strappado

• For the record, strappado -- the act of tying a prisoner's arms behind his back and hoisting him upwards -- is also known as a "stress position." —  Yahoo! Buzz US: Top Stories
• These freely admitted violations included beatings, hooding, exposure, sexual humiliation and the medieval barbarism of strappado: chaining a prisoner with his arms twisted behind his back and suspending him from the ceiling, where the weight of his own body tears at his sockets and sinews.
• At the CIA's center near Kabul in 2002, for instance, American interrogators forced prisoners "to stand with their hands chained to the ceiling and their feet shackled," an effect similar to the strappado. —  911Blogger.com - Paying Attention to 9/11 Related Alternative News
• • Fourth, American lawyers have never before had any association with torture: the core of their professional identity to know nothing of the rack, the thumbscrew, the strappado, induced hypothermia, and the water torture. —  AfterDowningStreet.org - Bush-Cheney Trials in '09
• Professor John Yoo has made the strappado and the water torture -- which Bush administration bureaucrats spoke of in euphemisms as "severe interrogation methods" just as the Elizabethans of the sixteenth century would speak of taking prisoners to embrace "the Duke of Exeter's daughter" -- part of the law. —  AfterDowningStreet.org - Bush-Cheney Trials in '09

Allen's Synonyms and Antonyms