Torture Irish Prisoners
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
The Guineapigs John McGuffin The first edition by Penguin sold 20,000 copies and was banned after one week by the British government and Reginald Maudling. The 2nd edition in 1981 updated the fate of the victims and named the torturers, but omitted two chapters from the original edition. A complete compilation of both editions is now here available for the first time. Feel free to download these pages, but if you decide to do so we would like to ask you to make a donation to Irish Resistance Books , in order that IRB can publish further works. (Note: We are not in receipt of any grants or Art Council funding.) From the back cover (2nd edition): The Guineapigs in the title were fourteen Irish political prisoners on whom the British Army experimented with sensory deprivation torture in 1971. These 'techniques' are now outlawed, following Britain's conviction at the International Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg, but have been exported and used by Britain's allies throughout the world. This book first appeared in 1974, published by Penguin Books in London. It sold out on its first print run and was then abruptly taken off the market following pressure from the British Government. In Ireland in 1971 there was deliberate and careful use of modern torture techniques, not merely to get information but to perfect the system of Sensory Deprivation for use against civilians. The author, an ex-internee himself spent two years researching the book following his release from Crumlin Road jail where he had been held without charge or trial. In this new edition he is at last able to name the torturers and those responsible for this sordid episode in British Imperial history. No member of the British Army or the Royal Ulster Constabulary has ever been convicted of torture or brutality to prisoners, although the Government has been forced to pay out over $5 million in compensation to torture victims. This re-issue of 'The Guineapigs' is dedicated to the blanket men in Long Kesh concentration camp and the women political prisoners in Armagh jail. 'Na reabhloidi Abu.' Acknowledgements This book could not have been written without the active help and advice of many people. Firstly I must thank the 'guineapigs' themselves, and in particular Jim Auld, Pat Shivers and Paddy Joe Mc Clean. A large debt is also owed to the Association for Legal Justice, Amnesty International (and in particular Richard Reoch) and the British Society for Social Responsibility in the Sciences. For help on the medical and psychological aspects of SD I am particularly indebted to Dr. Tim Shallice of the National Hospital and Dr. Pearse O'Malley of Belfast. As for the rest, many have preferred that they remain anonymous, but special thanks must go to Judy Smith, Frank Doherty, Johnathan Rosenhead, Kevin Boyle, Hurst Hannum, Father Denis Faul, Margaret Gatt, Ian Franklin, Eamonn Kerr, Billy Close, Joe Quigley, Noelle, Hugh, Judith and, of course, R. W. Grimshaw. I am grateful to Gil Boehringer for permission to use part of his work for Appendix I. Finally, I must thank Marie for her typing and Fra for putting up with it all. JOHN McGUFFIN Belfast, February 1974 Preface Torture and brutality – or 'ill-treatment' as Sir Edmund Compton would prefer to call it – are as old as war itself. Mankind has expended centuries of research in trying to devise newer and more bestial ways of extracting information from reluctant witnesses or causing lingering and painful deaths. The purpose of this book, however, is not to deal with torture in general. It is specific. It deals with the treatment meted out to fourteen Irishmen by the British 'security forces' in the period from August to October 1971. It is not written to show that this treatment was more barbaric than that practised by the British Army upon hundreds of other Irish internees/ detainees/ political prisoners since 1969 nor upon the victims of the ten colonial actions undertaken by the British since the Second World War. Instead it is an attempt to show how these men were selected as unwilling and unwitting subjects upon whom Army psychiatrists, psychologists and 'counter-terrorist strategists' could experiment in that particular field known as 'SD' – Sensory Deprivation. That the experiment was a dismal failure, both from a military and a propaganda point of view, mattered little to the men in the War Office. Worse still, the fact that several of the men used were literally driven out of their minds and still today, over two years later, suffer from severe mental traumas which they will carry with them to the grave has evoked not a shred of remorse, admission of guilt, or apology, let alone an attempt at recompense – though how do you give a man back his mental health? – from the 'mother of