Sources claiming to be part of the British public sector intelligence community and to be speaking on behalf of the responsible government ministers have recently reiterated their earlier insistence that, for reasons described as 'the interests of national security', information will never be given officially to the victims of a secret psychological experiment that the government has been conducting, beginning around January 2000.

The operation to deliver an experimental and potentially highly controversial psychological treatment to paedophile suspects is thought to have been conducted by a multi-disciplinary team, which included military intelligence or GCHQ personnel and, unusually for a secret operation said to affect national security, staff seconded from the National Health Service.

In a report published in December 1999 in The Daily Express, before the operation began, it was suggested also that 'community groups', 'environmental groups', 'New Age groups' and sections of the media would be involved alongside 'the armed services' of more than one country (probably a reference to military intelligence).

The Express report probably amounted to the synthesis into a single story of garbled, leaked accounts of several unrelated operations on the same theme, which all commenced at about the same time, including the psychological experiment in respect of which its victims now require information. A spokesperson for the intelligence community has denied repeatedly any involvement of the private sector in the specific operation in which it is still involved, or that their all-British operation is part of any international programme.

The stated primary purpose of the experiment is the treatment of paedophiles. Possible secondary purposes that intelligence service sources deny include (a) the development and perfection of techniques for detecting paedophilia (or its absence) in subjects not known in advance to suffer from that condition and (b) the obtaining of better estimates of the incidence of paedophilia in the general population.

For technical legal reasons, the operation falls outside the definition of intrusive surveillance given in the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000. During an interview which one of the victims was permitted to conduct, an agent claiming to be from the security services admitted that there was no statutory authority for the operation and that the operation had been mounted in implementation of decisions of the Executive said to have been taken in exercise of the Royal Prerogative, albeit, it was claimed, 'with all party support'.

Prof. David Feldman, who is Legal Advisor to the Joint Committee on Human Rights (a Parliamentary select committee), has described the legal loophole that permits the operation to fall outside the statutory definition of intrusive surveillance as 'a significant matter'. It is to be hoped therefore that the committee will investigate the legal implications of the operation later this year, with a view to introducing fresh legislation to prevent a repetition of the fiasco.

The experimental technique depends upon the use of certain advanced technology that is capable of detecting the electrical fields generated by verbal reasoning activities in the human central nervous system and deciphering them in order to provide information regarding an experimental subject's stream of consciousness to those monitoring him.

The technology used is also able to influence the subject's behaviour and perceptions, even to induce in the subject apparent auditory hallucinations. This is accomplished by delivering subliminal 'whispers' to the subject which, exploiting the subject's suggestibility, instruct him, for example, to hear audible voices, typically embedded in environmental white sound, or to experience particular emotions, including elation, melancholy or shame, but most especially, in the context of this application of the technology, sexual arousal or an absence of sexual feelings.

Another technique used is to induce what the experimenters describe as 'numinous' feelings in the subject (a sense of the presence of the uncanny, or perhaps the holy, such as the feeling that one is being haunted by ghosts, or being watched by God).

Contrary to the British Psychological Society's Code of Conduct for Psychologists and General Medical Council (GMC) published ethical guidelines, none of the experimental subjects were given information about their treatment before it began, nor were they or their relatives asked for consent. It has been admitted that a number of the subjects treated were found not to have been paedophiles after all.

The GMC has co-operated with the enquiries that have led to the publication of this report. The British Psychological Society promised to issue a statement, but has failed to deliver on that promise. The Royal Society of Psychiatrists has refused to comment.

One particular suspect treated, who is a man 49 years of age with four children and two grandchildren and whose present wife is actually slightly older than he is, has received a government apology 'off the record', but no compensation.

This particular subject is himself a survivor of homosexual child sex abuse and had never given any indication of having paedophile tendencies. His inclusion as an experimental subject is admitted to have been 'an accident'. He is nevertheless continuing to receive treatment, against his will, because of the risk his antagonism toward the programme is said to pose to national security. Presumably he is therefore now receiving quasi-medical treatment solely for holding dissident political beliefs.

Because of the sexually explicit nature of many of the subliminal 'whispers' that were employed before it was realised that the subject was neither a paedophile nor a homosexual, or perhaps before formal tests defined within the methodology had been completed to determine 'scientifically' whether or not he was a paedophile, this subject has described the experiment as 'the British government's secret Masturbation Policy'.

Certainly a central feature of the methodology appears to have been the deliberate attempt to incite masturbation as an alternative sexual outlet for the supposed paedophiles preferable to the sexual abuse of children. (Child sex abuse is a crime that the subject concerned had never in his life considered committing in the first place.)

The subject has religious objections to, as he describes it, 'the British government using the taxpayers' money to pay men, who perhaps joined the intelligence services in a fit of idealism after reading John le Carre novels, to deliver unwanted homosexual 'phone sex' to a heterosexual grandfather who had himself survived homosexual abuse as a child, rendering their antics more reminiscent of the plot of Tom Sharpe's novel Indecent Exposure than anything le Carre ever wrote'.

A spokesperson for the victims of this experimental treatment, who has asked to remain anonymous until such time as the government admits publicly the existence of the operation and that he is not a paedophile, has stated that, according to the GMC ethical guidelines, the individuals affected 'including even any real paedophiles that there may have been amongst the experimental subjects' are fully entitled (and from the outset always were entitled) to be given officially the information now demanded, including information about the technology used.

The victims need official information in order to seek injunctions restraining the government from continuing or resuming treatment and to mount challenges by way of judicial review, on ultra vires grounds, of the decision to mount such an operation in the first place and, on irrationality grounds, of the decisions to include as experimental subjects people who hadn't shown any evidence of being paedophiles.

The intelligence community is naturally reluctant to release information about technology that could be used for military, intelligence gathering or counter-insurgency applications. The government's representatives remain adamant that, 'in the interests of national security', no information will be provided to the victims (other than deniably) and that the issue is therefore not justiciable. This impasse has failed to be resolved despite months of unsuccessful negotiations during which there had appeared at first to be mutual goodwill and considerable common ground.

The operation would appear to conflict with Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which declares the right to respect for one's private and family life, even without this withholding of information. The refusal to allow the victims the official information that they would need in order to seek legal remedies, says the spokesman for the group, also places the UK government in breach of its ECHR Article 6 and Article 13 international treaty obligations. Articles 6 and 13 relate to the right to a fair and speedy trial and to the need for legal remedies against human rights abuse to be available to victims even when 'those acting in an official capacity' perpetrate the abuses.

The victims' spokesperson insists that this is an issue that should concern the entire public. The government has not provided evidence that ANY of the victims of the experiment were actually paedophiles. During an interview, a government spokesperson has stated that there were only twenty-six victims, but because the records of the operation are not open even to Parliamentary scrutiny, this claim cannot be verified.

The victims' spokesperson concludes, 'Whilst none of us is fond of paedophiles, that a government can break quite so many rules that were made to protect human rights and that it wishes to get away with so penetrating an invasion of privacy without the victims having access to a legal remedy is bad news for all citizens.'

The grandfather who survived physical sexual abuse as a child, only to receive psychological sexual abuse in his later years, as a result of a government policy that he obviously finds ludicrous as well as oppressive and sinister, concludes, 'The abuse I have endured at this time of my life is far worse than that which I endured as a child. If they can do it to me, they can do it to anybody. Even those who today are employed to perpetrate this type of abuse cannot be sure that tomorrow they won't themselves become its next victims. British Intelligence Service? British Stupidity Service, more like it! My favourite nicknames for them are The Mengele Clinic and The Thought Police.'

(c) copyright John Allman 2002