Torture – Informed Comment

Israel: Palestinian Healthcare Workers Tortured

Human Rights Watch — Tue, 27 Aug 2024 04:02:25 +0000

ICC Prosecutor Should Investigate Attacks on Health Care, Detainee Abuses

Human Rights Watch – (Jerusalem) – Israeli forces have arbitrarily detained Palestinian healthcare workers in Gaza since hostilities began in October 2023, deported them to detention facilities in Israel, and allegedly tortured and ill-treated them, Human Rights Watch said today. The detention of healthcare workers in the context of the Israeli military’s repeated attacks on hospitals in Gaza has contributed to the catastrophic degradation of the besieged territory’s healthcare system.

Released doctors, nurses and paramedics described to Human Rights Watch their mistreatment in Israeli custody, including humiliation, beatings, forced stress positions, prolonged cuffing and blindfolding, and denial of medical care. They also reported torture, including rape and sexual abuse by Israeli forces, denial of medical care, and poor detention conditions for the general detainee population.

“The Israeli government’s mistreatment of Palestinian healthcare workers has continued in the shadows and needs to immediately stop,” said Balkees Jarrah, acting Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “The torture and other ill-treatment of doctors, nurses, and paramedics should be thoroughly investigated and appropriately punished, including by the International Criminal Court (ICC).”

From March to June 2024, Human Rights Watch interviewed eight Palestinian healthcare workers who were taken by the Israeli military from Gaza between November and December 2023 and detained without charge for between seven days and five months. Six were detained at work following Israeli sieges of hospitals or during hospital evacuations that they said had been coordinated with the Israeli military. None of the healthcare workers said they were ever informed of the reason for their detention or charged with an offense. Human Rights Watch also spoke with seven people who witnessed Israeli soldiers detaining healthcare workers carrying out their duties.

Human Rights Watch sent a letter to the Israeli military and Israeli Prison Services with the preliminary findings on August 13 but has not received a response.

All the healthcare workers interviewed provided similar accounts of mistreatment in Israeli custody. After being in Gaza, they were deported to detention facilities in Israel, including the Sde Teiman military base in the Negev desert and Ashkelon prison, or, forcibly transferred to the Anatot military base near East Jerusalem and the Ofer detention facility, in the occupied West Bank. All said that they were stripped, beaten, and blindfolded and handcuffed, for many weeks on end, and pressured to confess to being members of the Hamas movement with various threats of indefinite detention, rape, and killing their families in Gaza.

A surgeon said he was “wearing scrubs and Crocs” when Israeli forces detained him during their siege of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia, Gaza, in December. “We were 50 healthcare workers, including nurses and doctors,” he said. “The soldier on the microphone ordered men and boys over 15 years old to evacuate the hospital…. When they took us out of the hospital, they told us to undress and stay in our underwear.”

One paramedic said that at the Sde Teiman detention facility he was suspended from a chain attached to handcuffs, electroshocked, denied medical care for broken ribs caused by beatings, and administered what he believed was a psychoactive drug before interrogations. “It was so degrading, it was unbelievable,” he said. “I was helping people as a paramedic, I never expected something like this.”

Healthcare workers also reported being punished in detention for moving or speaking, and collectively punished if other detainees spoke. “Sometimes if one spoke, they [soldiers] punished the whole warehouse [at Naqab prison], collectively,” one healthcare worker said.

The Gaza Health Ministry reported that Israeli forces have detained at least 310 Palestinian healthcare workers since October 7. Healthcare Workers Watch-Palestine, a nongovernmental organization, documented 259 detentions of healthcare workers and collected 31 accounts describing torture and other abuses by Israeli authorities, including the use of stress positions, deprivation of adequate food and water, threats of sexual violence and rape, and degrading treatment. Healthcare Workers Watch-Palestine helped Human Rights Watch interview released healthcare workers.

The prolonged arbitrary detention and mistreatment of healthcare workers has exacerbated the health crisis in Gaza, Human Rights Watch said. Since October, over 92,000 people in Gaza have been wounded, functional hospitals have fewer than 1,500 inpatient beds, and yet the Israeli authorities have allowed only 35 percent of nearly 14,000 people who requested medical evacuations to leave Gaza, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported on August 5.

The healthcare workers’ accounts are consistent with independent reports, including by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), Israeli news media, and rights groups, documenting dozens of detainee accounts of incommunicado detention, beatings, sexual violence, forced confessions, electrocution, and other torture and abuses of Palestinians in Israeli detention.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported on June 3 that the Israeli military was conducting criminal investigations into the deaths of 48 Palestinians in Israeli detention facilities since October 7. These include Dr. Adnan al-Bursh, a surgeon and head of orthopedics at al-Shifa Hospital, and Dr. Eyad al-Rantisi, the director of a women’s health center at Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia.

Common article 3 to the four Geneva Conventions of 1949, applicable to hostilities between Israel and the Palestinian armed groups, provides that “[p]ersons taking no active part in the hostilities … shall in all circumstances be treated humanely.” “Cruel treatment and torture” and “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment” are prohibited at all times. Those wounded and sick “shall be … cared for.”

Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, applicable to occupied territories, prohibits individual forcible transfers within the occupied territory as well as deportations of civilians from occupied territory to the occupying power’s territory, regardless of the motive. Serious violations of Common article 3 and article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention committed with criminal intent are war crimes.

Human Rights Watch has found that Israeli authorities for decades have failed to provide credible accountability for torture and other abuses against Palestinian detainees. According to official Israeli statistics, between 2019 and 2022, 1,830 complaints of abuse were opened against Israeli Prison Services officers, with none resulting in a criminal conviction. Israeli authorities have not allowed independent humanitarian agencies access to Palestinian detainees since the start of hostilities.

Governments should support international justice efforts to address Israeli abuses against Palestinian detainees and hold those responsible to account. The United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and other countries should press Israel to end its abusive detention practices, which form one aspect of systematic oppression underlying Israeli authorities’ crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution against Palestinians.

The ICC is considering arrest warrant applications against senior Israeli officials for grave international crimes and should ensure that its investigation addresses abuses against Palestinian detainees. Israel’s allies should press the government to urgently allow independent monitoring of detention facilities.

“The torture of Palestinian healthcare workers is a window into the much larger issue of the Israeli government’s treatment of detainees generally,” Jarrah said. “Governments should publicly call on the Israeli authorities to release unlawfully detained healthcare workers and end the cruel mistreatment and nightmarish conditions for all detained Palestinians.”

Humiliation, Ill-treatment, and Torture

The healthcare workers interviewed all reported humiliation, ill-treatment, and torture, including being stripped and beaten, with prolonged painful stress positions, near-constant cuffing, and blindfolding. Some said they were threatened with sexual violence and by attack dogs.

Abuses During Deportation, Detention

All eight men reported being forced to strip publicly immediately after being taken into custody and remain kneeling for extended periods, exposed to the cold, and at various times throughout their detention. Photographs and videos that Israeli soldiers shared online and that Reuters verified show Palestinian detainees unclothed or in underwear. Publishing such images online is an outrage on personal dignity and posted sexualized images are a form of sexual violence, which are war crimes.

“We were forced to strip in the street and remain in our boxers, one by one,” said Osama Tashtash, 28, a doctor at the Indonesian Hospital in Beit Lahia who was arrested in early December at his home nearby. “For an hour and a half, we were on our knees.” He said that during that period, he and other detainees were exposed to danger from Israeli military operations in the area. He said shrapnel fell on them as Israeli soldiers threw grenades at nearby houses and set them on fire.

Dr. Khalid Hamoudeh, 34, was arrested on the morning of December 12 at Kamal Adwan hospital in Beit Lahia. A photograph circulated late that evening by the Israeli broadcaster Channel 12 shows Dr. Hamoudeh shirtless alongside four other men he identified as fellow healthcare workers. The photograph shows the men standing in a row in front of an Israeli soldier holding a light panel, illuminating the detainees.

Dr. Hamoudeh said they were photographed, then designated for release or detention. Behind them the photograph shows hundreds of men sitting in a large pit with at least 18 Israeli soldiers guarding them. A detailed analysis by the investigative TechJournalist identified several detainees with their hands tied behind their back, including Dr. Hamoudeh.

The image, whose site was identified first by the open-source researcher FDov on X, formerly known as Twitter, and later confirmed by Human Rights Watch, was taken approximately half a kilometer northeast of the hospital. Dr. Hamoudeh said that about 50 healthcare workers sitting together separately from internally displaced people. He said he was told to undress and stay in his underwear and was then blindfolded.

The healthcare workers described beatings and physical abuse after being detained, including being punched, kicked with steel-toed boots, slapped, and beaten with assault-rifle butts by Israeli soldiers.

Eyad Abed, 50, a surgeon at the Indonesian Hospital who was detained during a coordinated evacuation of the hospital in November, said:

Every minute we were beaten. I mean all over the body, on sensitive areas between the legs, the chest, the back. We were kicked all over the body and the face. They used the front of their boots which had a metal tip, then their weapons. They had lighters: one soldier tried to burn me but burned the person next to me. I told them I’m a doctor, but they didn’t care.

