From the ‘if you think we have it bad here department’ more tales of jolly old England’s stiff-upper lipped charge into a full blown fascist state have surfaced in the last day. First being that human rights attorney Jesselyn Radack who assists in the representation of former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower was detained and harassed by goons at London’s Heathrow Airport. While the Queen’s subjects aren’t subjected to the same sort of ritual humiliation that American travelers are by the government sanctioned bullies, petty power freaks, pedophiles and thieves that the TSA regularly employs in The Homeland the Brits are slowly morphing into the Norsefire party style of rule familiar to viewers of the movie “V for Vendetta”. Not that upping the ante with the detaining and threatening of law abiding citizens should be new to our Anglo-Saxon counterparts across the pond, they were after all into the Empire business well before we were but their new level of abuse of purported anti-terrorist laws to harass political enemies is really pushing the envelope anymore.
Radack is a former ethics adviser to the Justice Department ran afoul of the Bushreich in the early days of the phony and endless “War on Terror” for speaking out about official mistreatment of captured battlefield trophy John Walker Lindh. Remember him? He was one of the first targets of the national “two-minutes hate” that the government used to whip Americans into a blood fury for vengeance in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks. It took a lot of courage to speak out in those days which unfortunately for our now collapsing republic wasn’t widespread allowing the fascist juggernaut that has now embodied itself within the Obama regime along with his criminal NSA and legion of assassins who enforce his official “kill list”. Had more people actually stood up to the bastards then we would not be mired in the lawless morass of war, economic decay, futility and national dumbness that we are today. So Radack has surely earned every bit of enmity directed at her by the authoritarian state in both the U.S. and U.K. She provided the below account on the liberal radio program Democracy Now:
Jesselyn, welcome back to Democracy Now! Describe what happened at Heathrow on Sunday.
JESSELYN RADACK: I was trying to enter through customs, which at Heathrow is called the Border Force, and I was directed to a very specific station rather than the regular line. And after the first question, which is, "Why are you here?" which is a normal question, things just got more bizarre as we went along. I said that I was here to see friends. They wanted me to be more specific. I said, "In the Sam Adams Association," the group that awarded Edward Snowden the award last year—I didn’t add that part. And then they asked for the names of the people in the group. And so I gave names of people who are publicly known to be members. And then they asked where we were meeting, and I said at the Ecuadorean embassy. And they asked, "With Julian Assange?" And I said, "Yes." But then, at that point, I was asked why I had been to Russia twice in the past three months. And I said, "Because I have a client there." And they asked, "Who?" And I said, "Edward Snowden." And then, this was the most bizarre thing: They said, "Who is Edward Snowden?" And I just said matter-of-factly, "He is a whistleblower and an asylee." They next asked, "Who is Bradley Manning?" And I said, "A whistleblower. And then they asked, "Where is Bradley Manning?" And I said, "In jail." And he said, "So, he’s a criminal." And I said that he’s a political prisoner. And then they said, "But you represent Snowden." And I said, "Yes, I’m a human rights attorney, and I’m one of his legal advisers."
But I found that entire line of questioning very jarring and very unnerving. I didn’t know what kind of answer I was supposed to give. I mean, obviously, it’s like asking, "Who is President Obama?" They’re asking about some of the most famous people on the planet. Obviously, I have an attorney-client relationship to protect. I’m not going to get into meetings that I’ve had with clients. And only some of my clients are public, Edward Snowden being one of them, so that’s why I could answer that question. But I walked away from the interview just shaking. During the interview, I was fine. I maintained my composure. But I walked away just shaking and just upset. I just cried. It was very intimidating and very, very, again, unnerving to be asked that line of questions as an attorney. And I don’t think journalists or attorneys should be harassed or intimidated at the border, and it’s very disturbing to me that this has occurred in the U.S. and the U.K., and I’ve heard that this happened to someone recently in Germany, though I don’t know the details of that. But certainly, as an attorney, having gone to 14 different countries in the past year, I have never endured a line of questioning like that. You get the usual, "Hi. Why are you here? Who are you seeing? Where are you staying?" But not, "Who do you—who is Edward Snowden? Where is Edward Snowden? Where is Bradley Manning? Do you represent Bradley Manning?" which I wouldn’t even be allowed to answer, obviously, because that would be attorney-client privileged information. I, in fact, do not represent him, but it would have put me in a really difficult situation of actually making a false statement if I did represent him and had to answer a question like that.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Jesselyn, could you talk about the significance of the inhibited persons list? How did you first learn about it, and are you in fact on it?
