A short history of British torture
by alethoICC | December 2005
When
the House of Commons was debating how much to increase the time limit
for detention without trial the question of torture came up. Officially
this was limited to the nice considerations of whether it was all right
to send people to places where torture is used and whether Britain can
use information collected by the use of torture in other countries. This
discussion gave an impression of democratic Britain as the home of
civilised behaviour where the very idea of torture is repugnant to our
legislators – unlike, say, the US with its secret CIA jails and where
Cheney has been labelled the ‘Vice President for Torture’. In reality,
the British state has a long history of using and developing a whole
range of torture techniques.
Interrogation in Northern Ireland
Between
1971 and 1975 more than 2000 people were interned without trial by the
state in Northern Ireland. Picked up without having any charges laid, or
knowing when they were going to be released, detainees were subject to
all sorts of treatments, some coming under the heading of ‘interrogation
in depth’. Apart from prolonged sessions of oppressive questioning,
serious threats, wrist bending, choking and beatings, there were
instances of internees being forced to run naked over broken glass and
being thrown, tied and hooded, out of helicopters a few feet above the
ground. The ‘five techniques’ at the centre of the interrogators’ work
were: sensory deprivation through being hooded (often while naked);
being forced to stand against walls (sometimes for over 20 hours and
even for more than 40); being subjected to continuous noise (from
machinery such as generators or compressors for periods of up to 6 or 7
days); deprivation of food and water; sleep deprivation for periods of
up to week. Relays of interrogation teams were used against the victims.
The
British state tried to discredit reports of torture. Stories were fed
to the media about injuries being self-inflicted – “one hard-line
Provisional was given large whiskies and a box of king-size cigarettes
for punching himself in both eyes” (Daily Telegraph, 31/10/77). There
were indeed instances of self-harm, but these were either suicide
attempts or done with the hope of being transferred to hospital
accommodation.
Then
the press said that any measures were justified if they helped to
‘prevent violence’. They contrasted “ripping out fingernails, beating
people with steel rods and applying electric shocks to their genitalia”
(Daily Telegraph 3/9/76), examples of “outright brutality”, with the
measures used in Northern Ireland.
In
1978 the European Court of Human Rights said that the techniques
Britain had used caused “intense physical and mental suffering and …
acute psychiatric disturbance”, but that while this was “inhuman and
degrading treatment” it didn’t amount to torture. This was a victory for
the British state because it was keen to use means that would cause the
maximum distress to the victim with the minimum external evidence. They
had been previously referred to the European Court over torture in
Cyprus, but in fact British interrogators had been using various
combinations of the ‘five techniques’ for a long time. When the army and
RUC approached Northern Ireland’s Prime Minister, Brian Faulkner, for
formal approval “They told him that the ‘in-depth’ techniques they
planned to use were those the army had used … many times before when
Britain was faced with insurgencies in her colonies, including
Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, the British Cameroons, Brunei, British
Guyana, Aden, Borneo, Malaysia and the Persian Gulf” (Provos The IRA
and Sinn Fein Peter Taylor).
By any means deemed necessary
British
intervention in the Malayan ‘emergency’ in the 1950s has been held up
as a model of suppression and ‘counter-insurgency’. Apart from the camps
established, the murder squads, use of rigid food controls, burning
down villages and the imposition of emergency regulations, the use of
torture was an integral part of British operations. With 650,000 people
uprooted and ‘resettled’ in New Villages, or put in concentration camps,
there was also a programme of ‘re-education’.
British
action in Kenya in the 1950s also showed what British civilisation was
prepared to do. At various times over 90,000 ‘suspects’ were imprisoned,
in either detention camps or ‘protected villages’. At one point Nairobi
(population 110,000) was emptied, with 16,500 then detained and 2,500
expelled to reserves. Assaults and violence, often to the point of
death, were extensive. As in Malaya, ‘rehabilitation’ was one of the
goals of the operation. More than 1000 people were hanged, using a
mobile gallows that was taken round the country. Overall, maybe
100-150,000 died through exhaustion, disease, starvation and systematic
brutality.
Recent
revelations in The Guardian (12/11/5) concerned a secret torture
centre, the “London Cage”, that operated between July 1940 and September
1948. Three houses in Kensington were used to interrogate some 3500
German officers, soldiers and civilians. Still in use for three years
after the end of the war, interrogation included beatings, being forced
to stand to attention for up to 26 hours, threats of execution or
unnecessary surgery, starvation, sleep deprivation, dousings with cold
water etc. “In one complaint lodged at the National Archives, a
27-year-old German journalist being held at this camp said he had spent
two years as a prisoner of the Gestapo. And not once, he said, did they
treat him as badly as the British.”
No exceptions
There
is a continuity in the British state’s actions. The Lieutenant Colonel
in charge of the ‘London Cage’ received an OBE for his interrogation
work in the First World War. In the 1950s there were reports of Britain
experimenting with drugs, surgery and torture with a view to designing
techniques that would be effective but look harmless. In the 1970s
thousands of army officers and senior civil servants were trained to use
psychological techniques for security purposes. Inevitably, the truth
about current activities is not in the public domain.
In
general, British democracy has been better than others at concealing
the brutal way its state functions. Anything that is exposed is denied
or dismissed as being an isolated excess. In France the extensive use of
torture in the war in Algeria was publicised as part of a battle
between different factions of the colonial aparatus. Victims had hoses
inserted in their mouths and their stomachs filled with water,
electrodes were put on genitals, heads were immersed in water. During
the Battle of Algiers 3-4000 people ‘disappeared’: fatal victims of
French torture techniques.
Although
France, and more recently the US in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, have been
less successful than Britain in keeping their actions under wraps, all
these “democracies” use the most brutal methods of interrogation and
detention. They also learn from each other’s activities, most notably in
Vietnam, where the US drew on British experience in Malaya as much as
earlier French experience in Indo-China.
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