Abed said that he had broken ribs and a broken tailbone as a result of the physical assault by Israeli soldiers during his arrest and detention, which two months later still had not healed.

An ambulance driver who asked not to be named said while he was being held with dozens of other men in large a metal “cage” near the Israel-Gaza border fence, he saw guards beat to death two men, one of whom he recognized, with metal bars.

The healthcare workers all described ill-treatment during their deportation from Gaza to detention facilities in Israel, including beatings, sitting in prolonged painful stress positions while blindfolded and cuffed by the hands and feet, being “stacked above each other like sheep,” pepper sprayed, and denied water.

Abuses in Detention Facilities

The healthcare workers said that Israeli authorities abused detainees at detention facilities inside Israel. Four said that when they arrived at detention facilities, the authorities forced them to wear adult diapers and denied them access to toilets.

The ambulance driver, who was detained for five months, was first transferred to a prison in Ashkelon, where guards interrogated him daily for a week, during which time they bound him in his underwear to a chair for between 10 and 15 hours a day in a room with a blasting air conditioner. He said he had been badly beaten and that sitting caused extreme pain in his spine. He said the authorities denied him access to a toilet, forcing him to urinate on himself, and refused to provide him any food or water. He was then transferred to the Ofer military detention facility in the Occupied West Bank, where at night, the guards threw cold water on him and on his mattress.

“P.O.W.,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / IbisPaint / Clip2Comic, 2024.

A paramedic, Walid Khalili, 36, said that when soldiers removed his blindfold at the Sde Teiman facility, he saw he was in a large building “like a warehouse,” with chains hanging from the ceiling. Dozens of detainees in diapers were suspended from the ceiling, with the chains attached to their square metal handcuffs. He said that personnel at the facility then suspended him from a chain, so his feet were not touching the ground, dressed him in a garment and a headband that were attached to wires, and shocked him with electricity.

Two doctors held at Sde Teiman said that other detainees came to them to seek care for wounds inflicted by Israeli authorities. When detainees “lifted their shirts, I saw signs of abuse and physical beatings,” one doctor said. The other said, “I saw [men] who had cigarette burns on their arms, it was very clear. One had a dog bite on his stomach.”

As punishment for moving or speaking, detainees would be forced to stand, sometimes for hours, with their cuffed hands held above their head or fixed to a fence, detainees said. Detainees could hear the screams of other detainees being beaten nearby. One said that after he asked a question, an Israeli officer forced his fingers through a chain-link fence, he “told me to shut up and not say a word,” and pressed downward on the detainee’s fingers for several minutes, causing severe pain until the detainee could no longer feel his fingers.

Three healthcare workers reported soldiers using military dogs to intimidate detainees. “They would threaten to shoot us and start loading their weapons,” one doctor said. “This felt like horror. They brought in military dogs. I screamed, that was the worst moment in my life, because I was still cuffed and blindfolded, not seeing where the dogs are coming from.” Another doctor said dogs were brought in late at night to wake and terrify detainees.

Threats and Acts of Sexual Abuse

Three healthcare workers said that Israeli authorities threatened them with sexual assault. Khader Abu Nada, 30, a nurse at Beit Hanoun hospital in northern Gaza, said that when he denied any Hamas affiliation during his first interrogation at a military base in Gaza, the commander threatened to rape him with an “electric stick.” When Abu Nada continued to deny any Hamas affiliation, soldiers beat him until he was bleeding from his nose, hands, and mouth.

Abu Nada said the commander then asked him where his mother was and threatened to bring her from the checkpoint where he was arrested and strip her in front of everyone. “When I heard this, I was psychologically broken. I felt humiliated,” he said. He said he was threatened with rape again prior to his release.

A detained paramedic who was transferred to al-Naqab prison after 20 days in Sde Teiman, said that a man who was visibly “bleeding from his bottom” was brought in and placed next to him. The man told the paramedic that before he was placed in detention, “three soldiers took turns raping him with an M16 [assault rifle]. No one else knew, but he told me as a paramedic. He was terrified.” In addition, a doctor said while he was detained in a military base, a detainee, “in his late 30s, crying hard … told me he was sexually assaulted during the strip search.”

Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Conditions

All the healthcare workers described horrific conditions in detention. Abed, the surgeon, said the food was “horrible” and inadequate, and that he lost 22 kilograms during a month and a half in detention. The bathrooms were “not even fit for animals.” The mattresses and blankets were thin, and the cold nights were “unbearable.” In the cells, water for toilets and for drinking was only available for one hour a day, with a “disgusting” stench emanating from the non-flushable toilets. “They gave us a bag for the garbage. We used to fill it with water and drink from it later. It smelled horrible but we had no choice,” Abed said.

For detainees’ meals at Sde Teiman, soldiers “emptied tuna cans into a garbage bag and gave it to me,” said Dr. Khalid Hamoudeh, whom soldiers ordered to distribute food to detainees. “One time I saw a soldier spit in the bag. Many [detainees] were starving and telling me they were hungry.” A nurse detained at Anatot said, “We got two meals [a day]. It was terrible food. I would just drink water, there were no fruits, not even apples. They gave us food just to survive the day.”

Khalili, the paramedic, said that at one point when he was detained in Sde Teiman, an Israeli news crew arrived, and a detainee who understood Hebrew told him that a prison official told the journalists, falsely, that the detainees were members of a unit of Hamas’s armed wing responsible for the October 7 attacks. The next day, the paramedic said, soldiers brought food and set it in front of the detainees, ordered them not to eat it, took photographs, then took the food away.

Prolonged Cuffing and Blindfolding

The healthcare workers said that they were cuffed almost constantly throughout their detention. They said Israeli authorities often ignored detainees who complained about the tightness of their cuffs or tightened their cuffs as punishment for complaining. In a public letter, an Israeli doctor working in the military field hospital at Sde Teiman wrote that in a single week, “two prisoners had their legs amputated due to handcuff injuries, which unfortunately is a routine event.”

Abu Nada, the nurse, said he was arrested at the Kuwaiti Roundabout in Gaza on November 22 while evacuating from the north with his family. Soldiers ordered him to strip, cuffed and blindfolded him, then took him for questioning. He said his first interrogation ended with an Israeli military commander punching him in the face and kicking him all over his body, then ordering another soldier to tighten his cuffs and drag him to an open field, where he waited on his knees for an hour.

“My wrists hurt so much, they felt paralyzed and numb. I cried so much, I couldn’t take the pain,” Abu Nada said. When he asked a soldier to loosen his cuffs, he said the soldier repeatedly kicked his head instead. “I told him, ‘Kill me I can’t take it anymore, kill me already.’” Israeli soldiers ignored or beat him in response to his multiple requests to loosen his handcuffs.

Abu Nada said his wrists later turned black, and he feared his mistreatment may have caused permanent damage: “I still feel pain in my hands. My hands are weak, and I have no strength to hold or carry anything. Also, there’s still pain from my shoulders all the way to my fingertips. I have severe neck pain from the pressure on my head when they kept pushing our heads down.”

As Physicians for Human Rights Israel has reported, prolonged physical restraint causes intense pain and can result in permanent nerve damage that interferes with using the hands and in extreme cases can lead to death.

The healthcare workers also all reported prolonged, near-constant blindfolding. According to Physicians for Human Rights Israel, “blindfolding can, even with short-term use, induce visual hallucinations in healthy individuals. Over extended periods, prolonged use of blindfolds can contribute to the onset of anxiety disorders, depression, substance abuse, and PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) in the medium to long term.”

Medical Neglect

The healthcare workers described medical neglect despite the detainees’ numerous requests and clear, urgent need for treatment for preexisting health conditions, or for injuries sustained during the hostilities in Gaza or from abuses in custody.

A nurse at Awda hospital in northern Gaza, who asked not to be named, said that on November 21 he was injured when an Israeli airstrike hit his hospital. He had emergency surgery at Awda hospital to stabilize broken fingers and a torn tendon in his right hand, which was then placed in a cast, and an open wound on his left hand was wrapped in gauze.

The next day, the nurse left the hospital in an ambulance along with 15 other people, including patients, their companions, and hospital staff, in an evacuation arranged by the Red Cross and Médecins Sans Frontieres (MSF or Doctors Without Borders). “The hospital shared our car license plate number, IDs, and names [with the Israeli military], and everything was approved,” he said.

Shortly after their departure, Israeli soldiers at the Kuwaiti Roundabout stopped the ambulance and ordered all passengers to exit. The nurse and another doctor were taken aside and ordered to strip. “My right hand had a cast and titanium [implants]; I couldn’t use it. I couldn’t even pee alone. The doctor detained with me helped me take off my clothes, even my shoes,” the nurse said.

Cuffed and blindfolded, the nurse was taken to Anatot military base. He said that on intake, soldiers introduced a man as a doctor who examined his wounds but did nothing else. He said despite repeated requests, the dressing was only changed for the first time on the third or fourth day of his detention and rarely after that. “They only changed the gauze on the injuries – no scans, no proper medication, nothing. My injury, the skin was open, [but I was given] nothing to treat possible bacteria,” he said. The nurse also said that after a week of detention he was released and needed surgery to treat hemorrhoids due to constant sitting and being kicked in detention.

