Why Barack Obama turned to Winston Churchill to condemn torture

By Gideon Swift | Published: April 30, 2009

When Barack Obama recruited Winston Churchill into the debate over CIA interrogation techniques, recalling that he never stooped to torture even in Britain’s darkest hour, something about his remarks struck me as oddly familiar.

In his press conference on Wednesday night, the President referred to “an article that I was reading the other day talking about the fact that the British during World War II, when London was being bombed to smithereens, had 200 or so detainees. And Churchill said, ‘We don’t torture’, when the entire British — all of the British people were being subjected to unimaginable risk and threat.”

The diligent American press corps immediately set out to find out which article the President was referring to. The Huffington Post duly tracked down a posting by the British-born journalist Andrew Sullivan on The Atlantic website entitled “Churchill v. Cheney”. Sure enough, that article quoted extensively from an article I had written back in 2006, about Colonel Robin “Tin-Eye” Stephens, the monocled commander of Camp 020, Britain’s wartime interrogation centre, who banned violent interrogation techniques against captured spies.

In two small steps, through the magical Chinese whispers of the internet, a three-year-old article and a hitherto obscure British intelligence officer had morphed suddenly into US government policy.