It was May 2001 and Brody is deep into investigating for Human Rights Watch the alleged crimes of the despot who was overthrown nearly 11 years earlier by his former chief of defense, Idriss Déby. As part of a documentary for the French-German television network Arte, he had asked to see the “pool,” a symbol of the dictatorship. A former swimming pool — hence its name — covered with a concrete screed that, under the previous reign, served as a torture chamber. A horrendous place with its tiny cells, in which prisoners died by the hundreds, and its sloping floor that allowed for the disposal of blood and urine.
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