Robert Fisk: It's not the brutality that is 'systematic'. It's the lying about it

It was Baha Mousa's dad I will always remember. On an oppressively scorching day in Basra, Daoud Mousa first spoke of his son's death, telling me how the boy's wife had died of cancer just six months earlier, how Baha's children were now orphans, how – not long after the British Army had arrested Baha Mousa and beaten him to death, for that is what happened – a British officer had come to his home and stared at the floor and offered cash by way of saying sorry.

"What do you think I should do?" Daoud asked me. Get a lawyer, I said. Tell Amnesty and Human Rights Watch. Let me write about it. When I called at the British base at Basra airport, one officer laughed at me. "Call the Ministry of Defence," he said dismissively. He didn't care.

I had spent years in Belfast, listening to the same kind of arrogant, vicious, indifferent reaction to the Army's brutality. It was always the same. Terrorists. Terrorist propaganda. The extraordinary discipline of British squaddies under enormous pressure, etc, etc, etc. Then – when the game was up and the evidence too fresh and too overwhelming – I used to get what we would today call the "Abu Ghraib response". A "few bad apples". Always a "few bad apples".http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-its-not-the-brutality-that-is-systematic-its-the-lying-about-it-2351634.html

See also:

Army suspends Baha Mousa soldiers as more prosecutions are considered

The Guardian reports (September 9^th): The army has suspended a number of soldiers after the publication of a damning report into the "violent and cowardly abuse" by servicemen that led to the death of an Iraqi detainee in British military custody.

There have been widespread calls for further prosecutions and the defence secretary, Liam Fox, disclosed that Ministry of Defence inquiries "are revealing evidence of some concern" in other Iraqi abuse cases.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/08/army-suspends-baha-mousa-soldiers

Baha Mousa inquiry criticises the British troops' 'lack of moral courage'

The Guardian reports (September 8^th): British soldiers indulged in an "appalling episode of serious, gratuitous violence" on a number of Iraqi civilian detainees leading to the death of the 26-year-old Basra hotel worker, Baha Mousa, and the abuse of nine others.

Mousa, the father of two children, was "subjected to violent and cowardly abuse and assaults by British servicemen whose job it was to guard him and treat him humanely".

Sir William Gage, a retired appeal court judge who presided over the two-year inquiry, paints a devastating picture of military culture in general and in particular a group of soldiers of 1st Battalion Queen's Lancashire Regiment.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/08/baha-mousa-inquiry-british-troops