parliaments'. This book is an attempt to tell these men's story, the story of the 'guineapigs'. Table of Contents Chapter 1: 'Ill -Treatment' – A Brief History Chapter 2: What is Sensory Deprivation? Chapter 3: The Swoop – The First Forty -eight Hours Chapter 4: The Experiment Chapter 5: The Compton Report Chapter 6: Replay Chapter 7: Parker: Cover -up MK2 Chapter 8: The After -effects Chapter 9: Down on the Killing Floor Chapter Postscript – Torture in the World Today 10: Tailpiece Afterword Appendix Memorandum of Modest Proposals for I: Preventing the Spread of Torture and Ill-treatment in Northern Ireland Appendix Proposed Draft for a UN Resolution on a II: Convention on Torture and the Treatment of Prisoners Chapter 1 'Ill-Treatment' — A Brief History It appears that the first recorded instance in English legal history of the use of torture to induce confession was in 1310 when, at the instigation of Pope Clement V, the Templars were tortured by Royal Warrant. Walter of Hemmingford reports that at that time 'torture was unknown in England and that no torturer was to be found in the realm'. [1] The English soon remedied this deplorable oversight and torture became something of a 'growth industry'. The Irish, however, seem in their usual awkward way to have been lagging behind in this field. Torture was not recognized by Irish Statute or Common Law. Torture to obtain 'confessions' raged unabated throughout Europe until the late seventeenth century (the Spanish Inquisition was finally abolished in 1809), and many learned tomes were written by earnest scholars and clerics on how to extract 'confessions' from the recalcitrant, chief among these being the awesome Malleus Malificarum of Sprenger and Kramer, first published in 1486. This massive treatise on demonology and witchcraft contains full instructions on torture and interrogation methods. It was not the only authority: there was the Directorium of Eymeric, the Grand Inquisitor of Aragon, with its five 'steps' of preparation before the actual torture, and of course Torquemada's Articles of the Inquisition .[2] By the twentieth century requirements had changed. Whereas in the past the State could take its time in breaking a man down, in the modern era speed was of the essence. Moreover, newer and more sophisticated methods were needed as more and more 'intelligence forces' recognized the truth of what Justinian had said in his great Digest nearly 2,000 years before. Torture is untrustworthy, perilous and deceptive. For most men, by patience or the severity of the torture, come so to despise torture that the truth cannot be elicited from them, others are so impatient that they Will lie in any direction rather than suffer torture, so it happens that they depose to contradictions and accuse not only themselves but others. The Russians seem to have been the first seriously to go into modern interrogatory techniques scientifically. Pavlov's experiments on dogs seem largely to have been ignored by the NKVD, despite claims to the contrary, but by the mid-nineteen-thirties, under the increasingly nightmarish regime of Stalin and with the almost unlimited resources of the Russian people to practise upon, they had evolved new forms of torture, pride of place amongst which went to what is now called SD. The torture had two distinct purposes. Firstly, to extract genuine information and confessions from political enemies and, secondly, to procure public confessions and conversions. This was the decade of the 'show trial' when internationally known and dedicated Bolsheviks such as Zinoviev, Bukharin, Rykov, Radek and Kamenev, as well as unknown technicians, could be made to appear in public and confess to treason, heresy, sabotage and a host of sins, recant in front of the world's press and be formally executed. (That some of the confessions were totally ludicrous seems not to have mattered, Stalin apparently being content to follow Goebbels's theories about 'the Big Lie'. For example one man pleaded guilty along with a host of other scientists to plotting to create artificial volcanoes which at a given signal would erupt and destroy large areas of the Motherland.) Indeed, by 1937 it had become apparent to most in the Russian Politburo that the whole process had got drastically out of hand; but by then it was too late. Article 128 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of the RSFSR laid down that a prisoner must be charged within forty-eight hours of arrest. This hadn't hindered the Cheka, nor did it worry the NKVD. In order to break a person down stress is necessary (see Chapter 2), and so Russian political prisoners were kept in abominable conditions, not out of indifference, callousness or old-fashion sadism, but as a deliberate move in the policy of 'softening them up'. Thus solitary confinement in the dark for up to forty days was common.