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julian assange
'Can't Make This Up': Journalist Arrested Under UK Anti-Terror Law Hours After Criticizing It
"I criticized the Terrorism Act before getting on the plane, then got arrested under the Terrorism Act upon landing."
Aug 21, 2024
Richard Medhurst, a Syrian-British independent journalist who defends Palestinians' right to resist Israeli apartheid, occupation, and other crimes, said this week that he was recently arrested at London's Heathrow Airport and held for nearly 24 hours for allegedly running afoul of a highly controversial anti-terrorism law critics say is used to silence legitimate dissent.
Medhurst—who is known for his work opposing U.S., British, and Israeli war crimes in the Middle East and for his advocacy for formerly imprisoned WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange—said on social media Tuesday: "I criticized the Terrorism Act before getting on the plane, then got arrested under the Terrorism Act upon landing. Can't make this up."
In a nearly nine-minute video posted Monday night on X, the social network formerly known as Twitter, Medhurst said that "on Thursday, as I landed in London Heathrow Airport, I was immediately escorted off the plane by six police officers who were waiting for me at the entrance of the aircraft."
"They arrested me—not detained—they arrested me under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act of 2000 and accused me of allegedly 'expressing an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organization,' but wouldn't explain what this meant," he continued.
The controversial law criminalizes anyone who "invites support for a proscribed organization" or "expresses an opinion or belief that is supportive" of such a group. Violators can be punished with up to 14 years' imprisonment and a fine.
As Laura Tiernan explained Tuesday at World Socialist Web Site:
Introduced by [former U.K. Prime Minister] Tony Blair's Labour government, the act is a legal dragnet. In Medhurst's case, it appears that commentary defending the right of Palestinians under international law to resist foreign military occupation and genocide is being defined as support for terrorism.
Hamas is among the organizations proscribed as terrorist by the U.K. government. While its military wing was proscribed in 2001, Hamas was banned in its entirety in 2021, aimed at criminalizing support for the Palestinian people. The political wing of Hamas won elections held in Gaza in 2006 and the organization also oversees charitable work.
Medhurst said: "I categorically and utterly reject all the accusations by the police. I am not a terrorist. I have no criminal record. Prior to this incident, I'd never been detained in my entire life."
"I'm a product of the diplomatic community, and I'm raised to be anti-war," he explained. "Both of my parents won Nobel Peace Prizes for their work as United Nations peacekeepers. They had a tremendous effect on my worldview and outlook and instilled in me the importance of diplomacy, international law, and peace."
Medhurst said he was searched, handcuffed, and taken in a police van to a station where he was searched again, fingerprinted, photographed, and placed in solitary confinement. His phone and work equipment were seized. When he questioned why he'd been arrested, "the police would say something like: 'Well, we're just the arresting officers. We don't really know.'"
"No one in the world knew what had happened to me or where I was," he said. "I had to ask like four or five different guards for several hours until I finally received a call. In total, I spent almost 24 hours in detention. At no point whatsoever was I allowed to speak to a family member or a friend. After waiting 15 hours, I was finally interviewed by two detectives."
"I felt that the whole process was designed to humiliate, intimidate, and dehumanize me and treat me like a criminal, even though they must've been aware of my background and that I'm a journalist," Medhurst alleged. He contended that his arrest was "done on purpose to try and rattle me psychologically," and noted that "many people have been detained in Britain because of their connection to journalism."
He named Assange—who was freed in June following a plea deal with the U.S. government—as well as Scottish author Craig Murray, Grayzone correspondent Kit Clarenberg, and Glenn Greenwald's late partner, Brazilian politician David Miranda, as people who have been targeted for their political beliefs and expression.
"Freedom of the press, freedom of speech really are under attack," Medhurst warned in the video. "The state is cracking down and escalating to try and stop people from speaking out against our government's complicity in genocide."
Israel is currently on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice over its 320-day assault on Gaza, which has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, wounded at least 93,000 others, starved hundreds of thousands more, and obliterated the coastal enclave.
"We cannot call ourselves a democracy as long as reporters are dragged off of planes and detained and treated like murderers," Medhurst concluded. "I am disgusted that I am being politically persecuted in my own country."
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Julian Assange's Freedom Also Belongs to Us
My emotional relief at his escape from the clutches of this government far outweighs my feelings about the broader implications of the guilty plea, which has justifiably stirred concern and controversy.
