More damage to international relations

In a new post on the Iraq Inquiry Digest website, I reveal that the government is again threatening to block the release of documents relating to the September 2002 Iraq weapons of mass destruction dossier, on the grounds of "damage to international relations".

The documents could shed light on some of the most controversial claims in the dossier, including a notorious claim that Iraq had sought uranium from Africa and a suggestion that its acquisition of aluminium tubes was related to a nuclear weapons programme.

Read more here

Toothless watchdog

In the Times today, former BBC journalist and goverment spin doctor Martin Sixsmith sinks his teeth into the information commissioner, for being utterly useless in pursuing what he describes as a freedom of information request but which seems to be a subject data access request under the data protection act.

Sixsmith tells how, after some pretty severe delaying tactics from the government

I urged the ICO to demand that the Government hand over the data. The ICO threatened enforcement action, but the Government did not reply. So the ICO set another deadline, which the Government also ignored. When the Government failed to meet a third deadline, the ICO moved it back again.

It was clear that the Government was accustomed to bullying and ignoring a toothless ICO, and that the ICO had no stomach to take it on.

All very familiar...

Out in the open

On Friday, the Campaign for Freedom of Information issued a press release and report stating that

Long delays by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) in investigating freedom of information complaints are undermining the effectiveness of the FOI Act...

This very much reflects my experience and it's disappointing that the story seems to have got little press coverage. Following the expenses scandal, I thought people were more tuned in to FOI and the tendency for public authorities to bury things for as long as possible.

A day earlier, the FOI News blog, was suggesting that the ICO "is no longer putting itself in the stocks for its slow handling of appeals". It published a letter putting the blame on the failure of Jack Straw's Ministry of Justice to fund it adequately.

A watershed?

I've done a new piece today for Index on Censorship, arguing that the expenses scandal is a watershed for freedom of information and that transparency is no longer just an obsession for journalists and freedom of information campaigners.

But then I would say that, wouldn't I?

Deeper, not wider

I've just done a new blog post for Index on Censorship in which I argue that, while Gordon Brown’s promise today to extend freedom of information is welcome, FOI needs to be deepened, not widened, if it is truly to hold power to account.

Brown’s promise that Justice Secretary Jack Straw will look at broadening the application of FOI to include new bodies that spend public money is not new and is an easy pledge to make at virtually no cost to to central government. What would be more impressive would be a commitment from ministers that they will release more information themselves.

FOI in tatters

Late yesterday I posted a blog piece on IndyMinds, asking, Is this the worst FOI response ever?

The Department for Transport has refused to let me have a copy of a letter sent by the BAA chief executive to transport secretary Geoff Hoon, on the grounds that its contents are already in the public domain, in the form of a BAA press release. The DfT is not so much witholding the information as:

"providing information in a format different than the format requested"

under the Environmental Information Regulations.

When it suits us

I've just posted a new piece for Index on Censorship, pointing out that the government has a double standard when it comes to the disclosure of confidential information, to the point where it will censor a document that it has already published.

Politically incorrect

I didn't update the blog yesterday as I was commenting elsewhere on Jack Straw's outrageous decision to veto the release of the minutes of those two pre-war cabinet meetings.

I did pieces for Comment is Free and Index on Censorship. Not everyone agreed that Straw's veto was a bad thing. Some of the more conservative commentators - and the Conservatives - argued that it was necessary to maintain cabinet confidentiality. The point that a lot of people seem to have missed is that the potential for cabinet minutes to be released has not gone away. Straw said that he was blocking these particular papers because of their sensitivity.

This morning I was briefly in the BBC's Millbank studios, for BBC Radio Scotland's Good Morning Scotland. In the studio booth next to mine was Hazel Blears, who gave me a very friendly smile although I doubt if she has a clue who I am. Blears was I presume talking about her "common sense not political correctness" speech, which will probably go down well with tabloid readers and Telegraph but was savaged in this Comment is Free piece by Ally Fogg.

On the other hand, Straw's veto has gone down very badly with the Daily Mail, which asks:

What do they have to hide?

