The Compton Report – a whitewash for torture

British Home Secretary Reginald Maudling

TORTURE of detainees by NATO forces has been widespread during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Forty years ago, torture by the government of a supposedly liberal ‘Western democracy’ required a hasty cover-up. The government in question was ‘Her Majesty’s Government’ in London and the torture victims were Irish citizens detained without trial in the Six Counties.
Internment without trial was imposed across the Six Counties on 9th August 1971.  The internees were taken initially to various barracks and camps before being detained in Crumlin Road Prison and on the Maidstone prison ship in Belfast Harbour. However, a number were singled out for special attention and these were the men who became known as the ‘guinea-pigs’. They were experimented on with techniques of torture, including ‘sensory deprivation’. This mainly took place in Palace Barracks, Hollywood, County Down.
Many of the internees were beaten and ill-treated in a variety of ways during and immediately after the internment swoop by the British Army in the early hours of 9th August. But for 14 men in particular this was the beginning of a prolonged nightmare. They were picked to be experimented on with the principal techniques of ‘sensory deprivation’. These were:-
1.    Hooding of prisoners prior to interrogation. Black hoods were placed over their heads and shoulders.
2.    Use of ‘white noise’ produced by a machine, a constant, repetitive, intensely irritating sound.
3.    Forced immobilisation in a position of stress – feet wide apart, leaning against a wall with only finger-tips touching the wall.
4.    Little or no food or drink.
5.    Being forced to wear loose overalls several times too big.
6.    Deprivation of sleep for days on end.
The treatment continued for hours and days, turning the men to mental and physical wrecks.
Internee, Joe Clarke, then aged 19, described what happened:
“There then followed a series of collapses – I could not say how many times I collapsed. Initially my hands and legs were beaten whenever this happened and the insides of my feet were kicked until my ankles were swollen to almost twice their normal size . . . The noise was insistent, driving mental resistance to its utmost. I thought I was going mad.”
Paddy Joe McClean, a teacher from County Tyrone, described his ordeal:
“I stood there, arms against the wall, feet wide apart. My arms, legs, back and head began to ache. I perspired freely, the noise and heat were terrible. My brain seemed ready to burst . . . Are they coming to kill me? I wished to God they would, to end it. My circulation had stopped. I flexed my arms to start the blood moving. They struck me several times on the hands, ribs, kidneys and my knee-caps were kicked. My hood-covered head was banged against the wall.”
The British Army tried to conceal what was being done but word soon got out that men were being tortured. Press reports and protests from relatives and political organisations forced the British Government to act to limit the political fall-out.
On 31st August 1971 British Home Secretary Reginald Maudling appointed Sir Edmund Compton to chair a committee of inquiry. The committee had no power to compel witnesses to attend or to have documents produced. It sat in secret.  Detainees were at first allowed no legal representation; when they were, their lawyer was not allowed to see, hear or question British Army and RUC witnesses who were themselves legally represented. As a result, all but one of the 342 men interned on 9th August boycotted the ‘inquiry’.
The Compton Report was a classic whitewash, designed to cover up the real actions and intentions of the British Army.
Compton admitted that there had been ill-treatment of detainees but denied there was brutality or torture. In the most notorious passage of his report, Compton essentially argued that it was only torture if the torturer enjoyed it:
“We consider that brutality is an inhuman or savage form of cruelty, and that cruelty implies a disposition to inflict suffering, coupled with indifference to, or pleasure in, the victim’s pain. We do not think that happened here.”
But by the time Compton was published, the brutality inflicted on internees was widely known and the report was greeted with disdain and ridicule. In September 1976, the European Commission on Human Rights found that, in its treatment of the detainees, the British Government breached the European Convention on Human Rights “in the form, not only of inhuman and degrading treatment, but also of torture”.
The Compton Report, discredited even before it appeared, was published on 16th November 1971, 40 years ago this month.