Onions: The New Waterboarding

How long until Amnesty International and the world left calls for a ban on onions? If we find out Dick Cheney ever ate onions all hell is going to break loose.

Thanks to the war on terror we have become all too aware of the torture techniques used by interrogators trying to obtain information.

Waterboarding and sleep deprivation was used on al-Qaeda chiefs in Guantanamo, while it is alleged that bloodier methods were employed in places like Pakistan and Morocco.

Now it is claimed that police on the Caribbean island of the Dominican Republic have alighted on a new and unusual torture device - onions.

The National Commission on Human Rights has documented dozens of cases in which police forced onions into people's mouths to make the victims feel as if they were choking.

While allegations of torture involving suspects and inmates has long been documented in the Caribbean country, NCHR vice president Joselin Melo said it was the first time the commission had heard of onions being used as weapons.

'They have specialised in this technique,' Melo said. 'It appears that the onion has given them results.'

When that didn't work they went to more traditional methods of torture.

Police also allegedly hit prisoners with baseball bats and subjected them to sexual abuse.