JESSELYN RADACK: As hard—as a graduate or an alumnus of the no-fly list, you’re never officially told, "You are on this list." It’s implied, and you hear it. This apparently is some list maintained in Great Britain, but originating from the Department of Homeland Security. And I wish I could tell you more about it, but that’s just what I was able to learn from speaking with other people who have had difficulty getting out of the U.K. My difficulty was getting in. I’m hoping I don’t have any difficulty getting out. But an inhibited persons list, to me, is another kind of watch list, just like how ridiculous it was that I spent a number of years on the no-fly list, when I obviously posed no direct threat. To Snowden, I’m an attorney doing my job, and being a human rights lawyer does not pose any kind of immigration violation or safety threat to entering the United Kingdom, so I’m not sure why I was subjected to that interrogation other than to try to intimidate me from doing my job.
Radack mentioned being placed on something called the “inhibited persons list” which seems to translate into some sort of Gestapo style conglomeration that is handed out to the low paid attack dogs of tyrannical governments with orders to make lives miserable. Now this is only (at this time at least) apparently being used for interrogations at checkpoints however with the NSA’s data-mining ongoing and the entrenched criminals in government hellbent at protecting their ill-gotten power it will only be a matter of time until “inhibited persons list” becomes “terrorist pickup list” – just ask Supreme Court Justice Scalia.
The second piece of news coming out of the U.K. is that the courts have ruled in favor of the Norsefire goons that their detention of David Miranda who is Glenn Greenwald’s partner for harassment under the same misused anti-terrorism laws has been fully blessed by her majesty’s royal scepter. In his typical style of ‘fuck you too’ exposure of hypocrisy and scum Greenwald blasts jolly old England and at a much deeper level the centuries old con game of royalty itself. From The Intercept I excerpt a choice piece of this very entertaining bludgeoning:
That such repressive measures come from British political culture is to be expected. The political elite of that country cling desperately to 17th century feudal traditions. Grown adults who have been elected or appointed to nothing run around with a straight face insisting that they be called “Lord” and “Baroness” and other grandiose hereditary titles of the landed gentry. They bow and curtsey to a “Queen”, who lives in a “palace”, and they call her sons “Prince”. They embrace a wide range of conceits and rituals of a long-ago collapsed empire. The wig-wearing presiding judge who issued this morning’s ruling equating journalism with terrorism is addressed as “Lord Justice Laws”, best known for previously approving the use of evidence to detain people that had been derived from torture at Guantanamo (he can be seen here).
None of this behavior bears any relationship to actual reality: it’s as though the elite political class of an entire nation somehow got stuck in an adolescent medieval fantasy game. But the political principles of monarchy, hereditary privilege, rigid class stratification, and feudal entitlement embedded in all of this play-acting clearly shape the repressive mentality and reverence for state authority which Her Majesty’s Government produces. That journalism disliked by the state can be actually deemed not just a crime but “terrorism” seems a natural by-product of this type of warped elite mindset, as does the fact that much of the British press led the way in demanding that the Guardian’s journalism be criminalized (not unlike how many members of the American media have become the most devoted defenders of the NSA and have taken the lead in demonizing the journalistic transparency brought to that and other government agencies).
He really hits the bullseye on that rant. There is truly nothing as obscene to human dignity, individual control of one’s own destiny and the health of entire societies as the very concept of royalty. Our forefathers fought a bloody revolution against the descendants of those flock of blood-sucking parasites whose aged, bloated toad of a Queen is ensconced at Buckingham Palace leeching off of the British people who meekly accept the ruler of a completely unentitled ruling class. It would seem that in The Homeland these days that the sacrifices of our forebears have too easily forgotten as our own ‘leaders’ fancy themselves as royalty with the divine right of kings to lord it over the rest of us.
The recipe for cutting out this rot is revolution and it can’t come soon enough.
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