When the torture ended, the prisoners were bundled into one of a number of fetid basement cells so crowded that prisoners created their own rotation for lying down, sitting and standing. ... The cells were about 9 foot-by-6-foot and each held between 35 and 40 prisoners."

Many lived in such cells for more than 20 years.

In North Korea, it's a similar story of a Stalin-like gulag, famine, terror and repression.

A new report written for the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea by David Hawk, a chronicler of the Cambodian genocide, is titled: "The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea's Prison Camps."

Hawk's report notes that torture, including the use of isolation cells and beatings, is common. Food deprivation appears to be the central way of controlling inmates. Work with livestock is coveted because prisoners have "the opportunity to steal animal food and even pick through animal droppings for undigested grains."

The Post quotes at length an account by one North Korean woman, a defector, of cannibalism:

"We started seeing cannibalism. You probably won't understand.

When one is very hungry, one can go crazy. One woman in my town killed her 7-month-old baby and ate the baby with another woman. ... I can't condemn cannibalism. Not that I wanted to eat human meat, but we were so hungry. It was common that people went to a fresh grave and dug up a body to eat meat. ..."

Another woman was held in a 5-foot-by-5-foot underground cell for 14 months - where, according to The Post - she was regularly tortured, denied sleep, doused with water and forced to kneel naked on ice. Sentenced to death, she was later reprieved and sent to a political prison camp. "Those seven years in prison still haunt me. I have seen so many different ways to kill and torture people. I still see them in my dreams."

She and another woman told of being repeatedly sold in and out of sexual slavery.

Currently, North Korea's highest-ranking defector - Hwang Jang Yop - is on a visit to the United States. Now 80, he defected to South Korea in 1997 after serving as a confidant to Kim Il Sung (North Korea's late leader) and a mentor to his son, Kim Jong Il (who succeeded his father).

Two quotes from Hwang:

(1) "I came here to tell the world about North Korea. By the time I left, more than 1.5 million North Koreans had died of hunger. ... I could not endure it any longer. Kim Jong Il was only preoccupied about holding onto his power. He did not worry about the destruction of our nation."

(2) "North Korean society has turned into a dark world of totalitarianism highlighted by hereditary succession of leadership and feudal patriarchy. The upshot of all this is famine and mass exodus of its people while the regime spends hundreds of millions of dollars to build the mausoleum for Kim Il Sung's dead body."

And so the catalogue goes endlessly on. Yet it remains as stark justification for America's abiding efforts to write "finis."