With respect, Mr. Minister, the defence act does give you the responsibility. You say that you couldn't use a board of inquiry because it would have involved potential criminal charges or potential code of service violations, but when you hadn't looked at the information, you couldn't possibly have known that.
The only way you could know that it was not a course of action open to you was to have actually considered the evidence, not investigate the evidence but consider the evidence that the ombudsman tried to present to you because he did not have the authority to proceed further.