October 20, 2007


What will it take for our government to face the awful facts of British detention policy in Iraq? Evidence now publicly available proves that UK forces had a systematic policy that led to the execution of scores of Iraqis in detention, and the torture of countless more. But most people remain blissfully unaware of the truth, while the government chooses to ignore it. It seems that it is too painful for the nation to recognise that what we did in Iraq is no more than what we have always done in times of conflict, and that an arrogant, brutal racism that harks back to colonial times requires urgent exorcism.

The starting point in understanding what we have to confront is the repeated accusation from the most senior military figures that Britain failed to plan for the occupation. It was assumed that the United Nations would be responsible because the security council would authorise military invasion and occupation in early 2003. When it refused, the US and UK invaded illegally and found themselves with no plan for occupation. Britain made up policy on the hoof - with deadly consequences. To make matters worse, our detention policy reflected our partnership with the US, who ran detention facilities with us. When Lieutenant Colonel Nicholas Mercer, the army's senior legal adviser at the start of the occupation, complained to senior civil servants and others about hooding, stressing and the use of noise (all authorised techniques amounting to torture), he failed to get the policy changed partly because the US considered our interrogation techniques too soft.

Our current detention policy includes the reintroduction of the five techniques banned by the Heath government in 1972: hooding, stressing, sleep and food deprivation, and noise. These techniques are a direct breach of the Geneva conventions and the UN convention against torture. Nobody in the chain of command, including at the highest level politically and within the civil service, attempted to bring our policy into line with basic legal standards even when they were told what was happening, by the Red Cross among others. And there were no command structures in place to inhibit the average soldier, who was expected to operate all the functions of central and local government in temperatures of up to 60C, without any training whatsoever in prisoner treatment.

It is no wonder that senior military figures seek to place the blame for the horrors of our detention policy on those in political command. While individual criminal culpability for these atrocities cannot be escaped, it is easy to see why the military felt so let down.

The public are not meant to know too much, as evidenced by the desperate, but ultimately unsuccessful, attempt to block my team's access to the documentation from the court martial into the case of Baha Mousa, who died with 93 separate injuries while in British custody in September 2003. However, what is already in the public domain should be more than enough to cause outrage. We now have to confront the Amara incident in May 2004, as reported in yesterday's Guardian. It appears that 22 Iraqis were taken into detention alive, only to be returned in body bags 20 hours later.

But worse still, the evidence suggests a catalogue of abuse: first, that soldiers had earlier executed Iraqis in front of a number of witnesses; second, some of them were executed by shooting at close range or strangulation; third, many of the bodies show clear evidence of torture; fourth, bodies had been mutilated with eyes gouged out, and multiple stab wounds and body parts severed (including a penis); and fifth, trained Iraqi medical operatives attest that many of the wounds were fresh and that deaths had occurred just before the bodies were returned. A survivor's statement gives shocking evidence of hearing the screams of Iraqis being tortured, and hearing one of my client's relatives executed by shooting.

The government's response is pathetic. It asserts that a military investigation (held, of course, in secret) concluded in May 2005 that there was no evidence of criminal wrongdoing and that all the deceased died of injuries sustained before detention. This is consistent with the decision of the present foreign and defence secretaries to shut their eyes to this evidence of systematic abuse and worse. My offers to show the foreign secretary this new evidence were ignored. The defence secretary ignores correspondence from various Christian churches and their leaders to open these matters up to public scrutiny.

Both prefer to rely on the advice of civil servants, despite it being obvious that it is the senior civil service that has most to lose. What makes this response so utterly depressing is that they have deluded themselves into believing that their response is justified. Ultimately, whether those responsible, including those who inhabit the shadowy corridors of power, are held accountable seems to depend on the response of the public to this evidence.

· Phil Shiner is a solicitor at Public Interest Lawyers which acts for all the victims mentioned above

@publicinterestlawyers.co.uk