Yet another journalist targeted by UK state and arrested without access to lawyer on return to UK
British journalist Richard Medhurst was arrested on the arrival of his flight Heathrow airport under Schedule 12 of the Terrorism Act banning “support of a proscribed organisation” – and was held for almost twenty-four hours without access to lawyers or even being able to let his family know where he was.
Medhurst, who was born in Damascus to British parents – winners of the Nobel Peace Prize for their humanitarian work as UN peacekeepers – is a supporter of Palestine who analyses Middle East politics and the genocide in Gaza on his YouTube channel, was not told what comment or comments were supposedly at issue. He was informed of various legal rights yet then denied them, including his right to legal representation, and was forced to surrender his electronics. In a video on his channel, Medhurst said he considered his arrest to be an attempt to intimidate him as a journalist:
Medhurst appears to be the first British journalist arrested under Section 12, but he is not the first to suffer legalised harassment by the state on his return to a UK airport in an evident attempt to silence inconvenient inconvenient journalism. In May, investigative journalist Kit Klarenberg was arrested at Luton airport under Section 3 of the same legislation and held in the same way, including the seizure of electronic devices.
Klarenberg’s work has caused a series of embarrassments for the British security state, exposing communications among intelligence agents and cut-outs, ‘academics’, so-called ‘disinformation experts’ and supposedly ‘left’ journalists – including, most notably, emails in which the now openly pro-war hack Paul Mason outlined and charted which left outlets, including the Grayzone site for which Klarenberg writes, should be discredited and put out of business.
Klarenberg has also exposed UK plans to destroy the Crimea-Russia Kerch Bridge, the CIA’s recruitment of two 9/11 hijackers, abuse of the Official Secrets Act by Tory MPs. Mason’s bizarre non-denial of the emails included attempts to smear Klarenberg as a Putin asset. Social media platforms appear to have collaborated with state attempts to reduce the circulation of revelations about Mason.
Keir Starmer, the unpopular ‘Zionist without qualification’ who is now red-Tory PM, colluded with the Tories on a series of laws designed to move the UK closer to an outright police-state – including helping to defeat a Commons vote to protect journalists from state persecution. Israel has murdered almost 200,000 Palestinians in Gaza, most of them women and children. Starmer at one point defended Israel’s right to deprive Palestinians of food, water and fuel, then later denied ever saying it.
Since he deceived his way into the Labour party leadership, Skwawkbox has warned that Starmer would increase repression of protest and dissent if he got into power. He became PM courtesy of the fascist Reform ‘party’, which gifted Labour a large number of seats. Of the ninety-eight seats in which Reform came second in July’s general election, Labour won eighty-nine, a number higher than its eventual parliamentary majority despite receiving far fewer votes than Corbyn’s Labour in 2017 and the supposedly-disastrous 2019 general election.
Skwawkbox condemns state intimidation of journalists and journalism.
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