Why ISD detainees won’t be sending LKY birthday greetings any time soon

From the accounts of Dr Lim Hock Siew, Ms Teo Soh Lung, Francis Seow and others, the ISD used the following techniques

standing against a wall for hours
hooding
subjection to noise
sleep deprivation
very little food and drink.

These are rough, very rough, though to be fair not as rough as “waterboarding” (a US favourite) or electric pods on genitals a Latin American, Russian favourite).

The ISD methods are very British techniques. I’ll let what a Brazilian interrogator sent to the UK learnt:

“The best thing … was psychological torture*. When a person was in a secret place, it was faster to obtain information. He also studied in other places but he said England was the best place to learn.”

Prof Glaucio Soares interviewed more than a dozen of Brazil’s top generals back in the 1990s. Several of them told him they sent officers to Germany, France, Panama and the US to learn about interrogation but they praised the UK as having the best method.

“The Americans teach, but the English are the masters in teaching how to wrench confessions under pressure, by torture, in all ways. England is the model of democracy. They give courses for their friends,” he was told by Gen Ivan de Souza Mendes – an interview recounted in the book Years of Lead which he co-authored with two other Brazilian academics.

Gen Aoyr Fiuza de Castro said the British recommend interrogating a prisoner when he was naked as it left him anguished and depressed, “a state favourable to the interrogator”.

The UK was apparently seen as having effective practices as it had faced a serious insurgency in Malaya up until 1960 and had latterly honed its techniques in Northern Ireland.

The method, using sensory deprivation coupled with high stress, has come to be known as the “Five Techniques”. These were:
standing against a wall for hours
hooding
subjection to noise
sleep deprivation
very little food and drink.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27625540

Maybe the most effective is isolation http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140514-how-extreme-isolation-warps-minds. Problem from perspective of interrogators is that this technique requires time, something they are often short off.

So can one really blame the ISD detainees, and the many S’poreans who refuse to wish LKY “Happy birthday”? Not that he would care. Like Darth Vader and his emperor, and other Sith Lords, LKY thrives on the hatred of those who hate him.

——

*O’Brien  in Orwell’s 1984 said

“By itself,” he said, “pain is not always enough. There are occasions when a human being will stand out against pain, even to the point of death. But for everyone there is something unendurable —  something that cannot be contemplated. Courage and cowardice are not involved. If you are falling from a height it is not cowardly to clutch at a rope. If you have come up from deep water it is not cowardly to fill your lungs with air. It is merely an instinct which cannot be destroyed. It is the same with the rats. For you, they are unendurable. They are a form of pressure that you cannot withstand, even if you wished to. You will do what is required of you.”

This could have been a British intelligence grandee or Special Brnch officer talking. Remember that Orwell was in the Burmese police force when Burma was British. And the British ruled an unruly empire, think Palestine, Egypt, India and Ireland.

Related highly commended video http://singaporerebel.blogspot.sg/2014/08/the-nature-of-paps-governance-is.html