Tag: torture

Palestinians released from Israeli torture camps detail ‘nightmare’ conditions

The Israeli army released 33 Palestinian abductees taken captive from Gaza in previous months, Anadolu Agency reported on 21 June, amid continued reports that Israel is subjecting the detainees to severe torture.

“The freed Palestinians were admitted to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital with thin bodies and signs of torture,” said Palestinian medical sources speaking with Anadolu.

The sources added that the detainees were set free in eastern Deir al-Balah in central Gaza.

Since the beginning of the Israeli ground invasion in Gaza, Israel has abducted thousands of Palestinian civilians, including women, children, and medical and rescue workers.

Israel has released some, while others remain in Israeli captivity.

One of those released on Thursday was Badr Dahlan, 30, who displayed signs of psychological distress, including bugged eyes and difficulty forming sentences while speaking.

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Palestinians recount torture and sexual abuse in Israeli detention facility

An Israeli military base in southern Israel is holding thousands of Palestinians in detention where mistreatment and torture is rife, according to a new report.

Since 7 October, the Sde Teiman military base has been used to detain roughly 4,000 Palestinians from Gaza, with some staying at the base for three months before release or transfer into Israel’s prison system.

Around 1,200 Palestinians who were at the base have been released back into Gaza after being found to be civilians.

A report by the New York Times (NYT) revealed that although many had been released after being found to be civilians, those people still underwent interrogations that are consistent with practices of torture.

Seven former detainees at the base, and whose detention was verified by the Israeli military for the report, gave accounts describing forms of torture being widespread at the base.

These accusations include repeated beatings during interrogations or for minor infractions, such as peeking under blindfolds or sleeping when not permitted.

Such accounts of beatings were corroborated by Israeli soldiers speaking to NYT, who said that colleagues boasted about beatings, and that at least one person had died as a result of being beaten.

At least 35 Palestinians have died at the base since 7 October, although Israeli officers speaking to NYT at the facility denied the deaths were as a result of abuse.

The officers said that 12 soldiers had been dismissed from the base, some for excessive use of force.

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GUANTÁNAMO PROSECUTORS ACCUSED OF “OUTRAGEOUS” MISCONDUCT FOR TRYING TO USE TORTURE TESTIMONY

IN A PRETRIAL HEARING Tuesday at the Guantánamo Bay military tribunal, Clive Stafford Smith, a lawyer for a potential witness in the war crimes case, accused government prosecutors of “outrageous” misconduct.

During the hearing for the case of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who is charged with masterminding the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole, Stafford Smith said the government attorneys had failed to release exculpatory information about Nashiri and made false statements in the course of their failure.

Stafford Smith, the lead counsel for Ahmed Rabbani, a former Guantánamo detainee who was tortured by the CIA, made the allegations after being called to the witness stand by Nashiri’s defense team.

Stafford Smith testified that the prosecutors had filed a brief that falsely said Rabbani had not recanted his initial testimony because, Rabbani said, it was made under torture. After raising the omission, Stafford Smith said, he felt it was not getting due attention and took the unusual step of reporting the prosecutors to their state bar associations.

“I’ve never, ever, in 40 years reported someone to the bar before this case,” Stafford Smith said in court. “I don’t like doing that, but I felt I was required to.”

In the court motion last year that set off Stafford Smith’s ethics complaints, the Guantánamo prosecutors said they had no knowledge of Rabbani’s recantation or claims the testimony in question were extracted by torture. (The chief prosecutor’s office declined to comment for this story.)

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Fontana pays nearly $900,000 for ‘psychological torture’ inflicted by police to get false confession

Within hours after Thomas Perez Jr. called police to report his father missing, he found himself in a tiny interrogation room confronted by Fontana detectives determined to extract a confession that he killed his dad.

Perez had told police that his father, 71-year-old Thomas Perez Sr., went out for a walk with the family dog at about 10 p.m. on Aug. 7, 2018. The dog returned within minutes without Perez’s father. Investigators didn’t believe his story, and over the next 17 hours they grilled him to try to get to the “truth.”

