I had seen British military brutality in Northern Ireland . . . I had even been threatened by British officers in Belfast . . . but I somehow thought that things had changed, that a new, more disciplined army had emerged from the dark, sinister days of the Irish conflict. But I was wrong. Baha Mousa, Dawood's son.

had died from the injuries he received in British custody, a young, decent man whose father was a cop, who did nothing worse than work as a receptionist in a downtown hotel.

Then I went to see Kifah Taha, who had been so badly beaten by British troops in the presence of Baha Mousa that he had terrible wounds in the groin. He told me how the soldiers would call their Iraqi prisoners by the names of football stars . . . Beckham was one name they used . . . before kicking them around the detention HQ in Basra.

There were stories of Iraqi prisoners being forced to kneel on sharp stones, of being kicked and punched in the groin, the kidneys, the back, shoulders, forced to sit with their heads down lavatory holes.

All this is among the evidence which ex-prisoners . . . and Baha Mousa's father . . . are taking to the High Court, now that the courts martial which followed Mousa's death have produced just one solitary conviction, a soldier jailed for a year and dismissed from the army for "mistreating" prisoners.

There's an old rule of thumb which I always apply to armies in the field. If you find out about one abuse, you can bet there were 100 others that will never be revealed. New stories of "forced disappearances, " hostage-taking and torture in British custody are emerging from Basra.

US troops are still being questioned about unlawful killings and torture.

The My Lai atrocity in Vietnam was revealed relatively soon after it occurred. But it was more than 40 years after the Korean War that we learned US soldiers had fired into thousands of unarmed refugees, because they feared north Korean troops were hiding among them.

I found out about Baha Mousa only because it was still safe . . . just . . .

to move around in Basra in 2004, to knock on front doors, visit hospitals, interview grieving relatives without the fear of being kidnapped or having my throat cut. Baha Mousa's young wife had died only a few months before him . . . from a tumour on the brain . . . and his two small children sat devastated in their home, staring at me as if I was a war criminal. His father Dawood said to me then, as he says in his latest affidavit: "As for me, Baha was not just my son, he was my friend."

What culture created these young men who treated their civilian prisoners with such contempt, cursing them and . . . if the documents are accurate . . . calling them "shit" and treating them like animals? Did it come from Glasgow or Cardiff or London or from some prison . . . yes, quite a lot of British soldiers are exprisoners themselves, former guests of Her Majesty who know all about prison rules and prison abuse.

How come the Americans tortured men at Abu Ghraib . . . officially permitted to do so, as we now know . . . without realising that they were breaking the rules of ordinary humanity?

I know the old saw, that our chaps are up against it, risking their lives in the front line, occasionally running over the traces amid the fear and drama of battle, a few rotten apples, etc. That's what we said about the 1st Battalion, the Parachute Regiment when they killed 14 innocent Catholic civilians in Derry in 1972. First Para?

Salt of the earth. Maybe they just broke after so much abuse and danger . . . a nice one that, except that 1st Para were a reserve battalion at the time, largely confined to Palace Barracks, hardly ever abused.

It's all up now, of course. Iraq is a disaster and the old cliches about "hearts and minds" are as dry as the sand on the desert floor. We will leave it with all our dreams in pieces, and it will be left to Iraqis themselves . . . men like Dawood Mousa, carrying the grief of his son's death with him forever . . . to create a new country out of the pain and sorrow we leave behind for them.