CENSORED: This man is trying to stop the truth about Army dirty tricks coming out, and is pursuing a Sunday Times Journalist for investigating it. May 14 2000 http://www.the-times.co.uk/news/pages/Sunday-Times/frontpage.html Gagged: Geoff Hoon, the defence secretary, is blocking press investigation into the burning of police evidence of army collusion with loyalist terrorists John Ware The invitation from the Special Branch of the Metropolitan police to Liam Clarke, The Sunday Times Northern Ireland editor, was exquisitely polite. "I should like to make arrangements for you to come to London . . . to be interviewed," wrote Detective Inspector Alan Learner. As Clarke read and reread the registered letter, he realised he was being asked to present himself to be arrested for an alleged breach of Britain's draconian Official Secrets Act. "I strongly advise you seek legal advice before responding to this letter," Learner concluded. Section 5 of the act, which the inspector says he suspects Clarke has breached, prohibits journalists from disclosing information passed to them without lawful authority by a crown servant. The inspector was referring to a series of articles in The Sunday Times based on interviews with Martin Ingram, a pseudonym for a former member of a covert British military intelligence unit that ran agents in Northern Ireland. Ingram had said that during the 1980s the Force Research Unit (FRU) was complicit in murder and had destroyed evidence that police investigators had gathered about this by burning down their inquiry headquarters. However, it is not these allegations of wrongdoing that Special Branch is investigating. As Learner explains, they are responding to a "complaint by the Ministry of Defence" (MoD), which is run by the tall, gangling figure of Geoff Hoon. The defence secretary is a Tony Blair favourite. He is one of a group who agreed to shave off their moustaches on the advice of Labour spin doctors. Hoon's facial hair had been a prominent feature ever since he served as a little-known MEP before he was elected to parliament in 1992. Like several members of the cabinet, Hoon has spoken of the government's commitment to a new culture of openness. He has described proposed freedom of information legislation as "the most radical information access package ever put forward by a British government". Hoon is also a barrister, however, and is drawing from an arsenal of civil and criminal law, in particular the 1989 Official Secrets Act - which in opposition Labour vigorously opposed - to kill off the growing number of contacts between journalists and former members of the intelligence services who have dark secrets to reveal. The decision to act against The Sunday Times is very much Hoon's, egged on by his civil servants and military advisers. It was not raised in cabinet, according to Downing Street. Nor were the Home Office or the office of the attorney-general consulted. In the past few months, several former FRU members have been questioned by Special Branch. One former military intelligence officer has been accused of being Ingram and is on police bail, having been questioned for 24 hours after he was arrested at Christmas. This soldier suspects it was British authorities who broke into a house he sometimes stays in when outside Britain and stole an early draft of a manuscript. The Treasury solicitor accepts the government does indeed have a copy of the draft, but claims it arrived anonymously in the post. The fact that proceedings are now also being brought against the messenger of Ingram's allegations was described yesterday by Lord Hattersley, the former deputy Labour leader, as "an extremely serious step". John Wadham, Ingram's lawyer, is the director of the civil rights group Liberty. "The authorities need to be investigating the revelations made by whistleblowers like Ingram and journalists like Clarke rather than attempting to use the Official Secrets Act to silence them," he said. Since the election, Hoon, John Morris, the former attorney-general, and Jack Straw, the home secretary, have often resorted to the police and courts to frighten off journalists who dip their toes into the murky and largely unaccountable world of Britain's secret services. In 1998 the home of Tony Geraghty, a former Sunday Times defence correspondent, was raided at dawn by MoD police. "We like to know you are home when we visit," one of the officers told him. Over the next seven hours they trawled through files and seized Geraghty's computer, modem and diskettes. He became the first journalist to be charged under the Official Secrets Act since Labour was last in power, although the charges were dropped earlier this year. One evening last year there was a knock on the door of another author, Nick Davies, whose informants for a book about the illegal activities of an agent in Northern Ireland had been former military intelligence officers. A representative from the Treasury solicitor and an MI5 officer presented him with a High Court order requiring him to hand over computer disks and files. "I had not been present in court; nobody had told me about it," said Davies. "I was warned that if I did not comply I would be fined £2,000 or serve two years in jail." The government is already pursuing Martin Bright, home affairs correspondent of The Observer, for interviewing David Shayler after the exiled former MI5 officer threatened to make even more embarrassing revelations over his claim that MI6 assisted a plot in 1995 to blow up Colonel Gadaffi, the Libyan leader. Shayler maintains that Robin Cook, the foreign secretary, has either lied or been lied to when he categorically denied that MI6 had any knowledge of the plot. When Bright refused to hand over his notes to Special Branch officers, he was ordered by an Old Bailey judge to comply. He now risks contempt of court proceedings and jail if he continues to defy the government. "I'd be lying if I said I wasn't worried about doing time," he says. FEW would argue when the government says it has a duty to guarantee the anonymity of agents who risk their lives supplying information to the intelligence services. In the Ingram case one of its concerns appears to be for the identity of a top agent codenamed "Steak Knife". A friend of Hoon's said: "The conduct of The Sunday Times in this matter has been disgraceful and dangerous. People can work backwards and find individuals. You publish details from the past and people can find out who's who." No details of "Steak Knife" have been disclosed other than his codename and Ingram has undertaken never to unmask him. Clarke has also given an undertaking to deliver documents and keep secret any information which might endanger intelligence personnel. Furthermore, "Steak Knife" and the FRU are also alleged to have been complicit in murder. This is a wholly legitimate matter for journalistic inquiry which has been seriously curtailed by Hoon - who resorted to legal relics of the Thatcher era. Hoon responded to the Sunday Times articles on Ingram by securing in secret an interim injunction so broad that anything Ingram has to say about any aspect of his life as a soldier can no