che Guevara? Michael Smith?

MICHAEL STEVEN SMITH: Well, it was devastating. They were very close, starting from Mexico. When Castro got out of prison, there was an amnesty, and Batista made the mistake of not killing Castro. And he was in prison, and they let him out, and he went to Mexico to regather his forces. And the third person to sign up for the team that became the movement that overthrew the Batista dictatorship was Che. Che had known somebody in Guatemala who had been with Castro at Moncada. And Nico López said, "I want you to meet Fidel Castro." So, he arranged a dinner, and Che came over for dinner with Fidel. And there was an instant sympathy between them. Che writes about this, and we write about it in the book. And they stayed up all night talking. And Che said, "I was ready to take on any dictator." And he signed on as the third man to go. He was supposed to be the group doctor, of course.

And there’s an apocryphal story about how, when the Granma, the little boat—and it’s really little; it would fit in this studio—the little boat crossed over to Cuba, and they landed. And they got to where they were supposed to be landing, and they got there a day late, and they landed in the wrong place. They landed in a mangrove swamp, which was almost impenetrable. And they got in there. And Batista had been forewarned, so they were ambushed. Of the 82 people on the Granma, all but 20 were killed or captured. And the 20 scrambled through the mangrove swamp into the hills, and that became the Cuban Revolution. Che, when he was under machine gunfire in that mangrove swamp, had a choice of either grabbing his machine gun bullets or grabbing his medical bag. And the story is that he grabbed the bullets.

They went up into the hills. Che proved to be such a competent soldier that Fidel appointed him as head of the Fourth Battalion. The truth is, there were not four; there were only two battalions, but they called it the fourth. And it was Che and Camilo Cienfuegos, as Michael said, fought the battle at Santa Clara, which caused Batista to get on the airplane and fly to Miami. So he was a hero of the revolutionary wars.

One of the first laws that was passed after the guerrillas in the Revolution came to power—the first law was to make Fidel—lower the age so he could prime minister, because he was only 33. And Che was even younger. And then the second law was to make Che a citizen. And then—

AMY GOODMAN: Because he was Argentine.

MICHAEL STEVEN SMITH: And then there was, of course, the great agrarian reform laws started happening, and that’s what stepped on America’s toes, because they nationalized the property of United Fruit. Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA, was a big stockholder in United Fruit, as was John Foster Dulles—

AMY GOODMAN: His brother.

MICHAEL STEVEN SMITH: —who was the Secretary of State, his brother. And—

AMY GOODMAN: And he had, in a—as a corporate lawyer, had represented United Fruit.

MICHAEL STEVEN SMITH: Exactly.

MICHAEL RATNER: And think about that. Five years before, Che had gone to Guatemala on his way up from Argentina, had fought against the overthrow of the Árbenz government, which was of course overthrown, in large part because of United Fruit owning large plantations, and the excess land had been taken by a democratically elected government, Árbenz. So you see the link. '54, he goes to Guatemala. Then, when he gets to Mexico and meets Fidel, another amazing link is, in ’56, he joins with Fidel, they're going to go to Cuba, and they get trained in military tactics. And who trains them? I don’t recall his name, but he’s a general, an older general, and he was a general in the Spanish Civil War.

MICHAEL STEVEN SMITH: Alberto Bayo. Alberto Bayo.

MICHAEL RATNER: Alberto Bayo, on the side of the republicans. And it goes even back deeper in history than that.

AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, right before 1954, the overthrow of Guatemala, of Árbenz, the Dulles brothers key in this, was 1953, when the Dulles brothers and the U.S. government sent the grandson of Teddy Roosevelt to Iran—

MICHAEL STEVEN SMITH: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: —to overthrow the democratically elected leader there.

MICHAEL STEVEN SMITH: Yeah, that’s right.

MICHAEL RATNER: Overthrow Mosaddegh.

AMY GOODMAN: Mohammad Mosaddegh.

MICHAEL STEVEN SMITH: That’s right.

