The Dictator Protection Plan
Praetorian guards, family retainers, and torture: how despots stay in power.
A ritual of sorts tends to mark the fall of a dictator. His torture chambers are opened, and the electrical cables and bloodstains testify to his crimes. Under the worst tyrants, like Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, there are photographs, too. His torturers were meticulous record keepers, taking pictures up to and including the subject’s gruesome death. As light shines into those fetid cells, emotional cleansing begins. Responsibilities are understood and must be assumed.
The torture chambers have not been opened yet in Tunisia or Egypt. The dictators are gone, but not their Praetorian guards, who are now in charge. The military, the secret police, the legions of spies and informers, interrogators and torturers remain. Faced with mass uprisings that all their ferocious coercion had failed to predict, the Praetorians opted to oust the leaders they’d served and to save themselves. Their promises of freedom, thus far, are no more than hypothetical...
