Firstly, with regard to Paul Hill's conviction for the murder of soldier Brian Shaw, Hill was convicted mostly on the basis that he was still resident in Belfast at the end of 1972. That conviction was overturned in 1994 due to a complete absence of evidence - which makes his confession a case of police opportunism because the events surrounding Shaw's death are notoriously unclear. Also, at that time (1974), the Surrey Police needed a legitimate link between the Guilford Four and the IRA and it "solved" an unsolved murder in the process. To the best of my knowledge, no effort has since been made to find out the truth about what happened to Brian Shaw.
I agree that the IRA did dole out excessive and violent torture in an effort to achieve their aims- mostly within the Catholic community - counter-productive and ideologically unsound, in my opinion. They attacked the wrong people and, in doing so, they alienated themselves from a rational political basis and their supposed population base. It was morally and politically unjustifiable by any equivocation, tactically pointless and I personally find it reprehensible.
However, the IRA was a guerilla/paramilitary organisation not a police force - in much the same way that the UDA/UVF/LVF were not legally empowered to police Protestant communities or Catholic communities - although they still did so. The RUC, MI5, MI6, the British army and the British judiciary are, by their own claim, representative of the democratic will of Britain itself and are, therefore, subject to the moral and legal standards they impose upon society itself.
The point that I think people are trying to make is that the British government and the security forces were extremely hypocritical in their application of justice in Ireland and with regard to the Irish. They have always been reluctant to call the situation in Northern Ireland a war - preferring the term 'police action' but nevertheless applied measures that would be considered excessive in war.
As for this specific case, it was not a mere case of one little bully-boy policeman pulling someone's ears - there were other less savoury methods employed that were not shown in the film. Also the film failed to convey the duration of the interrogations - seven days without sleep. I believe that threats to family were without doubt the most severe measure employed - and considering the rumoured collusion (then and now) between the British, the RUC and Loyalist paramilitaries, it was a very real threat. Additionally deprivation of sleep, food and water over a period of seven days can make such threats and schoolyard bully-boy methods all the more effective.
I do not doubt that you, rice-1, would consider such methods of torture to be mild. I imagine that we would all like to believe that we would be tough enough to resist such 'torture' - whether this is a case of wishful thinking, rampant egotism or genuine stupidity. I sincerely doubt that the torture employed was anything akin to the dramatic torture pornography of 'Saw' or 'Hostel' so prevalent in recent social discourse - but it was effective and it was illegal, immoral and hypocritically applied principally to Republican suspects. Moreover, it was coercion, pure and simple, and in terms of power relations the actions of the British/RUC/Security Forces was no different than that of the IRA -- in fact, the spate of denial and equivocation that has ensued makes it far more like the self-interested moral justifications of rapists and child abusers who endeavour to place guilt upon their victims.
The issue with the film, I believe, is not the torture specifically rather that the Guilford Four were scapegoats that the British knew to be innocent - officially after the Balcombe St. Gang was arrested in 1977 and a fact that was conceded in the 1987 Home Office memorandum regarding their appeal. The British police tortured innocent Irish people to provide the British public with a show-trial in the full knowledge that it was a perversion of justice - their own justice, noy just the Irish conception of justice.
I understand your reluctance to concede that Amnesty International (UK) are unbiased to a certain degree, especially after reading your post history. However, I was thinking that the recorded testimony of Lord Gardiner, former Lord Chancellor and legislative reformer, combined with the findings of The European Court of Human Rights, a democratic and impartial legal body, and the evidence of those working in British Intelligence such as Frank Steele, who was active in MI6 in Ireland in the 70s and had witnessed British decolonisation in Kenya - would merit reconsideration of the issue of police torture in Northern Ireland in the 1970s.
I believe that the innate hypocrisy of the British/Unionist agenda in Northern Ireland unwittingly gave the IRA undue legitimation for their actions. It served to deepen the division between Republicans and Unionists, institutionalised the use of violence and compromised any claim that British or Unionists may ever have to being defenders of democracy. A government cannot claim to represent any majority, or minority, democratically if they are willing to pervert the course of justice through torture, partial legislation and moral relativism.
Personally, I was never really impressed by 'In The Name of the Father' as a film or as a story. Films like 'In The Name of the Father' can be a negative influence not only because they take license with the facts but also because they are very emotive. Still, it is just a film. I think that most people can differentiate between the unreality of a film and the facts of history. Sadly, avid Republicans take it as an opportunity to vilify the British while British people and Unionists indulge themselves in bouts of selective memory or proto-fascist diatribe - in either case, something that is best described as post-fascism because it denies the possibility of any truth in someone else's experience, historical or otherwise. Neither party are particularly concerned with the truth, justice or film criticism - nor are they really concerned with democracy, human rights or social and political progress. It's the same old game of hate that kept it all going for thirty years.
Personally, I have found the relative and selective attitude to history employed by British, Unionists and Irish apologists to be particularly insidious and underhanded - even when it appears as racist drivel from the product of generations of selective inbreeding. It makes the British seem more monstrously hypocritical than any Republican propaganda ever could. It validates the presumption that all the British and the Unionists are still a seedy little cabal of bullies. Hence, people in Ireland (and elsewhere) tend to think of Unionists as the Ku Klux Klan of Europe and Britain as the boarding-school paedophile of history.
Equivocal and severely biased interpretations of history and democracy by British and Ulster Unionists after the fact only serve to embed this conception in popular consciousness - and this can become a post facto legitimation for the IRA's actions - especially if people see that there are actually British and Unionists out there who actually fit the supposedly fictional and stereotypical roles of British bully-boy, Unionist bigot or pseudo-fascist hypocrite.
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