Europe concerned as fascist Britain detains journalists and invokes the spectre of Hitlers Germany

Mr  Jagland  Secretary General from the Council of Europe sent the letter below to the UK Home Secretary Theresa May.   The Council of Europe is  concerned  about Britain's breech of European Human Rights and the chilling effect  on freedom of expression.  His letter bemoans  the detention of David Mirander the partner of  Guardian Journalist Glen  Greenwald and the theft by the UK police of  Mirander's  property.

Euorpe ignores  the arrest and jailing of journalists and their families at its peril.  Two world wars which ravaged Europe attest to the danger of allowing a pariah state like the UK  to devolve into a Police State where dissenters are  arrested, interrogated  and jailed.

Leah McGrath Goodman first Journlaist to be detained by the British Police at Heathrow under the Terrorist Act

The first  journalist to be detained  at Heathrow Airport was US journalist Leah McGrath Goodman.   Leah McGrath had written some revealing stories about the systematic child abuse in Jersey and she was returning the UK to meet other journalists. The British Police  detained her,  kept her for 12  hours, interrogated her, and seized her property. Leah  was banned from entering the UK and deported back to the USA.   Leah was not writing about  Government secrets she was writing  about little children who had been sexually  abused raped  and tortured in a children's homes.

This is  what happened to her in her own words  " took me to an empty room beneath the airport and simply locked the door behind me. I did not at any time consent to being imprisoned. My luggage, wallet, phone, bank cards and my identification were taken from me."  

I asked the guards what was happening and I was handed a piece of paper that said, “You have been detained under paragraph 16 of Schedule 2 to the 1971 Act or arrested under paragraph 17 of Schedule 2 of that Act.”

What did this mean? Was I being arrested? No one would say. I was fingerprinted and photographed. I asked the personnel watching me if I could call my solicitor or my consulate. “That’s what people always say,” one of the staffers said. I asked: What are my rights? A second staffer answered: “This is the border. You have no rights.”

Leah McGrath

It got worse from there. For several hours, I waited for any concrete information about how long I would be trapped in a basement. The border guards repeatedly told me they needed time to go through my luggage and papers before deciding what questions to ask me. This struck me as an attempt to reverse-engineer a case against me. I demanded to return to the States unless there were grounds to keep me there. I was told by the border officials they could make things much more painful if I did not cooperate.

At this point, I wanted to call my family to let then know where I was, but this, too, was denied. None of the officers would provide their full names and the paperwork they signed and occasionally handed me was indecipherable. Closed-circuit TV cameras were everywhere, but none of them took audio recording (which made sense, seeing what the officers were saying to me).

The fascist world depicted by Terry Gilliam in the film Brazil is alive and well under the Heathrow airport.

In all, I was there from 0645 GMT to 1900 GMT, 12 hours without food or sleep on the back of a redeye flight. Ultimately, I was denied entry to the UK and sent back to the U.S., the black stamp of death I’d always heard about, but never seen, punched in my passport.

 The two officers who interrogated me later that day asked very personal questions — some of them about where I lived, my exact addresses in New York and the Channel Islands, and some of them about the people who were closest to me. I was deeply reluctant to discuss my personal relationships or my addresses, as I got the feeling security and safety were not high on the UK Border Force’s priority list.

Once the questions had ended, there was another hours-long wait, after which I was informed that I was being ousted. By the time I received the verdict, I did not care anymore; I just wanted to sleep, shower and eat — things, by the way, you cannot do under Heathrow Airport. Flying home, I lay across the plane seats and cried.

Read her full story http://leahmcgrathgoodman.com/2012/06/29/anarchy-in-the-uk/