- As the story unfolds in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, I find
myself recalling Mohammad Salah, a Palestinian born in Jerusalem in 1953
who immigrated to the United States in 1971-and soon decided that America
was the land of his dreams. If a man worked hard, he and his family could
keep the money they earned. And there seemed to be no limit to what he
and his wife, Mariam, and their three sons and daughter could do.
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- I first wrote about Salah's harrowing story in December
1999, and in the five years that have elapsed since then things have not
gone much better for him. Nevertheless, he still has an incurable sense
of optimism. When I brought up the torture of prisoners in Iraq, Salah's
account of what had happened to him in Israel was an almost word-for-word
description of the experience of Iraqi prisioners. He also added a few
details that he and I had agreed were too horrific for print in 1999.
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- For example, Salah said, overhead cameras were always
on. When he refused to undress, his Israelis jailers handcuffed his feet
and hands and undressed him themselves. Sleeping pills were given to women
prisoners, who were then raped, Salah said. "If they didn't cooperate,"
he added, "they were warned of future acts."
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- While Salah was in prison, he said, some 14 women were
raped-and their rapes filmed. Some prison personnel sold photographs of
the rapes to make money on the side, and neighbors of the rape victims
were forced to watch the tapes. The women were called collaborators after
the films were shown. Such humiliating acts were commonplace, according
to Salah.
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- His experience as a prisoner began in 1993-after he had
become a U.S. citizen-when he decided to go back to Palestine and help
his less fortunate relatives. As he was making his travel plans, members
of his Chicago Muslim community asked him to help Palestinians in need,
and sent $200,000 in bank transfers with him to be used as needed in the
West Bank and Gaza.
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- Salah distributed more than $60,000 in Ramallah through
Palestinian physicians who told him of needy people. Then he traveled through
Israel to Gaza, where he left another $30,000 with doctors he had met in
a hospital there. He planned to return to Ramallah the next morning.
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- Israeli security agents stormed his room in Gaza, however,
and seized the $110,000 Salah had not yet distributed, his clothes and
his passport. They handcuffed him and threw him on the floor of a jeep
for the three- or four-hour drive to Ramallah.
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- In Ramallah they took him to the headquarters of Shabak,
Israel's internal security police. There, for the first time, he was accused
of being a member of Hamas.
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- Salah was stripped naked and told that if he did not
provide the names of all of the "Hamas" contacts to whom he had
been giving money, he would be sexually assaulted. After he was left naked
and alone for a time to think about this, his interrogators returned. When
he told them he would rather die than implicate innocent people just to
avoid torture, Israel's by now well-documented physical and psychological
torture began-and continued for nearly five years.
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- The first 48 hours of what Israeli law calls "moderate
physical pressure" began when a vile-smelling hood was put over Salah's
head. Then, with his arms handcuffed behind him, he was forced into a child-sized
chair, the shabah, with shorter legs in front than in back. To add to his
discomfort, the handcuffs were passed through the rungs on the chair, leaving
one arm pinioned behind his back and the other tied over the back of the
chair. As he sat there for hour after hour, blindfolded, barely able to
breathe, and unable to shift from his painful position, interrogators came
and went, sometimes hitting him as they asked him questions, other times
casually striking or kicking him whenever they passed his chair.
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- After two days on the tiny, sloping chair, Salah's Israeli
guards began to alternate the excruciatingly painful hours in the shabah
with periods in a brightly lighted cell. Salah's every move was recorded
on a video camera, and loud music was played to keep him from sleeping.
When Salah did fall asleep, he would be awakened and taken back to an interrogation
cell for more time on the shabah, hooded and subjected to endless interrogation,
punctuated by blows when he didn't answer.
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- Salah's interrogators told him they had arrested everyone
with whom he had come in contact in Ramallah and Gaza and let him know
that they were preparing, in Hebrew, what they first called a "routine
report," based upon his answers to interrogators, as well the testimony
of those whom he had contacted. Later they described the document, which
had expanded to 15 pages, as a "confession," which he would have
to sign to end his torture.
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- Salah refused. Eventually, because he had no idea what
they were writing down, he stopped saying anything at all, no matter how
hard or how often they struck him.
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- It was winter, and bitterly cold, in the prison, but
Salah's jailers took away the blankets in his cell. Sometimes they allowed
him to sleep, uncovered, on a thin mattress, and other times forced him
to lie on the cold floor. He was not able to wash for the first two months
of his imprisonment.
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- On his 16th day in custody Salah was allowed to meet
with a woman lawyer his brother had hired after reading about Salah's arrest
in the Israeli press. Salah asked her to tell the American Embassy he wanted
to see an English-language translation of the "confession" the
Israelis were preparing.
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- Members of Salah's family were not allowed to visit him
for the first four months he was in prison, although he did receive weekly
visits from his lawyer and occasional visits from U.S. officials.
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- The first U.S. consular official "interrogated me
more than he seemed to want to help," Salah recalled. "When I
said I would go on a hunger strike if my conditions did not improve, he
said, 'Don't do it.'"
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- Otherwise, however, U.S. officials reiterated that "all
we can do is protest" the life-threatening torture to which he continuously
was being subjected.
