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Intelligence and Security Committee

I do not know whether it is true; I hope it is. I was rather puzzled that the director general of the Security Service said in response to those concerns, "I cannot fully explain". I can understand that he did not know to start with, but I would have thought that, by the time the matter had been investigated, he of all people should have been able to "fully explain" why those matters had not been identified in the initial search and put to the knowledge of the Committee. This problem involves not just this particular case. If this were purely an isolated matter, one might not need to spend too much time on it, but if the reason given by the security services as to why those papers were not identified is that their internal information retrieval systems are so poor, in such disorder and so disorganised that these things just happen, and if the security services cannot either prevent them from happening or, in the longer run, explain why they have happened, we must assume that this arises not just in the case of Mr. Binyam Mohamed. If we are to accept what the security services have said, this must be a general problem that refers to all the information that they hold.