Well argued, well asked

Yesterday's Sunday Times carried a letter from Chris Lamb, the person who submitted the freedom of information request for disclosure of cabinet minutes in the run-up to the Iraq war.

In a well-argued series of comments, Lamb laments the information tribunal's refusal to order the publication of the cabinet secretary's handwritten notes of the two meetings. He describes the tribunal's decision as otherwise "exemplary".

I can't imagine the government will agree as it scrambles to find grounds for appealing the decision.

Transparency international?

I've done a blog piece today for Independent Minds, lamenting the government's tendency to suppress embarrassing information under the guise of protecting international relations.

Will this help

An independent panel, headed by the Mail editor Paul Dacre, has proposed cutting the 30 year rule in half, meaning that many - but not all - official papers will be released after 15 years.

The Independent's piece on this cites the attempt to secure release of the pre-Iraq war Cabinet Minutes from 2003, i.e. six years ago. Dacre says the freedom of information act:

is being applied in an "unsatisfactory and patchwork" manner and Britain now operates "one of the less liberal" regimens for accessing government records.

It is interesting to wonder how, if at all, a fifteen year rule would have affected the information tribunal ruling on the cabinet minutes. Would the tribunal have thought that releasing the papers nine years early was no big deal, or perhaps of so little help that it wasn't worth doing?

Egg on the commissioner's face

Last week I exposed as baseless another government claim on Iraq - that former attorney general Lord Goldsmith decided that the war would be legal before meeting two of Tony's cronies. In a new piece today for Index on Censorship, I suggest that information commissioner Richard Thomas also has egg on his face over for letting the government mix spin with fact.

It was Thomas who negotiated a shabby compromise with the Cabinet Office over a freedom of information request seeking to establish why Goldsmith had gone from doubting the war's legality on 7 March 2003 to unequivocally asserting that it was legal ten days later.

Instead of requiring the Cabinet Office to disclose actual documents, Thomas allowed them to construct a narrative account which would include claims that were not backed by documentary evidence. At the time, former minister Peter Kilfoyle called this a "sanitised timeline".

Faced with admitting that Goldsmith had met Sally Morgan and Lord Falconer on the same day (13 March) that he concluded that existing UN resolutions legitimised the war, the Cabinet Office merely asserted that he made up his mind mind before the meeting.

As I point out, Thomas failed not only to require the government to distinguish between fact and fantasy at the time, but to be open about the basis for the assertion when I asked him last November.

It seems the commissioner is still trying to get his head around the idea of openness.

Whose fault is that?

In the Times, Rachel Sylvester says that the real problem - for which Damian Green is being punished - is that the government has lost control over the flow of information. She accepts without question, the claims of ministers and officials that the freedom of information act is a bad thing:

They have a point. Of course, as a journalist I am all in favour of getting as much information as possible. But there comes a time when the public interest means that some things should be kept private. If the Information Commissioner decides that the details of Cabinet meetings should be released it will become almost impossible for ministers to have a frank discussion.

Officials have already become more circumspect in the advice they give for fear that their private musings will be released. People are reluctant to put things on paper. Even in e-mails civil servants use codenames, or replace some letters with asterisks when discussing individuals - so that a search for the person's name under the Freedom of Information Act, would draw a blank. Legislation that was meant to encourage more openness has, in fact, led to greater obfuscation. Sir Gus jokes with investigative journalists at parties that it is his job to frustrate their inquiries; the Civil Service sees its role as to block any important requests, which means that only trivia (such as the guest lists for dinners at Chequers or the amount of money MPs claim on expenses) is revealed. “Most ministers think that the Freedom of Information Act is a joke and a waste of taxpayers' money,” says one government member. “It's killing the system.”

There were 8,865 freedom of information requests in the past three months for which records are held. Hundreds of civil servants have to work full-time on answering the questions, at a cost of more than £20 million a year. Officials estimate that they have spent more than £1 million answering requests from the BBC alone. Lord Turnbull, Sir Gus's predecessor as head of the Civil Service, once told me he had to devote an hour a day to deciding which documents should be made public while a minister claims he spends twelve hours a week answering “scrutiny” questions including those submitted under the Freedom of Information Act. Many requests are a waste of time - one questioner asked how much money was spent on Ferrero Rocher chocolates by British embassies; another woman asked for a list of phone numbers of eligible bachelors in the Hampshire police force. Legislation designed to increase voters' trust of the political system has ended up undermining it.

