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Interview With Jailed Video Blogger Josh Wolf
Video blogger and independent journalist Josh Wolf has been in a federal jail for 170 days for refusing to turn over to a federal grand jury a video of a San Francisco demonstration. On Feb. 6 Wolf's length of incarceration set a new record for US journalism. "Democracy Now!" has an interview with Josh Wolf from his jail cell. If federal authorities can jail bloggers with impunity, it does not bode well for the future of citizen journalism.
I don't think the fellow was jailed with "impunity". He disregarded a subpoena from a court. Be a good citizen. Show up to court when called. It's no different than standard etiquette and social grace. If you're invited to a large party of important people, even if you disagree with them, at least show up and have a few hors d'oevres.
With respect to the tape I think that Josh has a positive mindset: let the judge review the tape. I'll grant that it is probably the US attorney who's being the idiot in this regard.
With respect to the testimoney I think that Josh has a negative mindset: as with the subpoena, show up to court. There are a million different ways of saying "I cannot be positive beyond a reasonable doubt. My religion prevents me from bearing false witness." Something along those lines. Again, if the US attorney weren't being the idiot with respect to allowing the judge to do his job and make the call on whether or not to include the tape, then this probably wouldn't be an issue.
I think that, as usual, the US attorney is being a knob because he can--because his social connections and political backing give him power over a standard citizen. At the same time: Hey, Josh! When a federal court sends you a subpoena that means "Show up or else!"
Disregarding a subpoena is a gesture of disrespect and impunity. Jailing a citizen for disregarding a subpoena is just standard procedure (afaik).
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
Why do "Journalists" have the special right to not give up information to a corut demanding it?
I would understand if it was about him, you know, fifth amendment and all.
But does he have some special credential that signifies him a journalist and immune from the eyes of the court? For that matter, is there any laws that discern high-profile journalists? If there are state laws, why are there?
I'm just questioning the reasoning behind different "class" of citizens.
A grand jury or a court can order you to produce damned near anything it wants. Being a jouralist (or a blogger) is no shield, or haven't you kids been watching the Plamegate/Libby trial?
And this is a good thing. You can't have justice without first establishing the truth and for that you have to be able to present ALL of the evidence. I really can't see why journalists think they are some sort of fscking priesthood set above all other instituitions. Get over yourselves, you are mostly talentless hacks anyway.
This idiot was issued an order to produce evidence, he refused and his butt is in jail. And that is exactly where he belongs, for his refusal to comply with one of the most basic responsibilities attached to citizenship.
Democrat delenda est
In all fairness he's asserted that he would be willing to turn the tape over to the presiding judge. It is the US attorney involved who has demanded that the tape be turned over to his office. I don't know the particulars of the subpoena but, afaik, a subpoena is issued from the court and not directly from the US attorney's office. The US attorney issues the subpoena through the court at which time the named party must show up at court to address the contents of the subpoena.
There's probably a whole slew of legal mumbo-jumbo going on in the background. If Josh didn't retain the services of an attorney prior to the date named on the subpoena, or if he flat out didn't appear on the date of the subpoena, then he's probably screwed.
I could be totally wrong. Maybe a subpoena is a direct request from the US attorney which bypasses the judge and the court altogether. I doubt it though.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
Josh has not refused to turn over the tape. Josh has demonstrated a citizen's concern over whom the tape be turned over to. Think rationally: Why is it so darned important for the US attorney to have the tape? What's wrong with allowing the judge to review it and then let the judge decide who gets it?
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
I think Josh Wolf's refusal to testify is important for a couple reasons: 1) You wouldn't know it from mainstream media these days, but journalists have the opportunity to be important counterbalances to unchecked government power via investigating and bringing otherwise obscure activities into the light for public discussion and, perhaps, correction. 2) One important tool in a journalist's arsenal that enables them to do the above is their ability to collect news without being seen as tools/agents of the government. Think of Bob Woodward and Deep Throat (aka Mark Felt) - Woodward went 3 decades refusing to name Felt because he'd promised him confidentiality. If journalists can be compelled to testify about what they've done and seen in the course of doing their jobs, people around them are less likely to be interested in being filmed, interviewed, etc. This is the reason many states have shield laws, which protect journalists' sources and unpublished work. The US attorney in Josh Wolf's case had to go through acrobatics to bring this case in federal court, because California has a shield law - the only reason it's in federal court is because a San Francisco police car that sustained a broken taillight during the protest in question was paid for partially by federal money - that's the only federal link here!
