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Records of Detention (Review Conclusions)

I echo the words of condolence that the Secretary of State rightly gave for those who died yesterday. I thank him for his statement and like him I sympathise with the plight of those who have to make difficult decisions in the chaos of the battlefield. The Secretary of State has come to the House today and presented the conclusions as comprehensive. Will he guarantee to the House that every record and every piece of information held by any element of the British Government armed forces, security and secret services and so on has been scrutinised exhaustively and that this is indeed the last word on the matter? At the heart of it is our relationship of trust with the United States. Does he acknowledge that the new Administration in America now acknowledge that things happened in the past that should not have happened, which they are defining as torture, for example, whereas the previous Administration denied that emphatically? Were not most of the assurances on which we are relying in the account the Secretary of State has given us today in fact assurances given by the previous Administration? If the memorandum of understanding between us and America, on which we are relying, was as strong as the Secretary of State invites us to believe, how was it so easily pushed to one side in this specific case? Did the British Government really buy the explanation that the US, with hundreds of thousands of personnel out there in its hunt for al-Qaeda operatives in Iraq, did not have a single person in the country who could speak the relevant Pakistani language, and that that amounted to an adequate reason to move the detainees elsewhere? Have we explicitly asked the Americans whether anybody handed over was at any point tortured or water-boarded? What is our policy for our personnel? Are British personnel explicitly told not to be complicit in abduction, rendition or torture? Perhaps the most disturbing thing in the statement was the fact that information was available and made available to the then Foreign and Home Secretaries, so in a sense it was missed at the time. Were the lawyers asleep on the job? Did they not come back later and give legal advice? As the temperature on the issue rose, with allegations of extraordinary rendition and the use of Diego Garcia for flights, did no official revisit the information that had been given to Ministers and draw their attention explicitly to it? My final point relates to the allegations made a year ago by Ben Griffin. Looking closely at what he said, we see that he was talking about joint operations, with UK and US troops working alongside each other. In the statement today, the Secretary of State gave a detailed account about people who were detained by the British, but later in his statement he said that, in the new arrangements that have existed since 1 January, we have probed with America their arrangements for treating people captured with assistance from UK troops. I ask myself whether there were instances when UK troops actually captured people but from the very word go they were deemed to be held by the Americans. I wonder whether the Secretary of State can reassure me that that is a distinction that does not really exist, because it seems to me that Ben Griffin's allegation may be slightly different from the explanation that the right hon. Gentleman has given today. These are very serious issues. The statement raises almost as many questions as it answers. The Secretary of State took the Conservative spokesman to task, saying that the hon. Gentleman might come to rue some of the things he said. I should like the Secretary of State to reassure the House that he is absolutely confident that nothing will come to light subsequently, either from more whistleblowers or investigative journalists, that might cause him or any other Minister in the future to have to come back to the Dispatch Box and acknowledge that we have not had as comprehensive a version of the truth today as he might like to think.