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DESPITE THE RESTRICTION to his mandate, Sir William Gage could and did reach some conclusions about the whole system of detention and interrogation operating in Iraq. An entire section of his report was devoted to unpicking the army’s protocol and regime. There had been, he said, a ‘corporate failure’ at the Ministry of Defence. When training manuals and prisoner-handling protocols had been drafted in the 1990s and after, they had forgotten the ban on those hooding and conditioning methods after the Northern Ireland experience in 1972. There was a wholesale failure to adopt a proper interrogation doctrine. No legal assessment had been made of the methods taught at Chicksands. When forces reached Iraq, they had no proper guidance on how to treat detainees lawfully and humanely, as they were required to do under the laws of war. Army lawyers stationed in Basra failed to appreciate those basic legal protections and ensure correct advice was given to the units who detained suspects. The implication was that a rotten system had developed. Rotten, that is, because no one cared sufficiently before or after Iraq was invaded to comply with those rules set down by the British government and by international laws fully endorsed by the British state.

Sir William made seventy-three recommendations in response to these findings. They almost matched the number of injuries so often quoted as suffered by Baha Mousa. The gist of them was that hooding and ‘conditioning’ should be banned; there should be no ambiguity in the manuals, in the training, in the standing orders.

Liam Fox, Secretary of State for Defence at the time of the report’s delivery, immediately accepted seventy-two of the recommendations when he rose to speak in the House of Commons an hour after it had been published. The only one he baulked at was the banning of ‘harshing’ during interrogation. It was an odd one to single out for retention. The very word ‘harshing’ implies much more than anyone will ever define in the manuals. How many years will it take before someone misinterprets the rules again? How long will it be before the heat of the moment allows a chain of personnel to institute a new abusive regime?

Other than that, Gage avoided concluding anything rotten in the general state of the army or even 1QLR as a whole. He was certain the abuse of the detainees during 14 and 15 September 2003 was not an isolated incident, but nonetheless he made a number of negative findings: ‘Although at times racist language was used by soldiers, there is no sufficient evidential basis to suggest that the violence was racially motivated’; ‘the evidence does not demonstrate disciplinary failures so widespread as to be regarded as an entrenched culture of violence within 1QLR’. He was not entitled, nor did he have the resources, to examine any such culture across the forces serving in Iraq.