MICHAEL RATNER: So when we look at Iran today—

AMY GOODMAN: They overthrew him, and because it was so easy and so successful, in their eyes, they decided that they would then move in on Guatemala. They wanted Kermit Roosevelt to do that revolution. I mean, he just brought in a bag of money, and in the end he did this. And he said, "Uh, uh, I’m not doing this."

MICHAEL RATNER: I’m so glad you recalled that, because when you talk about anything today—Guatemala, Iran—that history is critical. I mean, those governments are what they are, and their view toward the United States is because of what happened in 1953 and 1954. And it’s really important.

AMY GOODMAN: The Middle East and Latin America.

MICHAEL RATNER: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: I know you have to leave, Michael Smith.

MICHAEL STEVEN SMITH: Let me make one more connection before I rush off to a Brooklyn court.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you need me to give you an excuse for the judge? I’ll just write it out right now.

MICHAEL STEVEN SMITH: I don’t think it will float.

AMY GOODMAN: I’ll write it on the back of Who Killed Che? Or should I write it on the back of Hell No: Your Right to Dissent in Twenty-First-Century America?

MICHAEL STEVEN SMITH: Thanks, Amy. Che came from a very unusual aristocratic Argentinian family that had more blue blood than money. His parents eloped when his mother was three-months pregnant. They had been very active in supporting the republican government in Spain. Che grew up in a political household. Absolutely chaos in the house. The children would ride their bikes in the front door and out the back door. People would come over at all hours to drink red wine and smoke and hang out. There were stacks of magazines and books everywhere. There were no regular meal hours. Che had asthma, so he was kind of homeschooled. And even though he had asthma, he was on a soccer team. And he eventually organized a soccer team in his neighborhood. The team was made up entirely of atheists, and they would play against religious teams. And invariably, they would lose, because the religious teams were larger. And he started—

AMY GOODMAN: Some might say they were divine, but—

MICHAEL STEVEN SMITH: He started then keeping a journal, as a young man. And he cataloged everything he read. He wrote a long piece about Marx. He wrote about Lenin, saying that the man lived, breathed and slept Socialist revolution. He wanted to go to medical school. But before that, he traveled around Latin America on a motorcycle. And the diaries that he kept, he kept that—that’s The Motorcycle Diaries, was just an extension of the diaries he always kept. He saw the tin mines in Bolivia. He saw the copper mines in Chile. He wrote in his diaries that the imperialists have taken everything and left the people only an ox. So, when he graduated medical school, he came back to Argentina. He had 10 weeks to study for 10 exams in 10 different courses. And he did it, and he passed all 10, and he became a doctor. And he wanted to do some kind of research that would benefit humanity. So he went to Guatemala to get a job as a doctor. He was there for 11 months. He never got a job as a doctor. He was a photographer in Guatemala. And then, when the Árbenz reform government was overthrown, he hid out in the Argentinian embassy, after trying to fight, but, you know, it was futile. And then he fled to Mexico. And that was the beginning of what we now have as the legend of Che Guevara.

From the "Up w/ Chris Hayes" website":

Feb 5, 2012–First Hour

In today’s first hour we covered the Nevada caucus results where Mitt Romney won easily, the government crackdown on protesters in Syria, the standoff between Israel and Iran, and the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s reversal of their decision to stop providing funding to Planned Parenthood.

Joining Chris were Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman; host of MSNBC’s newest show, "Melissa Harris-Perry," which premieres February 18th at 10 a.m. EST; Melissa Harris-Perry, senior national security reporter for Newsweek / The Daily Beast Eli Lake; former director of policy planning for the U.S. Department of State; Princeton University Professor Anne-Marie Slaughter; and senior contributing writer for Newsweek / The Daily Beast Michelle Goldberg.

Feb 5, 2012–Second Hour

In the second hour of today’s show, we continued our discussion about the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s reversal of their decision to stop providing funding to Planned Parenthood, plus the Obama administration’s mandate that under the Affordable Care Act most health insurance plans, including those used by religious organizations, must cover contraception.

