Within days of the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, members of a British military intelligence unit were crossing the border from Kuwait to establish a facility that would operate inside the occupied country for more than five years, and would remain shrouded in secrecy throughout that period.
The men from F Branch, a training wing of the Joint Services Intelligence Organisation, had arrived to set up an interrogation centre where they would employ the techniques that they had learned – and passed on to other elements of the British military – at their headquarters at Chicksands, Bedfordshire. Once up and running this centre was known as the JFIT. The meaning of the acronym remains unclear, although it is usually taken to be the Joint Forward Interrogation Team.
At first, JFIT operated within the perimeter of a prisoner of war camp just north of the border, outside the port of Umm Qasr. It was a sort of prison within a prison, over which the commandant of the main camp had no control. Later it moved to a British logistics base at Shaiba, outside Basra, before being withdrawn, along with other UK forces, to the airport.
Hundreds of men passed through JFIT before it was closed at the end of 2008. Yesterday 222 of them brought proceedings against the Ministry of Defence alleging they were subjected to systematic torture at the centre. With the high court in London already ruling that these men were protected by the European convention on human rights – because they were held at a British detention centre – their lawyers argue that the government must hold a public inquiry into the abuses to meet its obligations under the convention. The MoD argues this would be too costly, and the ministry should be allowed to proceed with its own investigation into what happened at the JFIT. Yesterday the court began hearing arguments from both sides. Whatever the court decides, any investigation into the activities of JFIT will focus on 1,253 video and audio recordings of interrogation sessions, made by the interrogators themselves, possibly for use as future training aids at Chicksands. Just two of these videos have so far been disclosed to lawyers representing the former JFIT inmates. They appear on the Guardian website.
They show the interrogation in April 2007 of a suspected insurgent, "Hanif", detained and questioned about a mortar attack on a British base. The videos show Hanif – not his real name – being forced to stand to attention while two soldiers scream abuse and threaten him with death. They ignore complaints that he is not being fed or allowed to sleep.
At the end of each session he is ordered to don a pair of blackened goggles, earmuffs are placed over his head, and he is ordered to place the palms of his hands together so that a guard can grasp his thumbs to lead him away. At the end of one session an interrogator can be heard shouting an order to the guard, who then runs down a corridor, dragging Hanif behind him by his thumbs. Hanif's lawyers say he was then severely beaten.
In a statement submitted to the court, Hanif says he was blindfolded and severely beaten on his arrest, and then taken to a British base where he was examined by a female doctor who took no interest in his injuries. He says that he was held in a permanently lit cell, about one and a half metres square, and deprived of sleep for about 10 days by guards who would drag him out and force him to run while wearing blackened goggles and earmuffs.
Hanif says he would also be forced to run in zig-zags around an obstacle course before each interrogation session, during which he would be threatened and intimidated, and told that his mother and sister were to be raped. He says that during the first 21 days of his detention the blackened goggles and earmuffs were removed only while he was in his cell, or during interrogation sessions. Hanif was eventually moved to a prisoner-of-war camp, but it was to be seven months before he was freed, without any charges being pressed against him. He adds in his statement: "I would like the British army to acknowledge what it did to me was wrong."
The existence of the 1,253 tapes, and the fact they have all been seen by the Royal Military Police, emerged during a preliminary hearing earlier this year.
There is reason to believe that they show other JFIT detainees being treated in a similar manner. The inquiry into the death of Baha Mousa, the Basra hotel receptionist who was tortured to death by British troops in September 2003, showed trainee interrogators being taught by F Branch to behave in strikingly similar manner to Hanif's questioners.
Last month the Guardian reported that in training men and women from other military units in interrogation and "tactical questioning" – the initial interrogation of captured prisoners – F Branch instructed them to use threats, sensory deprivation and enforced nakedness, in an apparent breach of the Geneva conventions.
When Mousa was detained by men of the Queen's Lancashire Regiment a decision was taken to subject him to "tactical questioning", and at least one man involved was a trained tactical questioner. Mousa was suspected, wrongly, of involvement in the death of a popular officer. Two days later, after suffering 93 separate injuries, he died.
There is also evidence to support Hanif's allegations that he was mistreated before and after interrogation. Phil Shiner, a human rights lawyer representing 125 former JFIT inmates, has uncovered evidence from UK military detention records showing that guards were instructed to remove some inmates from their cells every 15 minutes, depriving them of sleep. He also submitted to the court evidence of radio signals referring to "internee 987 … woken every 30 minutes as part of TQ", and something called Operation Wideawake, "conducted using white light".
Furthermore, the allegations made by other former JFIT inmates are so similar that Shiner and his team argue they show a pattern of systematic abuse. Almost all the former inmates complain that they were severely beaten when arrested, usually at their homes. Some allege other family members were ill-treated and, in some instances, shot dead, by arresting troops. Most say that furniture was destroyed and cash stolen. Most of the former inmates allege they were again beaten in transit, in the backs of trucks or aboard helicopters.
