THE HANDSTAND

DECEMBER 2005


TORTURE

Dr. Samuel Johnson was one who saw that capital punishment satisfied a sinister human craving for power over others' lives, but did not really deter crime. Undiscriminating severity simply made criminals more cunning and more desperate, and confused small crimes with great ones." -Clive Elmsley, Crime and Society in Society in England 1750-1900


Nov.11th in Brad Blog:Editor & Publisher is reporting today that Senator Bill Frist and House Speaker Dennis Hastert have requested a congressional inquiry into "the leaking of classified information" which led to the article about secret al-Qaeda prisons run by the CIA in Europe. RAW STORY has obtained the
actual letter requesting the inquiry by Frist and Hastert. UPDATE: Inquiry into who leaked info on secret prisons may bite Republicans in the ass. Trent Lott reports that it was a leak by a Republican after a meeting held recently with Dick Cheney and Republican Senators. Says Lott, "He was up here last week and talked up here in that room right there in a roomful of nothing but senators and every word that was said in there went right to the newspaper." RAW STORY has more...
Frist worried about leak, not prisons: Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist says he is more concerned about the leak of information regarding secret CIA detention centers than activity in the prisons themselves

U.N. Blasts Practice of Outsourcing Torture;

By Thalif Deen
Inter Press Service

 
UNITED NATIONS, 10 Nov (IPS) - Six countries -- the United States, Britain, Canada, France, Sweden and Kyrgyzstan -- have been singled out for violating international human rights conventions by deporting terrorist suspects to countries such as Egypt, Syria, Algeria and Uzbekistan, where they may have been tortured.

 The charges, which come at a time when the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is accused of running secret detention centres overseas, have been catalogued in a 15-page U.N. report presented to the 191-member General Assembly by Manfred Nowak, a special rapporteur on torture.

 "Several governments, in the fight against terrorism, have transferred or proposed to return alleged terrorist suspects to countries where they may be at risk of torture or ill-treatment," says the report titled "Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment".  The study cites Article 3 of the U.N. Convention Against Torture, which says "clearly and unequivocally" that "No State party shall expel, return ('refouler') or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be danger of being subjected to torture."

 The practice of deportation has been strongly criticised by several human rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.  But countries such as the United States and Sweden have justified the extradition on the ground that countries receiving the deportees have given "diplomatic assurances or formal guarantees" that there will be no torture, ill-treatment or the death penalty.

 But according to Nowak, "diplomatic assurances are unreliable and ineffective in the protection against torture and ill-treatment and such assurances are sought usually from States where the practice of torture is systematic".  He also points out that diplomatic assurances are not legally binding. "Therefore they carry no legal effect and no accountability, if breached, and the person whom the assurances aim to protect has no recourse if the assurances are violated."

 In a separate report titled "Protecting Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms while Countering Terrorism", U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan pointedly says that "while States have the duty to protect their citizens against terrorism, counter-terrorist measures must be in conformity with international human rights, humanitarian and refugee law".

 "The Secretary-General, the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and many human rights experts continue to express concern that many counter-terrorism measures are infringing on human rights and fundamental freedoms," the report warns.  Both U.N. reports are currently before the General Assembly's Third Committee dealing with social, humanitarian and cultural issues.

 Mouin Rabbani, contributing editor to the Washington-based Middle East Report, concurs with the arguments by U.N. officials and human rights experts condemning the deportation of terrorist suspects.  "The conclusions of the new U.N. report and concerns expressed in it strike me as entirely warranted, all the more so because there is concrete and indisputable evidence from recent cases to demonstrate the validity of the report's conclusions and concerns, as well as evidence that intelligence personnel from the rendering countries play a role in such interrogations
and procedures," he told IPS.  Why are so-called "renditions" employed in the first place? Rabbani asked. "It seems to me that in many, and probably most cases, the reasoning behind them is quite simple: governments in countries resorting to renditions are unable to demonstrate the validity of their claims and suspicions against suspects to the satisfaction of national courts, or to do so while observing laws that guarantee due process that may be upheld by these courts," he said.  Or, he argued, governments may have other reasons to deport undesired individuals, to whom they previously granted asylum, back to their countries of origin.

