New cover-up as MI5’s plan for Special Branch withheld
Posted by Jim on May 20, 2019
An MI5 report on policing compiled at the height of the conflict in the
early 1970s must remain secret, a British official has ruled.
The Morton Report, which examined operating practices of the RUC Special
Branch police in 1973, is understood to contain details of illegal
activities which were recommended for use by the RUC as a
“counter-insurgency” strategy.
The decision appears to confirm the importance of MI5 officer Jack
Morton and his report in laying the groundwork for the Special Branch’s
Dirty War.
A year after the report was issued, loyalist paramilitaries acting in
collusion with Special Branch and other British forces killed 33 people
and an unborn child in a series of terror attacks against nationalist
civilians across Dublin and Monaghan. It was the deadliest attack of the
conflict.
Britain’s Information Commissioner said the report was instigated by the
head of MI5, Michael Hanley, who suggested to then RUC Chief Constable
Graham Shillington that a senior ‘Security Service’ officer conduct a
review of Special Branch in June 1973.
The officer chosen was Jack Morton, once a former colonial police chief
in India who eventually rose to become a high-ranking figure in British
military intelligence.
Over 20 academics from Britain and Ireland have called for the Morton
Report to be made available for their
Information Commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, declared the report should
stay secret because it was supplied by MI5, without any further
justification.
Reacting to the decision, Daniel Holder, deputy director of the
Committee for the Administration of
to conceive how the 1973 Morton report can’t be released by the PSNI for
national security reasons when the PSNI did – eventually – release most
of the 1980 Walker Report to CAJ in a similar case.
The Walker Report notoriously advised the RUC to maintain paid informers
instead of prosecuting them for any offences they had committed,
including murder.
“Both relate to the structures of RUC Special Branch, and both were
authored by MI5 officers,” Mr Holder said, adding that such reports
“reveal wrongdoing by the state.”
Mr Holder said that the public has a right to know about the past. “The
application of blanket national security vetoes over historic
information is not human rights compliant,” he warned. “Particularly
when the documents in question may contain evidence of past security
policies and practices that involved or facilitated human rights
violations.”
He said the Morton report should be disclosed to prevent “a repetition
of past practices that fuelled conflict.”