UK report clears army of Iraqi abuse

The British army's three-year investigation of abuse and unlawful killing of civilians in Iraq found no evidence of systematic mistreatment by its soldiers, the army said Friday.

One critic of the report quickly called it a 'whitewash," and a former British soldier acquitted in one of the abuse cases said the report should have blamed the military and the British government for racing into Iraq with too few soldiers and inadequate training and supervision.

The British inquiry involving cases in 2003 and 2004 condemned behavior in the abuse cases and recommended changes in the way soldiers are trained to handle prisoners of war.

But it added: "There is no evidence of fundamental flaws in the army's approach to preparing for or conducting operations: We remain the envy of our allies for the professionalism of our conduct."

The new British report comes less than a month after the most visible U.S. military abuse case in Iraq, the Abu Ghraib scandal, ended with the revelation that the Army threw out the conviction of the only court-martialed officer.

The British report drew criticism from former Col. Jorge Mendonca, 44, who left the British army after he was cleared in an abuse case and is writing a book about Basra.

"The report doesn't draw any lessons or make any judgments about the strategic failures that put those soldiers in the positions where incidents such as these could occur," he said.

Phil Shiner, of Public Interest Lawyers, which has represented Iraqi civilians, dismissed the British report as a "whitewash" and said there was clear evidence that abuse had been rife.

"What is important to understand is that the High Court will shortly have to decide whether to hold an independent and public inquiry into the U.K.'s detention policy in Iraq," he said.

The report by Brig. Robert Aitken, director of army personnel strategy, was commissioned after allegations of mistreatment of prisoners. Those included Iraqi hotel receptionist Baha Mousa, 26, who died while being restrained by soldiers after trying to escape custody in south Iraq, and Ahmed Jabber Kareem, 16, who drowned after allegedly being forced to swim across a river.

The court-martial related to the Mousa case — which also involved the abuse of eight other Iraqis in British custody — revealed confusion over the treatment of detainees, with senior officers apparently unaware that the "hooding" of prisoners and sleep deprivation were banned under the Geneva Conventions and British law.

Four service members were acquitted in Kareem's death, and six of the seven soldiers charged in Mousa's death were cleared.

The seventh soldier in the Mousa case, Cpl. Donald Payne, pleaded guilty to inhumanely treating Iraqi civilians in the southern Iraqi city of Basra in 2003. Britain's first convicted war criminal, he was sentenced to a year in prison and dismissed from the army.

"The army condemns the sort of behavior that has been exemplified in the cases of abuse with which this report is concerned," Aitken's investigation concludes.

The report criticizes the army for taking as long as three years after a serious abuse case to court-martial the soldiers involved.

"This report is rightly critical of our performance in a number of areas and it catalogs the significant number of steps we have already taken toward ensuring that such behavior is not repeated," Gen. Richard Dannatt, the head of Britain's army, said in a statement.