Dr. Hamoudeh said that during his detention at Sde Teiman in late December, he saw another detainee with apparent “trauma from beatings, and I was terrified he would die.” He alerted authorities who said they were paramedics – he never saw an Israeli doctor at the facility – and “they took pictures [of the injuries] and sent it to someone. The soldier then told them enough, and not to do any more medical care.” He said when he told soldiers about people in need of medical care, they would reply to him saying they did not care if they died.

Dr. Hamoudeh said that one day in December, soldiers brought in five detained doctors, including Dr. Adnan al-Bursh, head of orthopedics at al-Shifa hospital in Gaza, who was declared dead by Israeli Prison authorities in Ofer prison in April. “Dr. Adnan was in pain from the beatings. He was also punished. He had visible blunt trauma, and he had trouble breathing,” Dr. Hamoudeh said. “What happened to him, happened to many. There’s clear medical neglect.”

Dr. Osama Tushtash, 28, fell ill with a severe fever after a week in detention at what he believed was al-Naqab prison, but Israeli authorities refused to let him see a doctor or even to give him a painkiller. “They just told me to drink water,” he said.

Khalili, the paramedic, said he suffered broken ribs and a lung injury as a result of beatings, but received no medical treatment at Sde Teiman. He said he saw a detainee die from what he believes was cardiac arrest. When a soldier brought in a doctor, who confirmed the detainee was dead, the detainees shouted “Allahu akbar,” prompting a violent raid by an Israeli special unit tasked with prison raids.

Autopsies of Palestinians who died in Israeli detention facilities indicated medical neglect and signs of physical abuse, including bruising and broken bones, Haaretz reported in March. A report released by Physicians for Human Rights Israel documented treatment without consent, surgery performed without an anesthesiologist, and political interference in medical decisions in detention facilities.

In a letter to senior Israeli officials, an Israeli doctor at Sde Teiman field hospital described practices that endangered detainees’ health, including the lack of trained medical staff, and transferring patients back to the detention facility after only an hour of observation following “major [surgical] operations,” Haaretz reported.

Article 91 of the Fourth Geneva Convention requires facilities detaining civilians to “have an adequate infirmary, under the direction of a qualified doctor,” where those detained may receive “the attention they require, as well as an appropriate diet.” Under international human rights law, medical care for detainees should be at least equivalent to that available to the general population. Current conditions of detention violate the Israeli Incarceration of Unlawful Combatants Law, which provides for detainees’ right to medical treatment, hygienic conditions, healthy and dignified sleeping arrangements, and daily outside exercise.

Use of Prisoner Functionaries

Two healthcare workers detained in different facilities said Israeli military commanders tasked them to act as prisoner functionaries or Shawish (an Arabic slang term for “servant” or “subordinate”). The men said that shawish, who act as intermediaries between the guards and detainees, are the only detainees not constantly blindfolded, though their hands remain cuffed. The men prepared and distributed food, assisted detainees with eating or using the toilet, cleaned rooms, transferred detainees to interrogation, and provided basic medical care.

Whistleblowers who spoke to CNN alleged that Israeli authorities appointed detainees as shawish only after they were cleared of suspected links to Hamas, and thus had no reason to detain them. In a statement to CNN, the Israeli military denied holding detainees unnecessarily.

Dr. Hamoudeh said that soldiers at Sde Teiman told him to act as a shawish because he spoke English, warning, “If you do anything, you’ll be punished worse than the rest.” He was interrogated only once, for about 10 minutes, on the tenth day of his detention, and was released without charge after 22 days.

Abu Nada, the nurse, said authorities at the Anatot military base told him to work as a shawish. On the fifth day of his detention, a soldier speaking in Arabic told him that if he wanted a lawyer, he had to provide the lawyer’s phone number, which he could not. He said the soldier told him, “We didn’t find anything on you. But we will continue investigating.” He was released without charge after about eight days, on December 1.

With his blindfold removed, Dr. Hamoudeh saw 10 to 20 detainees with medical conditions at Sde Teiman, some of whom needed immediate medical care. “They [the soldiers] threw this responsibility at me, but [left me] without proper medical equipment and facilities,” Hamoudeh said. “I was terrified some would die. […] The shawish before me told me [before being released] that three detainees died during his time.”

Abu Nada accompanied cuffed, blindfolded detainees from the “warehouse” to the interrogation room. “All the way to interrogation, soldiers would be kicking and assaulting [the detainees],” he said. “I used to cry when transferring them, because I’m the one bringing them to this torture. Soldiers told me to turn my face not to look as they continued to kick and beat the detainees.”

Via Human Rights Watch

B’Tselem accuses Israeli Authorities of Systematically Torturing Thousands of Palestinian Prisoners

Juan Cole — Fri, 09 Aug 2024 05:35:19 +0000

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The brave and meticulous Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem has issued a report aptly entitled “Welcome to Hell” on the functioning of the Israeli prison system, in which it concludes that Israeli authorities are now routinely using torture on Palestinian prisoners.

This violence, B’Tselem showed, is part of Israel’s longstanding incarceration project, which has targeted hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, unraveling their social and political fabric. Since 1967, over 800,000 Palestinians have been imprisoned, dehumanized, and labeled as “terrorists,” facilitating their systematic oppression and the violation of their rights. The prison system serves as a tool of Israel’s apartheid regime to maintain control and to ensure Jewish supremacy between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. (“Between the river and the sea” is a slogan in the charter of the ruling Likud Party, by which it means it wants to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians).

Israel today holds some 10,000 Palestinians, many of them without charge or trial or any semblance of habeas corpus.

Although some prisoners had engaged in violence, many are arrested for thought crimes or by mistake. Like the FBI, the Israeli army gets people mixed up because of similar names.

The damning document has received almost no coverage on American television, and even the print media has largely ignored it and its implications. Israeli TV has now broadcast video of one of the gang rapes of a prisoner, which military police attempted to obscure from the camera with their riot shields.

B’Tselem’s report, based on testimonies from 55 former prisoners, reveals systemic abuse including violence, starvation, sexual assault, and denial of medical care. The Israeli government, under Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, implemented policies worsening prison conditions, particularly after declaring a “prison state of emergency” on October 18, 2023.

Ben-Gvir is the leader of the fascist “Jewish Power” bloc in parliament, allied with the equally fascist Religious Zionism block. These parties rooted in the racist ideas of Meir Kahane had been given the cold shoulder in Israeli politics until Benjamin Netanyahu brought them into his coalition and gave them powerful cabinet positions such as minister of national security. Ben-Gvir wondered aloud in early July why Israel could not deal with overcrowding in the prisons by just killing some of the Palestinian prisoners.

The B’Tselem exposé highlighted the ongoing oppression of Palestinian prisoners, who are subjected to harsh, inhumane conditions. It documented “violence, denial of medical treatment, starvation, withholding of water, sleep deprivation and confiscation of all personal belongings. The overall picture indicates abuse and torture carried out under orders, in utter defiance of Israel’s obligations both under domestic law and under international law.”

Witnesses reported that the Initial Reaction Force (IRF) personnel, wearing masks and unmarked black uniforms, engaged in extreme violence against Palestinian prisoners with impunity. Armed with batons, firearms, and often accompanied by dogs, the IRF used tactics that amounted to abuse and torture.

Cells meant for six prisoners were crammed with up to 14, forcing many to sleep on the floor without basic amenities. Prisoners often spent days without sunlight or fresh air, with some never seeing daylight during their entire period of incarceration. Frequent, violent roll calls and searches became opportunities for guards to degrade and assault prisoners. Access to legal counsel, courts, and aid organizations was severely restricted, with many inmates denied contact for up to 180 days, derailing any chance they had to report the torture they endured.

Prison authorities frequently denied essential medical care to Palestinian prisoners, leading to grave injuries and even amputations of limbs that had gone to sleep because they were too tightly shackled for too long. Testimonies revealed that medical staff were often instructed not to provide necessary treatments.

Physical and psychological abuse has escalated, becoming routine. Prisoners reported awful beatings, use of weapons, and frequent violence during transfers. Sleep deprivation was common, with guards constantly keeping the lights on and using loud noises to prevent rest. Sexual violence was also reported, with guards deploying physical and psychological tactics to humiliate and degrade prisoners, including strip searches and assaults.

Additionally, prisoners suffered from extreme food deprivation, resulting in significant weight loss and malnutrition. The poor quality of food further exacerbated their health issues, with rotten food often served. Hygiene conditions were dire, with a limited water supply and lack of cleaning supplies, leading to unsanitary living conditions and the spread of diseases.

Moreover, the B’Tselem report said that the dire state of the Israeli prison system is evident in the deaths of at least 60 Palestinian prisoners in custody. It highlighted three such cases: Thaer Abu ‘Asab, who was found dead with signs of violence on his corpse; ‘Arafat Hamdan, a diabetic who died after being denied insulin; and Muhammad a-Sabbar, who died from inadequate care needed to treat a special medical condition. The Israeli prison guards have gone from inflicting occasional, spontaneous vengeance on prisoners to instituting a systematic regime that violates human rights, supported by legal authorities, leading to widespread torture and inhumane conditions for thousands of Palestinian prisoners.

