Ian Cobain is a British journalist, best known for his investigation into torture perpetrated by agents of the United Kingdom government, and for his reporting on the culture of secrecy surrounding the British state, past
A journalist since the early 1980s, Cobain was the senior investigative reporter for The Guardian until August 2018. He has reported on six wars, including the 1991 Gulf War, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In September 2005, he revealed that the UK was supporting the CIA’s rendition programme and in 2006, when he joined the BNP as part of an undercover investigation, he ended up being appointed central London organiser for the party, a position he swiftly resigned. Cobain's 2012 book Cruel Britannia documents a remarkable continuity of British involvement in torture over the last six decades: in Palestine, during and after World War II, in Cyprus, Kenya, Northern Ireland and in extraordinary rendition in the War on Terror. David Hare described it as "one of the most shocking and persuasive books of the year", Peter Oborne in The Spectator said, "Carefully researched and well-written… should be congratulated for addressing a subject which much of the rest of Fleet Street has been determined to ignore", and the Sunday Times identified it as a "must-read" and declared it, "a fine study of the role Britain has played in the business of torture". The book won the Paddy Power/Total Politics Debut Political Book of the Year award. Throughout his journalistic career, Cobain has taken a close interest in the Troubles and the legacy of the conflict. As a result, in 2012, he was retained as an expert witness by lawyers seeking to overturn the murder conviction of Liam Holden, who had been the last man to be sentenced to hang in the UK before his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Also in 2012, Cobain investigated allegations of collusion between police and Loyalist paramilitary gunmen who had shot dead six men in a bar in the village of Loughinisland in 1994. A subsequent report by the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland confirmed that collusion. In 2014, Cobain drew upon contemporary police records, witness statements and pathologists’ reports to reconstruct events in Ballymurphy in west Belfast in August 1971, when nine men and one woman had been shot dead by British troops. A fresh inquest into the deaths was held between late 2018 and early 2020, and verdicts are awaited. , Cobain was a journalist at Middle East Eye.
Censorship
Cobain was rejected from attending the 2019 DSEI international arms sales fair in London Docklands, on the grounds that he tweeted messages unfavourable to the arms trade and DSEI, and because it was " he not write anything positive about DSEI".
