War & Peace Weapons are news but news are also weapons of war

Has East Timorese Nobel Peace Prize winner Jose Ramos-Horta, become a useful puppet for Bush-Blair Propaganda? Even right-wing lickspittles like Tim Blair suddenly quote Marxist freedom fighters at length. Strangest bedfellows, indeed...

It may be years before we hear the true voices of survivors, undistorted by propaganda or drowned out by accusations that it is propaganda. If and when we do, the tales will include ones like this (from a second world war Belgian resistance fighter tortured by the Gestapo, included by W.G. Sebald in his Natural History of Destruction):

I was raised with the chain until I hung about a metre above the floor. In such a position, or rather, when hanging this way, with your hands behind your back, for a short time you can hold at a half-oblique through muscular force. During these few minutes, when you are already expending your utmost strength, when sweat has already appeared on your forehead and lips, and you are breathing in gasps, you will not answer any questions. Accomplices? Addresses? Meeting places? You hardly hear it. All your life is gathered in a single, limited area of the body, the shoulder joints, and it does not react; for it exhausts itself completely in the expenditure of energy. But this cannot last long, even with people who have a strong physical constitution. As for me, I had to give up rather quickly. And now there was a cracking and splintering in my shoulders that my body has not forgotten to this hour. The balls sprang from their sockets. My own body weight caused [dislocation]; I fell into a void and now hung by my dislocated arms which had been torn high from behind and were now twisted over my head. Torture, from Latin torquere, to twist. What a visual instruction in etymology!
· Torquere [ABC(Spain)]