The report of the inquiry into the death of Baha Mousa by Sir William Gage, published on 8 September, is a damning critique of the British army – including senior officers, their legal advisers and right up the chain of command to the Ministry of Defence.
Baha Mousa, an Iraqi hotel worker, died in 2003 with 93 separate injuries on his body, including a broken nose and cracked ribs, and his head shoved down a prison latrine after he and eight others had been abused for over 36 hours by members of the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment. However, in the subsequent court martial only one soldier, Corporal Donald Payne, was convicted of ‘inhumane’ treatment of civilians and gaoled for a year. Six others, including the regiment’s commanding officer Jorge Mendonca, were acquitted of all charges.
The report criticises 19 members of the regiment as complicit in the ‘appalling episode of serious gratuitous violence’ meted out to the detainees – violence that included beating or kicking each man in turn to make them groan in a grotesque musical parody that their torturers dubbed ‘The Choir’. They include:
- Colonel Jorge Mendonca who, as commanding officer, bears ‘heavy responsibility’ for the ‘grave and shameful events’.
- Lieutenant Craig Rodgers and Major Michael Peebles who did nothing to stop the detainees being serious assaulted by soldiers under their command.
- Chaplain Father Peter Madden who visited the detention centre and ‘must have seen the shocking condition of the detainees’.
- Dr Derek Keilloh, the regiment’s medical officer, who claimed that he saw no injuries on Baha Mousa’s corpse.
All should face criminal charges. However, these are not just a few ‘bad apples’; Gage points at what he calls the ‘systemic and corporate failure’ of the Ministry of Defence to prevent the use of ‘conditioning’ methods [ie torture] banned by the Heath government in 1972 after their use against Republican prisoners in Ireland was exposed. Neither the soldiers carrying out the abuse, nor their superiors, seemed aware that forcing detainees to wear hoods and adopt excruciating stress positions was in contravention both of British law and the Geneva Conventions. During the inquiry it emerged that ‘the ban was never made explicit in British army guidance on prisoner of war handling’ and that ‘a four-star general was not aware of the Heath ruling. Nor was Adam Ingram, the former [Labour] armed forces minister’.
This blanket ignorance of any limitations on the abuse that could be meted out to detainees was no oversight, but rather, after 2002, a matter of official policy. The soldiers did what they did because they had been taught that, in the ‘war on terror’ the rules did not apply to them and that Iraqi lives were worthless. Phil Shiner, the lawyer for Baha Mousa’s family, also acts for 150 other Iraqis who are demanding an inquiry into Britain’s detention policy. On 8 September he told The Guardian that the allegations in these cases ‘involve a range of techniques and practices which were simply not on Sir William’s radar: unbelievably debased sexual behaviour, mock executions, vicious threats of rape of detainees’ female relatives, and systematic use of hooding, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation…’. This is British imperialism at war.
Cat Wiener
FRFI 223 October/November 2011
