50 years of censorship

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It is unlikely that the contents of the memo leaked by David Keogh and Leo O'Connor, for which the two men were jailed last week, will ever be disclosed. The British government has a long tradition of covering up its Middle East embarrassments. O'Connor's barrister remarked during the trial that the war in Iraq was the most controversial foreign affairs involvement of this country since Suez, but more than 50 years since Anthony Eden invaded Egypt, there are still documents which Whitehall refuses to release.

While working last year on a BBC series about the Suez crisis, I applied to the Cabinet Office under the Freedom of Information Act for the release of all withheld documents. It was a bit of a fishing expedition (just the sort of journalistic abuse of FoI that Lord Falconer despises) but well worth doing. I hoped that the Cabinet Office might consider the 50th anniversary of Suez an important enough occasion for putting all documents in the public domain. Some documents were released, after a six-month wait, but nothing revelatory. I was also told that a number of documents would not be disclosed as they related to "security matters" or would "prejudice" international relations.

"We acknowledge that release of information relating to the Suez crisis may add to the understanding and knowledge of this subject," wrote the Cabinet Office's Histories, Openness and Records Unit. "However, in favour of withholding this information we consider that, in this case, the effective conduct of the UK's international relations, and its ability to protect and promote its interests abroad, would be compromised if we released the information ... it is strongly against the public interest to damage our international relations in this way." It appears the same mixture of imperious and Alice-in-Wonderland logic which led the judge to censor reporting of the trial last week is also at work in the Cabinet Office.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2080502,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=networkfront

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