The Brits just made public a very long report of an official inquiry into the Sept. 2003 torture and death of Baha Mousa, a 26-year-old Iraqi who died in British custody, and into British military abuses of Iraqi prisoners in general. Seven UK soldiers were court-martialed over the Mousa incident in 2007, but 6 were acquitted. The seventh, Cpl. Donald Payne, was acquitted of manslaughter, but pled guilty to inhumane treatment, making him Britain's first convicted war criminal (presumably in this war, not all others). He was sentenced to a year in prison, the British defense ministry apologized for mistreating Mousa and 9 other Iraqis and coughed up $4.8 mil. in a settlement. (There was good coverage of those (expensive and controversial) trials in The Independent and The Guardian at the time.)
This inquiry, led by retired judge William Gage, labels the torture an "appalling episode of serious gratuitous violence," but concludes with the perfect bad-apple defense: while soldiers and officers were responsible for their actions, what happened "did not amount to an entrenched culture of violence." Mousa had 93 injuries (someone counted), fractured ribs, a broken nose, and death by asphyxiation because they kept him in a stress position. C'est la guerre, eh?
