- JERUSALEM (Reuters) -- Sexual
humiliation of the kind practiced by U.S. military police at Abu Ghraib
prison in Iraq does little to help interrogators gain useful information
from prisoners, Israeli counter-terrorism experts said Monday.
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- Israel, perhaps unique in having public debate and legal
guidelines on the use of physical coercion against suspects, does not use
Abu Ghraib-type methods despite its close ties with the United States on
security matters, they said.
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- "Under questioning, a terrorist should be made to
yield. Sexual abuse goes too far by breaking him, so it's not an option,"
Ami Ayalon, former chief of Israel's Shin Bet domestic security service,
told Reuters.
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- "A broken man will say anything. That information
is worthless."
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- The United States is reeling from revelations that low-level
personnel at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad piled naked Iraqi detainees
on top of one another and photographed them simulating sex acts.
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- New Yorker magazine said the abuses were ordered by U.S.
military intelligence as part of the effort to gather information on Iraqi
insurgents through interrogation. The Pentagon denied this, calling the
scandal an isolated incident.
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- For many in Israel, the case recalled charges by a Lebanese
guerrilla leader, Mustafa Dirani, that he was sodomized by an Israeli interrogator
while in captivity in the mid-1990s.
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- Ayalon said the Dirani case was exceptional as he had
been held by Israeli military intelligence, whose top-secret foreign missions
secure it virtual freedom from judicial scrutiny, while the Shin Bet works
in Israel and the Palestinian territories under strict Supreme Court guidelines.
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- "MODERATE PHYSICAL PRESSURE"
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- Under court restrictions, the Shin Bet can use "moderate
physical pressure," including sensory deprivation and shaking short
of causing permanent damage, on so-called "ticking bombs" --
suspects it believes know about imminent attacks.
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- "The Shin Bet has professionalism and oversight,
so everyone keeps to these methods. They are effective enough," Ayalon
said, adding that interrogators undergo almost three years of Arabic and
psychology training before confronting their first suspect.
-
- According to New Yorker correspondent Seymour Hersh,
some of Abu Ghraib's abused inmates may have been photographed in the hope
they could later be blackmailed into becoming U.S. informants. Israel depends
on a vast network of collaborators in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to help
its hunt for Palestinian militants waging a 3 1/2-year-old revolt with
suicide bombings.
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- Palestinian advocates say collaborators are recruited
on the offer of pay or after Israeli authorities withhold favors such as
travel permits, an account confirmed by Shin Bet sources.
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- But sexual blackmail is almost unheard of.
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- "An informant risks being caught and killed by his
countrymen, so he will only be effective if he works of his own free will,
feeling it is worth his while," said Menachem Landau, a retired Shin
Bet supervisor of Palestinian collaborators. "Someone acting out of
fear will be unreliable and could even end up attacking his handler to
clear his name."
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- http://news.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=5164061
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