B’Tselem ends by saying, “The testimonies presented in this report provide an account of how Israeli prison facilities have been turned into a network of torture camps. Given the severity of the acts, the extent to which the provisions of international law are being violated, and the fact that these violations are directed at the entire population of Palestinian prisoners daily and over time – the only possible conclusion is that in carrying out these acts, Israel is committing torture that amounts to a war crime and even a crime against humanity. We appeal to all nations and to all international institutions and bodies, including the International Criminal Court, to do everything in their power to put an immediate end to the cruelties meted out on Palestinians by Israel’s prison system, and to recognize the Israeli regime operating this system as an apartheid regime that must come to an end.”

Israeli Lawmakers try to Block Torture Prosecutions

Human Rights Watch — Sun, 04 Aug 2024 04:06:46 +0000

End Grave Abuses Against Palestinian Detainees, Impunity for Abuses

By Bill Van Esveld, Associate Director, MENA, Children’s Rights Division | –

A standoff at Israel’s Sde Teiman military base this week has thrown longstanding abuses against Palestinian detainees and the Israeli military’s history of impunity for torture into stark relief.

On July 29, Israeli military police arrested nine Israeli soldiers at the base on suspicion of “severe abuse” of a Palestinian detainee. News reports said the man was admitted to the hospital with broken ribs and life-threatening injuries to the anus and lungs.

Soldiers barricaded themselves inside the base to prevent the arrests. Protesters against the arrests, including members of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, pushed their way through the perimeter fence. When security forces removed the nine soldiers, protesters went to the Beit Lid military base, where the soldiers were eventually taken for questioning, and breached its perimeter as well.

Arrests of Israeli soldiers for abusing Palestinians are rare. From 2017 to 2021, just 0.87 percent of complaints against soldiers led to prosecutions, according to the Israeli rights group Yesh Din.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as well as Israel’s defense minister and the military chief of staff condemned the clashes at the two bases, though not the alleged torture of the detainee. Israel’s justice minister criticized detaining for questioning soldiers he said were performing a “holy job.” The finance minister and the national security minister both tweeted “hands off our reservists.” The Knesset’s foreign affairs and defense committee chair slammed “this despicable pursuit of our fighters.”

Since June, Israeli authorities have been transferring Palestinian detainees from Sde Teiman to other facilities due to reports of abuse. But the transfers, and investigations into some cases, are a grossly insufficient response to reports of “widespread torture” and ill-treatment at Sde Teiman. Rights groups cite beatings, stress positions, surgeries without anesthesia, sexual violence, and the prolonged cuffing of arms and legs. An Israeli doctor working there wrote in April that in one week, “two prisoners had their legs amputated due to handcuff injuries, which unfortunately is a routine event.”

The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights also reported waterboarding, electrocution, and the detention of healthcare workers, girls, and a woman over 80-years-old with Alzheimer’s disease. One man said Israeli soldiers fired a nail gun into his knee. At least 53 Palestinians have died in custody since October 7.

Israel’s allies should increase pressure to end grave abuses against Palestinians in custody, stop detaining them without charge or trial, and allow independent monitors access to detention facilities.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Israeli protesters enter army base after soldiers held over Gaza detainee abuse | BBC News Video

Civil War in Israeli Army, Parliament as MPs detain Soldiers for Gang Rape of Palestinian Prisoners at Vault of Horrors

Juan Cole — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 05:10:34 +0000

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Israeli newspaper Arab 48 reports that on Monday, military police raided the Sde Teiman detention center where Palestinian prisoners are being held, detaining 9 Israel soldiers suspected of gang raping and severely sexually torturing detainees. One further suspect was not apprehended. The soldiers belong to the Force 100 unit, which has been detailed to Sde Teiman as prison guards.

It is being reported that they were taken into custody because of the recent transfer of a Palestinian prisoner to the Soroka Medical Facility in Beersheba with severe injuries to his nether regions.

Soldiers at Sde Teiman put up resistance to the military police, with a fight breaking out, though the MPs clearly won that one.

Rejecting these charges against the soldiers, a right wing mob that included members of the Parliament from the Likud and the Religious Zionist and Jewish Power blocs, then attempted several times to storm through the gates of the facility and finally succeeded in breaching the military barricades, attacking MPs and reaching the area where Palestinians are held. One soldier said that no one seemed to be in control. The unruly crowd chanted its support for torture and even called for the summary execution of the Palestinian prisoners.

WION Video: “Israel detains 9 IDF soldiers over alleged abuse of a detainee at shadowy military facility”

Journalist Haggai Matar observed, “In essence, soldiers are in open rebellion for the right to rape prisoners, and more and more coalition politicians are joining them – from Likud, Jewish Power, and more.”

The mob, including the parliamentarians, then attempted but failed to storm the Beit Lid base, where the nine detainees were being held for interrogation.

An Israeli military spokesman said, “Following suspicions of serious abuse of a detainee held at the Sde Teiman detention facility, the Military Police opened an investigation at the behest of the Military Prosecutor’s Office.” Major General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi is Israel’s military advocate general, who ordered the detentions. The Israeli military said after the right wing mob’s assault that the soldiers had not been arrested, only detained for questioning.

The turmoil and governmental and army infighting caused the Israeli government to announce a postponement of the expected attack on Lebanon in reprisal for an alleged Hezbollah drone on the occupied Syrian Golan Heights that left several Druze children dead.

Israeli army radio said that the Palestinian prisoner who was tortured had been arrested in the Gaza Strip several weeks before and had been identified as an “unlawful combatant” and was being held at Sde Teiman under a permanent detention order. The radio station said that this prisoner was observed in serious condition, unable to walk, and was transferred to the hospital, where he underwent surgery. Since that time, the military police had begun gathering evidence and initiating an investigation.

The ten accused soldiers were prison guards at Sde Teiman. They were detained on suspicion of gang rape. One appears to be AWOL and has not yet been detained.

Israeli analyst Shaiel Ben-Ephraim wrote on “X,” “Israeli sources are now confirming the horrific CNN and New York Times reports of the conditions in Sde Taiman. They include electric shocks, amputations due to bad conditions, severe beatings, surgery without anesthesia, playing loud music until inmates’ ears bleed, deaths due to bad sanitary conditions, systematic torture and sexual abuse. Sources in the Israeli justice department are saying the evidence is so clear and the cases so severe, it will be an open and shut case for international courts. This is a horror that will never be forgotten. A permanent stain on the state of Israel.”

Professor Rula Jebreal relayed Israeli television footage of the Israeli parliament or Knesset debating the day’s events, where a member from the Likud Party of Benjamin Netanyahu was asked if it was all right to stuff a stick up a man’s rectum, and he replied that yes, if the man is a terrorist. So there is a pro-rape faction in the Israeli parliament.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyanu didn’t say anything for three hours after his extremist allies tried to storm the base, then called for calm. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant issued a communique in support of the troops and rejecting the assault on the military base.

Times of India Video: “Israeli Base Stormed; Fighting Breaks Out Inside Detention Facility After Raid To Detain Troops”

The International Criminal Court has requested warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant over war crimes in Gaza, and some observers believe that they authorized Monday’s detention of the accused soldiers only because otherwise the ongoing abuse at that base might increase the likelihood of their being indicted.

The minister of national security, Jewish Power extremist Itamar Ben-Gvir attacked the MPs and military prosecutor. He said, “The sight of military policemen arriving to arrest our best heroes in Sde Teiman is nothing short of shameful. I advise the defense minister, the chief of staff and the army authorities to support the soldiers and take advantage of the prison service [which is under Ben-Gvir’s responsibility]. Summer camps for and tolerance of terrorists are over. Our soldiers must receive full support.”

Ben Gvir had earlier urged summary executions of Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons.

Arab 48 writes, “Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara mentioned Ben-Gvir in a memorandum to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu regarding a petition being considered by the Supreme Court regarding ‘the conditions of detention at the Sde Teiman facility.’ Baharav-Miara wrote that ‘if the Sde Teiman detention facility is not returned to its intended purpose immediately, this will have far-reaching consequences,’ adding that it has become clear that Ben-Gvir’s National Security Ministry is ‘effectively halting efforts to implement the necessary solutions.’

Since the beginning of the Israeli war on Gaza last October, Sde Teiman has served as a detention center for Palestinian prisoners, the paper says, “who are held in inhumane conditions, where they are kept handcuffed and legged and blindfolded at all times.” The prisoners are held until it is determined whether they will be given long jail sentences or released. Many men are scooped up in Gaza without the Israeli army having a firm knowledge of whether they just happened to be in the vicinity or were enemy combatants. All the Palestinians released from Sde Teiman appear to have been the victims of severe torture.

Israel’s Experiments in Gaza are the new Face of America’s imperial Laboratory

Yoav Litvin — Sat, 01 Jun 2024 04:02:57 +0000

Israel has shattered its precedent of sadism, paving the way for wider imperial corruption and the end of the West’s neoliberal mirage, writes Yoav Litvin.

( The New Arab ) – On Saturday, October 7 2023, a significant shift occurred in the Palestinian-Israeli narrative.

