Senior Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) officer on interrogation

Our techniques of interrogation which we used in the early - the start of the conflict here [in Northern Ireland] - we used the army techniques of sleep deprivation, white noise and the hooding thing that is now very much in vogue in Iraq. Its funny, the way those things come back around. Those techniques we used here in Internment in 1971 as a way of disorientating a person to make them talk. [It was] just a pressurised interrogation. Hooding, white noise and wall-standing were used systematically at that point? After the troops came onto the streets of Derry, the military took primacy over the police. We really had no interrogation: we were just police - well a paramilitary police, an armed police. Thats the only difference and we had a land border to secure, we had big border guards down as well, stationed on the border because of the conflict with the 26 counties. And we had no background at all, and thats why Internment was so badly handled. We nearly arrested anybody who played for a Gaelic football team! So the military had to teach us how to do interrogation. We did questioning and generally crime was quite low in Northern Ireland and everybody usually did it and there wasnt much of a chance of interrogation. So on interrogation and when they were taken to Palace Barracks in Holywood, I think everybody got a claim out of it and it went to the European Court of Human Rights. There certainly was white noise used, there certainly was hoods used, there certainly was standing for a long time. And sometimes we carried those things through to interrogations in Castlereagh. More the standing with your hands against the wall for long, long periods. But the terrorists soon became very, very good at countering it. We would, at the time, the guys that you were interrogating would not speak if you had them for 7 days. They just would not speak. Even with no sleep? No, what came in after the European Convention of Human rights - the whole system was let down quite clearly, and its why instead of using interrogation to break the terrorists we started to use intelligence. What happened was the well from the Castlereagh and the holding centres dried up in that you couldnt use Sleep Deprivation, you could not question between midnight and 8am in the morning unless it was under very specific circumstances like the ticking bomb scenario. But you couldnt do it otherwise. There had to be regular meal breaks, they asked to go to the toilet, they had to be allowed to go and there was a form came in for that, and that actually was a forerunner to PACE which came in across the UK. Im not saying that some of them didnt get the odd thump at Castlereagh or the odd slapping, but there wasnt the systematic beating which they would make you think

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there was. And there wasnt the horror stories that came out. Theyd come in, think they were going to be tortured, think there were going to be electrodes attached to their testicles, thinking there were going to be people coming with rubber hoses to beat them up. And all the rough handling at Castlereagh, all the sensory deprivation, and all the naked [stuff], standing - the European Court of Human rights, when they said it was a breach of their human rights, it was all altered in 76, 77, 78. Thats why we moved towards the intelligence-led policing model. We had to because interrogations were not getting the results. I remember with ****** [a famous IRA suspect] one time, I said Look, well get this sorted out. I dont want to arrest you and have you taken to Castlereagh. And he said Castlereagh holds no tigers for me. Because all the teeth that Castlereagh had had been systematically pulled. And you know, this is the Americans seem to have made all the exact same mistakes that the British government made in the early 70s. They have now made in Guantanamo Bay and these other prisons. Their interrogation: most of the people theyre interrogating are internees, the same as the internees we were interrogating. Then we turned it on because whenever a person was taken to Holywood Palace Barracks, thats where the holding centre was in internment in 1971. I was only a part time reserve constable then, I was not a full-time member of the police service but from the stories that you hear, and from people who were involved in it, white noise was used. Hooding was used. Long standing was used. And there was another technique. They used to put them into helicopters and then took them up high. Then they pushed them out when they were only two or three feet above the ground. You know, they disoriented them. They were hooded. They were in a helicopter. The helicopter took off, then bounced about and came down to a couple of feet again, you know, so that the people were so disoriented that they didnt know where they were. Then they threw them out as if they were throwing them out from a height. Were these techniques that had come from the British army? Oh aye. That was a standard military interrogation technique then. It wasnt that was the use at the time. And I would say during the second world war, they didnt have helicopters, but where that developed, whether that developed during the Cold War period, but there were certainly interrogation techniques built up and grew. And sleep deprivation and white noise and disorientation and all those things that confuse a person certainly - it was taught. Thats what the army taught the police. I heard that the RUC were specifically sent to the UK for a course on how to do this stuff? I think it was more of a picked-up thing. Because up until 1976 the military had primacy. If you remember the early time of conflict, the military were allowed to arrest a person and keep them for four hours. And the idea of that 4 hours was just to give them time to hand them over to the police: if they were down in south Armargh where they couldnt get a patrol in, it might take 4 hours to get a helicopter

