Torture

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba - US military prosecutors allege that Ahmed al-Darbi has met with Osama bin Laden, trained at an Al Qaeda terrorist camp, and plotted to blow up a ship in the Strait of Hormuz or off Yemen. But the government may never be able to bring those allegations to court because of the torture the prisoner said he suffered in US custody in Afghanistan. Darbi said American troops subjected him to beatings, excruciating shackling, painfully loud music, isolation, and threats of rape, according to a new affidavit obtained by the Associated Press.

The Rio de Janeiro state government said Friday it will apologize to Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff for the human rights abuses she suffered during the country's 1961-1985 dictatorship. Rousseff is a former leftist guerrilla who spent three years in prison during the dictatorship and was tortured. Paula Pinto, a spokeswoman for Rio's Social Assistance and Human Rights Department, said Rousseff is one of 120 people who will receive apologies from governor Sergio Cabral on June 4 for the imprisonment and torture they or their relatives suffered in the state.

TEHRAN - An Iranian opposition leader yesterday released what he said was an account by a prisoner raped by his jailers, in a challenge to the country’s leadership, which has sought to silence claims of torture and abuses in the postelection crackdown. The allegations of torture and even rape being used against imprisoned opposition protesters have become a source of embarrassment to the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Iran’s clerical leadership as they try to put behind them the turmoil of the disputed June presidential election.

A former Navy man is being detained under a suicide watch after being charged with torturing his wife in their home for nearly five hours. The Day of New London reports ( http://bit.ly/K4RZA0) that 36-year-old James Tapp of Groton was charged Monday with kidnapping, cruelty to persons, assault and other crimes. The woman told police the ordeal began at about 11:30 p.m. Sunday and ended at about 5 a.m. Monday. She alleges Tapp beat her, squeezed her finger with pliers, threatened to shoot her and threatened to slice her from ear to ear with a knife.

At about the 47th minute of "Hostel: Part II" Heather Matarazzo is hanging upside down and naked from the high ceiling of a very old dungeon. Her mouth is gagged, but her grunts, cries, and squeals are unmistakable. A woman enters the room, removes her robe, and slips into the tub, right beneath the younger woman dangling above her. She raises up a scythe and proceeds to draw herself a blood bath. We can see the woman in the tub covered in red. We can see her writhe in ecstasy.

FRAMINGHAM - In the darkness stands a crowd of agitated people. When you walk between them, at their center you find a man, naked except for a black bag over his head. He would easily be the tallest in the room if he stood up. But he is kneeling, with his hands pulled behind him and tied to a post. And he is shot full of arrows. So it goes in Ana Maria Pacheco's haunting sculptural installation "Dark Night of the Soul" at the Danforth Museum. Though completed in 1999 and inspired by the figure of St. Sebastian, this wood passion play viscerally conjures up the specter of American torture...

President Barack Obama says the interrogation technique known as waterboarding constitutes torturing, disputing Republican presidential candidates who say they would reinstate the practice. Obama called waterboarding "torture" and said it was "contrary to America's traditions" during a news conference at the Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit. Republicans Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann said during a Republican debate on Saturday that they would reinstate the technique that former President George W. Bush authorized and Obama banned.

NEW YORK - For sale soon: a variety of torture devices from the 16th century, including "shame masks" to enforce silence, a 14-foot table-like rack to stretch the victim's body, and a "tongue tearer" to punish blasphemers and heretics. Even an executioner's sword. New York's Guernsey auction house plans to auction the privately owned collection, with proceeds to go to Amnesty International and other organizations committed to preventing torture, said Guernsey's president, Arlan Ettinger.

BEIJING -- He Depu, a Chinese democracy activist, was forced to lie still on a bed in a cold room for 85 days. Others told of being beaten with electric batons or sticks, and of sleepless interrogations that went on for weeks. The UN's first torture investigator to visit China said yesterday that torture, while on the decline, is still widespread. During the landmark two-week visit, Manfred Nowak met 30 detainees held in Beijing, Tibet, and the Muslim-majority region of Xinjiang.

WASHINGTON -- In a symbolic move, the House yesterday endorsed a Senate-passed ban on cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment of foreign terrorism suspects as negotiations between the White House and Senator John McCain over the provision appeared at an impasse. Approved 308 to 122, the procedural vote puts political pressure on House negotiators -- but does not require them -- to include in a military spending bill the ban and another provision standardizing interrogation techniques used by US troops.

