Paging Senator Durbin

By Aussiegirl

Dick Durbin could not be reached for comment:

Iraqis Found in Torture House Tell of Brutality of Insurgents, from today's NYT:

Marines on an operation to eliminate insurgents that began Friday broke through the outside wall of a building in this small rural village to find a torture center equipped with electric wires, a noose, handcuffs, a 574-page jihad manual - and four beaten and shackled Iraqis.

The American military has found torture houses after invading towns heavily populated by insurgents - like Falluja, where the anti-insurgent assault last fall uncovered almost 20 such sites. But rarely have they come across victims who have lived to tell the tale.

The men said they told the marines, from Company K, Third Marines, Second Division, that they had been tortured with shocks and flogged with a strip of rubber for more than two weeks, unseen behind the windows of black glass. One of them, Ahmed Isa Fathil, 19, a former member of the new Iraqi Army, said he had been held and tortured there for 22 days. All the while, he said, his face was almost entirely taped over and his hands were cuffed.

. . . "They kill somebody every day," said Mr. Fathil, whose hands were so swollen he could not open a can of Coke offered to him by a marine. "They've killed a lot of people."

Tsk, tsk -- and not a prayer rug or white gloves in sight -- and no mention of orange glazed chicken or rice pilaf either. We still don't know if he was subjected to Christina Aguilera music under unbearably hot conditions, but as savage as these guys were, I wouldn't put it past them.

The manual recovered - a fat, well-thumbed Arabic paperback - listed itself as the 2005 First Edition of "The Principles of Jihadist Philosophy," by Abdel Rahman al-Ali. Its chapters included "How to Select the Best Hostage," and "The Legitimacy of Cutting the Infidels' Heads."

Also recovered were several fake passports, a black hood, the painkiller Percoset, handcuffs and an explosives how-to-guide. Three cars loaded with explosives were parked in a garage outside the house. The marines blew them up.