[WIND BLOWING] For nearly 50 years, these men have been on a mission for truth and justice for themselves, their families and for humanity itself. All they ask is that what happened to them is readily recognized for what it was. The British government should wear the label of “torturer” on the international stage because that is exactly what they were. [MUSIC PLAYING] “Most people’s perception of torture is somebody getting physically brutalized. What happened to us was a program of techniques designed to break you mentally.” What’s wrong? Yeah? You don’t know who that is, do you? Nope.” [BELLS JINGLING] “Come on. That’s it. That’s you. That’s it girl. Oh, it’s OK. That’s us. That’s it girl. You get all twisted there, didn’t you? There we go. That’s the fastest living creature in the world. Aren’t you? That’s it girl. That’s it girl. Come on. That’s it girl. Come on. Sit up there. Near 50. Yeah, it is. She’s heavy, but she seems in good enough form. The two of them are the right weight but what’s unknown is whether they’ll like me enough to fly. From ’69 to ’71, Belfast was in turmoil.” “The British Army were on the streets, and they were hassling everybody.” “They didn’t have to charge them with anything, and some people spent many years in prison. Britain did that in all the places that they invaded.” [MUSIC PLAYING] “And yet, as a 19-, 20-year-old, I was out chasing girls. I’m trying to enjoy myself. I had been to a party, and I was walking up the street at 3:30 in the morning. As I got to the door, there was half a dozen soldiers pointing rifles at me. They marched me out onto the main road, where there was an army truck, and put me in the back of it. My mother and father spent that week going around hospitals and the morgue, looking for my body, because they were all convinced that I was dead. I was somewhere inside a building. And a hood was put on my head. My hands were pressed against the wall to tell me not to move. And I stood there. My arms started going numb because there was no blood flowing to them. So I took my hand down and as soon as I’d done that, there was batons coming at me from the back. And they battered me for three or four minutes. And then they put me back on the wall and emphasized my hands weren’t allowed to move. And that just went on and on and on.” [TICKING] [DOG BARKS] “Right. Get out. Get out.” “The whole point about working with birds like these is patience. They are captive bred. And it’s me that is getting it to the stage where it can fly free. Good girl. That’s you. Good girl. Hey, hey, hey. She’s on the ground, back this way.” [WIND BLOWING] “That’s her trying to train me. She’s looking at us now, waiting for me to spin because she knows that there’s food on it.” [COUGHS] “She’s in a dilemma: ‘I need the food, but if I go to him, is he going to kill me?’ That’s it girl. No?” “It’s a circular argument. You’re standing against the wall and in your head, you’re saying, ‘If I move, I’m getting battered to a pulp.’ But you don’t have any alternative because those batons that are hitting you are helping your blood circulate in your body. You get a feeling of relief because those batons that That’s the mental torture that was part of it. That’s all I wanted. Is that too bad? Settle down. It’s OK.” [WIND BLOWING] “I think that I must have fallen asleep. There was a soldier, and he kept trying to wake me up by standing on my left foot. Within a short period of time, I had no nails on my toes. It’s not a particularly pretty thing. Now all you do is squeeze it, and that’s the egg yolk out. It’s just to ensure that it’s meat that the birds get and not extra fat.” [BELLS JINGLING] “There we go. Come on. Good boy. Nope. Good boy. Good boy. That’s it boy. A falcon is the same as any one of us. It needs to survive. As long as it’s got enough food that it isn’t going to die, it doesn’t care about anything else. At one stage, I had pissed myself, [expletive] myself. And my mouth was like the Sahara Desert. And they put me down on the ground to try to give me a slice of dry bread. I wasn’t taking it.” [BELLS JINGLING] “Only thing that I was thinking of was, ‘They’re trying to kill me here.’ Are you going to settle here? [BELLS JINGLING] “Oh, that was a rise, shaking all his feathers into place so he’s ready to go. So he’d got all he wanted from me. There was no food left. So I’m [expletive] off. [BELLS JINGLING] The hood goes on, and he has no fear now. It’s the ostrich and their head in the sand. I can’t see anybody. I’m OK.” [BELLS JINGLING] [DOG BARKING] “You can hear our neighbor’s have a dog. And that’s all it [expletive] does. I can’t take noise. It’s one of the side effects that I still suffer from. My just — head closes down. Now, what was I going to do? Say, tea or coffee?” “Do you remember when the noise was introduced?” [STATIC] “At the beginning, it was only a noise in the background. That sound moves right between your ears. And you cannot get rid of it.” [MUSIC PLAYING] “You can’t think. You can’t — you don’t know your own name. You can’t — it’s there, and it overwhelms you. One of my last thoughts was, ‘This is the British government that’s doing this. There’s no way that they could allow me to live. So they are going to kill me.’ ‘Why am I suffering this, to die at the end of it?’ Well, my the plan was to hit my head off the pipe that was run along the bottom of the wall, hoping that I would break my neck and die. I cried because I didn’t die there. From that time on, everything became exaggerated. The beatings got worse, the noise overpowering. The loneliness was extreme. At some stage in there, they took me off the wall, obviously with a hood on, and brought me along a corridor, as I remember it, and brought me into a room and sat me down on a seat. And the hood was lifted to just my eyebrows. And he said, ‘Who do you know in the I.R.A.?’ I didn’t know nobody in the I.R.A. And I got battered, hood put on and trailed off. I was in prison for nine months before I was released to the psychiatric hospital. I kept having blackouts. I just collapsed. Whenever that was happening, I had been thinking about what had happened. The psychiatrist said it was a coping mechanism.” [MUSIC PLAYING] “When they’re saying, ‘It wasn’t torture. It’s just interrogation in depth,’ I get myself very angry about it because I know I was tortured. And I have never been charged with any offense in my life. I know that what happened to us is the justification for Britain and America, in particular, getting away with doing the same things, especially, I suppose, in Iraq.” [DOG BARKING] “Shut up.” [DOG GRUMBLING] “Working with the birds gives me access to peace and calm. Come on. Somewhere where I can relax on my own, that I can think thoughts not related to anything that I don’t want in my head. That’s a peace of mind to me. “As soon as you let that bird go, you’ll very quickly know whether it’s content to be with you or not.” [BELLS JINGLING] “Where the [expletive] did he go? He’s a half a kilometer away, 59 meters up. He’s flying about, happy as a pig in [expletive] over there. What the hell?” [BIRD WHISTLE] “If the bird is accepting you as part of its life, the bird gets flying, and it comes back. Here he comes.” [BELLS JINGLING] “I’m not in charge of the birds. The birds aren’t in charge of me. The thing merges into the one and I get that sense of freedom.”