I have to answer that very carefully, because when I was the access to information and privacy training officer at National Defence, we were going through the Somalia inquiry. If you think this stuff that you're dealing with is sensitive, you ain't seen nothing. That was a departmental thing that they actually set up. The provision of documents during that period of time was done by the Somalia Inquiry Liaison Team that was created at National Defence to provide documents to the inquiry. In our job of going to the record holder and saying these documents had been requested and that they should please send them because we needed to deal with them, we were very much out of that line, for better or for worse. I'm not personally aware of anybody ever denying the existence of a document that they knew existed.
I think lots of things get lost, so one of the points I want to raise is that your ability to get information out of the government is predicated on the government's or the civil service's organization of that information. In other words, when you ask for something, the people who create those documents have to know where that something is stored. That's the bigger problem, in general terms.
Around the Afghanistan issue, I'm not aware of anybody saying point blank that it doesn't exist. I'm going to be very interested in what the Information Commissioner says in answer to my request. I'll give this to the clerk, but I indicated that I think Foreign Affairs falsely responded to my request because of the political sensitivity of the issues contained in the records. That's my sense, and that's what I told them.