 The purpose is thus to exploit what is often the tenuous residency status of rendered individuals to permit the courts and security forces in countries of origin to "sort them out" -- to use more robust interrogation techniques like physical torture and credible threats against loved ones to extract punishable confessions or apply emergency laws to put them behind bars without the inconvenience of due process, he said.  "An added benefit is that all this tends to take place far away from the limelight of publicity, in environments where media and access are typically strictly controlled or forbidden entirely," Rabbani told IPS.

 Francis A. Boyle, professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law, is particularly critical of the policies of the administration of President George W. Bush -- specifically on renditions.  He condemned the "reprehensive policy known euphemistically as
'extraordinary renditions'" that involve both the "enforced disappearances of persons" and torture, as being "widespread" and "systematic."  Such acts, Boyle told IPS, constitute a "crime against humanity" as defined by Article 7 of the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court (ICC).  "That is precisely why the Bush Jr. administration has done everything humanly possible to sabotage the ICC," he added.

 To the contrary, Boyle argued, everyone in the chain of command responsible for this criminal policy -- from Bush down through Vice President Dick Cheney, National Intelligence Director John Negroponte, CIA Director Porter Goss and operatives at the Clandestine Services Unit of the CIA -- "must be prosecuted under both U.S. domestic criminal law, international criminal law, and the domestic criminal legal systems of every state in the world".
 Boyle also pointed out that there is no statute of limitations for such grievous international crimes.  "Furthermore, all Bush Jr. administration lawyers at the White House, the Department of Justice, and the CIA, inter alia, who signed off on 'extraordinary renditions' must also be prosecuted for aiding and abetting crimes against humanity, war crimes, torture, enforced disappearances, murder, and kidnapping," said Boyle, the author of "Destroying World Order" (2005) and "Biowarfare and Terrorism" (2005).  He said that Italy is correctly starting to do this.  Other states are obligated to follow under basic principles of both treaty and customary international law, Boyle added.

 Rabbani dismissed the so-called diplomatic assurances on deportations as "largely meaningless".
 "In reality, this is Guantanamo Bay (the U.S. detention facility for terror suspects in Cuba) on a global scale."  Rabbani said there is no persuasive explanation of why else renditions have in the past several years become a weapon of choice for officials who have demonstrated a total contempt for the rule of law, and have very publicly indicated their determination to leapfrog restrictions, such as the Geneva Conventions and longstanding protections of civil liberties, on their handling of suspects.  "Why else governments would willingly deport suspects they claim pose serious threats to their own national security, is beyond me," Rabbani added.


Report Warned on C.I.A.'s Tactics in Interrogation

By DOUGLAS JEHL

11/09/05 "
New York Times " -- -- WASHINGTON, Nov. 8 - A classified report issued last year by the Central Intelligence Agency's inspector general warned that interrogation procedures approved by the C.I.A. after the Sept. 11 attacks might violate some provisions of the international Convention Against Torture, current and former intelligence officials say.The previously undisclosed findings from the report, which was completed in the spring of 2004, reflected deep unease within the C.I.A. about the interrogation procedures, the officials said. A list of 10 techniques authorized early in 2002 for use against terror suspects included one known as waterboarding, and went well beyond those authorized by the military for use on prisoners of war.

The convention, which was drafted by the United Nations, bans torture, which is defined as the infliction of "severe" physical or mental pain or suffering, and prohibits lesser abuses that fall short of torture if they are "cruel, inhuman or degrading." The United States is a signatory, but with some reservations set when ratified by the Senate in 1994.

