Slugger has been keeping us up to date on Prescott and the Bloggers but a long-running blog saga is heating up over on Craig Murray’s site too.
Murray is a former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan who has since claimed that the British Government were aware of abuses carried out by the US-funded government there as well as its involvement in “extraordinary rendition” flights to the country.
As part of my recent thesis on blogging I used Craig Murray’s site as an example of the benefits of online publishing; he was able to circumvent the UK Officials Secrets Act for what he felt was a just cause and by doing so gained the support of thousands of other bloggers; the fact that countless sites published the ‘Tashkent Telegrams‘ made any court action pointless.
Now that his book on the issue has been published Murray has attempted to substanciate the claims he has made with further documentation on his website; these documents were largely sourced from Freedom of Information requests. What is interesting is the fact that The British Government is still threatening to sue if these documents are published, saying they have ‘Crown Copyright’. This would suggest that information that is freely available to the public on request cannot be published for the public to read; this notion subverts the whole idea of a FoI act and suggests that only the applicants have the right to view the information found.
Blairwatch is keeping close tabs on the whole thing, so head over there if you’re interested.
It does seem that many of the central tenants of Government secrecy are under threat from blogs; most bloggers would never be able to get their hands on this kind of information but when the odd Ambassador or Minister dissents all hell could break loose.
After watching the second episode of RTÉ’s Haughey documentary today you have to wonder, if blogging was around back in 1970 would one of the cabinet ministers of the day broken rank and told us what really happened in the lead-up to the Arms Crisis? Perhaps the same could be said for many incidents in Irish, British and International history.