Home > The Painful Lesson Israel Learned About Torture
by Eitan Felner
International Herald Tribune - Monday, May 31, 2004
’Moderate physical pressure’
MADRID "The methods of interrogation which are employed
in any given regime are a faithful mirror of the
character of the entire regime."
As the Abu Ghraib torture scandal keeps unfolding, I
recall these prescient words of the 1987 Landau
Commission appointed by the Israeli government to
review the interrogation methods used against terrorist
suspects.
Ironically, it was this same commission, headed by a
former Israeli Supreme Court chief justice, that
recommended the use of "moderate physical pressure" in
interrogations, causing Israel to become the only
democratic state in modern times that publicly
acknowledged and justified the use of physical coercion
in interrogations.
These disgraceful practices only ended in 1999 when the
Israeli Supreme Court took the courageous and long
overdue decision to ban outright all forms of physical
force in interrogation.
Now, the United States may be assuming this same
notorious standing. Not in sanctioning the behaviors
depicted in the now infamous Iraq prison photos, but in
adopting "moderate physical pressure," including
depriving prisoners of sleep, keeping them in stressful
positions for extended periods, forcing them to listen
to incessant piercing music and exposing them to
extreme heat or cold.
There are no lingering doubts that these coercive
measures are official policy of the Bush
administration. Hailed by Donald Rumsfeld and other
senior U.S. officials in recent Senate hearings as
legitimate methods of interrogation, these practices
were reportedly among the most common interrogation
techniques against Iraqi detainees until they were
recently barred by the top American commander in Iraq.
Yet this ban applies to Iraqi prisoners only; CIA and
U.S. military interrogators can continue to use them
against detainees held at Guantánamo Bay or in
Afghanistan and other U.S. detention centers where
terrorist suspects are held.
Unlike the Iraqi detainees, the Bush administration
considers those detained during the Afghanistan war or
elsewhere in the context of the "global war on
terrorism" as not being protected by the Geneva
Conventions. But the question of the applicability of
these conventions to Taliban and Al Qaeda detainees
from the Afghanistan war has no bearing whatsoever on
the fact that any coercive methods are absolutely
forbidden against any detainee, in every and all
circumstances.
The UN Convention against Torture, which applies at all
times and which the United States is bound to respect
as a state party to it, is no less categorical in its
prohibition of torture and other forms of ill-treatment
than the Geneva Conventions that apply only during
armed conflicts.
It is therefore not surprising that Israel’s High Court
of Justice ruled that these coercive methods used in
interrogations of Palestinians are illegal, since they
are degrading and infringe upon the detainee’s human
dignity.
Likewise, the Committee against Torture, an expert UN
body, determined that the interrogation methods used by
Israel during that long, grim period constituted
torture. Similar methods used by Britain in Northern
Ireland were also banned by the European Court of Human
Rights since they treated the suspect in an "inhuman
and degrading" manner.
The Bush administration may argue that no state can be
expected to respect the niceties of international law
when fighting a fanatical terrorist groups that
respects no rules. But as Aharon Barak, Israel’s
Supreme Court chief justice, wrote in the historic
judgment outlawing all coercive methods of
interrogations, "Although a democracy must often fight
with one hand tied behind its back, it nonetheless has
the upper hand. Preserving the rule of law and
recognition of an individual’s liberty constitutes an
important component in its understanding of security.
At the end of the day, they strengthen its spirit and
its strength and allow it to overcome its
difficulties."
Ultimately, the "rotten apples" allegedly responsible
for the abuses uncovered at Abu Ghraib may have been
the fruit of rotten seeds sowed by the Bush
administration when it authorized coercive methods
against terrorist suspects, even if the administration
did not intend or authorize the gruesome methods
depicted in those photos.
Once the moral and legal taboo of deliberately
assaulting the physical and mental integrity of
helpless detainees has been lifted, the use of torture
cannot fully be prevented.
If anything can be learnt from the disgraceful
experience of Israel with the use of force in
interrogations is that the slippery slope to torture is
built into any system that allows any form of physical
coercion in interrogation of its security suspects.
[Eitan Felner, a human rights consultant, was the
director of B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center
for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, and a
former chairman of the Israeli section of Amnesty
International.]