Joining Chris were Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman; host of MSNBC’s newest show, "Melissa Harris-Perry," which premieres February 18th at 10 a.m. EST; Melissa Harris-Perry, former director of policy planning for the U.S. Department of State; Princeton University Professor Anne-Marie Slaughter, senior contributing writer for Newsweek / The Daily Beast Michelle Goldberg; and politics editor for Business Insider Michael Brendan Dougherty.

Although Mitt Romney has yet to win a majority in a Republican primary, he won big in Florida. After he and the pro-Romney super PACs flooded the airwaves with millions of dollars’ worth of ads in a state where nearly half the homeowners are underwater, he talked about whom he wants to represent. “We will hear from the Democrat Party the plight of the poor, and there’s no question, it’s not good being poor,” he told CNN’s Soledad O’Brien. “You could choose where to focus, you could focus on the rich, that’s not my focus. You could focus on the very poor, that’s not my focus. My focus is on middle-income Americans.” Of the very rich, Romney assures us, “They’re doing just fine.” With an estimated personal wealth of $250 million, Romney should know.

Romney’s campaign itself is well-financed, but his success to date, especially against his current main rival, Newt Gingrich, is driven by massive cash infusions to a so-called super PAC, the new breed of political action committee that can take unlimited funds from individuals and corporations. Super PACs are legally prohibited from coordinating their activities with a candidate’s campaign. Federal Election Commission filings made public Jan. 31 reveal that the principal super PAC supporting Romney, Restore Our Future, raised close to $18 million in the second half of 2011, from just 199 donors. Among his supporters are Alice Walton, who, although listed in the report as a “rancher,” is better known as an heir to the Wal-Mart fortune, and the famously caustic venture capitalist and billionaire Samuel Zell, the man credited with driving the Tribune media company into bankruptcy. William Koch, the third of the famous Koch brothers, also gave.

Juxtapose those 199 with the number of people living in poverty in the United States. According to the most recent figures available from the U.S. Census Bureau, 46.2 million people lived in poverty in 2010, 15.1 percent of the population, the largest number in the 52 years the poverty estimates have been published. 2010 marked the fourth consecutive annual increase in the number of people in poverty.

Click to read the rest of this column at Truthdig.org.

Speaking on Democracy Now! last year, Garzón said between 150,000 and 200,000 civilians disappeared during the Franco regime, which seized power during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s.

Garzón has used the doctrine of universal jurisdiction to investigate war crimes and torture across national lines, famously indicting Osama bin Laden and other members of al-Qaeda in 2003 and attempting to indict members of the Bush administration for authorizing torture at Guantánamo Bay and overseas. In 1998, he ordered the arrest of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, leading to Pinochet’s arrest in Britain.

Click here to see the 1995 comment by Gingrich’s mother that Goodman refers to in her questions. During a nationally broadcast interview on Eye to Eye with Connie Chung, Gingrich’s mother whispered that her son called Hillary Clinton a "bitch."

See all of Democracy Now’s coverage of Election 2012.

AMY GOODMAN: Back in 1995, when Newt Gingrich was speaker of the House, I had an interesting conversation with him about the war on women. We’re going to introduce that little interaction with the news piece that introduced it, which was the news anchor at the time, Verna Avery-Brown.

VERNA AVERY-BROWN: The usually unflappable speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, was knocked a bit off stride today during his daily speaker’s conference, when Pacifica reporter Amy Goodman raised the issue of whether Republicans are waging an unofficial war against women with their welfare reform efforts.

AMY GOODMAN: I have a question about tone. You were talking about that earlier. Many people are talking about what’s going on in the House as a war on women, that most of the poor are women, the whole issue about reproductive rights that keeps getting raised. But this is a question not about legislation. Some say you really fired the opening salvo against women when you didn’t apologize to American women for calling the First Lady a bitch. Why haven’t you apologized?

SPEAKER NEWT GINGRICH: I never—I never said I—I never agreed to say anything about that. And I can’t imagine you asking this question.

