I
Have Been In Torture Photos, Too
By Gerry Adams
05 June, 2004
The Guardian
News
of the ill-treatment of prisoners in Iraq created no great surprise
in republican Ireland. We have seen and heard it all before. Some of
us have even survived that type of treatment. Suggestions that the brutality
in Iraq was meted out by a few miscreants aren't even seriously entertained
here. We have seen and heard all that before as well. But our experience
is that, while individuals may bring a particular impact to their work,
they do so within interrogative practices authorised by their superiors.
For example, the interrogation techniques which were used following
the internment swoops in the north of Ireland in 1971 were taught to
the RUC by British military officers. Someone authorised this. The first
internment swoops, "Operation Demetrius", saw hundreds of
people systematically beaten and forced to run the gauntlet of war dogs,
batons and boots.
Some were stripped
naked and had black hessian bags placed over their heads. These bags
kept out all light and extended down over the head to the shoulders.
As the men stood spread-eagled against the wall, their legs were kicked
out from under them. They were beaten with batons and fists on the testicles
and kidneys and kicked between the legs. Radiators and electric fires
were placed under them as they were stretched over benches. Arms were
twisted, fingers were twisted, ribs were pummelled, objects were shoved
up the anus, they were burned with matches and treated to games of Russian
roulette. Some of them were taken up in helicopters and flung out, thinking
that they were high in the sky when they were only five or six feet
off the ground. All the time they were hooded, handcuffed and subjected
to a high-pitched unrelenting noise.
This was later described
as extra-sensory deprivation. It went on for days. During this process
some of them were photographed in the nude.
And although these
cases ended up in Europe, and the British government paid thousands
in compensation, it didn't stop the torture and ill-treatment of detainees.
It just made the British government and its military and intelligence
agencies more careful about how they carried it out and ensured that
they changed the laws to protect the torturers and make it very difficult
to expose the guilty.
I have been arrested
a few times and interrogated on each occasion by a mixture of RUC or
British army personnel. The first time was in Palace Barracks in 1972.
I was placed in a cubicle in a barracks-style wooden hut and made to
face a wall of boards with holes in it, which had the effect of inducing
images, shapes and shadows. There were other detainees in the rest of
the cubicles. Though I didn't see them I could hear the screaming and
shouting. I presumed they got the same treatment as me, punches to the
back of the head, ears, small of the back, between the legs. From this
room, over a period of days, I was taken back and forth to interrogation
rooms.
On these journeys
my captors went to very elaborate lengths to make sure that I saw nobody
and that no one saw me. I was literally bounced off walls and into doorways.
Once I was told I had to be fingerprinted, and when my hands were forcibly
outstretched over a table, a screaming, shouting and apparently deranged
man in a blood-stained apron came at me armed with a hatchet.
Once a berserk man
came into the room yelling and shouting. He pulled a gun and made as
if he was trying to shoot at me while others restrained him.
In between these
episodes I was put up against a wall, spread-eagled and beaten soundly
around the kidneys and up between the legs, on my back and on the backs
of my legs. The beating was systematic and quite clinical. There was
no anger in it.
During my days in
Palace Barracks I tried to make a formal complaint about my ill-treatment.
My interrogators ignored this and the uniformed RUC officers also ignored
my demand when I was handed over to them. Eventually, however, I was
permitted to make a formal complaint before leaving. But when I was
taken to fill out a form I was confronted by a number of large baton-wielding
redcaps who sought to dissuade me from complaining. I knew I was leaving
so I ignored them and filled in the form.
Some years later
I was arrested again, this time with some friends. We were taken to
a local RUC barracks on the Springfield Road. There I was taken into
a cell and beaten for what seemed to be an endless time. All the people
who beat me were in plain clothes. They had English accents.
After the first
initial flurry, which I resisted briefly, the beating became a dogged
punching and kicking match with me as the punch bag. I was forced into
the search position, palms against the walls, body at an acute angle,
legs well spread. They beat me systematically. I fell to the ground.
Buckets of water were flung over me. I was stripped naked. Once I was
aroused from unconsciousness by a British army doctor. He seemed concerned
about damage to my kidneys. After he examined me he left and the beatings
began again. At one point a plastic bucket was placed over my head.
I was left in the company of two uniformed British soldiers. I could
see their camouflage trousers and heavy boots from beneath the rim of
the bucket. One of them stubbed his cigarette out on my wrist. His mate
rebuked him.
When the interrogators
returned they were in a totally different mood and very friendly. I
was given my clothes back, parts of them still damp. One of them even
combed my hair. I could barely walk upright and I was very badly marked.
In the barrack yard I was reunited with my friends and photographs were
taken of us with our arresting party. For a short time other British
soldiers, individually and in groups, posed beside us. Someone even
videoed the proceedings.
We were to learn
from all the banter that there was a bounty for the soldiers who captured
us. According to them we were on an "A" list, that is to be
shot on sight. The various regiments kept a book which had accumulated
considerable booty for whoever succeeded in apprehending us, dead or
alive. From the craic in the barracks yard it was obvious that the lucky
ones had won a considerable prize.
So for some time
we were photographed in the company of young, noisy, exuberant squaddies.
I'm sure we were not a pretty sight. I'm also sure that they were grinning
as much as the soldiers in the photographs we have all seen recently.
Our photos were never published, but somewhere, in some regimental museum
or in the top of somebody's wardrobe or in the bottom of a drawer, there
are photographs of me and my friends and our captors. To the victor,
the spoils.
· Gerry Adams
is president of Sinn Féin and MP for Belfast West