Censorship at Angelfire

If you know anyone who builds on the free angelfire.com webspace, they may need to know what angelfire did to me, so it doesn’t happen to them.

MY three year old, only-offensive-to-bad-employees, Making the Walls Transparent ACCOUNT AT ANGELFIRE.COM HAS BEEN CLOSED WITHOUT WARNING. The 750 Florida prisoners who told their stories on my site, their families, the DOC employees who are helping us, and the public who has been left in the dark without the truth have been hurt by the disappearance of MTWT. Of course, the errant guards are surely celebrating a short-lived victory.

As many of you know, last week an ex-sgt with the Florida DOC for 10 years, Mr. David Ortiz, had joined Making The Walls Transparent and was reporting wrong-doing in the Florida system, particularly at Hendry CI. All his information was being linked to the Guard’s Index.

The first page that disappeared was the Guard Index, where I listed all the opinions and stories of the employees of the DOC, guards and ‘Correctional’ Officers both. Yesterday everything else came down. I assume I stepped hard on some very guilty toes.

So much for free speech, huh?

The sign at my site claims I abused the policies, although Lycos will not respond as to what policy I abused, and they say they have no copies of my pages, and that I will have to get a warrant to ‘view the log’.

The DOC employee working with the project had a site on a private server. It also disappeared the same day mine did, he put it back up, it keeps coming back down.

Everything with a URL beginning with http://www.angelfire.com/fl4/prison has been taken down. The family index at http://www.angelfire.com/fl4/fci/family.html , the things at /www.angelfire.com/fl3/starke and Gary Waid’s stories at www.angelfire.com/la/kaylee/tales.html are still intact and people are trying to relocate them now as it is suspected that everything will come down soon.

No I did not have copies. Virus brought my old computer down, and my laptop disappeared at an airport recently along with a bag of prisoner information meant for the FBI. The current donated computer had few of those files that were lost.

I am rebuilding at a new donated overseas location so this can’t happen again, and the story I must begin with concerns another DOC “Isolated Incident”, that of Archie Davis, a young prisoner soon to be released from prison who was reliably reported to have been starved and tortured in subhuman ways for at least 10 days prior to his murder on January 10th 2002 by guards at Wakulla CI. Archie had written out about a drug running guard and a murder he had witnessed. His mail was stopped and now he’s dead, beaten as severely as Frank Valdes was, bootprints and all. Guards said he did it to himself and no mention of the death was reported in the paper. His mother is now forced to exhume the body and have a private autopsy and investigation done. More on this story, along with pictures of the marks of the abuse will appear soon on the new site.

I am more determined than ever to Make The Walls Transparent.

Kay Lee is director of the Pacific Institute of Criminal Justice in Berkeley, California. She can be reached at: kaylee@idiom.com