longer be reported. The government argued that as a crown servant, Ingram was in breach of his lifelong duty of confidence. A senior military intelligence officer is understood to have suggested in an affidavit that further breaches by Ingram would endanger lives. This is a siren song that requires no evidence but which judges find hard to resist because they are reluctant not to give such dire warnings the benefit of the doubt. By wheeling out first the law of confidence to stop the disclosures, then the Official Secrets Act to frighten both whistleblower and messenger, Hoon has successfully used both civil and criminal law to prevent disclosures of breaches of the law by crown servants who had a duty to uphold the law. According to Ingram, some of these breaches were very grave indeed. He alleges that in January 1990 a specialist military intelligence team broke into the Belfast offices of John Stevens, the then deputy chief constable of Cambridgeshire, and set fire to them. Stevens, now the Metropolitan commissioner, was leading a team of detectives investigating collusion between loyalist death squads and rogue members of the security forces. At 6am the following day Stevens was due to arrest Brian Nelson, a military intelligence agent who had been infiltrated into the Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF) and who was being run by Ingram's colleagues in the FRU. Classified files have subsequently shown that Nelson's job was to help the UFF improve its targeting of known Provisional IRA terrorists for assassination. In the event, the FRU's handling of Nelson was a lethal shambles. He became involved in dozens of murders, attempted murders and conspiracy to murder. At least three of his victims had no involvement with republican terrorism. What Stevens had unearthed was a culture in military intelligence that defined its own rule of law. Fresh from the British mainland, the military mindset was an eye opener. The RUC report into his fire said it was accidental. To this day Stevens and his team remain convinced that it was arson and that the RUC investigation was less than thorough. When his officers discovered the blaze they found none of the fire alarms working and even the telephones in the RUC guardroom were out of order. All of which makes Hoon's behaviour hard to fathom. His private secretary has told Clarke: "The defence secretary would not want you to feel inhibited from handing over any information to the police." Yet the officers investigating Clarke need look no further than their own new boss - the Metropolitan commissioner - for evidence about the fire. They appear to show no interest. Lawyers for the officer arrested last Christmas say not one question about the fire has yet been put to him. What is beginning to look like a purge of journalists investigating security and intelligence matters presents one more contradiction at the heart of Blair's modernising agenda. The prime minister says he is committed to open government and human rights. Yet although a Human Rights Act which respects "freedom of expression" will come into force later this year, all the old legal artillery of the Thatcher years which was strongly criticised by the European courts is still being deployed against journalists. Why has this "modernising" government so readily embraced such a dated security and intelligence order? Perhaps Labour ministers fear they have to prove that the intelligence services are safe in their hands. The secrecy that is the calcium of the bones of Whitehall is unlikely to diminish until there is a more effective democratic outlet for whistleblowers such as Ingram. Hattersley believes that by pursuing journalists for reporting whistleblowers, rather than constructing an alternative and effective outlet for whistleblowing, the government is being "extremely reckless". He recalls that in 1963 Harold Macmillan's government hounded Reg Foster of the Daily Sketch and Brendan Mulholland of the Daily Mail, who were jailed for six months for refusing to disclose their sources in the case of John Vassall, the Royal Navy spy. Macmillan paid a heavy price; taking on the fourth estate contributed to his downfall. Nothing so unites a divided press as a witch hunt against journalists whose only crime is to tell people what the people have a right to know. =================================================== http://www.the-times.co.uk/news/pages/Sunday-Times/frontpage.html May 14 2000 EDITORIAL Telling the truth Today's revelations about the British Army's secret intelligence offshoot, the Force Research Unit (FRU), raise more questions about its operations and Geoff Hoon's misuse of his powers as defence secretary to stifle legitimate investigation into its activities. Mr Hoon needs to understand, before he persists with his campaign to deter The Sunday Times from exposing the FRU's conduct, that this is not Algeria or Zimbabwe. The British system is quite simple: the most secret units in the armed forces are accountable to the government, ministers are accountable to parliament and we are all accountable to the law. Important questions arise from our revelation today that the FRU spied on Clare Short, a member of Tony Blair's cabinet, when she was a Labour backbencher in opposition. Who sanctioned the operation against her? Was it a minister in the Thatcher government? Was it a senior army officer acting without ministerial approval? Or was it a freelance operation that so easily strays into illegality? Why was Ms Short targeted in the first place? Her support for Irish nationalism was well known in the 1980s and she continues to speak her mind, to Downing Street's occasional dismay. But did anybody in military intelligence really believe she posed a threat to the safety of the state? She never supported terrorism while successive governments talked secretly to the IRA. Anyway, it is MI5, not military intelligence, which is responsible for vetting elected politicians with dubious contacts. We already know the FRU is suspected over the burning of files in a police station in Northern Ireland, an apparent attempt to disrupt the inquiry by Sir John Stevens into collusion between the security services and paramilitaries. Mr Hoon defends his efforts to gag the source of our disclosures about the FRU on the grounds that national security is endangered. That is untrue and he should lift his injunction against us. The longer he persists in using the law to gag investigation of a legitimate area of public interest, the greater the damage will eventually be to the government's integrity. Whitehall's latest moves to silence our Northern Ireland editor under the Official Secrets Act adds to its blunders. The government betrays its pledges by trying to stop us uncovering the truth. "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." Communist Tyrant Josef Stalin (Listen anytime to Votefraud vs Honest Elections "crash course" radio show over the internet at www.sightings.com in the archives, April 3rd, 2000 show, Jeff Rense host, Jim Condit Jr. guest) <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. 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