From: arens@ISI.EDU (Yigal Arens)
Subject: Lying about torture
Organization: USC/Information Sciences Institute
Lines: 54
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: grl.isi.edu

Yedi'ot Ahronot, April 9, 1993.  Excerpt.

EACH ONE AND HIS OWN NEVO*

(* A reference to General Azri'el Nevo, Shamir's Military Secretary. 
Irrelevant to this excerpt.)

By Nahum Barne'a

. . .

In mid '91 SHABAK found itself in the center of another storm [...]. 
A year and a half earlier, Khaled Sheikh Ali, 27, a member of the
Islamic Jihad, died at the SHABAK installation in Gaza prison.  The
two SHABAK interrogators who were responsible for his death were put
on trial. In September '91 the Supreme Court rejected their appeal and
sentenced them to 6 months in prison.  As far as is known, this was
the first time in Israel's history that SHABAK operatives were sent to
prison.  The Supreme Court unanimously rejected the warning by the
director of SHABAK that the sentence will be detrimental the
effectiveness of other interrogators. [...] The judges in the case
were [...] Barak, Goldberg, and Matza.

When they realized that they were on their own, the interrogators
agreed to talk.  Deputy State Attorney Rachel Sukkar[sp?] was placed
in charge of investigating the affair.  She [...] questioned the
directors of all SHABAK divisions.  She investigated only the matter
of the death in Gaza prison.  She discovered that not only torture,
but also "the culture of lies", which Judge Landau had described in
his report of two years before, were still very much in existence. 
Nothing had changed.

The report was classified and was seen by only some ten people, among
them the Prime Minister, the people at the top of the judicial system
and Judge Landau.  The director of SHABAK claimed that he did not
know.  After all, they were dealing only with a single jail and with
low ranking people.  The system bit the bullet and accepted the
explanation.  One of SHABAK's high-ranking officials was transfered
from his very high position to a less high position.

. . .

["The culture of lies" referred to above is the SHABAK interrogators'
policy of lying in court when denying detainees claims that they were
tortured in the course of interrogation.  The Landau commission sought
to correct this problem by legalizing a list of torture methods --
thus eliminating the fear that a detainee might be released if those
methods were used to extract a confession.  The fact that the need to
lie still persists would seem to indicate that SHABAK is not sticking
to the "approved" torture methods. -- Yigal]
--
Yigal Arens
USC/ISI                                                TV made me do it!
arens@isi.edu