The report, by John L. Helgerson, the C.I.A.'s inspector general, did not conclude that the techniques constituted torture, which is also prohibited under American law, the officials said. But Mr. Helgerson did find, the officials said, that the techniques appeared to constitute cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment under the convention.

The agency said in a written statement in March that "all approved interrogation techniques, both past and present, are lawful and do not constitute torture." It reaffirmed that statement on Tuesday, but would not comment on any classified report issued by Mr. Helgerson. The statement in March did not specifically address techniques that could be labeled cruel, inhuman or degrading, and which are not explicitly prohibited in American law.

The officials who described the report said it discussed particular techniques used by the C.I.A. against particular prisoners, including about three dozen terror suspects being held by the agency in secret locations around the world. They said it referred in particular to the treatment of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is said to have organized the Sept. 11 attacks and who has been detained in a secret location by the C.I.A. since he was captured in March 2003. Mr. Mohammed is among those believed to have been subjected to waterboarding, in which a prisoner is strapped to a board and made to believe that he is drowning.

In his report, Mr. Helgerson also raised concern about whether the use of the techniques could expose agency officers to legal liability, the officials said. They said the report expressed skepticism about the Bush administration view that any ban on cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment under the treaty does not apply to C.I.A. interrogations because they take place overseas on people who are not citizens of the United States. The current and former intelligence officials who described Mr. Helgerson's report include supporters and critics of his findings. None would agree to be identified by name, and none would describe his conclusions in specific detail. They said the report had included 10 recommendations for changes in the agency's handling of terror suspects, but they would not say what those recommendations were.

Porter J. Goss, the C.I.A. director, testified this year that eight of the report's recommendations had been accepted, but did not describe them. The inspector general is an independent official whose auditing role at the agency was established by Congress, but whose reports to the agency's director are not binding. Some former intelligence officials said the inspector general's findings had been vigorously disputed by the agency's general counsel. To date, the Justice Department has brought charges against only one C.I.A. employee in connection with prisoner abuse, and prosecutors have signaled that they are unlikely to bring charges against C.I.A. officers in several other cases involving the mishandling of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the current and former intelligence officials said Mr. Helgerson's report had added to apprehensions within the agency about gray areas in the rules surrounding interrogation procedures.

"The ambiguity in the law must cause nightmares for intelligence officers who are engaged in aggressive interrogations of Al Qaeda suspects and other terrorism suspects," said John Radsan, a former assistant general counsel at the agency who left in 2004. Mr. Radsan, now an associate professor at William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, would not comment on Mr. Helgerson's report.

Congressional officials said the report had emerged as an unstated backdrop in the debate now under way on Capitol Hill over whether the C.I.A. should be subjected to the same strict rules on interrogation that the military is required to follow. In opposing an amendment sponsored by Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, Mr. Goss and Vice President Dick Cheney have argued that the C.I.A. should be granted an exemption allowing it extra latitude, subject to presidential authorization, in interrogating high-level terrorists abroad who might have knowledge about future attacks. The issue of the agency's treatment of detainees arose shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, after C.I.A. officers became involved in interrogating prisoners caught in Afghanistan, and the agency sought legal guidance on how far its employees and contractors could go in interrogating terror suspects, current and former intelligence officials said.

The list of 10 techniques, including feigned drowning, was secretly drawn up in early 2002 by a team that included senior C.I.A. officials who solicited recommendations from foreign governments and from agency psychologists, the officials said. They said officials from the Justice Department and the National Security Council, which is part of the White House, were involved in the process.
Among the few known documents that address interrogation procedures and that have been made public is an August 2002 legal opinion by the Justice Department, which said that interrogation methods just short of those that might cause pain comparable to "organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death" could be allowable without being considered torture. The administration disavowed that classified legal opinion in the summer of 2004 after it was publicly disclosed.

