>They were also thrown from helicopters that were hovering close to the ground, having been told the aircraft were hundreds of feet in the air.
I’m sure that was absolutely terrifying… But I did chuckle a bit reading it.
You can be sure Drew Harris had a hand in it, I still can’t believe we made him Garda Commissioner when he actively prevented investigations into state collusion with loyalist terrorists up there. God knows what he could be leaking to intelligence services in the UK.
One thing that is always left out regarding the “alleged” torture of the 5 techniques (scare quotes because it *was* torture) is that failure to adopt and hold painful stress positions resulted in good old fashioned beatings until the subject resumed the position.
The descriptions of these techniques can often come across as very sterile or sanitised in articles which fail to get across the immense and calculated psychological damage they were designed to cause to those subjected to them. But equally the straightforward physical beatings that anyone would reflexively recognise as torture are often omitted as well.
Rona M Fields, an American psychologist, wrote a great book about the psychologic impact of the Troubles on the people of NI, including the widespread use of torture – “Society Under Siege: A Psychology of Northern Ireland”
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>They were also thrown from helicopters that were hovering close to the ground, having been told the aircraft were hundreds of feet in the air.
I’m sure that was absolutely terrifying… But I did chuckle a bit reading it.
You can be sure Drew Harris had a hand in it, I still can’t believe we made him Garda Commissioner when he actively prevented investigations into state collusion with loyalist terrorists up there. God knows what he could be leaking to intelligence services in the UK.
One thing that is always left out regarding the “alleged” torture of the 5 techniques (scare quotes because it *was* torture) is that failure to adopt and hold painful stress positions resulted in good old fashioned beatings until the subject resumed the position.
The descriptions of these techniques can often come across as very sterile or sanitised in articles which fail to get across the immense and calculated psychological damage they were designed to cause to those subjected to them. But equally the straightforward physical beatings that anyone would reflexively recognise as torture are often omitted as well.
Rona M Fields, an American psychologist, wrote a great book about the psychologic impact of the Troubles on the people of NI, including the widespread use of torture – “Society Under Siege: A Psychology of Northern Ireland”