News

Author: Britain still approves secret torture at highest level

Guardian journalist Ian Cobain gives the Amnesty International lecture as part of the Belfast Festival at Queen's last night. PICTURE: Cliff Donaldson 
Guardian journalist Ian Cobain gives the Amnesty International lecture as part of the Belfast Festival at Queen's last night. PICTURE: Cliff Donaldson  Guardian journalist Ian Cobain gives the Amnesty International lecture as part of the Belfast Festival at Queen's last night. PICTURE: Cliff Donaldson 

GUARDIAN journalist Ian Cobain told a Belfast audience last night that he was unsure how his book Cruel Britannia would be received given its criticism of the Britain's use of torture from the Second World War.

Cobain spent years trawling through historical military archives and interviewing police officers and former British soldiers about their use of banned torture techniques on prisoners.

Several hundred people packed into the Great hall at Queen's University to hear him deliver the Amnesty International talk as part of the Belfast Festival at Queen's.

The senior reporter said practices banned in Northern Ireland in 1972 are still used by the MoD - sanctioned, he claims, at the highest level.

"A lot of the documents from the time are not there and the MoD still went to great lengths to prevent my access to some material", he said.

"You find, just as the same interrogation techniques are used for decades, so too are the methods of concealment of information."

Cobain found that since 1945 British army intelligence corps sanctioned four methods of interrogation - hooding, starvation, sleep deprivation and the use of stress positions. In 1970 the white-noise technique was added.

"These five techniques were used in Northern Ireland from 1971," Cobain said.

"The use of them was authorised at the time by government ministers.

"Police officers were trained in their use despite some officers having serious misgivings about the legalities."

Although the use of the five methods was publicly banned 1972, Cobain found that they continued to be used against prisoners in Northern Ireland and that British soldiers experimented with other techniques such as 'waterboarding' - used in the case of west Belfast man Liam holden.

He served 17 years of a life sentence for shooting a soldier in Ballymurphy in 1972 but his conviction was over-turned last year on appeal.

Mr Holden says he was subjected to sustained torture by members of the British army and threatened that he would be shot unless he confessed.

"There is a chain of thought that some soldiers in Northern Ireland were out to punish a community and weren't too concerned about who was firing the shots," Cobain said.

"A lot of people I spoke to said they later came to the conclusion that using violence to suppress violence exasperated the conflict and made matters worse."

Cobain said that after the September 11 al-Qaida attacks on the US he noticed a marked change in the way the

British army dealt with prisoners in Basra compared to during the first Iraq war.

"In 1991 I watched British soldiers take prisoners in what resembled a humanitarian operation. They were giving them shelter and water," he said.

"In 2003 I returned to Basra with British forces and the techniques used couldn't have been more different.

"Prisoners were hooded, left kneeling on gravel for hours. It was a completely different atmosphere and I believe instructions were passing down from a chain of command I think came straight from Downing Street."

* FINDINGS: Guardian journalist Ian Cobain gives the Amnesty International lecture as part of the Belfast Festival at Queen's last night

PICTURE: Cliff Donaldson