Roger Smith reports on some recent issues of language
Labour’s former minister, Adam Ingram, escaped rather more lightly in Sir William Gage’s report into the death of Baha Mousa than Richard Norton-Taylor’s recent dramatisation of its proceedings (Tactical Questioning: Scenes from the Baha Mousa Inquiry, shown at the Tricycle Theatre). The latter culminated in a very funny passage where Ingram squirmed under cross-examination.
Ingram’s problem is that he gave repeated assurances that the UK did not torture: it did not even intimidate prisoners by “hooding” them. Thus, he told the chairman of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights: “Hooding was only used during the transit of prisoners; it was not used as an interrogation technique.” This assurance was somewhat at odds with a report from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) which had been previously received by Ingram. This said that: “Inmates were routinely treated by their guards with general contempt…Hooding appeared to be…part of standard intimidation techniques used by military intelligence personnel to frighten inmates into co-operating.”
Ingram was reduced before the inquiry to justifying his assertion that hooding
