Torture, Secrecy and the British State

[Paul Rigby]

Death of a Congo pygmy

An editorial, CIA-and MI6-serving, not to mention utterly hypocritical, in this morning’s Grauniad (“the finest British liberal daily CIA money could buy”), reminded me a) of a brief piece I intended to cobble together (but then misplaced the key clipping for); b) why I stopped buying the Observer (again); and c) why I loathe the BBC.

First up, that editorial:

Editorial, “In praise of… Patrice Lumumba,” The Guardian, Thursday 1 July 2010, p.

Of all the deaths in Congo's terrible history, Lumumba's is the best remembered

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/...-editorial

"Much that is incredible, extravagant, ambiguous and unjust has been written about Patrice Lumumba", his friend Thomas Kanza once noted. He was right. Congo's first prime minister, a hero of independence 50 years ago this week, was overthrown and murdered less that a year after taking office. Of all the deaths in that country's terrible history, Lumumba's is the best remembered: a man whose killing doomed hopes of African independence. It is too easy to think that, had he lived, the Congo would have thrived. Lumumba was not a saint and the challenge of running a vast country whose population had been denied basic education by Belgian rulers interested only in exploiting its wealth would have sunk any government. But the Congo, which became Zaire, would have been spared the autocracyof President Mobutu and perhaps the hideous war that followed his death. This week the Belgian king arrived in Kinshasa to mark Congo's half century as an independent state, a peculiar re-enactment of his predecessor's role granting independence in 1960. Then, Lumumba, denied a formal place at the ceremony, denounced colonial rule. Belgium conspired to overthrow him; so did the United States. No one knows who ordered his death, only that Belgian troops were involved in it. Now Lumumba's sons say they want justice. More than that, though, DRC needs peace and prosperity, rather than the continued abuses of its latest discredited government. That would be the best tribute to its lost leader.

Now for the establishment whitewash which had me bouncing the neo-con Observer off the wall (and which clipping I mislaid under a pile of other stuff):

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/...aphne-park

Mary Warnock, “What today's young women can learn from Daphne Park,” The Observer, Sunday, 28 March 2010, p.29

My friend broke barriers in MI6 and at Oxford and she had more fun doing it than her heirs could hope for

Daphne Park, who died on Wednesday, was probably the most remarkable woman I ever knew. I remember first meeting her soon after she came to take up her appointment at Somerville college, Oxford. I was at one of the hospitable but not very easy receptions that John Maud, then master of University College, used to give where his wife, a former concert pianist, used to play, mostly Brahms, and very loud, so that the room shook. One was constantly having to finish conversations in a hurry to seem to listen.

Daphne came up and introduced herself and it was some time before I realised she was the new principal of Somerville. She looked so startlingly unlike her predecessor, who had been tall and rather austere. Daphne was short and stout and wonderfully friendly and seemed (most misleadingly) ordinary. We talked about Moscow, where my brother had been ambassador in the early 1970s, and where I had stayed with him, and I assumed she was a former member of the Foreign Office. I even commiserated with her about how difficult it was to switch from that hierarchical world to being head of a college (I knew because my brother became master of Corpus, Cambridge, after retirement, and John Maud had made the same switch).

I did not discover what her real profession had been until later, nor the extreme courage she had displayed in the course of her life. Things kept coming her way after she had left MI6, Somerville among them, and, like me, she was inclined to say "yes" to everything, so she was never bored.

Reading her obituaries, I found myself reflecting on how different things were for those of us whose careers started in the late 1940s. There were still many professions where women had to be pretty determined if they were to get in and even more determined if they were to stay when they married and had children. I was lucky, because it was easy to combine a university job with a family (though the college of which I became a fellow was still suspicious of marriage and scandalised by pregnancy), but it was a long time before the Foreign Office allowed you to stay on after marriage. Daphne Park, though she could perhaps be described as lucky in having no family obligations, certainly opened up MI6 for women to reach right to the top and even be married.

But though women then needed determination and had to be far more scrupulous than men about never missing even half a day's work, never getting ill, never showing bad temper or resentment, in fact behaving impeccably, I believe that their lot was in some ways easier than the lot of women now. If they did succeed, they got a great deal of respect for being the "first woman" to do this or that. Once established in their jobs, they could expect to stay there and it was generally assumed that they had got where they were on merit, not because of anti-discrimination laws.

Of course, the marriage bar is no longer relevant. Women get round that easily enough by living with their partner without marrying. But the fear of pregnancy and children remains for all employers. It is expensive for them and no legislation can change that. Things are really worse, not better, than in the old days.

