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Interrogration, intelligence and security : controversial British techniques
Examines the origins and effects of the use of interrogation techniques known as the 'five techniques'. Through its in-depth analysis, the book reveals how British forces came to use such controversial methods in counter-insurgency, counter-terrorism and internal security contexts. This book will be of particualr interest to security professionals, academics and members of the public interested in the torture debate, intelligence, the military, counter-insurgency, counter-terrorism, foreign policy and law enforcement. -- P. [4] of cover.
Book
Torture, Intelligence and Sousveillance in the War on Terror
Torture, Intelligence and Sousveillance in the War on Terror examines the communication battles of the Bush and Blair political administrations (and those of their successors in America and Britain) over their use of torture, first-hand or second-hand, to gain intelligence for the War on Terror. Exploring key agenda-building drivers that exposed the torture-intelligence nexus and presenting detailed case studies of key media events from the UK and USA, this insightful volume exposes dominant political discourses on the torture-for-intelligence policy. Whether in the form of unauthorized leaks, official investigations, investigative journalism, real-time reporting, or Non-Governmental Organisation activity, this timely study evaluates various modes of resistance to governments' attempts at strategic political communication, with particular attention to 'sousveillance': community-based recording from first-person perspectives. A rigorous exposition of the power-knowledge relationships constituting the torture-intelligence nexus, which re-evaluates agenda-building models in the digital age and assesses the strength of the public sphere across the Third, Fourth and Fifth Estates, Torture, Intelligence and Sousveillance in the War on Terror will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in media and communication, sociology and social theory, politics and political communication, international relations, and journalism.
eBook
This Side of Silence
We are accustomed to thinking of torture as the purposeful infliction of cruelty by public officials, and we assume that lawyers and clinicians are best placed to speak about its causes and effects. However, it has not always been so. The category of torture is a very specific way of thinking about violence, and our current understandings of the term are rooted in recent twentieth-century history. InThis Side of Silence, social anthropologist Tobias Kelly argues that the tensions between post-Cold War armed conflict, human rights activism, medical notions of suffering, and concerns over immigration have produced a distinctively new way of thinking about torture, which is saturated with notions of law and trauma.
This Side of Silenceasks what forms of suffering and cruelty can be acknowledged when looking at the world through the narrow legal category of torture. The book focuses on the recent history of Britain but draws wider comparative conclusions, tracing attempts to recognize survivors and perpetrators across the fields of asylum, criminal law, international human rights, and military justice. In this thorough and eloquent ethnography, Kelly avoids treating the legal prohibition of torture as the inevitable product of progress and yet does not seek to dismiss the real differences it has made in concrete political struggles. Based on extensive archival research and ethnographic fieldwork, the book argues that the problem of recognition rests not in the inability of the survivor to communicate but in our inability to listen and take responsibility for the injustice before us.
eBook
“… Here I Went Through Deportation – Which was also Torture for Me”: Air-Deportations and Liberal Violence in Great Britain
This article contributes to understanding violence in deportation. Drawing on data from eight months of fieldwork conducted between 2015 and 2017 and interviews with asylum seekers and practitioners, the article shows how liberal violence, in its various forms, is integral to the contemporary air deportation process. The violence, as argued here, is not unusual, spectacular or resulting from procedural failures and lapses in individual officer judgement, but is integral to it. The conclusion calls for scholars to consider the very practice of deportation as violence and a crime against humanity, gather comprehensive evidence with an explicit aim of making deportations interrogatable by international criminal law, and hold the British state accountable and demand reparations.
Journal Article
DISTORTED TERMINOLOGY: THE UK'S CLOSURE OF INVESTIGATIONS INTO ALLEGED TORTURE AND INHUMAN TREATMENT IN IRAQ
The UK Ministry of Defence (MOD) has closed hundreds of investigations into alleged ill-treatment of detainees by British troops in Iraq. This article probes one reason given for the closure of these investigations: the assertion (without further evidence) that the allegations were ‘less serious’, ‘lower-level’ or in the ‘middle’ range of severity. These terms usually appear without reference to international law, and are once defined with reference to the English criminal law of assault, so that investigations were closed if the alleged treatment resulted in less than grievous bodily harm. The MOD's terminology is wrong-headed and conceptually underinclusive: it fails to grasp the threshold of inhuman or degrading treatment in international human rights law (IHRL), and largely neglects the investigatory obligations in IHRL, international humanitarian law (IHL) and international criminal law (ICL).
