Have We Learned Nothing?

19th October 2006

By Andrew Hogg

It was 1971 and Britain's war on terror was steadily escalating. In February the first British soldier to die during the Troubles, Gunner Robert Curtis, was hit by machinegun fire as his unit entered the Ardoyne. The following month, three more British soldiers were killed by the Provisional IRA when they were lured from a Belfast pub where they had been drinking.

During riots which then swept the province, two Catholic men were shot by the British Army in Londonderry. Official claims that the men had been armed were hotly disputed by locals, and days later a wave of bombings hit Belfast city centre.

Political pressure on the security forces to mount a determined response became critical and in August they acted, rounding up 342 people from all over Northern Ireland, and interning them in makeshift camps. Then, with intelligence sources warning that the Provisionals planned a bombing campaign on the mainland, they set about obtaining information from those they held.

Fourteen men were softened up over a period of days by a variety of methods that the European Court of Human Rights later founded amounted to "inhuman and degrading treatment" - hooding, noise bombardment, food deprivation, sleep deprivation and being forced to stand for long periods in a contorted position. (Today, given lower thresholds of the pain and suffering needed to establish torture to the court's satisfaction, they would all in likelihood be held to be torture pure and simple.)

The army called it "interrogation in depth", with the methods collectively known as the "five techniques".

Badly affected by their experiences, the men were then transferred to prison where they told other inmates what they had experienced. Reports soon reached the media with newspaper articles about the mens' treatment leading Prime Minister Edward Heath to appoint a commission which found that while ill treatment had taken place, it fell short of brutality.

The commission's report was debated in the House of Commons, with Lord Balniel, junior minister of defence, saying there was no evidence of "torture, ill treatment or brainwashing." Defense Minister Lord Carrington had no regrets. The only people subjected to the techniques, he said on television, were "thugs and murderers."

Incensed at that finding, two British intelligence experts wrote to the press. One, Cyril Cunningham, a former senior psychologist in charge of prisoner of war intelligence, slammed the methods as "blunt, medieval and extremely inefficient". Anyone employing them, he opined, was "singularly stupid and unimaginative."

The second, L. St.Clare Grondona, had served as commander of the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre during World War Two. German prisoners, he said, were always treated in accordance with the Geneva Conventions and any interrogation officer suggesting the use of physical force would have earned the derision of his peers. "Nevertheless, the intelligence we obtained... was of inestimable value."

Prime Minister Heath then set up a second enquiry, of privy councillors this time, called the Parker Commission to consider "authorised procedures for the interrogation of persons suspected of terrorism." After due deliberation, two of its members, Lord Parker of Waddington and John Boyd Carpenter, filed a majority report which accepted at face value army claims that the torture had produced a great deal of information ( although not one of the 14 was ever charged with a terrorist offence.)

Noting that the British Army had previously used some or all of the techniques in trying to pacify colonies such as Kenya, Aden and Malaya, they concluded there was no reason now to rule them out on moral grounds.

A third member of the commission, Lord Gardiner, strenously disagreed. Pointing out that it was the KGB that had established the "five techniques", he said there was nothing in domestic law that permitted members of the security forces to act in such a manner, and no officer or politician had the right to authorise it.

In conclusion he rued the abandoning of "our legal, well-tried and highly successful wartime interrogation methods" in favour of " procedures which were secret, illegal, not morally justifiable and alien to the traditions of what I believe still to be the greatest democracy in the world."

Edward Heath, his mind perhaps concentrated by the fact that the Irish government, on behalf of the 14 men, was in the process of taking the British government to Europe about the abuses, endorsed the minority report and announced that the government would prohibit such techniques.

Of course ill treatment and physical abuse amounting to torture still took place, as evidenced by confessions extracted from the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four several years later. But the torture was not systematic or authorised, and, without minimising the horror of their experiences, the victims were eventually released and compensated. Recently evidence has emerged that the torture of some prisoners did take place in World War Two and its immediate aftermath, but it was not institutionalised.

The Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, which sees more than 2,000 new cases a year, saw with alarm in the weeks after 9/11 that disgruntled US investigators wanted to be able to force al-Quaeda suspects to talk and twice asked the US Ambassador to Britain for a meeting to make him aware of our concerns, and seek assurances, but were rebuffed.

History, however, warns us that once justified and allowed for the narrower purpose of combating terrorism or other political violence, torture will almost inevitably be used for a wider range of purposes against an increasing proportion of the population. One need only consult any of the annual editions since the 1970s of the State Department's reports to Congress on human rights abuses around the world to find incontrovertible evidence of how torture, once justified, eats at the fibre of many countries' law enforcement agencies and of the social contract itself. It cannot be condoned in any circumstances.

Several UN declarations and treaties as well as human rights instruments of regional intergovernmental organisations prohibit torture. International human rights treaties to which the United States is signatory, including the Geneva Conventions, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the UN Convention Against Torture, explicitly prohibit torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. And the Geneva Conventions, ratified by more than 150 states, confirm torture to be a crime in both international and non-international armed conflicts.

It has been a profoundly misguided policy for the United States to undermine these international treaties, which it has upheld and promoted internationally for decades, by allowing its security forces to resort to torture or ill-treatment, in the process contradicting its earlier laudable concern about torture, as demonstrated by the Torture Victim Protection Act and the Alien Torts Claims Act.

Even if torture could be shown to be efficient in some cases - and, to the contrary, the evidence suggests that torture produces false or distorted information - it could never be permissible. Nothing denies our common humanity more than the purposeful infliction of unjustified and unjustifiable pain and humiliation on a helpless captive.

Those who torture once will go on using it, encouraged by its "efficiency" in obtaining the information or confession they seek, whatever the quality of those statements. They will argue within the security apparatus for the extension of torture to other detention centres; they may form specialist groups of interrogators to refine its practice; they may develop methods that hide its more obvious effects; they will find further reasons and needs for it against other groups within the population. What was to be done "just once" will become an institutionalised practice and will erode the moral and legal principles that stand against a form of violence that could affect all of society.

The authorities cannot claim to rule on the basis of any moral or legal authority whatever unless torture remains beyond the boundary of civilised law enforcement. In short, there is no scope in international human rights law for apologists for torture, in peace or in war, either at home or by foreign proxy.