On arrival at a British base, most of the former inmates say they were photographed, and examined by a military doctor who would take no interest in their injuries. Most say they were forced to kneel upright for long periods on arrival at the JFIT. Many say they were hooded or blindfolded and forced to run in zig-zags before interrogation. They all say that the most severe mistreatment was meted out while they were not being filmed.
In all, Shiner's team has documented 59 allegations of detainees being hooded, 11 of electric shocks, 122 of sound deprivation through the use of earmuffs, 52 of sleep deprivation, 160 of sight deprivation, including 117 using blackened goggles, 132 of the use of stress positions, 39 of enforced nakedness, and 18 allegations that detainees were kept awake by pornographic DVDs played on laptops.
Although the former inmates were held at different times over the five-and-a-half years after the March 2003 invasion, the same soldiers' names keep cropping up in their witness statements: one is an NCO said by former inmates to have been particularly brutal; another is a young woman, "Katie", alleged to have been involved in the sexual humiliation of inmates.
The Mousa inquiry has heard that the first JFIT commandant was a lieutenant commander in the Royal Navy. Subsequently it was commanded for a while by a flight lieutenant from the RAF. They answered to a senior intelligence officer at Divisional HQ – and through him directly to permanent joint HQ at Northwood in the north London suburbs.
The JFIT had its own guard force, seconded from units based nearby. Most of the interrogators were reservists, however, men and women who had been mobilised before the invasion. They were members of little-known "human intelligence units" that are maintained by the territorial army and the RAF and Navy reserves, and headquartered at Chicksands.
When the lieutenant commander who first commanded the JFIT gave evidence to the Mousa inquiry – identified only by the cipher SO40 – he described an operation in which prisoners were handled in a clinical but basically humane fashion. "The whole emphasis was on the guard force handling the PWs [prisoners of war] dispassionately." The former inmates, on the other hand, say they found themselves in a torture centre where the use of sleep deprivation, stress positions, beatings, sensory deprivation, threats and sexual humiliation was routine.
There is evidence that US military intelligence officers felt their British counterparts were not obtaining sufficient intelligence through interrogation. Brigadier Ewan Duncan, head of the Intelligence Corps, told the Mousa inquiry that the US was concerned that "UK interrogation was not producing results in Iraq".
It was not long before the officer commanding the main prison camp at Umm Qasr became deeply concerned at what was happening within the JFIT. At first, he told the Mousa inquiry, its officers attempted to bar him from entering their compound. When he did get inside he could see two rows of prisoners, kneeling in the sun with plastic hoods over their heads and their hands handcuffed behind their backs. This man, a lieutenant colonel who was at the time commanding the Queen's Dragoon Guards, identified at the inquiry by the cipher SO09, said that he regarded what he saw to be both wrong and illegal. "I made it clear that it was unacceptable to place plastic hoods upon the prisoners and leave them kneeling in the sun because it was not in keeping with UK law and was morally objectionable," he told the inquiry. "I also pointed out it would reflect badly on British troops." He was told that "it was that it was none of my business".
SO09 arranged for a visit to JFIT from Col Chris Vernon, who, as senior media spokesman, was the public face of the British military after the invasion.
Vernon told the inquiry that he too saw men who were hooded and kneeling "in what could be considered a stress position", and warned that this could "undermine the credibility of both British and coalition forces". He too was told that he would be ignored.
Further complaints were made by officials of the International Committee of the Red Cross, and by a senior military lawyer, Lt Col Nick Mercer, who warned the interrogators they were violating international law. Mercer told the inquiry: "Although the UK maintained that it took its responsibilities under the Geneva conventions in relation to prisoners very seriously, this was not my experience."
Any public inquiry into the activities of the JFIT would be expected to examine the extent to which it was supervised by military lawyers. It is now known that at least some of the training material used by F Branch at Chicksands between 2003 and 2005 escaped the scrutiny of the training centre's in-house lawyer, Brigadier David Yates, who told the Mousa inquiry that he did not "have the capacity" to check it.
The inquiry has also heard that in 2004 the MoD's senior legal adviser, Martin Hemming, and his deputy, Vivien Rose, decided against seeking the attorney general's advice on the legality of hooding prisoners. Asked in an email from a military lawyer whether such advice should be sought, Rose replied: "I would not be in favour of asking the AG at this point." Hemming told the inquiry: "I would have agreed not to go to the attorney at that time." It was, he said, "an academic question", and the attorney general was "a very busy" man.
Lord Goldsmith, attorney general at that time, told BBC's Panorama earlier this year that he was disappointed that he "deliberately wasn't asked" whether hooding was lawful. "I think it shows a bad approach to the role of the senior law officer," he said. "It appears on this occasion the MoD didn't want to know."