A normalised, gradual genocide over 76 years of Zionist colonialism, peppered by savage episodes of “mowing the lawn”, obscured by liberal Zionist propaganda and backed by imperial Washington, became an unapologetic, even gleeful mass murder of Palestinians, grotesquely captured on video for the world to witness.

Throughout its history, the Zionist movement has exploited fear-mongering and the lure of land and resource theft to subjugate and entice its populace into compliance.

In the aftermath of October 7, Israeli propagandists escalated their gaslighting of Palestinians and their allies, silenced opposing viewpoints in the media, concocted atrocity propaganda to justify Israel’s brutality and rallied support for extensive military action utilising Judaic motifs of revenge and trauma.

For nearly eight months, Israel’s settler colonial, white supremacist genocide has systematically shattered international taboos with its military accused of committing war crimes, crimes against humanity and the crime of genocide.

Israel has sought to obliterate Palestinian society by bombing hospitals, aid trucks, churches, mosques, schools, universities, UN facilities and tent encampments, while targeting women, children, the elderly, the sick, the disabled, journalists, healthcare workers and academics, among others.

Yet, in the process, Israel has done more than devastate the besieged Gaza Strip. It has intensified an inevitable unravelling of its internal apartheid fabric, with significant implications for global neoliberal dominance.

As Israeli actions continue with impunity – backed by financial, diplomatic, and military support from Western countries, led by the United States, and complicity of many countries in the Global South – they threaten to trigger a cascade of global acts of fascistic aggression.

“All Eyes on Gaza,” by Juan Cole, Digital, Dream/ Dreamworld v 3, IbisPaint, PS Express, 2024

The ethical fabric of human society

An orderly society shares a common ethical fabric, upheld by taboos at its extremes. Taboos shape human communities by regulating behaviour, defining identity, maintaining social control, preserving cultural practices, protecting communities, and influencing norms.

Ethical boundaries define the societal mainstream and are typically codified by laws and enforcement practices. For example, the United States Constitution defines rights and restrictions, with evolving interpretations empowering or disempowering individuals within society.

Taboos can be broken in various ways: (i) Violation: Deliberate acts against the taboo, like incest or forbidden rituals; (ii) Ignorance: Unintentional breaking due to lack of awareness; (iii) Rebellion: Acts of defiance against societal norms; (iv) Cultural change: Evolution of societal values can modify or eliminate taboos, and; (v) Contextual exceptions: Taboos may be relaxed in specific contexts, such as religious ceremonies.

Breaking taboos can lead to social progress and dismantling oppressive norms but also cause social tensions and conflicts. Societies constantly face conflicts between forces aiming to stretch or shrink ethical boundaries to serve specific agendas — ideological, social, political, or economic. Taboos are deeply embedded in the human psyche, making their erosion a process that requires both resistance and persistence.

Trial balloons

Breaking taboos and redefining behavioural boundaries often start with experimentation – trial balloons. Successful experiments, where society is conditioned to accept change while maintaining structural integrity, set precedents that shatter taboos. If these experiments face little resistance and set precedents, ethical and moral boundaries may stretch, shifting society in a regressive or progressive direction.

Importantly, trial balloons are effective within a broader context of a society primed for a particular change. In addition, an experiment must receive sufficient support so as to withstand a variety of challenges to its integrity, whether from within the society or external to it.

For example, bombing of hospitals has been deemed a war crime. To justify targeting hospitals in the Gaza Strip, Israel initially claimed, with no proof, that there were Hamas command centres underneath Gaza’s hospitals.

On October 17, a massive explosion hit Al Ahli Hospital, causing hundreds of casualties. Israeli officials suggested a failed rocket launch by Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) caused the explosion, while Palestinian authorities, reports from the ground and several independent investigations (e.g. see here) attributed it to an Israeli airstrike.

Regardless, the event was used by Israeli leaders as a trial balloon to assess public and imperial reaction to such a grave violation of a societal taboo.

Since it deemed opposition to it, most significantly the US, inconsequential, and despite the negative reaction of the West to a Russian attack on a maternity hospital in Ukraine in 2022, the Israeli military has targeted many more hospitals throughout the strip.

The Ahli Hospital incident was one of many trial balloons the Israelis carried out in Gaza, including the targeting of schools, UN facilities, universities and aid delivery convoys.

How Israel scapegoats to obscure criminality

The calculated dehumanisation and scapegoating of the Palestinian people echo a historical pattern of white supremacist colonial atrocities masking subsequent land grabs and gangster-like corruption of society from its highest echelons.

In fact, current Israeli genocidal aggression against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have served to conceal failures preceding October 7, and have extended to targeting any perceived and manufactured threats to the colony.

This signals an impending escalation of conflict between Israeli military/Zionist militias and opposition to apartheid and genocide in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and within Israel itself.

Of particular concern are Arab citizens of Israel, constituting over 20% of Israel’s population, primarily identifying as Palestinian but also encompassing Druze, Circassians, other Muslims, Christian Arabs, and Armenians, all of whom are already subjected to an array of discriminatory laws. Such an escalation may very well unravel the existing apartheid structure of Israeli society, leading to civil chaos and its ultimate collapse.

Further, the genocidal imperial laboratory in Gaza could serve as a template for future aggressive episodes in the Global South and against dissent in the imperial core, potentially marking the beginning of the end for the neoliberal mirage of “the West” in which, under the guise of “promoting democracy” and “humanitarian interventions,” the United States and its allies in the global north have aimed to extend their capitalist dominance whilst disrespecting and attacking international legal bodies.

In this scenario, naked fascism constructed of US-imposed taboos and lack thereof would prevail, propelling a colonial race to plunder global resources while scapegoating BIPOC communities. Israeli actions thus serve as a trial balloon for continued US imperial corruption and exploitation on the road to climate change-induced international turmoil.

Resistance to erosion of taboos on the one hand, and the promotion of accountability for criminal actions toward decolonisation on the other, may serve to blunt this dangerous downward spiral toward lawlessness and violence.

Reprinted from The New Arab with the author’s permission.

Carceral Imperialism: Torture, Abu Ghraib, and the Legacy of the U.S. War on Iraq

Maha Hilal — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 04:04:41 +0000

( Tomdispatch.com ) – “To this day I feel humiliation for what was done to me… The time I spent in Abu Ghraib — it ended my life. I’m only half a human now.” That’s what Abu Ghraib survivor Talib al-Majli had to say about the 16 months he spent at that notorious prison in Iraq after being captured and detained by American troops on October 31, 2003. In the wake of his release, al-Majli has continued to suffer a myriad of difficulties, including an inability to hold a job thanks to physical and mental-health deficits and a family life that remains in shambles.

He was never even charged with a crime — not exactly surprising, given the Red Cross’s estimate that 70% to 90% of those arrested and detained in Iraq after the 2003 American invasion of that country were guilty of nothing. But like other survivors, his time at Abu Ghraib continues to haunt him, even though, nearly 20 years later in America, the lack of justice and accountability for war crimes at that prison has been relegated to the distant past and is considered a long-closed chapter in this country’s War on Terror.

The Abu Ghraib “Scandal”

On April 28th, 2004, CBS News’s 60 Minutes aired a segment about Abu Ghraib prison, revealing for the first time photos of the kinds of torture that had happened there. Some of those now-infamous pictures included a black-hooded prisoner being made to stand on a box, his arms outstretched and electrical wires attached to his hands; naked prisoners piled on top of each other in a pyramid-like structure; and a prisoner in a jumpsuit on his knees being threatened with a dog. In addition to those disturbing images, several photos included American military personnel grinning or posing with thumbs-up signs, indications that they seemed to be taking pleasure in the humiliation and torture of those Iraqi prisoners and that the photos were meant to be seen.

Once those pictures were exposed, there was widespread outrage across the globe in what became known as the Abu Ghraib scandal. However, that word “scandal” still puts the focus on those photos rather than on the violence the victims suffered or the fact that, two decades later, there has been zero accountability when it comes to the government officials who sanctioned an atmosphere ripe for torture.

Thanks to the existence of the Federal Tort Claims Act, all claims against the federal government, when it came to Abu Ghraib, were dismissed. Nor did the government provide any compensation or redress to the Abu Ghraib survivors, even after, in 2022, the Pentagon released a plan to minimize harm to civilians in U.S. military operations. However, there is a civil suit filed in 2008 — Al Shimari v. CACI — brought on behalf of three plaintiffs against military contractor CACI’s role in torture at Abu Ghraib. Though CACI tried 20 times to have the case dismissed, the trial — the first to address the abuse of Abu Ghraib detainees — finally began in mid-April in the Eastern District Court of Virginia. If the plaintiffs succeed with a ruling in their favor, it will be a welcome step toward some semblance of justice. However, for other survivors of Abu Ghraib, any prospect of justice remains unlikely at best.

The Road to Abu Ghraib

”My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture… And therefore, I’m not going to address the ‘torture’ word.” So said Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld at a press conference in 2004. He failed, of course, to even mention that he and other members of President George W. Bush’s administration had gone to great lengths not only to sanction brutal torture techniques in their “Global War on Terror,” but to dramatically raise the threshold for what might even be considered torture.

