On 28 April US Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld met with US Senators to discuss the war in Iraq. What he failed to tell them was that both an army review of conditions in Abu Ghraib prison, Baghdad (the Taguba review), and confidential International Red Cross reports, had revealed systematic, sadistic abuse of detainees tantamount to torture. Hours later the first of the obscene photos which are now familiar appeared on CBS’s 60 minutes programme, and the following day details of the Taguba review were published in New Yorker magazine.
Revelations and photos of the torture came thick and fast as the Red Cross and Amnesty International confirmed that they had been advising the Coalition of abuse of detainees by both the US and Britain since May 2003. President Bush claimed that he did not know and admonished Rumsfeld (who, despite this, ‘was doing a great job’) for not telling him. Rumsfeld could not avoid the scandal: it was clear that he had known of the abuse throughout and he warned Congress that worse images were to come, including video film.
In response to outrage across the world, and in particular in Iraq and the Middle East, apologies were eventually given. This, the Bush administration claimed, was the work of a few low-ranking ‘bad apples’ at Abu Ghraib who were shaming America by their un-American activities. The matter would be investigated and the guilty would be charged.
In Britain the revelations of torture were hyped by the Mirror. It claimed to have accounts of torture by British soldiers backed up by photos. Both the Red Cross and Amnesty International confirmed their own concerns about British treatment of detainees, including deaths in custody. The British Parliament’s first response was to deplore not the torture but the revelations of torture, on the grounds that this would put British troops at risk. This was followed by a strenuous and finally successful effort to expose the Mirror’s photos as fakes. Piers Morgan, Mirror editor, was fired, and along with him went any serious attention to the fact that the British had been in breach of Geneva Conventions.
Immediately the British Labour government claimed the moral high ground. They had been accused wrongly by the tabloid press; they had been vindicated. British troops could hold their heads up and pretend that their occupation of southern Iraq is ‘firm but fair’, winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people and steering them like a kindly uncle towards democracy and liberation. Nothing could be further from the truth. In reality the British are the architects of the torture systems that are used, including by the USA, to humiliate oppressed people. This torture is not the product of depraved individuals or distorted personalities, it is a system designed to ‘soften up’ detainees for interrogation. The imperialists regard this as vital intelligence gathering. The British are the experts. They have brutalised their way through history.
A ‘short sharp shock’
British settlers in Kenya in the early 20th century believed that: ‘for a proper understanding of the savage African, one must not look on him as a human being, but as a rather superior kind of animal’. After World War II, the oppression of African people intensified as they were driven off the land into city slums and as the price of their staple foods rose by 600-800%. The Kenyan people began to organise, serving notice that they wanted their freedom. In response their organisations were banned and their leaders imprisoned.
In 1952 the uprising led by the Kenyan Land and Freedom Army – the Mau Mau – began. It was met with brutality and over the next seven years of war to defend the privileges of 40,000 whites, 11,000 ‘rebels’ were killed, more than 1,000 of them hanged. 80,000 Africans were detained in concentration camps where a system of torture was devised, called ‘the pipeline’. Detainees were sent through a series of camps, each more brutal and degrading than the last, until they were deemed to have co-operated with their captors by confessing or by implicating others.
The methods the torturers used will sound familiar. Prisoners were routinely beaten for long periods. Some police officers specialised in bending thumbs and hands back until they were dislocated. It was common to lock suspects in cells with detainees who had been shot; sometimes they were locked up with corpses. Apart from building the camps to hold the thousands of detainees, the government also had to find staff. Mercenaries were recruited from far and wide, including prison officers from South Africa, and some were sadists. They were not, however, responsible for the overall regime in the camps: that system of torture was devised by the government. Women detainees were routinely sexually abused and raped. They were made to work as hard as male detainees, malnourished and denied medical help in childbirth. Detainees who died from torture were issued with false death certificates or mysteriously disappeared. Notoriously the prison officials responsible for the massacre at Hola camp in 1957 tried to pass off the deaths as resulting from an infected water supply.
This account could have been written about any of the British colonies where people fought against their oppression: India, Malaya, Aden, Hong Kong. The British devised a system of policing and detention reserved especially for the colonies to keep down the ‘not quite human beings’ who did not appreciate British occupation. It was later that these brutal skills were modernised and refined closer to ‘home’ in the north of Ireland, where British imperialism faced its greatest challenge in the 1970s and 1980s.
‘A clear and present danger’
In the late 1960s the British were faced with renewed opposition in Ireland as a new generation tried to overturn British rule. This time the movement was based in the urban, deprived, working-class ghettoes in the north of Ireland. ‘Intelligence’ about the new movement was needed. The old Special Powers legislation from the 1920s empowered the government to introduce internment. 3,000 people were interned and interrogated to try to gather intelligence about the IRA. A small number of ‘guinea pigs’ were subjected to a new regime, later to be classified as torture and inhumane and degrading treatment by the European Commission on Human Rights. The five techniques of interrogation, developed for the ‘subhumans’ in Kenya, Malaya, Cyprus and Aden, were refined for a select group of internees. These techniques were: hooding; subjecting detainees to high pitched noise; forced standing against a wall for long periods; deprivation of sleep, food and water; sensory deprivation. The detainees were subjected to brutal treatment and threats, including the threat of being thrown out of helicopters.
Internment turned out to be troublesome. The treatment of the ‘guinea pigs’ led to two government inquiries and the finding of ‘torture, and inhuman and degrading treatment’. The detention camps were too much like prisoner of war camps. The Prime Minister, Edward Heath, decreed that these five techniques must never be used again, announcing to Parliament that: ‘If a Government did decide – on whatever grounds I would not like to foresee – that additional techniques were required for interrogation…they would probably have to come to the House and ask for powers to do it’. No such request has ever been made.
