Journalist and former ambassador detained; laptop/ phone confiscated after #FreeAssangeNow trip

Police state strikes journalistic freedom again

Journalist, human rights activist and former UK ambassador Craig Murray, who was also the whistleblower who revealed war crimes in Uzbekistan as part of the so-called ‘War on Terror’ – was detained on Monday 16 October by UK security forces under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, on his return from Iceland.

Murray had travelled to Iceland to visit other campaigners working for the freedom of wrongly-jailed Wikileaks journalist Julian Assange and also took part in a demonstration outside Iceland’s Alþingi parliament against Israeli war crimes and genocide in Gaza.

Murray’s electronics, including his laptop and phone, were confiscated and he was questioned about the pro-Assange activists he met and his attendance at the pro-Palestinian demonstration.

Murray is a former UK ambassador who became a journalist and exposed off-book meetings between Tory ministers and the then-Israeli ambassador. He was jailed for eight months, serving half the sentence before release, after a farcical conviction in a Scottish court for supposed ‘jigsaw identification’, even though so-called ‘mainstream’ media had actually identified the person involved and Murray had not. Alba Party MP Kenny MacAskill called Murray’s sentencing:

vindictive and a sad day for Scottish justice.

Murray’s detention, which looks like an attempt to punish and intimidate for not toeing the Establishment line, is the latest in a deeply worrying trend of UK government assaults on journalistic freedom. As well as Assange’s continued imprisonment and the government’s eagerness to deport him to the US despite the collapse of the US government’s case when its key witness admitted he had been lying all along, investigative journalist Kit Klarenberg was detained in May in a similar fashion to Murray, suffering the confiscation of electronics and the compromising of legally-protected journalistic confidentiality.

Klarenberg had exposed 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.

He also exposed UK plans to destroy the Crimea-Russia Kerch Bridge, the CIA’s recruitment of two 9/11 hijackers and abuse of the Official Secrets Act by Tory MPs. The assault on journalism is not limited to the Tory government. ‘Red Tory’ ‘opposition’ leader Keir Starmer infamously abstained on a vote to protect journalists from persecution by the UK government and has backed an array of laws against freedom of expression and accountability for state agents.

Solidarity with Craig Murray and all journalists of good faith against the burgeoning fascism of the UK Establishment.

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