As Vian Bakir argued in her book Torture, Intelligence and Sousveillance in the War on Terror: Agenda-Building Struggles, his comments were part of a three-pronged Bush administration strategy to reframe the abuses depicted in those photos, including providing “evidence” of the supposed legality of the basic interrogation techniques, framing such abuses as isolated rather than systemic events, and doing their best to destroy visual evidence of torture altogether.

Buy the Book

Although top Bush officials claimed to know nothing about what happened at Abu Ghraib, the war on terror they launched was built to thoroughly dehumanize and deny any rights to those detained. As a 2004 Human Rights Watch report, “The Road to Abu Ghraib,” noted, a pattern of abuse globally resulted not from the actions of individual soldiers, but from administration policies that circumvented the law, deployed distinctly torture-like methods of interrogation to “soften up” detainees, and took a “see no evil, hear no evil,” approach to any allegations of prisoner abuse.

In fact, the Bush administration actively sought out legal opinions about how to exclude war-on-terror prisoners from any legal framework whatsoever. A memorandum from Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to President Bush argued that the Geneva Conventions simply didn’t apply to members of the terror group al-Qaeda or the Afghan Taliban. Regarding what would constitute torture, an infamous memo, drafted by Office of Legal Counsel attorney John Yoo, argued that “physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” Even after the Abu Ghraib photos became public, Rumsfeld and other Bush administration officials never relented when it came to their supposed inapplicability. As Rumsfeld put it in a television interview, they “did not apply precisely” in Iraq.

In January 2004, Major General Anthony Taguba was appointed to conduct an Army investigation into the military unit, the 800th Military Police Brigade, which ran Abu Ghraib, where abuses had been reported from October through December 2003. His report was unequivocal about the systematic nature of torture there: “Between October and December 2003, at the Abu Ghraib Confinement Facility (BCCF), numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees. This systemic and illegal abuse of detainees was intentionally perpetrated by several members of the military police guard force (372nd Military Police Company, 320th Military Police Battalion, 800th MP Brigade), in Tier (section) 1-A of the Abu Ghraib Prison.”

Sadly, the Taguba report was neither the first nor the last to document abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib. Moreover, prior to its release, the International Committee of the Red Cross had issued multiple warnings that such abuse was occurring at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.

Simulating Atonement

Once the pictures were revealed, President Bush and other members of his administration were quick to condemn the violence at the prison. Within a week, Bush had assured King Abdullah of Jordan, who was visiting the White House, that he was sorry about what those Iraqi prisoners had endured and “equally sorry that people who’ve been seeing those pictures didn’t understand the true nature and heart of America.”

As scholar Ryan Shepard pointed out, Bush’s behavior was a classic case of “simulated atonement,” aimed at offering an “appearance of genuine confession” while avoiding any real responsibility for what happened. He analyzed four instances in which the president offered an “apologia” for what happened — two interviews with Alhurra and Al Arabiya television on May 5, 2004, and two appearances with the King of Jordan the next day.

In each case, the president also responsible for the setting up of an offshore prison of injustice on occupied Cuban land in Guantánamo Bay in 2002 managed to shift the blame in classic fashion, suggesting that the torture had not been systematic and that the fault for it lay with a few low-level people. He also denied that he knew anything about torture at Abu Ghraib prior to the release of the photos and tried to restore the image of America by drawing a comparison to what the regime of Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein had done prior to the American invasion.

In his interview with Alhurra, for example, he claimed that the U.S. response to Abu Ghraib — investigations and justice — would be unlike anything Saddam Hussein had done. Sadly enough, however, the American takeover of that prison and the torture that occurred there was anything but a break from Hussein’s reign. In the context of such a faux apology, however, Bush apparently assumed that Iraqis could be easily swayed on that point, regardless of the violence they had endured at American hands; that they would, in fact, as Ryan Shepard put it, “accept the truth-seeking, freedom-loving American occupation as vastly superior to the previous regime.”

True accountability for Abu Ghraib? Not a chance. But revisiting Bush’s apologia so many years later is a vivid reminder that he and his top officials never had the slightest intention of truly addressing those acts of torture as systemic to America’s war on terror, especially because he was directly implicated in them.

Weapons of American Imperialism

On March 19th, 2003, President Bush gave an address from the Oval Office to his “fellow citizens.” He opened by saying that “American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.” The liberated people of Iraq, he said, would “witness the honorable and decent spirit of the American military.”

There was, of course, nothing about his invasion of Iraq that was honorable or decent. It was an illegally waged war for which Bush and his administration had spent months building support. In his State of the Union address in 2002, in fact, the president had referred to Iraq as part of an “axis of evil” and a country that “continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror.” Later that year, he began to claim that Saddam’s regime also had weapons of mass destruction. (It didn’t and he knew it.) If that wasn’t enough to establish the threat Iraq supposedly posed, in January 2003, Vice President Dick Cheney claimed that it “aids and protects terrorists, including members of al-Qaeda.”

Days after Cheney made those claims, Secretary of State Colin Powell falsely asserted to members of the U.N. Security Council that Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons, had used them before, and would not hesitate to use them again. He mentioned the phrase “weapons of mass destruction” 17 times in his speech, leaving no room to mistake the urgency of his message. Similarly, President Bush insisted the U.S. had “no ambition in Iraq, except to remove a threat and restore control of that country to its own people.”

The false pretenses under which the U.S. waged war on Iraq are a reminder that the war on terror was never truly about curbing a threat, but about expanding American imperial power globally.

When the United States took over that prison, they replaced Saddam Hussein’s portrait with a sign that said, “America is the friend of all Iraqis.” To befriend the U.S. in the context of Abu Ghraib, would, of course, have involved a sort of coerced amnesia.

In his essay “Abu Ghraib and its Shadow Archives,” Macquarie University professor Joseph Pugliese makes this connection, writing that “the Abu Ghraib photographs compel the viewer to bear testimony to the deployment and enactment of absolute U.S. imperial power on the bodies of the Arab prisoners through the organizing principles of white supremacist aesthetics that intertwine violence and sexuality with Orientalist spectacle.”

As a project of American post-9/11 empire building, Abu Ghraib and the torture of prisoners there should be viewed through the lens of what I call carceral imperialism — an extension of the American carceral state beyond its borders in the service of domination and hegemony. (The Alliance for Global Justice refers to a phenomenon related to the one I’m discussing as “prison imperialism.”) The distinction I draw is based on my focus on the war on terror and how the prison became a tool through which that war was being fought. In the case of Abu Ghraib, the capture, detention, and torture through which Iraqis were contained and subdued was a primary strategy of the U.S. colonization of Iraq and was used as a way to transform detained Iraqis into a visible threat that would legitimize the U.S. presence there. (Bagram prison in Afghanistan was another example of carceral imperialism.)

Beyond Spectacle and Towards Justice

What made the torture at Abu Ghraib possible to begin with? While there were, of course, several factors, it’s important to consider one above all: the way the American war not on, but of terror rendered Iraqi bodies so utterly disposable.

One way of viewing this dehumanization is through philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer, which defines a relationship between power and two forms of life: zoe and bios. Zoe refers to an individual who is recognized as fully human with a political and social life, while bios refers to physical life alone. Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib were reduced to bios, or bare life, while being stripped of all rights and protections, which left them vulnerable to uninhibited and unaccountable violence and horrifying torture.

Twenty years later, those unforgettable images of torture at Abu Ghraib serve as a continuous reminder of the nature of American brutality in that Global War on Terror that has not ended. They continue to haunt me — and other Muslims and Arabs — 20 years later. They will undoubtedly be seared in my memory for life.

Whether or not justice prevails in some way for Abu Ghraib’s survivors, as witnesses – even distant ones — to what transpired at that prison, our job should still be to search for the stories behind the hoods, the bars, and the indescribable acts of torture that took place there. It’s crucial, even so many years later, to ensure that those who endured such horrific violence at American hands are not forgotten. Otherwise, our gaze will become one more weapon of torture — extending the life of the horrific acts in those images and ensuring that the humiliation of those War on Terror prisoners will continue to be a passing spectacle for our consumption.

Two decades after those photos were released, what’s crucial about the unbearable violence and horror they capture is the choice they still force viewers to make — whether to become just another bystander to the violence and horror this country delivered under the label of the War on Terror or to take in the torture and demand justice for the survivors.

Tomdispatch.com

Ron DeSantis: Yet Another Cog in Guantanamo’s Torture Machine

Common Dreams — Sun, 28 Jan 2024 05:02:49 +0000

Roy Eidelson

( Commondreams.org ) – Recently, there have been troubling revelations about Florida Governor Ron DeSantis — a leading 2024 GOP presidential aspirant — concerning his conduct as a Navy JAG officer at Guantanamo Bay. His responsibilities at the detention facility apparently included responding to claims of mistreatment from the war-on-terror prisoners there. Relatively few of these detainees had any connection with al Qaeda, and many had simply been handed over to US forces in exchange for bounty payments. But DeSantis seemingly viewed them all as wily and unrepentant terrorists.

Of particular note, DeSantis was at Guantanamo in 2006 during the brutal forced-feeding of prisoners engaged in a mass hunger strike. Years later, DeSantis acknowledged that, as a legal advisor, he had suggested this intervention as a countermeasure to what he described as the detainees’ “waging jihad” — by refusing to eat. When interviewed last month, DeSantis emphasized that he “didn’t have authority to authorize anything” and that Guantanamo was “a professionally-run prison.” His first claim — sidestepping personal responsibility — may contain elements of truth; his second is outrageously absurd.

