the British Army and the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) waterboarding suspected Irish Republican Army (IRA) members. Former RUC interrogators who were active during the Troubles claimed that waterboarding, among other forms of torture, were systematically used against suspected IRA members in police custody. In October 1972, Liam Holden was arrested by members of the Parachute Regiment on the suspicion of being an IRA sniper who had killed a British paratrooper, Frank Bell. He was convicted the next year of the crime and sentenced to be executed, largely on the basis of an unsigned confession produced by a range of torture techniques, including waterboarding. Holden's death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment and he spent 17 years in prison. On 21 June 2012, in the light of CCRC investigations which confirmed that the methods used to extract a confession from Holden were unlawful, he had his conviction quashed by the Court of Appeal in Belfast and was cleared of murder. Apartheid in the Union of South Africa The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission received testimony from Charles Zeelie and Jeffrey Benzien, officers of the South African Police under Apartheid, that they used waterboarding, referred to as "tubing", or the "wet bag technique" on political prisoners as part of a wide range of torture methods to extract information. Specifically, a cloth bag was wet and placed over victim's heads, to be removed only when they were near asphyxiation; the procedure was repeated several times. The TRC concluded that the act constituted torture and a gross human rights violation, for which the state was responsible. U.S. military survival training Until 2007, all special operations units in all branches of the U.S. military and the CIA's Special Activities Division employed the use of waterboarding as part of survival school (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) training, to psychologically prepare soldiers for the possibility of being captured by enemy forces. By 2002, many branches of the military had backed away from waterboarding trainees, at least in part "because it hurt morale", and in November 2007 the practice was banned by the Department of Defense because it "provided no instructional or training benefit to the student". John Yoo, former deputy assistant attorney general under President Bush stated that the United States has subjected 20,000 of its troops to waterboarding as part of SERE training prior to deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan. Dr. Jerald Ogrisseg, former head