[Memnoch]

I read this in the Sydney Morning Herald. If I didn't check the date I could've sworn we were still in the Dark Ages.


Standing orders for torturers: be creative


Quetta, Pakistan: "You must become so notorious for bad things that when you come into an area people will tremble in their sandals. Anyone can do beatings and starve people. I want your unit to find new ways of torture so terrible that the screams will frighten even crows from their nests and if the person survives he will never again have a night's sleep."

These were the instructions of the commandant of the Afghan secret police to his new recruits. For more than three years one of those recruits, Mr Hafiz Sadiqulla Hassani, ruthlessly carried out his orders. But sickened by the atrocities that he was forced to commit, last week he defected to Pakistan, joining a growing number of Taliban officials escaping across the border.

"Like many people, I did not become a Talib by choice," he said, explaining how his grandfather was arrested by the Taliban in 1988 and would only be released if he provided a member of his family as a conscript. Mr Hassani, now 30, was that relative.

He became a Taliban "volunteer", assigned to the secret police. At first, his job was to patrol the streets at night looking for thieves and signs of subversion. Then, the Taliban began issuing more extreme edicts.

The night patrols were instructed to seek out people watching videos, playing cards or, bizarrely, keeping caged birds. Men whose beards were not long enough were to be arrested, as was any woman who ventured outside her house. Even owning a kite became a criminal offence.

"Basically any form of pleasure was outlawed," Mr Hassani said, "and if we found people doing any of these things we would beat them with staves soaked in water - like a knife cutting through meat - until the room ran with their blood or their spines snapped. Then we would leave them with no food or water in rooms filled with insects until they died.

"We always tried to do different things: we would put some of them standing on their heads to sleep, hang others upside down with their legs tied together. We would stretch the arms out of others and nail them to posts like crucifixions. Sometimes we would throw bread to them to make them crawl. Then I would write the report to our commanding officer so he could see how innovative we had been."



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