A new opinion made public in December 2004 and, signed by James B. Comey, then the deputy attorney general, explicitly rejected torture and adopted more restrictive standards to define it. But a cryptic footnote to the new document about the "treatment of detainees" referred to what the officials said were other still-classified opinions. Officials have said that the footnote meant that coercive techniques approved by the Justice Department under the looser interpretation of the torture statutes were still lawful even under the new, more restrictive standards.

It remains unclear whether all 10 of the so-called enhanced procedures approved in early 2002 remain authorized for use by the C.I.A. In an unclassified report this summer, the Senate Intelligence Committee referred briefly to Mr. Helgerson's report and said that the agency had fully put in effect only 5 of his 10 recommendations. But in testimony before Congress in February Mr. Goss said that eight had.

Some former intelligence officials have said the C.I.A. imposed tighter safeguards on its interrogation procedures after the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison came to light in May 2004. That was about the same time Mr. Helgerson completed his report.

The agency issued its earlier statement on the legality of approved interrogation techniques after Mr. Goss, in testimony before Congress on March 17, said that all interrogation techniques used "at this time" were legal but declined to make the same broad assertion about practices used over the past few years.

On March 18, Jennifer Millerwise Dyck, the agency's director of public affairs, said that "C.I.A. policies on interrogation have always followed legal guidance from the Department of Justice."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Information Clearing House


torture and abuse of prisoners

Former Powell aide links Cheney's office to abuse directives

By Agence France-Presse
Information Clearing House
11/03/05
-- -- WASHINGTON Vice President Dick Cheney's office was responsible for directives that led to U.S. soldiers' abusing prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, a former top State Department official said Thursday.

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell, then the secretary of state, told National Public Radio he had traced a trail of memos and directives authorizing questionable detention practices up through Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's office directly to Cheney's staff. "The secretary of defense under cover of the vice president's office," Wilkerson said, "regardless of the president having put out this memo" - "they began to authorize procedures within the armed forces that led to what we've seen."

He said the directives contradicted a 2002 order by President George W. Bush for the U.S. military to abide by the Geneva conventions against torture. "There was a visible audit trail from the vice president's office through the secretary of defense, down to the commanders in the field," authorizing practices that led to the abuse of detainees, Wilkerson said. The directives were "in carefully couched terms," Wilkerson conceded, but said they had the effect of loosening the reins on U.S. troops, leading to many cases of prisoner abuse, including at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, that were contrary to the Geneva Conventions.

"If you are a military man, you know that you just don't do these sorts of things," Wilkerson said, because troops will take advantage, or feel so pressured to obtain information that "they have to do what they have to do to get it."

He said that Powell had assigned him to investigate the matter after reports emerged in the media about U.S. troops abusing detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan. Both men had formerly served in the U.S. military. Wilkerson also called David Addington, the vice president's lawyer, "a staunch advocate of allowing the president in his capacity as commander in chief to deviate from the Geneva Conventions."

On Monday, Cheney promoted Addington to his chief of staff to replace I. Lewis Libby, who has been indicted over the unmasking of a CIA agent.

Wilkerson also told National Public Radio that Cheney's office ran an "alternate national security staff" that spied on and undermined the president's formal National Security Council. He said National Security Council staff stopped sending e-mails when they found out Cheney's staff members were reading their messages. He said he believed that Cheney's staff prevented Bush from seeing a National Security Council memo arguing strongly that the United States needed many more troops for the March 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Wilkerson also said that the former CIA chief George Tenet did not inform Cheney's office of key weaknesses in the government's argument that Saddam Hussein had or was seeking weapons of mass destruction. That argument was central to the Bush administration's justifications for the Iraq war.

Wilkerson has also said recently that Cheney and Rumsfeld operated a "cabal" that hijacked U.S. foreign and military policy.



Copyright © 2005 the International Herald Tribune

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.


