Egypt's Torture Victims Describe Beatings, Electroshock, Rape Threats

Feb. 3, 2011 — -- When Abdel Haleem Halim approached Hosni Mubarak at a 2002 conference to confront the Egyptian president about rampant unemployment, he says he received a familiar response. Like many of Egypt's political dissidents, Halim says he was whisked away by the Mubarak regime's domestic intelligence agents and tortured.

"They would bring me a paper and want me to write and sign a confession," Halim told ABC News. "But I would refuse to write. So they would torture me because I was defiant."

Halim claimed that the SSI agents used beatings and electroshock, and that his 2002 encounter was only the latest in a long line of detentions. A veteran political dissident, he said an earlier beating left him with temporary memory loss.

Unlike some victims of the Egyptian government's security apparatus, however, Halim doesn't hold the U.S. responsible. Hossam el-Hamalawy, a 33-year-old journalist who says he was tortured by the SSI in 2000, is less forgiving.

"I can't accept that the U.S government preaches about democracy," said el-Hamalawy, "while at the same time supporting the Mubarak regime, which has been so brutal to its own people."

The U.S. State Department has joined international human rights groups in describing a culture of torture within Egyptian's security agencies, issuing a 2009 report in which it itemized alleged abuses ranging from electroshock to sodomy and said "officials often operated with impunity." Yet the U.S. government has also funded the Mubarak regime to the tune of more than a billion dollars per year, and since 1995 has used the Egyptians to interrogate terror suspects via extraordinary rendition outside the scrutiny of the U.S. legal system.

For the past 30 years, said Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, Amnesty International's Middle East and North Africa Deputy Director, Egypt has used a continuous state of emergency, instituted after Anwar Sadat's assassination, to justify the suppression of political dissent in the name of security.

"Critics of the Egyptian authorities have faced arrest, detention, prosecution on trumped-up criminal charges and unfair trials," said Sahraoui, and relying on torture to extract information.