Published: 20 September 2022
Last updated: 5 March 2024
For years, AVIGDOR FELDMAN was proud that, with legal colleagues, he had eliminated the possibility of extracting a confession by the use of torture in Israel. After a recent ruling, he thinks he was mistaken.
Between 11:53 pm on December 17, 2015, and 6:50 am on December 18, 2015, use was made during “fixed and brief periods of time” of so-called “special means”, applied with scientific precision, on the body of Amiram Ben-Uliel.
Ben-Uliel was convicted in May 2020 of three counts of murder and two counts of attempted murder in the 2015 attack on the Dawabsheh family while they were asleep at home in the West Bank village of Duma.
As one of the attorneys in the appeal submitted by Ben-Uliel, which was denied earlier this month by the Supreme Court, I am prohibited from describing the actual special means. The operating instructions of said means appear on one printed page, defining terms that need no definition – all in terse, concise and bureaucratic language that brooks no irony or ambivalence, avoiding self-awareness like the plague.
Judging from the wording of the text and its cadence, the operating instructions were written by not-very-sophisticated artificial intelligence, which got its training from reading the operating instructions of an old vacuum cleaner and, as ordered, presents precise directives for applying pain without feeling guilty.
We have become used to thinking that the human body and the kingdom of pain that resides within it are outside the control of the authorities.
Now the Supreme Court has set the limit of that protection to up to 36 hours after implementation of the means of pain. That is, the court ruled that a confession made 36 or more hours after the implementation of the means, is made freely and is accordingly admissible for use against a defendant.
Thirty-six hours are sufficient to consign to oblivion and to expunge all memory of the means, and thereafter free will pervades the quivering flesh.
READ MORE
I Thought I Put a Stop to Shin Bet Torture. I Was Wrong (Haaretz)