Life in universities, at any rate, is vastly less enjoyable now than it was then. It is regimented, ill-paid, constantly assessed and it carries with it an obligation to produce a string of publications, often a joyless business, but necessary if your department is to retain its reputation for productivity. And no one can assume that she will not be sacked or her department closed around her. Even teaching undergraduates and graduate students must be less fun than it used to be, with IT introducing increasing opportunities for production-line written work and the constant threat of plagiarism.

Young women starting out in whatever profession still need determination, but they also need the kind of courage that I would not have been capable of, though Daphne Park might, to face change, perhaps spells of unemployment and, even with anti-discrimination laws, immense competition for any job they apply for. I used to despise the concept of "networking" when it was first in the air about 30 years ago, but I now believe it is necessary, especially for women. If I were a young woman who, for example, had been to one of the 25 schools of the Girls' Day School Trust, I should make as much use as I could of its networking organisation, Minerva, and use it to look for freelance work when regular work failed and ruthlessly exploit any contact I could make through its communication system. Communication is now easy, but we used not to need it to anything like the same extent.

It seems as if those of us who had our first jobs in the middle or late 1940s were still pioneers, not in the heroic sense of the suffragettes or the first women doctors, but in the sense of embarking hopefully on a path that was trodden by not so very many people.

I do not know when this hopefulness (accompanied, perhaps, by some self-satisfaction) came to an end for women, but it had certainly long ended by 1980 and the "first woman prime minister" did nothing to restore it; neither, I fear, did anti-discrimination law. There may be more equality between the sexes at the beginning of a career, but there comes a point along the way when it seems to disappear. And what has been lost is any pleasure that women once got in being at least slightly out of the ordinary.

Perhaps it is still true now, as it always has been, that women will be happiest if they do not think much about equality, but just go ahead and work very hard in whatever their job is and whatever they enjoy. After all, working hard and enjoying it is a pretty good reward in itself, but it may in fact also be the best recipe for reaching the top. This is nothing new.

All the same, what my generation never had to show was the flexibility, the facing, even welcoming change, that everyone, men and women alike, needs to show today. I would not like it.

And people wonder why Britain’s spook-thugocracy gets away with it generation after generation, when one of our leading “moral philosophers” champions a right-wing criminal and fanatic as trail-blazing feminist!

MI6’s most overt British daily mouthpiece, The Torygraph, offered this predictably fulsome tribute to the far-right battle-axe:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituari...mouth.html

Park was a moral pygmy, one of the legion of fanatic European anti-communists utilised by the CIA to destroy a giant, a man whose bravery dwarfed that of the charlatans who destroyed both him and his country. Inevitably, the pygmy became a BBC panjandrum:

“She was a BBC governor between 1982 and 1987 under the then Director-General, Alasdair Milne, who identified her as a hardline opponent in his memoirs.”

To end on a more positive note: Here is what genuine courage sounds like...remember it, because you are never likely to hear anything remotely resembling it from any corporate whore among the Anglo-American political classes:

Speech of Patrice Lumumba, 30 June 1960 (with english subtitles)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzPO4KQCZP8

[Paul Rigby]

From memo written by HFT Smith, future head of MI5, Sep 1960:

"I see only two possible solutions to the problem. The first is the simple one of ensuring Lumumba's removal from the scene by killing him. This should in fact solve the problem since, so far as we can tell, Lumumba is not a leader of a movement within which there are potential successors of his quality and influence. His supporters are much less dangerous material. The other possible approach is for a constitution to be worked out which places far more power in the hands of the President,"

FO JB1015/401, 28 and 29 September 1960, PRO doc., cited De Witte, The Assassination of Lumumba (London: Verso, 2001), p.188, note 1.

[Magda Hassan]

Inside the Torture Chamber: water boarding allegations against the army and RUC

By Vincent KearneyBBC NI home affairs correspondentA documentary hears claims that water boarding was used during the Troubles (reconstruction image)
Continue reading the main story

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The term water boarding has been widely used in recent years. Since the attack on the Twin Towers in 9/11, the previously little known interrogation technique has been a central and highly controversial part of the West's war against al-Qaeda.
Inside the Torture Chamber - a documentary to be broadcast on BBC Radio Ulster this Sunday - reveals that the technique was used 40 years ago by the Army in Northern Ireland.
It also hears an allegation that it was used by RUC detectives in Castlereagh police station, Belfast.
Liam Holden knows all about the technique. In September 1972, he was 19 years old when members of the Army's Parachute Regiment took him to their base on the Black Mountain in Belfast, where they accused him of killing a soldier.
They threatened to shoot him and then used another interrogation technique not known to have been used in Northern Ireland at the time.
Death sentence"They got the bucket of water and they just slowly but surely poured the bucket of water right round the facial area, over my nose and mouth," Mr Holden said.
"It was like pouring a kettle of water, like pouring your tea into a cup out of the kettle, that sort of speed, basically until I passed out or close to passed out."
After several hours of interrogation, Mr Holden confessed to the murder.
He later gave his trial in Belfast Crown Court a detailed account of his interrogation, but neither the judge or jury believed him and he became the last person in the United Kingdom to be sentenced to death.
Liam Holden said the Army used water boarding to force him to confess to a murder he did not commit
He then spent four weeks in the condemned man's cell at Crumlin Road jail in Belfast, not knowing if each morning would be his last, before his sentence was commuted to life in prison.
Mr Holden then spent 17 years in prison for a murder he did not commit. His conviction was quashed by the Court of Appeal earlier this year.
Hanging cellAs part of the documentary he agreed to go back to Crumlin Road jail to visit the condemned man's cell - the cell where he would have been hanged - and to look at the white lines on a stone wall where prison officers had told him he would be buried.
"You were walking out that door and you saw where people had been buried who had been hung in Crumlin Road jail and you were sort of next in line," he said.
Continue reading the main story

