The Company You Keep

Take a quick quiz. Match the torture to the lawless regime:

a) burned him with cigarettes, smashed his right hand, deprived him of sleep, nearly drowned him and hanged him from the ceiling until he "confessed" to spying

b) interrogators deprived him of sleep, threatened him with police dogs and kept him in stress positions for hours

c) continuous interrogation of a person by relays of police for hours and even days at a time. ... often subjected to the "long interrogation" by a single interrogator who carried on his questioning sometimes for weeks and months. ... police interrogators threatened family members. Others hoped that by cooperating they would save themselves. Many confessed under beatings ..

And the answer is:

WASHINGTON - Abdul Rahim insists he's an apolitical student who fled a strict father. But he's fallen into a black hole in the war on terror in which first the Taliban and then the United States imprisoned him as an enemy of the state.

Arrested by the Taliban in Afghanistan in January 2000, Rahim says al-Qaida leaders burned him with cigarettes, smashed his right hand, deprived him of sleep, nearly drowned him and hanged him from the ceiling until he "confessed" to spying for the United States.

U.S. forces took the young Kurd from Syria into custody in January 2002 after the Taliban fled his prison. Accusing him of being an al-Qaida terrorist, U.S. interrogators deprived him of sleep, threatened him with police dogs and kept him in stress positions for hours, he says. He's been held ever since as an enemy combatant.

c) comes courtesy of Stalin because no discussion of institutionized, lawful torture is complete without him.