Conclusions and recommendations
1. At our request, the Government extended the period of time available to Parliament to scrutinise the UK/US Defence Trade Co-operation Treaty. This allowed us to conduct an inquiry into the Treaty. We are grateful to the Government for this flexibility. (Paragraph
5)
2. Unusually, because of the classified nature of the material presented to us, we had to conduct our evidence sessions for our inquiry into The Iran hostages incident in private. We had some reservations about conducting scrutiny on terms of the Government's choosing.
(Paragraph 12)
3. We concluded that the Fulton Report, and the evidence provided to us in support of it, contained a depth of operational detail which it would have been damaging to have made public. This made it difficult for us to demonstrate openly the grounds on which we reached our conclusions. In our Report, we assured the House that we had scrutinised the Fulton Report thoroughly and we wrote to the Secretary of State for Defence with a number of classified conclusions and recommendations.
(Paragraph 14)
4. We believe that visiting our troops wherever they are deployed is crucial to our understanding of the conditions in which our Armed Forces operate.
(Paragraph 54)
5. We do reiterate what we put in our Annual Report for 2007, that we would like Government responses to deal more fully not just with the content of the recommendations and conclusions of our Reports but also with the evidence and lines of argument that support those recommendations and conclusions. (Paragraph
60)
6. We were pleased that the MoD agreed to accommodate us at the Defence Academy and we are grateful to Academy staff at all levels for their assistance in making our seminar a success, and for their valuable contribution to our discussions.
We hope very much to make seminars of this sort at Shrivenham an annual event.
(Paragraph 61)
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