ABSTRACT
The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are belated, insincere, incomplete. On a cold Baghdad night in February 1963, an eight-year-old boy sat transfixed in front of the television as he watched the newly deposed Iraqi president, Abdul Karim Qassim, executed before a firing squad on Iraqi national television. The president sat on a folding chair with hands tied behind his back as he heard his sentence read. The prison situation is so bad that in December 2005 the head of the American Detention Facilities, John Gardner, refused to turn over custody of the prisons to the Iraqi government, stating that such transfer would not occur until ’The standards of inmate treatment and security match those maintained in US-run facilities’.
