"Hey - I've Been Tortured Too !"

The Guardian once again gives column space to Gerry Adams. No one should be surprised by the hypocrisy of the Sinn Fein/IRA front man. But how sad it is that the Guardian thinks he's a suitable person to expound on the morality of torture or ill-treatment.

"News of the ill-treatment of prisoners in Iraq created no great surprise in republican Ireland." says the MP for West Belfast. "We have seen and heard it all before. Some of us have even survived that type of treatment."

Quite - some of us have meted it out, too, but with a difference. If Adams, McGuinness and Danny Morrison's boys - Sinn Fein/IRA's internal security department (aka 'the nutting squad') get you, you don't survive unless you're rescued quickly.

"In January 1990, Sandy Lynch, an IRA volunteer who had been passing information to the RUC, was rescued by police as he was being interrogated in an IRA safe house in the Lenadoon district of West Belfast by members of the nutting squad. According to Lynch's court testimony, an interrogator called Fred Scappatici told him he would prefer to carry out the questioning in South Armagh, which he called God's Country. 'He (Scappatici) said that if I didn't admit to being a tout (informer) I'd get a jab in the a**e and wake up in south Armagh and he'd be able to talk to me the way he wanted, hung upside down in a cattle shed' said Lynch. 'He said it didn't matter about me screaming because no one would be able to hear.' As Lynch resigned himself to a terrible death, the RUC raided the house and rescued him. Among those arrested was Danny Morrison, Sinn Fein's director of publicity, who was known within the IRA as the Lord Chief Justice because because he held the power of life and death over an informer. Fred Scappatici was acquitted due to lack of evidence."

"On 30th June 1992, the bodies of three Portadown volunteers were dumped in South Armagh after they had been shot dead following interrogations lasting over a week. One had been tortured with a red-hot poker and another with cigarette burns."

According to Eamonn Collins, himself later abducted and killed by the Provisonals, most victims would tell their captors exactly what they wanted to hear and beg for their lives. In 1982 a part time UDR sergeant was abducted, his body found a week later. 'A man called Kieran told me that the poor b***** volunteered everything,' said Collins. 'He just p***** himself. They wanted information, they got it. They wanted to know the names of other personnel, he told them. But they still shot the guy dead'.

Dressed in a blue boiler suit, the body was still warm: the blood-sodden head was bound over the eyes with brown plastic tape and wrapped in a black bin liner.
The Derry volunteer (Paddy Flood, an IRA bombmaker) had maintained his innocence for seven weeks before 'admitting' what his interrogators had accused him of .... An Army intelligence officer said that he believed the IRA had been tricked by RUC Special Branch into thinking Flood was an informer. A senior Special Branch officer ... indicated that Flood had never been an informer. 'Every man has his limits and in the end he just told the boys what they wanted to hear.'

Information from Toby Harnden's 'Bandit Country - The IRA and South Armagh'