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- They seemed so detached and unsympathetic, Salah said,
that he gradually came to believe "the Embassy was sympathizing with
the Israelis, so I became even more afraid. I felt I was being set up."
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- Nor did conditions improve.
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- During his lengthy interrogations, Salah was not allowed
to use a bathroom, and was kept tied up. The blows that accompanied the
interrogators' questions increasingly were directed at his face, leading
him to believe that if he continued to remain silent, his jailers eventually
would kill him.
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- The cruelest of his interrogators, Salah recalled, was
Haim, an American-born Israeli whose family still lives in the United States.
In the "good cop, bad cop" game, Haim was the bad cop. The good
cop was a French Jew, who warned Salah that if he didn't cooperate, "they
plan to keep you here for life."
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- Salah looked forward to his lawyer's weekly visits. After
she left, however, the guards would challenge him, saying "what can
she do for you?" They laughed at his protests that he was an American
citizen.
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- "Who cares?" they said. "We're not afraid
of the CIA. And if they ever get you out of here, we'll kill you after
you get home."
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- One of his jailers even pretended to be from Chicago,
Salah said, and "confided" that "the ones who told us about
you are your friends in Chicago."
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- After 18 days, Salah had his first court appearance,
during which his lawyer asked for a continuance of his case. It was then
he learned he had been formally accused of working with Hamas. At Salah's
insistence, a U.S. Embassy representative was present, but they were not
allowed to speak to each other.
-
- Salah asked for a personal appointment with the Israeli
judge, who agreed, but failed to keep the appointment.
-
- Ironically, after Israeli authorities told Salah they
had "three or four secret files on me," presumably based on fabricated
reports by Palestinian collaborators, a U.S. Embassy representative assured
him he could not be convicted on secret evidence. This hope was dashed
at his next court hearing, however, when the judge warned the Shabak officials
that, in the absence of any open evidence, he "would let the prisoner
off with a sentence of only 12 years in prison."
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- In desperation, Salah hired a new Israeli lawyer, Avigdor
Feldman, who was highly recommended by Palestinians and Americans. This
infuriated his Shabak interrogators. "You have the No. 1 lawyer,"
they told him, "but we'll see that you get life in prison."
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- And, indeed, Salah's interrogators then produced a whole
new list of allegations. They also suggested that the only way he ever
would get out of jail would be to agree to collaborate with them after
he returned to the United States. They offered him 1.5 million Israeli
shekels (U.S. $1 million ) to do so.
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- Finally attorney Feldman advised him, "Don't dream
of justice; the right decision is to plea bargain." In this way, Feldman
explained, instead of a minimum sentence of 12 years, his sentence would
be reduced to five years, with credit for the time he already had been
in custody. Salah agreed and began serving the sentence-but that did not
bring an end to the uncertainties.
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- Salah recalls vividly now that at one point during his
sentence an Israeli police captain warned him that he was "from the
FBI" and that if Salah didn't cooperate after his return to the U.S.,
"we will seize your house." At the time, Salah laughed at him,
saying "this couldn't happen."
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- But that is exactly what has happened.
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- Upon his release after 58 months in Israeli jails, Salah
twice was taken to Ben-Gurion airport under Israeli custody-but was not
accepted by the pilots of the airlines upon which he had booked passage.
Finally, a TWA captain, after first asking to meet Salah, agreed to accept
him. He passed through immigration in New York on Nov. 9, 1997, without
incident and thinking his troubles were behind him.
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- On Dec. 5, 1997, however, Salah was served a subpoena
in Chicago saying that the FBI had placed a lien on his house. It was then
that he remembered the explicit threat he had received while in Israeli
custody. His bank account was seized as well, and he was forbidden from
working.
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- Since his assets have been seized, Salah has no further
personal funds to defend himself in court. However, Chicago Muslims, who
have raised funds and mounted protest demonstrations on his behalf, found
a lawyer to represent him on the assumption that the fees will be paid
by the U.S. government if it loses the case.
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- In the meantime, Salah has had some jobs. Each time,
however, he has lost them when his history was brought up. He taught at
a city college, and worked at Cisco Computer Network. He has tried to work
on his own, but was not successful. Although he has a work permit, time
after time he has been accused of working illegally.
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- Although Salah has written about some of his experiences,
he finds it painful to recall them. The fact that many are being duplicated
now in Iraq makes it particularly painful for him to keep abreast of the
news.
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- Some Israelis still find ways to hurt him-although it
is not clear why this maliciousness continues. One problem is that so-called
"terrorism expert" Steven Emerson at least twice has brought
up in his writings and on talk shows Israel's charges against and imprisonment
of Salah. Of course, the money raised by the Chicago Muslim community and
seized by the Israelis probably never will be repaid. But it is not clear
why the U.S. government has frozen his personal bank account and never
returned the funds to him.
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- Salah's eldest son is now 17. All of his children go
to local schools and are doing very well. It is that that keeps him cheerful
and optimistic despite his present circumstances. Whether this nightmare
will ever end and the family can go back to living a normal life still-after
more than a decade remains to be seen.
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- Richard H. Curtiss is executive editor of the Washington
Report on Middle East Affairs.
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