General: Whitehall thinks our soldiers are ‘ bad’
BRITISH troops are being hounded over incidents in Iraq and Afghanistan because the Establishment thinks soldiers are ‘bad’ and terrorists are ‘freedom fighters’, claims a former head of the Armed Forces.
General Sir David Richards yesterday said there was an ‘instinct’ in Whitehall that British soldiers ‘aren’t good’ and that no one has ‘the guts’ to challenge this view.
His remarks were echoed by a decorated officer arrested by the Iraq Historic Allegations Team (Ihat) last year, who said officials saw soldiers as ‘a load of thugs to hire’. Ihat is currently probing 1,668 cases of alleged wrongdoing in Iraq, while operation Northmoor is looking into more than 550 allegations from Afghanistan.
It is the first time Sir David, ex-Chief of the Defence Staff, has spoken out about the witchhunt against soldiers since the Daily Mail exposed the scandal last year.
As well as hitting out at the taxpayer-funded probes, Sir David also apologised to troops who have faced as many as five investigations into a single incident. He said he was sorry the military did not realise that legal claims would grow into a ‘many-headed hydra’.
He told BBC Two’s Victoria Derbyshire programme: ‘I’m very sorry that we didn’t identify the effect it was going to have. To begin with, in 2010 it didn’t affect our lives at all. It was only subsequently that we began to see it was growing as a many-headed hydra.’
Asked why this was happening, he said: ‘I think this comes out of this instinct somewhere in Whitehall, within the Establishment, that soldiers aren’t good and freedom fighters – we call them terrorists – kill 3,000 people in one go, but in the minds of some of these people they are somehow quite good.
‘And it has grown from that – no one has got the guts to say that’s rubbish.
‘The idea we’ve got hundreds of soldiers who are culpable, anyone who knows any army, let alone the British Army, knows this is not true.’
His comments were supported by a decorated officer who faces possible prosecution over the death of an Iraqi over a decade ago. He told the Mail: ‘I think that’s correct, they think we are a load of thugs to hire.’
The officer, who wishes to remain anonymous, was cleared in 2006 only to be arrested by Ihat in 2015. He now faces fresh manslaughter charges.
He said: ‘I am facing life imprisonment. The untold cruelties of this process have destroyed my life, my career, it has broken me.’
Two other former generals also slammed the process. General Sir Mike Jackson, who was head of the Army when Britain sent troops into Iraq in 2003, said he wanted to see the ‘burden lifted’ from innocent soldiers.
Speaking publicly for the first time on the subject, he added: ‘We are the British Army, not some rabble. We have our standards and they must be pursued. That does not include soldiers who find themselves subject to an investigation on the basis of cooked-up allegations.’
Meanwhile Lord Dannatt, who succeeded Sir Mike as head of the Army in 2006, said ‘nervous’ authorities had ‘veered too much on behalf of those making the allegations’.
Former Army captain and Tory MP Johnny Mercer added: ‘We are facing one of the most serious injustices in British military history. I’ve seen our servicemen being dragged through the courts for years.’
witch-hunt against our heroes