Since Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon more than three years ago, and certainly since the eruption of the intifada in September 2000, the unit has actively employed agents among the Palestinians in the territories, an area that until then was the almost exclusive preserve of the Shin Bet. Along with the change in the character of the unit's activity, the population that is now brought to the facility has also changed. As far as is known, in the past the main, though not the only, occupants of the facility were citizens of foreign countries - a term that does not include the inhabitants of the Palestinian Authority. They included Lebanese who were captured or abducted and brought to Israel, Iraqis who defected from Saddam's army and hoped to find political asylum in Israel, and there are also stories about an Iranian or two who were held at the facility in the past. In the past year, and perhaps in earlier stages of the intifada as well, Palestinians too were incarcerated there at times. The most senior of them, as far as is known, is Marwan Barghouti, who was interrogated at the facility for a few days.
"Barghouti sat on the same chair you are now sitting on," the interrogators said to one of the Palestinian detainees and made fun of the modest dimensions of the famous prisoner - "his legs didn't even reach the floor."
The fact that Palestinians were being held at the secret facility was revealed almost by chance in legal discussions between the state and Hamoked - Center for the Defense of the Individual, a Jerusalem-based human rights organization. Hamoked, which helps Palestinians locate relatives who have been arrested by Israel, wanted to know what happened to Muatez Shahin, who was arrested last October 5 at his home in the village of Salfit, near Nablus in the West Bank. The IDF control center replied that "he is not on any list."
After Hamoked and Shahin's relatives petitioned the High Court of Justice, the state referred them in its response to a policeman at the Kishon detention facility. However, when they contacted the policemen they were told that "Shahin is being held in a secret facility that is annexed to the Kishon facility." With that response they went back to the court and argued that the law and a series of legal precedents oblige the state to inform a detainee and his family of his exact place of incarceration.
The case of Shahin was the first in a growing list of Palestinians who "disappeared" as though they had been swallowed up by the earth. Through the veteran attorney Lea Tsemel, Hamoked continued to press the state for answers - which arrived in bits and pieces. Yes, the representatives of the State Prosecutor's Office finally told the court, the state operates a facility whose name and location are security secrets. The state attorneys went on to say that even though the facility belonged to the army, the Palestinians had been interrogated there by the Shin Bet. However, the facility "served the Shin Bet only temporarily, this being due to a shortfall in places of detention ... Recently, though, the situation changed and it was decided that the Shin Bet no longer needs to make use of the facility in which the petitioners were held as a detention facility, and accordingly [the Shin Bet] removed from the facility the detainees it was holding there."
However, within weeks of this statement to the court, Odit Corinaldi-Sirkis, a senior deputy to the state prosecutor, stated that the facility had been revived: "I wish to inform you," she wrote on June 4 to attorney Lea Tsemel, "that since our responses were submitted the circumstances have changed, and the security people have informed us that detainees are currently being held at facility 1391."
A few days later, in her response to the court, the representative of the State Prosecutor's Office added more details: In the past five years "only a few detainees" were held at the facility, but because of the shortfall in places of detention in the wake of Operation Defensive Shield, in April 2002, the Shin Bet had made use of the facility, holding residents of the territories there for brief periods during their interrogation. Now [two months ago] a few detainees were being held there. The court was also told that the facility had been subjected to a review to ascertain the conditions in it, and according to the State Prosecutor's Office it met the accepted criteria in the facilities of the Prisons Service.
Hamoked was not satisfied with this response. What began as an attempt to locate a few detainees soon became a matter of legal and democratic principle: What is the legal authority for operating the facility? Is the fact that its location and name are secret, and that it is not open to external, public and international review consistent with the letter of the law? The state, by the way, submitted to the court an interesting document, according to which then defense minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer on April 16, 2002, signed an order declaring facility 1391 to be a military prison. Even if this document makes it legal to imprison people at the site, what does it say about the legality of the activity that was carried out there in all the years that preceded Ben-Eliezer's action? The answers to all these questions will have to be provided by the High Court of Justice, which is scheduled to take up the issue next month.
It's very difficult to get substantive comments about facility 1391 from officials in the political, security or even legal spheres. A great many politicians, some of them with a rich security background, refused to say anything. Amnon Shahak, who was the director of Military Intelligence at the time of Sheikh Obeid's abduction, and later chief of staff, and was at one point briefly a candidate for prime minister, says he is "not interested in commenting on the subject." Oren Shahor, the chief intelligence officer at the beginning of the 1990s and today a program presenter on radio and television, says, "I can't help you with that."
