When I was Minister of Defence, as I said in my opening comments, each day that I was in my office—which is literally every day—I was briefed on operations and briefed on intelligence. When we had detainees, I was told how many we had, what state or condition they were in, whether they were ready for transfer, etc. I stayed up on all the information I could about Afghanistan.
We talk about the 2005 arrangement, which I believe was signed in December 2005. We took over government on February 6, 2006. We inherited this transfer agreement, and it took us a while to determine what could be improved, if it could be improved. We compared it with other agreements. For quite a while, if you recall, I said in Parliament that the Red Cross would inform us of what was going on.
Eventually the Red Cross, after 10 or 11 months, said that wasn't so, and I apologized. But I advised Parliament on the basis of the information I received at the time. I didn't make it up. I don't have a separate system of intelligence out of my own office; I have to take what my officials tell me.
Once we discovered that the Red Cross was not advising us of the condition of the detainees, we also looked at the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission. They said that they were doing the job but they were rather fragile. Looking at the Red Cross situation and the human rights situation, we decided that there needed to be an upgrading of this agreement, and it happened late in my mandate. The new agreement came in, the 2007 agreement, whereby we had direct access to the prisons.