The stunning news yesterday of the terrible things the CIA carried out under the George W. Bush administration, called then the “Enhanced Interrogation” programme and now finally called “torture”, is another example of what we are first told is not always 100% the truth.

All governments practice it, all large private corporations practice it, and none of it must be called “a pack of lies”, because in our Western society it is the norm, even when it is so far off of being 100% of the truth.

We all like to think our country’s leaders, the people we have elected, the ones who stood on a platform for open government and to be truthful will and are doing just that.

However, we don’t do it ourselves. We don’t always tell the truth.

Men are very honourable to men when men are not very honourable to their loved ones” is a saying I learnt as soon as I reached manhood. We know when a marriage is a lie but we go along with it. It is the norm.

However, there comes a time when even the norm, the lies, the final truth when told is shocking.

I have long believed we so called civilized people would never resort to the barbaric practices of torture the rest of the world, the 3^rd world carry out.

We hold up our hands in horror at the torture handed out to prisoners because we would never do such things. But we do, but our torture is sophisticated. It isn’t barbaric.

On the same day the report on torture carried out by America another report was announced in Brazil on military dictatorship’s abuse – see our story today “Brazil president weeps as she unveils report on military dictatorship’s abuses”.

Brazil. We shake our heads. Them. But if we read further where did the Brazilian military learn all these methods of torture from?

It was America and Britain. Britain? Brits don’t do that sort of thing. But we do. We just aren’t told we do.

From the aforementioned story published by the UK Guardian:

“In the 1970s, Brazilian officers were sent to London for training in torture techniques. A former president, General Ernesto Geisel, who ruled from 1974-79, is quoted as saying, “The English, in their secret service, acted with discretion. Our people, inexperienced and extroverted, did it openly. I don’t justify torture, but I recognise there are circumstances when the individual is impelled to practise torture, to obtain certain confessions and so avoid a greater evil.”

“The report also quotes former general Hugo de Andrade Abreu who said “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’.”

“In 1971 the “English system”, as it became known, was put into practice in Rio army HQ in Barão de Mesquita street, which had become a torture centre. Four new cubicles were built. One, lined with polystyrene and asbestos, was a “cold room”, another a “sound room”. A third was all white and the fourth, all black.

“Each cubicle was monitored to enable interrogators to listen to the prisoners’ heartbeats.

“They were variations on the techniques used by the British army against Irish terrorists,” said Amílcar Lobo, an army psychiatrist who worked in a torture centre at Petrópolis known as the ‘house of death’, “ they were destined to destructure the personality of the prisoners without touching them”.’

The English system!

How ironic two reports on torture that both America and Britain have practiced for decades come out on the same day.

And now because I don’t trust anything nor believe anything I am told is exactly the same I have to question how suddenly the US government has got religious about the mistreatment (the torture) of terror suspects.

It wouldn’t have anything to do with US President Barack Obama’s unpopularity and being ‘soft’ on the IS terrorist threat? Obama who accelerated the drone assassination programme….. I wonder what we in the West will say about that in years to come?

And nearer home do we believe everything we are told by our politicians?

Because what we are told now is not 100% the truth. And that is 100% the tru