POW Abuse Nothing New
ZNet Commentary, November 06, 2005
By Mickey Z
http://www.zmag.org

As news of a prisoner hunger strike finally begins to trickle out from Guantanamo, rest assured any wrongdoing will be pinned on a few bad apples. However, even a cursory glance at U.S. treatment of enemies captured during military interventions will demonstrate that the goings-on at Gitmo (or Abu Ghraib for that matter) are standard operating procedure for the home of the brave.

 
During the Second World War, for example, it required a mouthpiece none other than prominent racist Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr. to expose American tactics in the Pacific. His sentiments are summed up in the following journal entry:
 

"It was freely admitted that some of our soldiers tortured Jap prisoners and were as cruel and barbaric at times as the Japs themselves. Our men think nothing of shooting a Japanese prisoner or a soldier attempting to surrender. They treat the Jap with less respect than they would give to an
animal, and these acts are condoned by almost everyone. We claim to be fighting for civilization, but the more I see of this war in the Pacific the less right I think we have to claim to be civilized."
 

"When Lindbergh finally left the Pacific islands and cleared customs in Hawaii," says author John Dower, "he was asked if he had any [Japanese] bones in his baggage. It was, he was told, a routine question."
 

While the treatment of Japanese POWs was commonly little more than making sure there were no Japanese POWs, those Axis soldiers captured in the European theater often learned firsthand how good the good guys were.
 

"Before the invasion of Sicily, General Patton told his men to accept no surrender from enemy soldiers who continued to fire within the highly lethal 200-yards range," says historian Michael C.C. Adams. "At Biscari, U.S. troops killed thirty-four unarmed prisoners who had given up at the correct distance, but these GIs had seen buddies killed, and they didn't feel that a few yards made any difference...[Even] Audie Murphy told new men to take no prisoners and to kill Axis wounded."

 
Many of those who were actually taken prisoner may have soon wished they were killed. "Captured Germans held in France under the command of General Dwight D. Eisenhower were systematically starved," writes David K. Wright while another 676,000 or so German prisoners were shipped to the United States between 1942 and 1946.

    

Alexander Cockburn adds: "In U.S. camps, POWs were starved to the point of collapse, performed 20 million man-days of work on army posts and 10 million man-days for contract employers. Some were assigned to work for the Chemical Warfare Center at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland."

 
Some 372,000 German POWs in the United States were forced-at the behest of Eleanor Roosevelt-to undergo a re-education program, "to return them to 'Christian practices' and to reject 'German thinking,' says Cockburn. "As time wore on, the name of the program was changed to 'intellectual diversion'."
 

Canadian writer James Bacque, in his book "Other Losses," goes even further, claiming that up to one million German POWs in Europe died from Allied neglect while others were used by the French to fight the Vietnamese. While perusing "Good War" documents called the "Weekly Prisoner of War and Disarmed Enemy Report," Bacque found statistics under the heading "Other Losses" which he interpreted to mean POW deaths. The author consulted with Colonel Philip S. Lauben, who had been chief of the German Affairs Branch of the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF).

    
"[Other Losses] means deaths and escapes," Lauben explained.

    
When asked how many escapes he recalled, Lauben replied, "Very, very minor." Bacque later discovered the number was less than one-tenth of one percent.

    
"It is beyond doubt," Bacque writes, "that enormous numbers of men of all ages, plus some women and childen, died of exposure, unsanitary conditions, disease and starvation in the American and French camps in Germany and France starting in April 1945." Bacque puts those numbers at "almost certainly over 900,000, and quite likely over a million."

    
Needless to say, these controversial figures have been vigorously denied by official sources. Adams addressed Bacque's unsettling work in his book: "Bacques' crediblity has been assailed by Stephen Ambrose, a biographer of Dwight D. Eisenhower, the man who would bear ultimate responsibility for these crimes. Ambrose points out that Bacque at times relied on slender or circumstantial evidence and that it would have been hard to keep so great a scandal quiet for so long [New York Times Book Review, February 24, 1991]. On the other hand, American guards have come forward to support Bacque. One wrote: 'I witnessed the atrocities Stephen E. Ambrose tries to deny or gloss over' [New York Times Book Review, April 14, 1991]...The truth is probably somewhere in the middle...As another guard admitted: 'we sometimes slipped over the boundary of civilized behavior and resembled to some extent what we were fighting against.'"

