Tikun Olam-תקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place

Maybe WE don’t torture. But we have others who do it for us. Like Egypt:

A militant Egyptian cleric who prosecutors say was kidnapped by the Central Intelligence Agency said in a newly published account that he was tortured with electric shocks while he lay on a wet mattress in a Cairo prison and was repeatedly beaten and forced to eat rotten bread in a pitch-black cell, while rats and cockroaches ran over his body.

The cleric’s recounting was contained in an affidavit given to Italian prosecutors investigating his alleged abduction. Excerpts were published in a Milan daily newspaper, Corriere della Sera, on Thursday.

“I am writing my testimony from this, my tomb,” writes Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, known as Abu Omar, at the start of an 11-page letter that was excerpted Thursday by the newspaper. His face has been transformed, he claims, “as a result of the torture.”

…In the letter, Mr. Nasr says he was stopped by an American, asked for his documents and then forced into a white van where he was “beaten on my stomach and my entire body” before being bound and gagged and taken to Cairo by plane.

In the Cairo prison, he says, he was subjected to weeks of torture while he was being interrogated. “It lasted seven months,” he wrote, but “it felt like seven years.” His wife, Nabila, told Milanese prosecutors that Egyptian officials had tried to bribe her husband so he would deny that he had been kidnapped.

Writing from Egypt, she said that her husband had been offered $2 million “to say that he had not been kidnapped and to say that he had come of his own free will” to Egypt

With torturers like these doing our dirty work, who needs American torturers?

And to think that this man is STILL in an Egyptian jail rotting away. It’s absolutely despicable. I know Harry Reid’s not listening to me personally, but if I were him I’d consider a hearing on this case. If the Italians can’t extradite those CIA kidnappers for trial, then the U.S. Senate can do the next best thing: subpoena them to testify before Congress about their shenanigans. Make somebody accountable for a change.