Outbreak of Sanity - Col. Mendonca Cleared

[highcirrus]

BBC email flash:

Court martial clears Colonel Jorge Mendonca and four of his men of mistreating Iraqi civilians. More soon.

[Archimedes]

Link added to their webpage - Click (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6360261.stm)

[GOLF_BRAVO_ZULU]

Now stand back for all the claims of whitewash and cover up; and "be different if he was just other ranks"! No doubt the bleeding heart liberal class warriors will be exercising their vocal cords again.

Anyway, very pleased for him and that Justice has worked.

[Anotherpost75]

As WO Perkins said to General Allenby in "Lawrence of Arabia" - Bloody marvelous sir!

[Captain Kirk]

From personal experience, you could not hope to encounter a more genuine and sincere leader of men.

I am pleased for you Jorge, but sorry that the experience has compromised your belief in the Service that you have served so loyally.

[Ivor Fynn]

Well said Captain Kirk

Ivor

[teeteringhead]

No doubt the bleeding heart liberal class warriors will be exercising their vocal cords again...or just maybe they're keeping their heads down.

... sat through 20 minutes of BBC Breakfast News this morning hoping to hear some more......

..... a nanosecond glimpse of the front page of the Mail during review of the papers but that was it! But then there were the Brits (what?) to report, Bernard Matthews denying bird 'flu was his fault and an important report on watercress growing in Hampshire.....

No wonder I once heard during the last Gulf Unpleasantness a (very) senior officer refer to it as the Baghdad Broadcasting Corporation.....

[ORAC]

Torygraph: Colonel 'victim of witch-hunt'

An Army officer was cleared by a court martial yesterday amid claims that he had been prosecuted as part of a politically motivated witch-hunt. Col Jorge Mendonca, who was commander of the Queen's Lancashire Regiment, had been charged with negligently performing a duty after an Iraqi died in his battalion's custody in 2003.

The most expensive court martial in British history, estimated to cost more than £20 million, has sparked criticism of the Army Prosecuting Authority and the conduct of the Attorney General in supervising the prosecution.
Since investigations started against Col Mendonca, there have been claims that he was charged because Army chiefs and politicians wanted officers on trial alongside their men. The claims were backed by documents written by a senior Army commander and obtained by The Daily Telegraph which suggested that there was a determined effort to identify officers who could be put on trial for the misconduct of their troops in Iraq.

It has been alleged that the Army Prosecuting Authority made even greater steps to find evidence against Col Mendonca after the papers were published.

The process ended yesterday in a costly and embarrassing failure for the military's high command, who allowed the investigation to proceed unchecked, saying it had to remain independent from the chain of command.

Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney General, was accused of pushing the case through for political reasons. "A whiff of political correctness hangs heavy over the case against Col Mendonca, with law officers determined to have military officers prosecuted," Liam Fox, the shadow defence secretary, said.

He added that those responsible for bringing the case "need an urgent reappraisal of their procedures and perhaps even their motives"....

[Art Field]

Although there may be accusations of a "Whitewash" it is worth pointing out that the President of the Board was not military but a civilian judge and it was he who threw the case out.

[Anotherpost75]

Colonel and three of his men cleared over abuse of detained Iraqis

Steven Morris and Richard Norton-Taylor
The Guardian, Thursday February 15, 2007

The highest-ranking British officer to face a court martial in modern times and three of his men were cleared yesterday of involvement in the systematic abuse of Iraqi civilian prisoners.

Colonel Jorge Mendonca was acquitted of failing to ensure that his men did not mistreat prisoners who were being held at a British detention centre in Basra, southern Iraq. His three colleagues were found not guilty of taking part in the beating of the prisoners, violence which culminated in the death of hotel worker Baha Mousa, who was attacked over a 36-hour period while handcuffed and hooded and suffered 93 separate injuries……..

………..The case against Col Mendonca was that he should have known what was going on and ought to have acted to stop it. But the judge, Mr Justice McKinnon, yesterday directed the board hearing the courts martial to find Col Mendonca, Kingsman Fallon, Lance Corp Crowcroft and Sgt Stacey not guilty. He directed them to acquit Payne of manslaughter and of intending to pervert the course of justice. Mr Justice McKinnon told the board there was "no evidence" fit to put before them on which they could convict the men………….

……….General Sir Mike Jackson, who was head of the army until last year, last night said he was "certain" there had been no political interference in the case. "These difficult cases - and we must remember there is a dead body at the end of this - can only be judged on the evidence put in front of the prosecuting authority," he told Channel 4. "This is a matter of evidence, not a matter of politics or personal view."

Hmmmmmmmmmm??

[highcirrus]

This what Bliar and his band of incompetent political gutter snipes have done to the career of a fine officer, who’s past record and contemporary performance in a hugely difficult operational theatre should have been proudly held up as an inspiration to all in our Nation.

Stalled career of high flier

Steven Morris
The Guardian, Thursday February 15, 2007

Three years ago, Colonel Jorge Mendonca MBE was a soldier going places, and fast. In 2003 he had led the 1st Battalion the Queen's Lancashire Regiment with distinction as it tried to help with the rebuilding of Basra after the war. Almost every day the unit's 620 men faced riots, looting, armed robbery, smuggling, kidnapping, shootings, bombings and grenade attacks.

