Why Tony Blair governing Gaza would result in more war crimes

Under US president Donald Trump’s new plan for Gaza, former British prime minister Tony Blair has been touted as having a senior role in governing Gaza, acting as a deputy to Trump himself.

Aside from the obvious neo-colonial implications of this – Western Viceroys ruling over occupied Arabs, as opposed to those occupied Arabs being granted self-determination – Blair’s track record of human rights violations makes him deeply unsuitable for the job.

Blair made the decision in 2003 to join with the US in invading and occupying Iraq. Human Rights Watch has noted that “UK nationals committed abuses in Iraq after 2003 on a significant scale”.

Many of these abuses stemmed from policies that were implemented by Britain’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) under Blair’s leadership, wherein abusive interrogation techniques were authorised from above.

Under Blair’s MoD, ‘harshing’ was authorised – this constitutes a technique of psychological abuse wherein an interrogator screams into a detainee’s face, making implicit threats of violence and engaging in personal insults and vitriol.

‘Uncontrolled fury’

Justice Andrew Collins observed at the High Court in 2013: “There can be no doubt that the practices carried out under the guidelines then in place were unacceptable. The harsh technique included the following elements which could be deployed as the questioner considered necessary.

“The shouting could be as loud as possible. There could be what was described as uncontrolled fury, shouting with cold menace and then developing, the questioner’s voice and actions showing psychotic tendencies, and there could be personal abuse.”

Sir William Gage, who chaired the Baha Mousa Inquiry in 2011, noted: “The teaching of the ‘harsh’ permitted insults not just of the performance of the captured prisoner but personal and abusive insults including racist and homophobic language.

“The ‘harsh’ was designed to show anger on the part of the questioner. It ran the risk of being a form of intimidation to coerce answers from prisoners.

“It involved forms of threats which while in some senses indirect were designed to instil in prisoners a fear of what might happen to them, including physically.”

Footage published by The Guardian in 2010 of Iraqi detainees being harshed by British soldiers makes for harrowing viewing.

Nicholas Mercer, who served as the British Army’s chief legal advisor in Iraq in 2003, has stated that in his view, harshing is a violation of the Geneva Conventions.

Sexually abusing prisoners

In 2005, under Blair’s MoD, training documents at the headquarters of the British Army’s Intelligence Corps in Chicksands encouraged interrogators to sexually humiliate detainees as a form of conditioning and for punitive purposes.

One training aid stated: “Get them naked. Keep them naked if they do not follow commands.”

Another training aid encouraged the use of blindfolds in order to put pressure on detainees; harshing was also encouraged.

During the same period, a training document at Chicksands explicitly stated that “Sexual frustration” was a vulnerability that interrogators were allowed to exploit in detainees.

I have written about how between 2006 and 2007, evidence suggests that interrogators from the Intelligence Corps subjected detained Iraqi men to widespread sexual abuse at the Shaibah Logistics Base in southern Iraq.

Ian Cobain noted in regard to these training documents at Chicksands: “This material was created for the instruction of ‘tactical questioners’, who conduct initial interrogations of prisoners of war, as well as for the instruction of servicemen and women from all three branches of the armed forces who conduct ‘interrogation in depth’.

“The material suggests not only that British military interrogators have employed techniques that may be in breach of the International Criminal Court Act, but that the MoD has spent a considerable amount of time and money training them to do just that.”

‘Misguided zeal’

Blair’s MoD also oversaw a near-total lack of accountability for even the most serious war crimes in Iraq.

After photographs emerged in 2005 showing British soldiers physically abusing Iraqi civilians, stripping them naked, and forcing them to simulate oral and anal sex at Camp Breadbasket in southern Iraq, none of the Iraqi victims were called to give evidence at the subsequent court martial proceedings.

The Army Prosecuting Authority’s excuse for not calling the victims to give evidence is that it could not locate them – this is despite the fact that the Independent on Sunday was able to locate the victims and interview them.

None of the soldiers who were responsible for what the Judge Advocate described as “perhaps the worst of these offences” – namely, forcing detainees to simulate oral and anal sex – were prosecuted.

The images are reminiscent of what Israel has done to Palestinian detainees at its Sde Teiman camp in the Negev desert.

Captain Dan Taylor, who issued the order for the detainees to be “worked hard” at Camp Breadbasket, was exonerated by the British Army before the court martial proceedings even began.

The military determined that while his order was “unlawful”, he had “acted with well-meaning and sincere but misguided zeal”. He was subsequently promoted from the rank of Captain to Major.

A British soldier stands on an Iraqi detainee at Camp Breadbasket in May 2003. (Photo: British court martial handout / Alamy)

‘Unacceptable’

Similarly, in the 2003 case of Ahmed Jabbar Kareem Ali – a 15-year-old Iraqi boy who British soldiers beat and forced to enter a canal, where he drowned – the Royal Military Police’s Special Investigation Branch failed to conduct a proper investigation into the killing.

The MoD also massively delayed the court martial proceedings, which saw all of the soldiers being acquitted.

The court martial of the soldiers did not convene until 28 months after the incident – a delay which Brigadier Robert Aitken, who was commissioned to look into cases of detainee abuse, criticised as “unacceptable”.

These soldiers were all later deemed culpable for Ahmed’s death in a public judicial inquiry that took place in 2016, although some still dispute its findings.

The European Court of Human Rights examined this case, and found that “the Special Investigation Branch was not, during the relevant period, operationally independent from the military chain of command”.

It added: “no explanation has been provided by the Government in respect of the long delay between the death and the court martial.

“It appears that the delay seriously undermined the effectiveness of the investigation, not least because some of the soldiers accused of involvement in the incident were by then untraceable.”

The man who oversaw all these abuses – Tony Blair – should not be appointed to have any role in governing the people of Gaza; a people who have been subjected to a campaign of genocide, who are deeply traumatised, and who deserve to live with dignity and safety.

Most troubling is Trump’s stipulation that the people of Gaza must be “deradicalized” – if this “deradicalization” process is overseen by Blair, and involves a programme of detention and punishment, then it is virtually guaranteed that egregious human rights violations will occur.

This is not to mention that if anyone needs to be “deradicalized” in this conflict, it is the genocidal Israeli leadership and Israeli society who have perpetrated one of the gravest crimes in modern history in Gaza, as well as the likes of Blair himself – who appears to view the lives of Arabs as inferior to his own.