The Taliban's Chamber of Horrors
Even in view of the well-known shameless barbarism of the Taliban, this account of the punishment meted out to Red Cross worker Saed Abdullah for the crime of possessing a couple of Bibles still managed to shock me.
At first they would punch me and slap me.î When he insisted that he was a Muslim, they took out a whip and lashed his back. But worse was to come. "They tied an electric cable around my toes," he recalled last week. "The electric shock made me feel I was being lifted in the air and then slammed back on the ground. Words cannot describe the pain...After seven days he was pushed into a different room. "There was a table with bloodstains on it,î he said. "There was blood on the floor. Five or six guards stood there watching me. They took off their turbans and waistcoats." They tied his feet to a long pole and lifted each end of it. ìOne of them said, 'Just give us the names of the people you worked with. We know youíve being trying to make Christian converts.'"
When he again insisted that he was not a Christian they beat the bare soles of his feet and his back until he passed out. The next day he could not walk and was urinating blood. I had to crawl on my knees like a baby," he said. A doctor arrived and gave him some pills but the guards confiscated them.
Ten days later it started again: "Beating, whipping and the electric shock. The worst thing was the shocks. They started putting the wires on my genitals instead of my toes. And they pulled out my hair. I was so dehydrated I could no longer cry...."
Some Taliban asked questions. Others spat at him. One put a knife to his throat and said: "Let me kill this infidel. God will send me to heaven." When sentence was passed, Abdullah was told that in two days he would be taken to the roof of the Ministry of Communications, the capital's highest building, where he would be doused in petrol, set ablaze and pushed over the edge "to show how we deal with converts to Christianity."
Luckily the US is not bound by any soft-centred decisions of the European Court of Human Rights. In fact the US also needn't take any notice of the United Nations Convention against Torture either, because it was one of the few countries that had the sense not to sign the agreement in 1985. Argentina, Belgium, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Finland, France, Greece, Iceland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal,Senegal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Uruguay made the mistake of signing it, and subsequently Venezuela Luxembourg, Panama, Austria and even the UK and...
...Afghanistan joined in, but America didn't. Lucky for them. Now we can see how it's paying off. The US Army can put bags over the heads of whoever they like.