Brian Stewart and the five techniques
Former MP alludes to father's colonial role
Former Conservative MP Rory Stewart served as deputy coalition governor of the Iraqi provinces of Maysan and Dhi Qar in 2002-03, an assignment which contributed to allegations that he was an MI6 officer during his early Foreign Office career.1
Stewart did not address that claim directly in an interview with Novara Media’s Ash Sarkar on Sunday, but did get into other intelligence-related matters (from 57 minutes onwards) such as his past chairmanship of the spooky ginger group Le Cercle.
As Phil Miller has noted, he also discusses his father, Brian Stewart, stating that he ‘seemed to be open to the idea of torturing witnesses to get information.’
This immediate context was the elder Stewart’s time as a colonial officer during the Malayan Emergency of the 1950s, at the outset of a career in which he scaled the heights of MI6 and almost succeeded Maurice Oldfield as head of the service in the late 1970s.
But during his time as secretary of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) in the early 1970s, Brian Stewart was a forceful advocate of the use of colonial methods of interrogation in Northern Ireland. These were the so-called ‘five techniques’: ‘sparse diet’, sleep deprivation, hooding, white noise and wall-standing.2
Fourteen people were selected from the hundreds interned without trial during 1971 and subjected to the techniques, the so-called ‘hooded men’. This proved so controversial that the Heath government announced in March 1972 that the five techniques would be banned. In fact, however, a secret JIC directive allowed for their continued use.3
The Irish Government took the issue to the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled in 1978 that the five techniques were not torture but did constitute inhumane and degrading treatment.
The latter point was ignored by the Bush administration when it adopted the ruling as a blueprint for permissible interrogation practices during the War on Terror.4 US abuses contributed to renewed examination of the five techniques.
In 2009, academic Samantha Newbery found an intelligence assessment of the Northern Ireland interrogations, and published it together with a series of responses. One of these was from a ‘former intelligence practitioner’ - Brian Stewart.
I worked closely with Sir Dick White, Intelligence Coordinator and former Director General of MI5. We spent many an hour debating and drafting on the subject of the controversial Northern Ireland techniques addressed in the document published above. He, like many of my Malaysian colleagues, insisted that pressure was not required; skilled interrogators backed by a good team would do the trick. But they all ignored the fact that the Malayan Special Branch and MI5 successes had been achieved in times of war, when they had at their disposal a formidable range of carrots and sticks.5
While his son has taken a very different position on the issue, a certain forthrightness does seem to be a family trait. The same cannot be said of the British Government, which rather than engage in critical reflection on its past policies in Northern Ireland, has sought to control the record through the Northern Ireland (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act.
Hélène Mulholland, Rory Stewart acknowledges his career gives appearance he worked for MI6, The Guardian, 8 November 2010.
Ian Cobain, Cruel Britannia: A Secret History of Torture, Portobello Books, 2012, p.130.
Ian Cobain, Cruel Britannia: A Secret History of Torture, Portobello Books, 2012, p.163.
Patrick Corrigan, Belfast and Beyond, Amnesty International UK, 9 December 2014.
Samantha Newbery , Bob Brecher , Philippe Sands & Brian Stewart (2009) Interrogation, Intelligence and the Issue of Human Rights, Intelligence and National Security, 24:5, 631-643,