mayhem

Fellow blogger Josh Wolf is now a free man after serving 7 months in a Federal prison possibly the longest stay in history for his crime. A group called Anarchist Action held a march against Capitalism and War on July 8, 2005 in the streets of San Francisco where Josh attended and captured video footage to post on his website. Before Josh put it on his site he edited a few things out of the footage that he felt was unnecessary as anyone would before making it public. However, like most of us, he had no idea it would become such an issue with the government and serve a prison term for this crime.

The FBI found his video post which showed the aftermath of an officer being beaten and in the background marchers yell that a police car is on fire, but you don’t see it. You will also get a glimpse of a police officer pushing a marcher who is making his way across the street while yelling profanities at the marchers.

I do not claim to be a journalist nor an activist, just a person expressing my own views on a variety of topics. Here is my unbiased opinion about Josh’s ordeal and the march that he covered.

The point of a march is to express your feelings about a topic to the world. You’ll get some media coverage and may get the community thinking about the topic and their personal views on it. However, there is no need for the march to turn violent. That defeats your purpose and makes you look like hoodlums. Who would take you seriously then?

In the beginning of Josh’s video a boy and girl are commenting on the tragedy of loss of human life in the bombings of the public transportation system in London. The two say that, “any loss of human life is F*&@ed up”. Yet, later in that march a police officer gets his skull bashed in by unknown members of the march. When they spoke of their feelings on loss of human life they spoke for their group, which is also what the police beating accomplished for the organization.

I know when you feel strongly about something you feel everyone else is wrong. Top that off with some hard hitting music and an entourage of people and you are now feeling amped and invincible! This is what the video shows the marchers were feeling. A march to voice their opinions wouldn’t have been so terrible if they stayed on the sidewalk and showed much more restraint instead of disobeying law enforcement by marching in traffic on the street and vandalizing the city.

In the video you hear the crowd say that the down officer had been abusing his position of authority and were accusing him of police brutality, which is oh so common in California. However, beating an officer so badly his skull is fractured doesn’t seem warranted. We didn’t hear of any of the marchers being beaten to that extreme did we? Nor did we hear of vandalism to any of the marchers or their property right? Of course not, just arrests for disregarding the law and authorities trying to enforce it.

Since Josh’s sentence, the media has criticized his decision for withholding pieces of video in the name of journalism. Should a person with freedom of speech be imprisoned for his beliefs on video footage he took and posted on his site?

In his interview with Kevin Sites of Yahoo! News, he states that his reason for not giving the edited parts was because he didn’t want to reveal too much of the identities of the marchers for fear of being excluded from inside events in the future. He felt that they would not give him leads for any future reports. The thing that boggles me is that viewing the video he released you see a lot of the marchers masked and unmasked, enough so that you can figure out who they were if you were out to do so.

Josh also offered before he was sentenced that the judge review the “missing” pieces of video footage to verify his claim that the edited pieces didn’t contain any incriminating information to the case. The judge said it wasn’t his position to determine what becomes evidence and what does not so it was never released, that is, until now. Josh Wolf has now posted on his blog the original edited video, and the unedited version.

Why did Josh stop rolling the camera during certain times? Why didn’t he get police car burning or the actual beating of the officer? All questions that may never be answered completely to the complete satisfaction of the media, but the question here is not weather Josh is a journalist or an activist, but rather why he had to serve time.

He offered the review of the full video to the judge so he could see that it wasn’t any more incriminating than what they already had and he wasn’t directly involved in the chaos and criminal activity of the march on July 8,2005.

Think about this one…what if the video of the world trade center was edited before it was released just to show a pile of rubble after the collapse? And for whatever reason the videographer felt the entire footage shouldn’t be shown, and refused to give HIS tape that showed the plane descending from the sky into the first building and then into the second building, and he was sent to prison for that. Would that be right? Also, why is it ok for the government to have “classified” information that the general public can’t know weather it be video, pictures, or documents? It just doesn’t seem quite right does it?

After watching both videos, it is apparent to me that what was omitted from the original footage, what Josh fought so hard not to reveal and served time in prison for, was in no way more incriminating for any one person. It seems to me that it would have been much easier for him to release the extra footage and spare his criminal record since he ultimately released the full unedited version anyway just after serving his sentence in California Federal’s finest.