Curious
So anyway, I’m idly browsing today’s written questions to ministers (as you do) in the House of Commons’ “Question Book” (found via BlairWatch) when I spot this question from Plaid Cymru’s thorn-in-New-Labour-side, Adam Price:
To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, whether British service personnel have been deployed or seconded to (a) Guantanamo Bay, (b) Guam and (c) Diego Garcia since 1995.
Now, it’s a juicy question whose answer would be well worth seeking out. I googled the question to see if it had been picked up on anybody’s radar, only to find that Diane Abbott, Labour MP for Hackney North & Stoke Newington, asked almost exactly the same question on April 7:
To ask the Secretary of State for Defence whether British service personnel have been deployed or seconded to (a) Guantanamo Bay, (b) Guam and (c) Diego Garcia since 1994.
…to which Adam Ingram, Defence Minister, replied:
It has not proved possible to respond to my hon. Friend in the time available before Prorogation.
So why didn’t Abbott simply retable the question after the election? Or palm it off to a sympathetic colleague in the Parliamentary Labour Party instead of an opposition MP whose seat was the only one targeted by New Labour during the election? Maybe the anti-war crew in Parliament pool their questions.
You can see what the question’s getting at: Have British personnel been present at, or complicit in, any acts of torture or “rendering”? The answer will probably be a flat “no” (although if it was, surely Ingram would have had time to say before Prorogation) or a prevarication, but we shall see…
UPDATE: It is of course possible that Price retabled the question of his own volition after seeing that Abbott’s version had gone unanswered. I’m curious as to whether there’s any etiquette involved.
Posted on May 23rd, 2005 at 9:43pm under Uncategorized
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• 3 Comments |
Credit for the Question book belongs to NuLabour…
But thanks for the mention anyway
And well spotted re Diego Garcia, the other slant to the question is what have the US guys on DG been doing [Torture?] on what I understand to be British Territory, and does anybody care…?
Re: Diego Garcia, FCO minister Bill Rammell gave this answer to Alex Salmond on November 2 2004:
“The US authorities have repeatedly given us verbal assurances, most recently in May 2004, that no prisoners have at any time passed in transit through Diego Garcia or its territorial waters or have disembarked there. The British Representative on Diego Garcia has confirmed this to be the case.”
Which would seem pretty unequivocal. How the British Representative would know if say, prisoners were being held on a ship offshore, I don’t know. But Rammell’s answer doesn’t seem to give him much wriggle room if he’s wrong.
Making it “since 1995″ is a botch, because RAF Nimrods often deploy there to play hide-and-seek with submarines and also to enforce sanctions against, ahem, Iraq by looking for suspicious oil tankers. So yes, “British forces have been deployed to Diego Garcia since 1995″, but that tells us rather less than it sounds.