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Whistleblower faces official secrets charges
Foreign Office civil servant Derek Pasquill has begun the long trial process after being charged under the Official Secrets Act. He is accused of making six damaging disclosures of documents that came into his possession as a civil servant. These concerned government policy on two of the most pressing issues of the age: extraordinary rendition, and dialogue with radical Islamist groups in the Middle East such as the Muslim Brotherhood.
The charges are said to refer to articles that appeared in the Observer and the New Statesman under my byline.
I have been connected with two previous secrets trials, the first involving the MI5 whistleblower David Shayler and the second that of the GCHQ translator Katharine Gun. Both represented outrageous abuses of state power in their way, but they differed in several important senses from the Pasquill case. In both previous trials, the alleged disclosures involved documents classified as “Top Secret” or above. In the Pasquill case nothing involved has a classification above “Confidential”. There is no suggestion that the disclosures involved put agents of the intelligence services at risk or jeopardised any ongoing operations.