They were meant to win the hearts and minds of the people of Basra but conditions for the citizens were terrible, with fuel, electricity and even food and drinking water in short supply. In the searing heat tensions often bubbled over.

There were many bad days but the worst was when they lost a popular colleague, Captain Dai Jones, 29, a newlywed who was blown up by a roadside bomb. During the prosecution it was claimed that this death might have been one of the reasons why Col Mendonca's men treated the Iraqi detainees so badly.

On his return Col Mendonca, 43, was awarded the distinguished service order for the skill with which he led his men. At the ceremony the Queen told him that she had heard good things about his battalion. Typically Col Mendonca said he considered the award was not for him but for the whole battalion.

He also spoke passionately in a local newspaper interview about the suffering of some of the people he and his soldiers were there to help. "I have a two-year-old and a one-year-old son and to see people the same size as my older boy with nothing on from the waist down, absolutely filthy and running around in sewage and rubbish covered streets, is heartbreaking.

"It is hugely rewarding and challenging," he went on, "to make a success of it and give the children a better future."

After returning from Iraq he was given an important post at the Permanent Joint Headquarters in Northwood and in time he was expected to make brigadier.

Hugh Eaton, a now-retired lieutenant colonel who was also in Basra in 2003, said: "He was the man universally considered as being the best commanding officer [of a battalion] by some way."

Col Mendonca, 43, could not speak openly after he was charged. But his wife, Louise, said he had been treated appallingly and claimed the damage being done to the army was "irreparable". In a newspaper article she wrote: "The moment Col Jorge Mendonca, DSO, MBE steps into the dock he will leave behind a truly broken organisation."

Colleagues said he now wants to get his stalled career back on track. The fear for him is that his legal ordeal may make that very difficult.

[jstars2]

“No doubt the bleeding heart liberal class warriors will be exercising their vocal cords again.”

Looks like they are but the vocal chords of that classic representative of the sector, The Guardian (again), seem to be producing some remarkably critical and realistic comment on the antics of “Nu Labour” Bliar and his cerebrally challenged friend, “The Decider”.

Bit long but well worth reading.

At the sharp end of war

As pressure on our troops increases, military chiefs have never been so shut out of policymaking

Richard Norton-Taylor
Thursday February 15, 2007
The Guardian

Not since the second world war have Britain's forces been under such sustained pressure. They are the ones fighting Britain's new enemies. They are at the sharp end, facing the consequences of Tony Blair's interventionist policies.

In Iraq, British soldiers are acting as police officers, politicians, diplomats and providers of aid. They were sent to Afghanistan last year, as the then defence secretary John Reid famously said, to rebuild the country, not to seek and destroy the enemy. Their role has expanded exponentially as that of ambassadors and diplomats has declined, yet never before have senior military figures been so shut out of policy making. They have been unhappy about Iraq ever since the then chief of defence staff's instruction to encourage Iraqi officers to negotiate with the invaders to help maintain order was torn up by Washington - without a peep from the government. General Sir Richard Dannatt, the new head of the army, made his views clear last year when he said that Britain's presence was "exacerbating the security problems" in Iraq.

"We would be perfectly happy," said Reid, announcing the dispatch of thousands of troops to Afghanistan, "to leave in three years' time without firing a shot, because our job is to protect the reconstruction". Inadequately prepared British troops soon found themselves fighting pitched battles with the Taliban. And while British commanders warn of the serious dangers of eradicating Afghanistan's opium crop, Washington sends its chief anti-drugs adviser to Kabul. The poppy fields are to be sprayed, whatever the consequences, and despite the views of Britain's military.

Some argue that military chiefs are suffering from a culture shock as the army comes under unprecedented scrutiny. They must get over this. Yesterday's decision to clear Colonel Jorge Mendonca and four of his men may appear a vindication of those who argued that the charges were misconceived. Senior commanders "need to have more courage in connecting the high expectations of government in deploying armed forces with the realities of the missions they are asked to undertake", Professor Anthony Forster, of Durham University, has said. It is now commonplace for politicians, he wrote in the magazine International Affairs, to see "the deployment of troops as a means of achieving both security and democracy".

Hew Strachan, Chichele professor of the history of war at Oxford University, delivers a powerful critique of the way the military's political representatives - in the US as well as Britain - have abandoned any concept of strategy. In Iraq, he writes in the journal Survival, "strategy was driven out by the wishful thinking of their political masters, convinced that the US would be welcomed as liberators". Strachan refers to those here who bemoan the readiness to militarise foreign policy rather than to use patient diplomacy. But, he notes, "the fault is not that of the military. It is the responsibility of their political masters. They have used the armed forces as their agents in peace as well as in war".

Blair is about to announce a shake-up of Whitehall in an attempt to make the government's counter-terrorist strategy more effective. He must give a role to the military, with a mandate to tell ministers about life and death in the real world. And it is time the military hierarchy abandoned its sensitivities to New Labour always projecting British troops as purveyors of "soft power" - MoD publications are dominated by photos of soldiers performing good work; bonding with children in Pakistan in the wake of last year's earthquake. That may be fine. But they are doing much much more. Such images may be comforting. But they can also be misleading.