AMY GOODMAN: Why haven’t you apologized for it?

SPEAKER NEWT GINGRICH: I’ve talked to Mrs. Clinton. She understands exactly where we—

AMY GOODMAN: Why haven’t you apologized to American women, because it goes beyond calling—

SPEAKER NEWT GINGRICH: I never said—I never said—to the best of my knowledge, I never said what you just said.

AMY GOODMAN: So, you’re calling your mother a liar then?

SPEAKER NEWT GINGRICH: No, I’m calling you a remarkably foolish person for having that kind of a conversation here. And I am very sorry you would care to bring what Connie Chung back into the public arena. Connie Chung lied—

AMY GOODMAN: Sir, why—

SPEAKER NEWT GINGRICH: Connie Chung lied to my mother.

AMY GOODMAN: She said—

SPEAKER NEWT GINGRICH: You’re now trying to exploit a lie by a professional reporter to my mother. And I’m not going to take any more comment from you. I think it is very embarrassing that you, as a reporter, would try to take any use of Connie Chung having lied to my mother. And I think you should be ashamed.

AMY GOODMAN: Sir, your mother said it to more reporters than Connie Chung. It’s not about Connie Chung.

SPEAKER NEWT GINGRICH: I think you should be—yes, it is.

AMY GOODMAN: Why haven’t you apologized to American women for calling Hillary Clinton a bitch?

SPEAKER NEWT GINGRICH: Because I—because I didn’t—I’ll say it one more time. You’re trying to use my mother in what I think is a very despicable way. And I am very—

AMY GOODMAN: Your mother said something, and we’re responding to what she said.

SPEAKER NEWT GINGRICH: I think it is very sad, and I have advised my mother to talk to no reporters because of precisely this kind of exploitation by people like you. Next question.

AMY GOODMAN: So you’re denying—

AMY GOODMAN: That was Newt Gingrich in 1995 at speaker’s conference, which had been going on for many years. The speaker would hold a news conference every day. He ended it soon after that. Apparently, he blamed it on that interaction, among a few others. I thought it was more to do with the bombing of the Oklahoma City building. It happened just after that that he canceled the speaker’s conference, because his rhetoric sounded too much like those that surrounded Timothy McVeigh.

But anyway, I had a chance to follow up on the conversation when I met Newt Gingrich at Jimmy Hoffa’s party.

AMY GOODMAN: What are you doing now?

NEWT GINGRICH: I’m spending about half my time learning, and then I’m at the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution studying. And I have a consulting firm called the Gingrich Group, and I have a website called newt.org. And I’m a commentator on Fox. So, I’m not bored.

AMY GOODMAN: So you’re a commentator. Well, let me ask you for this comment. You’re on national television now. Will you apologize to American women for calling the First Lady a bitch?

NEWT GINGRICH: I never did that. That’s just plain false.

AMY GOODMAN: Your mother said you did.

NEWT GINGRICH: I—no, she did not say I did. That’s just false. Go back and read the record. What you just said is false.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we heard her telling Connie Chung.

NEWT GINGRICH: And I’m frankly offended. And I’m frankly offended that you would say that.

AMY GOODMAN: You said—

NEWT GINGRICH: I did not say that. Go back and look at the record.

AMY GOODMAN: But your mother said you said it.

NEWT GINGRICH: No, she didn’t. Go back and look at the record. You have it exactly backwards. And I find it very offensive that you would bring up my mother, as I found it offensive when Connie Chung brought up my mother. And I think it’s nuts for the national news media to pick on people who are clearly amateurs, who, in my mother’s case, had opened her home. My father had baked a cake. They were thrilled to be open. And she was exploited by a reporter. And I think it’s a very offensive that you would try to exploit my mother, which is what you just did.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, it was your mother, who said that you had called—

NEWT GINGRICH: No, she didn’t say that. Listen to what I said.

AMY GOODMAN: She did say it.

NEWT GINGRICH: She did not say that I called her that.

