Coming Out Of The Ice-Inside South Africa's Apartheid Regime's Most Secret And Deadly Police Cells

My dear readers my wife and I got into a violent argument Saturday night over the subject of torture. She firmly believes that there are some people who are so fanatical and so committed to a cause that no torture can break them. Even if one broke such a person, they would only tell lies and give misinformation to avoid further torture. I violently disagreed. All my life I have known that everyone has a breaking point.

My mind went back to September, 1991. I found myself in the police cells in Pretoria. I was charged with making a false trade subsidy. I got no money with this application but I ended up in prison. The Pretoria police cells were run at that time by a very humane female South African Police Colonel who improved conditions and stopped all torture of prisoners. She would visit every cell block on a daily basis to look in on prisoners and listen to complaints. The section I was in was eerie in a clinical sort of a way. The walls were an anteseptic white similar to the walls inside the execution chamber at Pretoria Central Prison where inmates used to be hung. I knew that something horrible had happened in years past.

I began talking to the old police officers and inmates who had been around this place for decades. I started to hear some chilling stories. Years before these cells that now held four men with beds and other civilized amenities had been one-person solitary confinement cells. These cells were reserved for a special breed of political prisoner. When the security forces or police captured an operative from the old Soviet Union, Communist China, North Korea, and East Germany includng spies and infiltrators, they were brought to these police cells. Sadly sometimes an anti-Apartheid activist from some other country also found their way to these cells. These sort of prisoners were similar to many of the militant Muslims one would find at a facility like Guantanimo Bay. The normal psychological means of interrogation and physical torture had no affect on such militant prisoners.

The people who ran the Apartheid system were very clever in ways. They devised a system of passive torture to deal with these prisoners. Political prisoners brought to these cells were stripped naked and put into solitary confinement in one of these cells with the antiseptic white walls. There was a toilet and a basin. There was no bed. The prisoners were put in the cells naked. They were left there for months or for years. They had no human contact at all. Their meals were on trays that an unseen jailer would slide under the cell door. In the cold Pretoria, winter they were not even given a blanket. All of us know how cold concrete gets in the winter.
This is known as total sensory deprivation. The stories I heard were of people cracking up and going mad. No one held up under this regime of passive torture. When they fell apart, they "told all." The Apartheid regime had found a method to break the most comitted Marxist-Leninist Communist. The US government has engaged in all sorts of torure of prisoners using fiendish and brutal methods to try to extract information. They have never matched the sophistication of the old South African Apartheir government.

What was most disturbing was what happened to such prisoners after they had been broken and given all the useful information they had. Unlike members of the ANC, South African Communist Party, etc. such Communist agents were not charged with criminal offesnses, taken through the court system, and put in prison for long sentences. The officers with decades there were reluctant to talk about the final fate of these prisoners. I suspect that some were traded for high-value South Africans held in other countries or political concessions. I suspect that the majority of them were taken out and shot. We probably will never know the whole story.

I asked my wife to give me a book for my 61st birthday. It is called Coming Out Of The Ice. It tells about an American man who spent 10 years in one of Stalin's forced labor camps in Siberia. The story of this book is below in this link:

http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title.jsp?stid=25427&atid=0&category=overview

I found this book while in those police cells. I only remembered it when my wife and I were having our argument about torture. I asked her to give me the book for my birthday that comes up this Friday. It will be a prized possession for me.