Given the dog-like determination of governments and corporations to conceal what what they are really up to, unofficial leaks are an effective way of holding power to account. For journalists, they are a crucial lever for getting information to the the public about what is actually going on behind the veil of official secrecy. Over the years, I’ve had my share of anonymous brown envelopes in the post, stuffed with photocopied documents revealing what officialdom doesn’t want you to know.
So it’s good news that the foreign office official Derek Pasquill won’t be going to prison for sending secret government documents to the New Statesman political editor and ex-Observer journalist Martin Bright after the prosecution dropped official secrets charges against him at the Old Bailey on Wednesday.
But how come Pasquill walked free from court while another civil servant, David Keogh, and a researcher, Leo O’Connor, were jailed last May for breaching the Official Secrets Act by passing a secret government memo to the Labour MP Anthony Clarke?
The case against Pasquill collapsed after it emerged senior officials in the Foreign Office had privately argued that, far from damaging national security, the leaks had helped provoke a “constructive debate”. Potentially even trickier was the fact that the defence planned to call cabinet ministers such as David Miliband, Ruth Kelly and Hazel Blears to make its case.
A couple of Pasquill’s leaks were about British involvement in US secret rendition – otherwise known as kidnapping – of terror suspects and the radicalising impact of British foreign policy on Britain’s Muslim community.
But most were about the government’s policy of engaging with non-violent Islamist movements, both in Britain and abroad – and its relations with the Muslim Council of Britain umbrella organisation. Pasquill thought this was “appeasement” – and so did Martin Bright, who went on to write a pamphlet for the Tory-linked thinktank Policy Exchange, “When Progressives Treat with Reactionaries“, much praised by neoconservatives on both sides of the Atlantic.
Partly as a result of the leaks and Bright’s efforts, government policy towards relations with Muslim organisations changed last year: the MCB was sidelined in favour of more pliable (and less representative) bodies such as the Sufi Muslim Council. Kelly, Blears and Miliband were among those backing the shift.
Keogh and O’Connor’s leak, on the other hand, was of a document detailing White House discussions between Tony Blair and George Bush in April 2004 during the first US assault on Falluja in Iraq, when it is known that British commanders had expressed concern about the use of white phosphorus by US troops. Speculation was published about the document’s contents – which Keogh is said to have described as “abhorrent” and “illegal” – including claims that the US president wanted to bomb the al-Jazeera TV station in Qatar. The courts have imposed tight reporting restrictions on the actual contents of the leaked material.
Could it be that the crucial difference between the two cases is that Pasquill’s leak suited a faction in the government, which used it to change policy – whereas Keogh and O’Connor’s leak was deeply embarrassing, not only to the British government, but also to the Bush administration, and so the two men were duly thrown to the wolves? Which would only go to show that it is political convenience, rather than any consistent application of the law, that determines when whistleblowers go to jail in Britain and when they go free.
Given the dog-like determination of governments and corporations to conceal what what they are really up to, unofficial leaks are an effective way of holding power to account. For journalists, they are a crucial lever for getting information to the the public about what is actually going on behind the veil of official secrecy. Over the years, I’ve had my share of anonymous brown envelopes in the post, stuffed with photocopied documents revealing what officialdom doesn’t want you to know.
So it’s good news that the foreign office official Derek Pasquill won’t be going to prison for sending secret government documents to the New Statesman political editor and ex-Observer journalist Martin Bright after the prosecution dropped official secrets charges against him at the Old Bailey on Wednesday.
But how come Pasquill walked free from court while another civil servant, David Keogh, and a researcher, Leo O’Connor, were jailed last May for breaching the Official Secrets Act by passing a secret government memo to the Labour MP Anthony Clarke?
The case against Pasquill collapsed after it emerged senior officials in the Foreign Office had privately argued that, far from damaging national security, the leaks had helped provoke a “constructive debate”. Potentially even trickier was the fact that the defence planned to call cabinet ministers such as David Miliband, Ruth Kelly and Hazel Blears to make its case.
A couple of Pasquill’s leaks were about British involvement in US secret rendition – otherwise known as kidnapping – of terror suspects and the radicalising impact of British foreign policy on Britain’s Muslim community.
But most were about the government’s policy of engaging with non-violent Islamist movements, both in Britain and abroad – and its relations with the Muslim Council of Britain umbrella organisation. Pasquill thought this was “appeasement” – and so did Martin Bright, who went on to write a pamphlet for the Tory-linked thinktank Policy Exchange, “When Progressives Treat with Reactionaries“, much praised by neoconservatives on both sides of the Atlantic.
Partly as a result of the leaks and Bright’s efforts, government policy towards relations with Muslim organisations changed last year: the MCB was sidelined in favour of more pliable (and less representative) bodies such as the Sufi Muslim Council. Kelly, Blears and Miliband were among those backing the shift.
Keogh and O’Connor’s leak, on the other hand, was of a document detailing White House discussions between Tony Blair and George Bush in April 2004 during the first US assault on Falluja in Iraq, when it is known that British commanders had expressed concern about the use of white phosphorus by US troops. Speculation was published about the document’s contents – which Keogh is said to have described as “abhorrent” and “illegal” – including claims that the US president wanted to bomb the al-Jazeera TV station in Qatar. The courts have imposed tight reporting restrictions on the actual contents of the leaked material.
Could it be that the crucial difference between the two cases is that Pasquill’s leak suited a faction in the government, which used it to change policy – whereas Keogh and O’Connor’s leak was deeply embarrassing, not only to the British government, but also to the Bush administration, and so the two men were duly thrown to the wolves? Which would only go to show that it is political convenience, rather than any consistent application of the law, that determines when whistleblowers go to jail in Britain and when they go free.