Around The Torture World In 80-Seconds

I didn’t notice any of these recent stories at Amnesty International, so I decided to take a quick tour of current events in the world of torture.

This Algerian held at Guantanamo would rather stay there than be returned home.

Some of the tortures at Guantanamo were described by this prisoner.

[H]e complained of mistreatment that ranged from having his beard forcibly shaved and spending weeks without sunlight to the poor quality of the camp's weekly newsletter

Meanwhile,

The same media hacks that brought us countless images of Spc. Lynndie England doing her best John Dillinger imitation with an Iraqi prisoner while covering the Abu Ghraib scandal have suddenly gone mute on the release last week by US military officials of a graphic al-Qaeda torture manual that provides illustrations and instructions on how to use hammers, blow torches and meat cleavers to extract information from their victims in Iraq.

Decades later, this Khmer Rouge honcho is now the first brought to trial.

Duch, 62, also known as Kaing Guek Eav, headed the S-21 prison in Phnom Penh, a virtual slaughterhouse where some 16,000 suspected enemies of the regime were tortured before being taken out to what later became known as "killing fields" near the city….

Even before the Khmer Rouge came to power, he ran a prison for the group in the jungle, where suspected enemies were held and executed.

In Zimbabwe, “President Robert Mugabe's ruling ZANU PF party has begun
re-establishing torture camps to intimidate the opposition ahead of next
year's watershed elections…”

Russia may be reverting to its old ways.

Russian psychiatrists warned yesterday that the Kremlin was preparing to revive the Soviet practice of locking up dissidents in asylums after an opposition activist was forcibly incarcerated at a mental health clinic.

Larisa Arap, a member of United Civil Front, which is led by Garry Kasparov, the former chess champion, was beaten, chained to a bed, and repeatedly injected with drugs after she was detained in the northern city of Murmansk on July 5, opposition officials said.

And, in Libya graphic descriptions emerge.

I was locked into a room with three dogs during the first few days. They ordered the animals to attack me. My leg is covered with scars from their bites. I had a large hole in my knee….

One of the things they did was to wrap bare wire around my penis. Then they would drag me around a room that was at least 40 by 40 meters. I screamed and cried.
One of the most excruciating things was their electric torture machine -- a manually operated box that works like a generator. They would attach the negative cable to a finger and the positive cable to one of my ears or my genitals….

'I Am Ashamed about the Things they Did to the Women'
Sometimes we were tortured in the same room. I saw them half-naked and they saw me completely naked when I was being given the electroshocks. We heard each other whimpering, crying and screeching. Kristiana was hung up on a window while they put me on an iron pallet and applied the electroshocks. I am ashamed to talk about all the things they did to the women. They were raped. Kristiana was forced to put a bottle in her vagina. At one point Nasya, who couldn't stand it anymore, broke off a piece of window glass and slit her wrist. They took her to the hospital, under a false name, and then they brought her back to our torture chamber.

My cell was so small that I couldn't lie down. For one year I slept with my legs pulled up to my chest, leaning against the wall of the cell….

Bruce Kesler