In response to my assertion that torture isn't an English value, a reader points to an account by Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams on the treatment he and others endured:
[T]he interrogation techniques which were used following the internment swoops in the north of Ireland in 1971 were taught to the RUC by British military officers. Someone authorised this. The first internment swoops, 'Operation Demetrius', saw hundreds of people systematically beaten and forced to run the gauntlet of war dogs, batons and boots. Some were stripped naked and had black hessian bags placed over their heads. These bags kept out all light and extended down over the head to the shoulders.
As the men stood spread–eagled against the wall, their legs were kicked out from under them. They were beaten with batons and fists on the testicles and kidneys and kicked between the legs. Radiators and electric fires were placed under them as they were stretched over benches.
Arms were twisted, fingers were twisted, ribs were pummelled, objects were shoved up the anus, they were burned with matches and treated togames of Russian roulette. Some of them were taken up in helicopters and flung out, thinking that they were high in the sky when they were only five or six feet off the ground. All the time they were hooded, handcuffed and subjected to a high–pitched unrelenting noise. This was later described as extra–sensory deprivation. It went on for days.
During this process some of them were photographed in the nude. And although these cases ended up in Europe, and the British government paid thousands in compensation, it didn’t stop the torture and ill–treatment of detainees. It just made the British government and its military and intelligence agencies more careful about how they carried it out and ensured that they changed the laws to protect the torturers and make it very difficult to expose the guilty.
The above YouTube is captioned:
As one of the 'Guildford Four' Gerry Conlon was wrongfully imprisoned as an IRA bomber in 1974. It took 16 years before his conviction was quashed in 1989 and he was released. His case was one of the most notorious miscarriages of justice in English legal history. Conlon's autobiography Proved Innocent was adapted into the Oscar and BAFTA Award-nominated 1993 film In The Name of the Father. Here he speaks to Cageprisoners' patron Yvonne Ridley about why he's fighting for Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantanamo.
More on the Guildford Four here. This is indeed a stain on the country's honor, and has since been formally accepted as such by the British government. It is, however, another example of how the imperial exceptions (and they were many) violated the domestic rule – a good warning against empires, in my view.
The Dish 