BY ERIC S. MARGOLIS -- Khaleej Times
Sept. 24, 2006 -- IN THE late 1980’s, I was the first western journalist allowed into the world’s most dreaded prison, Moscow’s sinister Lubyanka. Muscovites dared not even utter the name of KGB’s headquarters, calling it instead after a nearby toy store, Detsky Mir. I still shudder recalling Lubyanka’s underground cells, grim interrogation rooms, and execution cellars where tens of thousands were tortured and shot. I sat at the desk from which monsters who ran Cheka (Soviet secret police) - Dzerzhinsky, Yagoda, Yezhov, Beria — ordered 30 million victims to their deaths.
Prisoners taken in the dead of night to Lubyanka were systematically beaten for days with rubber hoses and clubs. There were special cold rooms were prisoners could be frozen to near death. Sleep deprivation was a favourite and most effective Cheka technique. So was near-drowning in water fouled with urine and faeces.
I recall these past horrors because of what I have long called the gradual Sovietisation of the United States. Now, Canada has also become afflicted. We have seen America’s president and vice president, sworn to uphold the US Constitution that expressly forbids ‘cruel and unusual punishment,’ advocating exactly the same tortures techniques the KGB used at the Lubyanka. The Bush Administration has claimed beating, freezing, sleep deprivation, isolation, and near drowning, were necessary to prevent terrorist attacks. So did KGB.
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