Military steps up use of live 0.22 inch bullets against Palestinian stone-throwers

[Jefferson23]

5. What America Learned About Torture From Israel and Britain

One striking aspect of the debate over Bush-era interrogation methods has been the willingness of the program’s defenders to support methods that are routinely described as torture when employed by other countries. “In [Dick] Cheney’s world, nothing Americans do can be called torture, because we are not al-Qaida and we are not the Japanese in the Second World War (whom we prosecuted for waterboarding) and we are not ISIS,” writes the New Yorker’s Amy Davidson. She continues: “t was not really the Justice Department that ‘blessed,’ or rather transubstantiated, torture; it was our American-ness.”



The United States, though, is not the only democracy to have tortured. In fact, in justifying the interrogation program, its architects drew on the experiences of two of America’s closest allies.

As was widely reported in the Israeli media, last week’s Senate report notes that the CIA used Israel as a precedent to justify its use of coercive interrogation tactics. The Jerusalem Post reports:

On November 26, 2001, soon after the September 11 attacks on the U.S., the CIA general counsel wrote that “the Israeli example” could serve as “a possible basis for arguing ... regarding terrorist detainees that ‘torture was necessary to prevent imminent, significant, physical harm to persons, where there is no other available means to prevent the harm.’ ” The internal memorandum also said that “states may be very unwilling to call the U.S. to task for torture when it resulted in saving thousands of lives.”

The use of torture in fighting terrorism has been a recurring subject of debate in Israel. In 1987, following the deaths of two Palestinian prisoners, an Israeli government commission led by former Supreme Court justice Moshe Landau found that in some extraordinary cases “the exertion of a moderate degree of physical pressure cannot be avoided.”

According to the human rights group B’Tselem, Israel’s internal security service, the Shin Bet, used physical force against at least 850 persons per year in the years following the Landau Commission, usually not in the “ticking bomb” scenarios the report had used to justify such methods. These methods include depriving prisoners of sleep, forcing them into “stress positions,” threatening them, subjecting them to extreme temperatures, and blasting them with loud music—all methods that would later become commonplace in CIA interrogations.

snip* Proponents of the U.S. interrogation program took from these examples that government can get away with an awful lot of mistreatment without having to call it “torture.” Israel’s experience is also a reminder that security forces will find ways to exploit the loopholes left open in legal judgments. This is concerning given that the Obama administration is reluctant to launch any prosecutions program and that its legal position on torture leaves some troubling ambiguity on the topic of “black site” prisons. And the British interrogations, still being argued in court four decades later, suggest that even if the U.S. is completely finished with torture, the controversy over the program is far from over.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_world_/2014/12/15/what_america_learned_about_torture_from_israel_and_britain.html