Greek Police Try to Photoshop Away Signs of Prisoner Abuse

Things keep getting hairier in Greece, where austerity measures have led to a "humanitarian crisis" of poverty and homelessness, and civil society is fraying and radicalizing into factions of ultra-nationalist fascists (the Golden Dawn, which is frighteningly well-integrated into the police force) and anarchists.

A few days ago, Amnesty International said Greek police had photoshopped away signs of torture in photographs of four anarchist bank robbers arrested earlier this month. From the AI website: “The Greek authorities cannot just Photoshop their problems away. This culture of impunity needs to be stopped."

You can see examples of the doctored photos at roarmag.org, which also reports:

Let’s not forget that a few months ago, the same government, the same Minister of Public Order, and the same police force, tortured — as it was proven — 15 antifascist activists for having organized an AntiFa moto-parade. And it is the same state officials who launched an attack against the country’s squats... It is by now obvious that the Greek state, in order to defend the extremely unpopular and unsuccessful austerity measures it has been imposing for a couple of years now, has chosen the road of repression. It is not something new: we have seen such practices in the past too — in Chile, in Argentina, and elsewhere. The difference is that in those cases we were talking about military dictatorships, while in the Greek case we are talking about a democratically-elected government...

Some Greek theater company has got to be staging Dario Fo's Accidental Death of an Anarchist these days. I can't imagine a better context for that show right now than Greece.