British Soldiers Don't Kill Terrorists

[Flying Pig]

The al-Sweady inquiry, set up to investigate claims that British troops mistreated and murdered several Iraqis following the so-called Battle of Danny Boy in 2004, has reported that the allegations are 'false' and 'a conspiracy'.

Allegations that British troops murdered Iraqis in the aftermath of an infamous 2004 battle were the result of a "conspiracy" to pervert the course of justice, the UK government has said.

The Ministry of Defence told the Al-Sweady public inquiry claims that bodies were mutilated were also "dishonestly made" by witnesses.

Lawyers for the Iraqis withdrew the murder and mutilation claims in March.

The inquiry was set up in 2009 to examine claims of mistreatment.

It is due to report by the end of this year and to date has cost £22.7m. It has reviewed millions of documents and heard from more than 280 witnesses.

In closing statements to the inquiry, lawyers for the MoD said the allegations had caused "immense anxiety and distress" to the soldiers concerned.

"The untruthful allegations cannot be attributed to honest mistakes or misunderstandings," the MoD said.

"They are the product of a conspiracy between a number of the Iraqi core participants to pervert the course of justice."

The four-year inquiry has been examining the Battle of Danny Boy - named after a British checkpoint near the town of Majar al-Kabir in southern Iraq - during the Iraq war.

British troops were accused of unlawfully killing 20 or more Iraqis at the nearby Camp Abu Naj.

But Neil Garnham QC from Treasury Solicitors - which represented many of the British personnel involved in the inquiry - said that some Iraqi witnesses had resorted to "elaborate fabrication" to explain why they and others were on the battlefield in the first place.

He accused the witnesses of being motivated by the prospect of receiving compensation.

Two parts of the coverage stand out in particular. One is the sheer and unnecessary cost - it cost over £22 million (enough to pay the wages of an entire regiment for a year), and the MoD spends something like £30 million per year on lawyers to deal with other similar claims. This is in a time of huge defence cuts and layoffs in the military. Admittedly, even that total cost is nothing compared with an aircraft carrier or a fighter wing, but it's surely not a lot of comfort to the long-service Sergeants Major (£50,000 a year) losing their jobs for lack of money. The inquiry blamed this on MoD transparency, or more precisely lack of transparency:

The inquiry was established after the MoD failed to prove that it had carried out a proper examination of the events of 14 May 2004.

The MoD was condemned for a "lamentable" failure to disclose information, including complaints made by detainees to the Red Cross.

"None of this would have been necessary if they had acted responsibly and in the public interest years ago," Mr O'Connor added.

The second is that some claims of mistreatment were upheld, but these seem really quite laughable. Bear in mind that these interrogations were done literally minutes after a firefight lasting several hours by soldiers who had been in that firefight, in the field - not in a rear-echelon base like Bastion by trained interrogators. I'll quote again:

[The inquiry judged that:]

The detainees should have been given some privacy while being strip-searched and should have been given proper food when they were first detained. They should not have been deprived of sleep before they were questioned or shouted at during interrogation. They were deprived of sight by being made to wear blacked-out goggles for prolonged periods when this had no security purpose.

It also described as "ill treatment" an interrogator banging a tent peg on a table and walking around a blindfolded detainee blowing on the back of his neck.

To an extent I'll take the unnecessary blindfolding point, but 'shouted at during interrogation'? Not to mention the insistence on giving them proper food - one senior officer was on the radio yesterday explaining politely that the soldiers in question hadn't had the chance to provide proper food for themselves at the time, because they'd just come off the battlefield. This interrogation was being done to gather information with immediate tactical value - does that not justify some level of rough handling, especially of supposedly military people?

A further point should be made, I think - a fair number of British soldiers have encountered hostility from the public when coming home from deployments, and a small number of British people even shipped out to Iraq, Afghanistan and now Syria to fight on the other side. Does the press need to think about its own practices, having given a great deal of publicity and credibility to these rumours, which have now been declared totally baseless?

 

[Borachio]

Hmm.

I imagine the establishment breathed a collective sigh of relief over this issue.

But, for myself, I haven't trusted the Ministry of Defence over any issue ever since the nuclear tests in the 50s.

As far as I know, it continues to treat even its own military personnel with lamentable negligence, so why would it take any concern over the welfare of foreign nationals?

Still, yeah, a lot of money. But money well spent if it's resulted in finally uncovering the truth of the matter, or, equally good from the MoD point of view, a successful coverup.

(Call me cynical, if you wish.)

 

[Flying Pig]

Hmm.

I imagine the establishment breathed a collective sigh of relief over this issue.

But, for myself, I haven't trusted the Ministry of Defence over any issue ever since the nuclear tests in the 50s.

As far as I know, it continues to treat even its own military personnel with lamentable negligence, so why would it take any concern over the welfare of foreign nationals?

Still, yeah, a lot of money. But money well spent if it's resulted in finally uncovering the truth of the matter, or, equally good from the MoD point of view, a successful coverup.