They're investigating a violent protest - a policeman (apparently) had his skull cracked, for goodness sake.
Now, we only have his word to go on, but apparently the police car sped up to ram a group of protestors; one of the officers then exited the vehicle and began to choke one of the protestors.
IF this is the case (and again, why wouldn't he show the video?) then there's certainly no shame in cracking one of the officer's skulls; he is committing (aggravated?) assault against a citizen and need's an ass whoopin. Officers of the law cease to be officers of the law when they engage in criminal activity (regardless of whether or not they're wearing their uniform).
I stress one more time: IF what he said is what actually happened, I can't find myself shedding much of a tear for the officer who apparently received a concussion. I mean how would you feel about the cop beating down Rodney King getting his ass kicked, on the spot, for his crime?
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
The "crime" that is under investigation by the grand jury is a broken taillight on a police car. They blew it up into a "Federal Charge" because some of the money for that vehicle came from Federal Funds. I've never heard about any police getting a broken skull, but certainly police have been known to do such things to citizens without any legal recourse.
So, we're talking a journalist (blogger or not - "mainstream" media paid him for this reporting) jailed for about half a year so far because he still is foolish enough to believe we still have a Constitution in this country.
And, inbetween various rants about raping the guy in jail for his patriotic act - you gotta ask yourself if spending months and months of tax money and citizen time (Mr. Wolf's and the Grand Jury) investigating a broken police car taillight is what you think of every time you see that federal tax deduction on your paycheck. Seems to me that while the Feds are screwing around justifying their salaries terrorizing Journalists, there are that many less resources going into preventing actual terrorism.
Right wing, Left wing, or wingless: do you believe it's an effective use of Federal money to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars investigating a broken taillight? Head over to Ford and pay fifty bucks and move on...
Huh?!?? If you want to be pedantic about the legality, Saddam had agreed to several provisions when he signed the armistice to end the first gulf war. If he failed to comply, the war was "back on". He failed to comply with the big one - prove that he had gotten rid of all weapons of mass destruction that had been identified, documented and cataloged by UN and US weapons inspectors. He did whatever with the WMDs - either getting rid of them in secret or hiding them; we may never really find out. But one way or the other, he was legally bound to prove he no longer had them. He decided to try what will go down in history as one of the most terminally stupid bluffs ever to tell everyone he was keeping them and more or less told the US to go fuck themselves. Doesn't mean that Bush had to go and do a shitty job with the whole regime change thing, but Saddam pretty much did everything but get down on his knees and beg to get his ass kicked.
Sorry, but there was a recent article referencing a study posted on slashdot that demonstrated class mobility was higher in India than in the US.
Well, the subpoena was sort of a formality. If he showed up they would have simply tossed him in jail when he refused to identify his sources.
This case has a long and storied history but basically it's part of an emerging pattern by the US DOJ of eliminating confidentiality for journalism sources. Say what you will about whether journalists have a legal privilege to protect sources or not, the fact remains that this is a deliberate break from 35 years of tradition dating back to (and this is not a coincidence) Watergate. The reason this case is troubling is because the Feds shouldn't even be involved--their argument is that because a city squad car which was partially funded by federal dollars was damaged during the protest, it's a federal case. In other words, they have no other reason to butt in other than to fuck with this kid. To me that's disturbing.
Moreover, even if you feel that this is an acceptable practice for national security matters (Judy Miller, Matt Cooper), the government is doing the same thing in cases that have no national security purview whatsoever. You might have heard about the two SF reporters who were jailed for refusing to identify their sources in the steroids/BALCO case? Same deal. To me that's really disturbing.
If anyone is interested, there's a 4-part series on PBS frontline which discusses all these issues, including this specific case.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
It is hard to tell what the true details of this case are. Certainly, hitting a policeman over the head is unfortunate. But forcefully cuffing someone for placing a foam sign under a car (those charges were later dropped), and arresting someone for lighting a firecracker seems petty. I would have expected the police to deploy sufficient force to handle situations like this peacefully, and I would also expect policemen deployed to quell riots to wear helmets.
