Is a terrorist a person who murders civilians, or attempts to, or wants to?
In the United Kingdom, a law from the year 2000 defines terrorist as a person involved “in the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism.” If authorities suspect someone fits that definition, the law grants them special terror powers to suspend the person’s rights and detain them to determine if the person is a terrorist.
On Sunday, U.K. authorities invoked that power for a shocking detention. They held David Miranda, a Brazilian national and partner of The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, without rights or contact with outsiders for nine hours.
The U.K. does not accuse Miranda of being a terrorist. They knew who he was. And they haven’t offered any information to prove that it took them nine hours to figure out he wasn’t a terrorist. Instead, it looks like the U.K. exploited a special power for fighting terrorism in order to harass the partner of a journalist who has been reporting on government surveillance.
In response, the very British politicians who wrote the Terrorism Act are decrying the operation as an abuse of a security power to intimidate the press.
Miranda’s lawyers went to court asking for a declaration that the detention illegal and for the return of property seized by authorities. The incident is causing international outrage because abusing security powers to harass the press is a hallmark of authoritarian dictatorships — not open democracies.
And yet here in the U.S., some prominent voices are actually defending the U.K.’s action. First, critics say that because Miranda is not a professional reporter, he shouldn’t have been carrying any materials for The Guardian. Second, there’s the aggressive allegation that because classified material might be on his computer, Miranda is basically a drug mule. New Yorker legal affairs expert Jeffrey Toobin said, “I don’t want to be unkind, but he was a mule. He was given something, he didn’t know what it was, from one person to pass to another at the other end of an airport. Our prisons are full of drug mules.”









