The Vietnam war whistleblower Dan Ellsberg once said: “Like so many others, I put personal loyalty to the president above all else – above loyalty to the constitution and above obligation to the law, to truth, to Americans, and to humankind. I was wrong.”
More than three years ago, as George Bush and Tony Blair rushed headlong into the invasion of Iraq, Martin Bright, then at the Observer, tested the veracity of an e-mail passed to him and his colleagues anonymously, while I nervously waited to see if the contents would appear in a newspaper. The e-mail, which the paper duly published, contained details of a bugging operation designed to coerce wavering members of the UN Security Council to vote for the use of force. It alerted the world to what I saw as scandalous dirty tricks within the United Nations.
I was sacked from my job at GCHQ, the top-secret government eavesdropping centre, and prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act, though the government dropped the prosecution when it was put under pressure to reveal the legal advice that took Britain into war. My aim had been to bring into the open government manoeuvrings and lies which were aimed at securing public support for what I believed was an unjust war, one that would lead to the deaths of thousands, and the untold misery of millions.
Had the case gone ahead, I would have argued that my action was intended to prevent an immediate threat to life. But I knew at the time that there was no automatic “public interest” legal defence for whistleblowers such as myself.
http://www.globalecho.org/view_article.php?aid=7163
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