AMY GOODMAN: She did say it. But then my question is, you were talking about the Contract with America.

NEWT GINGRICH: I have nothing to say to you. If you’re telling me what my mother said, that’s pretty offensive.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, she said it on national television.

NEWT GINGRICH: No, she didn’t.

AMY GOODMAN: You were describing—

NEWT GINGRICH: No, no, no.

GINGRICH AIDE: There’s no more. There’s no more. There’s no more.

AMY GOODMAN: As you were—

NEWT GINGRICH: No.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, no, I have a fair question to ask that I’d like you to respond to.

NEWT GINGRICH: No, no, no.

GINGRICH AIDE: There’s plenty of nice people here who are interested in talking. We don’t need—you know, we’re here with friendly people. You’re being rude, just not nice.

AMY GOODMAN: I’m not being rude. I’m asking a very serious question.

GINGRICH AIDE: OK, but we—we’re not—we’re not going—we’re not talking about it anymore.

AMY GOODMAN: And that was the interaction with Newt Gingrich at the Jimmy Hoffa party that was sponsored by the Republicans.

Supporters of Abu-Jamal note prison officials just received more than 5,000 petitions calling for his transfer and release. Superintendent John Kerestes has previously said Abu-Jamal would have to cut short his dreadlocks, and meet several other conditions, before a transfer would be allowed.

While on death row at SCI Green, Abu-Jamal made regular phone calls to Prison Radio in order to record his columns and essays, but prison officials revoked his phone privileges after he was moved to SCI Mahanoy, the Frackville, PA prison in which he’s currently being held. Prison Radio has since announced it will continue to record and distribute Abu-Jamal’s essays as read by his well-known supporters.

Click here to listen to Noam Chomsky read Of Idiots and Sages.

See all of Democracy Now’s coverage of Mumia Abu-Jamal.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re broadcasting from Park City, Utah, at the Sundance Film Festival. And we’re joined now by Cara Mertes, who is the director of the Documentary Film Program and Fund here at the Sundance Institute.

Welcome to Democracy Now! and happy 10th anniversary.

CARA MERTES: Thank you very much.

AMY GOODMAN: So, 10 years of the documentary—

CARA MERTES: Mm-hmm.

AMY GOODMAN: —track here at the Sundance Film Festival.

CARA MERTES: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about what the labs are here.

CARA MERTES: Sure, yeah. Sundance has a very unique lab structure. We’ve been doing that for 30 years, as well. It started with feature film. And it’s a very immersive retreat kind of opportunity. And we now have two doc edit story labs, and we bring a really creative village, actually, up at Sundance resort in the mountains, in the Wasatch Range. It’s incredibly beautiful. And we bring in about 25 or 30 people—advisers, directors and entire teams with films. We recreate their edit rooms. We bring in an assistant editor to support them. And then we spend the entire nine days, the entire group looking at each film and really helping the directors rebuild the film, from scratch, in a way, to revisit their original intentions.

And the whole idea is that we can really bump up the quality of the film by allowing the filmmaker to step back from the day to day and look again at how they’re telling the story. And I think the proof of the quality of the lab—we invite people that we really think can take the heat and really absorb all of this feedback, and pretty consistently we see those films are very successful on the festival and broadcast circuit. So, Queen of Versailles this year, which opened the festival, was a film that we labbed. And Lauren Greenfield will tell you it completely changed how she approached her storytelling.

AMY GOODMAN: Queen of Versailles, this brings up an interesting issue about taking on power, which so often documentaries do. You have another documentary here about the making of a film called Bananas!*, taking on Dole and pesticide use that ends up being used against Nicaraguan workers. The film, original film, Bananas!*, was to air at the L.A. Film Festival, and they were threatened with a suit. The filmmaker, a Swedish filmmaker, was threatened with a suit. Maybe you can tell us about what the next version of that film is that is now airing now at the Sundance Film Festival.

