A day or two ago I listened to General Francis Richard Dannatt, Baron Dannatt, GCB, CBE, MC DL on Talkback. He was explaining to the show’s presenter how the ‘hooded men’ were subjected ‘interrogation tactics’. It might be called torture now but that’s not what it was called then. All right, the Supreme Court may have found that the PSNI acted unlawfully by not proceeding with the men’s claim that they were tortured, but that wasn’t the point. General and Lord Dannatt explained that what is now called torture wasn’t considered torture in the early 1970s, and it was similar to techniques the British Army used in other places such as Kenya.
I think he thought that kind of normalised it all. If it was OK in Kenya against the Mau Mau, it was OK here against the IRA.
Except that none of the hooded men had anything to do with the IRA.
When it was pointed out to the General and Lord that men had been taken up in helicopters and told they were to be thrown out, he said that oh well, that certainly was wrong, not sanctioned, clearly a group of Army men taking things into their own hands when they shouldn’t.
Me, I’m a sceptic. The General and Lord is no doubt the very model of a modern Lord and General, but he is very limited when it comes to the old grey matter. To cite the brutality of the British Army in Kenya as some sort of justification for the torture of the hooded men is, to put it mildly, seriously stupid. To disown the soldiers who threatened to throw men out of helicopters is par for the course (cf Bloody Sunday).
Talkback then had someone come on to complain that no one was held responsible for the Shankill bomb (actually they were), the death of Jean McConville and other activities by the IRA. Which was like saying OK, you beat up your granny, but have you heard about the guy down the street who thumped his da? What was being talked about on Talkback was the actions of the British Army in torturing people and the actions of the PSNI in blocking any further search for the truth. The IRA could indeed be confronted with many questions but what we’re talking about here is barbaric treatment of innocent people by the British Army, who are supposed to be public servants – hence the phrase ‘Thank you for your service’ and hence the fact that we pay their salaries – and that of the PSNI, who blocked further pursuit of truth.
If you want to start drawing comparisons, as I think Mark Durkan did, the truer comparisons are with the Ballymurphy massacre and Bloody Sunday.
The bitter truth at the core of all this is that the British army in Ireland has for centuries treated the native people as a kind of sub-species which doesn’t understand how Britain is merely trying to keep the peace in Ireland and that yes, some soldiers may occasionally overstep the mark, but they were behaving according to the norms of the time and if any of them had done really bad things, like threaten to throw people out of helicopters, they were needless to say acting on their own, no point in expecting their superiors to shoulder responsibility for that kind of thing.
The difficulty with people like the Lord and General Dannatt is that they assume everyone accepts what they claim, that the British army are the guys in the white hats. And should anyone try to point out the patches of mud and blood on those hats, they are merely making mischief.
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