Slashdot Mirror
Journalist Cleared of Riot Charges in South Dakota (nbcnews.com)
Her video went viral, viewed more than 14 million times, and triggering concerns online when she was threatened with prison. But a North Dakota judge "refused to authorize riot charges against award-winning journalist Amy Goodman for her reporting on an attack against Native American-led anti-pipeline protesters." An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes NBC News:
Goodman described the victory as a "great vindication of the First Amendment," although McLean County State's Attorney Ladd Erickson told The New York Times that additional charges were possible. "I believe they want to keep the investigation open and see if there is any evidence in the unedited and unpublished videos that we could better detail in an affidavit for the judge," Erickson told the newspaper.
The native Americans "were attempting to block the destruction of sacred sites, including ancestral burial grounds," according to a new article co-authored by Goodman about her experiences, which argues that "Attempts to criminalize nonviolent land and water defenders, humiliate them and arrest journalists should not pave the way for this pipeline."
The native Americans "were attempting to block the destruction of sacred sites, including ancestral burial grounds," according to a new article co-authored by Goodman about her experiences, which argues that "Attempts to criminalize nonviolent land and water defenders, humiliate them and arrest journalists should not pave the way for this pipeline."
In 2008 Amy Goodman filed a civil suit against the Minneapolis and St. Paul Police Departments, the Ramsey County Sheriff and United States Secret Service which resulted in a settlement.
So, the day ain't over yet.
There is a migration movement in New Hampshire called the Free State Project and its attracting a lot of liberty-minded individuals to the state for the purpose of pursing liberty and freedom. The underlying philosophy is that you should not utilize violence, fraud, or coercion to achieve social or political goals. Unfortunately that's exactly what a state does. If there is no victim, violence, theft, fraud, or coercion there should be no crime. Principled libertarians (as opposed to the frauds that make up the national libertarian party, ie republicans took it over essentially) don't think we should have guards on the board deciding who can come and go, that the state should be giving permission to travel/drive (drivers licenses), have a construct called 'intellectual property'/copy'right'/etc, or stealing money for social programs such as government indoctrination programs (ie public schools). No victim, violence, coercion, theft, or fraud there should be no crime.
So as one can imagine government agents have repeatedly violently attacked the most active and public individuals and politicians in this movement. Failing that they have libelled and slandered people. A prominent example of that is police and various government agents have attacked a radio host Ian Freeman, here in Keene, New Hampshire, numerous times.
Once they raided his place, of which he rents some rooms, has a studio, and an activist center in search of building code violations. They got him on a dead battery in a smoke alarm (they came with warrant in hand and police where normally a letter would be sent and no warrant would be issued to conduct the search, but the idea in and of itself is just unbelievable, that the government can come in and search at any time for building code violations, yet this really happens).
More recently those who hate him have been spreading misinformation about his stance on age of consent in an effort to paint him as a child molester. They twisted a story about his sexual experiences as a young person with an older person into him supporting child molestation. The FBI even got in on the act shortly after he attacked the FBI on the air for *DISTRIBUTING CHILD PORN* (if children are harmed by the act of viewing CP they were being hypocritical for distributing it). Two weeks later the FBI raided his home, stole his studio equipment (10s of thousands of dollars worth), his tenants computers, his computers, and so on. 30+ computing devices were stolen in the raid and these people will never get them back. He has not been arrested and this was nothing more than a smear campaign to ruin his image. It's hard to ruin a person's image who advocates non-violence and peace- but make it out as though the person is a child molester and the people will do it for you.