For nine hours. For being
Glenn Greenwald's partner:
Glenn Greenwald's partner was detained by authorities at London's Heathrow airport for nearly nine hours, the Guardian reported on Sunday.
David Miranda, who lives with Greenwald in Brazil, was held under a controversial provision of Britain's Terrorism Act that allows
police to stop, question and search people without having to prove any
reasonable suspicion, and without a lawyer needing to be present. The
paper said he was held for the maximum amount of time allowed under the
law...
Glenn Greenwald reacts:
This is obviously a rather profound escalation of their attacks on the
news-gathering process and journalism. It's bad enough to prosecute and
imprison sources. It's worse still to imprison journalists who report
the truth. But to start detaining the family members and loved ones of
journalists is simply despotic. Even the Mafia had ethical rules against
targeting the family members of people they feel threatened by. But the
UK puppets and their owners in the US national security state obviously
are unconstrained by even those minimal scruples.
If the UK and US governments believe that tactics like this are going
to deter or intimidate us in any way from continuing to report
aggressively on what these documents reveal, they are beyond deluded. If
anything, it will have only the opposite effect: to embolden us even
further. Beyond that, every time the US and UK governments show their
true character to the world - when they prevent the Bolivian President's
plane from flying safely home, when they threaten journalists with
prosecution, when they engage in behavior like what they did today - all
they do is helpfully underscore why it's so dangerous to allow them to
exercise vast, unchecked spying power in the dark.
So this is how civil liberties disappear. It's a continuation of the West's uncivil reaction to 9/11. Did the terrorists win? Cliché, yes, but on point. For now it seems they have.
No comments:
Post a Comment