According to court records, detectives told Perez that his father was dead, that they had recovered his body and it now “wore a toe tag at the morgue.” They said they had evidence that Perez killed his father and that he should just admit it, records show.

Perez insisted he didn’t remember killing anyone, but detectives allegedly told him that the human mind often tries to suppress troubling memories.

At one point during the interrogation, the investigators even threatened to have his pet Labrador Retriever, Margosha, euthanized as a stray, and brought the dog into the room so he could say goodbye. “OK? Your dog’s now gone, forget about it,” said an investigator.

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Torture, Executions, Babies Left To Die, Sexual Abuse… These Are Israel’s Crimes

Hostages tortured to death. Parents executed in front of their children. Doctors beaten. Babies murdered. Sexual assault weaponised.

No, not Hamas crimes. This is part of an ever-growing list of documented atrocities committed by Israel in the five months since 7 October – quite separate from the carpet bombing of 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza and a famine induced by Israel’s obstruction of aid.

Last week, an investigation by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz disclosed that some 27 Palestinians seized off Gaza’s streets over the past five months are known to have died during interrogations inside Israel.

Some were denied medical treatment. But most are likely to have been tortured to death.

Three months ago, a Haaretz editorial warned that Israeli jails “must not become execution facilities for Palestinians”.

Israeli TV channels have been excitedly taking viewers on tours of detention centres, showing the appalling conditions Palestinians are kept in, as well as the psychological and physical abuse they are subjected to.

An Israeli judge recently called the makeshift cages in which Palestinians are held “unsuitable for humans”.

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Israel Accused Of Torturing UN Workers To Obtain False Testimony About UNRWA

A recent UNRWA document says its staff report having been tortured while detained by Israeli forces, who pressed them to provide false statements about ties between the agency and Hamas.

“The document said several UNRWA Palestinian staffers had been detained by the Israeli army, and added that the ill-treatment and abuse they said they had experienced included severe physical beatings, waterboarding, and threats of harm to family members,” Reuters reports, saying UNRWA workers “reported having been pressured by Israeli authorities into falsely stating that the agency has Hamas links and that staff took part in the Oct. 7 attacks.” 

This is another one of those stories about Israeli offenses that are so stunning that at first you can mistakenly believe you must not be reading it correctly — especially since the western political-media class haven’t been treating it like the jarring news that it is. If we had anything remotely like an objective news media in the western world, reports that Israel tortured United Nations staff to get them to make false statements against a UN aid agency would be the top story everywhere for days.

Many, including myself, speculated that torture was involved in obtaining the Israeli “intelligence” behind initial claims of UNRWA staff involvement in the October 7 attack when this narrative first surfaced back in January. A senior Israeli official told Axios at the time that Israeli intelligence agencies came upon the information about the UNRWA staffers largely through “interrogations of militants who were arrested during the Oct. 7 attack.” Israel has an extensive history of using torture in its interrogations, and there’s no reason to believe such methods haven’t been used on captured Hamas fighters in recent months — but reports that it was actual UN staff being tortured are something new.

We may be certain that if it was Hamas being accused of torturing workers for international aid agencies in order to extract false confessions, we’d never hear the end of it. To this day unsubstantiated rumors of mass systemic sexual violence on October 7 continue to dominate the headlines resulting in scandalous instances of journalistic malpractice, despite the Israeli spinmeisters behind those reports having a much worse track record than UNRWA in the truth-telling department and UNRWA standing much less to gain than Israel by lying.

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The stories of the women accused of being witches must be told

THERE has been an increased interest in the Scottish witchcraft trials of the 16th and 17th centuries in recent months, with campaigns ongoing for an apology, a pardon and a national monument.

Much has been written about the numbers accused – about 3837 – the role of the Kirk and the courts, and the beliefs of both the church and the accusers. But what of the women who were accused? What was the experience of those taken in for questioning?

Those accused of witchcraft were predominantly women – 84%. They were Christian but also said to be practitioners of magic. These magical powers might have been innate, inherited from a mother or grandmother, or they might have been gifted by the fairies.

