But torture was definately a part of the Israeli repetoire at least until late 1999.
That does mean that for 32 years prior, it was in fact used, as is indicated by two of the three articles.
Again, please accept my apology for lobbing the one liner earlier.
Ed

http://www.la.utexas.edu/chenry/aip/press99/090799israel-rights.html
September 7, 1999

Israeli Court Bars Routine Use of Force in Interrogations

Forum
• Join a Discussion on Israeli Politics

By DEBORAH SONTAG
ERUSALEM -- In a watershed ruling, the Israeli Supreme Court Monday unexpectedly outlawed the security service's routine practice of using physically coercive interrogation methods, which critics have long denounced as torture.
The court banned several of the General Security Service's techniques for obtaining information from suspected terrorists. They include violently shaking the suspects' upper torsos, forcing them to crouch like frogs and shackling them in contorted positions with sacks over their heads.
The ruling has no precedent in a country where repeated terrorist attacks have long created a perceived conflict between the security interests of the state and the human rights of suspects. Until this decision, the court has shied away from imposing restrictions on security agencies, effectively condoning their practices.
Monday civil rights lawyers seemed stunned when, years after the lawsuits were filed but only four months after their hearing, the court not only ruled decisively that the interrogation methods were illegal but immediately ordered the Government to stop using them.
"It was certainly surprising," said Dan Yakir, lawyer for the Association for Civil Rights in Israel. "On the one hand, it was the only legal decision they could have handed down. On the other, the Supreme Court does not have a very impressive record in defending human rights in light of security claims."
The ruling by the nine judges, led by Chief Justice Aharaon Barak, who made up the court panel deciding this case, was unanimous. But the judges acknowledged mixed emotions.
"Deciding these applications weighed heavy on the court," the decision said. "Our apprehension is that this decision will hamper the ability to properly deal with terrorists and terrorism, which disturbs us. We are, however, judges. Our brethren require us to act according to the law."
The court suggested that Parliament draft legislation if it wanted to override the ruling and sanction the use of force in interrogations. Chief Justice Barak has long believed that the issue should be addressed in the legislature and not the courtroom.
But the new Justice Minister, Yossi Beilin, is unlikely to advocate legislation that undoes the court's ruling. Speaking from Gaza, where he was meeting with his Palestinian counterpart, Beilin said he was "very proud" of the decision. "They took a decision that was not easy," he said of the judges.
Prime Minister Ehud Barak issued a statement Monday night saying the decision appeared to be problematic. "A way must be found to allow for interrogation when bombs may be detonated, in order to save lives," he said. (The judge and the Prime Minister are not related.)
The Government has long argued that forceful interrogations are legal and desirable tools for extracting information that can prevent terrorist attacks. Violent shaking and other techniques do not constitute torture, they say. Rather they are emergency methods used on suspects who may know of a "ticking bomb."
Critics, however, argue that the emergency methods were used routinely, and routine use is what the court outlawed Monday. The judges still left the door open for agents to use such methods when a bomb is really ticking, by suggesting that they could invoke the emergency conditions as a defense if criminal charges were brought against them.
During the administration of the previous Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Supreme Court was under constant attack for being too active in matters of state and religion. It was not immediately clear whether the change of Government contributed to Monday's decision.
Many cases against the methods of Shin Bet, as the General Security Service is better known, have been pending for years. The judges combined seven in issuing their ruling. Among the petitioners were human rights organizations, like the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, and individual Palestinians.
One, Hatem Abu Zayda, who challenged the Shin Bet's use of interrogation methods like sleep deprivation, shaking and beatings, was later convicted and sentenced to 74 months in prison for his activities as a member of the military wing of Hamas, the Islamic fundamentalist group. The Government argued before the court that information obtained during Abu Zayda's interrogation led to the thwarting of a terrorist plan.
Another was a suspect who the Israeli Government acknowledged was shaken to death by Shin Bet agents during an interrogation, the court said.
Several right-wing members of Parliament Monday condemned the court, saying it had given improper weight to the human dignity of terror suspects when compared with the security of Israel. Members of the opposition Likud Party said they would immediately draft legislation seeking to bypass the court decision.
"Israel is setting a precedent as a country losing its ability to defend itself," said Yuval Steinitz, a Likud member of Parliament.
In its decision the court, although it detailed the history of recent terror attacks, concluded that security agents can use no more force than regular police investigators. It also described the interrogation methods in unflinching detail.
According to the court, forceful shaking, which causes the suspect's head to whip back and forth, is the harshest technique. The General Security Services claimed that "shaking is indispensable to fighting and winning the war on terrorism," the court said. Violently shaking suspects had allowed agents to procure information that thwarted fatal attacks, the Government claimed.
