The Fine Line Where Secrecy Trumps Transparency: The British Case

Alan Cowell

May 29, 2015

British Inquiries Shed Light, Until They Don’t

LONDON — What do we really know about events that mold the national narrative? In this era of digital information harvested by whistle-blowers, who draws the line in the contest between security and openness? Is it, indeed, surprising that some might suspect the maneuvers of a hidden cabal of power and privilege narrowing the limits of disclosure?

The questions intrude insistently in this country with its reflexive reverence for official secrecy, despite — or perhaps because of — years of investigations and inquiries that have sometimes offered illumination and sometimes achieved the opposite.

Most notable at the moment is the panel investigating the Iraq war in 2003, named for its head, Sir John Chilcot, a retired civil servant. Although it began its work in 2009, it has yet to produce a final report on its interviews with 129 witnesses and its scrutiny of 150,000 government documents including confidential exchanges between Prime Minister Tony Blair and President George W. Bush.

Months of dispute between Mr. Chilcot and high government officials have turned on Mr. Blair’s deliberations when he took Britain to war alongside the United States on the basis of falsehoods about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and in the face of overwhelming public opposition.

Not only have government officials sought to limit publication of these exchanges, but Mr. Blair and other senior figures have been given time to reply to their critics — a process that could last into next year.

“There is a danger that the pattern of delay looks like an establishment stitch-up,” said Tim Farron, a Liberal Democrat politician.

Mr. Chilcot’s is only one of a series of inquiries into issues from royal shenanigans to child abuse that have provoked charges that, rather than shed light on transgressions, the authorities use them to airbrush official errors or at least to delay embarrassment.

Even the establishment of an inquiry deflects attention, enabling government leaders to argue that comment on the issue at hand would be “inappropriate,” a favored word in the lexicon of obfuscation. Others prefer a sporting analogy — kicking a problem “into the long grass,” where controversy is out of sight and out of play, at least for the time being.

Nonetheless, there have been fuller accountings that inspired fiercer passions.

Lord Hutton’s inquiry into the death of a British weapons expert, David Kelly, in 2003 convulsed the BBC with high-level resignations. The so-called Bloody Sunday inquiry into events in Northern Ireland finally drew a remarkable apology from Prime Minister David Cameron in 2010 for the killings by British soldiers of 14 unarmed demonstrators in 1972.

Then, there was the Leveson inquiry into the behavior of the British press in the phone hacking scandal that singled out Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers here for harsh criticism and provoked calls for new and tighter press regulation. (Only now, in a separate court case, are Mr. Murdoch’s tabloid rivals being brought to book for comparable transgressions.)

But the clamor for openness has just as often collided with a reflex sharpened by the undercover campaign against Islamic militancy. Last year, the terrorism trial of a 27-year-old law student, Erol Incedal, and a friend, Mounir Rarmoul-Bouhadjar, was held in such secrecy that some critics questioned whether British justice itself was in jeopardy.

“From time to time, tensions between the principle of open justice and the needs of national security will be inevitable,” said Sir Peter Gross, one of Britain’s most senior judges, who ordered an easing of some restrictions.

His conclusion pervades official thinking far beyond the struggle with terrorism.

Only last year did the authorities permit a public inquiry into the death of Alexander V. Litvinenko, a former K.G.B. officer poisoned with radioactive polonium in London in 2006. But there were limits. The head of the inquiry, Sir Robert Owen, made clear that some testimony concerning intelligence material would be heard in private and that “at least some of my final report will also have to remain secret.”