- The vast British base at the international airport on
the outskirts of Basra is a curiously quiet place. In the arrivals hall
- with its little coffee bar - the desert boots of British soldiers squeak
across the floor. Go up to the first floor and the officers will tell,
with a slightly patronising air, how the British Army is doing things differently
here in the south. They will tell you about their unique experience, about
lessons learnt in Northern Ireland, compared with the ill-trained US forces
in the north.
-
- By yesterday those reassurances sounded increasingly
hollow as pictures of British soldiers - allegedly members of the Queen's
Lancashire Regiment - were published yesterday apparently showing them
beating an Iraqi detainee and urinating on him during an eight-hour long
assault last year. It was the second set of photographs to emerge in two
days, after US soldiers in the north were shown abusing detainees.
-
- Suddenly the two major Allies have been tarred with the
same awful brush - charged with beating and abusing Iraqis in their care.
After weeks of bad news from Iraq the pictures have threatened to explode
the fragile and contentious legitimacy of UK operations in Iraq.
-
- In the images published in the Mirror newspaper yesterday,
a hooded Iraqi, allegedly a thief, is sitting in the back of what looks
like a canvas-sided vehicle, stripped to his underpants and a T-shirt with
an Iraqi flag on it. In one photograph a soldier urinates on his head.
In another a kick is aimed at his head, while in a third an assault rifle
is jabbed at his genitals.
-
- It is a story whose details were filled in by two unnamed
soldiers - A and B - who told the Mirror how the young man had been picked
up from the nearby docks for stealing. 'As we took him back,' said soldier
A, 'he was getting a beating. He was hit with batons on the knees, fingers,
toes, elbows and head ...
-
- 'Because it was so hot we put him in the back of a four-tonner
truck which has a canopy over it. That's where the photos were taken. Lads
were taking turns to give him a right going over, smashing him in the face
with weapons and stamping on him. We had him for about eight hours ...
-
- 'He was missing teeth. All his mouth was bleeding and
his nose was all over the place. He couldn't talk, his jaw was out ...
he was on his way to being killed.'
-
- The soldiers claim that at least one officer was aware
of the treatment being handed out and ordered the men involved to dump
the victim. It was not, says the Mirror's editor Piers Morgan, an easy
story to run even though he immediately knew he had a scoop when the photographs
came across his desk more than a week ago.
-
- According to Morgan, a team of his journalists had been
investigating the Queen's Lancashire Regiment after allegations that rogue
elements were seeking reprisals for the death of a popular captain at the
hands of an Iraqi mob.
-
- But Morgan himself was worried about the effect of running
such disturbing images in a paper known for its opposition to the war.
He knew that no one else had the pictures. They had been given to the paper
by one of the soldiers involved in the attack, which happened several months
ago.
-
- His mind was made up when pictures of American atrocities
against Iraqi captives were televised around the world on Thursday. Suddenly
the tenor of the debate changed.
-
- 'We did not publish these photographs lightly,' Morgan
told The Observer. 'We were very aware of the reaction but the simple truth
of the matter is that this type of behaviour has no place in the British
Army. It should never have happened and it will have a very adverse effect
on opinion in Iraq where we are supposed to be winning people's hearts
and minds.'
-
- Yesterday the picture of the urinating soldier and his
victim was published under the headline 'VILE.'
-
- Coming hard on the heels of Tony Blair's condemnation
of similar photographs of United States soldiers abusing detainees at Baghdad's
Abu Ghraib prison, it sent a shock wave rushing through the Ministry of
Defence, the Foreign Office and Downing Street.
-
- In Number 10, as the first copies of yesterday's Mirror
landed late on Friday night, the first response to the photographs was
'are they real?' Officials are still asking that question but they quickly
realised that it would be impossible to build a 'handling strategy' around
such a premise.
-
- 'There were two routes for us,' said one Downing Street
adviser. 'We could have stalled and said we were looking at the issue but
that could have given the wrong impression that we weren't taking it seriously.
So we decided to immediately make it clear how appalled we were about the
allegations.'
-
- For senior coalition officials in Iraq, as well as for
Downing Street and the White House, the Mirror's revelations were a double
whammy coming hard on the heels of photographs of abuse by US soldiers
at Abu Ghraib prison broadcast by CBS's 60 Minutes programme on Thursday
and carried around the world. But one thing was quickly clear - the very
different nature of the images and even of the abuse involved.
-
- In the American photographs there is no attempt to hide
the identities of the soldiers who were involved but there is something
about the smiling casualness of the abuse that makes them equally sinister.
