Eric Margolis is smokin’ mad and with reason.
Prisoners taken in the dead of night to [Stalin’s] Lubyanka [prison] were systematically beaten for days with rubber hoses and clubs. There were special cold rooms were prisoners could be frozen to near death. Sleep deprivation was a favorite and most effective Cheka technique. So was near-drowning in water fouled with urine and feces.
I recall these past horrors because of what this column has long called the gradual `Sovietization’ of the United States. This shameful week, it became clear Canada is also afflicted.
We have seen America’s president and vice president, sworn to uphold the Constitution, advocating exactly the same tortures techniques KGB used at the Lubyanka. They claimed beating, freezing, sleep deprivation and drowning were necessary to prevent terrorist attacks, calling them by the euphemism, `tough interrogation’. Stalin made the same arguments, but did not stoop to euphemisms.