At the end of June, at an event held in conjunction with a day set aside to remember the victims of torture around the world, heretofore secret documents were released that revealed the extent of the torture inflicted by the British army on prisoners held during the dirty war in Northern Ireland. These included electric shocks and, of course, waterboarding. From opendemocracy.net:

One victim of waterboarding in Belfast spoke out publicly about his experience for the first time at following the recovery of his original testimony from 1972, which recounts that he 'felt like I was drowning or suffocating until I fell on the floor unconscious."… They add to growing evidence that interrogation practices in Northern Ireland went beyond those criticised by the European Court of Human Rights in the 1978 case of Ireland v. the United Kingdom. The so-called 'five techniques' examined in that judgement included deprivation of sleep, deprivation of food and drink, stress positions, hooding and subjection to 'white noise'.

Of interest in this country is the fact that, in a case brought before it in 1978, the European Court of Human Rights criticized the activities of the British forces focusing on these five techniques. However, the European Court refused to describe these techniques specifically as torture. Which brings us, as the report illustrates, to the what was done in our name by the Bush administration.

Although the European Court condemned these practices as 'inhuman and degrading' it refused to describe them as torture. This paradoxically opened the way for the ruling to be used as a blueprint by interrogators, notably in the 'torture memos' drafted by the Deputy Assistant Attorney General of the US John Yoo to justify practices used during the earliest phase of the 'War on Terror'.

This is the truth about torture. It is a highly contagious activity. It always "goes beyond" what we laughingly refer to as its limits. It always spreads from country to country, whether those countries are democracies or authoritarian states. Constitutions, written or otherwise, do not immunize a society from resorting to torture if it gets frightened or angry enough.

An anonymous former detainee read an extract from his own newly recovered testimony given in 1972 when he was aged 17. He stated that in between beatings and other abusive techniques at Black Mountain Army Base "they wrapped a towel round my head and poured water all over it."

"As it filled with water, it felt like I was drowning or suffocating until I fell on the floor unconscious. Once I was conscious they would then beat me again with batons until I was on my feet and repeated the process again. I lost a stone in weight in seven hours and my clothes were ripped to shreds. Finally an army officer came in. I had met him before. He said he believed that I wasn't involved, but he felt that I could give him information on the IRA, and he would give me one week to do so. He drove me back to the Springfield Road and threw me out."

A statement given by the same detainee's mother to a Cork-based NGO in November 1972, described how, during his detention "he was brutally beaten and had a wet towel tied tightly round his head and face.

"This was filled with water at intervals causing him great distress and suffocation. His body was doubled over causing him extreme pain. He was also forced to hold an armalite rifle and a .22 calibre pistol to have his fingerprints on them, and was told this was enough to get him 15 years."

"When my son arrived home I was so distressed by his appearance that I decided to send him away for his own safety. He was completely changed in his personality from a happy-go-lucky boy to a very frightened one."

By coincidence, in Oregon, several survivors of the American torture regime are moving forward with a civil suit against the two psychologists who made $81 million when they helped design the torture program for the CIA in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. As Spencer Ackerman reports in The Daily Beast, the two defendants have come up with a defense for their actions that is a bit unprecedented.

After failing to convince a federal judge in Washington state to dismiss the suit, attorneys for Mitchell and Jessen have settled on an unexpected argument ahead of a critical Friday court hearing. They're like contractors to Nazis and other war criminals, attorneys claim, but the sort that war-crimes tribunals have exonerated. In a recent filing in the case, Mitchell and Jessen's attorneys portray the two contract psychologists as analogous to those who made the Zyklon B gas used to murder Jews and others in Nazi concentration camps. Mitchell and Jessen's lawyers note that in a British military court in 1946, the Zyklon manufacturing company Tesch & Stabenow's "first gassing technician" was ultimately acquitted. Although the technician, Joachim Drohsin, played "an integral part of the supply and use of the poison gas," the British court wrote, he was "without influence" and was found not guilty.

Torture drives people mad. This is not a truth limited to its victims.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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