Adventures of a Gonzo Journalist
Posted in Journalism, and MintPress News
From the Rodney King incident in 1991 to more recent incidents like the deaths of Eric Garner and Freddie Gray, we might never know the appalling reality of modern police brutality if it weren’t for video recorded by bystanders.
Multiple courts have upheld the rights of journalists and photographers to take photos or video in public spaces and film the police and other law enforcement going about their duties. However, the ACLU notes:
Posted in Archive, Journalism, and MintPress News
Lawyers for Chelsea Manning, the U.S. Army whistleblower imprisoned for leaking classified documents that revealed secret details of the United States’s military empire, will be better prepared for an upcoming appeal of her sentence after an ongoing, highly successful fundraising campaign.
Manning leaked hundreds of thousands of documents to WikiLeaks in 2010, revealing the inner workings of American diplomacy and warfare. Her leak included “Collateral Murder,” a video showing U.S. helicopters firing on and killing a group of people that included two Reuters journalists and a family of bystanders that attempted to rescue the victims. After the government subjected Manning to solitary confinement and other conditions many argue were torture, a military court convicted her of violating the Espionage Act and sentenced her to 35 years in prison in August 2013. She is currently serving her sentence at an Army installation at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
The alleged mistreatment is at the heart of an upcoming appeal of her conviction, but Manning and her supporters first needed to raise funds to mount a credible legal defense. Manning began tweeting in April, and later that month she tweeted a link where supporters could donate to her legal aid fund. Her appeal raised $40,000, but this fell far short of the needed amount.
Posted in Journalism, and MintPress News
Just how free is free speech in the United States? Even though the First Amendment protects freedom of speech and freedom of the press, government authorities and other powerful interests still find ways to suppress the truth.
“Open societies are also no stranger to the censorship of contentious novels and historical accounts of controversial events,” Abby Martin said last year on her show, “Breaking the Set.”
“Now, of course, the First Amendment prohibits the outright banning of books by the federal government, but there are many less insidious ways that ‘dangerous content’ is kept off American bookshelves.”
Posted in Journalism, and MintPress News
According to reports from supporters on social media, Texas Department of Criminal Justice officials moved imprisoned journalist Barrett Brown into solitary confinement last week.
Brown is an outspoken and controversial journalist who worked closely with Anonymous during the peak of that movement in the early years of this decade. The government noticed this collaboration and targeted Brown for prosecution during their campaign against the hacktivist group Lulzsec, a high-profile subgroup of Anonymous, which also resulted in the imprisonment of political prisoner Jeremy Hammond.
Brown was sentenced to 63 months in prison in January. In addition, he must pay about $800,000 in restitution to Strategic Forecasting, the corporate intelligence agency based in Austin, Texas, that was a target of Lulzsec hacking.
Posted in Journalism, and MintPress News
At 78 years old, Seymour Hersh remains one of the most important, controversial, and even cutting-edge voices in journalism. His newest report, which criticizes the official narrative of the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden, is just one revelation in a long history of undermining government propaganda through investigative reporting.
In the bin Laden report, published this month in the London Review of Books, Hersh accuses the United States of collaborating with Pakistan to orchestrate bin Laden’s capture and then covering up the real story with a tale of all-American heroism. Hersh’s account makes it clear that bin Laden was a pawn the Pakistani government traded to the U.S. in return for military aid, and the terrorist leader’s capture an almost theatrical event carefully managed by both governments for maximum positive publicity.
The White House previously maintained that the mission was carried out using only U.S. intelligence and troops, as mythologized in the Oscar-winning film “Zero Dark Thirty.” The Obama administration strongly denies the claims of collaboration, but already the mainstream media is confirming part of Hersh’s story.
