The headline figures are eye-watering. Up to 100,000 Afghans could have been placed at risk after a British soldier, according to the Times, sent the names of 33,000 people who supported British forces to a contact he hoped would help verify their applications for sanctuary in this country. The story behind these numbers is one of real people who had already been living in fear for years, and who have been treated abhorrently by the British state.
As soon as it became clear that the information could fall into the Taliban’s hands and lead to these people and those close to them being targeted, the highly secret Operation Rubific was launched. This debacle occurred under the previous Conservative government, which obtained a superinjunction preventing several media organisations that were aware of the leak from reporting on it.
