On Friday afternoon, Premier Dr. Ewart Brown told the House of Assembly that Police Commissioner George Jackson had carried out a security assessment on the four Uighurs brought to Bermuda from Guantánamo Bay a day earlier.

Mr. Jackson, he said, had concluded that "there is absolutely no security risk". Yesterday, Mr. Jackson and Governor Sir Richard Gozney said that Dr. Brown's statement was untrue and misleading.

Mr. Jackson, who only learned of the arrival of the Uighurs on Thursday (presumably along with the rest of Bermuda or just before) in fact told Sir Richard and Public Safety Minister Sen. David Burch on Friday that the men were "a high risk".

And yet Dr. Brown told the House of Assembly that afternoon that Mr Jackson said the men posed "absolutely no risk".

Last night, Dr. Brown's spokesman said that the Premier was briefed by Sen. Burch on the Police Commissioner's preliminary assessment and that the Premier's comment in the House was consistent with the content of the Minister's briefing.

As of 8 p.m. last night, Sen. Burch had not responded to requests for clarification, but no doubt will do so today.

So, according to the Premier, Sen. Burch either received different information from Mr. Jackson than Mr. Jackson now says he delivered, misinterpreted what Mr. Jackson told him, or Sen. Burch outright lied to the Premier, which seems unlikely.

It is worth noting that the Police, in giving their high risk assessment, did not rule out giving the Uighurs a clean assessment later on.

The reason for the high risk assessment was that they had too little information from the US Government and the Bermuda Government to give any other one, although no doubt they had seen the US Government transcripts in which the Uighurs admitted getting some military training in Afghanistan.

Now a full assessment with information from other governments, including Britain's, is being carried out – precisely the in-depth assessment that should have been carried out before the Uighurs arrived and would have been carried out had Dr. Brown and the US Government not been so intent on deceiving the British in the first place.

It is also noteworthy that giving the Uighurs a clean bill of health fit in with the central theme of Dr. Brown and his apologists' defence of the Uighurs; that they are completely innocent victims of circumstance. That may be so, but the Bermuda Police now say that they cannot reach that decision without more information. Did Dr. Brown hear what he wanted to hear? Only Sen. Burch will be able to tell.

What is unquestioned is that Premier Brown misled the House of Assembly, even if he did so unknowingly.

Under the Westminster system, the one thing that you cannot do is lie to your colleagues. Parliamentary privilege means that you can accuse people of all sorts of heinous acts. But you are expected to tell the truth.

If lying in Parliament was acceptable, then the whole foundation of parliamentary democracy would collapse. If Cabinet Ministers and MPs regularly lied about their actions, laws and policies, then those very actions, laws and decisions would be meaningless.

That's why Parliaments are so strict on this point. Erskine May's 'Parliamentary Procedure' has this to say: "It is of paramount importance that ministers give accurate and truthful information to Parliament, correcting any inadvertent error at the earliest opportunity."

If Dr. Brown unknowingly misled the House then he needs to correct himself, and quickly.