Phil Miller: Why I took the police to court over a 48-year-old secret document 📂 Archived Message Posted by sashimi on July 16, 2021, 2:25 pm 15 July 2021 (quote) Declassified UK's chief reporter enters the Kafkaesque world of official secrecy as he tries to uncover the British state's involvement in a notorious terrorist bombing for which no one has been held to account. It was the evening rush hour in Dublin when three car bombs ripped through the streets of Ireland's capital. Ninety minutes later, a fourth device exploded in Monaghan, a town near the border with British-controlled Northern Ireland. Those blasts on 17 May 1974 killed an unborn child and 33 civilians. Nearly 300 people were injured. This was the deadliest terrorist attack in the bloody history of the Troubles, that long conflict between the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the British state about which much remains classified nearly half a century later. No one has ever been charged with the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, but the shadowy Ulster Volunteer Force did eventually claim responsibility. They are a pro-British "loyalist" paramilitary gang which fought the IRA (and innocent Irish civilians) often in collusion with the UK authorities - who even lifted a terror ban on the group six days after the blasts. A subsequent inquiry by former Irish Supreme Court judge Henry Barron concluded: "A number of those suspected for the bombings were reliably said to have had relationships with British Intelligence and/or Royal Ulster Constabulary special branch officers." Barron criticised the British authorities for refusing to share key documents with his inquiry. Battle for the truth The Royal Ulster Constabulary has since reformed as the Police Service of Northern Ireland and today I challenged its Chief Constable Simon Byrne in court. More than four years ago, I asked his officers to release a report into police Special Branch tactics compiled the summer before the 1974 blasts, which could shed light on those "relationships" between police and terrorists. My freedom of information request was quickly refused. I then complained to the Information Commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, the supposed guardian of the public's right to know, who sat on it for 18 months until it became one of her top-10 oldest files. She finally rejected my complaint without even looking at the special branch report. Denham sided with the police because they gave her "verbal assurances" that the report was "supplied directly" by MI5, Britain's domestic spy agency which is completely exempt from the Freedom of Information Act under a draconian clause called Section 23. All she would say is that in June 1973 Northern Ireland's police chief allowed a "senior MI5 officer to conduct a review of and report on the RUC Special Branch organisation and its functions". The man who carried out this task was Jack Morton, "a serving MI5 officer". Morton was a veteran of imperial policing in the Punjab who believed that "Indians were a sort of immature, backward and needy people whom it was the natural British function to govern and administer." He had honed his intelligence skills by breaking up anti-colonial cells. (/quote) -- Cont'd at https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2021-07-15-why-i-took-the-police-to-court-over-a-48-year-old-secret-document/ Message Thread: Phil Miller: Why I took the police to court over a 48-year-old secret document - sashimi July 16, 2021, 2:25 pm « Index   Searching