Free Journalist Josh Wolf!

(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)

Video journalist Josh Wolf has been held in prison since September 22, charged with contempt of court for refusing to turn over to the state the unedited version of videotape footage he took of an anti-G8 summit protest on 8 July 2005 called by Anarchist Action in San Francisco. He was first detained in August of this year and released on bail on September 1 before being imprisoned again. Now Wolf is on his way to becoming the longest incarcerated journalist on charges of civil contempt in American history. In order to circumvent California law, which says that a reporter cannot be “adjudged in contempt...for refusing to disclose any unpublished information,” Wolf’s case has been declared to be under federal jurisdiction. The pretext for this is that the San Francisco Police Department, whose vehicle was allegedly damaged during the protest, receives federal funding!

Wolf justly fears that if he hands over his footage he will become part of a McCarthyite witchhunt in which he will have to identify leftist and anarchist protesters on the tape. Wolf stated: “I don’t want to be an investigator for the state, I’m a journalist, not an FBI agent.” Under the “war on terror,” in which the government brazenly declares to the populace that every phone may be tapped and all Internet traffic searched, the state wants you to know that its eyes are everywhere. An edited version of the video is available on his Web site, www.joshwolf.net.

On November 21 the Partisan Defense Committee—a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League—sent a letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales protesting Wolf’s detention demanding that the charges be dropped and that Wolf be immediately released. As the letter states, Wolf’s jailing

“is an attack on the First Amendment right to free speech and freedom of the press. The state claims that the unpublished tape might be useful in prosecuting protesters who allegedly tried to burn a cop car. Yet the police report has no mention of burns, and only describes damage to the car’s tail light. This is a pretext used to chill dissent and send a message to those who might seek to film police atrocities in action. Clearly, the police, FBI and Joint Terrorism Task Force are pushing to gather broad intelligence on those who protest government policies and on those who consider themselves anarchists….

“As Bay Area ABC7 News stated, this is ‘a battle of principle over a reporter’s ability to bring you the news.’ If a reporter’s unpublished footage can be subpoenaed any time so the cops can scan it for faces of those accused of a crime, then every video journalist will be considered a surveillance camera. As Wolf himself declared: ‘That’s not a world I want to live in’.”

Donations to the Josh Wolf Legal Defense Fund can be made from his Web site or to his mother: Liz Wolf Spada, P.O. Box 2235, Wrightwood, CA 92397.