CARA MERTES: It’s premiering here. And interestingly, it’s Fredrik Gertten, is the filmmaker, who’s a journalist. And we supported Bananas!*, the original film. We funded and worked with him on it. And when he tried to bring it to Los Angeles, where the original lawsuit against Dole was based, Dole, of course, sued him, and sued the film festival. So it’s a very interesting cycle that we’re in now, as documentarians are taking on these questions of power and corruption, increasingly, as journalists can’t. What the corporations are doing, they’re trying to sue the weak link in the chain, which tends to be a non-profit. So, in that case, it was the Los Angeles Film Festival. In other cases, it’s the filmmaker, like Joe Berlinger’s case, where they go right after Joe Berlinger as an artist, who’s not making a lot of money, but he’s, you know, someone that perhaps the corporation can pressure into changing the outcome.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Chevron suing—

CARA MERTES: That was Chevron.

AMY GOODMAN: —Joe Berlinger’s film Crude.

CARA MERTES: Correct. And that also premiered at the festival. And so, this year, with Queen of Versailles, David Siegel sued Sundance Institute, actually, for defamation, and is not really something—

AMY GOODMAN: Well, explain what Queen of Versailles is about.

CARA MERTES: Well, Queen of Versailles is about the Siegels, and David Siegel owns the largest timeshare property business in the world, actually, Westgate. And it’s a portrait, really, of the sort of American Dream gone wrong, through the lives of the Siegels. And they’re quite extraordinary people, actually, for letting Lauren spend four years working with them. And there was a—there was a question of whether or not the film might damage the reputation of the company, and that’s what the lawsuit is based on. But interestingly, it’s directed toward the Institute itself, as a non-profit, to try and—you know, try and affect the outcome of, you know, the way that the film will roll out. And beyond that, I can’t say too much about it, because I’m actually named in the lawsuit.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Cara Mertes, I thank you very much for being with us.

CARA MERTES: Thanks.

In his State of the Union address, many heard echoes of the Barack Obama of old, the presidential aspirant of 2007 and 2008. Among the populist pledges rolled out in the speech was tough talk against the too-big-to-fail banks that have funded his campaigns and for whom many of his key advisers have worked: “The rest of us are not bailing you out ever again,” he promised.

President Obama also made a striking announcement, one that could have been written by the Occupy Wall Street General Assembly: “I’m asking my attorney general to create a special unit of federal prosecutors and leading state attorneys general to expand our investigations into the abusive lending and packaging of risky mortgages that led to the housing crisis. This new unit will hold accountable those who broke the law, speed assistance to homeowners and help turn the page on an era of recklessness that hurt so many Americans.”

Remarkably, President Obama named New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman as co-chairperson of the Unit on Mortgage Origination and Securitization Abuses. Schneiderman was on a team of state attorneys general negotiating a settlement with the nation’s five largest banks. He opposed the settlement as being too limited and offering overly generous immunity from future prosecution for financial fraud. For his outspoken consumer advocacy, he was kicked off the negotiating team. He withdrew his support of the settlement talks, along with several other key attorneys general, including California’s Kamala Harris, an Obama supporter, and Delaware’s Beau Biden, the vice president’s son.

In an op-ed penned last November, Schneiderman and Biden wrote, “We recognized early this year that, though many public officials—including state attorneys general, members of Congress and the Obama administration—have delved into aspects of the bubble and crash, we needed a more comprehensive investigation before the financial institutions at the heart of the crisis are granted broad releases from liability.”

When news of Schneiderman’s appointment surfaced, MoveOn.org sent an email to its members declaring: “Just weeks ago, this investigation wasn’t even on the table, and the big banks were pushing for a broad settlement that would have made it impossible. ... This is truly a huge victory for the 99 percent movement.”

The stakes are very high for the public, and for President Obama. He relied heavily on Wall Street backers to fund his massive campaign war chest in 2008. Now, in this post-Citizens United era, with expected billion-dollar campaign budgets, Obama could find himself out of favor with Wall Street. For the public, as noted by the Center for Responsible Lending: “More than 20,000 new families face foreclosure each month, including a disproportionate percentage of African-American and Latino households. CRL research indicates that we are only about halfway through the crisis.”

