Ah, The Good Old Days Can Always Be Re-lived In The Right Old Fashioned Enough Country, Eh, Barney?

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) -- "The footage is shocking: A man lies screaming on the floor of a police station as officers sodomize him with a wooden pole.

Compounding the shock, it turns out that it was the police who made the film, and that they then transmitted it to the cell phones of the victim's friends in order to humiliate him.

Egyptian officials say they have introduced a human rights training program for police and a commission to investigate torture allegations. They also say cases of torture have fallen since 1999, but give no numbers. The Egyptian Organization for Human Rights says it documented 120 deaths from torture from 1993 to 2004, 15 of them in the last year it counted.

Hafez Abu Saada, secretary general of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, said his group reports some 400 cases of alleged police abuse a year. He said 20 percent result in prosecutions, and convictions are much rarer.

In 2002, eight police officers were convicted of torturing detainees to death and sentenced to between one and 10 years in prison. Two years later, three senior police officers were tried for torturing a prisoner to confess that he killed his daughter, who turned out to be alive. Their sentences ranged from one to three years, but they were acquitted in a retrial."

Thanks to War on Guns, who keeps a close eye on the Only Ones.