War crime? Smore crime!
Images of the injuries sustained by Baha Mousa, lying dead after being beaten to death by British soldiers. Photographs taken from the Guardian.Buried by the reporting on the fertiliser plot, the only soldier with the dignity to admit to taking part in the beatings which led to the death of the Iraqi hotel receptionist Baha Mousa, was yesterday sentenced to a year in prison and dismissed from the army.
Yep, you read that right. Even though Corporal Donald Payne was convicted of a war crime, as defined by the International Criminal Court Act of 2001, his punishment, apart from losing his pension, is a whole year of imprisonment for taking part in the abuse. He was cleared of manslaughter, as it was not proved that his blows had personally lead to Mousa dying. Payne was identified as one of the soldiers' who took it upon himself to conduct the Iraqi detainees like a choir, who had been mistakenly identified as potential insurgents and possibly the men that had killed a popular young captain, Di Jones, battering them one at a time, relishing the groans and pleas coming from the prisoners, while entertaining his fellow comrades who at no time did anything to stop the blatant breaking of rules on treatment of detainees that had been introduced over three decades previously.
In a way, it's hard not to feel sorry for Payne. He was honest enough to come forward and admit that he was in the vanguard of attacking the prisoners, even though by all accounts the evidence against him, unlike that against the others tried during the court martial, was damning. Rather than being protected by the other soldiers involved and by the higher-ups who authorised the re-introduction of conditioning in the first place, he's been left to hang out to dry, a sacrificial lamb designed to appease those who demanded justice for Baha Mousa and those who suffered with him. Instead, Payne's treatment is more than representative of the way both the government and the army have dealt with allegations of abuse by British soldiers: cover it up, deny anything really shameful happened, and move on.
If Payne hadn't admitted his guilt, then the army might have entirely got away with it. The closing of ranks which took place during the trial, the endless repetitions uttered by witnesses of "I don't remember" and the lack of interest in much of the media other than to damn the government for daring to bring the court martial in the first place has meant that much of the British public probably think that the only real abuses by British troops in Iraq were those photographs of Iraqis being forced to simulate sex for the cameras. The photographs above, and the diary of a soldier reproduced in the Grauniad at the weekend tell a far different story.
Payne is now considering whether to sing like a canary about what he knows. One can only hope that he does: the authorities who OK-ed the use of conditioning need to be exposed and brought to account, as do those soldiers that took part in the beating of four ordinary Iraqis who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. It all seems very different from the speech that Colonel Tim Collins gave on the eve of war:
It is a big step to take another human life. It is not to be done lightly. I know of men who have taken life needlessly in other conflicts, I can assure you they live with the Mark of Cain upon them. If someone surrenders to you then remember they have that right in international law and ensure that one day they go home to their family.
From there we go to "the fat bastard" who couldn't be revived, which was "what a shame".
It's therefore difficult to take seriously Sir Richard Dannatt's claim that they don't know who was responsible for the death of Baha Mousa. As Panorama pointed out, they know the regiments that were there, the know the soldiers who were in the base where they taken, and they know who took part in the conditioning. It's just that they haven't been brought to justice.
Finally, as you might expect, today's Sun has absolutely no mention of the sentencing of Payne. Then again, we shouldn't have expected one, for Payne's imprisonment is only for a so-called crime. For Mousa's family, the Sun is only a so-called newspaper.
Labels: Baha Mousa, British army abuse, Donald Payne, Scum-watch, Sun-watch, torture
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