Unanswered at this point is whether or not Schneiderman’s appointment signals his willingness to go along with the multistate settlement now said to be nearing completion. Details are not yet public, but the deal is said to involve a $25 billion payment from the largest banks as a settlement for charges surrounding problematic mortgage-loan practices like robo-signing documents and grossly inadequate loan servicing, making foreclosures more likely. Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi, who has been doing essential investigative reporting on the financial crisis, told me: “It doesn’t make sense for companies to settle without New York or California, since the potential liability from those two states alone could put them out of business, could cripple any of the too-big-to-fail banks.”

Obama is aware that those at the Occupy Wall Street protests around the country include many who were his most active supporters during the 2008 campaign. Does the formation of the new task force signify a move to more progressive policies, as MoveOn suggests?

Longtime consumer advocate and former presidential candidate Ralph Nader doesn’t hold much hope: “This financial crimes unit, that’s like putting another label on a few doors in the Justice Department without a real expansion in the budget.” Delaware’s Biden expressed similar concerns about the task force, asking: “How many FBI agents are being put on it? How many investigators? How many prosecutors?”

This is the Occupy Wall Street conflict distilled. Will Eric Schneiderman’s new job lead to the indictment of fraudulent financiers, or to just another indictment of our corrupt political system?

© 2012 Amy Goodman

CHAPTER 1

A shootout in Miami
1986

It was 9:45 a.m. on April 11 when Special Agents Benjamin Grogan and Gerald Dove spotted the suspects driving a stolen black Chevrolet Monte Carlo on South Dixie Highway. The two armed men had been robbing banks and armored trucks in southern Dade County over the past four months. To catch them, Gordon McNeill, a supervisory special agent with the Miami field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had set up a rolling stakeout. “They had killed two people; another woman was missing,” McNeil said. “They had shot another guy four times.In my 21 years with the agency,” McNeill said, “I never felt more sure that when we found these guys, they would go down hard.”
Moments later, other FBI units converged; soon, three unmarked sedans trailed the bank robbers. McNeill, closing from the opposite direction, spotted the black Monte Carlo at the head of the strange convoy. In the passenger seat of the Monte Carlo, one suspect shoved a 20-round magazine into a Ruger Mini-14 semiautomatic rifle. “Felony car stop!” McNeill shouted into his radio to the other units. “Let’s do it!”
FBI vehicles corralled the Monte Carlo, ramming the fugitive automobile and forcing it into a small shopping center parking lot. The three remaining government sedans skidded into surrounding positions. Two more FBI cars arrived across the street. In all, eight agents faced the two suspects.
Suddenly, one of the fugitives in the Monte Carlo started shooting. FBI men scrambled for cover and returned fire. The occupants of the Monte Carlo seemed to be hit in the ensuing fuscillade, but the government rounds weren’t stopping them.
In the chaos, the federal agents struggled to reload their revolvers, jamming cartridges one after another into their five- and six-shot Smith & Wessons. Three of the FBI agents were members of a special-tactics squad and carried fifteen-round Smith & Wesson pistols. But none of the handgun fire seemed to slow the criminals. The gunmanwith the Ruger Mini-14, on the other hand, merely had to snap a new magazine into his rifle, giving him another twenty rounds instantly. One clip had forty rounds. His partner had a 12-gauge shotgun with extended eight-round clips. The two bank robbers were armed for a small war.
Agent McNeill took a round in his right hand, shattering the bone. Bloody flesh jammed the cylinder of his revolver, making it impossible to reload. He rose from a crouch to reach for a shotgun on the back seat of an FBI vehicle. As he did, a .223 rifle round pierced his neck. He fell, paralyzed. A fellow agent was grievously wounded when he paused to reload his Smith & Wesson Chief Special. “Everybody went down fighting,” McNeill said. “We just ran into two kamikazes.”
