Judge and Jury
The latest revelations about the 1994 Chinook helicopter crash - highlight the dangers of allowing people in powerful places - to be judge and jury in their own cause.
The BBC reports that new evidence has emerged to suggest that computer software faults may have caused the 1994 Chinook helicopter crash on the Mull of Kintyre.
The crash killed all 29 people on board - and the official RAF inquiry found the two pilots guilty of gross negligence.
Yet an internal Ministry of Defence (MoD) document - written only nine months before the crash - admitted that the helicopter's software was "positively dangerous".
The MoD insist the helicopter was airworthy and the latest information could not be classed as new evidence - because it was available to the internal RAF inquiry team.
But crucially, this 'new' evidence was not released to ministers or shared more widely - nor was its significance explained in the official inquiry report.
"Why not?” - is the obvious question.
For the past 15 years, families of the pilots have been fighting to clear their dead relatives' names - in the teeth of opposition from the military establishment.
Since the original internal RAF inquiry - three subsequent inquiries have found the cause of the crash was inconclusive - and these too were denied access to the latest information about faulty computer software.
The BBC spoke to Squadron Leader Robert Burke, chief test pilot for the Chinook Mark 2 at the time of the crash.
He said he was told by a senior officer to stop advising the civilian air accident investigator. He was not asked to take part in the official RAF inquiry into the crash.
He said the Ministry of Defence had failed to inform ministers of software problems and criticised the RAF inquiry."Their finding of gross negligence is not because there was hard evidence of gross negligence - it was because they had ruled out everything else," he said.
He told the BBC that it was "bureaucratic stubbornness" stopping the Ministry of Defence from reconsidering the matter.
The rules have changed since the Mull of Kintyre crash - the RAF cannot now conduct its own internal inquiry into such a terrible tragedy - and then decide for itself what information should and should not be withheld from public scrutiny.
And that's a very good thing - because experience suggests that powerful bureaucracies will always try to keep vital information to themselves - as it avoids answering awkward questions.
