Torture appeal lost by UK government

[Magda Hassan]

Yeah, I saw that too. "It's all their fault!" Those naughty Yanks.

I like this too. Talk about blaming the messenger:

She went on to say that the allegations of complicity in torture could disrupt MI5's work.

[David Guyatt]

I wondered if there was a bit of preemptive blame storming going on in light of Inspector Knacker of the Yard's apparently pending investigation. Things being the way they are, it is always the former, retired boss who is seated beneath the dangling sword.

[David Guyatt]

As if:

http://johnrentoul.independentminds.live...09489.html

Truth about torture

Posted by John Rentoul

Wednesday, 10 March 2010 at 10:18 am



Perhaps all those who paid too little attention to the detail of the news reports designed to give the impression that British ministers were "complicit" in torture of terrorist suspects will read the reports of the lecture given by Eliza Manningham-Buller, former head of MI5 (right), to the Mile End Group last night.

The Americans were very keen that people like us did not discover what they were doing.

This is something that the British Government cannot easily say, for obvious reasons.

I said to my staff, ‘Why is he talking?’ because our experience of Irish prisoners, Irish terrorists, was that they never said anything.

They said, 'Well, the Americans say he is very proud of his achievements when questioned about it'.

It wasn’t actually until after I retired that I read that, in fact, he had been waterboarded 160 times.

Complain about Manningham-Buller's lack of curiosity if you must, but how much moral sophistication does one need to see the difference between that and ministerial collusion?

***

John Rentoul

John Rentoul is chief political commentator for The Independent on Sunday, and visiting fellow at Queen Mary, University of London, where he teaches contemporary history. Previously he was chief leader writer for The Independent. He has written a biography of Tony Blair, whom he admired more at the end of his time in office than he did at the beginning.

(my bolding and italics)

Voluntary blindness becomes her and him:

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/201040...rn-Ireland

[quote]Details emerge of British army's torture techniques in Northern Ireland


Irish Republican News
Fri, 08 Jan 2010 13:12 EST



Confirmation that the British Army tortured prisoners in Ireland during interrogations in the 1970s is emerging after one of the victims launched an appeal against his conflict-related conviction.

Liam Holden was sentenced to hang after being convicted in 1973 of the murder of a soldier, largely on the basis of an unsigned confession. His death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment and he spent 17 years behind bars.

The jury did not believe Holden's insistence that he made the confession only because he had been held down by members of the Parachute Regiment, whom he says placed a towel over his face before pouring water from a bucket over his nose and mouth. The torture technique, known as 'waterboarding', is akin to drowning.

But now the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) has referred Holden's case to the court of appeal in Belfast after unearthing new evidence, and because of doubts about "the admissibility and reliability" of his confession.

The commission says it believes "there is a real possibility" his conviction will be quashed. After a preliminary hearing last month, Holden's appeal was adjourned.

Lawyers who have taken up his case have identified a second man who gave a similar account of being waterboarded after being arrested by the RUC. In a statement to a doctor in April 1978, this man said the RUC had put a towel over his face and poured water over his nose and mouth, and that "this was frightening and was repeated on a number of occasions". He was eventually released without charge. The CCRC also has a statement taken from a third man who says he was waterboarded by the British army in the early 70s.

All of the allegations come from a period after March 1972, when the then British prime minister, Ted Heath, claimed to have banned notorious torture methods which were later condemned by the European court of human rights as being inhuman and degrading.

Holden, a Roman Catholic, was 19 and a chef when he was seized during a raid by soldiers of the Parachute Regiment on his parents' home in the Ballymurphy area of west Belfast in October 1972.

He said that after being arrested in his bed the soldiers had taken him to their base on Black Mountain, west of Belfast, where he was beaten, burned with a cigarette lighter, hooded and threatened with execution.

Holden also gave a detailed account of being waterboarded, although he did not use that term. In a court report published the following day, it was reported that the defendant told the jury that he had been pushed into a cubicle where he was held down by six men, that a towel was placed over his head, and that water was then poured slowly over his face from a bucket. "It nearly put me unconscious," Holden was quoted as saying. "It nearly drowned me and stopped me from breathing. This went on for a minute." A short while later he was subjected to the same treatment again, he said.

A sergeant from the Parachute Regiment and a British army captain told the court that Holden had confessed to the shooting during an "interview". The unnamed sergeant said Holden had wanted to confess to the murder because "he wanted to get it off his chest", while the officer said the teenager had told him that he had left the IRA a short while later because he felt such remorse.

The jury took less than 75 minutes to convict Holden of capital murder, and the judge, Sir Robert Lowry, told him: "The sentence of the court is that you will suffer death in the manner authorised by law." The then British secretary, William Whitelaw, commuted the sentence the following month, and the death penalty was abolished in the Six Counties shortly afterwards. Holden did not appeal, however, with relatives saying at the time that he believed his trial had been "rigged" and a "farce".

He was eventually released from prison in 1989.

Holden's solicitor, Patricia Coyle, said: "At trial Mr Holden gave compelling evidence that the alleged confession was obtained by the army using water torture. He spent 17 years in jail. He is looking forward to the court hearing his appeal."

The new evidence that the CCRC has submitted to the court of appeal is being kept secret. The CCRC is unwilling to discuss this material, other than to say that it has not yet been disclosed at the request of the public body from which it was obtained. Holden's lawyers are now asking for it to be disclosed.