But the justices said: "Plainly put, shaking is a prohibited investigation method. It harms the suspect's body. It violates his dignity. It is a violent method which does not form part of a legal investigation. It surpasses that which is necessary."
The judges also described and forbade a technique by which Shin Bet agents seat a suspect on a child-sized chair that is tilted forward, tie one hand behind his back and one behind the chair, cover his head with a suffocating sack and play very loud music.
In criticizing the court's decision, Gideon Ezra, a member of Parliament and former Shin Bet official, said the agency would find ways to get around the ruling.
"I am sure that the G.S.S. will find new methods," he said. "Maybe they find a chair that is a little higher."
On the other hand Dan Meridor, the former Justice Minister and head of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, said the decision "constituted a certificate of honor for the state of Israel."
Meridor recalled when Menachem Begin, a former Prime Minister, summoned a security chief in 1977 and instructed him to use "wisdom rather than violence" in interrogations.
"Perhaps that was the first Prime Minister that gave an instruction like this, more than 20 years ago," Meridor said. "What the High Court ruled is that in an interrogation, even during a difficult war against terror where the interrogation is vital, one must preserve basic standards of behavior."
Under pressure from within and internationally, Israel has long debated the legitimacy of the security agents' methods. The Government says they are used only rarely and under high-level supervision. Human rights groups, however, say forceful interrogation methods are used against hundreds of Palestinians each year.
Twelve years ago a state commission began an inquiry into the practices, and ended up legitimizing the use of a "moderate measure of physical pressure" as a last resort to prevent violent attacks.
International human rights groups considered this tantamount to legalizing torture and kept up a steady stream of pressure, backing up the dogged efforts of Israeli human rights groups, who kept filing legal petitions.
Today in London, Amnesty International officials called the decision, which effectively overturns the state commission's authorization of force, a milestone.
"Under no circumstances can you torture," said Elizabeth Hodgkin of Amnesty. "That is what the Convention Against Torture, which Israel ratified, said, and now at last the Israeli Supreme Court has concurred. What they've been doing there is simply unacceptable."
Interviewed by Channel 2 on Israeli television, Abdel Rahman al-Rahman, a former detainee who said he was subjected to physical coercion by Shin Bet agents, did not applaud the ruling.
"A prize should not be awarded to the Supreme Court justices," he said. "It's only natural that torture should not be allowed."

http://www.middleeast.org/archives/1999_01_13.htm

ISRAELI TORTURE IS SYSTEMATIC AND "LEGAL"
MER FLASHBACK - 3rd Week January 1997:
[MER - Torture of Palestinians is not only routine and systematic, in it actually sanctioned by the Israeli legal system that has been twisted to serve Israeli policies. Going back to the Shinbet scandal of the early 1980's, even more sadistic forms of torture have given way to the kinds of 'legalized' torture methods outlined in this important article from one of the few independent and courageousmedia sources in Israel, The Alternative Information Center (AIC). Among the reasons the Israelis get away with such systematic torture of Palestinians is that hardly anyone is willing to protest. The so-called "Palestinian Authority" practices similar and even worse torture techniques, as do nearly all of the Arab governments in the region -- so they are hardly in a position to protest. And the"liberal" American Jewish community has been morally bankrupt about such issues for so long now that to speak up at this point would be to condemn themselves for permitting, and even encouraging in many cases, such Nazi-like behavior by the Israelis for decades.]
ISRAELI JUSTICE ON TORTURE
A Shining Light Unto Nations?
"The entire Israeli establishment countenances torture..."
First, his head is covered with a thick rancid sack. It’s difficult to breathe. Handcuffed, he is bound in a twisted position to a kindergarten chair with hardly any back support and held there for four days straight. Every time his head falls when sleep overcomes him, he is slapped on his face to wake up. Maybe on the fifth day the handcuffs are removed and he is allowed to sleep in a tiny windowlesscell. Music is blaring in the cell around the clock. It is difficult to sleep with noise and the constant glare of the shining fluorescent light. On the sixth or seventh day, his head is covered again with the rancid sack, but this time, he is chained to a pole in the corridor and made to stand there for four more days. Or perhaps, he is handcuffed to a hook a meter from the ground and is forced to squat for three days; three days continuously that is. Or he is undressed and made to sit in front of a blasting air-conditioner for hours. There is no sleep. His hands are swollen from the tight handcuffs; he is vomiting from the prolonged contorted position he is heldin. He smells, unshaven, he wants to sleep.