(Call me cynical, if you wish.)

'The Ministry of Defence's' treatment of foreign nationals isn't the question, though: these allegations were levelled at specific infantry soldiers, and soldiers do look after their own. I also think the idea that soldiers are generally treated badly is a bit of a misleading one - yes, barracks housing and food is sometimes rubbish, but if you're a private soldier you're a young man working an entry-level job that doesn't need any qualifications - you're not going to be living in a mansion and eating like a prince if you work at Tesco either. As for equipment, the issues going into Iraq and Afghanistan were the inevitable disconnect between plans and reality - there's only so far you can predict how much of what you're going to need in advance, and pretty soon you end up having to make stopgap purchases (like the many UORs) to fill the inevitable gap. We also ended up literally writing the book on modern counter-insurgency since nobody had actually done it well in several decades.

 

[Pangur Bán]

A British inquiry led by government-appointed judge Sir Thayne Forbes whitewashes British army.

That's me convinced.

Now, what's this conspiracy theory nonsense I've been hearing about Santa Claus being a giant lie?

 

[Borachio]

I was thinking more of Operation Antler when I said mistreated their own military personnel.

 

[Flying Pig]

A British inquiry led by government-appointed judge Sir Thayne Forbes whitewashes British army.

That's me convinced.

Now, what's this conspiracy theory nonsense I've been hearing about Santa Claus being a giant lie?

British inquiries do have a rather good record of condemning the military when needed - the whole point of public inquiries is that they're independent. We've got a similar 'Savile Enquiry' going on at the moment which turns up another idiotic mistake by the police force on a weekly basis, and the Hillsborough Inquiry similarly saw a government-appointed judge identify that the government's agents had acted in a despicable and criminal manner. Even the Baha Mousa Inquiry about a very similar incident in Iraq did find a British soldier guilty of murdering an Iraqi civilian. So I don't think the cover-up idea holds much water here. They had much more reason to hide the murder of Baha Mousa, and didn't.

I was thinking more of Operation Antler when I said mistreated their own military personnel.

That was an awfully long time ago... about the same time as they tested LSD on exercising troops, as I recall.

 

[Borachio]

Well, I met a man who'd taken part in the nuclear tests in the Pacific only a couple of months ago. He was still miffed about the way they'd been treated.

Just because something is a long time ago doesn't mean that the injustice of it has gone away.

And the issue has never been satisfactorily dealt with, so why should I have any confidence in the present MoD?

 

[Pangur Bán]

British inquiries do have a rather good record of condemning the military when needed - the whole point of public inquiries is that they're independent. We've got a similar 'Savile Enquiry' going on at the moment which turns up another idiotic mistake by the police force on a weekly basis, and the Hillsborough Inquiry similarly saw a government-appointed judge identify that the government's agents had acted in a despicable and criminal manner. Even the Baha Mousa Inquiry about a very similar incident in Iraq did find a British soldier guilty of murdering an Iraqi civilian. So I don't think the cover-up idea holds much water here. They had much more reason to hide the murder of Baha Mousa, and didn't.

That sort of argument is like saying 'if x really was a serial killer, surely he'd have killed y'. Bloody Sunday was in accordance with Sir Humphrey's old dictum, 'We should always tell the public freely and frankly anything that they could easily find out some other way'. The point of public inquiries they are seen to be independent, and the reliability of its outcome would depend, obviously, on how it has been set up, who set it up, how it was conducted, and what range potential results were seen to be tolerable. You are entitled to believe what you like, but given that neither of us know, I'd say my position is the safer one. We won't know for sure for decades, if ever.

 

[Flying Pig]

That sort of argument is like saying 'if x really was a serial killer, surely he'd have killed y'. Bloody Sunday was in accordance with Sir Humphrey's old dictum, 'We should always tell the public freely and frankly anything that they could easily find out some other way'. The point of public inquiries they are seen to be independent, and the reliability of its outcome would depend, obviously, on how it has been set up, who set it up, how it was conducted, and what range potential results were seen to be tolerable. You are entitled to believe what you like, but given that neither of us know, I'd say my position is the safer one. We won't know for sure for decades, if ever.

Not really, because not killing someone and returning an embarrassing verdict are qualitatively different - it's more like saying 'I believe that John will turn up to work on time tomorrow, because he's turned up on time every day in the past week'. Yes, sometimes John doesn't turn up, but the mere fact that he's John is not reason to believe that he won't turn up on any given day - quite the reverse. So I think the default should be assuming that a non-embarrassing verdict given by a public inquiry is just as valid as an embarrassing one, though you're right that declassification in a few years may change our picture of the facts, and that the conductors of inquiries are only ever human.

 

[Pangur Bán]

Not really, because not killing someone and returning an embarrassing verdict are qualitatively different - it's more like saying 'I believe that John will turn up to work on time tomorrow, because he's turned up on time every day in the past week'. Yes, sometimes John doesn't turn up, but the mere fact that he's John is not reason to believe that he won't turn up on any given day - quite the reverse. So I think the default should be assuming that a non-embarrassing verdict given by a public inquiry is just as valid as an embarrassing one, though you're right that declassification in a few years may change our picture of the facts, and that the conductors of inquiries are only ever human.