British imperialism was an old dog, but it was not averse to adapting its tricks. To replace internment a different regime was devised which would also have the advantage of criminalising the opposition. Brigadier Frank Kitson, later head of UK Land Forces, the British army’s expert on counter-insurgency techniques in the colonies, served in the north of Ireland from 1970-1972. He promised to ‘squeeze the Catholic population until they vomit the gunmen out of their system’. Kenneth Newman was promoted to Chief Constable of the RUC in 1976 by which time the new system was in place. Intelligence gathering was centralised, the CID was reorganised to specialise in interrogation and Castlereagh police station became the designated centre for most interrogations to take place. The Prevention of Terrorism Act (Temporary Provisions) 1974 was introduced by the Labour government in the face of ‘a clear and present danger’, allowing the arrest and interrogation of detainees, without access to solicitors, for up to seven days. All that the new system needed to do was extract the information by ‘softening up’ the detainees. Diplock courts with no juries allowed the prosecution to introduce confession evidence obtained under duress. The conveyor belt was in place.
From July 1976 to November 1979 5,067 ‘terrorist suspects’ were interrogated at Castlereagh. A pattern of brutal treatment emerged. In 1978 two priests, Faul and Murray produced an account of the treatment of detainees in Castlereagh. They listed examples of treatment used to ‘soften up’ detainees for interrogation, many of them designed not to leave marks on the body. Here are some of them:
Hair pulling • Punching to back of head • Heavy slaps across face and head and ears • Strangling • Chops to the throat • Gripping and pulling the Adam’s apple • Pushing fingers into pressure points on neck • Punches and kicks to the stomach, buttocks, kidneys, spine • Manual squeezing of testicles; punching and kicking testicles • Lifting naked prisoner by placing sticks between legs • Arm twisting • Bending wrists backwards • Finger twisting • Forced positions of stress against a wall • Sitting on non-existent chairs • Squatting on hunkers • Press- ups to the point of exhaustion • Wrestling holds until prisoner vomits • Trailing body along the floor • Prone on floor while personnel stand and jump on back • Riding prisoner like a horse • Placing plastic bag, hood, jacket, underpants over head to restrict breathing • Simulated execution by clicking gun behind the head • Simulated electrocution by putting plug into mouth and turning switch to on • Burning skin with matches and cigarettes • Degradation: making prisoner lick water or vomit off floor or behave like a dog • Spitting in the face • Stripping prisoner naked and making obscene remarks about his body, his wife, his children • Pouring liquid into ears • Threats to execute prisoner secretly • Threats to harm family • Women detainees sexually abused and threatened with rape.
Sound familiar? It should. The descriptions and the photos of what happened at Abu Ghaib have all the hallmarks of a similar regime of terror and torture. Alongside the brutality administered in Castlereagh and in the prisons where the IRA prisoners were kept, was the other half of British strategy to control the uprising. Along with the stick came the carrot: the blandishments offered to middle class liberals and opportunists; the cup of tea over the garden fence; the collection of information. When the British talk about their years of experience in public order policing distinguishing them from the crudities of the US army, they would like us to think of the carrot. The reality behind the scenes is the stick, and it is undoubtedly the case that torture is being used by the British in Iraq. That is why Iraqis have died in detention. That is why, for the first time since Edward Heath’s promises in the early 1970s, hoods have been routinely used on prisoners of war.
It is a red herring to examine the perverted or sadistic personalities of the men and women who performed this torture in Iraq. It is a pipedream to imagine that the torture will stop because they are put on trial. Instead we should be asking what political cause has driven the Coalition to torture the detainees in this way. The answer lies in the growing militant opposition to US and British occupation of Iraq. The Coalition is desperate. They need ‘intelligence’ and they need to divide and rule Iraqis by buying off the elite, eliminating the insurgents and terrifying their poor and working class supporters.
After 11 September the US unilaterally and illegally declared that Taliban and Al Qaida suspects would not be covered by the Geneva Conventions. Now they have extended the torture regimes to Iraq. That is why Abu Ghraib was reopened as a specialist torture centre last July, staffed by US Military Intelligence. That is why Major General Geoffrey Miller was moved from Guantanamo Bay concentration camp to Iraq to ‘gitmo-ise’ its prison regime. That is why the accounts of torture meted out to the British detainees released from Camp X-Ray match the descriptions of torture emerging from Iraq’s prisons.
In March 1968, in a small village in Vietnam, My Lai, US troops, under orders, slaughtered up to four hundred villagers, raping and violating them, alive and dead. Gradually over the months that followed the news seeped out as the soldiers involved, as well as those who refused to be involved, told their stories. In response to reports of torture and murder, a Major Colin Luther Powell reassured his superiors that this could not be true. All new soldiers arriving in South Vietnam received a lesson on civic affairs and the importance of treating the Vietnamese with courtesy. They were told about the Geneva Conventions. The Vietnamese people, he wrote, were very appreciative of the efforts of the Army to improve their lives. By 2004 Colin Powell should have got tired of the same old lies. Calley, the only soldier to stand trial for the My Lai massacre was quickly pardoned and became an overnight hero. Jonathan Schell, a journalist, wrote in 1968: ‘If we learn to accept this, there is nothing we will not accept’. Enough said.
Carol Brickley
Further reading
Mau Mau, an African Crucible, Robert B Edgerton, IB Tauris,1990
Ireland, the key to the British revolution, David Reed, Larkin Publications, 1984
Beating the Terrorists, Peter Taylor, Penguin, 1980
Labour, a party fit for imperialism, Robert Clough, Larkin Publications, 1992
Four hours in My Lai, Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim, Penguin1992
FRFI 179 June / July 2004
