From The Boston Globe, 1/23/08:

Lieberman tapped to McCain 'leadership team' in Conn.

w w w . h a a r e t z . c o m
Last update - 01:18 15/06/2007
The twilight zone / 'Now you are paralyzed, as we
promised'
By Gideon Levy

"We have to make you do a little sports," the Shin Bet
interrogator said, launching four successive days of
questioning accompanied by brutal physical torture.
The result: Luwaii Ashqar can no longer stand on his
feet. He sits in his wheelchair, dressed in a
fashionable quasi-military suit, super-elegant, new
Caterpillar-brand shoes on his paralyzed feet.

"I love this color," he says about his uniform. "It's
the color of the soldiers who came to arrest me for
the interrogation that did all this to me."

His smile is captivating, his Hebrew rich and
incisive. He is a young man whose world fell apart. He
entered prison sound of body and mind and emerged a
broken man. For four days and four nights nonstop, he
says, he was interrogated and subjected to torture of
the most brutal kind. The result is the person we see
before us in the wheelchair, in the elegant home high
in the village of Saida, north of Tul Karm, which was
placed at his disposal by a friend after he was
released from Israeli prison a month ago.

Was there a judgment by the High Court of Justice?
There was. It banned precisely the types of torture he
underwent: the "banana posture," the "shabah" (body
stretching with hands tied to a chair), "invisible"
blows and the "frog posture" (being forced to stand
for hours on the toes in a crouching position) - all
the way to a vicious kick to his chest that bent his
body backward while he was tied to a chair with his
arms and legs, and which was the probable cause of the
partial paralysis of his legs.

Throwing up with the vomit entering his nostrils,
losing consciousness and being given only saltwater to
drink, relieving himself in his pants, not sleeping or
resting - all of that for four consecutive days and
nights.

What does the interrogator Maimon tell his children
when he goes home? What do Eldad and Sagiv tell their
wives about their daily labors before they turn in?
That they tortured another helpless prisoner until
they turned him into a cripple? That they beat this
charming young man brutally and that at the end of the
interrogation he was tried for only marginal offenses?
And where is the Supreme Court, which in 1999
prohibited precisely the chain of torture that Luwaii
Sati Ashqar, 30, who was married three years ago,
underwent in the Kishon detention facility?

Ashqar is not alone. The Public Committee Against
Torture in Israel has just issued a new report
containing the testimonies of nine torture victims
(English version: http://www.stoptorture.org.il/eng/
). As the authors of the shocking report say, the
testimonies "paint a dismal picture in which can be
discerned various categories of secret-keeping
collaborators, who, in keeping silent, protect the
[Shin Bet] system of torture." ...

On the wall is a picture, a fine drawing of a kneeling
prisoner, his head between his knees. The caption: "I
am in the darkness of the prison, living on your
memory. I am far from you, lying in my bed, my spirit
cruising your land all night. God will release all the
prisoners, the strong will triumph."

Ashqar is sitting in his wheelchair, his left leg
completely enclosed in a cast, his right leg shaking
nonstop. When he tries to get up and lean on his
crutches, he threatens to topple over. "I was married
in 2004, and I started to work in aluminum in the
village to provide for my new household. On April 22,
2005, at 2:30 A.M., the soldiers came and started to
throw grenades and to shout for everyone in the house
to go outside. They blindfolded me with whatever they
use and handcuffed me. I was taken in a jeep to prison
and I was examined by an army doctor. He looked over
my body - no operations, doesn't take medication, no
illnesses. Again I was taken in a military jeep, this
time to Kishon. 'Yehuda, incoming,' the warder said
and transferred me to the interrogation office. They
opened my eyes: Good morning. An excellent morning.
One of the interrogators, Maimon, told me: I am
responsible for your file. What file? The one you were
arrested for. This is the major, and this tall guy is
the colonel, this is Sagiv and this is Eldad. Eight
interrogators.

"They said: We have no time, it will soon be our
Passover and you have to finish everything in a short
time. Finish what? You have to tell us what you have.
I don't have anything to tell you. I begged. They
said: We know all that nonsense. We are talking about
security. Plans for terrorist attacks at Passover. I
said: I don't understand what you are talking about.
They said: The suicide bomber was at your place. What
suicide bomber?