This is ‘moderate physical pressure’ under Israeli law and it is legal. Under international law this is torture and is completely prohibited at all times. This ‘moderate physical pressure’ is routinely used by the Israeli secret police (‘GSS’) to extract confessions from Palestinian detainees under interrogation. The UNConvention Against Torture, of which Israel is a signatory, states that the use of any physical or psychological pressure which causes pain or humiliation is absolutely prohibited at all times.
What constitutes torture and degrading treatment is subjective -- determined by the victims’ sensation of the physical and mental pain caused to him. Sitting in front of cold air may not on its face compare to torture methods like electric shock, but after two weeks of little sleep and sitting in contorted positions, undressed in themiddle of the rainy winter, 12 hours of the ‘air conditioner’ feels like hell. One detainee described it as ‘putting the air in a state of war with me’.
Despite the prohibitions under international law, the entire Israeli establishment countenances torture: The Israeli military courts routinely disregard claims of torture and extend the interrogations until the Israeli secret police finish the interrogation; the Ministry of Justice defends the torture in the Israeli High Court of Justice; the High Court of Justice itself puts the stamp of approval on the torture often rejecting petitions that request the court to order the GSS to cease the torture; the Israeli Knesset Ministerial Committee (composed of members of the Labor and Zionist Left parties including Yossi Sarid) consistently renews the license to the GSS Director granting him total discretion to determine when torture beyond‘moderate physical pressure’ can be used.
The GSS Director has just given his okay for the torture to go ‘beyond moderate physical pressure’. The detainee is grabbed by the shoulders or by his collar and shaken violently for seconds or minutes. His head convulses, rattled back and forth, incessantly, it feels as if it will fly off, he loses his stand, dizziness overtakes him, his body is on fire. Sometimes he falls unconscious; sometimes he just falls to theground. Or maybe he is beaten.
No one knows what methods constitute ‘moderate physical pressure’ or ‘beyond moderate physical pressure’ since GSS activities and methods are secret and unreviewable by the public. The information we know is derived solely from testimony of former torture victims.
The Perversion of the Israeli Legal System
Two weeks ago, the Israeli High Court of Justice, lead by Justice Aaron Barak, ruled that Muhammed Hamdan, a student from Bir Zeit University, could continue to be tortured. The Court deferred to the secret police’s ‘ticking bomb’ argument -- that torture was necessary to uncover information to an imminent bomb attack. This despite the absolute prohibition against torture under international law and thefact that the imminence was doubtful -- Hamdan had been in Israeli custody for over a month. The High Court gave such deference to the secret police, that one of the justices, Michael Cheshin, rebuked Hamdan’s lawyer as immoral for petitioning the court to stop the torture.
Later on that week, the High Court rejected another petition to order the secret police to stop using torture. In this case, the court ruled that the secret police could continue to deprive Khader Mubarek -- another victim -- of sleep and to cover his head continuously with a rancid sack. The court refused to issue a temporary order to halt the use of moderate physical pressure during the interrogation, but ordered the secret police to refrain from placing Mubarek in painful sitting positions.
The High Court’s decisions sanctioning torture demonstrate how perverted the Israeli legal system has become. In the name of preserving Israel’s ‘democracy’ and existence, the High Court of Justice routinely sanctions trespass on the liberal state’s most cherished assets -- one’s body and one’s liberty. Justice Aaron Barak-- the President of Israel’s Supreme Court, the same justice that is invited and honored by Harvard and Yale Law Schools and the American Bar Association as a leading liberal legal-jurisprudence thinker -- is also the Justice who permits the GSS to torture, physically and mentally degrade others.
Instead of remaining true to the two most alienable principles of most legal systems -- the presumption of innocence and the right to remain silent -- Israeli justices and judges allow the GSS to treat every Palestinian under interrogation as a convicted terrorist and to torture him until he talks. Judge Shlomo Issacson, President of theRamallah military court1 and a religious Jew, ruled once that the Palestinian detainee in front of him deserved the ‘difficult’ interrogation because he had chosen to remain silent and was not ‘cooperating with the interrogators’ i.e. confessing. He extended the detainee’s interrogation for another 14 days with full knowledge thathe was returning the detainee to another round of torture.2 Torture corrupts both the victim and the torturer. Just as the victim remains psychologically and, at times, physically scarred by his traumatic experience, the torturer is mentally corrupted from dehumanizing his suspect and benefiting from his pain and suffering. The GSS torture has already corrupted the Israeli legal system. Cloaking themselves in the moral high ground of security and protecting Israel’s democratic existence, these justices and judges pervert all principles of human dignity and liberty and corrode the very foundation and raison d’etre of a democratic’ legal system. By continuingto permit and defend torture in all its forms, these justices and judges have becomea threat to the same liberal and free principles that they were appointed to protect.