It is naive to assume that because a finding is embarrassing that they are making a sacrifice. In accordance with Sir Humphrey's old dictum, 'We should always tell the public freely and frankly anything that they could easily find out some other way', they have to take account of what people know/will find out anyway'. As you admit, neither of us actually know or are in a position to reach judgment about Sir Thayne's inquiry.

Your default assumption that everything flung down to us from the great ones is basically accurate, besides being shown by history to be misguided, is, because it is the prevalent one, partly responsible for the lack of de facto accountability and thus much of the outrageous behaviour perpetrated by our elites and their servants.

 

[Flying Pig]

I agree that you can explain the Hillsborough Inquiry and possibly the Savile Enquiry on those lines, but what about the Baha Mousa one? Or the Plebgate inquiry, after which Andrew Mitchell remained scalped and the police were severely criticised, even though a court later gave Mitchell much less of the benefit of the doubt than the inquiry had?

I object to the idea that generally trusting public inquiries is the same as trusting 'everything flung down to us from the great ones' - indeed, the whole point is that they're at least one step removed from the government of the day, overseen by people who can't be sacked or incentivised with promotions. If a government minister had chaired the inquiry, I might be more inclined to agree with you.

 

[Pangur Bán]

So you think Sir Thayne the government appointed judge is independent of the political system and patronage?

Once again I refer to Sir Humphrey's dictum. I advocate agnosticism on public inquiries. The political processes are too intricate and veiled for the public to know one way or the other if they are reliable.

 

[Flying Pig]

About as close as you can get. He's retired - the only incentive they've got is that he might theoretically be made a lord in the future, but he's sufficiently minor that that's unlikely in the first place. That's more than can be said for just about anyone else that could have been chosen.

I like the idea of agnosticism but I make it a kind of 'positive agnosticism' rather than your 'negative agnosticism' - I say 'we can't know for sure, but it's more likely than not to be mostly right', whereas you're saying 'we can't know for sure, so we should assume that it's totally wrong'. If nothing else, we have plenty of journalists who usually find out when the government spouts unmitigated rubbish.

 

[Pangur Bán]

I like the idea of agnosticism but I make it a kind of 'positive agnosticism' rather than your 'negative agnosticism' - I say 'we can't know for sure, but it's more likely than not to be mostly right', whereas you're saying 'we can't know for sure, so we should assume that it's totally wrong'. If nothing else, we have plenty of journalists who usually find out when the government spouts unmitigated rubbish.

'It's more likely than not to be mostly right' is not agnosticism. To me this is 'God exists, Mohammed was his prophet, whether or not He wants us to pray five times a day and so on, who knows'.

If nothing else, we have plenty of journalists who usually find out when the government spouts unmitigated rubbish.

Good to see you've kept your sense of humour!

About as close as you can get. He's retired - the only incentive they've got is that he might theoretically be made a lord in the future, but he's sufficiently minor that that's unlikely in the first place. That's more than can be said for just about anyone else that could have been chosen.

How do you know that's the only incentive? You don't know anything about this. Tell me about Sir Thayne's personal and informal relations with other members of the elite? How many members of his family have careers where promotion relies on patronage? Who does he owe favours to? What shares does he own? How badly does he want other inquiry chairs? How much does he want a lordship?

 

[Flying Pig]

As Fiona Woolf found out, any one of those can be grounds to get you removed as a head of an inquiry - especially if those journalists I just mentioned find out. As for getting other inquiry chairs - I can't think of a single person who has ever chaired two, can you?

 

[Pangur Bán]

Yes, the guys who want him to do this whitewash are going to uncover all those intimate easily deniable details.

Like I said, you're a funny guy Flying Pig. Indeed, how could anyone thing patronage politics could flourish when we have all those independent and inquiring journalists!

 

[Traitorfish]

British inquiries do have a rather good record of condemning the military when needed

I'm not sure if an inquiry decades after the fact, after the original inquiry was proven to be a farce, and resulting in no prosecutions, can be reasonably described as a "rather good record".

 

[Flying Pig]

The prosecutions part isn't really the job of the inquiry, is it? Also I might argue that the very fact that the Widgery inquiry was acknowledged to be rubbish and a second inquiry set up is a sign that the truth usually (eventually) gets out - though that may well be a case of PB's Sir Humphrey maxim again.

 

[Traitorfish]

I'm just wondering how things would look if we applied those standards to civilian murderers.

"Did you murder all those people?"
"No."
[forty years pass]
"Wait, you did murder all those people!"
"Little bit."
"And do you plan do anything about it?"
"Nah".
"Oh. Well, fair enough."

 

[JollyRoger]

OJ Simpson has determined that a British infantry soldier was the real killer.