lying about torture yedi ot ahronot april excerpt each one and his own nevo a reference to general azri el nevo shamir s military secretary irrelevant to this excerpt by nahum barne a in mid shabak found itself in the center of another storm a year and a half earlier khaled sheikh ali a member of the islamic jihad died at the shabak installation in gaza prison the two shabak interrogators who were responsible for his death were put on trial in september the supreme court rejected their appeal and sentenced them to months in prison as far as is known this was the first time in israel s history that shabak operatives were sent to prison the supreme court unanimously rejected the warning by the director of shabak that the sentence will be detrimental the effectiveness of other interrogators the judges in the case were barak goldberg and matza when they realized that they were on their own the interrogators agreed to talk deputy state attorney rachel sukkar sp was placed in charge of investigating the affair she questioned the directors of all shabak divisions she investigated only the matter of the death in gaza prison she discovered that not only torture but also the culture of lies which judge landau had described in his report of two years before were still very much in existence nothing had changed the report was classified and was seen by only some ten people among them the prime minister the people at the top of the judicial system and judge landau the director of shabak claimed that he did not know after all they were dealing only with a single jail and with low ranking people the system bit the bullet and accepted the explanation one of shabak s high ranking officials was transfered from his very high position to a less high position the culture of lies referred to above is the shabak interrogators policy of lying in court when denying detainees claims that they were tortured in the course of interrogation the landau commission sought to correct this problem by legalizing a list of torture methods thus eliminating the fear that a detainee might be released if those methods were used to extract a confession the fact that the need to lie still persists would seem to indicate that shabak is not sticking to the approved torture methods yigal yigal arens usc isi tv made me do it arens isi edu
