Lawyer alleges collusion between Britain and US over ill-treatment of prisoners, including sexual humiliation

• Jenny Percival
• The Guardian, Saturday 14 November 2009
• Article history

The Ministry of Defence confirmed last night that it is investigating 33 cases of alleged abuse, including rape and torture of Iraqi civilians by British soldiers.

One claimant alleges that he was raped by two British soldiers, while others claim they were stripped naked, abused and photographed. Female soldiers are also alleged to have taken part in abuse.

A pre-action protocol letter was served on the Ministry of Defence last week by Phil Shiner, the lawyer representing the Iraqis, according to the Independent.

In the letter to the MoD, reported in the newspaper, Shiner said the allegations raised questions of collusion between Britain and the US over the ill-treatment of Iraqis. "Given the history of the UK's involvement in the development of these techniques alongside the US, it is deeply concerning that there appears to be strong similarities between instances of the use of sexual humiliation," said Shiner.

Responding to the allegations, Bill Rammell, the armed forces minister, said: "Over 120,000 British troops have served in Iraq and the vast majority have conducted themselves to the highest standards of behaviour, displaying integrity and selfless commitment. Only a tiny number of individuals have been shown to have fallen short of our high standards. Allegations of this nature are taken very seriously, however allegations must not be taken as fact and investigations must be allowed to take their course without judgments being made prematurely."

The Guardian reported in September that the Royal Military police had launched a criminal investigation into allegations that British soldiers repeatedly raped and mutilated an 18-year-old Iraqi civilian who was working as a labourer at Camp Breadbasket in Basra, the scene of other abuse allegations.

The man who wishes to remain unnamed alleged that two soldiers raped him, subjecting him to a 15-minute ordeal, then slashed him with a knife. He was treated in hospital for cuts and the military police are understood to have secured the medical records. The victim said he was so traumatised he tried to kill himself.

Shiner also represents Baha Mousa, 26, an Iraqi who died after being taken into UK military custody. Mousa and nine other civilians were arrested at a hotel in Basra in September 2003. The father-of-two died the following day, having suffered 93 separate injuries, including fractured ribs and a broken nose.

Corporal Donald Payne became the first member of the British armed forces to be convicted of a war crime when he pleaded guilty at a court martial in September 2006 to inhumanely treating civilians. He was dismissed from the army and sentenced to one year in a civilian jail.

At the ongoing public inquiry into Mousa's death, a former British soldier admitted for the first time that he saw Payne and Private Aaron Cooper kicking and hitting the Iraqi shortly before he died. Garry Reader told a hearing on Monday how he had tried to resuscitate Mousa.

By Tom Chivers
Published: 2:47PM BST 05 Oct 2009

The MoD document appeared on the website Wikileaks

The Defence Manual of Security is intended to help MoD, armed forces and intelligence personnel maintain information security in the face of hackers, journalists, foreign spies and others.

But the 2,400-page restricted document has found its way on to Wikileaks, a website that publishes anonymous leaks of sensitive information from organisations including governments, corporations and religions.

Known in the services as Joint Services Protocol 440 (JSP 440), it was published in 2001. As Wikileaks notes, it is the document that is used as justification for the monitoring of certain websites, including Wikileaks itself.

Under the section “Leaks of Official Information", it says: "Leaks usually take the form of reports in the public media which appear to involve the unauthorised disclosure of official information (whether protectively marked or not) that causes political harm or embarrassment to either the UK Government or the Department concerned…

"The threat [of leakage] is less likely to arise from positive acts of counter-espionage, than from leakage of information through disaffected members of staff, or as a result of the attentions of an investigative journalist, or simply by accident or carelessness."

The document is particularly keen to avoid the attentions of journalists, noting them as "threats" alongside foreign intelligence services, criminals, terrorist groups and disaffected staff.

As far as traditional espionage and intelligence threats go, the document singles out the Chinese as having "a voracious appetite for all kinds of information; political, military, commercial, scientific and technical."

However, it is "very different to the portrayal of 'Moscow Rules' in the novels of John Le Carre". The Chinese agencies do not "run agents", but instead "make friends", as befits intelligence officers in the Facebook era.

Wikileaks was also behind the memorable leaks of the British National Party membership list, the operating procedures at Guantanamo Bay and the secret workings of the Church of Scientology.

The Ministry of Defence was accused today by three high court judges of "lamentable" behaviour and "serious breaches" of its duty of candour over the failure to disclose crucial information about allegations of murder and ill-treatment by British soldiers in Iraq in 2004.

In a withering attack, they damned the ministry's chief witness – the deputy head of the military police – as lacking all credibility. They described his evidence to the court as "seriously flawed".

The MoD's failure to conduct a proper investigation of its own into the allegations has forced Bob Ainsworth, the defence secretary, to hold an independent public inquiry, the high court heard.

The MoD has already been forced into a public inquiry into the death of Baha Mousa while in the custody of British soldiers in Basra in 2003. Yesterday's case relates to allegations that an Iraqi named al-Sweady was murdered and others ill-treated after they were taken prisoner at a British base near Majar al-Kabir, north of Basra, in May 2004.

The Iraqis' lawyers demanded a public inquiry under the Human Rights Act, saying the original military police investigation into the claims was inadequate. The police, officials and ministers resisted the demand and withheld vital information in attempting to do so, the court heard.

"We are forced to the conclusion that the approach of the secretary of state to disclosure in this case was lamentable," Lord Justice Scott Baker, Mr Justice Silber and Mr Justice Sweeney ruled today.

They said that when he was armed forces minister earlier this year Ainsworth signed a demand for a gagging order even though the information he sought to suppress had already been published. The matter caused the judges "very considerable concern", they said.

Over more than eight months, "the secretary of state's agents had simply failed for no good reason during that lengthy period to carry out these critically important and obviously highly relevant searches [for documents]", the judges added.

They singled out Colonel Dudley Giles, deputy provost marshal – deputy head of the military police – for "lamentable disclosure failures". Asked why he had not referred in his witness statement to a document stating that the soldiers had detained between 10 and 12 Iraqi detainees, Giles replied that he did so to avoid prejudicing any future prosecution.

"When this assertion was examined, it became obvious that it was wholly without foundation," said the judges.

Wrong, too, they said, was the colonel's assertion that there was a six-day delay before the initial investigation into the claims got under way.

The evidence showed that the investigation was blocked for a month "thereby resulting in a crucial loss of vital time and investigative opportunity".

That was something Giles either did know or should have known to be the case, said the judges, adding that any court hearing evidence from him in future should do so "with the greatest caution".The MoD has already had to pay out £1m in costs in hearings estimated to have cost more than £2m.

In court the judges made it clear they shared the concerns of Rabinder Singh QC, for the Iraqis, that the MoD would "blackslide" on a commitment to hold an independent public inquiry into the incident, which happened after a fierce gunfight nearby between British troops and insurgents.

James Eadie QC, for the MoD, assured the court that Ainsworth agreed to an inquiry, though he said that did not mean the defence secretary accepted that "there may have been murder or ill-treatment in the manner alleged".

The court will reconvene in two weeks' time to discuss the inquiry's terms of reference and which judicial figure will chair it.

The court heard earlier that the Met declined to investigate the allegations, saying it was "not feasible".

Scott Baker replied: "That puts the cart before the horse." The Met's conclusion was "frankly not good enough", he added.