Written by Minister of Information JR Monday, 25 August 2008
On August 20th 2008, between 1-2pm Nadra Foster, a Black female programmer and single mother was beaten to the ground by the Berkeley police, arrested, hog-tied and taken to jail, after the management of KPFA radio station and the Pacifica Foundation, had called the police on her, falsely accusing her of being "banned" from the station.
The incident started when Nadra Foster entered the radio station to work on some radio with the KPFA jazz radio show "Transitions on Traditions". She was let into the Ujima studio, by Michael Yoshida, KPFA's chief engineer and member of KPFA's management team, who was not aware of "the ban" on her. Vini Beecham, another member of management, contacted Lois Withers, the KPFA business manager aka accountant, telling her that Nadra was in the building using station resources for her personal benefit. Lois, another member of KPFA's management team, contacted Michael Yoshida to escort her while she kicked Nadra out of the station. When the two arrived at the door of Ujima, Nadra stated that she refused to leave because Lois does not have the power to kick her out. According to Yoshida, Lois called Dominga Estrada, the Human Resource Director of the Pacifica Foundation, to see how to deal with the situation. Dominga authorized Lois to call the police.
According to what Nadra told me, Lois told the police that she was the general manager of the station, and that Nadra was a fired employee who refused to leave. In reality, Lois is the business manager, and Nadra is a volunteer at the station, and member of the unpaid staff organization. Two male police officers slammed Nadra to the ground, kneeing her in the groin in the process, as well as severely spraining her arm. A number of KPFA broadcasters saw what had happened, including Anita Johnson of Hard Knock Radio who was in tears pleading with the management and other people at the station to get involved and help Nadra, to no avail. Weyland Southon of Hard Knock Radio taped Nadra's chilling screams as the police were slamming her to the ground and twisting her arm. He also taped Nicole Sawaya, the Executive Director of the Pacifica Foundation, slapping his camera out of his hand, on the scene. Interim Program Director Sasha Lilley was also an eye witness to this act of management initiated police terrorism, and did nothing in defense of Nadra's human rights. After 2 days in jail, now Nadra is facing 5 misdemeanors, including trespassing, 2 assault on a police officer charges, and two charges of resisting arrest.
The Prisoners of Conscience Committee, along with the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, the Black New World, and producers from the Voices of the Middle East radio show are organizing in the Black and Brown communities of the Bay Area, and throughout the media to expose this grave injustice. A town-hall meeting is planned for Sunday, September 7th, at the Black New World (836 Pine St, West Oakland at 3pm) so that the community can have an opportunity to get the facts about what happened to Nadra Foster and the current status of her case, as well as can get a glimpse into the shady workings of the corrupt administration running KPFA currently. We invite everyone to express themselves about this outrageous act of police terrorism in our community, and get involved in the organizing to get the charges against Nadra Foster dropped, get KPFA to pay for all medical and legal bills, demand that they acknowledge that they didn't follow any due-process or protocol as laid out in the handbook in relation to "banning" somebody, demand that the Unpaid Staff is reinstated and that there is a transparent grievance process, among other things. People should also start to think about organizing to get this interim administration at KPFA removed from power, and a Black public affairs show on the airwaves of KPFA, which talks about the domestic affairs of Black people in the country considering that KPFA, and the broader Pacifica network of radio stations uses Black voices like James Baldwin, Paul Robeson, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and the Black Panthers to raise money, but the reality is if these people were alive today they would not have a show on the KPFA airwaves that is dedicated to the people they were organizing. Although most people would have thought that KPFA would have done this decades ago after the Civil Right Movement, today this still does not exist.
After the Block Report broke the story on KPFA airwaves Thursday, and followed it up with Block Report coverage on Friday August 22, Interim Program Director Sasha Lilley and Vini Beecham recently went on vacation for 2 weeks. On August 22, Lem Lem Rijio, the interim General Manager of KPFA issued a statement on the incident. In part it reads "It is important for you to know that the Berkeley Police acted independent of direction from KPFA". Considering that she is African, what Black person that is connected to the community calls the police, and thinks that after the police come they have control over the police's actions? This incident and the writing of the press release, exemplifies the incompetence of this current KPFA administration led by Lem Lem Rijio, as well as the current Pacifica administration led by Nicole Sawaya. Aileen Alfandary, the white news director of KPFA told me personally that this was not newsworthy, and that is why the news did not cover the issue on Thursday. Also the handicapped white executive producer of the Morning Show at KPFA, Mitch Jeserich, also told me that this incident was not newsworthy on Thursday, a day after the tragic incident. And Andrea Ali, the manager of Guerrilla Cafe, told me, when asked if we could have a community meeting regarding the incident, that she was on a spiritual quest and did not want to deal with KPFA's negativity at Guerrilla Cafe. Community, support those that support you and don't support people that don't support you.
If you did not get a chance to hear the audio accounts from people who eye-witnessed the police terrorism inflicted on Nadra Foster, you could go to www.blockreportradio.com, as well as to stay updated on the community organizing surrounding this topic.
Via: Current.com
Bloggers in Africa fight government censorship to go above and beyond the role of mainstream journalists.
By Jonathan M. Gitlin | Published: June 15, 2008 - 08:45PM CT
No matter what you think of blogging, Internet-based citizen journalism is a real threat, not just to traditional media business models but to totalitarian governments. How do we know that bloggers are drawing blood? Because some governments are hitting back harder and harder; last year saw a tripling in the number of bloggers arrested around the world compared to 2006, according to a report from the University of Washington.
"Last year, 2007, was a record year for blogger arrests, with three times as many as in 2006. Egypt, Iran and China are the most dangerous places to blog about political life, accounting for more than half of all arrests since blogging became big," said Assistant Professor Phil Howard, lead author of the World Information Access Report. Howard also suggests that the real number of arrests may be much higher, as not every arrest makes it into the media.
The report separates the reason for arrests into six categories: violation of cultural norms, blogging involved with social protest, blogging about public policy, blogging about political figures, exposing corruption or human rights violations, and finally "other." In addition to Iran, Egypt and China, Middle Eastern regimes in Syria and Saudi Arabia, and South East Asian nations such as Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand also figure in the report. 2007 saw 36 bloggers arrested around the world, and since 2003 at least 64 have been arrested, with a total of 940 months of prison time served. Even liberal democracies are not immune; France, Canada, the USA, and UK have all arrested people following their blogging activity since 2004. However, some of these cases might not seem so egregious; last year a blogger was arrested in Los Angeles following his postings about his attraction to young girls, and the beginning of 2008 saw an arrest in the UK after one Gavin Best used his blog to threaten a police officer's family following his arrest for a large number of thefts.
Another troubling trend has been the complicity of western Internet firms such as Yahoo and Google, both of whom have handed over details of bloggers to the Chinese government, despite publicly condemning such policies.
The Internet isn't just landing people in prison; occasionally it helps get them out too. Earlier this year there was the widely publicized case in Egypt where US blogger James Buck used Twitter, the microblogging platform, to alert his friends and colleagues to the fact that he'd been arrested following his efforts to cover an anti-government protest.
Meanwhile, the worldwide blogging community shows no signs of going away, although fear of persecution may drive more of them to do so anonymously. But long may they continue to show that the pen (or, in this case, the keyboard) is mightier than the sword.
source: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080615-worldwide-rise-in-the-number-of-blogger-arrests.html
RSS Feed