As law enforcement officials would later discover, the bank robbers, Michael Platt and William Matix, were no ordinary thugs. They had met in the 1970s at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Matix served as a military policeman with the 101st Airborne; Platt received Special Forces training. Both were practiced marksmen. They operated a landscaping business, and according to neighbors they seemed hard-working individuals. Neither had a criminal record. But something had driven them off the deep end. Investigators later found out the two men had brutally murdered their wives.
Platt, demonstrating his Special Forces close-combat skills, fired the shoulder-held Mini-14 with precision. Based on the M14 military rifle, the Mini-14 was popular with small-game hunters, target shooters, and, ironically, the police. Platt took full advantage of the semiautomatic weapon’s large ammunition clip and penetrating force. Bobbing and weaving, he sneaked up on Grogan and Dove, the agents who originally spotted the black Monte Carlo. “He’s coming behind you!” another agent screamed. But the warning came too late. Platt fatally shot Grogan in the torso, and Dove in the head.
The firefight had been going on for four minutes when agent Edmundo Mireles, badly wounded, staggered toward Platt and Matix, who had piled into a bullet-ridden FBI Buick. A civilian witness described Mireles’ stiff-legged gait as “stone walking.” Holding a Smith & Wesson .357 at arm’s length, he fired repeatedly at the two gunmen at point-blank range, killing them both.
It was the bloodiest day in FBI history.
All told, the combatants had fired 140 rounds. In addition to the deaths of Platt and Matix, two FBI agents were killed, three were permanently crippled, and two others injured. “Gun Battle ‘Looked Like OK Corral,’” the Palm Beach Post declared the next morning, quoting a shaken witness. But the legendary gunfight in 1881 in Tombstone, Arizona, had lasted only 30 seconds and involved just 30 shots, leaving three dead— one fewer than the modern day gunfight in Miami.
*
Lieutenant John H. Rutherford, the firing-range director with the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, heard about the shootout in Miami the day later that day. “The bad guys,” he recalled, “were starting to carry high-capacity weapons, unlike what they had carried in the past….That was a scary, terrible thing to hear about,” he said. “If the FBI is outgunned, something is wrong.”
Scholars of law enforcement and small arms would later pore over the forensic records of the Miami Shootout, generating thousands of pages of reports. Police departments across the country held seminars on the gunfight. Gun-buff magazines published dramatic reconstructions. NBC broadcast a made-for-TV movie called In the Line of Fire: The FBI Murders.
Later examination would reveal that, for all their bravery, the FBI agents prepared poorly for the violent encounter. At the time, though, and ever since, one idea about the significance of Miami eclipsed all others: The lawmen had been, in Lieutenant Rutherford’s word, “outgunned.” It was a perception widely shared by cops, politicians, and law-abiding firearm owners: The criminals were better armed than the forces of order. Nationwide, crime rates were rising. Drug gangs ruled inner-city neighborhoods. Guns had replaced knives in the hands of violent teenagers. The police, the FBI, and everyone else protecting the peace were increasingly seen as being at a lethal disadvantage.
The FBI helped to shape this perception by emphasizing the seven revolvers its agents had used, deflecting attention from the three fifteen-round pistols and two twelve-gauge shotguns the agents had brought to the fight.
“Although the revolver served the FBI well for several decades, it became quite evident that major changes were critical to the well-being of our agents and American citizens,” FBI Director William Sessions said in an agency bulletin after Miami. Revolvers held too little ammunition, and they were too difficult to reload in the heat of a gunfight. There were questions about their “stopping power”: In the Miami gunfight, the FBI fired some 70 rounds, and Platt and Matix received a total of 18 bullet wounds. And yet the killers stayed alive long enough to inflict a terrible toll.
In 1987, Jacksonville’s Lieutenant Rutherford received the formal assignment to recommend a new handgun to replace the Smith & Wesson revolvers that his department in north Florida issued. His counterparts in hundreds of local, state, and federal police agencies were given similar missions. “My job,” Rutheford told me, “was to find a better gun.”