Seven months before Holden was detained by British soldiers, the Heath government had publicly repudiated and banned five "interrogation techniques". RUC officers had learned the techniques - hooding, sleep deprivation, starvation and the use of stress positions and noise - from British military intelligence officers, but Heath assured the Commons that they "will not be used in future as an aid to interrogation".

Waterboarding was used on republican prisoners as a form of punishment, as well as a means of extracting confessions. The British army also experimented with other methods of torture, including electric shocks, and the use of drugs.

In recent years, British military officers have admitted the use of waterboarding as early as the late sixties.

[Peter Lemkin]

Ironic, isn't it that the UK and the Americans like to think of themselves as the pinnacle of civilized behavior....what would Jung have to say...even Hitler?

[Peter Presland]

Plus this from Craig Murray - ex UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan:

Eliza Manningham-Buller, former head of MI5, is engaged in an outrageous attempt to rewrite history, by claiming we were unaware that the CIA was getting intelligence from torture.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/...18945.html
The government knew the CIA was sending us intelligence from torture from at least November 2002, when I sent a diplomatic telegram to Jack Straw and others - including MI5 - informing them so. I repeated it in February 2003, and was called back to a meeting on March 7 2003 where I was told that, as a matter of policy in the War on Terror, we were using intelligence from torture. Sir Michael Wood said at the meeting that in his opinion this policy was not contrary to international law.
I have made available indisputable documentary evidence of this, and that the policy of using intelligence from torture was sanctioned by Jack Straw:
Download file">Download file
Download file">Download file
Download file">Download file
The redactions were made by the government.
I am astounded that, having obtained the first two documents under the Freedom of Information Act last November, no mainstream media outlet will mention them and refer to them, despite acres of reporting on whether Ministers had an intelligence from torture policy.
Plainly these documents disprove entirely the Eliza Mannigham Buller claims that we did not know. But don't expect to see them referred to in the media.
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2...ingha.html

[David Guyatt]

Ironic, isn't it that the UK and the Americans like to think of themselves as the pinnacle of civilized behavior....what would Jung have to say...even Hitler?

Jung would say that Man is pitiful unaware of his psyche" (for which read shadow).

In fact he did say that.

One reason why I keep banging on about it.

By this statement he meant that we are all capable of the most prolific deceits, conceits and utterly inhuman and evil actions and that out way of dealing with the eye-popping hypocrisy of this is to irresponsibly project those attitudes and actions on to others. In other words they are to blame, not us. Until each one of us has confronted, absorbed and digested their own personal shadow this same action and reaction will continue on a collective level ad infinitum. Ergo, it is up to each one of us individually to engage in the shadow confrontation and withdraw our own projections. That is the only way we may impact the collective in any meaningful way.

Of course, few people ever wish to engage in this and prefer, instead, not to take it at all seriously. After all someone else will sort it out won't they - it's not really our responsibility is it.

[David Guyatt]

Peter, thanks for posting that. I believe it is vitally important that the lies and deceits of Brit intel and government on this issue is shoved right back up their collective fundament. Towards that end I am posting the first letter made available by Craig Murray in its entirety as these things sometimes have a way of disappearing

[Peter Presland]

From cartoonist Steve Bell in The Guardian

What the former MI5 chief Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller and her colleagues knew



Satire on a satire that says it all.

A play on Oscar Wilde's 'The importance of being Earnest' - itself one of his best demolitions of the puffed up arrogance of the Victorian English upper classes. The exclamation refers to the following dialogue:

Jack: I don't actually know who I am by birth. I was... well, I was found.
Lady Bracknell: Found?
Jack: Yes. The late Mr. Thomas Cardew, an old gentlemen of a kindly disposition found me and gave me the name of Worthing because he happened to have a first class ticket to Worthing at the time. Worthing is a place in Sussex. It's a seaside resort.
Lady Bracknell: And where did this charitable gentlemen with the first class ticket to the seaside resort find you?
Jack: In a handbag.
Lady Bracknell: [closes eyes briefly] A handbag?
Jack: Yes, Lady Bracknell, I was in a hand bag. A somewhat large... black... leather handbag with handles... to it.
[pause]
Lady Bracknell: An ordinary handbag.
Lady Bracknell: And where did this Mr. James... or, Thomas Cardew come across this ordinary handbag?
Jack: The cloak room at Victoria Station. It was given to him in mistake for his own...
Lady Bracknell: [Shocked] The cloak room at Victoria Station?
Jack: Yes. The Brighton line.
Lady Bracknell: The line is immaterial.
[begins tearing up notes]
Lady Bracknell: Mr. Worthing. I must confess that I feel somewhat bewildered by what you have just told me. To be born, or at any rate bred in a handbag, whether it have handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life which reminds one of the worst excesses of the French revolution, and I presume you know what that unfortunate movement led to?

With Manningham Buller in the Lady Bracknell role.

OK - a little esoteric English but the offensive 'Uncle Tom' servants in the background plus the Dick Cheyney water-pouring lookalike should commend it to those in the USA too. You can be sure that Manningham Buller will see it and that she and here ilk be suitably outraged - after all they are SUCH superior beings eh?

[Magda Hassan]

Lovely! A farce! There is so much of that around at the moment. Nothing like Wilde to show up the pretentiousness. :handkiss:

[David Guyatt]

And isn't that a Dubya lookalike standing just behind the Cheney figure?

Everyone knows, but it can only be openly expressed by satire.