Jun 30, 2024
fter twelve years — including five years of solitary confinement at Belmarsh Prison in London — Julian Assange is free. God bless America! He wasn’t extradited to the U.S. to stand trial, where he faced a sentence of 170 years in prison for violating the so-called Espionage Act.
Instead, he took a plea deal with the U.S. government, pleading guilty to one count of violating that act — you know, threatening America’s freedom — for which he had paid by his time already served. He was officially pronounced free at a U.S. federal court in Saipan, capital of the Northern Mariana Islands (a U.S. territory), after which he flew home to his wife and two children in Australia.
My emotional relief at his escape from the clutches of this government far outweighs my feelings about the broader implications of the guilty plea, which has justifiably stirred concern and controversy. The government got its little triumph: a “legal” acknowledgment of its right to keep monstrous secrets about what it does and punish any unauthorized spilling of the beans as “espionage.”
“He’s basically pleading guilty to things that journalists do all the time and need to do,” according to Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, quoted by the New York Times.
And Matt Taibbi said the decision “will remain a sword over the heads of anyone reporting on national security issues. Governments have no right to keep war crimes secret, but Assange’s 62-month stay in prison is starting to look like a template for Western prosecutions of such leaks.”
While such concerns are no doubt worrisome, I don’t think the legal system is a mechanism for seriously addressing them. Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, was hardly an equal in this hellish controversy. He was in the legal crosshairs of the most powerful country on the planet, which he had had the nerve to defy, by publishing an enormous amount of “classified” — that is to say hidden — data, given to him by government-employed whistleblowers.
This is called journalism, no matter that part of the U.S. case against Assange was that he doesn’t count as a real journalist. Mainstream, corporate journalists know how to behave themselves, I guess. They’re far more likely to “respect” the do-not-cross lines the government establishes.
As I wrote in 2010, at the beginning of the WikiLeaks controversy: “In a time of endless war, when democracy is an orchestrated charade and citizen engagement is less welcome in the corridors of power than it has ever been, when the traditional checks and balances of government are in unchallenged collusion with one another, when the media act not as watchdogs of democracy but guard dogs of the interests and clichés of the status quo, we have WikiLeaks, disrupting the game of national security, ringing its bell, changing the rules.”
As long as “national security” includes the waging of war, honest — a.k.a., real — journalism will be a nuisance to those in charge, because it includes actual reportage, not simply press-releases and public-relations blather. In the real world, war equals murder. War is not an abstract game of strategy and tactics. War itself is a “war crime” — especially when it’s waged not to gain freedom from an oppressor but to maintain control over the oppressed.
WikiLeaks releases were outrageous acts of espionage — from a war-waging government’s point of view — because the data was raw, real and unsanitized. They included 90,000 classified documents on the US war in Afghanistan and nearly 400,000 secret files on the Iraq war, which . . . uh, bled beyond the official propaganda and, among other things, showed that civilian deaths in the two wars were, according to Al-Jazeera, “much higher than the numbers being reported.”
In addition, WikiLeaks released data that, as Al-Jazeera noted, “unearthed how the Geneva Conventions were being violated routinely in the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba. The documents, dating from 2002 to 2008 showed the abuse of 800 prisoners, some of them as young as 14.”
And then, of course, there was the infamous “collateral murder” video, which showed a U.S. helicopter firing at people on a street in Baghdad, killing seven of them, including a Reuters journalist, and wounding a number of others, including two children, who were sitting in a van that had pulled up to aid the wounded people in the street. And all this happened as helicopter crew members snickered about the deaths. This was the United States in full view, waging its “war on terror” by unleashing terror at the level only a superpower could commit.
Showing snippets of truth about the war on terror is Julian Assange’s crime: his act of espionage. And I get the government’s point of view. Assange put war itself into the forefront of collective human awareness — as a hideous reality, not a political abstraction. What he did bears striking similarity to what Emmett Till’s mother did. She exposed the raw horror of Southern racism by insisting that her son, a 14-year-old boy who was beaten and drowned by Mississippi racists for allegedly speaking to a white woman, have a public funeral with an open casket, so the whole world could see what had been done to him. This was in 1955. Not long afterward, the Civil Rights Movement was fully underway.
Human evolution isn’t a legal issue, decided by the courts. It involves humanity facing and transcending its own dark side, which can be a messy and chaotic process. This is the nature of truth.
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Sick of Julian Assange? Fine. Just Don't Miss The Message.
