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Secrets and Lies
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
sent by MichaelP
[Whistleblowing is right even under the Brit's Official Secrets Act.
But the Brit authorities lie to protect themselves ! -M]
The Guardian - Jan 11, 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2238973,00.html
National security is being invoked not to protect us
but to shield politicians from embarrassment
by Richard Norton-Taylor
Years ago, when the Thatcher government reformed the Official Secrets
Act after a jury's speedy acquittal of Clive Ponting - indicted for
exposing lies about the sinking of the Argentine cruiser the Belgrano
during the Falklands conflict - we were promised that, in future,
prosecutions would be brought only when genuine issues of national
security were at stake.
New Labour promised less secrecy. More recently, Gordon Brown promised
even greater transparency. Wednesday's abrupt collapse of the case
against Derek Pasquill, the Foreign Office civil servant charged under
the act, shows the pitfalls facing governments when they break their
promises. Pasquill's crime was leaking documents about secret CIA
rendition flights and contact with Muslim groups. One document included
a warning from the FO's top official that the Iraq war and UK foreign
policy were fuelling Muslim extremism in Britain.
The prosecution should not have gone ahead in the first place. What is
now clear is that FO officials admitted almost two years ago the leaks
caused no damage within the meaning of the act. That this admission did
not come to light until this week smells like an attempt to pervert the
course of justice. It would not be the first time FO officials have
been implicated in such practices.
Official secrecy seems more alive now than for decades. There is more
than one case in which government lawyers are trying to suppress
information - not to protect national security, but to shield the state
from embarrassment or shame.
On Monday the Guardian and other papers will challenge an attempt by
the prosecution to hold a murder trial in secret. Wang Yam, a financial
trader, is accused of murdering Allan Chappelow, an 85-year-old recluse
who lived in Hampstead, north London. Yam was arrested in Switzerland.
A British customs investigator faces the prospect of an Official
Secrets Act prosecution over suspicions that he exposed how US and
British intelligence agencies interfered in his attempts to halt a
nuclear smuggling ring. Police have searched the home of Atif Amin for
evidence that he passed classified information to the authors of a book
recently published in the US, America and the Islamic Bomb: the Deadly
Compromise. Its authors, David Armstrong and Joseph Trento, say that in
2000, Amin uncovered evidence of the Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer
Khan's involvement in establishing Libya's nuclear programme, but was
ordered to drop his inquiries and return home at the request of the CIA
and MI6. Amin was in charge of Operation Akin, an investigation into
links between UK firms and the illegal network run by Khan, who helped
build Pakistan's nuclear arsenal.
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Defence has obtained a gagging order
preventing the media repeating allegations of abuse of Iraqis by
British soldiers. A high court order bans papers and broadcasters from
publishing details of the case reported in the Guardian two months ago.
The order follows a legal challenge to the MoD's refusal to set up an
independent inquiry into the allegations, which lawyers say is required
by the Human Rights Act. Gagging orders are supposed to prevent a jury
being prejudiced at an imminent trial, yet the MoD has repeatedly said
there is no evidence of any wrongdoing by the soldiers and so no
prospect of a trial. Indeed, it is precisely the MoD's refusal to
prosecute soldiers that lies behind this high court case.
There are genuine threats to national security and to our public and
personal safety. It is a dangerous abuse if a government hoists the
flag of national security and deploys the Official Secrets Act when all
it is really trying to do is protect itself from embarrassment.
[Richard Norton-Taylor is the Guardian's security affairs editor.]
*
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