"After two hours of talking they said to me: If you
don't give everything you have, we will have to take
it by a different way. What is the different way? Did
you hear of a military interrogation? You might leave
here with your body battered or crippled. I was taken
to a military interrogation. Here you pray to God that
you will die, they said, but we won't give you that.
We will let you die only after you spill out what we
are looking for. He gave me a prison uniform and I
told him that if I was going to die, I preferred my
own clothes.

"They sat me down on a square chair without a back,
which was attached to the floor and had sharp metal
ends [sticking up]. My legs were tied to the legs of
the chair with metal cuffs and my hands were tied
behind my back with metal cuffs. One interrogator sat
behind me and the other in front of me. The
interrogator opposite me said: We have to give you a
little sports, so you will be able to hold out in the
military interrogation. The sports was that they
pushed me backward by the chest, a backward
somersault, and I would hold myself so my bones would
not break. After a minute or two I would automatically
fall on the floor, but the interrogator behind me
would put his foot on my chest and press, and the
interrogator in front would grab my hands and pull and
pull behind the chair. They kept on like that until I
don't know what happened to me, heat in every part of
my body, puking everything I had in my stomach and it
would go into my nostrils. I would wake up when they
poured water on my face. When I woke up, we went back
to the same situation. It went on like this 15-20
times an hour.

"After that they made me crouch on my toes, not
letting me lean on the back of my foot. I was in that
position for 40-50 minutes, maybe an hour - that was
my estimate - until I felt my soles swelling and they
turned blue and there was tremendous pain. After that,
stand up, and they tied my hands and pressed as hard
as they could on the metal handcuffs until the metal
dug into my hand. Here are the signs, you can still
see them. Because of the pressure, the key of the
handcuffs didn't always work and they would bring huge
metal scissors, like they use in construction, and
tear off the handcuffs and then bring new ones, to go
on. The color of my hands changed to blue, and when
they opened [the handcuffs] my hands shook. The
interrogator stood on the table and pulled me with a
chain of handcuffs. When I fell, they pulled me by the
hair.

"I would cry, beg, shout, and they came back to me
with words, that it was impossible to stop, only after
you start talking about what we want. I said to them:
Tell me what you want. Tell me I am responsible for
the attack on the Pentagon, I am ready to confess to
everything, just tell me what. I want to end this
death."

"There were always four interrogators and two rotated
every four hours, day and night. The new ones would
tell me they were stronger than the ones before, that
the ones before were a joke, we are the strong ones.
And that was true. The new ones tied me and started to
beat me all over my body. One interrogator pressed
hard on my testicles and on my feet with his shoes.
When they slapped me and I tried to pull back, the
major would say: What are you doing? If you move back,
I will break your nose, and if you move forward I will
rip off your ear. Be strong and take it sportingly,
because you are a soldier and a fighter. They broke
this tooth."

Ashqar suddenly stops talking. He turns pale and his
face is covered with beads of perspiration. His
father, Sati, quickly wipes his face with a damp
cloth. "Every time I try to remember I get dizzy, even
when I am alone." Quiet descends in the room. It will
take Ashqar another few minutes to pull himself
together.

"I was taken into detention on Friday morning, and
that was the last light of day I saw before the
interrogation. I came out for the first time on Monday
night or before dawn on Tuesday morning. On those long
days I sat in a chair and did not even go to the
toilet. So you won't kill yourself, they said. I
urinated in my clothes, and a terrible stench started.
For four days I didn't eat anything. They told me: If
we give you something to eat, something will happen to
your stomach and your intestines. Maybe they will
explode under the pressure of the food when we push
you backward. You will drink only half a cup of
saltwater. That is what they gave me every time after
they bent me and I vomited. Why with salt? I asked.
Give me without salt. No, so nothing will happen in
your stomach and intestines. I would drink it and
vomit.

