Robert Fisk: A cry for justice from a good man who expected us to protect his son

Robert Fisk: A cry for justice from a good man who expected us to protect his son

A report from the man who broke the original story...

From the moment I knocked on the front door of Daoud Mousa al-Maliki's home in Basra, I knew something had gone terribly wrong in the British Army in southern Iraq...

Then I went to see Kifah Taha, who had been so badly beaten by British troops in the presence of Baha Mousa that he had terrible wounds in the groin. He told me how the soldiers would call their Iraqi prisoners by the names of football stars - Beckham was one name they used - before kicking them around the detention headquarters in Basra. There were stories of Iraqi prisoners being forced to kneel on sharp stones, of being kicked and punched in the groin, the kidneys, the back, shoulders, forced to sit with their heads down lavatory holes.

...There's an old rule of thumb which I always apply to armies in the field. If you find out about one abuse, you can bet there were a hundred others that will never be revealed. New stories of "forced disappearances", hostage-taking and torture in British custody are emerging from Basra. US troops are still being questioned about unlawful killings and torture in Iraq. If one girl is raped and murdered and her family slaughtered by a US unit south of Baghdad - all of which is true - how many others have died in circumstances we shall never discover?

The My Lai atrocity in Vietnam was revealed relatively soon after it occurred. But it was more than 40 years after the Korean War that we learned US soldiers had fired into thousands of unarmed Korean civilian refugees, because they feared troops were hiding among them. How many air strikes in Afghanistan and Iraq kill the innocent yet go unrecorded, because journalists are no longer safe to travel in these remote, dangerous areas?

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http://news.independent.co.uk/fisk/article2666406.ece