Copyright Dominic Streatfeild 2010. All rights reserved www.dominicstreatfeild.com

come and pick you up to bring them in. The army were given a much, much wider power of arrest. The powers of arrest for the police were written down in the statutes of common law, but they brought in a specific one, I remember, for Her Majestys Forces [which] may arrest any person who they suspect of committing any offence. And not even reasonably suspect, and not a serious effect: for your dog crapping in the middle of the street, the military had power of arrest. For no TV license, the military had a power of arrest, which we police officers would never ever have had and wouldnt have used anyway. The military had each person for four hours before you got them. So one of the things that we did was have the person medically examined, after we handed them over to the military. In case he was beaten. And to protect ourselves. People couldnt walk out of Castlereagh and say Well the police shouted at me so I told them everything. People had to come out with I was tortured in Castlereagh and build up the feeling that Castlereagh was a torture chamber. It was not a pleasant place to go. But it was not a torture chamber. You didnt use electrodes. You used sleep deprivation, you kept them going for a while, you had no windows so they didnt know what time of day it was. But we didnt use hoods. In Castlereagh we made them think it was different. Theyd think they were in for a good nights sleep, then we got them up, and there were mealtimes at different times. We would have fed them, we wouldnt have starved them but we would they would not have known if they were in for two days or four days. We also had quite a few of them standing against the walls of the interview rooms. I remember once complaining at one time and them coming up and fingerprinting the walls. You make a person stand against a wall with his fingertips holding it We certainly medically examined them. We lost a police officer called **** [in a bomb blast] and there was a guy that came in, a leading terrorist who was caught nearby in the follow-up, and he was brought to Castlereagh. He was medically examined and all intelligence was that he did do it. When the interview came up he sat in an interview room for seven days and looked in the corner and didnt speak. And other things, too: on one occasion when a woman police officer was doing the interrogation he just dropped his trousers and jerked himself off in front of her. Another one picked his nose and flicked it at us, trying to put you under different pressures. But most of them were trained just to pick a spot in the wall and just say nothing. To refuse to speak, refuse to talk. Anyway, this guy didnt speak for 7 days and when he was being released, again [he was] medically examined to make sure he was not physically ill treated, he said that his ears were sore, that theyd slapped him in his ears. And what it was: he had perforated eardrums. He didnt complain about this on the way in but he had been so close to the explosion, hed blown his own eardrums out and then used that, and kept quiet about it, thinking about what he was going to do. He was not complaining on the way in. The doctor couldnt say I didnt examine his ears on the way in. So he said I examined his ears and I didnt find anything.

