Torture

"Mad Dog" is back. Reputed mob hit man Anthony "Mad Dog" DiPasquale, 58, acquitted of two killings in 1966 and one in 1973, a suspect in "numerous unsolved murders," and an extortionist who beat victims with bars, bottles and pipes until they paid up, moved into a federal half-way house in Philadelphia on Monday. After serving 15 years of an 80-year federal sentence, he'll be released from the half-way house on Dec. 22, according to Thomas Kowalski, of the U.S. Parole Commission.

When the Singapore government recently sentenced an 18-year-old American to six lashes on the buttocks for vandalism, smug local officials called the punishment an example of their superior values. According to polls, many Americans agree that the punishment fits the crime, although they may not realize that flogging Singapore-style means tying the victim down on a trestle and ripping open his flesh with a wetted rattan cane. I call that torture (though I have no problem with the vandal serving time in a Singapore jail)

Well, I guess that settles that. "We do not torture," said President Bush on Nov. 7. Never mind all those torture pictures from Abu Ghraib. Never mind all those torture stories from Guant?namo Bay. Never mind the 2002 Justice Department memo that sought to justify torture. Never mind reports of U.S. officials sending detainees to other countries for torture. Never mind Dick Cheney lobbying to exempt the CIA from rules prohibiting torture. "We do not torture," said the President.

WHAT MIGHT HAVE happened if, last spring, President Obama hadn't blocked congressional hearings into the Bush administration's authorization of torture - or even a milder "truth commission" - that then was supported by 62 percent of the American people? Would Dick Cheney, sure to have been top on the list of those investigated, now be taking every opportunity to undermine the current commander in chief? Would the White House be scurrying to explain that Obama does too use the words "war" and "terror" enough?

AFTER THE photos from Abu Ghraib sickened the nation and the world last year, George W. Bush assured us that it was merely the work of "a few bad apples," and that "this country does not believe in torture. " In fact, on June 26, 2004, in a statement commemorating the U.N. International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, Bush proclaimed that "freedom from torture is an inalienable human right, and we are committed to building a world where human rights are respected and protected by the rule of law. " Those are some noble words, George.

Amnesty International accused Egypt today of torturing detainees, many of them Muslim fundamentalists, and it quoted some of those freed as saying they were whipped, hung by their wrists, given electric shocks and sexually abused. The human rights group urged President Hosni Mubarak's government to protect political detainees from torture by prison officials and ensure them prompt access to lawyers, relatives and doctors. "The torture testimony has been consistent and prompts the conclusion that there is a pattern of torture in Egypt," it said in a 40-page report.

I DON'T always agree with Michael Smerconish, but generally find him to be intelligent and thoughtful. Unfortunately, he and many otherwise intelligent and thoughtful people persist in the delusion that torture, as practiced by the U.S., should be referred to as "enhanced interrogation techniques. " EIT, as defined by the infamous Yoo/Bybee memo, included not just waterboarding, prolonged stress positions and sleep deprivation, but also gouging eyes out, dousing with acid, slitting an ear, nose, or lip, and disabling a limb.

"Somebody tell me frankly, what times are these, what kind of world, what country?" THESE words come from a poem about torture that Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman composed during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. But they resonate through the seemingly daily revelations from government and military reports of the abuse of prisoners by Americans in Guantanamo, Afghanistan and Iraq. They fit all too well the testimony of those whom the CIA allegedly delivered to countries where they were tortured.

IWAS DEEPLY disturbed by your otherwise-excellent editorial titled "Rumsfeld must go" to see that you believe that "Torture has a place in the fight against terrorism. " What exactly is this place? According to one of the many Bush government explanations of its presence in Iraq, the U.S. attacked Iraq to free its people from the tyrant Saddam, who had tortured and killed thousands. Now we are saying that torture is all right as long as we are the ones doing it? And as long as the victim is a bona-fide terrorist?

BENGHAZI, Libya - Doctors Without Borders has suspended its work in prisons in the Libyan city of Misrata, saying torture was so rampant some detainees were taken there for care only to make them fit for further interrogation, the group said Thursday. The announcement was compounded by a statement from Amnesty International, which said it had recorded widespread prisoner abuse in other cities as well, leading to the death of several inmates. The allegations, which come more than three months after former leader Moammar Gadhafi was captured and killed, were an embarrassment to the governing National Transitional Council, which is struggling to establish its authority in the divided nation.

CAIRO - An international rights group on Saturday accused the Egyptian armed forces of beating and torturing protesters arrested during antimilitary demonstrations early this month, and said that by permitting such actions the military "enables further abuse. " The three days of street clashes in Cairo that began May 2 and left nine civilians dead were the latest in a string of deadly confrontations between the military and protesters in Egypt since a council of ruling generals took power 15 months ago. In its violent crackdown on the May demonstrations outside the Defense Ministry, the military arrested more than 300 people and referred them to military tribunals.

