People With A Moral Core

Even though it had been heavily edited by Elbit, the security guards’ bodycam footage played in court still showed them wielding whips and sledgehammers against the protestors, in breach of the Prevention of Crime Act 1953. The Epstein British State and the rest of the Epstein Israel Lobby clearly expected 12 members of the general public to regard that as perfectly reasonable and even commendable. Talk about an unassimilable parallel society. Craig Murray writes:

As the trial finished at Woolwich Crown Court of the six Palestine Action activists who entered the Filton factory to destroy Israeli killer drones, Starmer, Cooper, Lammy and Mahmood are left bereft of a single guilty verdict in the case on which they relied heavily to label Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation.

I could not, on pain of imprisonment, tell you this during the trial. One item produced by the prosecution as evidence was the notebook of Charlotte Head, on which she had written details from her training session with Palestine Action and of the proposed direct action against Elbit’s drone factory.

The first ten pages of her notes were about the Israeli weapons company Elbit, their footprint in the UK, their corporate structure and the weapons they manufacture, and the evidence of the use of their weaponry in the genocide in Gaza.

The jury were shown the notebook but were specifically not allowed to see the first ten pages. Throughout the trial anything that referred to the crimes of Elbit, their role in the mass killing and mutilation of women and children, and their cosy relationship with the British government, was excluded from the jury. The judge continually stopped the defence lawyers from asking or saying anything about who Elbit are or why their property was being attacked.

The defendants were not permitted therefore to explain to the jury why they did what they did – which you might have believed was a pretty fundamental right. The jury were additionally, in effect, instructed by Judge Johnson to convict on the least serious charge, that of criminal damage.

But despite the state taking every possible precaution to ensure that the state got its convictions in this show trial, the jury refused to find that trying to stop Genocide is a crime.

This trial was fundamental to the government’s argument that Palestine Action is a terrorist organisation. And the key to that was the accusation that Palestine Action from the start intended harm to people, not just to property. That is why these defendants were all charged with “aggravated burglary”.

Aggravated burglary is an extremely serious charge, carrying a potential life sentence. It is the offence of breaking into a property with the intent to use a weapon. On aggravated burglary, all six defendants were found resoundingly Not Guilty.

So the attempt to portray Palestine Action as an organisation involved in violence against persons has fallen flat on its face. Because the jury could see it was stupid and obviously untrue.

When it comes to events after the activists were attacked by security guards, three of the six were found not guilty of the charge of “violent disorder”. On three others the jury could not reach a verdict.

Most interesting of all perhaps was the charge of criminal damage to Elbit’s machinery and instruments of genocide. Here Judge Johnson to all intents and purposes had instructed the jury to convict. Yet enough of the jury could not accept that stopping genocide is a crime.

The final question was the charge against Samuel Corner of Grievous Bodily Harm with Intent. This was the famous incident where the security guards attacked the defendants with weapons and there was a melee as they defended themselves.

It is worth stating that the tabloid stories and right-wing meme of “a policewoman’s spine was fractured” was always utter nonsense. As the defence closing speech stated:

The prosecution have said it was a fracture to the spine, a deliberate choice of words which although technically accurate, conjure up a break, a snapping of the spinal vertebrae. Maybe that’s what the jury had in mind until they saw the CT scan – it was actually an injury that wasn’t obvious. The doctors looking at the first X-rays didn’t identify any bone damage, nor in an MRI later.

The injury didn’t require surgery and Sergeant Evans was advised to take painkillers and do physiotherapy. The agreed facts state from medical evidence that you’d expect such a fracture to heal in six to twelve weeks, with full healing in three to six months, and no long-term consequences.

The unfortunate policewoman suffered no damage at all to her spinal cord. She had a possible hairline fracture to the wing of one vertebra. That there was any fracture at all was never definitive from the X-rays and MRIs. Whether it reached the bar of grievous bodily harm was disputed; how it was caused was disputed; and whether there was any intent to harm was disputed. The refusal of the jury to convict was completely consistent with the evidence heard in court.

