Torture

Two young Camden boys were abducted and put through a day of torture that included being attacked by a pit bull terrier, police say, because their torturers believed the boys had stolen their cocaine stash. Throughout it all, police said, drugs continued to be sold to customers who came in and out of the torture house. Identities of the boys, both aged 12, were withheld by police. One was admitted to Cooper Hospital-University Medical Center, where he was kept for several days and treated for a concussion, a broken arm and ankle, and numerous cuts and bruises.

Channels 3, 6 and 10 battled each other yesterday with high-tech wizadry and aerial manuevering of helicopters to bring to television the story of murder, torture and imprisonment in a home owned by Gary Michael Heidnik. Channel 3's Walt Hunter grabbed a very brief interview with Heidnik as the suspect was taken to Metropolitan Hospital after reportedly being attacked by prisoners at the Police Administration Building. The station used its helicopter to relay a signal live from its microwave van to get on the air breaking story of a body uncovered in South Jersey in connection with the Heidnik case.

As President Bush and Sen. John McCain sat in the Oval Office on Thursday to announce an agreement to ban prisoner torture, it seemed the nation had two commanders-in-chief. Bush earns credit for doing what he rarely has done during his time in office: reverse a white-knuckle position, even one that was a pet cause of Vice President Cheney. But it is the Arizona Republican, a former prisoner of war in Vietnam, who led the country to higher moral ground and better security for its soldiers by relentlessly pressing for an outright ban in U.S. law on torture.

Security officials have responded to recent bombings in Uzbekistan with a harsh campaign of mass arrests and torture, according to opposition politicians and human-rights activists here. Hundreds reportedly have been arrested or detained without being charged. Some say they have suffered severe beatings, electric shocks, and anal rape with bottles. "There's a trail of evidence here that's simply undeniable," said Allison Gill, the head of the Human Rights Watch office in Tashkent.

'I'm just a bloody normal bloke who likes a bit of torture," declares Mark "Chopper" Read in a moment of approving introspection. And yes, he does like his torture, but it can work both ways: He can take a shiv to an inmate's face more than a half-dozen times, and he can sit there and urge someone to slice the tops of his ears off. And do it right! he glares. Based on the best-selling memoirs of one of Australia's celebrity criminals (I guess they have a few more where this guy came from)

THE THREE women, all Arabs, style their hair to look more European. One dips a cloth in peroxide, she'll soon be having more fun as a blonde. All apply makeup. A man appears and hands each of them a handbag containing a bomb. "Air France," he man tells one. "Cafeteria," he tells another. The last one will take her deadly package to a place called "the milk bar. " Soon, all three women are at their destinations. The woman at the cafeteria slides her bag under the counter with her foot.

Something's out of whack in Closet Land, an intense two-person drama about political oppression, torture and censorship that looks more like a Calvin Klein Obsession ad than an impassioned treatise for human rights. Written and directed by Temple film school alumna Radha Bharadwaj, the entire thing takes place in a jaunty-angled, checkerboard-floored room dominated by towering Greek columns. At any moment, you expect some moody model with severe hair to wander across the colorless scape, murmuring angst-ridden non sequiturs.

A convicted killer today escaped death row after a Philadelphia jury failed to come to a unanimous decision on whether he should receive the death penalty. Daryl Thurston, 36, of Northeast Philadelphia, will instead spend the rest of his life in prison. Thurston was convicted of first-degree murder earlier this month. His victim, Juan Rosa, 32, of Feltonville, was found dead in Trenton. Before Rosa was shot four times in the skull and once in the chest, he was stripped naked, tortured, then wrapped in plastic.

When Bi Van Dang rolled up in his motor-powered wheelchair to get his diploma and his handshake at Delaware County Community College last Thursday, few of the 484 graduates knew of the suffering that lay behind the calm, smiling face he presented. After all, the Vietnam War is far in the past now, and as far as most people were concerned, Dang was just a slight, scholarly-looking 47-year-old man getting an associate's degree in computer operations. Even when Dang tells the story of how he came to be in the United States, getting a degree, he speaks so casually that it takes a minute to sink in. He has sacrificed a great deal for his political beliefs and still remains a Vietnamese patriot, holding firmly to an optimistic outlook on life.

The amazing thing about "Closet Land" is that it was ever made in Hollywood. There is no action, no romance, no cute kiddie antics - just two people sequestered in a dreary room, locked in a contest of wills that involves brutal displays of psychological and physical torture. Madeleine Stowe stars as a writer of children's fiction, wrongly accused by her government of incorporating subversive messages into her books. When we meet her, she is blindfolded and handcuffed to a chair in a grey room marked by institutional columns and a black-and-white checkerboard floor.