For those who were shocked/concerned by the torture of Iraq civilians by UK soldiers in my posts/video last week, please also see what happened in:

Kenya https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mau_Mau_Uprising#British_war_crimes

Hooded Men, Northern Ireland
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_techniques

The UK, like most other states, will torture when it can get away with it

UK is not exceptional

For more, see @IanCobain's brilliant and disturbing Cruel Britannia, one of the most important books you may ever read https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B008YJAA5O 

And then ask yourself: just why is the UK seeking to make it more difficult to prosecute its personnel for the war crime of torture?

Torture and the UK State

"The British government recognises that Kenyans were subjected to torture at the hands of the colonial administration"

A lefty lawyer?

No, a Conservative Foreign Secretary

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/uk-compensate-kenya-mau-mau-torture

Admissions, not allegations

There is no need for hyperbole, nor mere accusation

A careful compendium of official documents, government admissions, judicial findings and public records is enough to show UK state has long used, benefited from, or been complicit in torture

Repeatedly

'It can't happen here'

The histories of the law and practice both of slavery and of torture are enough to undermine any UK exceptionalism

Both are obscured by lucky accident, yet both are as horrible as many other countries

But, to use a word, they have been 'erased'

Erased by red ink on a world map

For example of use of contemporaneous court judgments showing practice of torture by UK state, see the 1954 references here at para 126 https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/QB/2011/1913.html

Seem familiar?

Kenya > Northern Ireland > Iraq

See how UK state keeps doing it, while pretending to be exceptional?

"interrogation centres and prisons to which the Queen's subjects whether innocent or guilty are led by armed men without warrant and detained and as it seems tortured until they confess to the alleged crimes"

Criminal court judgment, 1954

Governor General of Kenya was Evelyn Baring

Am not concerned with Baring's relatives - nobody can help their ancestors

What *is* worth noting is that even though London fully aware of the torture in Kenya, he was made a hereditary baron and, in 1972, a Knight of the Garter.

The KG (of which there is a strict limit on numbers) is the highest honour the UK state can give an English person (other than a VC/GC), plus a rare hereditary peerage

That is how ashamed the UK state was at the torture in Kenya

That is, not at all

And that 1972 KG for Baring was well-timed, as similar techniques were then being used by the UK state on civilians in Northern Ireland