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Was it actually helpful to have suspects coming in scared even after the hooding and so on had been stopped? Absolutely. Castlereagh frightened the living daylights some people were actually shaking as they were being arrested. Once they went through it once they saw it wasnt that bad so it didnt frighten them again. And thats why a lot of people gave it up very quickly. People were really sick of what was going on, but there was the fear: that menace. You always let the menace be there for new people coming in. You made them think, if they dont speak Its just round the corner. Its just round the corner. This torture, this white noise, these methods of cutting off fingers and putting electrodes onto testicles. Its just round the corner if you dont speak. So you let that fear be in them. The police in the United Kingdom are moving to the intelligence model of policing, because theres very, very few people will give up on an interrogation. [A suspect] may give it up but he may give it up because the overwhelming physical evidence to this against him: You were seen here, your blood was on the girl, your fingerprints were in this and a person may shrug their shoulders and make a statement. But we find that with a dedicated terrorist they generally did not. They knew that if they made a statement, when it came to the preliminary enquiry, all the documents served on them would be handed to the [IRA] officer commanding their wing in the prison (they had a command structure within the prison). And the officer commanding would be a leading IRA or UDF man in the prison. There were a couple who were training to be lawyers while they were in prison. Going through everything. First of all [the IRA officers] were looking to see what you told them: What did you give up, why did you surrender this? What statement did you make? Because you were told in your training camps that you were not to speak and not to sell any colleagues and that if you went to prison and sold a colleague out, you would die. As has happened in the prison. They would kill you. Second they were looking to see if it was an intelligence operation - to see if they could make some sense of where the intelligence had come from, to see if they could find out who or what the source was. Was it a technical source, or was it a covert humint source, or was it just luck on the polices hands? So youre into Castlereagh, and its first it was very good, very, very successful, very, very productive. But as people began to realise that they werent being tortured and the 7 days was not that bad - because the doctors were there, because they werent getting the white noise, because they werent getting the beatings, they werent made to stand. There was this You did do it, you didnt do it? technique and thats all you could really say. If you went to question someone now and you say We believe you were involved in the murder of X at Burnside on 4th of January 2002, you were seen there - and he says It wasnt me, I wasnt there, somebody made a mistake, I didnt do it - and you repeat the question, the lawyer says Youve already asked this, weve answered this question. Move on. Interrogation now has nearly lost its value in the police sense.

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Because its been so reined-in? Yeah. PACE and application of lawyers. Lawyers are there for civil rights and people say Well thats good, thats right. But then you have to move on. If interrogation isnt going to get a person to give it up, or to tell you whats going on, theres really they are allowed to use physical force in their interrogation techniques. They can grab you by the hair and shake your head. Their court allows you a certain amount, because if they have a, maybe a man who has maybe transported a suicide bomber, and they havent much time, they talk about the ticking bomb scenario, you have a bomb that you know is going to go off, or you have an incident that is going to take place, so interrogation in effect in the western world and this is where the Americans have stepped back into the Dark Ages, as we did in 1971 and 72 and 73, interrogating people because we thought it was the only way forward. But its not. They have to find a different way. We have tried to tighten up and every time the civil rights people come - youre watched by the civil rights people so that you dont go into a totalitarian state, go back to the days where a prisoner has no rights. A prisoner certainly needs to have some rights. But also you have to deal with the victims rights when youre dealing with a prisoner. Were RUC officers surprised by the British Armys approach to interrogation and prisoner handling in the 1970s? [The RUC at the time] was a sort of a rural country-type force. When I was young 45 years ago a policeman would have boxed your ears very quickly. Rather than sent you off home. And that was the way the RUC was in those days. The 56-62 conflict was badly organised, badly financed and actually not supported by the people, it hadnt a good propaganda campaign going on. It fizzled out. There werent that many incidents that were going to cause a big lot of prisoners. Internment was both sides of the border and therefore it worked much better but Internment in 71 was purely a Northern Irish thing. It was done with bad intelligence. What was one of the best recruiting sergeants for the IRA, was actually was to lift these people from all these families. Because the military came in blind, the police hadnt got any good intelligence so they went for nearly anybody who was Catholic who played Gaelic football: They were supporting their land, they must be terrorists. So as well as catching possibly the core or a number of Republican activists, you also picked up a number of innocent people. And the community knows that very quickly. We made a number of mistakes in those days by doing blanket searches of houses. We would have searched a street to find one bombers house: if you were trying to cover a [clandestine human intelligence] source, do not go straight to number 41! What you would do it pick four houses in the street, but all with intelligence that theres Republicans, sympathisers or Republican activity in those houses. So the rest of the public are not involved. They can say They had it coming, they knew it was

