Britain Quits the "Free World"

Police Have Arrested 29 Protesters as Government Abuses Terrorism Laws

Metropolitan Police officers detain people during the protest for carrying signs “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.” Photo credit: Jeff Moore

The United Kingdom just leap-frogged the US to become the leading country in the so-called “Free World” to abandon its much touted tradition of freedom of speech, press, and assembly, along with the right to protest.

The move to abandon what in the US is popularly known as First Amendment rights actually came a few days ago when the both houses of Parliament, led by the Labour Party and Prime Minister Keir Starmer (ironically a former human rights attorney, and later the government’s chief prosecutor, where he spent years dutifully trying to help the US extradite Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to face espionage charges) voted to declare the protest group Palestine Action as a “terrorist” organization. This heavily Zionist-lobbied decision was taken following a protest action by Palestine Action in which some of its ,members painted slogans in red spray-paint on two RAF aircraft.

Although the “damage” the planes was estimated rather absurdly by local police to have been £7 million (about $9,5 million), the spray-paint stunt was really just an act (however costly to erase) of non-violent vandalism. Calling it a “terrorist act” marks a draconian expansion of Britain’s Terror Act.

Enacted in July 2000, that act defines terrorism as any political action that:

(a) involves serious violence against a person,
(b) involves serious damage to property,
(c) endangers a person’s life, other than that of the person committing the action,
(d) creates a serious risk to the health or safety of the public or a section of the public, or
(e) is designed seriously to interfere with or seriously to disrupt an electronic system.

But even though calling painting graffiti the side of a plane an act of terror may seem a laughable departure from such a definition, shoe-horning it into the Terror Act’s purview and declaring a group like Palestine Action to be a terrorist organization, is no laughing matter. Doing so has suddenly made being a member of Palestine Action or even attending an action by the organization a matter of risking arrest and facing a potential sentence of 14 years in prison. In fact, in the UK, making any, statements oral or written, in support of any group defined as being ‘terrorist” makes a person also liable to up to 14 years in prison. At that point the government is not just punishing an act of political vandalism as if it were equivalent to a mass terror protest, which is bad enough. It is punishing speech itself.

As a number of British columnists have noted (in the process perhaps putting themselves at risk of prosecution on a charge of supporting the alleged terrorist group Palestine Action!), no one has been injured or threatened by any of Palestine Action’s protests, including the plane painting, and yet Israel and its have committed countless war crimes and stands accused of genocide in Gaza, as should the governments of the US and Britain, which have been providing the weapons Israel uses to commit those crimes, and they are not facing any legal jeopardy.

For the moment, Britain with its legislative action labeling Palestine Action as a terrorist organization, has made the biggest move towards the abandonment of free speech and association, but the US my soon overtake it in the race down that dark path.

Indeed, even before Trump appeared on fhe scene, the Bush/Cheney presidency used Americans’ fear of terrorism after the 9-11 attacks in 2001 to go after anti-government protesters, launching “”terrorism” investigations into groups and individuals where no terrorism was involved. I also paid informants and agents-provocateur to create terror schemes and then ‘bust them. The FBI And Homeland Security also developed a Terrorism Watch List—actually several watch lists—for people who are suspected terrorists themselves or are one, two or three degrees of separation from alleged terrorists or ’terrorist” groups.

These lists have all been misused. In some cases the FBI has put people on a Terrorist “No-Fly” Watch list—most often Arabs or other Muslims—as a way of pressuring them to agree and report on other people and activities in their community so they can travel freely. In other cases people are put on a terrorism watch list to punish them, for examples journalists who have been too aggressive in their reporting on government crimes and corruption. I know this to be the case because I found myself placed on a Terrorism Watch List back in 2018 during the first Trump administration. For two years until 2020 early in the Biden administration when I found I was no longer being harassed by special pre-boarding intensive searches, I could not obtain my boarding passes online 24 hours before a flight even through my wife could, and had to obtain them in-person at a check-in counter the day of a flight. Mostly being on the list was a matter of annoyances and fear of being delayed so long that a flight might be missed. But then I learned from FBI testimony in a lawsuit over the watch lists that they were open and searchable by any US law enforcement officer (including local cops), with a computer, by private security agencies, and by foreign governments.

The reason I was put on the list? A cover story I wrote for The Nation magazine on the Pentagon’s massive accounting and budget fraud over decades.

Things are certain to get worse here in the US where it comes to the misuse of terror charges, and where it comes to the Bill of Rights, especially the First Amendment. Already Congress and the White House along with the Trump Department of Justice (sic), are using the spoken and written words of foreigner students, workers, immigrants with permanent residence visas (Green Cards), s grounds to arrest, detain and and deport them for criticizing Israeli genocide or saying anything favorable about Hamas o Hezbollah.

It’s only a matter of time—and Trump is already talking about wanting to do this —before it will be not just immigrants but US citizens being jailed or even losing their citizenship and being deported for exercising their First Amendment rights.