Malice intended

Posted by Jim on April 22, 2017

Anne Cadwallader tells the story of the Hooded Men, internees subjected
to fine-tuned methods of torture, that left little physical evidence, in
various imperial theatres of war – from Malaya to Kenya – imported by
Britain to Ireland in 1971. (For Morning Star)

“I prayed for death. I believed I was going to die anyway because they
would never let us live to tell the world what they had done to us. So I
just wanted to die quickly and stop the pain.”

The speaker is not a prisoner in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo. He is a Irish
man who was detained without trial in 1971 — one of the 14 internees
known ever since as the “Hooded Men.”

But don’t look for outraged articles in the British mainstream press
about him or others like him. Save yourself the bother.

This is despite evidence being produced in a Belfast court last month
that ministers of the crown had authorised criminal acts and presided
over the premature death of at least one detainee.

And despite the fact that we now know that at least five people were
“waterboarded” during the 1970s in Northern Ireland — decades before
Guantanamo.

Such claims would normally prompt solemn editorials in some British
newspapers — and screaming, hostile headlines in others.

But the victims were, after all, just “a few Irish people” and the
injustice and suffering seem to be not nearly as shocking and outrageous
in Britain as those inflicted more recently on Iraqis and Afghans.

The story of the Hooded Men begins when, having fine-tuned methods of
torture (without leaving too much physical evidence) in various imperial
theatres of war — from Malaya to Kenya to Brunei to Yemen — Britain
imported them to Ireland in 1971.

A lieutenant colonel was brought to Belfast to teach what have since
been called, euphemistically, the “Five Techniques” to the local
constabulary — the RUC.

But the cops weren’t stupid. Even they knew this amounted to something
that seemed uncommonly like torture and they sought — and were granted
— immunity from any future prosecution.

So when the internees were rounded up, the police had clear orders.

First, they picked out people at random, based purely on their
geographical status (one from Co Tyrone, one from Co Derry, a couple
from Belfast etc) and then they went to work.

The pool from which they selected their victims was almost entirely
Catholic (the Pat Finucane Centre has found a declassified document
baldly entitled “Arrest Policy for Protestants” which details what
amounts to a non-arrest policy).

The “Five Techniques” involved forcing men to bear their entire body
weight on their toes and fingers, or face savage beatings. Deprived of
food, drink and sleep, they were hooded and then subjected to “white
noise.”

It drove several of them nearly crazy.

Certainly the psychological consequences are felt right to the present
day. One man says he frequently wakes in cold sweats and, on one
occasion, found himself cowering inside a wardrobe.

The physical pain suffered was indescribable. Then there was the
psychological sadism.

Some of the internees were put, hooded, into helicopters and flown into
the air. Believing they were miles above the countryside, they were then
kicked out — to hit the ground seconds later.

Aside from nightmares, depression, and the other ills that flesh is heir
to after intense suffering, one family whose loved one was subjected to
the “Five Techniques” lost their father, not just psychologically but
entirely.

Sean McKenna, a school caretaker from Newry, Co Down, was arrested and
— it was decided — should be tortured on purely geographical grounds,
like the others, despite the fact he suffered from angina and should
therefore have been deemed unsuitable for “deep interrogation.”

Beaten and terrorised, McKenna’s hair turned white in a week and he was
released into immediate psychiatric care. Four years later, McKenna died
from complications arising from the original cardiac diagnosis.

However you duck and dive to avoid such a conclusion, that death looks
suspiciously like official murder.

“My father died a broken man. He was never the same. We saw him shaking,
crying, suicidal, hallucinating. Aside from the torture, they had set
dogs on him. He was forced to drink from the dogs’ dishes, he was
smashed into concrete posts,” says his daughter Mary.

Dogs were also used in Yemen and elsewhere. The present author has heard
evidence that British soldiers dug pits where they threw, first, dogs
and, second, prisoners to be horribly bitten.

Last month, Mary McKenna and her sisters joined the surviving members of
the original 14 “Hooded Men” in the Royal Courts of Justice in Belfast
for a four-day judicial review.

Their lawyers argued that there had never been an independent or
effective investigation into the episode, despite various official
commissions and reports, because so much information has been withheld
over the years.

The Irish government, for example, had taken a case to the European
Court of Human Rights arguing the “Five Techniques” amounted to torture
(the one crime that is never legally justified, no matter what the
circumstances).

Although the European Commission of Human Rights found in 1976 that the
men were tortured, the court disagreed, finding in 1978 only they had
been subjected to “inhuman and degrading treatment.”

Since then, however, the Pat Finucane Centre in Derry has discovered
papers showing that London had misled the court on the location where
the “deep interrogation” had taken place (not Holywood outside Belfast
but Ballykelly outside Derry). What other lies were told?

The Irish state broadcaster RTE also discovered that what has become
known as the “Rees memo” in which the word “torture” is used and in
which the then Labour government makes clear that “ministers” — in
particular the previous government’s minister of defence Lord Carrington
— had ordered the torture.

North of the border, the Police Service of Northern Ireland’s only
response to date has been to call into question the second document’s
authenticity — by contracting a researcher to review two official files
— thus implying RTE had manufactured evidence.

RTE has managed to demolish this challenge by cross-referencing the
document its researcher found in Galway with an official file kept in
the National Archives in Kew. There was no mystery about it, said RTE
producer Rita O’Reilly.

The Irish government, in contrast, has — uniquely — referred its
original case back to the European Court, which has yet to decide
whether to order a rehearing.

Meanwhile, back in Belfast a High Court judge has heard the evidence and
retired to consider his ruling on whether there should be an
independent, effective investigation or whether there has already been
one.

He has to decide whether the “Five Techniques” amounted to torture,
whether British government ministers ordered it, whether any deadlines
for legal action have been crossed and whether a new investigation is
justified.

Hugh Southey QC, for the “Hooded Men,” asked if it was right that a
government can withhold evidence for so long that a deadline passes for
taking action based on that evidence? There was, he said, a deliberate
attempt to disguise the level of government liability.

No attention seems to have been paid, he said, to questioning the two
witnesses still living who might be able to shed light on the “Five
Techniques” — the noble lords Carrington and Balneil; the latter said
in court to have witnessed RUC men being trained for the torture.

Karen Quinliven QC for Sean McKenna’s family said the crown case was
“preposterous.” The RUC had realised the “Five Techniques” were illegal,
she said, and since 1975, the state knew McKenna had died as a result of
the torture, yet no investigation was carried out.

Her description of McKenna’s condition remains long in the memory.

Confused, suicidal, broken, suffering from constant headaches, unable to
look after himself, he died in St John of God’s Hospital in Dublin.

His son, also Sean, who had been interned alongside his father in 1971,
later took part in the 1980 hunger strike that preceded Bobby Sands’s
fast to the death. Sean Jnr, who also never recovered, took his own life
in 2008.