16

SUCH WAS THE erratic ebb and flow of proceedings that for a moment attention shifted to other defendants. Witnesses were brought forward as they became available. It made for a confusing pattern, but there was no choice given the administrative difficulty of bringing to court so many military personnel from across the globally stretched operations of the army.

The crucial moment for LCpl Crowcroft, Kingsman Fallon and Sergeant Stacey had arrived, though. It was 28 November 2006. Private Jonathan Lee, the whistleblower from the Hollender multiple of Anzio Company, was to give his evidence. He was the one who had said he saw all three accused assault the detainees on the first day of their arrest.

Over the course of the next two days, Private Lee was interrogated like a slowly roasting pig.

He began adamant about what he had seen, kicks administered by Lieutenant Rodgers to the Iraqis lying on the floor when arrested in the Hotel al-Haitham, ‘like kicking a football’, then in the detention centre back at base, Corporal Payne, whom he knew, came and went without perpetrating any violence, and Stacey, Fallon and Crowcroft were left behind to look after the prisoners. He did remember that during his short time in the facility about twenty other people of differing ranks had come in to take a look, but it was Crowcroft, Fallon and Stacey whom the court was most interested in. What were these soldiers doing?

‘They were shouting and swearing … Crowcroft and Fallon were going round punching and kicking the Iraqis … every time a person went to ground, they went over to them, pulled them back to their feet and then waited for the next one to fall … Corporal Stacey was laughing … when I said the person to my left was doing quite well in the stress position, he kicked his feet until he fell to the floor … he kicked the bottom of his feet … he stamped on him and punched him and dragged him back to his feet.’

After these moments of cruelty, Sergeant Stacey had taken Lee away from the facility back to their barracks, leaving Crowcroft and Fallon behind. Later on in the day Lee had seen the two junior soldiers again, back at Camp Stephen, the sister base of Battle Group Main, and they told him that they had been left to beat the prisoners up. The two soldiers ‘had cuts and bruises all over their hands and their shins and their feet’, Lee said. ‘They were complaining about it.’

Perhaps Mr Bevan, who was undertaking the examination in chief, could feel the air of scepticism surrounding Private Lee’s testimony. Lee was a young lad after all, only twenty-three years old, and he had the appearance of an adolescent still, maybe not wholly convincing to the panel. Bevan knew that Crowcroft’s and Fallon’s barristers would question why it was that Lee had felt the urge to inform on his colleagues. But Bevan didn’t want to unravel the knot of motivation. He simply asked when Private Lee had first told someone his story.

It was when the regiment was serving in Cyprus, March 2004, Lee said. He had gone to see the doctor about a spell of depression and told him what he’d seen in Iraq. The doctor had put him in touch with the padre, the padre had sent him to see the RMP, and the RMP had contacted the Special Investigations Bureau. It was a little convoluted and certainly gave no explanation of why he had waited until that moment to say anything.

Mr Ferguson, LCpl Crowcroft’s barrister, had hardly finished standing up before he began his assault on the witness. Private Lee had made all this up, hadn’t he? His behaviour had been aggravating, hadn’t it? He’d been moved from company to company because the other soldiers couldn’t stand him, wasn’t that right? He couldn’t make it as an infantry soldier, struggled from the beginning, went AWOL for over a year between March 2002 and March 2003, for which he was found guilty at court martial, correct?

The last allegation was admitted by Lee. He had no choice as the record was plain. What had he been doing all that time when he had been on the run from the army? Ferguson asked.

‘I was with my girlfriend sir.’

‘That’s hardly a full-time job, is it?’ Ferguson said. ‘Were you drawing unemployment benefit?’

‘No, sir.’

‘How were you managing financially?’

‘I had savings, sir.’

‘Savings? From where?’

‘I had about four grand saved up from the army.’

What had he been up to for a whole year?

‘I was seeing friends … out, sir.’

‘Out?’

‘Aye, sir.’

Why had he absconded in the first place? Private Lee said he’d been bullied. When he had handed himself in eventually, he’d been given fifty-six days’ detention as punishment. That was when he was sent to the Colchester glasshouse, where he first came across one Corporal Donald Payne. It was a small world in 1QLR.

Ferguson continued to dissect Private Lee’s character, his personality and its various failings, exposing them to the court and the press assembled about the chamber. It was ritualistic in its brutality. But he wasn’t concerned with the wisdom in sending such a flawed soldier to a war zone. He wanted to press on with his prepared argument that everything Lee had said was suspect. He ‘constantly shirked his duties’, he ‘frequently pretended to faint’, he ‘fell asleep on duty’ were the accusations Ferguson threw at him. And, pointedly, he’d had an altercation with Crowcroft, one of the men he was now accusing of assaulting the detainees. Ferguson suggested Lee had refused to relieve Crowcroft from guard duty, Crowcroft had chased Lee down some stairs, Lee had dived into a guardroom, grabbed a rifle, cocked it, pointed it at Crowcroft, before another soldier had snatched it off him. And then Lee had shouted he would grass up Crowcroft. Did Lee remember this now?

No.

‘I suggest that the account you’ve given about what took place on 14 September 2003 is a concoction of lies. You were never in the detention centre … that’s something you made up … you’re a fantasist,’ Ferguson said.

‘No, sir,’ Lee replied.

Ferguson pressed him with further allegations. All Lee had done in this chamber was tell lie after lie. The accusations speared through the young man who acknowledged he had a troubled history. There seemed little left that was credible of the man whose original statement in March 2004, all those years before, had been instrumental in bringing three men in front of Britain’s first official war-crimes court martial. If eyewitness testimony relied upon the quality of integrity then Private Lee had tested the connection to its limits, or at least, that was the impression Richard Ferguson QC wished to plant.

The other barristers acting for Kingsman Fallon and Sergeant Stacey took precisely the same approach. Lee was a ‘habitual and congenital liar’, Geoffrey Cox QC proclaimed. Everything had been made up to suit Lee’s purposes. He had used the whistle-blowing as an excuse to return to Britain from Cyprus, to go on long-term sick, and eventually to leave 1QLR and the army.

Jonathan Lee spent a day and a half rebutting allegation after allegation. His fortitude before the prolonged assault was remarkable, a tour de force of resistance to the pressure applied by some of the most senior criminal law barristers working the courts today. Was it convincing? The jury panel consisted of senior army officers. What would they make of a young man who by his own admission wasn’t cut out for army life, who was a failure, who went absent without leave almost as soon as he joined the army, who stayed on the run for over a year, who served time in an army gaol for his absence, who was released only to be sent immediately to serve in the cauldron of Basra? What would these professional soldiers, with the creed of the army deeply imprinted in their imaginations, see in ex-Private Lee? Would they consider him a liar? About everything, everything he claimed to have seen at the detention centre?

Lance Corporal Gareth Hill was in the same multiple as Private Lee. He was next into the witness box and he, like Lee, could remember when LCpl Crowcroft and Kingsman Fallon returned to base after they had finished their guard duty at Battle Group Main. They were speaking about ‘the choir’, he said, about people being hit in the stomach to produce differently pitched noises. But Crowcroft and Fallon weren’t boasting, Hill said. They were just telling everyone what had gone on. When cross-examined, with little of the sustained assault on his integrity as Lee had received, Hill admitted he may have been mistaken about what he’d heard. Perhaps with all the talk about the choir he was misinterpreting what had been said. Perhaps what he had actually heard was people’s description of Corporal Payne’s little joke, not boastful admissions of brutality. Might that be right?

Yes, it might, he agreed.