How free is information?
Funny how some of the most important issues only come out by sheer chance. It's just happened again - we only found out that 2 alleged terrorism suspects, so dangerous that they had to be subject to control orders, had escaped and have been at large for 2 months and 2 weeks respectively, because someone leaked the security breaches to the media.
Just before that came to light, there were the cases of another 2 terror suspects being heard by the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC). The SIAC meets behind closed doors. Evidence in both cases had been submitted by the intelligence serivces. It was found that the evidence submitted in one case contradicted that submitted in the other - not by any formal rules of disclosure, but only because the same barrister happened to be representing both suspects.
It's all reminiscent of that earlier flagrant example when we were told, just before the Iraq War, that a deadly ricin plot had been uncovered, to frighten us about the imminent threat of terrorism, only to discover two years later, at the trial of the Algerian involved that there was no ricin and no plot and that the story, in the words of the defence counsel was "a tapestry of lies and manipulation."
Now, to cap it all , the Government is cracking down. Not on deceit, but on the Freedom of Information Act which it itself introduced (and very welcome at that) by imposing a very tight cost cap which, by aggregating requests across a period or organisation is likely to ensure that requests for more contentious information are rejected as too expensive.
Comments
Gordon Brown promised, in his recent Chatham House speech regarding "terrorist finance", an Order in Council. This has now been published online (see SpyBlog here
Note the "Get Out of Jail Free Card" for the Treasury, namely:
Section 18 The Crown
(2) No contravention by the Crown of a provision of this Order makes the Crown criminally liable;
[...]
What possible justification is there for the Treasury to exempt itself from criminal liability, if they do not intend to get up to sneaky and illegal activities ?
An interesting discussion of the SIAC 'MK' contradictory MI5 evidence case is here
Posted by: Tom | October 24, 2006 01:28 PM