A Very British Killing: The Death of Baha Mousa Book

On 15 September 2003 Baha Mousa, a hotel receptionist, was killed by British Army troops in Iraq. He had been arrested the previous day in Basra and was taken to a military base for questioning. For forty-eight hours he and nine other innocent civilians had their heads encased in sandbags and their wrists bound by plastic handcuffs and had been kicked and punched with sustained cruelty. The story of Baha Mousa's death symbolised some of the tragedy of Britain's involvement in the Iraq war. Not only does it show how easily our troops could abuse the very people we were supposed to liberate but it also revealed how incapable - or unwilling, or incompetent - the army, government and the law were in stopping that abuse. This book proves that the detention and interrogation system imposed by the armed forces was flawed. It enabled abusive techniques (hooding, imposing stress positions - known as 'harshing') to be used that frequently spilled over into physical and psychological violence. The government has set up a body to find out the scale of the problem and already almost 200 separate cases are being investigated.