British intelligence's use of torture

[Magda Hassan]

Revealed: victims of UK's cold war torture camp

Photographs of victims of a secret torture programme operated by British authorities during the early days of the cold war are published for the first time today after being concealed for almost 60 years.
The pictures show men who had suffered months of starvation, sleep deprivation, beatings and extreme cold at one of a number of interrogation centres run by the War Office in postwar Germany.

A few were starved or beaten to death, while British soldiers are alleged to have tortured some victims with thumb screws and shin screws recovered from a gestapo prison. The men in the photographs are not Nazis, however, but suspected communists, arrested in 1946 because they were thought to support the Soviet Union, an ally 18 months earlier.

Apparently believing that war with the Soviet Union was inevitable, the War Office was seeking information about Russian military and intelligence methods.

Idiots.

Yesterday there were calls for the Ministry of Defence to acknowledge what had happened and apologise.

When hell freezes over.

The MoD dismissed the calls, saying questions about the interrogation centres were a matter for the Foreign Office.... Although the file was in the possession of the Foreign Office, the pictures were removed at the request of the Ministry of Defence. They have finally been released after an appeal by the Guardian...Meanwhile documents about a secret interrogation centre which the War Office operated in central London between 1945 and 1948, where large numbers of men are now known to have been badly mistreated, are still being withheld by the Ministry of Defence. Officials say the papers cannot yet be released because they have been contaminated with asbestos.

How about both departments acknowledge, investigate and apologize and compensate. And ring an asbestos cleaning company and split the costs.

Declassified Whitehall papers show that members of the Labour government of the day went to great lengths to hide the ill-treatment, in part, as one minister wrote, to conceal "the fact that we are alleged to have treated internees in a manner reminiscent of the German concentration camps".

It's not torture when we do it.

The photographs were taken in February 1947 by a Royal Navy officer who was determined to bring the torture programme to an end.

Give this man a medal. We must know is name and honour him and use him as an eample to follow.

It is not clear whether the men in the photographs fully recovered from their mistreatment.

No one ever recovers. Physical wounds may heal but psyches are broken forever .

Did it ever end?

No. Ask any Kenyan or Irish independence activist for starters.