Torture Victims

At a Red Cross center at Malmo the doctors don't wear white coats and there are no medical appliances to be seen. All the patients are torture victims, and appliances and white coats are often grim reminders of torturers' equipment and the doctors who supervised the torture. The atmosphere at the center is calm and friendly as staff listen to the anguished outpourings of the victims, share their torment and offer help.

About two weeks ago, police stopped Cetin Paydar on his way to work at a coffeehouse in this village in western Turkey. They had a complaint from a relative that the 40-year-old waiter had killed his own father. A short, thin man with listless eyes, Paydar shook as he recalled what happened next: "The police hit me nonstop during the ride to the station. They kept demanding that I confess," he said. "I kept telling them I had done nothing of the kind and that I had no idea where [my father] was.

A Los Angeles federal judge on Friday froze all the assets in the estate of the late Philippine President Ferdinand E. Marcos until the completion of a lawsuit filed on behalf of 10,000 alleged Philippine torture victims and their families. The freeze was imposed by U.S. District Judge Manuel L. Real in response to contentions that the assets--including at least $320 million in Swiss and Hong Kong bank accounts--might be spent by Marcos' widow and children before the suit concludes.

As President Obama grapples with accusations of torture by U.S. agents, I suggest he consult the former Senate majority leader, Tom Daschle. I first contacted Daschle in 1975, when he was an aide to Sen. James Abourezk of South Dakota, who was leading a somewhat lonely campaign against CIA abuses. At the time, I was researching a book on the United States' role in the spread of military dictatorships throughout Latin America.

A Tijuana rights group, charging that the torture of crime suspects is "institutionalized" in Mexico, unveiled a report Wednesday alleging 158 cases of beatings and other physical abuse by federal police officers. The report states that the 158 victims, including 14 women, had suffered a wide range of tortures that included beatings with fists, bats and guns; the imposition of electric shocks to their bodies and near-suffocation by the placing of plastic bags over suspects' heads.

She sat down, stood up, made the sign of the cross. She tapped her hands, then her feet. Waiting, waiting, waiting. Ana, who fled Uganda five years ago after being repeatedly tortured, hadn't seen her children in six long, agonizing years. But their plane was on the ground at Los Angeles International, Ellis Island of the West, and this last bit of waiting was testing her nerves. An hour went by, then two, and Ana watched hundreds of travelers emerge from customs.

THE BURLAP BAG felt rough and scratchy against my cheek, but it also smelled earthy and deceptively comforting. Thick tape already covered my eyes, so the bag's only purpose was to frighten me. And it worked. I knew I had entered another dimension. A day earlier I had been a not-too-unusual 24-year-old American student from UC Santa Cruz, working with the Peronist Youth organization for social change in Azul, Argentina.

Five foreign men who sued a San Jose-based CIA contractor for its alleged role in abducting them abroad and spiriting them to secret interrogation sites have exhausted their legal avenues for getting the practice known as "extraordinary rendition" branded a human rights violation. The U.S. Supreme Court decided Monday to let stand a federal appeals court ruling that the president has the power to scuttle the men's lawsuit because state secrets, such as how CIA operatives interrogate terror suspects, could be revealed if the case went to trial.

Iraqi forces maintained at least two dozen torture sites in Kuwait city as part of a massive effort to subjugate the Kuwaiti people after seizing the country in August, 1990, according to a U.S. government report released Friday. The report, compiled by the Defense Department and made available by the State Department, was submitted to the United Nations in accordance with an effort to document war crimes committed by Iraqis during their seven-month occupation of Kuwait.

The late Philippine strongman Ferdinand Marcos so skillfully squirreled away billions in national wealth that, even 26 years after his ouster, those pursuing recovery of the ill-gotten bounty have little inkling of its true value. There may be more than $60 billion salted away in offshore accounts or secret jungle hideouts. Stories have circulated for decades,  some documented in court proceedings,  of Marcos seizing a 2,000-pound golden Buddha from a treasure hunter in 1971 and hiding away other priceless spoils of the Japanese Imperial Army's World War II sacking of Southeast Asia.