Why the Mirror’s editor was sacked
Was Piers Morgan rightly sacked three years ago? After all, didn’t he publish faked photos of British troops urinating on Iraqi prisoners?
In fact, Piers’ decision to publish the photos was totally justified. The photos represented what actually took place, even though they were faked.
Stuart MacKenzie, a private in the Territorial Army who served with the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment in Iraq, orchestrated the photos. A court martial against him was dropped, however, and he was cleared of all criminal charges in 2005.
Also, Mackenzie kept a diary where he boasted about the violence meted out to Iraqi civilians during his tour of duty in Iraq in 2003. Last year he appeared as a prosecution witness at the court martial of seven soldiers from the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment. The seven soldiers were accused of abusing of 11 Iraqi civilians in Basra, one of whom, Baha Musa, died. Baha Mousa was found to have had 93 separate injuries to his body, including fractured ribs, a broken nose and kidney failure.
The soldiers were acquitted on insufficient evidence, although one of them, Corporal Donald Payne, became Britain’s first convicted war criminal when he admitted that he had treated Iraqis inhumanely and “enjoyed” hearing Iraqis cry out during torture, referring to their screams as a “choir”. He was jailed for a year.
Mackenzie’s diary contained detailed accounts of abuse of Iraqis. Moreover, at the trial Iraqi civilian Muhanned Thaher Abdullah al-Mansouri said that – among other things — he had been urinated on by his captors.
So Piers Morgan published photos of abuse that really happened. He was sacked for depicting the truth of British abuse of Iraqi prisoners.
Those editors of British media who repeated the governments’ lies about the “Iraqi threat”, however, are still in their jobs.
