Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

I had gotten this far in my reading about Pol Pot when I visited the torture prison at Tuol Sleng, known as S-21. The former Ponhea Yat High School, in a respectable residential area of Phnom Penh, had been converted to a prison—a natural conversion, since large schools of classrooms are designed for confinement.

The building itself looked like any three-story high school, the same brickwork, the same proportions. Inside, some classrooms had been divided into small wooden or brick cubicles for prisoners awaiting interrogation; other classrooms served as torture chambers. Some torture took the form of shackling a person to an iron bedstead, where he or she was shocked with electricity, beaten with clubs, stabbed, and made to confess to crimes against the state.

"The role of S-21 was not to kill but to extract confessions," Philip Short wrote. "Death was the finality, but it was almost incidental."

Obeying an obsessive if ghoulish sense of order, and so as to create a paper trail of traitors, all prisoners at Tuol Sleng were photographed before they were tortured, their names and ages and histories recorded—where they'd lived and worked, details of their families and education, the names of their friends. Far from being mere prison numbers or statistics, they were presented in the round, as utterly human. Their faces were fixed in terror, shocked, fatigued, very ill; oddly serene or dead-eyed; old women, young women, old men, wide-eyed boys, young children. Mothers too, many a woman holding her baby, posed in an agonizing pietà, both of them about to die.

Of the fourteen thousand people who passed through this prison, all were tortured, and all but twelve were murdered. The horror of their plight was evident on the upper floors, where outside the classroom cubicles a veranda was hung with barbed wire. A sign explained: The braid of barbed wire prevented the desperate victims from committing suicide.

Even though I knew that this torture prison had been turned into a museum by a sanctimonious government that itself violated human rights (corruption, embezzlement, torture in police custody, land seizure, and extrajudicial killings), I was horrified—who wouldn't be?—by the pathetic faces of the thousands who'd been killed.

One hot day I went through the bare dreary rooms and splintery cubicles, past the displays of doomed faces and the portraits of child soldiers, some as young as ten, and the glass cases labeled Instruments of Torture, most of them farm implements—mattocks, axes, clubs, machetes, shovels. Like my visit to Dachau, it was a cruel example of inhumanity, of sadistic and pitiless murder. "No other country has ever lost so great a proportion of its nationals in a single, politically inspired hecatomb," Short wrote, "brought about by its own leaders."

Though all of this was appalling, the worst moment for me came out side in the sunshine, in the courtyard of the prison, which had been part of the old school's playing field. It was a gallows, three sections, with hooks on each section, looming over three large-mouthed ceramic barrels. The sign on it said,

Prisoners were hung upside-down [by their feet, from ropes on the hooks], until they lost consciousness. Their heads were then dipped into the jar of water. By doing so, the victims quickly regained consciousness and their interrogators could continue their interrogations.

A week before I visited Tuol Sleng, Vice President Dick Cheney was asked about similar American practices, known by the laughable euphemism "enhanced interrogation techniques." These were being used on suspected terrorists in American military prisons. In the torture called waterboarding, which was also used at Tuol Sleng, a hooded prisoner was strapped head-down on a slanted board and such a powerful volume of water poured over his face in a continuous stream that he was briefly suffocated, convinced that he was drowning. And Cheney was questioned about simple submersion, as with the torture jars I was staring at.

What did the second most powerful politician in America think of this way of extracting confessions, this "dunk in the water"?

"It's a no-brainer for me," Cheney said, and the president backed him up. "It's a very important tool."