Mood:
downTopic: human rights
Sydney Indymedia news website is down for maintenance.
This seems quite incredible given APEC is only a week away. Perth is effectively the primary IMC for APEC news now apart from my own humble news website here
www.sydneyalternativemedia.com
SIM was also down for nearly 2 months prior to the controversial state govt election.
This writer was talking to a Chilean democracy activist at Addison Rd Community Centre on Sunday and he immediately assumed it was ASIO. Who would know.
Good to see posts at Perth IMC by long time effective organisers like Graeme Dunstan and his street theatre characters. Ghosts indeed.
Also there is the Canadian story of police infiltrators at Quebec which is a ripper, well sourced and very revealing - note they were masked and one was carrying a rock. APEC is definitely not a place "to rock". Anyone with such attitudes, not least the police, is not welcome here in Sydney.
In Feb 2003 250-500,000 peace protesters marched entirely peacefully. That's the democratic action we want. Others intent on public vandalism or mindless damage are NOT WELCOME. Like George Bush and Rice actually with their organised military industrial terrorism.
This writer was intent on not attending APEC wankery but on reflection think we should support the anti war march like in Feb 2003, this time in lawyer's suit and legal observer signage, and solicitor's card. At least to do a decent report for community media and gather evidence of any police misbehaviour - which does seem possible to justify their huge budget but should be avoided at all costs.
It would be a severely ethical dilemma if SAM's editor saw evidence of protester violence. SBS Dateline reported a blogger who went to jail rather than give up footage of protesters to the FBI - the longest imprisonment of any media practitioner in the USA apparently - the story is curiously absent from their archive here http://news.sbs.com.au/dateline/index.php?page=archive
Here are google results for the jailed 'blotter' Josh Wolf here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josh_Wolf
The Blotter: Jailed Blogger Could Spend a Year in Detention
at
http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2006/11/jailed_blogger_.html
(US ABC network)
Personally this news website editor would find it pretty hard to go to jail for an idiot breaking a police van window, damaging the cause of the protest movement and our reputations, but you never know, depending on the journalism principle of protecting sources.
The time is approaching where reputable blogs, blots or whatever will need our our media union coverage which may or may not mean the official MEAA, which is might be noted shows no interest in helping over a fascist blacklisting of SAM's editor from Sydney University campus for simply reporting a student education protest.
MEAA on the evidence to date are not at all interested in the community media right to know, only the Big Media with their big dollars.
