Aletho News

UK troops tortured Iraqis ‘systematically’

Press TV – November 6, 2010

Lawyers of over 200 Iraqi civilians have presented the High Court in London with “credible” evidence of their “systemic” torture and abuse by British forces.

The evidence showed that British troops tortured those incarcerated in “the UK’s Abu Ghraib” by denying them food and water, depriving them of sleep and exposing them to mock executions at secret facilities, including one near Basra in southeastern Iraq.

The documents also revealed that prisoners were physically and sexually abused, kept in long-term solitary confinement, forced to kneel in painful positions for up to 30 hours at a time, and subjected to electric shocks at the Basra facility run by the Joint Forces Interrogation Team (JFIT) among others.

Michael Fordham QC, for the former inmates, said, “there are credible allegations of serious, inhumane practices across a whole range of dates and facilities concerning British military detention in Iraq.”

The Public Interest Lawyers (PIL), which represents the Iraqi civilians, said the torture techniques were used in all 14 British military detention centers in Iraq but the majority were reported in three facilities.

The Ministry of Defense has already admitted that British troops were involved in the torture and murder of a number of Iraqi civilians.

The murders include the case of a man who was kicked to death on board an RAF chopper, another who was shot by a soldier after being involved in a traffic incident and a teen who was pushed to his death into a river.

Those murders only added to the 2003 scandal over the death of the 26-year-old Iraqi hotel receptionist, Baha Mousa, who was killed while in the custody of Britain’s 1st Battalion the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment.

It emerged that Mousa had been hooded and beaten severely during interrogation by British soldiers, which left him with 93 injuries, including broken ribs and nose that led to his death.

Now lawyers are calling for a public inquiry into the cases of hundreds of Iraqis, who were tortured in British detention facilities in Iraq as well as an investigation to determine which people in the top military or political ranks are responsible for the authorization of such techniques.

This comes as the MoD has said it will lead the investigation itself with the Liberal Democrat armed forces minister Nick Harvey arguing “a costly public inquiry would be unable to investigate individual criminal behaviour or impose punishments”.

But Fordham said the proposal will be “the military investigating the military” and against the UK’s obligations under the European convention on human rights.

According to Phil Shiner, the lawyer representing the former inmates, “It is nonsense to suggest, as the MoD does, it is a case of just a few bad apples.”

“People at the highest level knew what was going on, it goes up to the very highest level and is not something that just happened after we went into Iraq,” he said.

November 6, 2010 - Posted by aletho | Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes