Is sleep deprivation torture?
How about if the subject of sleep deprivation is a fourteen-year old?
What if he is a fourteen-year old who was dragged out of his bed and his parents' home at two o'clock in the morning?
What if he is a fourteen-year old Palestinian child who was dragged out of his bed and his parents' home at two o'clock in the morning on the charge of 'throwing stones?'
A journalist for the UK Independent newspaper, Catrina Stewart, reports that she was able to view a six hour video of Israeli police using sleep deprivation and other brutal tactics while interrogating a 14 year old Palestinian child.
The terrified boy was accused of throwing stone, but it is suggested that the real purpose of the tactic -- and the harsh interrogation techniques -- is to elicit false confessions, and to induce children such as the 14 year old child Stewart saw in the video, to give up names of other Palestinians, who will then be arrested by Israeli police.
Stewart writes:
During the nearly six-hour video, 14-year-old Palestinian Islam Tamimi, exhausted and scared, is steadily broken to the point where he starts to incriminate men from his village and weave fantastic tales that he believes his tormentors want to hear.
This rarely seen footage seen by The Independent offers a glimpse into an Israeli interrogation, almost a rite of passage that hundreds of Palestinian children accused of throwing stones undergo every year.
Stewart's report demonstrates that Israel is descending into barbarism.
Taxpayers from the United States give financial support to this barbarism.
American politicians give political cover to this barbarism.
New York Representative Nan Hayworth was one of the 81 United States congresspersons who travelled to Israel over the August break. She wrote of her travels in an email:
the people of Israel [discuss] the same spectrum of things that we do as Americans, perhaps not surprisingly. There is a deep affinity, a connection, between them and us, that transcends time and distance. . ...
Prime Minister Netanyahu [said that] we must suspend our disbelief that men responsible for the lives of millions of their own fellow citizens will act out of madness and not out of rationality.
Madness indeed.
No other state in the region, other than Israel, rousts children from their beds, deprives them of sleep for 12 hours in order to elicit incriminating information from them. No other state in the region acts with that degree of madness and irrationality.
According to the Independent,
7,000 The estimated number of Palestinian children detained and prosecuted in Israeli military courts since 2000, shows a report by Defence for Children International Palestine (DCIP).
87 The percentage of children subjected to some form of physical violence while in custody. About 91 per cent are also believed to be blindfolded at some point during their detention.
12 The minimum age of criminal responsibility, as stipulated in the Military Order 1651.
62 The percentage of children arrested between 12am and 5am.
Maybe Hayworth was jet-lagged from her Israel fun-in-the-sun tour; no morally awake and aware person could fail to see that what the Independent reported as routine in Israel does NOT reflect American values.
Although, as Chas Freemanhas pointed out, Israel's increasing derogation of the rule of law is infecting American values and policy decisions. In a speech at the Palestine Center in Washington, DC, Freeman said:
Humanitarian law and the law of war are arguably the supreme moral artifacts of Atlantic civilization. . . . Both objectives are very relevant to contemporary Palestine. It is, however, hard to find any principle of due process, the several Geneva Conventions, or the Nuremberg trials that has not been systematically violated in the Holy Land.
Examples of criminal conduct include
~mass murder,
~extra-judicial killing,
~torture,
~detention without charge,
~the denial of medical care,
~the annexation and colonization of occupied territory,
~the illegal expropriation of land,
~ethnic cleansing and
~the collective punishment of civilians, including
-the demolition of their homes,
-the systematic reduction of their infrastructure and
-the de-development and impoverishment of entire regions.
These crimes have been linked to a concerted effort to rewrite international law to permit actions that it traditionally prohibited, in effect enshrining the principle that might makes right.
As the former head of the Israeli Defense Forces’ (IDF) Legal Department has argued:
“If you do something for long enough the world will accept it. The whole of international law is now based on the notion that an act that is forbidden today becomes permissible if executed by enough countries . . . . International law progresses through violations.”
A colleague of his has extended this notion by pointing out that:
“The more often Western states apply principles that originated in Israel to their own non-traditional conflicts in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, then the greater the chance these principles have of becoming a valuable part of international law.”
These references to Iraq and Afghanistan underscore the extent to which the United States, once the principal champion of a rule-bound international order, has followed Israel in replacing legal principles with expediency as the central regulator of its interaction with foreign peoples. The expediently amoral doctrine of preemptive war is such an Israeli transplant in the American neo-conservative psyche.
Why are American citizens tolerating that their representatives endorse, rather than condemn, this vicious behavior on the part of Israel's government?
If you believe that American taxpayers should support American values, and that the representatives of the American people should be chastising and instructing Israel in the behavior that is expected of a friend of the United States, rather than degrading American values to conform to Israel intransigence, then write to your congressman, and especially, notify those congresspersons who have travelled to Israel this summer of your displeasure with their -- and Israel's -- behavior.
Mo Brooks R-5 AL
Eric Cantor R-7 VA
Russ Carnahan D-3 MO
Tim Scott R-1 SC
Gus Bilirakis R-9 FL
Dennis A. Ross R-12 FL
Steve Chabot R-1 OH (went last month)
David Cicilline D-1 RI
Jeff Duncan R-3 SC
Stephen Fincher R-8 TN
Yvette Clarke D-11 NY
Mark Critz D- 12 PA
Scott DesJarlais R- 4 TN
Chuck Fleischman R-3 TN
John Garamendi D-10 CA
Ron Kind D-3 WI
Kay Granger R-12 TX
Michael Grimm NY-13
Janice Hahn D-36 CA
Jaime Herrera Buetler R-3 WA
Mazie Hirono D- 2 HI (unconfirmed)
Steny Hoyer D-5 MD
Jesse Jackson Jr. D-2 IL
Patrick Meehan D-7 PA
Kevin McCarthy CA-22
Gwen Moore D-4 WI
Bill Owens D-23 NY
Steven Palazzo R-4 MS
Ed Perlmutter D-7 CO
Tom Price R-6 GA
Peter Roskam R-6 IL
Loretta Sanchez D-47 CA
David Schweikert R-5 AZ
Adam Smith D-9 WA
Steve Southerland R-2 FLA
Betty Sutton D-13 OH
Scott Tipton R-3 CO
Allen West R-22 FL
Frederica Wilson D-17 FL
Kevin Yoder R-3 KS
Kathy Castor D-11 FL
Terri Sewell D-7 AL (not confirmed)
Anne Marie Buerkle R-25 NY
Judy Chu D-32 CA
Hank Johnson D-4 GA
Bob Dold R-10 IL (unconfirmed)
Blake Farenthold R-27 TX
Mike Fitzpatrick R-8 PA
Tom Reed R-29 NY
Kevin McCarthy R-22 CA
4:08 PM PT: What do you suppose the international community thinks of the congressional representatives of a people -- American citizens -- who fawn over the leaders of a state, whose police force is demonstrated to be engaged in the practice of torturing children?
What if the state in question were Burma, and 81 American congresspersons had just visited Burma, then wrote to their constituents how fond they were of Burma, how closely alike in practices and values the US was to Burma, and all of that in the same week that a reporter for a reputable, internationally recognized newspaper reported that the Burmese police routinely tortured children?
Would you be proud to claim that congressional representative as YOUR representative?
Would he/she represent YOUR values, as a human being, as an American?