This has driven right-wingers into a frenzy with completely false claims about the extent of the injury, and continued reference to a highly edited brief video clip.

That video clip is extremely important because it represents the height of the state’s attempt to use this incident to demonise Palestine Action. The police were permitted, during the course of the trial, to release a single and highly edited clip of video said to represent the injury of Sergeant Evans by a sledgehammer. A great deal of other video evidence was not released. This resulted in a massive media frenzy.

Even before this, Yvette Cooper and Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Mark Rowley had caused massive prejudice by stating that a policewoman had been attacked with a sledgehammer.

None of these deliberate attempts to affect the trial was censured by the judge nor resulted in any proceedings for contempt of court. Yet we were strictly told we absolutely could not mention that the judge was withholding the evidence about Elbit from the jury, as that would prejudice the trial and we would face contempt of court proceedings.

On Sergeant Evans, she has become a cause célèbre for the right, but I should say there is no evidence she is herself whipping this up. Her behaviour on the night was admirable. She was not herself involved in the excessive use of force – and, despite her own painful back, tended to others after the event quietened.

In my view, this prosecution was doomed by the overcharging and exaggeration used by the government to demonise Palestine Action. The “aggravated burglary” charge was ludicrous. To attempt to claim that the activists entered the factory with the intent of using weapons against people, went so far against the evidence it was bound to fail.

The massive over-exaggeration of the extent of Sergeant Evans’s injury has successfully whipped up right-wing hysteria, but did not really meet the threshold of grievous bodily harm, and the decision to add intent to that charge was again not backed by evidence.

On criminal damage, the jury plainly refused to accept the destruction of weapons of genocide was a crime. For that, I salute them. For the rest, they simply applied robust common sense to the evidence before them.

The “policewoman attacked with a sledgehammer” nonsense of course featured heavily in the English judicial review of the proscription of Palestine Action. In the Scottish judicial review, they cannot really use this – not without a caveat that a jury did not agree with them.

The Filton result is great news for the Scottish judicial review. We have to submit all the paperwork for that, in just seven working days. I hate to say this, but we are now desperately short of funds to continue this action. I cannot keep asking the same supporters to give more, but if you know people who can afford it and will contribute please activate them.

Asa Winstanley writes:

Six Palestine Action activists who broke into an Israeli arms factory in the UK have been acquitted or not convicted of all charges against them.

Campaigners told The Electronic Intifada on Wednesday that the result was a “monumental” and “total” victory.

After eight days of deliberation in January and February, the jury either acquitted or refused to convict Charlotte Head, Samuel Corner, Leona Kamio, Fatema Zainab Rajwani, Zoe Rogers and Jordan Devlin of all charges.

Five out of the six were released on bail Wednesday evening.

All six were found not guilty of aggravated burglary, the most serious charge which could have led to life sentences. The six activists were arrested on site in August 2024 and held on remand for 17 months.

They were the first of a total of 24 defendants to face trials relating to the invasion and smashing of a factory in Filton, near Bristol in the west of England, owned by a subsidiary of Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer.

The group of 24 includes some of the prisoners who recently went on a hunger strike.

Once inside, the group destroyed Israeli quadcopter drones, which have been used frequently to massacre Palestinians in Gaza.

During the trial, acquitted defendant Fatema Zainab Rajwani (a third-year film student at the time of the action) was open that, “I damaged drones which is what I went in to do.” She commented on video footage shown to the court, saying, “That is me dismantling a quadcopter drone with a crowbar,” and explaining that the group wanted to “document the presence of quadcopters and [Elbit’s] crimes.”

Fourteen other defendants were rounded up by Britain’s feared Counter Terrorism Police, in a series of violent pre-dawn raids in November 2024 and July last year.

A Palestine Action source told The Electronic Intifada on Wednesday that the remaining Filton 24 prisoners will now appeal to be released on bail.

