"Teach-in" spy tape released!

Documentalist Grant Crowell has posted audio tape secretly recorded by his operative Peter Fotopoulos (such a cool word--operative) after Ben Whitmer made him shut down his video camera (and had the CU cops enforce the edict) at the Ward Churchill "teach-in" in March.

Ah, golden memories. Listen with me, won't you?

Hear the clapping for Natsu? Think I was being generous in saying there might have been 60 people in attendance. Now Natsu's telling me to ask permission of audience members before taking pictures. Then her paranoid warning about evil mini-tapers:

As always with these things, there are folks here who are . . . participating in the attempt to discredit Ward Churchill [noise] frequently been taken out of context but . . . if we let attempts to intimidate silence us to start with, then, the job is accomplished.

Bwahahah--you get the idea. Remember, she's talking about someone making a recording, generally regarded as helpful in establishing context (not to mention accuracy). Breathtaking illogic. Purely intentional.

Notice also that Natsu makes no mention of Ben Whitmer's (who also spoke at the teach-in) ludicrous Billy Joe Shaver theory of recording rules at CU (in his drunkenly self-pitying "Contemptible Ben" post): "Refusing people the right to videotape whatever they want is not a denial of free speech. You go to a Billy Joe Shaver show, you don’t get the right to record without permission. Just as you don’t get the right to post entire books on the internet. The folks involved didn’t have permission to record, end of story."

Tom Mayer's up next--tedious. Oh, rats. Fotopoulos quit recording before Mayer's big finish, which was pretty funny. He indicated he'd synopsized the case for Chutch and paused for a second, obviously prefatory to beginning on his second handout, which he was holding. Unfortunately, people misread this as him saying he was finished, and began clapping. Mayer looked forlorn, but quit.

(via (duh) PB)

Update: Billy Joe Shaver, who was fine in a small part in Robert Duvall's wonderful The Apostle ("hug mah naick").

Update II: The Internet Archive wasn't working last night, and I really wanted to post an episode of I Was a Communist for the F.B.Iiiiyah here. Now it's working. This one's called, simply, "The Pit Viper" (5/21/52).