The intelligence services have never understood the need for a criminal process: their ideal world would be one in which official suspicion led straight to incarceration. This is why they so fervently oppose the idea that any of the 'evidence' they build up should be exposed to the rigours of a criminal trial, a process for the safeguarding of individual liberty with which they are, institutionally, profoundly out of sympathy. The refusal of the intelligence services to yield on the admissibility of intercept evidence, and the support they have received for this position from their political masters, is the clearest evidence we have that if this is not yet the case, it is (though they would no doubt phrase it differently) the wish of important elements in our political and security community. |