"On Monday evening, they told me that five witnesses
had testified that Luwaii had transported a wanted
man. I told them that there was a famous wanted man
named Luwaii Sadi, but my name is Luwaii Sati, and
maybe they had mixed us up. He said to me: Are you
saying the Shin Bet is that stupid? We know exactly
what we're doing, and it is all correct. I said: Put
me on trial for whatever you want. He said: Ya'allah,
sports again. He pushes me backward in the chair. I
will help you become a story in Palestinian history.
He is talking to me and my head is down below. He
pushes strongly with his leg and presses on my chest.
I felt something like an explosion in my body. Like
something broke. After that I don't know what
happened. I woke up and they were pouring water on my
face. Again they pushed me backward and again I
fainted.

"He said to me: Stand on your feet. I felt that my
legs were cold, like pins and needles in the legs. I
said: I can't. He said: Now you are paralyzed. I said:
I guess I am. He said: That is what we promised you
and that is what you want."


"I discovered I had a wound in the back and it was
bleeding - because of the sharp chair - and one of my
bones was protruding. Because of the blood and because
of the urine of four days there was such a stench that
the interrogator could not come close to me. He said:
Why do you stink like that? I told him: That is your
perfume. A warder took me to the shower and threw me
on the floor and said to me: Ya'allah, you have two
minutes to shower. I looked at the faucet up above and
I could not reach it. I pulled down my pants and the
underpants stayed in place. I tried to pull them down
- I could do it in front but behind it was stuck to my
back. The two minutes went by and the warder started
to pound on the door. Time's up. I told him: Give me
another two minutes, I can't reach the faucet. He came
in and asked: What do you have on your back? I said: I
don't know.

"He called the interrogator and said: Come and see the
prisoner. The interrogator came and asked: What do you
have, Luwaii? I said: I don't know what I have on my
back, I can't pull the underpants down and I can't
reach the faucet. He said: Ya'allah, we will go up and
finish the story and take you to the doctor.

"Two warders took me in a Prisons Service vehicle to
Rambam [Medical Center in Haifa]. In emergency, my
hands and feet were tied and a Russian doctor asked
me: What hurts you? I told him: My whole body hurts
from the interrogation. The Druze warder said: Shut
up. The doctor turned me on the side and stuck a
finger into my *****. I asked him: What are you doing?
He said: I am checking whether you have hemorrhoids.
Why didn't you ask me first? I am a professional, he
said. I said: What about the wound on the back? He put
ointment there and dressed it. After 10 minutes I was
taken back to interrogation. Again I was tied to the
square chair. The bandage fell off and the wound
started to bleed again. After that, they stopped the
military interrogation."


He was interrogated for another two months, but
without physical torture. He was told that his wife
had been arrested because of him - a complete
fabrication - and he was given a lie detector test
("the falsehoods machine," in his Hebrew). For two
weeks he was placed in a cell with stool pigeons. In
the end, he was indicted on only two counts, in
Prosecution File 2157/05: assisting a wanted person to
hide and using a forged document. No ticking and no
bomb. Ashqar was sentenced to 26 months in prison and
was released a month ago. In the meantime, his younger
brother, Osaimar, disappeared. Soldiers came to the
house looking for him, but he was not there. His
family has not seen him since: He told them that he
was not willing to undergo what Luwaii did.

Luwaii is now looking for a way to get medical
treatment in Israel or abroad, after his physician
told him that he would not be able to get
rehabilitation in the West Bank. His lawyer told him
that the Shin Bet will almost certainly prevent him
from going anywhere.

---

This is the response received by Haaretz from the Shin
Bet:

Luwaii Ashqar was arrested in April 2005, after
serious suspicions were raised against him concerning
his involvement in terrorism, including possession of
weapons and assistance to wanted individuals - terror
activists from Islamic Jihad.

One of the suspicions was that he had provided
accommodation, ahead of a terrorist act, for Sirhan
Sarhan, the perpetrator of the attack in Kibbutz
Metzer, who murdered Revital Ohayon and her two
children, Noam and Matan, of blessed memory.

The suspect was tried and convicted in a plea bargain,
and sentenced to 14 months in prison and another 14
months in prison stemming from a pending conditional
sentence, so that all told he was sentenced to 26
months in prison. In addition, he received a 28-month
suspended sentence.

His interrogation was carried out according to the
rules and directives, with constant review of the
interrogation process.

