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waterboarding
Inspired by US, Israel Moves Toward Legalizing Torture of Palestinian Prisoners
Cabinet passed controversial bill that would allow force-feeding of hunger strikers
Jun 15, 2015
The Israeli cabinet over the weekend passed a controversial bill that approves the force-feeding of hunger striking prisoners--an act that is widely considered torture, including by the Israeli Medical Association.
The move means that the bill can now be sent to Israel's parliament, the Knesset, for its second and third readings.
However, Dr. Leonid Eidelman who leads the Israeli Medical Association reportedly told Haaretz, "If the law passes, we'll call on doctors to ignore it."
Force-feeding, which has been compared to water-boarding, involves the painful insertion of tubes and pumping of food and can cause stomach damage and asphyxiation. The U.S. military's routine force-feeding of peaceful protesters at Guantanamo Bay was condemned by the United Nations human rights office as torture and a violation of international law.
Yet, Israeli officials have openly referenced the U.S. practice to justify the bill. When advocating for the legislation last year, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu directly cited the U.S. policies at Guantanamo Bay.
Physicians for Human Rights declared that the Israeli bill, if passed, would "legalize torture and gross violations of medical ethics and international conventions."
"Instead of force-feeding prisoners who are humiliated and whose lives are in danger, Israel should deal with the demands of the hunger strikers--through the ending of administrative detentions," the advocacy organization added. Administrative detention refers to the widespread Israeli practice of incarcerating Palestinians without charge or trial on secret evidence.
Hunger strikes are a common tactic of Palestinian resistance against widespread detentions, which stem from Israeli policies of occupation and apartheid.
According to Palestinian human rights organization Addameer, in April 2015 there were 5,800 political prisoners in Israeli jails, including 414 people in administrative detention.
Many of those incarcerated are children. Defense for Children Palestine reports, "Since 2000, at least 8,000 Palestinian children have been arrested and prosecuted in an Israeli military detention system notorious for the systematic ill-treatment and torture of Palestinian children."
Coordinated hunger strikes among those incarcerated continue to the present. Palestinian news agency Ma'anreports that the latest wave of strikes began in April with hundreds joining in since then.
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Amid Torture, Experts Say CIA's Other Crime Was 'Human Experimentation'
Formerly classified document exposes how agency's attempt to legitimize abusive interrogation program was itself another layer of crime
Jun 15, 2015
After the Central Intelligence Agency was given authority to begin torturing suspected terrorists in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, newly published documents show that another of that program's transgressions, according to experts, was a gross violation of medical ethics that allowed the agency to conduct what amounted to "human experimentation" on people who became test subjects without consent.
"Crime one was torture. The second crime was research without consent in order to say it wasn't torture."
--Nathaniel Raymond, Harvard University
Reported exclusively by the Guardian on Monday, sections of a previously classified CIA document--first obtained by the ACLU--reveal that a long-standing policy against allowing people to become unwitting medical or research subjects remained in place and under the purview of the director of the CIA even as the agency began slamming people into walls, beating them intensely, exposing them to prolonged periods of sleep deprivation, performing repeated sessions of waterboarding, and conducting other heinous forms of psychological and physical abuse.
The document details agency guidelines--first established in 1987 during the presidency of Ronald Reagan but subsequently updated--in which the CIA director and an advisory board are directly empowered to make decisions about programs considered "human subject research" by the agency.
As journalist Spencer Ackerman reports:
The relevant section of the CIA document, "Law and Policy Governing the Conduct of Intelligence Agencies", instructs that the agency "shall not sponsor, contract for, or conduct research on human subjects" outside of instructions on responsible and humane medical practices set for the entire US government by its Department of Health and Human Services.
A keystone of those instructions, the document notes, is the "subject's informed consent".
That language echoes the public, if obscure, language of Executive Order 12333 - the seminal, Reagan-era document spelling out the powers and limitations of the intelligence agencies, including rules governing surveillance by the National Security Agency. But the discretion given to the CIA director to "approve, modify, or disapprove all proposals pertaining to human subject research" has not previously been public.
The entire 41-page CIA document exists to instruct the agency on what Executive Order 12333 permits and prohibits, after legislative action in the 1970s curbed intelligence powers in response to perceived abuses - including the CIA's old practice of experimenting on human beings through programs like the infamous MK-Ultra project, which, among other things, dosed unwitting participants with LSD as an experiment.
The previously unknown section of the guidelines empower the CIA director and an advisory board on "human subject research" to "evaluate all documentation and certifications pertaining to human research sponsored by, contracted for, or conducted by the CIA".
Critics have long blasted any members of the medical community who participated in the torture program as traitors to their ethical and professional duties, but as the Guardian notes, "The CIA, which does not formally concede that it tortured people, insists that the presence of medical personnel ensured its torture techniques were conducted according to medical rigor."
But Steven Aftergood, a scholar of the intelligence agencies with the Federation of American Scientists, told the Guardian that these men who were tortured by the agency were, in fact, being studied by medical professionals to see how they would respond to such treatment. In addition to the inherent crime of that abuse, they were also unwitting subjects who never gave their informed consent to be studied in this way. "There is a disconnect between the requirement of this regulation [contained in the document] and the conduct of the interrogation program," Aftergood explained. "They do not represent consistent policy."
And Nathaniel Raymond, a former war-crimes investigator with Physicians for Human Rights and now a researcher with Harvard University's Humanitarian Initiative, put it this way: "Crime one was torture. The second crime was research without consent in order to say it wasn't torture."
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