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Ireland: the 'Hooded Men' comes back into the public eye

23 July 2014

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"That night, the Prime Minister Ted Heath invoked that phrase again with the then serving Lord Chief Justice, John Widgery when commissioning his now infamous Bloody Sunday inquiry. Britain was “fighting not only a military war, but also a propaganda war”, he said. Four days later, on February 4th, 1972, Heath met Lord Widgery’s predecessor, Hubert Parker. Lord Parker was about to submit a Privy Counsellors’ report into interrogation techniques that had led to the torture allegations in Strasbourg, the ‘five techniques’ of sensory deprivation: hooding; ‘white noise’; wall-standing in stress positions; and sleep, food and water deprivation.

"Heath had commissioned the report after public outcry and unwelcome scrutiny from Amnesty International over the treatment of, in particular, 14 so-called ‘Hooded Men’, arrested and removed by helicopter to a secret location and for days subjected to the combined use of the techniques. An initial inquiry by a civil servant, Sir Edmund Compton, had been roundly dismissed as a whitewash."

See: Torture retold: how the ‘Hooded Men’ case has come back under the spotlight (Irish Times, link)

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