A Nation Trapped By Ambulance Chasers

Last week it was America that suffered a self-inflicted wound. This week it was Britain.The al-Sweady inquiry was a five year, £31 million judge-led inquiry into a single incident involving British troops in Iraq. Ten years ago, after a particularly bloody battle, British troops took a number of Iraqi insurgents (from the Mahdi army) into custody. The men were questioned and subsequently released.

But enter two firms of lawyers who should evermore stand as the absolute definition of ‘ambulance chasers’ – were there any actual ambulance to have chased in this case. But there was not, because nobody was even harmed. Nevertheless the firms ‘Public Interest Lawyers’ and ‘Leigh Day & Co’ sought out, instigated and outrageously prolonged a full-scale legal inquiry into the events. The Iraqis who had been detained claimed that British troops had murdered, mutilated and tortured the detainees in their care. The two firms acting on behalf of these men even failed – among other things – to declare until more than four years into the inquiry documents showing that the men making the claims were insurgent fighters. They pretended they were innocent civilians. In this way, among many others, the lawyers managed to continue to rack up their fees even as the reputations of British soldiers were dragged through the mud.

This week, after gathering more than 600 witness statements and hearing oral evidence from almost 300 people, came to a close. It found that the claims of the Iraqis were ‘Wholly and entirely without merit or justification.’ Indeed the allegations were, the presiding judge found, the product of “deliberate and calculated lies”.

Reaction to the verdict of the inquiry was predictable. The troops who had had to live with 10 years of grotesque allegations hanging over them and their families, were first relieved and then justifiably angry that they had ever been put through this ordeal. But the predictions of parts of the press was equally predictable. The Guardian and the Independent – to name just two papers – seemed positively disappointed by the result. It seemed not just to be their expectation but their hope that our nation’s troops would be found guilty of war crimes. And so they ran front-page headlines focussing on the fact that there were small criticisms in the report relating to prisoner care (late delivery of a meal and a detainee being ‘breathed on’ among them). Thus these papers continued to satisfy what they appear to believe is an insatiable public thirst for stories of wrong-doing on our own side.

So many aspects of this story are terrible: the mistreatment of our soldiers, the waste of public money, the outrageous behaviour of some of these lawyers and an apparent willingness to always believe the worst of our own soldiers. But some good should come of it. And perhaps it could be a moment for political unity. These outrageous allegations were made about a war begun under a Labour government. Labour MPs and others who have gone through all this see as clearly as anyone could the problems in our system which have given rise to these outrageous proceedings. Meanwhile, announcing the findings of the inquiry in the Commons this week the Defence Minister Michael Fallon was rightly and visibly angry that the charges had ever come to this. If good is to come from this it should be a serious discussion between the two main parties not just to recognise what went wrong with al-Sweady, but to ensure that nothing like it ever happens again.

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is of British soldiers on patrol in Helmand province, southern Afghanistan. Photo: Reuters.