Such prisoners can usually be held on remand before trial for up to six months. But the politicization and fallacious government “terrorism” campaign against the group – in connivance with Israel – meant that the campaigners have been held on remand for as long as 17 months.

Not guilty

In addition to beating the most serious charge, the jury acquitted Fatema Zainab Rajwani, Zoe Rogers and Jordan Devlin of violent disorder. It refused to convict Charlotte Head, Samuel Corner and Leona Kamio of the same charge.

Samuel Corner was also not convicted of “grievous bodily harm with intent” for allegedly striking a police officer.

Crucially, the jury refused to convict any of the defendants of criminal damage.

Yet five of the group had admitted in court to destroying Israeli weapons and equipment belonging to Elbit at the factory.

That the jury could not reach a majority verdict on some of the lesser charges means in theory that there could be retrials in some cases – though that is not expected to have a realistic chance of success.

That is why the sixth defendant, Samuel Corner, was not immediately bailed on Wednesday. Government prosecutors asked the court for more time to decide if they wanted to pursue a retrial in relation to the grievous bodily harm charge.

The Palestine Action source also said that certain issues relating to matters under reporting restrictions imposed by the judge in this trial meant that the verdict was the best possible outcome for the group.

The source said that the verdict represented a “total victory” for the six Palestine Action campaigners.

Most of the remaining “Filton 24” group have been held on draconian remand for months – for more than a year in some cases.

But one, Sean Middlebrough, escaped during a short-term release in November last year. In an exclusive statement, he told The Electronic Intifada that he was not on the run, and was instead “refusing to be held as a prisoner of war of Israel in a British prison.”

Government ministers such as former Home Secretary Yvette Cooper attempted to portray the Filton activists as violent criminals who assaulted a police officer. The British press for the most part obediently parroted such claims and insinuations. But during this “Filton 6” trial, body-cam footage released to the jury – some of which can be viewed in the video above – showed the exact opposite: Elbit security guards apparently assaulting the activists with sledgehammers.

In a statement released on Wednesday the Filton 24 Defence Committee said the result was a “monumental victory.”

The committee detailed how the trial unfolded.

According to the committee, the verdicts demonstrated that “the jury did not accept the prosecution case that the defendants entered the Elbit weapons factory with the intention of using the items they carried as weapons.”

They said that instead the “jury agreed with the defense argument, that the defendants’ sole intention was to use the items, including sledgehammers, as tools to disarm Israeli weapons … The jury understood that it is not those who destroy Israeli weapons which are guilty, rather the guilty party is the one that deploys such weapons to commit genocide in Gaza.”

The trial also revealed that footage went missing from a number of Elbit’s internal CCTV cameras covering key angles, the committee said. The security guards’ body-worn videos had also been repeatedly turned off and on, as well as edited by Elbit.

Twenty-first century suffragettes 

Defense lawyer Rajiv Menon compared the six to the suffragettes – women who demanded the right to vote. In the early 20th century, the suffragettes were routinely denounced as “terrorists and extremists,” although “the reality of course is very different,” Menon said.

The lawyer also said that Judge Jeremy Johnson tried to exclude evidence on Elbit Systems, and interrupted when counsel for the defense asked questions about the Israeli weapons manufacturer.

Menon said that the judge “has restricted what the defendants have been allowed to tell you … what they knew about Elbit’s role in the Israeli attack on Gaza. The consequence of that is that you do not know everything that the defendants knew about Elbit before” they took action against the factory.

The lawyer told the jury that Elbit is a “massive weapons company that has played a critical role in the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians.”

At the end of the evidence, the judge told the jury that the “situation in the Middle East” and Elbit’s operations are “not relevant” to the case and directed the jury to “follow the legal directions I’ve given you and not anything else.”

The judge also issued a series of reporting restrictions on the case. As a result, I am still prevented from reporting certain details here.

Nonetheless, because the case was heard in open court, I am able to report the following.

During the trial, a juror asked whether they were allowed to acquit because the defendants genuinely believed that they were destroying weapons to prevent their use in genocide.

