It was a day in November 1971, Brigadier Richard Mansfield Bremner, the commandant of the British Army’s Intelligence Corps, took his seat at his desk at Templer Barracks in Ashford situated to the southeast of London.

With a serious expression, he began to set out his recall of the development of UK military interrogation methods since the Second World War. In fact, the techniques used by the British Army’s interrogation squads were used and became more sinister in their imaginative methods during World War II.

It was Bremner’s intention to justify those methods on the basis of the intelligence that the techniques had squeezed out of captives both fighters and civilians. What the brigadier wrote was so disturbing, however, that a senior MOD official stamped the words ‘UK Eyes Only’ at the top and bottom of each page of his report and decreed that it should remain classified for at least 100 years.

In the event, it was included in a batch of MOD papers that were declared fit for public consumption after just thirty years. The file was then dispatched, along with hundreds of other documents, to the country’s National Archives.’

The British interrogatory squads had devised a method of torture that combined isolation, sensory deprivation, seemingly self-inflicted pain, exhaustion and humiliation. It was a process that was simple to teach, inexpensive to apply and required no drugs or devices. It could be employed close to the front line during times of war. Disturbingly, these sinister methods and appliances of interrogatory torture could be applied in discreet urban interrogation centres in times of peace. Read more MEGACAUST

‘The method was based on the combination of five stresses, known within the Intelligence Corps as The Five Techniques. They were starvation, or what Bremner termed a meagre diet; sleep deprivation; hooding; the use of an incessant hissing sound known as white noise; and what was described as ‘wall-standing.’

This last technique was a stress position in which the victim would be forced to stand with his or her legs spread wide apart, leaning forward with arms spread wide and high, with much of their weight supported against a wall on outstretched fingers.

Before being forced into this position, the male or female victims would be stripped naked, subjected to an intrusive and humiliating ‘medical examination’ to ensure that they would survive what was to follow, and then dressed in an outsized, shapeless, buttonless boiler suit that resembled the clown-like clothing that the prisoners at Bad Nenndorf, one of the British Occupation Force’s more sinister torture centre in Allied-occupied Germany were obliged to wear.’

The hooding and the noise quickly produced the psychosis that was first seen at McGill University. Wall-standing produced the self-inflicted pain recommended by Kubark. It was so painful, however, that the Five Techniques were always supported by a sixth, unspoken, technique: anyone who refused to maintain the stress position would be very harshly beaten. 

Nothing about the techniques was written down, Bremner reported. This was doubtless a result of extreme misgivings about the morality and legality of their use. Instead, the method was passed on by successive generations of Intelligence Corps interrogators by word of mouth.

In 1945, Brigadier Bremner wrote, ‘interrogations took place to clear up a number of problems left over from World War II. The subjects were mainly prisoners of war, refugees and alleged war criminals.’
By the time Bremner wrote his report (1971), the Joint Services Interrogation Wing was training interrogators from the United States, Jordan, Israel (Occupied Palestine) Germany and Norway in the Five Techniques.

He penned, ‘our very simple system is admired’, while Hong Kong police, some detectives from Scotland Yard’s Special Branch and some MI5 officers also received training.

With an irony that appears to have passed Brigadier Bremner by, his report explains that the interrogation school also trained members of the British armed forces to resist interrogation, by showing them what they might expect at the hands of an unscrupulous enemy. EXTRACT: Cruel Britannia: A Secret History of Torture by Ian Cobain from the book All Lies Invasion II (Paperback / Ebook) by Mike Walsh

The book All Lies Invasion II (Paperback / Ebook) by Mike Walsh