The publication of a redacted version of the US Senate committee report on the CIA’s use of torture in the “war on terror” came within 24 hours of the announcement that the Irish Government has decided to ask the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) to reverse its 1978 ruling that while the techniques used on the “hooded men” in the North in 1971 might have amounted to “inhuman and degrading treatment”, they didn’t amount to torture.
In a memo delivered to the White House in 2002, legal aides advised President George W Bush that the ruling in Ireland v the UK had "recognised a wide array of acts that do not amount to torture, thus appearing to permit, under international law, an aggressive interpretation".
While the precedent offered by the “hooded men” case will hardly have been decisive in persuading the Bush administration to give the go-ahead for “enhanced interrogation techniques”, it appears at least to have been an important facilitating factor.
The British have long been world leaders in providing precedent and devising justification for the infliction of evil on people perceived as challenging their rule. It is not that British people are naturally inclined towards torture. It is just that they have a longer colonial history than most.
This wealth of experience shines through in a memo from home secretary Merlyn Rees to prime minister James Callaghan in March 1977 advising on Irish attorney general Declan Costello’s argument to the ECHR that soldiers and police officers identified as having participated in maltreatment of the hooded men should be prosecuted: “It is my view . . . that the decision to use methods of torture in Northern Ireland in 1971/72 was taken by ministers, in particular Lord Carrington, then secretary of defence.
‘Methods of torture’
“If at any time methods of torture are used in NI contrary to the view of the government of the day, I would agree that individual policemen or soldiers should be prosecuted or disciplined, but in the particular circumstances of 1971/72, a political decision was taken.”
If we are rumbled, throw them a handful of the rank and file to sate their need for truth, justice and so forth. But keep in mind that it’s only those who obey orders, never those who issue the orders, who should be made accountable. (It is worth noting here that the political elite, when it believes itself out of earshot of the masses, has no problem calling torture by its name.)
British authorities
The decision by the ECHR the following year, 1978, to ditch the torture definition, lifted the British authorities off the hook. But now the Irish government, at a bad time for the reputation of the major western powers, is to ask the court to reinstate its original decision.
The practice of dealing with allegations of atrocious behaviour by agents of the state by giving up the most junior of the guilty parties has nowhere been seen more clearly than in Lord Saville’s wildly over-welcomed report on Bloody Sunday which laid all of the blame for the massacre on a handful of paratroopers and a single allegedly undisciplined officer, while ignoring a wealth of evidence in order to exonerate every senior military and political figure involved.
The Bloody Sunday march in January 1972 had been aimed against internment without trial, introduced five months earlier, in August 1971. Reports of the horrors visited on the “hooded men” had figured prominently in publicity of the march.
Much of the pressure on the Irish Government to go back to the European court came from Amnesty which, naturally, gave an enthusiastic welcome to last week’s development. At the same time, Amnesty repeated its concern at the refusal of successive governments to take seriously the matter of “rendition” flights using Shannon as a stopover.
In December 2005, the then minister for foreign affairs, Dermot Ahern responded to complaints about rendition flights by declaring: “If anyone has any evidence of these flights, please give me a call and I will have them immediately investigated.” Amnesty speedily supplied the minister with details of more than 50 logged landings at Shannon by “planes known to have be involved in rendition”. That was the last that was heard of Ahern’s immediate investigation. Every Irish government since has taken the same do-nothing approach.
So the Irish Government is seeking to re-indict its British counterpart for complicity in torture in a case subsequently cited by the US government to justify its own use of torture, while refusing to lift or even to wag a finger at the likely use by the US of Irish facilities in the perpetration of torture . . .
What a tangled web has here been woven.