During the interrogation, the above-named put forward
medical complaints, which were examined and treated by
the appropriate medical authorities, including an
examination he underwent in hospital.

It should be noted that during the interrogation he
did not cite medical complaints of the same
seriousness as those mentioned in the query.

Complaints relating to his interrogation, from, among
other sources, the Committee Against Torture and the
Red Cross, were referred to the State Prosecutor's
Office for examination, which ordered an examination
by the Ombudsman of Interogees' Complaints.

The examination of the complaints did not turn up any
excesses in the interrogation, and in the wake of
this, the official in charge of the OIC in the State
Prosecutor's Office decided to close the examination
file.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/871239.html


Chapter 11
THE JEWISH COSMOLOGY OF VICTIMHOOD (Part 1)

"I have frequently had hotheaded romantics assume that our family fled
Russia to escape persecution. They seem to think that the only way we
got out was by jumping from ice flow to ice floe across the Dnieper
River, with bloodhoods and the entire Red Army in hot pursuit. No such
thing. We were not persecuted and we left in a quite legal manner with
no more trouble than one would expect from any bureaucracy, including
our own. If that's disappointing, so be it." Isaac Asimov, I. Asimov.
A Memoir. 1994, p. 19

Ask any non-Jewish American what his or her personal link is to the
Roman era, the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, and other epics of human
history and he will tell you: nothing. He knows nothing about it. And
he doesn't care. For such a late twentieth century American to reflect
on his own roots back to, say, medievalism, is to look with the naked
eye for Mars: it is a vague dot, reputed by others to exist, in the
remotest distance. Indistinct. Unfathomable. Something eternally
elusive, lost forever.

Few Americans can trace their family history more than a few
generations, if that. Throughout anyone's own ancestral lineage,
however, going back deeply into time, there obviously exists their own
share of participants -- as both perpetrators and victims -- in great
and minor wars, massacres, invasions, famines, epidemics, and other
disasters of every kind. Presuming five procreative generations per
century, exponentially, any human being alive today can theoretically
claim direct genetic lineage to over a thousand ancestors back to
1800, over 37,000 people to 1700, over a million back to the year
1600, and over a staggering billion human beings back to 1400 (thirty
generations). Whatever the mathematically realistic number, (and
Jewish history claims 4,000 years) the deeper we go back into history,
the more we must consider the veritable Milky Way of humanity that
preceded us in direct ancestral lineage; people of every imaginable
sort, and they all knew well the melancholic chords of human
suffering, sometimes subtly, sometimes brutally. Every single one of
them.

Today's Americans of French, British, Italian or other European
descent find themselves today lumped together in the generic "white"
American community. Their respective ancestries are stirred together,
gone. Their European origins mean little to them; they are homogenized
in the New World, their identities now expressed -- for better or
worse -- in the icons of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Billy the
Kid, Babe Ruth, the hallowed Constitution, even McDonald's hamburgers,
or other superficial national icons that ancestrally have nothing
directly to do with them.

The typical American's alienation, disinterest, and lack of connection
to distant history is not characteristic of modern Jews. On the
contrary. A stone thrown in spite through a Jewish window in Italy in
the fourteenth century is a stone thrown into Jewish hearts today. The
actions against Jews by desperate thugs in Poland in the eighteenth
century are dumped on Gentile doorsteps in our time by Jews who are
still grieving, still embittered, still seeking redress. And when we
turn, in more recent history, to the bestial deeds of Adolf Hitler to
conquer the world, we find that Jews have pulled tightly in a circle
to proclaim that everything sinister in the whole world malevolently
labors against them, and them only.

Ultimately, it is a central article of modern Jewish faith --
reflecting both secular and religious attitudes, formed and hardened
over the ages -- that to be Jewish is to be always maltreated for
innocence by others. Or, perhaps more correctly to Jewish eyes, as
part of this innocence, being Jewish is to be a victim for the crime
of being superior to their persecutors. This claim to superiority was
originally religiously based, as God's "Chosen People" of Old
Testament tradition. And this Jewish preoccupation -- as being victims
of their self-presumed superiority -- has been passed down,
religiously, over the ages (traditionally epitomized in Jewish
pilgrimage to Jerusalem's Wailing Wall to bemoan their communal fate,
manifest also in the likes of the volume Sefer Yosifon, anonymously
compiled in the tenth century as a litany of Jewish complaints and
miseries). In the aftermath of Hitler's atrocities against Jews during
World War II, this world-view has come to define, more tightly than
any other aspect of Jewish tradition -- and now highly politicized --
modern Jewish self-identity.