‘When the state itself beats and extorts, it cannot longer be said to rest on foundations of morality and justice, but rather on force . . . Just as this situation is one of coercion and submission, so the state itself, which permits it, becomes a state of coercion and submission. When a state employs forceful means which no ends can justify, such as torture, it reduces the moral distance between a governmental act and a criminal act. . .’.3
1 Despite the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and the West Bank cities, the Israelis continue to operate military courts all over the Occupied Territories. The Gaza military court still functions today as well.
2 In many cases where the GSS cannot obtain a confession because the detainee kept silent, or where the GSS lacks sufficient evidence to bring charges, the detainee is not released but rather sent to administrative detention. The detention is then approved by another military judge and is extended periodically by the military commander upon the approval of the civil administration’s legal advisor.
3 Kremnitzer, Mordechai, ‘The Landau Commission Report -- Was the Security Service Subordinated to the Law, or the Law to the ‘Needs’ of the Security Service?., Israel Law Review, Vol. 23, No. 2-3 1989, at 248.
*************************
Allegra Pacheco (Pacheco is an Israeli lawyer at the Palestinian Society for the Protection of Human Rights (LAWE) and is a member of the Hebron Solidarity Committee. From: NEWS FROM WITHIN December 1996Published by the Alternative Information Center -- Jerusalem/Bethlehem
**

http://www.polsci.wvu.edu/lpbr/subpages/reviews/evans99.html
Vol. 9 No. 7 (July 1999) pp. 296-298.
PREVENTING TORTURE: A STUDY OF THE EUROPEAN CONVENTION FOR THE PREVENTION OF TORTURE AND INHUMAN OR DEGRADING TREATMENT OR PUNISHMENT by Malcolm D. Evans and Rod Morgan. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. 475 pp.
Reviewed by Donald W. Jackson, Department of Political Science, Texas Christian University.

"[T]he justification for, and certainly the temptation to use, forms of coercion that might be judged to constitute torture lies at best only just below the surface of everyday police and custodial practice." That is the assertion of Evans and Morgan in the preface of their book. To some, such an assertion might seem outrageous. To others, like myself, it is a modest statement of fact, for, as the authors also note at the outset, prisoners, whether ordinary prisoners in criminal justice systems, or political prisoners, are among the most marginalized members of a society. Indeed, it should be stressed that when the justifications for torture are suspected terrorism or "national security," the temptations for its use are even more likely to "justify" the actual practices of coercion.
For an example of perceived necessity as the justification of torture, consider the authors’ review of the work of the Israeli Commission headed by Mr. Justice Moshe Landau. The Landau Commission was created to investigate the treatment of prisoners or suspects by Israeli security agencies. It founded a justification for the "systematic use of physical pressure by the state on the criminal law defense of necessity." While the Commission’s report did not justify extreme physical coercion, it did conclude that interrogation techniques:
should principally take the form of non-violent psychological pressure through a vigorous and extensive interrogation, with the use of stratagems, including acts of deception. However, when these do not attain their purpose, the exertion of a moderate measure of physical pressure cannot be avoided (p. 47).
But we can hope that such concessions by those who otherwise may be committed to the rule of law will sometimes run aground. On May 26, 1999, the Israeli Supreme Court heard testimony challenging the legality of the interrogation procedures that had been authorized by the Landau Commissions. Israel is a party to the two principal conventions that ought to control: the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel or Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT, 1984) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR, 1966). According to a Human Rights Watch report, interrogation techniques practiced by the Israeli General Security Service have led to the death of at least one Palestinian and to permanent injury to many others. Unfortunately, the May 29th hearing was only for the Plaintiffs to present testimony. A decision on the merits may yet be months away (Human Rights Watch, 1999).
The Evans and Morgan book is about the European equivalent of CAT. The European Convention for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (ECPT) was adopted by the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe in 1987 and opened for signature by member states. As of the publication date of the Evans and Morgan book, thirty-seven European states had ratified ECPT, the most recent being Croatia in November 1997. At that point only Latvia, Lithuania and Russia among members of the Council of Europe had yet to ratify the ECPT.
