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The prosecutions for torture by three members of the British Army are just the tip of the iceberg. There are over 164 investigations at present involving British troops involving 20 deaths of Iraqis in British custody. Mass torture and abuse by US troops have been exposed in Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay and Afghanistan. For both countries (the US and Britain), the torture, abuse and degrading treatment has been authorised from on high as a way of getting confessions (which are obviously useless, since a tortured inmate will say anything to get more lenient treatment).
There have been a series of programmes recently on Channel 4 on torture, starting on the 28th of February with two programmes primarily on Guantánamo Bay (see www.channel4.com/torture and www.channel4.com/dispatches). It was revealed from a leaked US memo that their government defined torture only where abuse resulted in organ failure or death!
A Daily Mirror article by John Pilger revealed that torture has been systemic within the British Army throughout its history, in complete contrast to the claims of military “experts” (usually generals or ex-generals) that are interviewed in the mass media. It has also been commonplace in the British police force. The first programme on torture also talked about the techniques of the West Midlands Serious Crimes Squad in extracting confessions from the Birmingham Six. One of them, Paddy Hill, showed he doesn’t have any teeth left and it was pointed out that they still have not yet received an official apology from the British government (unlike the Guilford Four).
The New Labour government was finally forced to release the foreign “terrorist suspects” held for years without trial in Belmarsh prison. It was claimed that they had the right to return to their own countries, but of course they would have faced torture, if not death, if they had taken up this option. They proposed that the Home Secretary (currently Charles Clarke) can order house arrest without trial, even for British citizens. House arrest was a method adopted by the apartheid regime of South Africa in the past, and by the Philippines against Aung-Yun Sang Chi. Unfortunately, most Labour backbenchers and Liberal Democrat and Tory opponents of this New Labour policy restricted their demands to one that a judge should make the decision. Judges may generally be more liberal than New Labour politicians at present, but that is a sign of how far to the right Labour has gone in recent years. Judges should be elected, and trials in front of juries should be required to condemn a citizen of any country to detention, whether in jail or at their home, or indeed to application of the “control orders” short of house arrest that severely restrict an individual’s freedom.
The massive web of conspiratorial organisations on the sides of big business and the working class is enough to protect Western civilians from serious acts of terrorism. 9/11 was allowed to happen by the US government, as revealed on www.911truth.org.
