The Indignation Thingy

The inquiry into the killing of Baha Mousa has elicited the expected degree of moral fervour, together with the obligatory vows that such things shall never happen again save where the torture has been properly outsourced. Daveybloke did the indignation thingy so well that he lapsed into the kind of gibbering incoherence more generally associated with Gordon Brown: "The British Army, as it does", except in cases such as the one he was talking about at the time, "should uphold the highest standards". Mousa was killed in 2003, under the complaisant gaze of a Catholic chaplain, by soldiers whom nobody, least of all the Blair government, had bothered to inform about their obligations under international law. It took a mere six years to set up the inquiry, and a further two years for the verdict to be delivered. "Britain does not cover these things up, we do not sweep them under the carpet," Daveybloke burbled. "We deal with it", for example by appointing Sir Peter Gibson to head an inquiry into torture. Tragically, the comments of Jack Straw, Geoff Hoon, Adam Ingram and the Reverend Tony himself do not appear to have been recorded.