Criticism
Dubbed "the Israeli Guantanamo", the secret was kept in such a manner as to be even unknown to Prof. David Libai, Minister of Justice in Yitzhak Rabin's government and member of the secret services related ministerial committee. According to Leah Tsemel, an Israeli lawyer who specialises in advising Palestinians, "Anyone entering the prison can be made to disappear, potentially forever, it's no different from the jails run by tinpot South American dictators."
According to accounts of former captives, the detainees are led into the facility blindfolded, and kept in cells (most are 2 m × 2 m) with no natural light. Two smaller cells (1.25 m × 1.25 m) with heavy steel doors and black or red walls, and almost no light, are used for solitary confinement. Some of the cells do not have adequate toilet facilities and the guards control the running water. Mustafa Dirani, an Amal commander who was captured by the Israelis in May 1994 and released in 2004 as part of a prisoner swap, has filed a suit in Tel Aviv's district court claiming he was sexually abused in the prison. It has been acknowledged by the government of Israel that "within the framework of a military police investigation the suspicion arose that an interrogator who questioned the complainant threatened to perform a sexual act on the complainant".
Inmates are not allowed visits at the facility from the Red Cross, nor is any other independent organization permitted to inspect the site. The prisoners are not told where they are, nor are their families or lawyers. In 2003, in response to a lawsuit, Israeli government lawyers said that while the location was secret, Palestinians who are incarcerated there have their rights safeguarded, and can meet with lawyers and Red Cross at an off-site location. In May 2009, the United Nations Committee against Torture (CAT) questioned Israeli officials about the facility and expressed skepticism about this claim. The CAT stated that "Israeli security secretly detains and interrogates prisoners in an unknown location called 'Camp 1391' without granting access to the committee, the International Red Cross (ICRC), or the lawyers or relatives of the prisoners", questioned why interrogations at Camp 1391 were not recorded, and stated that "600 complaints of alleged ill-treatment or torture were brought between 2001 and 2006, but none had been followed up".
Israeli officials maintain that Camp 1391 "is no longer used since 2006 to detain or interrogate suspects", but several petitions filed to the Israeli Supreme Court by the CAT to examine the facility have been rejected. The Israeli Supreme Court also refused to allow an inquiry of the alleged abuses, declaring that Israeli authorities had acted reasonably in not conducting investigations into allegations of torture, ill-treatment and poor detention conditions of detainees. The Committee Against Torture responded to this by asserting that secret detention centers are per se a breach of the United Nations Convention Against Torture, concluding that the state "should ensure that no one is detained in any secret detention facility under its control in the future" and that Israel "should investigate and disclose the existence of any other such facility and the authority under which it has been established. It should ensure that all allegations of torture and ill-treatment by detainees in Facility 1391 be impartially investigated, the results made public, and any perpetrators responsible for breaches of the Convention be held accountable."
Read more about this topic: Camp 1391
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“A friend of mine spoke of books that are dedicated like this: “To my wife, by whose helpful criticism ...” and so on. He said the dedication should really read: “To my wife. If it had not been for her continual criticism and persistent nagging doubt as to my ability, this book would have appeared in Harper’s instead of The Hardware Age.””
—Brenda Ueland (1891–1985)