A report has just been published by the Ministry of Defence on the treatment of detainees in Iraq during and after the war. There were a number of incidents resulting in torture and death although it was unclear if anyone will ever be prosecuted to the difficulties in obtaining evidence. Soldiers were acquitted of the death of Musa Baha, who suffered 93 separate injuries, as the prosecution were unable to make a case.
In the worst abuse case, Baha Musa, a 26-year-old hotel receptionist, died
after suffering 93 separate injuries while being held in detention for 36
hours by soldiers from the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment; and eight other
Iraqis suffered “varying degrees of abuse” at the same time.
The cause of this abuse has been traced to the lack of procedures on interrogation techniques. The army banned five techniques in 1972 during the Ulster insurgency; five techniques that were deployed in Iraq. Such a policy should have been communicated and disseminated to the troops. Yet, this was not implemented as the Army was expecting a peacekeeping situation rather than a violent insurgency.
Although Brigadier Aitken emphasised in his report - an investigation into cases of deliberate abuse and unlawful killing in Iraq 2003 and 2004 - that measures had now been taken to redress all the weaknesses he had uncovered, he said those responsible for preparing the troops for Iraq seemed to have had a “lack of awareness of the operational context” of the campaign.
Brigadier Aitken also said that the plans for post-conflict in Iraq had focused on humanitarian relief but not on the likelihood of a violent insurgency. “One consequence of that was that we had insufficient troops in theatre to deal effectively with the situation in which we found ourselves; peace support operations require significantly larger numbers of troops to impose law and order than are required for prosecuting a war,” he said.
This is the only admission that the Army will make on postwar operations in Iraq, leaving the infantry ill-prepared to cope with an unexpected insurgency, in terms of equipment and numbers. Such factors will have contributed to stressed forces, who had little guidance for their relationships with the indigenous population and whose rules of engagement did not expressly forbid dehumanising actions to obtain information.
This is a salutary lesson in how rules of engagement are necessary to guide the actions of the infantry in combat, since the stresses of war understandably undermine the constraints imposed by civil society. Officers, especially NCOs, provide the necessary leadership in retaining these constraints. One muct ask why the Ministry of Defence is not investigating this failure of policy, given the large number of 'staff' and civil servants that must have been involved in the planning. Dennatt's responses appear glib:
Both Brigadier Aitken and General Dannatt highlighted the importance of soldiers having a loyalty, not just to their mates, but also to the operation in which they are serving. In the Baha Musa case, the judge accused the QLR of “closing ranks” and of maintaining a “wall of silence” when the death was being investigated by the Royal Military Police.
General Dannatt said: “I think people have got to fully understand that just saying nothing and being part of a conspiracy of silence actually is disloyalty and not loyalty to anyone.”
Brigadier Aitken said some soldiers, and commanders, had failed to live up to the Army’s core values of selfless commitment, courage, discipline, integrity, loyalty and respect for others. “Courage includes having the moral courage to challenge unacceptable behaviour whenever it is encountered,” he said.
What about the responsibility of the planners in ensuring that rules of engagement were applied properly? Who undertook this role? Until we hear the Ministry of Defence sack the civil servants and staff responsible for this management failure, we should regard ethical references in the report as an insufficient response, and perhaps a tangential defence: blaming the infantry without putting any MOD officers in the dock.