But is this true? From the evidence we have already seen, are Jews
correctly depicted as history's consummate, incomparable, and innocent
victims? Have Jews pre-eminently and collectively suffered more than
all other human beings, "victims of centuries of persecution and
bigotry?" [UROFSKY, M., 1978, p. 378] And for no reason?

Here's a typical view of the Eastern European Jewish past, by Judith
Arcana, who discusses the roots of Jewish American poet Grace Paley's
family to the Jews of Russia: "One of Isaac's brothers, Russya, was
killed in a workers demonstration in 1905 ... In the wake of that
death, probably spurred by the retaliatory wave of pogroms, the family
decided to leave Russia. Knowing the unpredictability of royal whim,
Natasha Gutseit, Isaac's widowed mother, sent the young couple to
America before the czar could change his mind and snatch them back
again." [ARCANA, J., 1993, p. 10] Here Arcana, who omits the relevance
of Jewish socialist agitation in Russia as a factor in their
"persecution" [Elsewhere she notes that even both Paley's parents were
socialists, enemies of the Tsarist regime -- p. 9], speculates that
the Russian czar would have interest in "snatching" Jews back to
Russia.

In the American context, "one commonly finds a sentence like this in
many [Jewish] books or articles," says Joshua Rothenberg, "... 'Jews
came to the shores of this country from the ghettos of the shtetlekh
[Eastern European Jewish villages] as a result of the pogroms.' Each
phrase in this sentence is untrue or oversimplified to the point of
untruth. There were no ghettos in 19th century Eastern Europe (except
in the metaphysical sense) ... And the pogroms were not the principal
reason for emigration: proportionately more Jews came to the United
States from Austrian-ruled Galicia -- where there were no pogroms --
than from Tsarist Russia." [ROTHENBERG, p. 3]

"It has been discovered," says Henry Feingold, "that religious
persecution, even its physical manifestations of pogroms, rarely
furnishes sufficient impetus for Jews to uproot themselves. Moreover,
it cannot account for the thousands of Jews who chose to leave areas
relatively free of religious persecution ... [FEINGOLD, p. 60] ...
Historians have taken a closer look at the early acculturation process
and have discovered that the highly touted ability of the Jewish
family to withstand the stresses of transplantation have been
overstated. New studies on Jewish vice and crime and criminality and
the discovery of a relatively high divorce and desertion rate among
immigrant Jews present a picture of a community paying a dear price
for establishing itself." [FEINGOLD, p. 61]

"The lachrymorose recollection of the shtetl, which are still with
us," says Daniel Bell, "fail to recall its narrowness of mind, its
cruelty, especially to schoolchildren (to whom a whole series of
memoirs, such as Solomon Ben Maimon's, testify), and its invidious
stratification." [BELL, Reflections, p. 318] Little remembered is this
oppression of Jews by Jews. "Prior to World War I," adds Rothenburg,
"the Kehilah [Jewish governing bodies] were ruled, in most cases, by
an oligarchy of the rich and the [Jewish] clergy. Their excesses,
especially in the area of indirect taxation (kosher meat, etc.) and
the silencing of the protesting voices of the poor, are well-known and
documented. The Kehilahs remained a source of bitter complaint for the
majority of the Jewish population, which had no say in the conduct of
their own community affairs." [ROTHENBURG, p. 5]

continued

HARTFORD, Conn.-

Sen. Joe Lieberman has been named a chairman of Republican
presidential hopeful John McCain's state leadership team.

Lieberman, an Independent who caucuses with Senate Democrats, has
endorsed the Arizona senator and campaigned for him in Florida,
Michigan, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

__________________________________________________

McCain and LIEberman deserve each other.

Harry