Prevention of Terrorism Bill

Part of the debate – in the House of Lords at 11:00 pm on 7 March 2005.

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Photo of The Earl of Onslow The Earl of Onslow Conservative 11:00, 7 March 2005

I would surmise that the problem outlined by the noble Baroness, Lady Ramsay, and my noble friend Lady Park is not new. I assume that throughout the Irish Troubles we had agents deep within the IRA. We knew that we did not have to compromise them and we knew how not to compromise them.

On intercept evidence, I go back to the 1914 war. That may sound rather odd, but I refer to the famous Zimmermann telegram. Because we had broken the German diplomatic code, we could read all the German diplomatic exchanges within the United States. It was absolutely essential that we did not allow the Germans to know that we had broken their code—exactly the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Ramsay.

Noble Lords will know that Zimmermann was the German Foreign Minister. He sent a telegram to the German ambassador in Mexico asking him to please stir up a war between the United States and Mexico. Mexico could then have Arizona, Texas and New Mexico back. That drove the United States up the wall. It was a really important piece of information. We had to convince the Americans that it was genuine—Woodrow Wilson was being difficult—and we had to convince the Germans that we had not broken their code.

The point is that there is nothing new in this problem and therefore we can deal with it in the old ways. We must be very careful not to compromise our sources of intelligence. Al'Qaeda knows perfectly well, because it has been all over the American newspapers, that when one of Osama bin Laden's people uses a satellite television in a cave in Afghanistan, almost immediately a drone aeroplane zaps in from on high, having picked up the signal. Those people know that we have very high quality interception. These problems can be overcome, as they have been in countless previous court cases, whether they concern the IRA or spies for the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

On the subject of torture, the noble Lord, Lord Judd, makes a good point in saying that the Home Secretary complains that he cannot prove a negative. If he gets a tip or information from the Uzbek intelligence community, it is almost a racing cert, because that is how those people function, that it has been obtained through torture. Equally, I suggest that the Egyptian anti-terrorist intelligence services are not exactly members of a Liberal Democrat parish council.

All these problems are knowable; there is nothing new in them and there is no reason why we cannot deal with them in complete conformity with a view to human rights and according to our own standards. That is what we are in this House to maintain.