These powers could be used to help heal a sick child, find lost property or gain a husband. Those with a reputation for being a witch might well be tolerated within a community – and indeed welcomed by some – for a time until external pressures caused the community to turn against them.

The turbulence of the Reformation and the wars of the Three Kingdoms were the two main pressures communities faced at that time. For John Knox, the father of Scottish Calvinism, power was unnatural to women therefore any woman who had power could only have derived it from an evil source – Auld Nick, meaning the Devil.

With that mentality added to the command “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” in the King James version of the Bible, magical practitioners came under threat.

When an accusation was first made, these women were taken from their homes and dragged in front of the Kirk minister and elders to face an aggressive interrogation.

The moral leaders of their community castigated them as evil, wicked and in thrall to the Devil. Physically, there might be several men crowding round them, roaring and bellowing in their faces about their black, sinful soul. They were scared and disoriented – and expected to confess to the very worst of crimes. Torture might be used to force that confession.

Trial records note that accused women were tortured by “hanging them up by the thombes and burning the soles of their feet at the fyre”.

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Why Torture Is A Failed Policy And Practice

Judge Napolitano was the inspiration for doing this post. He wrote an excellent piece in the Daily Wire last week commenting on the apparent collapse of the criminal case against Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9-11 attacks. The Judge wrote:

As the pre-trial hearings in the case of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and others who are charged with masterminding the 9/11 attacks proceed at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba, the government continues to stumble with its own witnesses. In hearings last week, government lawyers tried to demonstrate that statements the defendants made to CIA and FBI agents were voluntary.

When the government’s principal torturer, a now-retired psychologist, had difficulty recalling that during a torture session he threatened one of his victims by offering to slit the throat of the victim’s young son and that he had recounted that threat under oath in previous testimony, it became apparent to all in the courtroom and to those of us who monitor these awful proceedings that the government was encountering a strange and unexpected difficulty in defending the behavior of its torturers.

The Judge’s judicial instincts are spot on. But there is much more to this story. The American public, and much of the world, have been bamboozled into believing that torture is an effective interrogation technique. It is not. It is counter productive.

Hollywood and novelists have played a key role in my view of popularizing torture as a necessary evil. The TV show, 24, featuring Kiefer Sutherland as Jack Bauer, routinely relied to torture to get info out of terrorists. Hell, even Supreme Court Justice Scalia, when he was alive, believed Jack Bauer had the right to torture:

“Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles. … He saved hundreds of thousands of lives,” Judge Scalia said. Then, recalling Season 2, where the agent’s rough interrogation tactics saved California from a terrorist nuke, the Supreme Court judge etched a line in the sand.
“Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?” Judge Scalia challenged his fellow judges. “Say that criminal law is against him? ‘You have the right to a jury trial?’ Is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer? I don’t think so.

“So the question is really whether we believe in these absolutes. And ought we believe in these absolutes.”

Then there is the late Vince Flynn. As you can see from the image posted at the top of this piece, I was friends with Vince — at least until he because famous — and helped him with his first five books. His views on torture are his own. I suggested otherwise, but he explains his thinking in this interview with Robert Bidinotto:

Flynn: Yes. Here’s where I sit. It’s real simple. If al Qaeda signed the Geneva Convention, put on a uniform, stuck their flag in the ground, and said, “Let’s meet on the battlefield,” I would say: “Absolutely. Torture—you can’t do it. Period. End of discussion.” But we have an enemy that won’t put on a uniform, has not signed the Geneva Convention, hides behind men, women, and children, and then attacks men, women, and children—civilians.

I think it’s a joke that we are even having this debate, as a nation. I think that torture should take place only for high-value targets where we know they are withholding information that could help us bust up cells, financing, organization, and possible operations.

The problem is that because we are a civilized society, and because we’ve lost our mooring—we’ve lost our attachment to our Judeo-Christian beliefs—we’ve gone off on this little safari with PC. We think that we have to say things so that people will think, “He’s smart, he’s compassionate, he cares, he’s got a good heart.” The reality is that if you were to ask the American people, “When Mitch Rapp starts to torture some bad guy who knows where the nuke is, are you sitting there in the privacy of your home crying and saying, ‘Please stop torturing this guy’? Or are you saying, ‘Get him, Mitch! Get the information out of him!’”