The biggest question raised here is exactly what federal laws were broken. Saying this was a federal crime for damaging a police vehicle that was partly paid for with federal funds seems very weak. But since the federal privilege laws offer fewer protections than the California journalist shield law, it is thought that the feds got involved to help local law enforcement.
But speak out or have a difference of opinion and goto jail. Or be ostracized all the way through you're public school career for being different.
It's hard to argue that the US is economically broken, but socially we're just as fucked as every other society.
Stories like this are less about being allowed to live what has become the American dream (having a lot of stuff defining your success) and more about reclaiming what use to be the American dream (total freedom from over zealous rulers, economically and socially.)
No sig for you!!
From his lawyer: I think the significant thing here is that the grand jury subpoena has been issued by the Joint Terrorism Task Force, so I think that you should put the Josh Wolf stuff aside, in a way, namely whatever happened at that particular demonstration, I think it's an attempt to get at people who were critical of the Bush administration. There is no crime -- there is no grand jury sitting right now in the state court. There is no crime being considered in the state court. The whole question of whatever happened to a policeman is a state court problem. You could not issue a subpoena out of the federal court to investigate what is a state court problem. There is no investigation of any kind going on, so far as we know, in the federal court. So there's no reason to hold him, and we have made this argument, and the argument has been rejected.
Specifically, it has not been established that mere attendance at the protest constituted a crime, so the US attorney is not entitled to information about who was there.
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I hate to tell you this but you really need to actually know a little history of the US before you make statements like "Given the state of today's government". Read a little about the War of 1812 or even just about Alexander Contee Hanson and the Baltimore Riot of 1812. Today's government in the US is a rank amateur in political corruption and cronyism, suppression of rights and individual profiteering compared to the government in 1812 and then it was in a completely unjustified war that was started primarily as an attempt to steal Canada from Britain while it was distracted by Napoleon. Hell the British army that was invading the US and even burned the capital was primarily supplied by New England merchants. The British could pay better since the war pretty much bankrupted the US government. It really annoys me when people who clearly have no knowledge of US history talk about the current US government being the most corrupt and evil ever in the US.
Who is John Galt?
Last I checked, unemployment was at record lows.
That is what the numbers say. But it's not reflective of the actual situation. Most measures of unemployment only consider people who are considered "part of the workforce", and actively trying to find a job. Those same measures tend to define somebody who has "left the workforce" as a person who has not worked in three to six months, even if they are actively searching for a job.
Thus in many regions, especially in the Rust Belt (which has been hit hardest by the moving of manufacturing overseas), the official unemployment rate is quite misleading. In such regions it's quite common for people to not find work for a year or more. And so they're officially considered to have left the workforce, and thus are not counted in the unemployment statistics. While you may have 50% of the workforce without jobs in such areas, an unemployment rate of only 4% to 6% is commonly given, as that's the number of people who are either just getting into the workforce (ie. high school graduates), or who have been laid off in less than six months.
Gasoline is nearly back to $2 a gallon.
In Texas, perhaps. But not in the rest of the country. I drove from NYC to Detroit and back a week ago. Gas prices ranged from $3.25 a gallon in Michigan to as high as $4.50/gallon in rural Ohio and Pennsylvania. I think the lowest I saw was about $2.75, and that was near Detroit.
Home ownership is among the highest (possibly THE highest) in the entire world.
America has experienced a housing bubble over the past decade. Yes, many new houses have been built, and many people have begun living in them. But those people don't actually own their homes. Many such buyers have had to take on a 35 to 40 year mortgage. Some are even at the point where they have to go into massive credit card debt to cover their non-mortgage living expenses. Just because lending institutions have been very willing to give out mortgages recently it does not mean that a larger portion of the population are actually home owners. There only ownership in such a situation is that of a bank or other financial institution owning large amounts of homebuyer debt.
Americans can go to school, work hard, become successful, more readily than anywhere else in the world.
