Stephen Lendman

Founded in 1990 to highlight a growing problem, the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PACTI - stoptorture.org) "believes that torture and ill treatment of any kind and under all circumstances is incompatible with the moral values of democracy and the rule of law. (It) advocates for all persons - Israelis, Palestinians, labor immigrants and other foreigners in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) - in order to protect them from torture and ill treatment by the Israeli interrogation and law enforcement authorities."

They include the Israeli Police, the General Security Service (GSS), the Israeli Prison Service (IPS), and the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). In June 2009, PACTI published a report titled, "Shackling As A Form of Torture and Abuse." Its findings are discussed below.

PACTI reviews the "serious phenomenon" of shackling Palestinian detainees "in a systematic manner and throughout all stages of detention and interrogation." Its purpose is to dehumanize and inflict pain, suffering, punishment, intimidation, and discrimination as a way of lawlessly extracting information even though experts acknowledge that torture is ineffective, counterproductive, and, of course, illegal under all circumstances at all times with no exceptions allowed ever.

Israel's use of shackling "has snowballed almost out of control....even when it serves no real" purpose, and it begins at the time of arrest. Plastic handcuffs are used "that can be tightened but cannot be released or halted." They inflict pain, especially when hands are cuffed from behind, the most common way.

Shackling continues during interrogation, "where diverse and creative forms of cuffing are intended to apply pain and pressure...." Then in cells, detainees are painfully shackled to beds for extended periods. Even when they're transfered for urgent hospital treatment, cuffing stays in place throughout.

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Neil Mackay

[Editor's note: the author, an award-winning journalist with The Sunday Herald, Glasgow, Scotland, provided Culture Change this article and the related ones that follow. They are historic, though dated Sept. 15, 2002, and Oct. 6, 2002, respectively.]

A secret blueprint for US global domination reveals that President Bush and his cabinet were planning a premeditated attack on Iraq to secure ''regime change'' even before he took power in January 2001.

The blueprint, uncovered by the Sunday Herald, for the creation of a ''global Pax Americana'' was drawn up for Dick Cheney (now vice-president), Donald Rumsfeld (defence secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's deputy), George W Bush's younger brother Jeb and Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief of staff). The document, entitled Rebuilding America's Defences: Strategies, Forces And Resources For A New Century, was written in September 2000 by the neo-conservative think-tank Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

The plan shows Bush's cabinet intended to take military control of the Gulf region whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power.

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Chris Hedges

(AP/Adem Hadei) An Iraqi woman takes her
dead son into her arms. The 6-year-old was
killed on the way home from enrolling for his
first year of school.

War is brutal and impersonal. It mocks the fantasy of individual heroism and the absurdity of utopian goals like democracy. In an instant, industrial warfare can kill dozens, even hundreds of people, who never see their attackers. The power of these industrial weapons is indiscriminate and staggering. They can take down apartment blocks in seconds, burying and crushing everyone inside. They can demolish villages and send tanks, planes and ships up in fiery blasts. The wounds, for those who survive, result in terrible burns, blindness, amputation and lifelong pain and trauma. No one returns the same from such warfare. And once these weapons are employed all talk of human rights is a farce.

In Peter van Agtmael’s “2nd Tour Hope I don’t Die” and Lori Grinker’s “Afterwar: Veterans From a World in Conflict,” two haunting books of war photographs, we see pictures of war which are almost always hidden from public view. These pictures are shadows, for only those who go to and suffer from war can fully confront the visceral horror of it, but they are at least an attempt to unmask war’s savagery.

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Sarah Menkedick

In a throwback to 1950s America, Israel allows gender-based segregation on its public buses and looks the other way when women are violently abused for not sitting in the back of the bus.

Egged, Israel's state transport company, runs around 100 mehadrin (super-kosher) bus lines catering to haredi (ultra-orthodox) riders. In theory, gender segregation on these publicly-funded lines is voluntary. In practice? Women are verbally abused, publicly humiliated and sometimes even beaten if they don't "voluntarily" dress modestly, board and exit from the rear bus doors, and sit in the back of the bus.

In November 2006, American-Israeli Miriam Shear was brutally beaten, kicked, spat on, and shouted at by ultra-Orthodox men for refusing to give up her seat in the front of the bus. Shear had been riding the Egged No. 2 bus to pray at the Western Wall every morning, and had experienced several run-ins about her choice of seating before one haredi man decided to take action. He spat in her face and when she responded by refusing to stand up, he threw her down and began beating her. While Shear was being beaten, other riders yelled at her for being a stupid American and having no common sense.

The only witness who backed Shear's story (the bus driver denied Shear was beaten and Egged and other passengers stood behind his story) says that she was blocked from helping Shear by the other riders.

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