The FCO and public interest immunity
‘The Foreign Office (FCO) solicited the letter from the US State Department that forced British judges to block the disclosure of CIA files documenting the torture of a British resident held in Guantánamo Bay, The Observer can reveal.
‘The letter said that the release of papers relating to Binyam Mohamed would damage future intelligence sharing between the two countries.
‘A former senior State Department official said that it was the Foreign Office that initiated the "cover-up" by asking the State Department to send the letter so that it could be introduced into the court proceedings. (…)
‘The former senior State Department official said: "Far from being a threat, it was solicited [by the Foreign Office]." The Foreign Office asked for it in writing. They said: 'Give us something in writing so that we can put it on the record.' If you give us a letter explaining you are opposed to this, then we can provide that to the court."
‘The letter, sent by the State Department's top legal adviser John Bellinger to foreign secretary David Miliband's legal adviser, Daniel Bethlehem, on 21 August last year, said: "We want to affirm in the clearest terms that the public disclosure of these documents or of the information contained therein is likely to result in serious damage to US national security and could harm existing intelligence-sharing arrangements."’
The reasons advanced by the Foreign Secretary in the Binyam Mohamed case for asserting public interest immunity are precisely the same reasons as he put forward in his PII certificate in the current Lockerbie appeal. It was claimed in the Appeal Court by the Advocate General that the UK Government had tried, but failed, to obtain the consent of the “foreign power” that supplied the document(s) which Mr Megrahi’s legal team sought to have disclosed and the non-disclosure of which at the original trial formed the basis of one of the grounds on which the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission held that his conviction may have amounted to a miscarriage of justice.
One is now left wondering just how hard the FCO tried to get the foreign power’s consent to disclosure, and whether it was suggested to the foreign power that the FCO’s preferred response to the request would be “No”.
Behind all this lies a much deeper and sinister agreement that corrupts everything within British intelligence and legal systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Agreement
ReplyDeleteThe UK is not allowed to do anything that infringes US interests.
Interesting. Yet, there are still citizens believing that The Evil Impire will rectify itself against its own interests, beyond a not-too-important case now and then, to show that the system works.
ReplyDeleteEven in totally drop-dead obvious cases, like Lockerbie and McKie, we do not see any other prosecutions than those against the innocents. Simply because most people do not really care much about the system they live in until they see an immediate close threat.
They came for all the others one by one, I said nothing. And then they came for me.
DeleteECHELON, as exposed by Snowden, has been running for more than a decade. It runs between the US, GCHQ Cheltenham and other places, monitoring and recording every phone call and email around the world. You have no secrets. Look up ECHELON on the web. Be ready for a shock.