[Peace-discuss] Britain Taught Brazilian Dictatorship to Torture

[David Johnson via Peace-discuss]

Britain Taught Brazilian Dictatorship to Torture

Description: Britain Taught Brazilian Dictatorship to Torture

 
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Published 11 December 2014 (2 hours 17 minutes ago) 

Brazilian interrogators learned techniques from the British army, who had
mastered their psychological torturing skills on suspected republicans in
Northern Ireland.

British army officers trained Brazilian police in torture methods, perfected
in Northern Ireland against people opposing British rule there, a report
into human rights abuses during the dictatorship revealed.

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, who was tortured herself by the regime
in the 1970s, wept as she
<http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Brazil-Truth-Commission-Reveals-Dicta
torships-Atrocities-20141210-0021.html> presented the 2,000 page Truth
Commission document Wednesday, which confirmed that 191 were killed and 243
disappeared.

Not only did Brazilian officials travel to the UK to learn the "English
System," but the study also shows that British officers returned the visit,
teaching extreme interrogation at Brazilian police headquarters.

"At the end of 1970 we sent a group of army officers to England to learn the
English system of interrogation. This consists of putting the prisoner in a
cell incommunicado, a method known as the 'refrigerator'," the report quotes
former general Hugo de Andrade Abreu.

Psychological torture techniques were adopted that the British mastered in
Northern Ireland, designed to destabilize the suspect to the point of
admitting to a crime.

"They were variations on the techniques used by the British army against
Irish terrorists," said Amilcar Lobo, an army psychiatrist who worked in a
torture center nick-named the 'house of death', "they were destined to
destructure the personality of the prisoners without touching them."

Though more subtle, the study also uncovered British admission of
involvement in the scheme, as well as the desire to disassociate themselves
from it. The practices that the British taught Brazil were banned by Prime
Minister Edward Heath in 1972, deemed too barbaric.

The Brazilian report, which took three years to complete, contains a secret
letter from the British ambassador of the time, David Hunt. He wrote in
1972, "As you know, I think, they have in the past been influenced by
suggestions and advice emanating from us; but this connection no longer
exists ... It is important that knowledge of this fact should be
restricted."

Another British official in Brazil, Sir Alan Munro, also alluded to the
Northern Ireland link. "If the Brazilians were looking for techniques of
interrogation used by British authorities, the example would have been the
early years of Northern Ireland. This would have been undertaken on a
Brazilian initiative, and the extent that it might reduce the most brutal
methods, it would have been a step in the right direction," he said to
investigators.

Brazil was under an authoritarian military dictatorship from 1964 until
1985.

 

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