In the interest of not offending anyone, I redacted the operative word in the title...which is going to prove
incredibly ironic given the below, which most certainly should offend any human being with the remnants of a soul.
That word, however, is penis.
From the diaries of one Benyam Mohammed, as reported by The Guardian. Not for the faint of heart:
They cut off my clothes with some kind of doctor's scalpel. I was naked. I tried to put on a brave face. But maybe I was going to be raped. Maybe they'd electrocute me. Maybe castrate me. They took the scalpel to my right chest. It was only a small cut. Maybe an inch. At first I just screamed ... I was just shocked, I wasn't expecting ... Then they cut my left chest. This time I didn't want to scream because I knew it was coming.
Why am I posting this? One word: awareness. Or maybe two words, I should say: additional awareness.
One of them took my penis in his hand and began to make cuts. He did it once, and they stood still for maybe a minute, watching my reaction. I was in agony. They must have done this 20 to 30 times, in maybe two hours. There was blood all over. "I told you I was going to teach you who's the man," [one] eventually said. They cut all over my private parts. One of them said it would be better just to cut it off, as I would only breed terrorists. I asked for a doctor.
I am not a naive, young pup. I know of the claims of our government that these "terrorists" are trained in such accusations.
Doctor No 1 carried a briefcase. "You're all right, aren't you? But I'm going to say a prayer for you." Doctor No 2 gave me an Alka-Seltzer for the pain. I told him about my penis. "I need to see it. How did this happen?" I told him. He looked like it was just another patient. "Put this cream on it two times a day. Morning and night." He gave me some kind of antibiotic.
These, and many like them that we have heard of, are of a demonstrable nature. These are not accusations, these are the results of intentions:
One time I asked a guard: "What's the point of this? I've got nothing I can say to them. I've told them everything I possibly could."
"As far as I know, it's just to degrade you. So when you leave here, you'll have these scars and you'll never forget. So you'll always fear doing anything but what the US wants."
Ah, "hearts and minds."
They told me that I must plead guilty. I'd have to say I was an al-Qaida operations man, an ideas man. I kept insisting that I had only been in Afghanistan a short while. "We don't care," was all they'd say.
The coup de grace:
I suffered the razor treatment about once a month for the remaining time I was in Morocco, even after I'd agreed to confess to whatever they wanted to hear. It became like a routine. They'd come in, tie me up, spend maybe an hour doing it. They never spoke to me. Then they'd tip some kind of liquid on me - the burning was like grasping a hot coal. The cutting, that was one kind of pain. The burning, that was another.
In all the 18 months I was there, I never went outside. I never saw the sun, not even once. I never saw any human being except the guards and my tormentors, unless you count the pictures they showed me.
The graphic, almost tactile nature of these writings compelled me to post this. And to wonder, do any of us even have a clue how deeply this runs? The corruption, the utter negligence and sheer hatred for human life...can we even wrap our minds around what the "leaders" of our country are doing around the world?
If I was a religious man, I would pray. But the fact is that acts such as the above are, at worst, ordered, and at best, condoned by "religious" men.
Someone, somewhere, save us all.