This is a country where 12,000 to 30,000 political prisoners and prisoners of opinion rot in overcrowded, violent jails; a country where public expression of dissidence, be it on the street, in writing, on the Internet, or in meetings, is closely monitored and punished; a country where repression is organized by security forces that report to a handful of senior princes, out of the reach of an abrupt, arbitrary judicial system; a country where physical punishment, torture, and the threat thereof, in the absence of transparent and fair procedures, are the alpha and omega of the judiciary and the ultima ratio of political acquiescence.

This situation is not new. Torture in Saudi jails is the topic of the third volume of Turki al-Hamad's best-selling fiction Ghosts in the Deserted Alleys, in which the hero is taken to Jeddah's political prison and subjected to interrogations and beatings for belonging to the banned Ba‘th Socialist Party. The scene is in the early 1970s, but the novel was published in 1998, during the crackdown on the activists who in 1991–1993 had petitioned for political reforms. More recently, international organizations and independent Saudi groups have repeatedly assessed Saudi repression. In 2001, Human Rights Watch reported that in the 1990s, al-mabahith al-‘amma, the ominous Interior Ministry's secret police, had arbitrarily arrested, detained, and tortured hundreds of political activist. According to both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, the situation grew worse after 9/11, when political crackdown was justified and facilitated by the U.S.-Saudi antiterrorism joint effort: “Since 2001…the number of people detained arbitrarily in Saudi Arabia has risen from hundreds to thousands.” Most detainees “have been held for years without trial and without access to lawyers,” are regularly tortured, and usually have “no idea of what is going to happen to them.” Some others were submitted to “rehabilitation” programs, the mixed record of which was packaged for Western audiences as feel-good stories in which bad Muslims were reformed into positive citizens.