-
- In perhaps one of the most shocking of the photographs
that have emerged, a woman private called Lynndie England is shown with
a cigarette dangling from her mouth giving a thumbs-up sign while pointing
at the genitals of a naked and hooded young Iraqi who has been ordered
to masturbate. In another, a grinning England poses behind a pile of naked
Iraqis piled in a clumsy pyramid.
-
- Also pictured is Staff Sergeant Ivan 'Chip' Frederick,
a tall, muscular man, a corrections officer in a Virginia prison.
-
- Frederick, a reservist, occupies a unique position in
the scandal as - in his ever more vocal justification of his behaviour
- he has provided the most coherent insight into how soldiers turned to
abusers in a country they went to liberate.
-
- Frederick blames the US army for its lack of direction
from above and says that he will plead not guilty to any charges made against
him. 'We had no support, no training whatsoever,' he told CBS's 60 Minutes.
'I kept asking my chain of command for certain things ... like rules and
regulations. And it just wasn't happening.'
-
- Frederick makes clear that the abuse was not only for
pleasure but was regarded as part of interrogations led by US intelligence
and private contractors in the prison.
-
- 'We had military intelligence, we had all kinds of other
government agencies, FBI, CIA ... All those that I didn't even know or
recognise. Military intelligence has encouraged and told us, "great
job". We help getting them to talk with the way we handle them ...
We've had a very high rate with our style of getting them to break. They
usually ended up breaking within hours.'
-
- While the source of the British photographs remains anonymous
and difficult to authenticate, the pictures from Abu Ghraib came from an
outraged military policeman - Specialist Joseph M. Darby - who was given
a CD containing pictures of the naked and abused Iraqis by one of those
who is facing prosecution. Darby penned an anonymous complaint and attached
the CD. He later came forward to give evidence against his colleagues.
-
- Darby was not alone in having become aware of abuse at
the hands of British and US forces. As early as last summer, researchers
for Amnesty International had began picking up worrying allegations of
torture and killings within the then still chaotic system for the detention
of Iraqis. These claims, Amnesty says, have persisted despite its own report
warning the occupying powers of their obligations under the Geneva Conventions.
-
- It was not only Amnesty that was hearing reports of abuse.
Over the past six months, as has now become clear, a number of warnings
were being sounded about abuse by allied soldiers. And they were warnings
the coalition forces appear to have ignored until this year.
-
- By November last year dark rumours of violence and sexual
abuse were in circulation among Iraqis, human rights groups and the media
- many of them impossible to verify. But some should have been easy to
check out, not least those pointing to Abu Ghraib and the persistent claims
of abuses within its walls.
-
- Among those who complained but were ignored was Sheikh
Sharif al-Qubaysi, a 72-year-old tribal leader imprisoned in Abu Ghraib.
According to Qubaysi, as he was sitting in his cell one evening a US woman
soldier came in and ordered him to strip before parading him in front of
other inmates.
-
- Qubaysi is not the only victim to describe this form
of humiliation. Another credible report of persistent sexual humiliation
at Abu Ghraib was supplied by a journalist with Al Jazeera who was wrongly
arrested by US forces and taken to the prison.
-
- In an interview with the US political magazine the Nation
, Salah Hassan, 33, described his experiences in detention last November,
alleging he was stripped naked and hooded with a plastic bag by soldiers
who addressed him as 'Al Jazeera', 'boy' or 'bitch'.
-
- He says that he was forced to stand hooded, bound and
naked for 11 hours in the cold, and that when he fell down soldiers kicked
him until he got up again.
-
- But if these allegations now seem chillingly credible
in the light of the photographs, more serious allegations have emerged
from Abu Ghraib that remain impossible to establish - not least allegations
of rape involving both male and female detainees.
-
- US military investigators are examining one case of male
rape but last year allegations emerged in an anonymous letter widely disseminated
among Iraqis that US soldiers had also raped women - claims that were being
circulated by Iraqi rebels to foster animosity against coalition forces.
-
- But if the warnings were ignored for months, by early
this year others in the US military had become aware of abuses inside the
prison. At the beginning of this year the US commander in Iraq, Lieutenant
General Ricardo S. Sanchez, ordered a confidential investigation by Major
General Antonio M. Taguba.
-
- Taguba's report - leaked to the New Yorker magazine -
stated that between October and December last year there were multiple
incidents of 'sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses' in the prison
carried out by soldiers of the 372nd Military Police Company, and also
by members of the intelligence community.
-
- After months of operating with impunity in a twisted
little world, the net was closing in on England and Frederick and was about
to catch rogue elements of the Queen's Lancashire Regiment.
-
- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1208000,00.html
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