THE PHRASE was coined after a particularly gruesome loss to the Padres in April 2010. The San Francisco Giants were defeated in the most inglorious fashion, allowing San Diego exactly one hit while losing, 1-0. "Giants baseball," Duane Kuiper, their longtime announcer, said on the air the next day. Then, pausing for effect: "Torture. " The Phillies began the final game of a three-game series Sunday with the same sort of odor surrounding them. The previous night, facing a San Diego team with the second-worst record in baseball and its most tepid lineup, they had managed one hit in 10 opportunities with runners in scoring position, left 12 batters on base, and again wasted a winning effort by their ace, Roy Halladay, in a 2-1 loss.

The one-year anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden has reignited public debate over the effectiveness of harsh interrogation techniques in U.S. antiterrorism efforts. The discussion is welcomed by an ex-CIA official who has published a book defending controversial interrogation techniques such as simulated drowning, also known as water boarding, as needed to save American lives. That might have been the case when fictional spy Jack Bauer would save the day on the old TV series 24, but top officials, including Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, have dismissed the notion that torture produced the intelligence that led to bin Laden's lair.

The Raven opens with Edgar Allan Poe near death on a Baltimore park bench, which conforms to what historians know about the writer's final moments. Circumstances surrounding Poe's death remain a mystery, but The Raven offers its version - we see that not long before, Poe had been trying to get money out of a newspaper publisher, which would kill just about anybody. Poe, as we learn in The Raven, was not just the genius inventor of the detective story, the proto-Goth poet, nor the swooning balladeer to the departed.

The Bucks County District Attorney said Monday that he will seek the death penalty for a Bristol Township man charged with the torture and murder of an 18-month-year-old Bensalem girl. "This is a terrible, terrible tragedy," David Heckler said before the arraignment for Adrian Morgan Allen. "We contend this was an intentional killing, first-degree murder. " The child, called B.A. in court documents, died on March 7, 10 days after she was taken to St. Mary Medical Center unconscious with a severe head injury that required emergency surgery.

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court sounded prepared Tuesday to shield multinational corporations from being sued in the United States for allegedly violating human rights in other countries. The justices heard arguments in a suit brought against the Royal Dutch Petroleum Co. by Nigerian survivors of atrocities carried out by the Nigerian regime in the oil-rich delta region. The suit alleges that the Dutch oil company aided the regime. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy opened by stating that no nation allows for suits against foreign corporations for actions that took place outside its territory.

WASHINGTON - As the city of Homs shuddered Thursday from another day of Syrian army bombardments, U.N. investigators held regime officials and military commanders "at the highest levels" responsible for "crimes against humanity and other gross human-rights violations" against civilians and opposition groups. Although it did not name individuals, the U.N. Human Rights Council report effectively accused Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his top aides of directing, as a matter of state policy, a "widespread and systematic" campaign of murder, torture, and illegal detention aimed at smothering the 11-month-old uprising against more than four decades of Assad family rule.

BENGHAZI, Libya - Doctors Without Borders has suspended its work in prisons in the Libyan city of Misrata, saying torture was so rampant some detainees were taken there for care only to make them fit for further interrogation, the group said Thursday. The announcement was compounded by a statement from Amnesty International, which said it had recorded widespread prisoner abuse in other cities as well, leading to the death of several inmates. The allegations, which come more than three months after former leader Moammar Gadhafi was captured and killed, were an embarrassment to the governing National Transitional Council, which is struggling to establish its authority in the divided nation.

The Leopard By Jo Nesbø Translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett Knopf. 517 pp. $26.95   The horror, the horror. Joseph Conrad knew the savagery simmering in the heart of darkness, and Norwegian noir-master Jo Nesbø returns and returns to it because his mission is to show readers just how depraved human beings can be, and how noirer than noir a Norwegian author can be in this, our global village of crime fiction. At the heart of The Leopard is not a leopard, but a Leopold's Apple - a torture device designed by a 19th-century Belgian to scare the diamonds out of recalcitrant black warlords in the Congo.

LONDON - An extremist cleric described as one of Europe's leading al-Qaeda operatives should not be deported to face terrorism charges in Jordan because of the risk that evidence obtained through torture would be used against him, Europe's highest court ruled Tuesday. After a six-year legal battle, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that deporting Abu Qatada from Britain, where he is in prison custody, would "give rise to a flagrant denial of justice. " Abu Qatada, whose real name is Omar Mahmoud Mohammed Othman, is an extremist Muslim preacher from Jordan who has been described in Spanish and British courts as a leading al-Qaeda figure in Europe.