As a general matter, the forced-feeding of mentally competent individuals violates international standards of medical ethics and constitutes inhuman and degrading treatment. This was especially so in the case of the Department of Defense, which opted to employ extreme, punitive measures — even described as torture by United Nations investigators — when force-feeding the prisoners at Guantanamo. These measures included a restraint chair that immobilized the detainee’s entire body for hours at a time, and the use of tubing that was inserted through the nose into the stomach and then removed and reinserted multiple times each day, often causing sharp pain and bleeding. A defense attorney for Guantanamo prisoners subjected to forced-feeding has written, “Only a sadist could impose and witness such treatment without grave concern and soul-sickness.” It’s hard to argue with that blunt assessment. But there are also two larger truths we shouldn’t overlook.

First, even though DeSantis has disingenuously characterized the detainees as master manipulators who all claimed to be “Koran salesmen,” the hunger strikers were actually protesting an unconscionable system of indefinite detention and ruthless interrogation that relied on daily abuse — solitary confinement, physical beatings, sexual humiliation, and more. This routinized cruelty didn’t solely involve guards and interrogators. It also depended upon guidance from health professionals,who seemingly abandoned their fundamental “Do No Harm” principles to accommodate a White House insistent that the prisoners had no entitlement to humane treatment.

Vice News Video from 2017: “Guantanamo Ex-Detainees Talk Through Their Past Torture (HBO)”

These abusive conditions and techniques have left many Guantanamo prisoners —past and present — with deep psychic wounds. Survivors of torture often experience overwhelming feelings of shame, helplessness, and disconnection as a result of having been subjected to mistreatment at the hands of another human being. Frequently, the victims of such traumas are also haunted by depression, anxiety, and PTSD; by nightmares and flashbacks; and by a lasting sense that safety and solace will never be achieved. Viewed from this perspective, the hunger strikes that DeSantis witnessed — and apparently dismissed as terrorist tactics — are better understood as the prisoners’ desperate and despairing attempts to regain some semblance of control over their lives and circumstances, even at the risk of starvation.

The second larger truth is this: accountability for Guantanamo’s horrors has never been a priority for our country’s elected leaders. No US president has ever taken meaningful steps on this front. George W. Bush, of course, never sought to discipline those responsible for the torturous policies his own administration authorized. Barrack Obama took action to end torture — but when it came to accountability, he decided “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” Donald Trump clearly had no interest in such matters, promising instead to bring back waterboarding and “a hell of a lot worse.” And although Joe Biden has expressed a desire to close Guantanamo, he’s now building a second, multi-million-dollar courtroom there for military commission prosecutions in which detainees have limited due process rights.

So then how does Ron DeSantis’s alleged up-close-and-personal connections to prisoner abuse years ago really matter? It would be naïve to think that his political prospects will suffer. Indeed, he may even gain in popularity among voters who embrace his authoritarian mindset, share his disdain for protecting the rights of the vulnerable, and believe his misleading characterizations of the prison and the prisoners at Guantanamo.

But the attention DeSantis’s story has brought to Guantanamo can still do some good. Ideally, it can spark broader public interest in an examination of the facility’s shameful 21-year history: how its detention and interrogation operations have dishonored the values this country has long professed to hold dear; how the prisoners there became defenseless victims of state vengeance run amok; how the perpetrators of torture and abuse — and their masters — have eluded any form of accountability; and how essential it is to close Guantanamo and throw away the key.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

US celebrates Nobel for Iran’s Narges Mohammadi, but We have Executions, Torture and Prisoner Abuse Too

Juan Cole — Sat, 07 Oct 2023 05:00:34 +0000

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Peace Prize this year to Iranian feminist and human rights worker Narges Mohammadi, 51. It was the second time that an Iranian woman had won, the first having been attorney Shirin Ebadi in 2003. Mohammadi, although trained as a physicist, worked as a journalist and activist in Ebadi’s center in the early zeroes of this century. She was first arrested in 1998 and spent a year in jail at that time, but subsequently has been in and out of prison.

She is currently in Evin Prison on multiple charges, including spreading propaganda against the government, with 10 years, nine months left on her sentence. She issued a statement on hearing the news: “I will continue to fight against the relentless discrimination, tyranny and gender-based oppression by the oppressive religious government until the liberation of all women.”

She supported last year’s movement for “Woman, Life, Liberty” from behind bars, have long criticized compulsory veiling.

Mohammadi’s causes included women’s rights, of course. But she has also campaigned for human rights more generally, including the right of women to be safe from sexual harassment even in prison and of prisoners to be safe from torture and from the death penalty.

Although many observers in the United States will applaud this award as a black eye for the self-styled Islamic Republic of Iran, the fact is that Mohammadi would be critical of American policies as well. That is, if we are to listen to her prophetic voice with approval, we must do more than use her politically to denigrate our enemies; we must take to heart the implications of her ethical witness for our own society, too.

Article continues after bonus IC video
Democracy Now! “Woman, Life, Freedom: Narges Mohammadi, Imprisoned Iranian Activist, Awarded 2023 Nobel Peace Prize”

For instance, there were 18 executions of prisoners in the United States in 2022, up 64% from the total of 11 killed by the state in 2021. Although the US executes many fewer prisoners each year than Iran or Saudi Arabia, and although the number in the US has fallen significantly since the 1990s, it still does execute prisoners, and Ms. Mohammadi deeply believes that is wrong. She might well be in jail here if she lived in the United States, from protesting in front of city halls and jails. Only 13 states still permit executions in the US, and half of those killed in 2022 were executed in Texas and Oklahoma.

Moreover, 7 of these executions were seriously botched. In one instance, it took 3 hours of trying to get a fatal intravenous line into the arm of an Alabama convict. Some initial attempts to kill the convict were called off because of difficulties with the intravenous injection or because proper protocols has not been followed.

Between 46% and 54% of Americans believe in capital punishment, depending on which poll you believe. So Mohammadi might well be in a minority on this issue in the US, as well.

As for torture, Karen J. Greenburg wrote this week about the scandal that the Guantánamo Prison Camp still has not been closed. One of the difficulties has been that some prisoners were so badly tortured that no court, including a military tribunal, can now conduct a legitimate trial.

There has never been a reckoning by the US establishment with the Bush administration’s extensive use of torture.

If Mohammadi had been an American she might have been put on trial, as Josie Setzler was, for protesting torture at Guantánamo.

As for sexual abuse of female prisoners by male guards in federal prisons, a Senate report from last year makes it clear that this is a real issue and that it hasn’t been adequately addressed by the Bureau of Prisons.

Regarding women’s rights, I doubt Ms. Mohammadi would approve of Nebraska jailing a woman for two years for giving abortion pills to her daughter. In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that she would not like our current Supreme Court much at all. She rails against religious theocrats’ repression of women.

So a warm congratulations to her, and to her cause, of women’s rights and human rights in Iran. But we owe it to ourselves also actually to listen to what she is saying and to take to heart the principles for which she has spent so much of her life in jail, torn from her husband and children.

The Guantánamo Prison Camp may someday be Closed, but it Will leave a Permanent Scar on America’s Conscience

Karen J. Greenberg — Fri, 06 Oct 2023 04:02:06 +0000

( Tomdispatch.com) – For 18 years, I’ve been writing articles for TomDispatch on the never-ending story of the Guantánamo Bay Detention Facility. And here’s my ultimate takeaway (for the moment): 21 years after that grim offshore prison of injustice was set up in Cuba in response to the 9/11 attacks and the capture of figures supposedly linked to them, and despite the expressed desire of three presidents — George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden — to close it, the endgame remains devastatingly elusive.

At times due to a failure of will, at times due to a failure of the system itself or the sheer complexity of the logistics involved, and at times due to acts of Congress or the courts, efforts to shut that prison have been eternally stymied. Despite endless acknowledgements that what’s gone on there has defied domestic, international, and military law — not to mention longstanding norms of morality and justice — that prison persists.

Recently, however, for those of us perpetually looking for a ray or even a glimmer of hope, there have finally been a few developments that seem to signal steps, however tiny, toward closure.

There are still 30 detainees at Guantánamo. Sixteen of them have been deemed no longer threats to the United States and cleared for release, but arrangements have yet to be made to transfer them to another country. Three others are considered too dangerous for release. And eleven have been charged in the military commissions system that was set up in 2006 and revised under President Obama in 2009. One, Ali Hamza Ahmad Suliman al-Bahlul, has been convicted. Another, Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, recently pleaded guilty. Now, nine detainees face trials in three separate cases. All of them were tortured at CIA “black sites” for different periods of time between 2003 and 2006.

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Progress in the Biden years has been occurring, even if at a snail’s pace. His administration has said that it intends to close Guantánamo by the end of his term. And in the last two and a half years, it has indeed reduced the population from 40 to 30, the most recent transfer of a freed prisoner to another country occurring this April. In addition, the Biden administration increased the total number of remaining detainees eligible for release from six to its current 16.