KABUL - Three relatives of a 15-year-old girl received 10-year prison sentences for torturing and imprisoning her for five months because she refused to become a prostitute, the girl's lawyer and government and humanitarian officials said late Thursday. The three defendants in the case of the Afghan girl, Sahar Gul, have appealed the judgment. Her case attracted widespread attention in Afghanistan when she was released in December by the local police from a filthy basement bathroom in northern Baghlan Province where her husband and his family had kept her without adequate food or water.

The in-laws of a child bride who became the bruised and bloodied face of women's rights in Afghanistan have been sentenced to 10 years in prison for torture, abuse and human rights violations, a judge said Saturday. The plight of 15-year-old Sahar Gul captivated the nation and set off a storm of international condemnation when it came to light in late December. Officials said her husband's family kept her in a basement for six months after her arranged marriage, ripping out her fingernails, breaking her fingers and torturing her with hot irons in an attempt to force her into...

An appeals court on Wednesday tossed out a convicted terrorist's lawsuit accusing a high-ranking Bush administration lawyer who wrote the so-called "torture memos" of authorizing illegally harsh treatment of "enemy combatants. " Former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo is protected from such lawsuits because the law defining torture and the treatment of enemy combatants was unsettled in the two years after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, when the memos were written, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said.

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Wednesday that the family of a US citizen killed during a visit to the West Bank may not sue the Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization under a 1991 federal law, the Torture Victim Protection Act. The law allows civil lawsuits against "an individual" who engages in torture or killings, and the question in the case was whether that term could apply not only to people but...

Testimony about torture aboard a hijacked German ship off the coast of Somalia is expected to resume during a federal piracy trial in Virginia. A Ukranian crewmember aboard the Marida Marguerite told jurors Wednesday he was tortured in 2010 by Somali pirates. The testimony was heard in the case of Mohammad Saaili Shibin, who's been charged with piracy, hostage-taking and other federal charges in connection with the ship's hijacking. Shibin also faces charges in the hijacking of an American yacht in which all four passengers were shot and killed.

The tortured and bound bodies of seven men were dumped in a Pacific port city along with messages signed by a drug gang, authorities said Thursday. The Michoacan state prosecutors' office said each victim's head was covered with a black plastic bag and had a bullet wound in the back of the neck. Police found posters with threatening messages from the New Generation gang, an ally of Mexico's powerful Sinaloa Cartel. The killings in the port of Lazaro Cardenas came only two days after nine bodies were found in other Michoacan towns, also with messages signed by New Generation.

The Rio de Janeiro state government said Friday it will apologize to Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff for the human rights abuses she suffered during the country's 1961-1985 dictatorship. Rousseff is a former leftist guerrilla who spent three years in prison during the dictatorship and was tortured. Paula Pinto, a spokeswoman for Rio's Social Assistance and Human Rights Department, said Rousseff is one of 120 people who will receive apologies from governor Sergio Cabral on June 4 for the imprisonment and torture they or their relatives suffered in the state.

NEW YORK — It was an ordeal that lasted 19 hours. In that span, a man bound a Columbia University graduate student in her apartment, raped her, doused her with hot water and bleach, slit her eyelids, and finally set a fire before fleeing, police said. Police have pressed a manhunt for the assailant in the week since the attack, with investigators hoping DNA evidence and a $12,000 reward for a tip leading to an arrest would produce fresh leads. The victim, who managed to free herself before the fire spread, was still in the hospital yesterday, police said.

In the entire Museum of Fine Arts, there cannot be many pictures more compelling than this. It's an unusual version of an old standby of Christian iconography, "Christ as the Man of Sorrows. " Everything about it forces your attention. It is, to begin with, shockingly graphic: There are at least nine separate streams of blood flowing from Christ's forehead alone. His muscular torso is a gruesome mess. And notice the way the blood coming from the wounds on his left arm seems to trickle upward, against gravity: It's a device to remind us of Christ's recent agony; it suggests he has only recently...

A California man accused of killing an 18-year-old man during a meth high has been found guilty of first-degree murder and torture. Robert Gardner is facing up to 25 years to life in prison in the December 2009 death of 18-year-old Eric Bean. He was convicted Thursday. Authorities say Bean was hogtied and tortured for hours before another defendant in the case, Timothy Delosreyes III, put a dagger in his mouth and stepped on it. Bean choked on his own blood. Also charged were Delosreyes's father and Gardner's wife.