UK freedoms, farewell! Detention of Miranda reveals vindictiveness of wounded police state
UK freedoms, farewell! Detention of Miranda reveals vindictiveness of wounded police state
Annie Machon is a former intelligence officer for the UK's MI5, who resigned in 1996 to blow the whistle. She is now a writer, public speaker and a Director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.
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However it is all too easy for mission creep to set in, as I have been saying for years. The definition of terrorism has expanded to cover activists, placard wavers, and protesters as well as, now apparently, the partners of journalists. The old understanding of due legal process is merely yet another quaint, British artifact like the Magna Carta and habeas corpus.
In the UK we now have secret courts covering all things "national security", pervasive Big Brother surveillance (as exemplified by GCHQ's TEMPORA program), and we have our spies involved in kidnapping and torture.
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Snowden has the protection of the only state currently with the power to face down the brute might of US "diplomacy", and Greenwald still has the shreds of journalist protections around him. Friends and partners, however, can be seen as fair game. I know this from bitter personal experience. In 1997 former MI5 intelligence officer, David Shayler, blew the whistle on a whole range of UK spy crimes: files on government ministers, illegal phone taps, IRA bombs that could have been prevented, innocent people in prison, and an illegal MI6 assassination plot against Gaddafi, which went wrong and innocent people died. Working with a major UK newspaper and with due respect for real national secrets, he went public about these crimes. Pre-emptively we went on the run together, so that we could remain free to argue about and campaign around the disclosures, rather than disappearing into a maximum security prison for years. After a month on the run across Europe, I returned to the UK to work with our lawyers, see our traumatized families, and pack up our smashed-up, police-raided flat.
In September 1997 I flew back with my lawyer from Spain to London Gatwick. I knew that the Metropolitan Police Special Branch wanted to interview me, and my lawyer had negotiated this ahead of my travels. Despite this, I was arrested at the immigration desk by six heavies, and carted off to a counter-terrorism suite at Charing Cross police station in central London, where I was interrogated for six hours. At that point I had done nothing more than support David. As another ex-MI5 officer I agreed that the spies needed greater oversight and accountability, but actually my arrest was because I was his girlfriend and going after me would be leverage against him. But it got worse - two days later Shayler's two best friends and his brother were arrested on flagrantly trumped-up charges. None of us was ever charged with any crime, but we were all kept on police bail for months. Looking back, our treatment was designed to put more pressure on him and "keep him in his box" – it was pure intimidation. Journalists and students were also threatened, harassed, and in one case charged and convicted for having the temerity to expose spy crimes disclosed by Shayler. To this day, none of the criminals in the UK intelligence agency has ever been charged or convicted. So the threats and intimidation around the Snowden case, and the detention of Greenwald's partner, are old, old tactics. What is new is the sheer scale of blatant intimidation, the sheer brutish force. Despite the full glare of global Internet and media coverage, the US and UK spooks still think they can get away with this sort of intimidation. Will they? Or will we, the global citizenry, draw a line in the sand?
Oh, and let's not forget the sheer hypocrisy as well - the US condemns Snowden for seeking refuge in Russia, and castigates that country for its civil rights record on certain issues. Be that as it may, the US establishment should look to the log in its own eye first - that one of its young citizens faces the death sentence or life-long incarceration for exposing (war) crimes against the global community as well as the country's own constitution. There is an internationally-recognized legal precedent from the Nuremburg Nazi trials after World War 2: "just following orders" is not a defense under any law, particularly when those orders lead to victimization, war crimes and genocide. The UK border guards, as well as the international intelligence communities and military, would do well to heed that powerful lesson from history.
So this overzealous use of a law to detain the partner of a journalist merely travelling through the UK should make us all pause for thought. The West has long inveighed against totalitarian regimes and police states. How can they not recognize what they have now become? And how long can we, as citizens, continue to turn a blind eye?
http://rt.com/op-edge/uk-gay-greenwald-freedom-police-679/
= new reply since forum marked as read
David Miranda detention prompts outcry over 'gross misuse' of terror laws
Journalists, human rights lawyers and civil liberties campaigners condemn Miranda's nine-hour detention at Heathrow
Lisa O'Carroll and Richard Norton-Taylor
The Guardian, Monday 19 August 2013 19.13 BST
The Labour MP Keith Vaz called the detention 'extraordinary' and said it seemed the legislation was being used 'for something that does not appear to relate to terrorism'. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian
The detention under anti-terrorism legislation of the partner of the Guardian journalist who exposed mass email surveillance by the US government has been widely condemned as unlawful.
Newspaper editors, human rights lawyers and civil liberties campaigners said David Miranda's detention and questioning was a gross abuse of the Terrorism Act 2000, which despite its scope was never meant to be used as a licence for extracting information.
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Gareth Peirce, a leading human rights lawyer who has been heavily involved in many cases under the 2000 statute, said: "However widely the authorities try to construe the act, and however widely they use and abuse its parameters, it was never meant to facilitiate an ambitious intrusion into the rightly protected work of investigative journalists."
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The leading human rights lawyer Gavin Miller told the Guardian the police would have to prove that they had detained Miranda with the express intention of eliciting information about alleged terrorist activities, and not on a fishing expedition related to the Guardian's journalistic activities or as means of intimidating Greenwald or the paper.
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The National Union of Journalists described the detention "as a gross misuse of the law" and raised questions about the guarantees journalists could now give their sources. "Journalists no longer feel safe exchanging even encrypted messages by email and now it seems they are not safe when they resort to face-to-face meetings," said the NUJ secretary general, Michelle Stanistreet.
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Bob Satchwell, the executive director of the Society of Editors, which represents national and regional newspapers, said it was "another case of disproportionate reaction by authorities" using "an important piece of legislation for a purpose for which it was neither intended nor designed". He said: "Journalism may be embarrassing and annoying for governments, but it is not terrorism".
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http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/19/david-miranda-detention-outcry-terrorism-laws
Those bungling assholes just keep adding more fuel to the fire of the people's outrage. Their panic has made them lose their heads.