Vince violated the Gannon Rule. Dick Gannon was my boss at State CT. He was a retired Marine Colonel and Vietnam Combat vet. He was fond of saying, “If it feels really good it is probably wrong.” What I tried to tell Vince was no matter how emotionally satisfying torturing a bad guy is for the purpose of entertaining an audience, in the real world it is counter productive and fails to produce reliable intelligence.

Unfortunately, most of the world labors under the false belief fostered by the Jack Bauers and Vince Flynns that the CIA is skilled and practiced in the art of torture. That is a lie. The opposite is true. The CIA training program for case officers offered zero instruction in torture or interrogation. The primary mission of a CIA operations officer is to recruit foreigners to spy for us — i.e., to commit treason against their own country. This process is a seduction, not coercion. If you have convinced someone to betray their country or their cause it better not be based on anger at you for inflicting pain or threatening to harm loved ones. That is a recipe for getting screwed over by your recruited source.

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UN Report Finds Palestinians Sexually Abused and Beaten in Israeli Detention

A document compiled by the UN Palestinian agency (UNRWA) found rampant abuse of Palestinians in Israeli detention facilities. The detainees report frequent beatings, sexual abuse, and even the deaths of prisoners. Thousands of Palestinians have been rounded by the Israeli Defense Forces in Gaza over the past four months. 

The New York Times viewed a UNRWA report that documents pervasive abuse in Israeli detention camps. “Detainees said they were beaten, stripped, robbed, blindfolded, sexually abused, and denied access to lawyers and doctors, often for more than a month,” the outlet wrote. “Some detainees, according to the report, told UNRWA investigators that they had often been beaten on open wounds, had been held for hours in painful stress positions, and had been attacked by military dogs.”

One prisoner reported he was “beaten so badly that his genitals turned blue and that there was still blood present in his urine,” adding that “guards made him sleep naked in the open air, next to a fan blowing cold air, and played music so loudly that his ear bled.” 

The draft document describes “a range of ill-treatment that Gazans of all ages, abilities, and backgrounds have reported facing in makeshift detention facilities in Israel.” Such treatment, the report concluded, “was used to extract information or confessions, to intimidate and humiliate, and to punish.”

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Ear-Piercing Noise Blares Through DC Gulag Torturing Sleep Deprived J6 Political Prisoners For Weeks

An ear-shattering, harrowing sharp noise has been blaring throughout the Washington DC  Correctional Treatment Facility for weeks where January 6 political prisoners are detained.

J6 defendants housed in C3A, the cell block known as the Patriot Pod in the DC gulag where J6ers are segregated from the general population, called The Gateway Pundit urging the American people to demand oversight of the jail from US Marshals and members of Congress.

As TGP has reported, J6ers have been brutalized and tortured for exposing the corruption within the Bureau of Prisons System and the Department of Justice to the media. In February, two political prisoners were ripped from their cells, abducted and transferred to the country’s most hostile anti-Trump correctional facilities and barred from communication for regularly speaking out.

J6 political prisoner Matthew Krol has been living on a pacemaker for nearly two years in the DC jail and has described dying from a heart attack while incarcerated and “coming back” while waiting years for heart surgery. Krol is one of several J6 defendants in the correctional facility in a legal battle with DC jail for medical deprivation.

After enduring more than two weeks of unbearable loud noise, Krol is calling on everyone on the outside for help.

“We have another situation here in C3A. For weeks, now throughout the day and many nights, there [are] sounds of construction going on,” the political prisoner, who is living on a pacemaker, told TGP after 14 days of the madness. “The supervisors say there is no construction at night, yet the noise continues.

“And there have been C/Os that have said there [is] no construction going on in the pod above us. It is 10:23 PM and our current C/O has been in my cell listening twice tonight to the noise. Inmates in the USA are supposed to get 8 1/2 hours of interrupted sleep a day, that does not happen here.”

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