    
With the high level of censorship existing in the Allied theater of operations, perhaps the key to keeping "so great a scandal quiet for so long" is that, for most people, it never existed. At the time, General George S. Patton wrote in his diary: "Ike made the sensational statement that while hostilities were in progress, the one important thing was order and discipline, but now that hostilities were over, the important thing was to stay in with world public opinion-apparently whether it was right or wrong...Eisenhower talked to us very confidentially on the necessity for solidarity in the event that any of us are called before a Congressional Committee."

 
No matter who's in office or where the war takes place, it's all the same.
 

Mickey Z. is the author of several books, most recently "50 American Revolutions You're Not Supposed to Know: Reclaiming American Patriotism"
(Disinformation Books). He can be found on the Web at
http://www.mickeyz.net.
http://www.zmag.org


FACILITY 1391, ISRAEL

By Julie Flint

The Daily Star, Beirut, Jan 29, 04

http://www.dailystar.com.lb

 

The Guantanamo detention camp is, quite rightly, the subject of loud and unrelenting protest by all major international human rights organizations. As the American facility in Cuba entered its third year this month, Amnesty International denounced it as “a human rights scandal.” Amnesty’s UK director said it was “two years too many,” and called for the immediate closure of a place where prisoners detained in the course of President George W. Bush’s “war against terrorism” are held without access to lawyers and without charge or trial.

But have you heard of Facility 1391, “Israel’s Guantanamo”? Probably not, because it is not mentioned by those campaigning against America’s Guantanamo. The only human rights organizations speaking out against Facility 1391 are Israeli. Yet the facility is, in every respect, far more shocking than Guantanamo. It is, in the words of Israel’s Haaretz newspaper: “(O)ne of the darker corners of Israel.”

Sheikh Abdel Karim Obeid, who is due to be released today as part of the prisoner exchange between Israel and Hizbullah, was held in “administrative detention,” without charge or trial, in Facility 1391 for 13 years. Mustafa Dirani, who will also be released today, was detained there for eight years ­ seven in solitary confinement. For most of those years, Dirani was held in subhuman conditions ­ tortured and, according to his Israeli lawyer, raped. Obeid, Dirani and other Lebanese prisoners held in Facility 1391 ­ some of them teenagers ­ were not visited by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) because the ICRC did not know the prison existed. The Lebanese prisoners did not even know where they were. If they asked, they were told they were “on the moon,” “in outer space,” or, even, “in Honolulu.”

Facility 1391 was airbrushed out of aerial photographs and is unmarked on maps. Officially, it did not exist, and what happened there happened with the certainty of complete impunity. And all the evidence suggests that what still happens there is very much worse than what happens at Guantanamo.

Set in a concrete fortress on a rise overlooking a kibbutz, close to the pre-1967 border between Israel and the West Bank, Facility 1391 belongs to the Israeli Army ­ specifically, to an army intelligence group known as Unit 504, which specializes in interrogation. Unit 504’s heyday came during the occupation of south Lebanon, when it ran a vast network of collaborators and was responsible for interrogating captured resistance fighters (and others who were not fighters).

At the end of the 1980s, Unit 504 began kidnapping Lebanese Shiites who could be held as hostages in the search for information about the fate of men like Ron Arad, the Israeli pilot who was shot down over Lebanon in 1986 and who has been missing without sight or sound since 1987. This was not only a violation of international humanitarian law, which categorically prohibits hostage taking; after April 2000, when Israel’s highest court ruled that the administrative detention of Lebanese nationals as “bargaining chips” was illegal, it was also a violation of Israeli law.  