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happening. Youre covering your source by searching maybe three or four sources but knowing that one is the main house. And as they got more sophisticated, we got more sophisticated. But in the early times, if youre gonna talk about the inhuman and humiliating treatment and the European convention of human rights and the court decisions, Im not saying the courts decisions were wrong. But certainly the treatment of the prisoners at the early stages of the conflict was not as good as it is now. Where did the white noise and the hooding and so on actually come from? How did they come to Northern Ireland in the first place? Oh! We didnt know about white noise! We didnt know about this hooding thing! Ill tell you I remember one guy came in one time and he was crapping himself. You could see this guy was nervous. But one of the detective sergeants went out and got Marigold gloves. And had the door open. And they were actually rewiring the place at the time with this big black armoured cable. And when this boy was being interviewed, he said You fucking hang on there! Ill go out and get this one. He pulled the Marigold gloves out of his pockets and slapped them on. He then went out and grabbed this cable and began shaking, like Christ! Switch it off! Switch it off! And the boy crapped himself. He actually crapped himself. He thought he was going to be electrocuted. Now, people can pick up that bit of the technique but actually to systematically make people stand, to systematically put hoods on them, to systematically use white noise, I am not so sure. Now whether that was actually trained into us from the military [I dont know] but I am sure it was that it wasnt there [before] 71. The techniques of Castelreagh were, I believe, learned from the military interrogation style that took place. Theres no doubt that the interrogation techniques in Castlereagh were effective for a while. Not as much for what actually happened in Castlereagh, - but because of what the fear of what they thought might happen. But once they got used to being in Castlereagh, and once the allegations of ill-treatment came out, people jumped up and down and lawyers got involved and doctors got involved and society got involved. Then the techniques that may have been used stopped very quickly and I forget the form 17a?, 3817a?, a special prisoner form, and it had on it a chart with all the marks a person had when he came in. They were not allowed to be interviewed after a certain amount of time. The ability to go to ablutions, the ability to make sure they got the proper meal breaks. So you maybe had a window from 9 till 11 in the morning, then you went for lunch from 11 till 1, then you went from 1 till 3, and had maybe a shower and went for tea at 5. Then you maybe talked to them from 6 till 8. And thats where it went. It changed. And all the good results stopped. Stopped. It was not going to be as successful because people came in and they realised Im going to have a shower now. Also they were getting anti-interrogation techniques. They were being trained in all those matters. And also the biggest incentive for not talking was that you would be ostracised or murdered when you came out if you said too much. Or you could be murdered in the prison. There was one in particular where somebody was turned out

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of prison not so long ago, 2002, a Loyalist. And the death that they gave him was unbelievable. Because he turned and he was going to give evidence against his colleagues on the outside. And ***** was killed, you know who he is - the man who was a source for Special Branch during the Finucane murder, and he was the quartermaster for the UDA. And the gun that was used to kill Finucane was held by ***** and theres things that they tried to prosecute him here for being involved in the Finucane murder and the prosecution collapsed - as we had told them it would. But when he came out the UDA decided that he was an informant and killed him two nights later. All those fears and all those concerns were there when this took place. Castlereagh was not a place you would want to go to. But then it became a place of a tiger with no teeth. Imterrogation became impotent? Not against a domestic murderer, not against a bar fight where someone gets stabbed. Not against those things. But where you have either organised crime, or organised terrorism, then it becomes impotent unless you have some force behind it. If youre sitting there alone and youve killed someone, then ordinary interrogation techniques may help. But if you belong to an organisation and you have the ideals of Al Qaeda in your mind, of the ideals of the UDF, if you think youre doing it from some higher cause, youre not going to succeed in appealing to their higher nature, the moral exhortation. Were you surprised when you saw the pictures of prisoners at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib? Are British troops involved? I think they did do a bit of hooding somewhere. The military are still allowed to hood if theyre taking them through sensitive areas, is that not right? I thought I heard Blair or Hoon on the radio saying there are circumstances where they can hood, going though sensitive areas. I could be wrong but I dont think so - I think thats what they said. Because I couldnt believe that this was taking place.

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