>...Last week, before the full impact of Abu Ghraib had been felt, there was a story in the New York Times about two of the post-9/11 detainees. Javaid Iqbal, a Pakistani who was married and American, and an Egyptian resident named Ehab Elmaghraby were both arrested without charges and held in solitary confinement in a federal detention centre.
I quote from Nina Bernstein's story about their lawsuit: 'The men were repeatedly slammed into walls and dragged across the floor while shackled and manacled, kicked and punched until they bled, cursed as "terrorists" and "Muslim bastards" and subjected to multiple unnecessary body-cavity searches, including one during which correction officers inserted a flashlight in Mr Elmaghraby's rectum, making him bleed.'
Sounds familiar? Yes, but this was Brooklyn not Abu Ghraib, and the story, which received very little attention at the beginning of last week, should lead Americans to wonder if there is not something rotten beginning to take hold at the heart of their state. http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,1212627,00.html
Late 80's or so Salim Muwakkil of In These Times had a series on torture routinely applied in a Chicago PD precinct. AIUSA had a report. NYRB had a good piece on these electroshock devices and US prisons. In numerous books on the Vietnam War (see esp. the great volume that has just been reprinted, my high school library had a copy, "Vietnam, Inc.") torture of VC suspects was done by these hand cranked telephones in the field, application of electricity to the balls.
http://www.amnestyusa.org/rightsforall/stun/cruelty/cruelty-1.html The Stun Belt: Control Through Fear ...In recent decades, torture by mains electricity or hand-operated generators has occurred in many countries. In the USA, for example, an investigation of Tucker Prison Farm, Arkansas, in 1966 revealed a hand- cranked telephone device used to torture inmates by electric shock. In 1989, allegations of systematic torture in Area 2 police station in Chicago carried out over a 20-year period came to light, involving at least 60 suspects who reported torture methods including electric shocks from a hand-operated generator. In February 1999, a coalition of lawyers and activists called for an investigation into the cases of 10 of the 60 who remain on death row, saying their prosecutions were built on confessions obtained by torture.
http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/pen-l/2001m03.2/msg00116.htm AIUSA report, Chapter 8, US Arms Exports
-- Michael Pugliese