The judge’s response was “no.”

Trials of the remaining Filton 24 prisoners are still due to happen at some point in the future.

Blow to UK and Israel

Clare Rogers, the mother of defendant Zoe Rogers and a relentless campaigner in her own right said in the committee’s statement that “these are six young people of conscience … They had tried everything else – marches, petitions, writing to MPs, encampments … They felt they had no option but to take action themselves, to try to save as many lives as they could.” 

The verdicts are a severe blow to the UK government’s attempt to smear Palestine campaigners as violent criminals and “terrorists.” 

In a controversial move last July the home secretary banned Palestine Action as a “terrorist” group, marking the first time ever a non-violent protest group had been outlawed under Britain’s draconian Terrorism Act of 2000. 

Activist lisa minerva luxx, from the Filton 24 Defence Committee, criticized the government for prejudicing the trial: “This was a trial by media. Yvette Cooper and [Prime Minister] Keir Starmer took evidence in this case out of context and broadcast it on televisions and tabloids across the country in order to justify proscribing Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation.” With the result of a legal challenge to that ban expected any week now, the verdict also represents a serious blow to the credibility of that proscription.

This is despite the government – and even the legal system – going to the greatest lengths to try and stitch up this case.

There are also serious implications for the continuing right to trial by jury in the UK. The fact that a jury of their peers acquitted or refused to convict the first six of the Filton 24 shows the importance and the democratic potential of jury trials.

It is exactly for those reasons that the UK government is seeking to abolish, or seriously erode, the right to trial by jury in the UK. In large part, these so-called “reforms” seem to be targeted precisely at supporting Israel and preventing juries from acquitting according to their conscience.

Jonathan Cook writes:

Jurors bravely set aside social conditioning, the natural instinct we all share to defer to authority, and expectations fomented by establishment media. Instead they considered the actual evidence.

Even before the trial began, the British government had done its utmost to prejudice the proceedings against six Palestine Action activists.

It declared that they belonged to a terrorist organisation and that they were engaged in a terrorist enterprise in breaking into an Israeli weapons factory in Filton, Bristol – one, British officials avoided mentioning, that makes drones used to kill children in Gaza.

In the months before the trial, the home secretary of the time, Yvette Cooper, explicitly said her decision to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation was, in part, based on the events that had unfolded at the Filton factory. We were told the logic behind her decision – the first time a non-violent direct-action group has been proscribed in British history – would become clear through the trial.

In the midst of the proceedings, the police released a highly edited – and extremely prejudicial – video clip to present the defendants as bent on violence against the weapons factory’s security guards and police officers who later attended the scene.

Meanwhile, the judge overseeing the trial, Mr Justice Johnson, refused the admission of any testimony relating to the crimes committed by Elbit Systems. He also directed the jury to convict the Filton Six on the charge of criminal damage.

The British establishment wanted one outcome and one outcome only – and it did everything in its power to make sure it got its way.

Yet after eight days of clearly intense deliberation, the jury refused to convict the Filton Six of any of the charges against them.

They were all acquitted of the most serious charge, aggravated burglary, that could have seen them locked up for life. Three were acquitted of violent disorder, while the jury was unable to reach a decision on the other three. The jury was similarly split over the criminal damage charge, despite the extreme pressure put on them to convict by the judge.

Given the highly inflamed and politicised climate surrounding the trial, that decision required extraordinary bravery – a courage some of the jurors presumably found in the inspiring speech delivered by one of the defence barristers, Rajiv Menon. He reminded them of the 350-year-old right established in British law for juries to ignore judicial interference of the kind exercised by Mr Justice Johnson.

You can read part of that astonishing speech in the link here.

On possibly the most significant charge from the government’s point of view – of grievous bodily harm levelled against one defendant, Samuel Corner – the jury was again split. This related to a tussle with one of the sledgehammers that was being used to destroy the Israeli killer-drones. The incident led to a female police officer’s back being injured. More on that injury later.