But not for long: In March 2002 the Knesset passed a draconian and repressive piece of legislation that allowed Israel to continue holding “bargaining chips.” No prizes for guessing why the law, titled the “Imprisonment of Combatants Who are Not Entitled to Prisoner-of-War Status,” was popularly called the “Obeid-Dirani Law.”

The first glimpses of what went on behind the thick, high walls of Facility 1391 followed the accidental disclosure of the prison’s existence in the wake of Operation Defensive Shield, the Israeli Army’s re-invasion of West Bank towns in April 2002. Mass arrests strained Israel’s customary detention facilities to breaking point, and 1391 was used to accommodate the overflow. In the course of inquiries into the whereabouts of one young Palestinian, an Israeli human rights organization, Hamoked, eventually forced an admission that he was being held in a prison that no one had ever heard of: Facility 1391.

Former Palestinian guests of 1391 have described a vision of hell: tiny, stinking, windowless cells where they could barely see their own hands; solitary confinement cells without a toilet where prisoners used their own clothes to contain their waste; water turned on and off at the whim of guards; torture as a matter of routine during interrogation ­- even after the Israeli Supreme Court banned torture in 1999.

Obeid and Dirani will be the first long-term foreign nationals to give insider accounts of Facility 1391, but everything suggests that their treatment was even worse than that of Palestinian detainees. Dirani’s lawyer, Zvi Rish, has filed a $1.3 million lawsuit against Israel claiming that his client was raped and systematically beaten. Dirani’s cousin, Ghassan, developed catatonic schizophrenia during his 13-year incarceration without trial ­ some of those years in 1391.

In his suit, Dirani charges that he was subjected to torture and humiliating treatment for more than a month after he was kidnapped. He says he was beaten, shaken violently, deprived of sleep, kept naked during five weeks of interrogation and forced to squat for hours on end with his hands tied behind his back. He says he was raped twice -­ on one of those occasions sodomized with a club by the head of his interrogation team.

Rish said that after the club incident, “they forced him to drink oil and a lot of water, put a diaper on him and forced him to relieve himself in that for days while they laughed at him and photographed him.” Dirani was reportedly refused all medical assistance, despite severe bleeding.

The Israeli government has denied Dirani was raped, but has confirmed that prisoners were routinely stripped naked for interrogation.

To this day, Israel refuses to answer many of the questions asked about Facility 1391. How many people are being held there, and in what conditions? Why? Will they be put on trial? Answers are needed, and those answers may not be forthcoming without the unrelenting pressure of international organizations. They should speak out. Now.

 

Julie Flint is a veteran journalist based in Beirut and London. She wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR


Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, New York, 10 December 1984 www.ohchr.org/ english/bodies/cat/
 
Last update: 7 October 2005.  
Entry into force: 26 June 1987, in accordance with article 27 (1) 1 .
Registration: 26 June 1987, No. 24841.
Status: Signatories: 74, Parties: 140.
Text: United Nations, Treaty Series , vol. 1465, p. 85. 

Note: The Convention, of which the Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish texts are equally authentic, was adopted by resolution 39/46 2 of 10 December 1984 at the thirty-ninth session of the General Assembly of the United Nations. The Convention is open for signature by all States, in accordance with its article 25.
ISRAEL,

Israel  22 Oct 1986  3 Oct 1991 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

United States of America 11 18 Apr 1988  21 Oct 1994 
GERMANY Upon signature:

The Government of the Federal Republic of Germany reserves the right to communicate, upon ratification, such reservations or declarations of interpretation as are deemed necessary especially with respect to the applicability of article 3.

Upon ratification:

Article 3

This provision prohibits the transfer of a person directly to a State where this person is exposed to a concrete danger of being subjected to torture. In the opinion of the Federal Republic of Germany, article 3 as well as the other provisions of the Convention exclusively establish State obligations that are met by the Federal Republic of Germany in conformity with the provisions of its domestic law which is in accordance with the Convention.