It's quite astonishing that a journalist can accept such tosh at face value without asking whose fault it is that civil servants spend so much time and money being obstructive. Not that £20m a year for freedom of information is a great deal when the government spends hundreds of millions on its own propaganda. The old chestnut about Ferrero Rocher chocolates came straight out of the very same government spin machine.

Scarlett protected by censorship

I've done a piece myself for Index on Censorship. The Cabinet Office has refused to release the email in which MI6 chief John Scarlett is alleged to have asked for the report of the (post-war) Iraq Survey Group to be sexed-up.

Here is the report that gave me the idea.

Protecting the guilty

There's an intriguing new decision on the Information Tribunal website. The Foreign Office has been ordered to release documents dating back to the 1960s showing the involvement of British diplomats in bribing Saudi officials and ministers to secure arms deals. But the tribunal has allowed the FCO to conceal the names of the Saudis involved, some of whom remain in goverment today.

The tribunal found that publication of files requested by Campaign Against Arms Trade campaigner Nicholas Gilby would be highly likely to cause "real and substantial prejudice" to Britain's relations - and arms dealing - with the Saudi regime But it ruled that the public interest nevertheless requires disclosure of evidence that UK officials facilitated illegal payments to secure contracts relating to tank exports and aircraft maintenance.

Significantly, the tribunal ruled that there was a "greater sensitivity" around information relating "directly to those involved in the [Saudi Arabian Government]". For this reason, it found that the public interest in concealing the information outweighs reasons for disclosure.

During the hearings in March, the UK's ambassador to Saudia Arabia, William Patey, had pointed out that the country's defence minister, Prince Sultan, had been in place since 1962. "Thus the documents... may notwithstanding the passage of time continue to be directly relevant to those currently in power."

Gilby, who has carried out extensive research into Britain's ongoing arms trading relationship with Saudi Arabia, won praise from the tribunal for the way he represented himself during the public parts of the hearing. The tribunal had taken the unprecendented step of appointing a special advocate (Khawar Qureshi QC) to represent his interests in its closed sessions.

Gilby told me: "I am delighted the tribunal has accepted the strength of the public interest arguments in exposing British Government complicity in highly dubious business practices relating to arms deals with Saudi Arabia."

The tribunal also hinted that it had heard evidence suggesting that the public interest in continuing arms exports to Saudi Arabia was greater than could be stated publicly. It stated that, although the value of sales in global economic terms was very small, it was "in no doubt as to their importance in the public interest having regard to both the open evidence which we have heard but also that in closed session."

What could this mean? There have been suggestions that BAE might not survive without Saudi contracts, although this seems unlikely. It was also said during the recent case over the Tony Blair's decision to drop the Serious Fraud Office inquiry that intelligence co-operation was at stake.

One thing is for sure: everything about the arms trade with Saudi Arabia is very murky.

For what it's worth, an FCO spokesman gave me the usual line in such cases: "we have seen the judgement and are considering it carefully." The FCO has 28 days (from 22 October) to release the information or appeal to the High Court.

Not over yet

The US defence department says the fundamental character of the conflict in Iraq remains unchanged, despite dramatic security improvements there, the BBC reports.

Meanwhile, the William Hague has said that setting up an Iraq inquiry will be one of David Cameron's first acts as prime minister.

I've just done a new blog piece for the Indy, pointing out that the government has little time left either to release documents showing how the Iraq dossier was sexed-up or to appeal to the Information Tribunal.

Less truth comes out

I've just come across a new (and I think unreported) "open" decision by the Information Tribunal, dismissing the Campaign Against Arms Trade's (CAAT) attempt to secure the release of two memorandums of understanding (MoU) relating to the Al Yamamah Saudi Arms deal.