The highly edited videos of the struggle released by the prosecution – a move that should have been held as contempt of court in a proper trial – were designed to prove the government’s case that Palestine Action is a violent organisation deserving of proscription.

(It seems it needs clarifying here for some observers that violence, in law, refers to attacks on people, not property. If Palestine Action only damages property – weapons being used to kill civilians in Gaza – that makes it a non-violent organisation and one that should never have been proscribed.)

It is important to set out why the jurors reached the decisions they did, given the widespread denunciations that have greeted their findings – not least from former home secretary Suella Braverman, now with Reform, and the current Conservative shadow home secretary, Chris Philp.

It is important to understand why the bar for conviction was never likely to be reached – and why the jury were right in refusing to convict.

The aggravated burglary charge required proving that the six defendants harboured an intention, as they broke into the factory, to use the sledgehammers they had brought with them not only to destroy the killer-drones but additionally to hurt the security guards. The prosecution was unable to provide such evidence because it did not exist. The jury, therefore, had no choice but to acquit.

In fact, it was incredible overreach to imagine that such a charge would ever stick. It was brought for one reason only: because it was critical to building the government’s case that Palestine Action is a terrorist organisation. In other words, it was an entirely politicised charge. The jury saw right through the legal chicanery.

The government’s fallback position was the violent disorder charge, which still suggested violent intent from the activists. The problem once again, however, was that the charge clearly did not fit the events the jury watched for themselves from the much longer video footage.

Violent disorder is a charge usually associated with football hooligans or groups of people who start pub brawls. It is meant to prosecute those who conspire to cause random acts violence that innocent bystanders believe threaten their safety. However, the longer video footage – or rather the bits that Elbit Systems had not withheld or destroyed – showed that it was actually the security guards who initiated much of the violence.

In violent disorder, there is a defence: of self-defence. In three of the cases, the jury was sure that the defendants had been protecting themselves or their fellow activists from violence being directed at them from the security guards. That is why they acquitted. The video evidence, incomplete as it was, was presumably more ambiguous in the case of the other three, which is why the jury could not reach agreement.

On the least significant charge, criminal damage, the judge had made clear he expected a conviction – and he tried to rig the trial to get that conviction by stripping the defendants of the only defence that was available, of “lawful excuse”. The defendants’ argument was that, yes, they had caused criminal damage but it was justified in stopping a far graver crime, that of genocide.

Despite the huge pressure on them to submit to the judge’s demand, enough of the jury clearly thought that, in this case, criminal damage – in the form of smashing up killer drones – was a reasonable action. It is quite extraordinary that the hill politicians like Braverman and Philp, and sections of the British public, want to die on is defending Israel’s right to make killer-drones on British soil. Thank God, we had people with a moral core, not these ghouls, on the jury.

On the single charge of grievous bodily harm against Corner, the jury could again not reach a decision. He is still on remand, with the danger he will be retried on this charge and possibly others. It is, therefore, difficult to say much beyond the fact that, given the clamour to convict him from politicians, the media and Israel worshippers, there must have been pretty clear extenuating circumstances that led some of the jurors to believe a conviction would be unreasonable.

Unlike much of the public, who have been inflamed by the official story that a “police woman’s back was broken”, the jury heard the actual medical diagnosis. In his closing speech, Corner’s defence barrister set out the facts: 

The doctors looking at the first X-rays didn’t identify any bone damage, nor in an MRI later. The injury didn’t require surgery and Sergeant Evans was advised to take painkillers and do physiotherapy. The agreed facts state from medical evidence that you’d expect such a fracture to heal in six to twelve weeks, with full healing in three to six months, and no long-term consequences.

Keir Starmer’s government – a government actively complicit in Israel’s genocide – has every incentive to keep the Palestine Action trials going. It much prefers a public conversation about whether opponents of genocide are violent criminals and terrorists than one about whether British government ministers should be in the dock at the Hague for complicity in crimes against humanity.

