S-21. Genocide and Fraternity Pranks.

Beautiful, tranquil, horrific.
This former high school was the site of many of the worst tortures of
the Cambodian genocide: S-21 prison. Saloth Sar (aka Pol Pot) was a
former school teacher who decided that the entire Cambodian nation
needed to be re-educated. By torturing, then murdering anyone
who was educated in the old ways. Just wearing glasses was enough
to mark you as an intellectual to be liquidated. S-21 is now a museum
dedicated to educating the Cambodian people about this ugly episode.

The rules and regulations by which S-21 was run. (Click to enlarge.)
The classroom/torture chambers have been left pretty well they way they were
when the prison was shut down. There are many graphic photos of the victims in
death, as well as walls of mugs shots of those arrested and condemned.
After a stay at S-21, the inmates were taken to the killing fields just
outside town and executed by bludgeoning. There's a museum there
as well, but we were too depressed after this tour to go there.

The waterboarding exhibit is part of the display of the tortures the
Khmer Rouge used to force false confessions from their victims.
This evil practice is torture when employed by evildoers like the
Khmer Rouge, but enhanced interrogation, or even the equivalent
of a harmless fraternity prank when duly authorized by
our freedom-loving government.

Here's the actual board and water can used. The display calls the practice
torture, but what does a primitive third-world country know, lacking
as they do the sophisticated legal expertise of John Woo and Dick Cheney.
As part of the political settlement designed to reconcile the country,
many of the worst actors of the Khmer Rouge were brought into
the government, where they remain today. Very few were ever tried
or punished. Pol Pot died in exile, unpunished and unrepentant.
I believe this is called looking forward, not backward.

The sign forbids laughing on the premises.
It's hard to imagine anyone wanting to.

P.