Censorship On The Indymedia.org Network

By Lloyd Hart

03/03/2012

The message that came up on the D.C. IMC today when I went to publish an article ( http://dc.indymedia.org ) site reads as follows:

---We are sorry.

Your IP address has been blocked, and is no longer permitted to post to ths site.

The address was blocked on 2012-03-03 with the following note:

Refuses once a week



Because of the open nature of the IMC publishing philosophy, this type of blocking is a rare occurrence, and only happens when repeated and egregious violations of Editorial Policy force us into the position of doing so. Maintaining a clean IMC site is hard, often thankless work, and constant inconsideration makes our work that much more difficult.

If you wish to appeal this restriction, please contact dc*indymedia.org and offer an explanation of why you believe this block to have been unjust or inaccurate. We will consider it, and offer you our response as soon as possible.---



What preceded this over the last twenty four hours was that someone kept completely deleting, not hiding the following article:

"--- Here Is Your Free Libya, Obama!

By Lloyd Hart

I have been completely disgusted with the Obama regime's foreign policy but nothing quite symbolizes the savagery of Obama's policies than the video Russian Times has released to the public today. Barrack Obama has taken the best organized African nation where every citizen had better healthcare than Americans and turned it into a mad house run by right wing muslim fundamentalists who are practicing radical racism, wide spread torture and wholesale murder.

Mr. President, you're a war criminal and deserve nothing less than life in prison for your crimes. No election year spinning will get you a new glow to con voters with after they see this. The contents of this video reveals the psychopath lurking underneath your deceitful professorial calm. The world is much larger than the American psychosis and you can no longer hide behind the blathering of your corporate propaganda. I can't wait to here your two faced response to seeing this video. Maybe Bill Maher can make you cool again after this.

http://rt.com/news/libya-rebels-torture-africans-679/ ---"



I can't see why someone would delete this article for purely editorial reasons but I can see why someone with little editorial experience would delete it for political reasons. Complete deletion but not a total block from publishing also happened to my last article critical of the Occupy tactic.

The open newswire was designed to allow people to have a voice when they feel a need to express themselves about an injustice they see going on in our society or around the world.

It must also be noted that I have been completely blocked from publishing at NYC IndyMedia.org for about the last five years for political reasons as well. After some investigation I discovered while I was in NYC in 2008 that it was Amy Goodman and her gang that demanded that I be blocked from publishing on NYC IndyMedia.org. Amy Goodman also refused to review my feature documentary film "The Peace Movement" that celebrated the incredible rise of the American Peace Movement against the pending invasion of Iraq. This particularly hurt me because I was giving Democracy Now all my raw footage from every rally I filmed free of charge which Goodman then used regularly on her show without crediting me. I also discovered that the censorship imposed on me by NYC IMC was due to my publishing 911 inside job articles and the criticisms I wrote about when United for Peace and Justice and International A.N.S.W.E.R. disavowed the traffic blocking that occurred at the beginning of the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

I have produced shows for Free Speech T.V. and was a credited associated producer on the ground breaking feature documentary Stolen Childhoods http://www.stolenchildhoods.org narrated by Meryl Streep and have a long history of activism that included a sixty day hunger strike in 1987 to protest the resumption of uranium mining in British Columbia in which I exposed that my father died of radiation poisoning. All my activism I thought should protect me from political harassment from my colleagues on the left but clearly not.

Now DC IMC has completely blocked me from publishing which in my view can only be described as political harassment. I am justifiably critical of the Occupy tactic for many reasons and am very critical of Barack Obama's war crime, the destruction of Libya and the mass genocide committed by NATO in the city of Serte, Libya Obama gave orders for.

I know that it is hard to maintain a level headed editorial volunteer staff that doesn't knee jerk their personal political views over top of the "Open Newswire" publishers but this is what is happening at DC IMC and NYC IMC. I will go on publishing where I can but I must demand the "Open Newswire" be kept open and not censored by personal political views.

Please know that each city has its own local autonomous editorial staff. LA-IMC can not tell you why your IP number has been blocked at DC-IMC. You will need to contact DC-IMC and ask them. Please know that it could have been blocked in error, this has been known to happen in the past when administrators are fighting off spam attacks.

We have reviewed your past contributions to the LA-IMC newswire and found nothing posted that violates the LA-IMC guidelines for removing articles. So please know that you are not blocked from contributing to LA-IMC. Also please know that the action of one local IMC does not necessarily reflect the policy of another local IMC or of the Indymedia network as a whole. Thank you for understanding.