5

THREE DETAINEES FOLLOWED. The man who serviced the generator at the hotel recalled how he saw a soldier stamp on Baha Mousa when they were arrested. It was in the hotel lobby, he said. But he didn’t really know what happened. He had seen no injuries to Baha’s face afterwards. Then the scene shifted and they were at the detention block. ‘Torture started,’ the generator man said.

‘Torture?’

‘They made us stand by the wall our hands stretched out, our knees bent; half sitting half standing … kicks on my thighs, punches on my face. He would strangle me to make me stand. A headlock.’

Other soldiers were there too. They were punching and hitting. At night-time the ‘torture’ got worse. First day became second day. The beatings continued, but were more intense. There were lots of soldiers. He saw them when his hood was lifted to take a drink of water. The beatings had no reason. Then a metal bar appeared. He said he was hit with it. Other blows, kicks, continued. So hard he collapsed. He said he screamed so much they brought a stretcher and he was taken to the clinic at the base. He saw a medic and told him he’d been hit. The medic just shook his head and gave him an injection.

The cross-examination of the generator man was light, almost polite. His evidence had been consistent, solid. Suggestions were made that he couldn’t be sure about when particular attacks occurred or who might have inflicted particular injuries. This was generic questioning. It applied to all the detainees. The fact that, by their own evidence, they had sandbags encasing their heads, were exhausted and hungry, and the events they were describing happened over three years before, all emphasised an inherent uncertainty coursing through their testimony. An astute observer in the courtroom would know the purpose of these seemingly innocuous questions; where there were no obvious contradictions, the ground was being prepared for submissions that their evidence was inaccurate, or just mistaken. It didn’t really matter how these witnesses appeared. They would be damned by an argument, not evidence.

The generator operator was dismissed and the man in charge of the restaurant at the Hotel al-Haitham appeared. He was the one who’d tried to help the soldiers in the hotel locate one of the owners, the one who had run away. The soldiers asked him to take them to the man’s house, which he did. But he wasn’t there and the soldiers weren’t happy, he said. He was hit across the face when he asked for water. Then he was taken to the detention centre, the place where the beatings began: stress positions, kicks to the kidneys when he failed to stand/kneel/squat as instructed. It was a familiar refrain. He added the ‘dance like Michael Jackson’ account. Soldiers made him dance the morning after Baha died. From Camp Bucca he was taken to the hospital at Shaibah where he stayed for two weeks. Then he was back at Camp Bucca for another couple of months.

There was one more thing he wanted to say. Corporal Payne, whom he identified in a video, was the ‘one who killed Baha … he was shouting all the time … he would beat us and then go away and then come back and beat us’. Even with a sack over his head, he was able to see Payne through the small holes.

Sensing a slight fissure in the man’s testimony, Julian Knowles, acting for Payne, stepped in.

‘You didn’t see what happened to Baha Mousa, did you?’

‘No.’

‘So who told you it was this soldier who killed Baha Mousa? Who have you been speaking to?’

‘That soldier came, Baha was taken to another room, the soldier was shouting, it gave me the impression that it was him who killed Baha.’

‘So it’s just a guess on your part … there were lots of soldiers around … you have no idea, have you, who was doing what to whom … you had sacks over your head.’

‘Correct.’

‘Have you spoken to other people about what happened?’

‘Of course … my family.’

‘Other detainees?’

‘We weren’t allowed to talk to each other.’

‘What about over the last three years?’

‘Yes.’

The suggestion of collusion was enough.

Then it was the turn of Ahmed Maitham, the car-crash detainee. He had nothing to say about events at the hotel. And, as it was common ground that he only arrived in the detention block at Battle Group Main late on the evening of the day the other detainees were arrested, his evidence was dealt with quickly. Two of the defendants couldn’t have been involved in his treatment. Crowcroft and Fallon had left the facility by that time. Whoever had assaulted Maitham it wasn’t them. Within an hour the witness was released. 3,000 miles. It was a long way to come for sixty minutes of painful recollection.

So this was the state of the detainees’ testimony. Would it have been enough for the military panel of jurors to appreciate the feelings of these men subjected to such vindictive and casual violence? What could those colonels and majors have heard amidst the legal bluster? Had they sensed the pain and anguish? Or had they doubted it? Had the persistent accusations of exaggeration or lack of identification or uncertainty in timings and events or contradictory accounts introduced disbelief?