The end of the legal saga for the Wikileaks' founder should not be seen as the end. It should be seen as a warning.
Jun 26, 2024
CD editor's note: The original Swedish language version of this op-ed first appeared in Sweden's Dagens Nyheter newspaper and this English translation is provided by the author.
After fifteen years, it appears that the Julian Assange case has reached a conclusion. But, as with almost everything to do with Assange, that conclusion may end up creating more problems than it solves, and raising more questions than it answers.
This was man who, on the back of material leaked by whistleblower Chelsea Manning, and by leveraging the possibilities presented by rapidly-evolving digital technologies, challenged the might of the U.S. military and the authority of the U.S. government. And, he did so through an innovative collaboration between WikiLeaks and major European and U.S. news outlets that for a brief period suggested the possibility of a new model for whistleblowing, data-gathering, and journalism.
The conclusion to the Assange case sends a clear and chilling message to journalists around the world... that you challenge U.S. power at your own peril.
WikiLeaks released the Collateral Murder video, showing a U.S. attack helicopter killing people in Baghdad, including two Reuters journalists. Some of those killed were blown to pieces as they lay injured on the ground. U.S. politicians and commentators, Democrats and Republicans alike, saw Assange and WikiLeaks as the enemy and as people who should, at best, be tried for espionage or treason or, at worst, assassinated. In 2010, none other than Donald Trump said there should be the “death penalty” for what WikiLeaks had done.
Then, the tide turned. In multiple directions. Because, after all, this was Assange.
The allegations of sexual assault made in Sweden in 2010 marked the start of a period where the support Assange and WikiLeaks had developed among some progressives rapidly began to fade. No charges were ever leveled against Assange for sexual assault or rape, but the fallout from the incident was stark. Assange called Sweden “the Saudi Arabia of feminism,” and his followers smeared his accusers as being lying tools of the U.S. government who had set Assange up. The misogyny was obvious and aggressive.
Assange sought asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and the Ecuadorian embassy years saw WikiLeaks rapidly disintegrate into a farcical side-show, marked by an increasingly close relationship between the Trump administration, a clear opposition to Hillary Clinton, the amplification of right-wing conspiracy theories and potentially dangerous acts such as linking to unredacted emails revealing private information about female voters in Turkey.
Assange, once considered by many to be a symbol of transparency, anti-Americanism and anti-militarism was now seen as doing the bidding of elites on the U.S. political right. He was hailed by right-wing politicians and commentators such as Tucker Carlson. In 2016, Trump, who just six years earlier said Assange and Manning should be put to death, now said, “I love WikiLeaks.”
The WikiLeaks account on Twitter became a steady mix of opinion, hyperbole, half-truths, and disinformation. The lifeblood of organizations that work with whistleblowers is a combination of trust, competence, and solidity. But, just the few short years after the leak of material from Chelsea Manning that shook the U.S. establishment and led to thousands of news articles across the globe, it was impossible to imagine any serious whistleblower deciding to work with WikiLeaks.
So, when Assange faced extradition to the U.S. to stand trial for his role in obtaining and publishing the material from Chelsea Manning, many shrugged their shoulders. The Assange/WikiLeaks image had been permanently tarnished. If he wasn’t guilty of espionage, the reasoning went, then the sexual assault allegations, the suggested support for Trump and the disintegration of WikiLeaks into amplifying right-wing conspiracy theories clearly made him unworthy of sympathy or attention.
And yet.
All of the distaste for Assange the person, and for what WikiLeaks had become in the years after the Manning leaks, overshadowed a fundamental yet powerful truth. The Assange case was, and is, absolutely fundamental to the working of critical investigative journalism in the U.S. and globally. Whatever dislike one may have for Assange or WikiLeaks, the fact remains that his pleading guilty to one felony count of "conspiring to unlawfully obtain and disseminate classified information relating to the national defense of the U.S." might enable Assange to leave prison, but is nevertheless a victory for the United States government and military, and a loss for freedom of information and the critical examination of power.
The conclusion to the Assange case sends a clear and chilling message to journalists around the world—Assange isn’t American, remember—that you challenge U.S. power at your own peril. This, in turn, sends a message to citizens that they are not worthy of knowing what the state does in their name. Which is pretty ironic, given that democracy is supposed to be about the rule of the people.
So, the end of the Assange case has given us one final twist, namely that the end is not the end.
It’s a warning.
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