THE INDEPENDENT,
London, August 21, 1998 Medical
research files 'suppressed' By Paul Lashmar
and Andrew Mullins DETAILS of
50-year-old medical experiments on monkeys
and stray dogs, and a report on the use of
outer space written in 1959 among files
suppressed by the Government. Despite the Labour
Government's much-vaunted commitment to
open government, thousands of documents
are being withheld past the 30-year
period. The files on animals
are Medical Research Council documents
held at the Public Record Office in Kew,
west London, but not open to the public.
Other MRC reports are held
back. Two files from 1950
titled Monkey Experimentation, from the
minutes of the Research Committee on the
Medical and Biological Application of
Nuclear Physics, are closed for 50 years.
One can speculate that these are held back
to spare the feeling of animal lovers over
the grim fate of our fellow
primates. The Medical Research
Council says that files involving animals
or patients' records are held for 50
years. The suppression of
the Ministry of Defence's 1959 report,
"The use of outer space", will be grist to
the mill of Ufologists and X Files addicts
alike. The non-release of a 1972 MoD file
on Kenneth Littlejohn will also
arouse the interest of conspiracy
theorists. Littlejohn was a renegade MI5
agent working against the IRA who died in
mysterious circumstances. There have been
suspicions that the secret services may
have had a role in his death. These items may
verge on the bizarre but many Cabinet
minutes and memorandums are still
suppressed. Taking 1953 as a random year,
22 Cabinet minutes and 19 Cabinet
memorandums for that year are still
excised from the record. They will not to
be released until 2004 or 2054. Numerous files on
Hong Kong from the MoD and the Foreign
Office are "retained by department" with
no release date. Why, for instance, is a
Cabinet document on "Anglo-French Union",
dated October 1956, withheld? In July 1993,
William Waldegrave, the minister
then responsible for Cabinet records,
launched an initiative to release
documents held past the 30-year period.
Tens
of thousands of documents were given
"accelerated release". | 2. But concern is
rising at the number that continue to be
withheld. Some are withheld to protect
privacy. These include hundreds of files
on the Royal Family. Files that
impinge on individual privacy of those
still alive are often closed for 75
years. But, the Government
cannot say how many documents it continues
to hold back. A spokeswoman from the
Cabinet Office said there is "no central
tally" of documents that continue to be
suppressed. In recent weeks the
Government's commitment to open government
has been questioned after the failure to
produce a Freedom of Information
Bill. Historians, such as
Richard Aldrich, of the University
of Nottingham, say the Government
concentrates on releasing documents that
produce publicity, such as details of the
plot to kill Hitler. "What we have
is a few high-profile releases like the
recent SOE [Special Operations
Executive] documents, while documents
that are more important to our
understanding of history may take another
10 years to be released." Brian
Brivati, of Kingston University, said
that by "cherrypicking" files that attract
publicity, "we end up with bits and pieces
and it will be a long time before we can
write proper history". According to Mr
Aldrich, the biggest problem is the lack
of resources given to government
departments to release documents. "Britain
doesn't value its history. In the United
States, government hire the best
historians to oversee their
declassification programmes. Here they
often use low-rank civil servants who have
little historical knowledge." He cited the recent
case of a government "weeder" who had
obviously spent hours excising the
initials "PUSD" from documents. PUSD
stands for the Foreign Office's Permanent
Under-Secretary's Department and one of
its tasks is to keep an eye on
MI6. "The authorities
seem quite unaware that the intelligence
and security aspects of PUSD were
discussed as early as 1956 in Lord
Strang's memoirs," Mr Aldrich
said. He pointed to
cutbacks in the number of people "weeding"
files for release. "Each year the budgets
are cut," he said. "The staff are
demoralised and worked to the bone. The
MoD record office has been moved three or
four times in the last three
years." Mr Brivati said: "It
is ludicrous that they do not release
everything pre-1950, exempting only those
files which intrude on individual privacy.
This would free up weeders to work on
later
periods." ![](../../std/dings/square.gif) |