Evans and Morgan begin with a fascinating history of torture. Their review includes nuggets such as the fact that in ancient Greece and in the early Roman empire citizens were ordinarily exempt from judicially mandated torture, while the testimony of non-citizens, slaves and foreigners was accepted in court only if coerced. However, by the late Roman empire anyone suspected of a serious crime could be tortured, and so could witnesses in serious cases (pp. 2-3). Indeed, it was not until the age of the Enlightenment that torture was viewed as anathema by leading thinkers. Of course, that did not mean that torture was entirely abandoned by governments, but as the authors conclude:
The emergent view of contemporary historians is that the decline and abolition of torture was intimately bound up with the growth of the state, the establishment of a more professional judiciary, the emergence of incarceration and forced labor as punishments, and subtle changes in the law of evidence (p.11).
The problem for us is that torture reemerged with a vengeance in the twentieth century, and the authors’ historical review cites many examples: in terms of ideology, Nazism, Fascism, Communism, Maoism, as well as Anti-Communism, in other terms, racism (especially Apartheid), religion, and ethnic identity have provided some of the twentieth century justifications for torture. Yet, Evans and Morgan present three case studies of torture by liberal democratic states: by France in Algeria (1954-62), by the United Kingdom in Northern Ireland (1963-94) and, as we saw above, by Israel against the Palestinians.
A key difference between torture in ancient times and today is that while torture was once accepted and acknowledged, it is now mostly "secret and denied" (p. 55). Yet most close observers of modern justice systems know (or suspect) that what Evans and Morgan call "near torture" (the sorts of practices accepted and approved by the Landau Commission) often lie just beneath the surface. For example, in the instance of the United Kingdom in Northern Ireland, "near torture" consisted of physical isolation, "wall standing" (leaning for protracted periods with one’s hands against a wall as the only means of support), "hooding" (a black opaque hood being placed over the head), "noise" (the use of a continuous and unpleasant background noise, and, finally, a bare bread and water diet (p. 34, see also Jackson, 1997, Ch. 3).
Because torture or near torture is rarely disclosed or acknowledged, it cannot easily be discovered or, of course, regulated (p. 58). So the usual response has been to attempt to prohibit it. Article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Article 3 of he European Convention on Human Rights, Article 5(2) of the Inter-American Convention on Human Rights, and Article 5 of the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights all condemn torture and inhuman or degrading treatment. And, as we saw above, the 1984 UN Convention Against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment of Punishment (104 ratifications as of the publication of this book) provides potential global coverage.
The European Convention for the Prevention of Torture (ECPT) represents Europe’s effort to make the prohibition of torture more than pious platitudes. Evans and Morgan bring impressive expertise and practical experience to the writing of this book. The Secretary to the Committee created by the ECPT, the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT), invited one of the authors to join the Committee as an observer expert during its first visit of inspection in 1990. He became, as the authors note in the preface, an "insider" to the work of the CPT, and both of the authors have monitored the documentary history of the CPT from its beginning through early 1998, when this manuscript was submitted to the publisher.
The ECPT came into force on February 1, 1989. The ECPT creates no new prohibitions. Instead, it provides for a Committee (the CPT, consisting as of the writing of the book of 29 members) with unusual access to holding facilities and places of detention within the European member states. The work of the CPT chiefly consists of conducting visits and making "findings, recommendations and requests for further information of the responsible governments. Apart from the visits, most of the work of the CPT is conducted behind closed doors. That, of course, makes the access of the authors to the CPT especially useful. The plenary sessions of the CPT are conducted entirely in secret. Between 1990 and 1997 the CPT issued reports on 30 governments and general annual reports through 1996. Despite the written reports, Evans and Morgan tell us that the CPT has low visibility, but they find that those who know of its work are "overwhelmingly positive." Still, few activists within NGOs and few officials have actually read the reports of the CPT, except, as they note, the reports for their own country. The authors found that their visits to Greece and Austria were especially informative because the CPT had found evidence of "grave ill treatment" in both countries. In Greece officials were quite angry about the CPT report, while in Austria officials acknowledged that there had been a problem with the detective branch of the Vienna police, as the CPT found (p. 355 et seq.).
If, as the authors say, the work of the CPT is to "discover evidence of ill treatment," to "investigate allegations of ill-treatment," to "inspect conditions in which people are detained," and to "seek improvements in the legal protection of detainees," then, while they find some serious shortcomings in the methods of the committee, overall they find it to have been a "conspicuous success" (p. 381).
This is an excellent book on an emerging institution that is as yet little known, particularly in the United States. It is especially recommended for those, such as NGO lawyers and activists, who have a keen interest in this important but little studied subject.
REFERENCES
Human Rights Watch, "Israel Torture Trial Background Briefing," May 27, 1999. www.hrwatchnyc@igc.org.
Jackson, Donald W. 1997. THE UNITED KINGDOM CONFRONTS THE EUROPEAN CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS. Gainesville: The University Press of Florida.