Baha Moussa was a night-shift receptionist at the Ibn al Haithan Hotel in Basra when British troops raided the hotel. The 23-year-old was arrested along with other members of hotel staff and taken to a British military base for questioning. Four days later Baha’s corpse was in a morgue. He had been battered to death by British thugs in uniform.
"When they took the cover off his body I could see his nose was badly broken," said Daoud Moussa, a senior Iraqi police officer. "The skin of his wrists had been torn off. The skin on his forehead was torn away. On the left side of his chest there were clear blue bruises. On his legs I saw bruising from kicking."
The commander of the troops involved in Baha’s killing was promoted. Colonel Mendonca was selected to attend a top military college aimed at "grooming the next generation of generals," said the London Times.
The signal that sends out is clear. It signals the British authorities are perpetuating war crimes. As the lawyer for Baha Moussa’s family said, the British government is perpetuating a "history of impunity."Amnesty International said there is a clear "pattern" of killings, torture and ill treatment by British soldiers of detainees.
British authorities then pretend to address war crimes but in reality do nothing about it and even encourage it privately. The government and army brass create publicly the impression, that only a tiny element of forces are involved the reality is different as any republican in Ireland who came into contact with them, will attest.
Torture of detainees is a cynical game played by the British authorities in all of its invasions worldwide down through the centuries. Over a two-year period it is conservatively estimated that 30-40,000 were detained in prisons in Iraq since the official end of "the war." Given that British invasion was in itself illegal, according to former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, the subsequent use of massive, prolonged detention without trial along with torture should also constitute a serious breach of international law and a war crime.
Given the scale of the torture and the relatively few superficial prosecutions, enable the British authorities to peddle the notion that the war crimes were perpetrated by "a few bad apples." These disingenuous reports send out more signals of impunity to members of their forces. The Defence Secretary of the time John Reid, said that the public and media should be "a little slower to condemn and a lot quicker to understand," the torture, after video evidence emerged of British troops viciously beating unarmed Iraqi teenagers.
The self-congratulatory delusion and deception about the real behaviour of British forces is shared by senior British politicians across all the parties. The benign self-image is also reflected in all the major news media.
On a scandal of troops on video torturing youths, the BBC reminded viewers that the army is performing "an essentially peacekeeping role." The Times described it as "a shot in the foot." The so called liberal-left Guardian lamented "rogue breaches," while The Independent said it was "a propaganda gift to our enemies."
This assumption across the MI5 controlled British media and politic being, that killings and torture are aberrations in the noble cause of British troops in Iraq, is an indication of how deep-seated the culture of hypocrisy and impunity is in British society. This is why historian Mark Curtis described Britain as "a single-ideology totalitarian state."
In his book Web of Deceit, Curtis pointed out that torture of civilian populations is a deliberate policy of control by British colonialism and imperialism. An official British investigation in 1971 in occupied Ireland observed that the British army had engaged in the torture of detainees, using methods including "wall-standing, hooding, noise, bread and water diet and deprivation of sleep."
These techniques of torture, the investigation concluded, were "important" to counterinsurgency operations in Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, British Cameroons, Brunei, Guyana, Aden, Borneo/Malaysia, the Persian Gulf and in Occupied Ireland.
This puts what is really happening in Afghanistan into historical perspective, a perspective of unrelenting British violence, torture and crimes against humanity. A perspective that would be more readily recognised by Baha Moussa’s family and thousands of other families in Ireland, Iraq, Afghanistan rather than Bliar and Brown utterances, about helping to "achieve democracy." Centuries of torture worldwide, being rationalized by Brutish bullscutter and propaganda.
Link to Documented Outsourced British Torture
BBC BRUTISH BULLSCUTTER COPERATION
Don't even give them a chance to launch their Bullscutter !
Oh, no. Brutish Bullscutter Coperation. Don't come fucking near me today. Dear Jaysus, you Kerry fucking recruits and gobshites all over the Irish media are their by-product. There are so many things I could say to express my deep mistrust and yes, anger of these new media Irish opinion makers. Their world service can be a titillating export but their rampant censorship of the restless native's replies stinks to high heaven, of arrogance, cultural imperialism and age old repression.
I don't vote right wing as far as I know, so maybe that also explains my antagonism to them. I don't believe the Brutish Bullscutter Coperation, which henceforth will be simply called the BBC, offer anything approximating legitimate alternatives for this country, indeed any country but thats their business. I disagree with their monarchy, class system of commoners, lords, inherited privilige and intolerance of diversity or alternatives.
Lest you think nationalism is blinding me, do not confuse my rants against Brutish Bullscutter with the many Scottish, English and Welsh friends I have known down through the years, most of whom are the salt of the Earth in my opinion and great people.
It goes against every fibre of my being and tradition to be rude to people but you have got to stand up for your identity these days or become a smiling zombie product of their pundits and seductive manipulating bullscutter.
Brutes are people too but we must take this tour d'arse with all of its insanity, as a relief from the bland sanitized, couldn't give a fuck mercenary BULLSCUTTER ! of our age.
