Newly arriving prisoners were routinely beaten until they lost consciousness. Others were flogged with electric cables, burned with lit cigarettes, or hung upside down by means of a stick placed under the knees, a position the guards gleefully called “grilled chicken.
I don't want to justify the abuses, but if these were people so horrible and radicalized that the Jordanians were comfortable with this treatment, why the hell would they release them?
They took a bunch of angry, radicalized men, and turned them into angrier, more radicalized men with compelling stories to tell. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
I am beginning to understand my father's fondness for General Pinochet. He was better at being a brutal dictator than the Kings of Jordan were.