MK Zahava Gal-On (Meretz), who has put in a request to visit the site but has yet to receive a reply, says, "The fact that such a facility exists, whose location no one knows formally, is one of the signs of totalitarian regimes and of the Third World. It is inconceivable that detainees do not know where they are and that their relatives and lawyers don't know, either; that under the auspices of the army, the State of Israel is violating elementary rights of detainees. Even prisoners have rights. There are international conventions. It is inconceivable that the state abducts people and that there is no review or supervision. I visited all the interrogation facilities of the Shin Bet and there was no problem. So what's the problem here?"
One big garbage pail
Raab Bader, a 38-year-old accountant who is married and the father of two, was arrested last December at his work place - an engineering consultancy firm in Nablus. At 9:30 A.M. soldiers arrived at his office, but he wasn't there at the time. When he got back, he decided to wait for the soldiers, and they returned in the afternoon and took him away. His wife says he waited for them because he was convinced he had done nothing wrong and wasn't worried. She adds that he was asked by his interrogators about his ties with wanted individuals. Today he is in administrative detention - arrest without trial - at Ofer Camp near Ramallah. As he has not been brought to trial, it is very difficult to know what he is suspected of. What follows are extensive excerpts from his testimony about the 42 days he spent at facility 1391. He have the testimony to attorney Lea Tsemel on June 12 at Ofer Camp: "I was arrested on December 10, 2002. After being interrogated by the Shin Bet for 31 days in Petah Tikva, I was taken to a secret military facility. Those who took me there wore army uniforms.
"I was blindfolded and black glasses were placed on top of the blindfold to prevent me from seeing anything. I was handcuffed and shackled. Soldiers sat me down on the floor of the car and the soldiers then covered me with a black cloth. I couldn't see a thing the whole time and I was kept on the floor of the car for the entire long trip.
"I spent about 40 days at that place according to my count. I was never told the name of the place or where I was. I received different replies to my many questions. Sometimes I was told or they hinted that we were in Atlit, someone said Acre Prison, one interrogator said a 'submarine,' and many times the answer was that we were in 'space' or 'outside the borders of Israel.'
" .... There are two types of solitary confinement cells that I got to know. At first, for the first 11 days - according to the count I tried to keep - I was held in the worst of the solitary confinement cells. By my measurement, the cell is 120 centimeters wide (a bit wider than a mattress) and about 2.5 meters long. There is a damp mattress (all the mattresses are always damp) on a platform about 30 centimeters high and there are damp blankets. The blankets have a terrible smell; the mattress, too. There is a large black plastic garbage pail in the room, a small pitcher for water, and a rag.
"The room is completely black. All the walls are painted black, and I never saw the ceiling. When I looked up, I saw only darkness. Light of candle brightness penetrates weirdly from one side of the room, from a device that seems to be almost above the ceiling, and the light is filtered through three thick pieces of glass. The light in the room is so faint and illuminates such a small part of the room that if I had had a book it would have been totally impossible to read it. You can hardly see a thing.
"Of course the room has no windows. You can't tell whether it is day or night or when day becomes night. I had no way to know when it was time for prayers, I could only guess.
"There are one or two pipes in the ceiling, which are apparently for ventilation. I say apparently, because I could never ascertain where there was ventilation. Most of the time and in all the solitary confinement cells I felt I didn't have enough oxygen, and sometimes I thought I was about to pass out.
"I spent many days in that solitary confinement cell and in others like it, and hour after hour I would talk to myself and feel that I was going crazy, or find myself laughing to myself. I would sit on the mattress, get up and walk around in a circle, and sit down again. The only thing that kept me sane was thinking about my wife and children.
"What sets this solitary confinement cell apart from the others is the fact that it has no toilet facilities and no source of water ... I remember the first time I had to relieve myself. I thought about what to do, and in the end I removed my underpants, placed them on the floor, relieved myself into them, tied them up and threw them into the garbage pail. The pail remained with me in the cell as it was. On other occasions I had to stand on my toes so I could aim my droppings into it and not tip it over onto myself.
"I myself did not wash during all these days and no one offered me a chance to wash. Of course I did not brush my teeth or wash my face. Three times a day they brought a little water in a pitcher into the cell.
"On my ninth day in this stinking cell, when one of the soldiers had to come in or take me out, he almost threw up and rushed out of the cell. As usual, I stood against the wall with my head covered by a black cloth. He called another soldier and they made arrangements and plans for removing the garbage pail. They told me drag it. I told them I couldn't do that while blindfolded, and I dragged it but it was too heavy and I couldn't get it out of its niche. So they agreed to remove the blindfold and let me drag the garbage pail out the door, and then they blindfolded me again and one of the soldiers grabbed my shirt and pulled me while I was still dragging the stinking pail.
