Late Night Thoughts on torture:
The woman was naked. She had been raped and beaten repeatedly and her body was a mass of bruises. Now she was being strapped into a metal bed. Electrodes were introduced into her vagina and anus.
“Dear God, dear God, dear God” she repeated again and again.
Her torturer reached out, grabbed a torn breast, and twisted and squeezed until she screamed, a high wail of anguish.
“There’s no God here.”
Sometimes in the 1990s I was unfortunate enough to be assigned to help a professor researching torture by Latin-american right wing squads. After a while, I made it a policy to try to copy documents without reading them. That particular paragraph came, I think, from a Colombian survivors’ report, but I can’t swear to it. What I can tell you is that it has stuck in my mind for more than twelve years and I still wake up screaming from time to time.
There’s No God Here.
After the capture of Khalid Sheik Mohammed many bloggers have expressed their disinterest in the methods of his interrogation. Some, in fact, seem downright delighted that he would be tortured. We need to know what he’s planning. He killed thousands of us. He deserves it.