It is likely the government will seek at least some retrials in this case and try to secure convictions against other Palestine Action activists whose trials are still pending. It will hope that, sooner or later, it gets the victory it needs to retrospectively justify its proscription and silencing of Palestine Action.

From the government’s point of view, it is a win-win. If it can get a compliant enough jury to win one of these trials, it will say it was right all along to declare Palestine Action a terrorist organisation. If it doesn’t secure any convictions, it will argue that these failed trials prove that juries need abolishing – an agenda it is already pursuing precisely to stop juries acquitting people the government wants convicted for political reasons.

Sadly, too many onlookers are falling for this legal charade, denouncing the jury’s decision in the Filton Six trial as if they know more about what happened at the weapons factory that night than the jurors who sat through 10 weeks of evidence and spent eight days deliberating on that evidence.

That is a strange, unhealthy kind of self-regard – and too many people are currently engaged in it.

A final point. Yes, juries can make mistakes. But that is highly unlikely to have been a problem in this trial.

Miscarriages of justice typically occur when the jury’s own socially conditioned biases, bolstered by judicial and political pressures, take priority over the evidence, or when the evidence is rigged to secure a conviction.

They happen in trials like the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four in the 1970s, when a series of men were wrongly jailed for IRA-related bombings in UK cities simply because they were Irish. In these cases, the juries assumed that the police had not fabricated evidence and had not coerced confessions through torture. They were wrong. The legal system was more interested in securing a conviction than justice.

The biases we hold as self-evident truths are always socially constructed – and the people who get to construct them are the political and media establishments that dominate the flow of information we receive from cradle to grave.

Those same political and media establishments exert most pressure when they see their own class interests under threat.

In short, the pressures on the jury in this case were in one direction only: to convict the Filton Six.

Transcripts show the judge – the trial’s highest authority figure – barely hiding his own biases in favour of conviction.

In refusing to convict, the jury had to set aside its social conditioning, the natural instinct we all share to defer to authority, and the wider social expectations fomented by the establishment media.

The route of least resistance – the one most people take – would have been to have found all, or at least some, of the Filton Six guilty – not least Corner, who had been turned into a hate figure by the media. It is a sign of how strongly the evidence pointed in a different direction that the jury still refused to do as it was told.

And the following comment was left anonymously on yesterday’s post about this case:

Samuel Corner has been denied bail despite receiving no convictions in the first trial relating to the dismantling of weapons at Elbit Systems’ Bristol weapons factory. The other five defendants in the case have had bail granted following their acquittals on aggravated burglary. Samuel was acquitted of aggravated burglary along with all defendants. He wasn’t convicted on any charge including the charge of GBH against a police officer. Powerful testimony was given in court over the circumstances surrounding the incident and how Sam acted defensively. The CPS have asked for time to decide if they will retry the defendants on the charges of which there were no verdicts. Nobody should be held in prison under these circumstances. Free Samuel Corner. Shut Elbit down. LIFT THE BAN ON PALESTINE ACTION.

As was this one:

Banning Palestine Action was justified by falsely claiming the group had committed three acts of "terrorism". Now, those claims are completely falling apart.

The first supposed "terror" attack was an action in 2022 in Thales, Glasgow, when five activists scaled the roof of the weapons factory. They were charged with breach of the peace. It was later exposed as never being considered terrorism by Police Scotland.

The second was an action against Elbit's weapons factory in Kent, where actionists allegedly caused over a £1 million in damages. After Palestine Action was banned, the CPS dropped the most serious charge of 'aggravated burglary' in this case. It is yet to go to trial.

The third was the Filton action. The first six to go on trial were acquitted by a jury of aggravated burglary and some counts of violent disorder. The jury did not convict any of them of any offences, showing they didn't believe their actions were criminal.

This has left the proscription case against Palestine Action in tatters. It is only a matter of time before the ban will be lifted.

To the first, Kemi Badenoch’s televised contempt of court ought to make a retrial impossible. To the second, prepare for a false flag.