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

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17897.htm

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...

By Robert Fisk

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How have we failed these people! What culture created these young men who treated their civilian prisoners with such contempt, cursing them and - if the documents are accurate - calling them "shit" and treating them like animals? Did it come from Glasgow or Cardiff or London or from some prison - yes, quite a lot of British soldiers are ex-prisoners themselves, former guests of Her Majesty who know all about prison rules and prison abuse.

How come the Americans tortured men at Abu Ghraib - officially permitted to do so, as we now know - without realising that they were breaking the rules of ordinary humanity? Is this the result, perhaps, of all those violent, virtual reality worlds so shockingly documented by Tim Guest in his new book, Second Lives, where pain no longer hurts, where lives are only "virtual", where killing is easy?

Yes, I know the old saw, that our chaps are up against it, risking their lives in the front line, occasionally running over the traces amid the fear and drama of battle, a few rotten apples, etc. That's what we said about the 1st Battalion, the Parachute Regiment when they killed 14 innocent Catholic civilians in Derry in 1972. First Para? Salt of the earth. Maybe they just broke after so much abuse and danger - except that 1st Para were a reserve battalion at the time, largely confined to Palace Barracks outside Belfast.

And the soldiers in Basra? They were beating their prisoners in the comfort of their barracks - "Chemical Ali's" old jail, of course - in the comparative safety of Basra in the immediate post-invasion months.

It's all up now, of course. Iraq is a hell-disaster and the old clichés about "hearts and minds" are as dry as the sand on the desert floor. Maybe there are hearts and minds to be maintained inside the Green Zone in Baghdad or any of the other "green zones" around the Middle East where our Western forces shelter from their enemies in their modern versions of the Crusader castles that once littered the Holy Land. But the moral high ground - if ever it could have existed after Tony Blair and George Bush's illegal invasion - has long ago been abandoned.

We will leave Iraq with all our dreams in pieces, and it will be left to Iraqis themselves - men like Daoud Mousa, carrying the grief of his son's death with him for ever - to create a new country out of the pain and sorrow we leave behind for them.

as usual.