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AT THE BEGINNING of April 2004 Captain Lord of the SIB reviewed WO Spence’s case file on the Baha Mousa killing. Lord reported that ‘a thoroughly professional inquiry meticulously maintained and a credit to the warrant officer in charge and his team’ had been conducted. There were lines of inquiry outstanding, but in his opinion all was going well.

Within three weeks the ‘shit had hit the fan’ as some in A Company would describe it. The whole investigation came under minute and very public scrutiny. Britain’s media were itching for sordid tales of wrongdoings in Iraq. And by a very convoluted route, the story of Baha Mousa and his fellow detainees had begun to capture the interest of journalists.

When the British press get hold of a story they are dogged in its pursuit. All sorts of methods of uncovering information are used, some not as legal as others. In May 2004 they hardly needed to lift their collective heads to be drenched by waves of revelations about Coalition forces and their criminal behaviour in Iraq.

The first wave came from the USA. Rumours about some shocking exposure of prison conditions in Iraq had been filtering through media channels for a few weeks, but it was a TV news report which heralded uproar. The 28 April 2004 edition of the programme 60 Minutes on CBS News broadcast a slideshow of photographs of US troops humiliating and abusing Iraqi men inside a prison facility. A female guard pointing at the genitals of naked inmates; the stripped bodies of several men piled high in a corridor, two soldiers grinning behind the bizarre tableau; the same female guard holding a dog leash attached to a collar worn again by a naked man lying on a concrete floor. The images were extraordinary. They possessed a wicked intensity worthy of a Pieter Bruegel painting except that the smiling guards made the viewer think they must be just a joke. There was nothing funny for those subjected to the humiliation and, it would later appear, the torture.

After the programme came the press reports, the analysis, the condemnation. These photographs, apparently taken as debauched trophies, had been recorded on mobile phones by the guards themselves. They brought to international prominence the name ‘Abu Ghraib’, the prison where they had been taken. This had been one of Saddam Hussein’s infamous jails. Rather than disband it after the invasion the US forces had adopted it as their own. They needed a place to process all those suspected loyalists to the Saddam regime and all those so-called potential terrorists. Now there was evidence that the Americans had adopted similar methods of treatment for its inmates to those used before the ‘liberation’. The irony wasn’t lost on many commentators as the US went into a period of self-loathing analysis.

The story and the pictures were reproduced in the UK. The British media soaked up the emerging exposé. It followed a sustained critique of the situation at Guantanamo Bay, which had started to outrage human-rights activists with its legal ‘black hole’ status and suspected coercive interrogation methods.

Then, almost miraculously, on 1 May 2004 the London press had its own photographs. The Daily Mirror published a scoop of pictures allegedly taken by British soldiers abusing an Iraqi civilian. They weren’t as graphic as those from the US, but they were just as effective in their portrayal of ‘our boys’ disgracing themselves and the whole British Army. Piers Morgan, then editor of the paper, vouched for their veracity. The pictures showed Iraqis in hoods in the back of a truck being beaten and urinated on by British soldiers dressed in desert combat gear. Two squaddies, named only Soldier A and Soldier B by the paper, had purportedly taken the photographs and given their story to a Daily Mirror journalist. Their identities weren’t revealed. The news article reported their accounts of violence done to Iraqis and accused members of the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment as the culprits. Such brutality was endemic, it was claimed; hardly conducive to winning over hearts and minds.

The paper reported the soldiers’ story of a civilian picked up in Basra and subjected to a horrific attack by them and their mates. Soldier A claimed that the man was given a beating with batons. He said there was blood and spew and urine everywhere. The victim’s jaw was ‘out’. He had been thrown from the back of the truck, left with his injuries. They didn’t know whether he lived or died.

The whole story was lurid, but it was the photographs that lent it its power. That soldiers would act like this was bad enough, but to take pictures of it as well simply accentuated the moral catastrophe for the British Army. The political reaction was prompt. Armed Forces minister Adam Ingram said the photographs were ‘deeply disturbing’. There would be a full investigation, he assured Parliament. General Sir Michael Jackson said the soldiers involved weren’t ‘fit to wear the Queen’s uniform’, but pleaded that the whole army shouldn’t be judged by a few criminals within its ranks. It maintained the highest standards of behaviour, punished those who transgressed, and it would act swiftly in this case to identify and prosecute any culprits, Jackson said.

The general’s comments were applauded by the Daily Mirror. The paper began to run a parallel story to the torture claims: the allegations should be investigated, the paper reported, but that should not detract from the heroic conduct of the vast majority of those serving in Iraq. A distinction was made with the American forces. In contrast to them, so it was implied, the British were humanitarian, professional and courageous. The paper’s editorial on 1 May 2004 described the troops as renowned for their ‘discipline and self-control’. The ‘sick minority’ should be punished quickly and the paper was heartened to hear General Jackson’s emotional promise to ensure that that would happen. But it warned that none of this should detract from the heroism that typified the ‘best army in the world’.

The Mirror’s patriotic message took firm root in the newspapers shortly thereafter. It would last well beyond Iraq and underscore all reporting on the British military presence anywhere in the world, particularly in Afghanistan. For a time there would be a conflict between the condemnatory tone directed at British forces for their part in harming innocent civilians in far-off wars and the ingrained story that the troops were fundamentally heroic. The latter triumphed, attaining mythic status, but the battle between the two lasted for quite some time. Neither side profited from the Daily Mirror’s supposed revelations.

Within a couple of days of publication, the photographs – not the abuse they portrayed – became the story. The BBC revealed the next day that the pictures had been faked. Ministry of Defence experts and members of the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment had examined the photographs with forensic efficiency. They had spotted several details which didn’t add up. The soldiers were wearing the wrong type of hats (floppy instead of berets or helmets), they were carrying rifles which had never been issued to troops in Iraq, the stream of urine ‘didn’t look authentic’, army boots were laced in a criss-cross fashion when the army preferred them in parallel. And, with a final flourish, the Royal Military Police had matched distinctive scratches and marks on the truck in the photographs to one ‘found’ in a Territorial Army barracks in Preston. The analysis was pedantic, but damning. Whoever had undertaken the investigation had acted with extraordinary speed. How they had managed to track down the exact same truck in twenty-four hours, carry out the examination and confirm the match wasn’t publicised. It was an investigatory miracle.

Despite standing by its story for a few days, the Daily Mirror eventually had to accept that the photographs they had bought were faked, mock-ups. Piers Morgan was dismissed from his post as editor. An apology was printed: ‘Sorry … we were hoaxed’ was the headline. The paper presented itself as a victim of deception. It was almost a great press tradition: journalists suckered into believing they were being handed a fabulous scoop whereas in fact all they had was an amateurish fabrication. People still remembered the Hitler’s diaries debacle in the early 1980s when Stern magazine and the Sunday Times were hoodwinked along with a notable British historian. It had been a lesson for editors which the Daily Mirror had perhaps forgotten. Now it had to backtrack.

Geoff Hoon, the Secretary of State for Defence, and Brigadier Geoff Sheldon of the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment both welcomed the retraction. There was an air of smugness about their responses. It was ‘good to know the Daily Mirror had done the right thing so quickly’ was the message; the hoax was malicious but the paper’s donation of money to an army charity was accepted with magnanimous approval. Honour had been restored to the maligned regiment.

On the same day as the Mirror published its admission, the Royal Military Police confirmed that they had arrested four men over the Baha Mousa allegations. The news was drowned by the furore and incestuous press commentary over Piers Morgan’s dismissal. No one seemed to care that although the pictures were fakes, the abuses weren’t.