"British said my son would be free soon. Three days later I had his body"

[Aidoneus]

"The British Said My Son Would be Free Soon.
Three Days Later I Had His Body"
by Robert Fisk
www.dissidentvoice.org
January 5, 2004
First Published in The Independent

The last time Lieutenant Colonel Daoud Mousa of the Iraqi police saw his son Baha alive was on 14 September, as British soldiers raided the Basra hotel where the young man worked as a receptionist.

"He was lying with the other seven staff on the marble floor with his hands over his head," Col Mousa says today. "I said to him: 'Don't worry, I've spoken to the British officer and he says you'll be freed in a couple of hours.'" The officer, a second lieutenant, even gave the Iraqi policeman a piece of paper and wrote "2Lt. Mike" on it, alongside an indecipherable signature and a Basra telephone number. There was no surname.

"Three days later, I was looking at my son's body," the colonel says, sitting on the concrete floor of his slum house in Basra. "The British came to say he had 'died in custody'. His nose was broken, there was blood above his mouth and I could see the bruising of his ribs and thighs. The skin was ripped off his wrists where the handcuffs had been."

Baha Mousa left two small boys, five-year-old Hassan and three-year-old Hussein. Both are orphans, because Baha's 22-year-old wife died of cancer just six months before his own death.

No one hides the fact that most if not all the eight men picked up at the Haitham hotel - where British troops had earlier found four weapons in a safe - were brutally treated while in the custody of the Royal Military Police. One of Baha's colleagues, Kifah Taha, suffered acute renal failure after being kicked in the kidneys; a "wound assessment" by Frimley Park Hospital in Britain states bluntly that he suffered "generalized bruising following repeated incidents of assault".

When Col Mousa and another of his sons, Alaa, visited Kifah Taha in a Basra hospital immediately after his release to seek news of Baha, they found the wounded man - in Alaa's words - "only half a human, with terrible bruises from kicking on his ribs and abdomen. He could hardly speak."

--snip--

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Jan04/Fisk0105.htm

[The Backlash Cometh]

1. Sounds like he was in custody with one of our U.S. police departments.

"The British came to say he had 'died in custody'. His nose was broken, there was blood above his mouth and I could see the bruising of his ribs and thighs. The skin was ripped off his wrists where the handcuffs had been."

Here's an idea: Draft the L.A., N.J and Georgia police to Iraq!

[Cooley Hurd]

2. Hell's gonna be a crowded place...

...once all those responsible for this illegal and outrageous war cross the River Styx, including the bastards who killed Baha Mousa.

"Tony Blair, meet Herr Hitler. You're going to be his new 'bitch.'"