ZGram - 10/13/2004 - "The Secret of Unit 1391"

zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org
Mon Oct 11 04:35:13 EDT 2004





ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny:  Now more than ever!

October 13, 2004

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

A friend who sent me the Newsweek article below added this preface:

"Subject: Israeli torture

"This story again shows that the same methods are being used by the 
US and Israel in the humiliation and torture of prisoners. Again, 
this is very close to what Ernst Zundel experienced in a US prison, 
where prisoners were dragged from their cells, dogs snapping at their 
heads, with female police crawling in a sexual manner over them while 
videotaping and photographing them."

[START]

MSNBC.com

Secrets Of Unit 1391
Uncovering an Israeli jail that specializes in nightmares

By Dan Ephron
Newsweek

June 28 issue - Sometimes a country's darkest secrets have a way of 
surfacing in the most offhanded manner. Gad Kroizer, an Israeli 
historian, was researching old British police buildings when he 
stumbled on a 70-year-old map drawn by a government architect. The 
map showed the location of 62 police compounds built by the British 
in Palestine in the late 1930s and early 1940s where both Arabs and 
Jews who agitated against Britain's occupation were interrogated. 
What caught Kroizer's eye was a camp called Meretz, which he had not 
seen on any contemporary Israeli map or read about in any modern 
writing on security compounds in the Jewish state. "There was a 
discrepancy between the map I had and the lists I'd been looking at," 
says Kroizer, who lives in Jerusalem and teaches at Bar-Ilan 
University. "I started putting two and two together."

What Kroizer had discovered and later footnoted in an academic paper 
(published in the March 2004 issue of Cathedra, circulation: 1,500) 
was the location of an ultrasecret jail where Israel has held Arabs 
in total seclusion for years, barred visits by the Red Cross and 
allegedly tortured inmates. Known as 1391, the facility is used as an 
interrogation center by a storied unit of Israel's military 
intelligence, whose members-all Arabic speakers-are trained to wring 
confessions from the toughest militants. According to Arabs who've 
been imprisoned in 1391, some of the methods are reminiscent of Abu 
Ghraib: nudity as a humiliation tactic, compromising photographs, 
sleep deprivation. In a few cases, at least, interrogators at 1391 
appear to have gone beyond Israel's own hair-splitting distinction 
between torture and what a state commission referred to in 1987 as 
"moderate physical pressure."

But the nightmare for those in 1391 is the isolation and the fear 
that no one knows where you are, say Arabs who've been held there as 
well as an Israeli who's been inside the prison. The location of the 
compound is so hush-hush that a court this year banned a visit by an 
Israeli legislator. Prisoners describe being hooded everywhere at the 
facility except in their cells. Jailers often tell them they're on 
the moon or in another country (in fact, the compound is less than an 
hour's drive from Tel Aviv). "This can be devastating emotionally," 
says Dalia Kerstein, whose Israeli human-rights group, HaMoked, has 
petitioned the High Court of Justice to close down 1391. "We've seen 
that psychological pressure in certain instances can be even harder 
on inmates than physical pressure."

Hassan Rawajbeh would be the first to agree. A member of the nearly 
disbanded Palestinian Preventive Security force suspected of taking 
part in a shooting attack on Israelis, Rawajbeh was picked up by 
soldiers in Nablus 18 months ago. Af-ter stops at two other detention 
centers, he was hooded, handcuffed and thrown on the floor of a van. 
When the hood was removed, he was in a tiny, windowless cell with 
black walls and almost no light. The chamber contained no toilet, 
only a bucket in the corner, which the 39-year-old Rawajbeh says his 
jailers would empty once every few weeks. A low buzzing droned 
constantly. Rawajbeh, who denies shooting at Israelis, was never 
beaten, but he says he was on the verge of a breakdown. "I was jailed 
six times before," he said earlier this month at his office in 
Nablus, where other Palestinians, some armed with pistols, smoke 
cigarettes and drink coffee. "But those experiences were like 
five-star hotels compared to 1391."

For nearly four months, Rawajbeh saw no -one but his interrogators, 
who kept him naked for days at a time and prevented him from going to 
the bathroom. "You begin to feel like the jail exists only for you, 
that no one else is there," he says.

Israeli officials deny torturing inmates at 1391 or any other 
facility. But Gideon Ezra, the former deputy head of Israel's Shabak 
security service, says psychological pressure is one of the most 
effective tools interrogators have in the war against terrorism. 
Ezra, now a member of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's Likud Party and 
his cabinet, says 1391 was actually set up as an interrogation center 
for non-Palestinian Arabs who entered Israel illegally. (Ezra says 
the number 1391 corresponds to the adjacent military base and has no 
particular significance.) "In cases like that, you need to find out 
very quickly who this person is and how he might harm you."

But at least one former inmate at 1391 says the comparison to Abu 
Ghraib is fitting. Mustapha Dirani was brought to the facility after 
being abducted by Israeli commandos from his home in Lebanon in 1994. 
Israel believed Dirani knew the whereabouts of a missing airman, Ron 
Arad, and wanted to glean information quickly, while he was still 
stunned from the kidnapping. Dirani, who returned to Lebanon five 
months ago in a prisoner swap, said in a phone interview that he was 
raped by a soldier in those first days at 1391 and sodomized by an 
interrogator he identified as George. His civil suit against the 
state for more than $1 million in damages is scheduled to start in 
January. "It's the same style as in Abu Ghraib. They take advantage 
of the fact that Arabs and Muslims are culturally conservative," says 
Dirani, who spent eight years at 1391 but was never tried for a 
crime. In what might look to some people like a foreshadowing of Abu 
Ghraib, Dirani said in an affidavit four years ago that he was 
interrogated naked for days and photographed repeatedly.

George has since left the intelligence unit that operates at 1391, 
according to Kerstein of HaMoked. She believes the Army might be 
worried the interrogator will divulge other scandals if the Dirani 
case ever goes to trial. In an interview with Israel's Channel Two 
television four months ago, George said Dirani invented the rape 
story to avoid retribution back in Lebanon for information he 
divulged to the Israelis.

Kroizer, the academic who stumbled on 1391, is still surprised by the 
attention his footnote received. Days after his paper was published, 
his editor got a call from Israel's military censor, who wanted to 
know why the article had not been submitted for inspection. "We 
publish an historical journal. We usually deal with issues that are 
at least 30 years old," says the editor, Benjamin Zeev Wexler. "But I 
thought it was interesting to note that this old British 
interrogation center was still operating today." For a few hundred 
Arabs held there over the years, it was no news at all.

With Joanna Chen in Jerusalem and Samir Zedan in Nablus

© 2004 Newsweek, Inc.

URL: <http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5251751/>http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5251751/

[END]


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