"They led me to another solitary confinement cell, made me enter it with the pail and told me to empty it into the hole of the 'Turkish toilet' [a hole in the floor] in that cell. The soldiers were in control of water outside the cell, and as I emptied the pail they turned on a powerful jet of water and I and my clothes were dirtied.
"They made me wash the pail. I demanded to wash myself and I told them I was a worshiper but I would not be able to pray while I was dirtied with excrement. That was the first time I saw running water there. I spoke so angrily that they agreed to let me wash myself. I asked for a towel and one of the soldiers went to my cell and brought the rag, which had an unbearable stench.
"I asked for a new set of clothes and for a real towel but I didn't get them. All the behavior of the soldiers was coarse and filled with threats, and this time again they threatened that if I didn't use the opportunity I was being given I would not get another. I undressed as they watched through the opening and made insulting comments. I stood naked under a hole in the concrete from which water emerged. The soldiers turned on the water but didn't let me enjoy it for even five minutes and then shut it off from the outside.
"It was winter and cold, but I had no choice other than to put the soiled clothes on my wet body, and I was taken back with the sack on my head and an empty pail into the stinking cell. I stayed there for another two days.
"After spending 11 days there I was upgraded to a cell with a Turkish lavatory. That isn't really a higher level, because the soldiers control the water no matter what and they decide when to supply it ... After I got to this cell I was given the chance to shower once a day. The way the shower works: a soldier declares the possibility of showering. I have to undress as the soldier watches through the crack in the door. When I am naked I have to stand above the toilet hole and pin myself against the wall so that the soldier will turn on the water of the 'shower.' The water comes from one hole in a concrete protrusion that is about 15 to 20 centimeters from the wall and about 1.5 meters from the floor. To get flowing water you have to stand right against the wall and wait for the water.
"I declare that the soldiers never turned on the water for more than five minutes. They can control whether the water is hot or cold and they make use of that as they please ... To illustrate the soldiers' control of the water, I will tell you that one time I had soaped myself and the soldiers decided to shut off the water. I yelled, I pounded on the door and after my shouts and demands the soldier acceded and turned on freezing water.
"Everyone knew about these conditions. Obviously the soldiers who did guard duty at the cell knew. So did the paramedic who saw me every day and the doctors who saw me once or twice a week. Of course all the interrogators, to the last of them, knew about it and apparently gave the orders for it. The paramedic and the doctors, who I would have expected would be compassionate men of medicine, saw me day after day in the same clothes, without underpants, smelled the stench that came off me day after day and said nothing, as though this is the way of the world.
"The interrogators truly suffered from the way I smelled. The interrogator Yoni had to suffer my stench day after day. I remember that one day Yoni approached me and looked as though he was about to pass out. He said 'Rihtak hara' [You smell like shit] and told me I had to finish the interrogation. Many times, when the questioning was over, he and the other interrogators would say, 'Arja listal al hara' [Go back to the shit pail].
"When I was in Yoni's interrogation room he would turn on the air conditioner right over me. It was winter and cold, and many times I told him I was cold, but he went on doing it. I understand why, because my smell was intolerable.
"It's also clear that the judges could know, too, if they bothered to ask why people who are filthy and stinking are brought before them. For my two remands in custody I was brought from that facility to the Kishon Prison (Jalama). When I was brought before a judge after 22 days in the facility I complained to him, I showed him my undershirt and I told him that when I was arrested it was white and now it was yellow, and I told him I had no underpants. I asked him to smell me and told him that I couldn't wash without a towel and clean clothes. The lawyer who was there told me that the judge told the soldiers to give me clothes.
"That night, at about 11 P.M., in the facility, they brought me clothes that were used but clean. They didn't bring a towel. When I asked for a towel in the days that followed I always got the same answer: 'Quiet.'
"During the whole period I was given food in the cell and made to eat sitting down. The food arrives on a fairly small dish. Three meals a day. The food was tastier than in the Shin Bet interrogation division in Petah Tikva. The problem was with the cleanliness. In the filthy solitary cell the soldiers would place the portion of food on the garbage pail, and in the second cell they put the food right on the toilet. Once I went on a hunger strike because of that and I refused to eat the food and complained to the Shin Bet agent, but no one was the least impressed. I did not get any hot drinks other than once in a while insipid tea that I had to spill out. I lost 14 kilograms during my stay there.
"There is no opening to the light or the sun and no daily walk. There is no possibility of getting a prayer book."
Haaretz.com, the online edition of Haaretz Newspaper in Israel, offers real-time breaking news, opinions and analysis from Israel and the Middle East. Haaretz.com provides extensive and in-depth coverage of Israel, the Jewish World and the Middle East, including defense, diplomacy, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the peace process, Israeli politics, Jerusalem affairs, international relations, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the Israeli business world and Jewish life in Israel and the Diaspora.
