The Abu Ghraib H-Blocks

A few times in our 16 month history of blogging, we have felt compelled to note analogies between the current war in Iraq and the Troubles in Northern Ireland. In one recent post, we noted, with what was meant to be tone of sarcasm:

The US forces in Iraq should be getting advice from their British counterparts on how not to run their War on Terror.

This was in the context of the demonisation of the people of Fallujah in terms of a savage mob that had attacked a convoy of US contractors; a similar demonisation of an Irish mob had arguably led to the state-facilitated murder of the lawyer for members of this supposed mob. But as we say, we thought we were being sarcastic about Britain's War on Terror guiding the war in Iraq. That was until we read the analysis of the stunning "torture memos" which are now leaking to every big newspaper here in the USA. Brad DeLong has very helpfully pointed his readers to an expert analysis by Michael Froomkin of one of the Justice Department memos from August 2002, and as we read down we see the following:

Despite the increasingly heard right-wing complaint that the [US] Supreme Court should not rely on the decisions of foreign courts, the [US Justice Department] Memo then turns to what other nations have said constitutes torture. The most important case on which the Memo relies is "Ireland v. United Kingdom":, a 1978 decision of the European Court of Human Rights which held that "interrogation in depth" involving "five techniques" was not "torture" but merely "inhuman and degrading treatment". The five techniques were:

a) wall-standing: forcing the detainees to remain for periods of some hours in a "stress position", described by those who underwent it as being “spreadeagled against the wall, with their fingers put high above the head against the wall, the legs spread apart and the feet back, causing them to stand on their toes with the weight of the body mainly on the fingers”;

b) hooding: putting a black or navy coloured bag over the detainees’ heads and, at least initially, keeping it there all the time except during interrogation;

c) subjection to noise: pending their interrogations, holding the detainees in a room where there was a continuous loud and hissing noise;

d) deprivation of sleep: pending their interrogations, depriving the detainees of sleep;

e) deprivation of food and drink.. subjecting the detainees to a reduced diet during their stay at the centre and pending interrogations.

Froomkin goes on to discuss whether US law even admits a distinction between torture and "inhuman and degrading treatment" (he thinks it doesn't) but we were simply flabbergasted to see that the Pentagon is in fact relying on techniques drawing directly from the Northern Ireland experience. We're not sure that anyone has ever argued that these tactics were even "effective" in the sense of proving the security forces with good information, but they certainly created an ongoing public relations debacle and surely fueled the disastrous IRA hunger stikes of the early 1980s. Just what do Blair and Dubya talk about at these summits?

UPDATE: In all of Christopher Hitchens' lust for war in Iraq, it looks like the one thing that finally awoke his conscience is the Northern Ireland analogy.

[Updated link: the relevant sections are pages 27-29 of the Bybee memo].

FURTHER UPDATE 1 MARCH 2005: Another quote and link to back up our closing paragraph above. This New Yorker article notes the futility of the US resorting to 1970s British tactics in Northern Ireland, when the British themselves gave up on them:

Tom Parker, a former officer for M.I.5, the British intelligence agency, who teaches at Yale, argued that, whether or not forceful interrogations yield accurate information from terrorist suspects, a larger problem is that many detainees "have nothing to tell." For many years, he said, British authorities subjected members of the Irish Republican Army to forceful interrogations, but, in the end, the government concluded that "detainees aren’t valuable." A more effective strategy, Parker said, was "being creative" about human intelligence gathering, such as infiltration and eavesdropping. "The U.S. is doing what the British did in the nineteen-seventies, detaining people and violating their civil liberties," he said. "It did nothing but exacerbate the situation. Most of those interned went back to terrorism. You'll end up radicalizing the entire population."