"Start Quote

At that time I thought they were actually going to kill me"

Felim O Hamill
Féilim Ó hAdhmaill doesn't know Liam Holden, but said he was subjected to a similar interrogation technique in an attempt to force him to confess to a murder.
Now a lecturer at Cork University, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison after being caught in England in 1994 in a car containing explosives and a gun. He was released early under the Good Friday Agreement.
Back in 1978, he was interrogated by RUC detectives in Castlereagh police station in Belfast. Afterwards, he told a doctor that he had been subjected to a form of water torture.
"Somebody produced a towel, or what looked like a towel, and put this towel over my head and over my nose and mouth region and twisted it at the back and pulled my head down while they were holding my limbs," he told the programme.
"Somebody poured water over my nose and mouth region and they were shouting 'breathe it in'. It was terrifying if I am truthful......at that time I thought they were actually going to kill me."
Unfairly damagedThis is the only known allegation that members of the RUC used water boarding as an interrogation technique.
The documentary examines allegations of torture by the RUC at Castlereagh police station
The documentary also examines other allegations of torture by the RUC at Castlereagh police station, where dozens of paramilitary suspects claimed they were assaulted and forced to sign confessions.
Roger McCallum joined the police in 1976 after graduating with a law degree and rose to the rank of superintendent. Now a trustee of the RUC George Cross Foundation, he said the allegations have unfairly damaged the reputation of the RUC.
"For many years many brave men and women served the community, all the community in Northern Ireland and in the vast majority of cases, 98, 99 per cent of cases, without any problems whatsoever," he said.
Continue reading the main story

"Start Quote

The vast majority of people who have served with pride in the RUC were guilty of nothing along those lines whatsoever"

Roger McCallumRUC George Cross Foundation
"These allegations unfortunately will tarnish any organisation and it's unfortunate that they are made and unfortunate that one or two folk in the past have been guilty of something, but certainly the vast majority of people who have served with pride in the RUC were guilty of nothing along those lines whatsoever," Mr McCallum said.
The army has also been accused widespread torture of suspects. Veteran republican Kevin Hannaway was one of them. He was one of 14 so-called Hooded Men who were selected for what the army termed deep interrogation.
Bitten by dogsThey were hooded, beaten and then subjected to what were called the five techniques, which included food and sleep deprivation and being subjected to very loud noise for long periods.
He recalls how he was thrown out of a helicopter into a compound where he was bitten by dogs before beaten and then interrogated for 12 days.
"I don't think there's any words that could describe what we 14 men went through," he said. "If there's a hell I would say the other 13 men and I have been there and back again."
The five techniques the men were subjected to were later banned by the prime minister at the time, Edward Heath. They were also the subject of an investigation by the European Commission following a complaint from the Irish government.
In 1976, it ruled that the British government was guilty of torture and inhumane and degrading treatment.
Concerned by the damage to its international reputation, the government appealed and two years later, in 1978, the European Court ruled that while the five techniques amounted to inhumane and degrading treatment, they did not constitute torture.
Veteran journalist Peter Taylor, who has made several programmes and written a book about the allegations of torture in Northern Ireland, studied the ruling carefully.
"I always thought that the decision to delete the word torture and to agree a ruling that the British government had been guilty of inhumane and degrading treatment was the correct one in light of what actually happened," he said.
InquiryBut what if the European Court had been aware of the allegations that the army and police had used water torture?
"I suspect it may have changed its decision and agreed with the Commission and gone along with torture," Mr Taylor said.
Patrick Corrigan, the director of Amnesty International in Northern Ireland, agrees. He believes there are sufficient grounds for an inquiry into allegations of the use of torture by the army and police, as well as republican and loyalist paramilitaries.
"We believe that if you carry out a crime, a crime under national or international law, you should be held accountable for that," he said.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-19857088