- The bearded face of David Shayler appears
behind bars along with his prisoner number: 269151F.
-
- Welcome to the website of David Shayler,
a former officer with the domestic intelligence agency, MI5, who fled the
United Kingdom after revealing secrets about the workings of MI5.
-
- He has spent the last month in a French
jail pending a British government application for his extradition.
-
- Click on Mr Shayler's face, and you get
an idea what this is all about: "I'm in prison for telling the truth,"
reads the headline.
-
- It is a site which the British Government
tried to restrict. Even clicking on "government attempts to ban this
website" leads to a tantalisingly blank page.
-
- It emerged in July that the government
had warned the site's service provider in the US that publishing further
allegations would be in breach of an injunction.
-
- But lawyers acting for Mr Shayler said
the injunction would not be legally binding in the US and could be safely
ignored.
-
- At the moment, the home page provides
an easy way of accessing material which has previously been published by
and about Mr Shayler.
-
- The site links to articles from the Mail
on Sunday which originally paid Mr Shayler for his story, as well as to
other papers.
-
- The articles include Mr Shayler's claims
that MI5 failed to act on prior knowledge of the bombing of the Israeli
embassy in London in 1994, and his allegations of a plot by the UK's foreign
intelligence agency MI6 to assassinate Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.
-
- Mr Shayler also uses the site as a platform
to defend his case: "I should be protected not prosecuted," he
declares.
-
- "Rather than suppressing whistle-blowers
the government should set up an independent body to investigate these disclosures.
MI5 and MI6 should not be able to hide behind the secrecy legislation."
-
- Clearly, there is more to come, including
the "diary" section which at present leads only to the message:
"when we hear from David we will flag his messages here".
-
- Also "coming soon to the Shaylergate
site" are "David's Damning Report to the Parliamentary Intelligence
and Security Select Committee" and "Progress Reports on the fight
against extradition".
|