Israel Reservations:

"1. In accordance with article 28 of the Convention, the State of Israel hereby declares that it does not recognize the competence of the Committee provided for in article 20.

"2. In accordance with paragraph 2 of article 30, the State of Israel hereby declares that it does not consider itself bound by paragraph 1 of that article."

Syrian Arab Republic Declarations:

In accordance with the provisions of article 28, paragraph 1, of the Convention, the Syrian Arab Republic does not recognize the competence of the Committee against Torture provided for in article 20 thereof;

The accession of the Syrian Arab Republic to this Convention shall in no way signify recognition of Israel or entail entry into any dealings with Israel in the context of the provisions of this Convention.

United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland Upon signature:

"The United Kingdom reserves the right to formulate, upon ratifying the Convention, any reservations or interpretative declarations which it might consider necessary."

United States of America Upon signature :

Declaration:

"The Government of the United States of America reserves the right to communicate, upon ratification, such reservations, interpretive understandings, or declarations as are deemed necessary."

Upon ratification :

Reservations:

"I. The Senate's advice and consent is subject to the following reservations:

(1) That the United States considers itself bound by the obligation under article 16 to prevent `cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment', only insofar as the term `cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment' means the cruel, unusual and inhumane treatment or punishment prohibited by the Fifth, Eighth, and/or Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States.

(2) That pursuant to article 30 (2) the United States declares that it does not consider itself bound by Article 30 (1), but reserves the right specifically to agree to follow this or any other procedure for arbitration in a particular case.

II. The Senate's advice and consent is subject to the following understandings, which shall apply to the obligations of the United States under this Convention:

(1) (a) That with reference to article 1, the United States understands that, in order to constitute torture, an act must be specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering and that mental pain or suffering refers to prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from (1) the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering; (2) the administration or application, or threatened administration or application, of mind altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality; (3) the threat of imminent death; or (4) the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering, or the administration or application of mind altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or personality.

(b) That the United States understands that the definition of torture in article 1 is intended to apply only to acts directed against persons in the offender's custody or physical control.

(c) That with reference to article 1 of the Convention, the United States understands that `sanctions' includes judicially-imposed sanctions and other enforcement actions authorized by United States law or by judicial interpretation of such law. Nonetheless, the United States understands that a State Party could not through its domestic sanctions defeat the object and purpose of the Convention to prohibit torture.

(d) That with reference to article 1 of the Convention, the United States understands that the term `acquiescence' requires that the public official, prior to the activity constituting torture, have awareness of such activity and thereafter breach his legal responsibility to intervene to prevent such activity.

(e) That with reference to article 1 of the Convention, the Unites States understands that noncompliance with applicable legal procedural standards does not per se constitute torture.

(2) That the United States understands the phrase, `where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture,' as used in article 3 of the Convention, to mean `if it is more likely than not that he would be tortured.'

(3) That it is the understanding of the United States that article 14 requires a State Party to provide a private right of action for damages only for acts of torture committed in territory under the jurisdiction of that State Party.

(4) That the United States understands that international law does not prohibit the death penalty, and does not consider this Convention to restrict or prohibit the United States from applying the death penalty consistent with the Fifth, Eighth and/or Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States, including any constitutional period of confinement prior to the imposition of the death penalty.

(5) That the United States understands that this Convention shall be implemented by the United States Government to the extent that it exercises legislative and judicial jurisdiction over the matters covered by the Convention and otherwise by the state and local governments. Accordingly, in implementing articles 10-14 and 16, the United States Government shall take measures appropriate to the Federal system to the end that the competent authorities of the constituent units of the United States of America may take appropriate measures for the fulfilment of the Convention.

III. The Senate's advice and consent is subject to the following declarations:

(1) That the United States declares that the provisions of articles 1 through 16 of the Convention are not self-executing.