Journal Article
A British 'Foreign Legion'? The British Police in Mandate Palestine
The men of the British section of the Palestine police have romantically imagined their time as officers in Mandate Palestine, a land infused with historical and biblical significance. Many compared their service to that of the famed military force, the French Foreign Legion. This study sets the nostalgia of memory against the reality of service in Palestine, one that involved considerable brutality against local people. This essay details the empirical evidence of violence, including torture and a 'dirty war', mining archival sources, contextualizing primary source material within wider notions of British ideas of collective punishment within the empire. The Palestine police failed in its job of policing, necessitating the deployment of the army to Palestine, and with this collapse in police control the force became more violent. Ironically, the reality of life in the Palestine police was similar to that in the French Foreign Legion: a shock force there to maintain imperial control. The article argues that policing methods from the Mandate period continued after the Palestine force was disbanded in 1948, both within Israel and in other parts of the British Empire where demobilized Palestine police officers went to serve. It pushes the current paradigm on policing, extending the literature that details reforms and institutional change in the Palestine police to include the impact on local people.
Journal Article
The Role of the Courts in the Political Constitution
The article sketches the beginnings of a theory of what the courts should do in the political constitution. As such, it differs from most of the literature on political constitutionalism (which tends to say more about what courts should not do) and most of the literature about what courts should do in constitutional law (which tends to be framed in a legal constitutionalist perspective). First, arguments are presented about how a political constitutionalist might distinguish between rights which are best left to political institutions and those which better lend themselves to judicial enforcement. Second, the argument is made that in constitutional litigation the courts should focus as much (if not more) on powers and evidence as on rights. The article closes with brief consideration of the legislature's role in the political constitution and of the courts'role in supporting the legislature. Throughout, the article takes the British constitution as its principal case study, but the implications of the argument presented here extend beyond Britain alone.
Journal Article
A History of Violence: The Shooting in Jerusalem of British Assistant Police Superintendent Alan Sigrist, 12 June 1936
This article provides a narrative of the shooting in Jerusalem by two Palestinian gunmen — Bahjat Abu Gharbiyah and Sami al-Ansari — in June 1936 during the Arab revolt in Palestine of a British police officer, Alan Edward Sigrist. Abu Gharbiyah and al-Ansari specifically targeted Sigrist because of his violence towards Palestinians — an issue that has not been discussed fully in the literature. This study measures, against the contemporary record, Abu Gharbiyah's account of why he shot Sigrist, using the shooting as a case study to open up debates on the British use of official and unofficial violence to maintain colonial rule, alongside one on the response of local people to such violence. While recognizing the partisan nature of Abu Gharbiyah's memory of events in Palestine, the article gives voice to the Palestinians, explaining how and why rebels fighting British rule and Jewish immigration to Palestine used violence. Following the analysis of the shooting of Sigrist, the article details more general torture by British forces as recalled by Abu Gharbiyah, setting this against the extant evidence to test the traditional notion that Britain used 'minimum force' in countering colonial disturbances, tying Sigrist's behaviour to that of British troops and police in Palestine more generally. Thus, while the article is narrow in its focus it has broader implications for contemporary imperial and military history.
Journal Article
The British Anti-Apartheid Movement and Political Prisoner Campaigns, 1973-1980
This article analyses selected Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) activities designed to publicise political prisoners and detainees. The political prisoner campaign was one way in which the AAM highlighted the role of the liberation movements fighting apartheid. It illustrates how the AAM not only played a key part in exposing the immorality of apartheid, but also in popularising the liberation movements, and especially the African National Congress (ANC). All AAM activity broadly supported the liberation movements, informed British public opinion on conditions in South Africa, and aimed to change British government policy. However, certain actions focused more specifically on popularising the liberation movements and specific members in these movements. Political prisoner campaigns showed the difficulties faced by specific people caught up in the South African judicial system and the way in which the South African government used trials and jail sentences to weaken the liberation movements. On the one hand, the AAM attempted to highlight the activity of the liberation movements inside South Africa and the violence of the South African regime. On the other hand, it appealed to international concerns about human rights. The AAM aimed to invert the idea that the liberation movements were primarily responsible for violence through focusing on violence by the regime. Of all the campaigns for individual prisoners, that for Nelson Mandela achieved the highest profile. These campaigns were effective in increasing international criticism of apartheid and provided an opportunity for many concerned about human right to take a stand against apartheid.
Journal Article