Eye sometimes goes digging underneath major events and often finds quite startling information (and you thought we were just a gossip column!).
We commend to readers with internet access a long report on the History News Network of George Mason University (link below). This is a compelling account by a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Alfred W. McCoy, of how official torture techniques can masquerade as the behaviour of 'rogue soldiers'.
McCoy has researched the subject of interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror and last year published a book on it (New York: Metropolitan Books).
When he saw the published photographs of abused prisoners at Abu Ghraib jail he says he did not see snapshots of a breakdown in military discipline. After a decade of studying military techniques used in the Philippines he could see 'the tell-tale signs of the CIA’s psychological methods.
'For example, that iconic photo of a hooded Iraqi with fake electrical wires hanging from his extended arms shows, not the sadism of a few "creeps" but instead the two key trademarks of CIA psychological torture. The hood was for sensory disorientation. The arms were extended for self-inflicted pain.'
When the US ratified the UN Convention against torture in 1994, it added 'reservations.' Physical torture was banned but sensory deprivation and self-inflicted pain were not.
Eye notes that one of the techniques, called 'Water Boarding', appears to have originated in 1541 in France - it was standard Gallic torture.
See the McCoy article on http://hnn.US/articles/32497.html.