Arranging such transfers has proven painstaking work, requiring complex negotiations with foreign countries, as well as assurances to American officials — and ultimately Congress — that the release will pose no future threat to the United States and that the prisoner will be treated justly in the receiving country. Those releases have been complicated because, after Obama announced at the outset of his presidency that Guantánamo would close within a year, Congress banned any Gitmo detainee from ever being transferred to the United States for any purpose whatsoever, a ban that’s been re-authorized every year since then.

While those detainees cleared for release await transfer to other countries, developments over the past few months have put the military commissions in the forefront of activities aimed at closure.

Until now, the commissions have indeed been a dismal failure. A mere nine convictions have been secured since the passage of the first Military Commissions Act in 2006, all but two through plea deals, and four of the nine have been overturned on appeal. Two remain on appeal. Generally, however, the fact that all of the individuals currently charged and facing trial were initially held at CIA black sites around the world where they were grievously tortured has proven an impassable barrier to trial. Consequently, as New York Times reporters Carol Rosenberg and Charlie Savage have reminded us, “No former C.I.A. detainee has been convicted at trial before a military commission.”

The reasons are many. Obama delayed the trials for three years and the pandemic delayed them further. But by far the biggest obstacle remains the fact that the detainees were horrifically tortured at those black sites. Defense attorneys have persistently insisted that evidence derived under torture should be inadmissible in the proceedings in accordance with the law. While the prosecutors have claimed otherwise, even so many years later, the tortured defendants continue to suffer from the devastating fashion in which they were treated, impeding their defense and causing further delay. In fact, their torture-induced severe psychological instability and often physical incapacity, not to mention instances of distrust of their lawyers, have made it difficult to hold hearings of any sort. As a result, after so many years, the cases remain in the throes of pre-trial hearings and jury selection is still far off.

President Biden has indeed set himself a lower bar than Obama, who issued an early executive order calling for the closure of the prison within a year only to encounter immediate blowback and failure. Still, Biden has made some modest headway in closing Gitmo. Since he took office, most of those who remained in “forever prisoner” limbo have at least been cleared for release. In addition, he’s appointed Tina Kaidanow, former State Department ambassador at large for counterterrorism, to oversee their transfers and has secured the release of 10 prisoners since he took office.

But the recent signs, however incremental, of further movement pertain not to the three remaining “forever prisoners” or to the 16 who have been cleared for release but to those being dealt with by the military commissions established by Congress.

The Military Commissions Cases

The military commissions still face the almost insurmountable hurdle that has haunted them from the start: the legacy of CIA torture. Nevertheless, there has been some recent modest progress, despite the irrevocable damage it caused both individual detainees and our system of justice.

The first signs of movement came in the initial days of the Biden presidency when the Pentagon referred charges against three men to the military commissions. The two Indonesians and one Malaysian captured in Thailand in 2003 had been accused in connection with bombings that targeted two nightclubs in Bali in 2002 and a Marriott Hotel in Jakarta in 2003, resulting in the deaths of more than 200 people, including Americans. A trial date has now been proposed for 2025. (This would, of course, be after Joe Biden’s first term in office.)

Then, there have been signs of progress on potential plea deals. In the summer of 2021, pretrial hearings in the case of Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, an Iraqi captured in 2006 and accused of being a senior member of al-Qaeda, began. The al-Iraqi case reached a resolution in June 2022, when he pleaded guilty to war-crime charges for acts committed in Afghanistan. The terms of his plea deal are still unknown. His sentencing is set for 2024.

In addition, starting in the spring of 2022, prosecutors reached out to defendants in the 9/11 case, who have been facing the death penalty, to begin potential plea-deal discussions in which a maximum life sentence would replace the threat of death. But the path towards resolution remains fraught. In September, perhaps in response to pressure from some of the 9/11 families intent on keeping the death penalty in place, President Biden reportedly refused to approve certain details of those proposed deals. As with so much else at Guantánamo, for every step forward, there seem to be two steps back. Still, negotiations are presumably continuing.

In another instance of inching forward, the commissions have recently addressed the case of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, one of the 9/11 defendants. He has displayed severe signs of mental instability, including delusions and hallucinations, owing to his brutal treatment in CIA custody. He’s convinced, for instance, that CIA agents are still pumping unnerving noises and vibrations into his cell, causing sleep deprivation. His inability to talk about much else has stymied the attempts of his lawyers to prepare him for future hearings. Last June 6th, in fact, a panel of psychiatrists and forensic experts declared him unfit to stand trial, given his post-traumatic stress syndrome and his psychotic delusions. Based on their report, Commissions Judge Matthew McCall agreed and, on September 21, 2023, severed him from the trial.

Excluding Tortured Evidence

While there are, in other words, signs of progress via plea deals and severance, the most promising development may be in the longest running military commission case of all, that of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. He’s accused of masterminding the bombing of the USS Cole, a destroyer off the coast of Yemen, in 2000 killing 17 American servicemen.

Al-Nashiri, a Saudi, was held in CIA black sites from 2002 to 2006, while being tortured using techniques like waterboarding, stress positions, forced sodomy, and mock executions. He was finally indicted in 2011, but his case has faced innumerable pretrial hurdles since then, largely involving debates over evidence derived from torture and the possible inadmissibility of it at trial.

Lawyers considered that his case had taken a step forward when the government reversed its position on torture-derived evidence. A Biden Department of Justice brief filed on January 31, 2022, said, “The government recognizes that torture is abhorrent and unlawful, and unequivocally adheres to humane treatment standards for all detainees… [T]he government will not seek admission, at any stage of the proceedings, of any of petitioner’s statements while he was in CIA custody.” That reversed a prior policy allowing such statements to be used in pretrial hearings, if not at trial itself.

Then, in August, the judge in the case made torture the grounds for taking yet another step forward. Like other detainees, al-Nashiri had been interviewed in later years by FBI “clean teams” of agents who attempted to solicit the same confessions without torture and were often successful. The prosecution wanted to use those confessions, but defense attorneys argued that the impact of torture didn’t dissipate with the clean teams, that the detainees feared their torturers were waiting in the wings to punish them if they gave different answers. They insisted that the defendant’s torture trauma and the perpetual fear of more of it remained an ongoing obstacle to statements of truth.

Al-Nashiri’s lawyers filed papers seeking to exclude his clean-team testimony. Judge Lanny Acosta then took a long-overdue step forward, ruling against the admission of such later confessions. He noted that the clean-team agents “acted professionally and in no way coerced the accused,” even offering “tea and pastries” and reassuring the defendant that he was no longer in CIA custody. Nonetheless, Acosta ruled the statements inadmissible in pre-trial proceedings as well as at trial, since prolonged torture had undoubtedly affected al-Nashiri’s later testimony.

In his 50-page opinion, the judge offered a detailed chronology of the kinds of torture Nashiri had suffered and noted as well the continued use of force against him during his time at Guantánamo, treatment and conditions that could indeed evoke memories of his period in CIA custody. As the judge wrote,

“[H]e was in no position to know whether Drs. Mitchell and/or Jessen [the architects of the CIA’s “Enhanced Interrogation” program] were watching…. prepared to intervene with more abusive treatment… He had no reason to doubt that he might, without notice, suddenly be shipped back to a dungeon like the ones he had experienced before… [or if someone] lurked nearby with a pistol, a drill, or a broomstick, ready to intervene in the event he chose to remain silent or to offer versions of events that differed from what he told his prior investigators.”

As the Judge concluded, “Even if the 2007 statements were not obtained by torture or cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment, they were derived from it.” Michel Paradis, a senior attorney in the Department of Defense’s Office of the Chief Defense Counsel and counsel for Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, has summed up the situation aptly, telling me, “What the refusal to admit the so-called ‘clean team’ statement shows is what anyone who looks at it up close sees. There is nothing clean about torture and there is no way to sanitize it.”

The judge’s decision also marks a potential threshold for the remaining Gitmo cases. If evidence from torture is disallowed, including in pre-trial proceedings, that may lead to future plea deals and even some leniency. Either way, in the wake of Judge Acosta’s decision, the interminably slow Guantánamo cases might just begin to proceed more rapidly.

Add to all this the effect of the passage of time, given among other things the aging not just of Gitmo’s prisoners, but of those working to bring their cases to trial over all these years, many of whom have retired. Judge Acosta gave notice of his retirement from the Army as September ended, while Matthew McCall, the fourth judge to preside over the 9/11 case, has similarly indicated that he’ll be leaving next April, also before it comes to trial. Several of the attorneys for the detainees have retired as well, after so many years representing their clients.

The belated but increasingly accepted notion that torture renders trials impossible, now seemingly shared by the court as well as the defense teams, has become more than mere rhetoric. As Paradis commented to me, “No justice system worth the name permits even the whiff of evidence tainted by torture. We have revolted at the idea for more than a century in this country and even persuaded the world that it should do the same, such as when Ronald Reagan signed the Convention Against Torture.”

Ironically, the acknowledgement of this reality may finally bring these cases to their conclusion. But so many years later, despite being determined to grasp every ray of hope, I suspect that, when it comes to the closing of Guantánamo, the sorrowful record of the past may overshadow the dreams of a better tomorrow.

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