That's not really the case. Higher education is far too expensive for most Americans. Coming out of a 4-year college program with $160,000 in debt, even after scholarships and bursaries, tends to put people in a pretty terrible position. Compare that to places like Canada, Australia, the UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and even Russia. Students coming out of universities in those countries are just as capable as American graduates, but face nowhere near the financial burden (both before attending and after).
My god people...what the fuck do you want?
I think they may want people like you to take a look at the facts. Yes, CNN and FOX News will tell you again and again that the economy is doing great, unemployment is low, and every other country is a shithole compared to the US. But that just isn't the case. It's not reality.
You make some statements that I would question. I don't agree that the United States is the most free nation in the world. First of all, having 5% of the world's population, they incarcerate 25% of the world's prisoners. If I lived in the United States, I would have a 1 in 14 chance of spending time behind bars in my lifetime.
Let's address your "anarchist retards" who were "breaking shit". If the investigation was really into people who were "breaking shit", it would be carried out by state law enforcement. A federal government anti-terrorism task force is claiming federal laws were broken because they give extra grants to police for anti-terrorism training, which makes the potential damage of a police cruiser a federal jurisdiction matter. The jailed journalist offered the requested information for an in camera (private) review by the judge to determine if it merited turning over as evidence of the alleged crimes. I can't think anywhere (else) in the world where this wouldn't be good enough.
The United States is only the "most free nation on earth" on paper. The constitution is, unfortunately, vague and in areas where it does speak, the government is taking pains to erode it further. Let me give an example: habeas corpus. The constitution says that habeas corpus can only be suspended at time of war. Right now, the United States federal government is alleging that because the constitution doesn't explicitely say that habeas corpus is a right the rest of the time, that it isn't.
Yes, that is the boogeyman. This keeps me awake at nights precisely because I do worry about losing rights in my own borders. Canada is under enormous pressure to cave into things like DMCA. Yes, let's in one law criminalize law using technical means to protect the fair use that another law expressly allows. I've published articles on how to rip and transcode DVD's onto Pocket PCs, and host the software for doing that. If I own a DVD, that is perfectly legal in Canada, yet if I travel to the United States, I can get arrested for making software to let me watch the video from my own DVD on a different device. You call that the most free nation on earth? Don't even get me started on the Patriot Act.
What you both are overlooking is that the assault on the police officer is a California crime, not a federal crime. As I've argued above, I can't think of any federal crime at all that Wolf's video might have shown -- although the assault apparently is being labeled as terrorism. Which is absurd. Wolf doesn't want these people he might know to be disappeared off to Gitmo, deprived of their rights, and driven out of their minds, which is apparently what the feds do to suspected terrorists. (Never mind the "Oh, that was months ago! We are so over that now!") I think Wolf is the one with a decent justification for keeping mum, and it's the feds who are behaving unreasonably. If I were in his shoes I would be leery of even meeting with the federal judge.
$META_SIG_JOKE
"Are not in daily, constant fear of being beaten randomly"
h tm
are you quite sure? There seems to be a lot of contrary evidence.
http://www.reprieve.org.uk/casework_omardeghayes.
"and then transferred to Guantanamo Bay, where he has been held for three years. In one beating by the ERF (Emergency Reaction Force) team, he was permanently blinded in his right eye."
not Japanese POW camps certainly, but hardly a shining beacon of justice.
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Yeah, Really
Responding to questions from Sen. Arlen Specter at a Senate Judiciary
Committee hearing on Jan. 18, Gonzales argued that the Constitution
doesn't explicitly bestow habeas corpus rights; it merely says when
the so-called Great Writ can be suspended.
"There is no expressed grant of habeas in the Constitution; there's a
prohibition against taking it away," Gonzales said.
Gonzales's remark left Specter, the committee's ranking Republican,
stammering.
"Wait a minute," Specter interjected. "The Constitution says you can't
take it away except in case of rebellion or invasion. Doesn't that
mean you have the right of habeas corpus unless there's a rebellion or
invasion?"
Gonzales continued, "The Constitution doesn't say every individual in
the United States or citizen is hereby granted or assured the right of
habeas corpus. It doesn't say that. It simply says the right shall not
be suspended" except in cases of rebellion or invasion."
Video of the above exchange
If the govt becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law, it invites man to become his own law, it invites anarchy
Except a book deal when he gets out of prison.
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying. - Woody Allen