Special forces thwarted the ‘normal rules’ and were disconnected from rest of British army, witnesses said

Damning evidence of the culture of Britain’s special forces, from their training camps in Herefordshire to the battlefields of Afghanistan, was released on Tuesday.

It was disclosed by the judge-led inquiry set up in the wake of detailed reports of unarmed civilians executed in cold blood in night raids by SAS soldiers.

A special forces soldier said prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq were put on the prongs of forklift trucks which were then raised and driven so fast that they fell off.

“It was something they did for fun doing this and jamming on the brakes so they fell off,” one of the inquiry witnesses said she had been told. 

The inquiry, chaired by appeal court judge Sir Charles Haddon-Cave, also heard that alcohol, banned for everybody else in the military, was “widespread” in the special forces.

“Normal rules”, including respect for rank and “observance of dress”, were also ignored by the SAS which was disconnected from the rest of the British army.

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‘Out of control’

In evidence first heard in closed hearing, Christopher Green, a former army officer, testified that the SAS was under a chain of command “that did not place the same level of significance on the moral domain in the way we fight”.

He said the SAS seemed to be “out of control”, benefitting from a “culture of exceptionalism”, while he was called a “Taliban-loving apologist” who could not be trusted and had no authority to contradict elite special forces. 

He was told by a senior army commander in Helmand to drop his questioning of SAS tactics.

Green, who became a whistleblower after serving in Afghanistan in 2012 and later gave a statement to the military police, told the inquiry that the rules that applied to the rest of the army in the conduct of military operations did not apply to the SAS.

In its attempts to cover up evidence, Green was denied access to “gun tapes” – video footage of special forces operations, he told the inquiry. He described the refusal to let him see the tapes as “an admission of guilt”. 

“What I would like to see”, he said at the end of his evidence, “is the British army [which has] been losing wars for the last twenty plus years … restored to being a winning organisation rather than a losing one”.

‘Local atmospherics’

Green referred to an SAS night raid in the village of Rahim in Helmand province, Afghanistan, in 2012 when three young men, described as innocent farmers, were killed. 

The Ministry of Defence later paid their mother, Bebe Hazrata, more than £3,600. It said the money was not “compensation” but an “assistance payment “ to “calm local atmospherics”.

The inquiry has heard how British special forces drew up “kill lists” and engaged in night raids, sometimes executing unarmed Afghans in their beds and planting “drop weapons” by their bodies to justify the killings.

Among several reports on the SAS, Declassified has described how a senior British special forces officer warned that the failure to own up to criminal behaviour in Afghanistan by the SAS – including shooting toddlers in their beds – would allow the regiment to descend into “the sewer” and sink to the level of despotic regimes.

Evidence to the inquiry released on Tuesday also includes a witness statement by Monica Grenfell who described “coarse and feral”, and racial comments heard as she worked at the SAS training camp in Hertfordshire.

It was Grenfell who said she was told by a special forces soldier during her time at the camp about the detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan being driven on the forklift trucks.

Describing a “corrosive” atmosphere, she said the SAS portrayed themselves as a “band of brothers” but they were far from it, with the regiment’s two main units “hating each other”.  

She has written an account of her work for SAS “support services” under the pseudonym, Monica Lavers.