I wrote about the hearing in March on Comment is Free. My main point then was that the government's attempts to save Saudi embarrassment were as counterproductive as the attempts to stop the SFO investigation into bribes paid to Prince Bandar.

The Ministry of Defence has won this case as well but received a kicking in the process. The Tribunal was very critical of the Treasury Solicitor's presentation of evidence, which threw a spanner in its schedule for the hearing:

we hope that in future no Tribunal will be faced with documentation that is not presented properly in a form that can assist its understanding by the Tribunal

The Tribunal was also critical of the government's alleged attempt to secure the permission of the Saudi government to release confidential documents. This appears to have resembled the description put forward by former diplomat Carne Ross, a witness for CAAT:

"In my experience what tends to happen is that the FCO will say
something like:

'There is this awful Tribunal in London that is threatening to release these documents, don't youthink this will be a very bad idea?'

to which the foreign interlocutor is likely to respond:

'Yes, that would be a bad idea, please report that to London.'

The Tribunal observed:

We have had the benefit of considering contemporary documentation in closed session and we are able to say in this open decision that in our view the approach adopted by MoD in consulting the KSA was unsatisfactory. We consider that at the very least it should have been put neutrally to the KSA and that only if KSA asked what was the attitude of MoD should that have been indicated.

The "open" decision is a version of the decision that can be published without giving away secret information, including the information that is in dispute. Surprisingly, the Tribunal made clear that there is no "smoking gun" showing corrupt conduct in the Al-Yamamah deal:

If either MoU revealed evidence of such conduct, we would expect to have attached significant additional weight to the public interest in disclosure, when balancing it against the public interest in maintaining the exemption. However, we have had the advantage of reading the MoU and we can say in this open decision that there is nothing in either of the documents that would support such a conclusion.

Compare that to the Information Commissioner's decision in my latest case on the dossier:

There is therefore a strong public interest in a degree of exposure of the circumstances of the dossier’s production, because that would facilitate public understanding of and participation in the debate about alleged Iraqi weapons capability and intentions, and promote accountability and transparency of the bodies responsible for producing the dossier and for taking decisions on the basis of its contents. The latter point would of course be of even greater significance if there was evidence that the dossier was deliberately manipulated in order to present an exaggerated case for military action, particularly as its intended audience included Parliament itself.

Like the Tribunal, the Commissioner could easily have stated that such evidence is not to be found in the papers, but chose to leave open a strong suggestion that it is.

Spilling the beans

The Mail on Sunday has a new angle on my own freedom of information case last week:

Secret advice from a foreign power, thought to be America, helped to shape the dossier that said Saddam Hussein could attack within 45 minutes and set out the case for war in Iraq.

Information Commissioner Richard Thomas' decision did indeed allow the Cabinet Office to keep under wraps something that:

would reveal information of a confidential nature concerning the relationship between the United Kingdom and another state or states.

The MoS again picks out the key sentence from the decision:

Mr Thomas has ordered the disclosure of material that could provide ‘evidence that the dossier was manipulated to present an exaggerated case’.

More truth comes out

The Sunday Telegraph has a great story this morning about the British government's obstruction of the investigation into the murder of Julie Ward in Kenya 20 years ago:

Jon Stoddart, who wrote the independent report – seen by The Sunday Telegraph – on behalf of Lincolnshire Police, said of the role of the FCO and the British High Commission: "There is clear evidence of inconsistency and contradictions, falsehoods and downright lies, and it is this that has not surprisingly led to John Ward believing that there was an active conspiracy to prevent him from identifying his daughter's killers."

Ms Ward's father obtained the report, written in 2004, under the Freedom of Information Act. It was originally suppressed on the grounds of national security.

The truth... at last?

Yesterday's story about the Information Commissioner's latest decision on the Iraq dossier was picked up well by the mainstream media and bloggers but studiously ignored by the BBC.

I've even got the Daily Mail on my side. In a leader (at the bottom), the Mail says:

thanks to the Commissioner's principled stand, the truth may at last come out.

It's a shame it took the Commissioner nearly three years to get there, albeit with some significant obstructiveness from the Cabinet Office.

This morning, I have a piece on the Indy's Open House Blog.