Jim Dwyer, in Saturday’s NY Times, in a column that will surely not get enough attention, pulls the cover off of a couple of very ugly details in our current war on terror.

• The torture used in Egyptian prisons, under Hosni Mubarak, was as demented as it was long lasting
• That torture helped create a fanatical cadre of those wanting retribution against those who had done it
• Egypt was, all during this time, a solid friend of the US; not just an ally, but a “friend of the family,” as Secretary of State Clinton recently referred to Mubarak
• Those who had been tortured made links between those who had tortured them, and those who had supported the torturers — and in fact, in recent years, used the torturers to do work they would not do.

“The blind sheik in charge of blowing up New York City had invited reporters to interview him one evening in 1993, so 57 of us stood in his bare living room. … for more than half an hour, the sheik, Omar Abdel Rahman, spoke at a dead sprint, in Arabic. The translators panted. From the sound of things, they apparently were able to render only about one phrase in English for every three he spoke in Arabic.

There were two words, though, that the sheik uttered dozens of times, virtually spitting them across the room, and which needed no translation:

“Hosni Mubarak.”

… When Mr. Rahman met with reporters in 1993, he was pressed about his connection to the trade center bombers, who had attended his sermons. “This kind of question is not known except for the interrogation in Egypt,” he said.

The prisons of Mr. Mubarak were, he said, designed for degradation.

“Prisoners are tortured with electric shock,” the cleric said, “with hungry mad dogs and with a hot iron that is used on their skin and hanging them from the ceiling from their hands and feet and hitting them with sticks and wires and sexually abusing the prisoners.”

The brutality of the Mubarak prisons was a growing scandal for human rights watchers, but it did not close the circle to kill six innocent people in the trade center basement at lunchtime on Feb. 26, 1993: Monica Smith, Stephen Knapp, William Macko, Robert Kirkpatrick, Wilfredo Mercado and John DiGiovanni.

BEFORE long, the sheik was convicted of plotting new attacks, the assassination of Mr. Mubarak when he came to the United Nations, and blowing up the tunnels into New York. These schemes were discussed in earshot of a wired informant.

As one threat seemed to vanish, the Egyptian prison system remained an open sore. The movement that included Mr. Rahman gave way to one led by Osama bin Laden and his top collaborator, an Egyptian doctor, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

After the assassination of Mr. Sadat, Mr. al-Zawahiri spoke in court about the efforts to get him to confess. “They shocked us with electricity,” he said. “And they used the wild dogs!”

In “The Looming Tower,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning history of terrorism leading to 9/11, Lawrence Wright argued that humiliation in the prisons nurtured a violent rage. “Egypt’s prisons became a factory for producing militants whose need for retribution — they called it justice — was all-consuming,” Mr. Wright wrote. Even after 9/11, the Egyptian authorities were used by the United States to carry out interrogations and acts that would have been illegal for United States agents.

Dwyer

It is to our shame that we accept our leaders being family friends with brutal dictators, and we not raise a howl of protest.  Celebrate the Egyptian people’s recent victory, and ask ourselves what then we can do so they at least have a chance for a democracy of their own.

Print PDF