Israelis Seem Ambiguous on Issue of Torture : Prisons: A human rights group finds brutal interrogations increasingly taken for granted. Official guidelines ironically seem to promote acceptance.

There was relief in the Shin Bet, Israel’s secret police, when it was learned that Mustafa Akawi, while in custody, had suffered a fatal heart attack and was not tortured to death--at least not directly. The Shin Bet’s director had contended that liberals complained prematurely about the case and that the outcry had harmed the agency’s work.

But underlying the rare public comments by the secretive Israeli official was a notable lack of interest in details of Akawi’s autopsy or the investigation of the Palestinian’s death. Little mention was made of his chest bruises--possible signs of a beating--or of an independent expert’s report that Akawi was kept in a freezing corridor, interrogated and returned to the hall for hours after a judge ordered him examined by a doctor.

“There was an orgy of self-congratulation that he had died of a heart attack. All the other circumstances were blocked out,” said Stanley Cohen, a criminologist and critic of Israeli interrogation practices.

Despite criticism of the practices from human rights groups, including a fresh condemnation this week by the organization known as B’tselem, beating, kicking, hogtying and manacling for long hours, even the application of electric shocks--all tools of secret interrogation--are increasingly taken for granted in Israel, the Middle East’s only democracy.

Ironically, that acceptance has been made easier by official guidelines intended to curb the worst abuses.

At home, Israelis’ ambiguous attitudes toward torture appear to bear out earlier warnings that efforts to quell the Arab uprising, now 4 1/2 years old, would inevitably erode the nation’s values. Abroad, the battering of Israel’s image strikes at its effort to maintain the moral high ground in its conflict with the Arab world, where in many places torture is practiced without apology.

In 1987, after a scandal over the treatment of a Circassian, a Russian-born Israeli accused of spying, a government commission looked into the question of torture. The commission, headed by former Supreme Court President Moshe Landau, resolved that “moderate physical pressure” could be used to elicit confessions and information.

The part of the report that contains precise guidelines was kept secret but was meant to keep interrogation methods from “sliding towards methods practiced in regimes which we abhor,” the commission said.

But critics contend that the commission gave a green light to torture and that recent reports of abuse are the logical result.

“The Landau commission has had an anesthetizing effect on the public,” Cohen argued.

In a recent series of press reports, allegations of brutality were made against a team of five traveling interrogators working for the police. The reports included unusual testimony from both prisoners and some police, describing beatings with strong wooden sticks, kicks and electric shocks in the genitals.

The team was reported to have worked in jails in the West Bank towns of Hebron, Ramallah and Jericho. The interrogators “played soccer,” kicking prisoners in the body, and “basketball,” slamming heads against the floor, according to the reports. They burned prisoners’ eyelashes with lighted cigarettes and put guns to their heads.

One police witness, disturbed by the torture’s intensity, admitted that abuse is common, but added that he had never witnessed anything like this. He told the Hadashot newspaper: “In the morning, the interrogation room . . . looked like a battlefield. The ground was littered with broken clubs and pieces of rope stained with blood. The prisoners were only able to crawl after questioning.”

So far, officials deny responsibility for the activities, although they stop short of asserting that no abuses took place.

Yossi Portugal, described as an assistant director of the police, admitted that the interrogation group existed, but said it acted “without torture of any type.”

Last year, in a special report, B’tselem documented numerous cases of torture of Palestinian prisoners detained for the relatively minor offenses of stone-throwing and displaying Palestinian flags.

The report described tiny detention cells in which the prisoner must stand manacled and blindfolded for long hours. Hoods placed on the head are sometimes soaked in water from privies. Prisoners told of being hanged by their hands, tied behind the back, for long periods, or of being bound across chairs with their abdomen exposed to blows.

“It turns out, then, that what the (Landau) commission describes as ‘moderate physical pressure,’ which does not reach the point of torture or degrading treatment, is none other than degrading treatment or torture,” wrote Mordechai Kremnitzer, dean of the Hebrew University Law School, in a critique.

B’tselem noted that the commission guidelines came out of the need to distinguish whether a confession was admissible or not. Judges had run into a problem: Interrogators simply denied using coercion. To get interrogators to stop lying, the Landau commission invented a criterion of acceptable force.

In reviewing the year since its original study, the human rights group claims to have traced three trends: Severe torture is on the wane; beatings and abuses such as sleep deprivation and keeping prisoners in harsh conditions, however, have become routine; and the use of informers to beat up fellow Palestinians in jails has increased.

B’tselem, in a report released Wednesday, estimated that at least 5,000 of the 25,000 Palestinian prisoners jailed last year had been tortured. “Despite the official reactions, the setting up of government inquiries, the debates in the Knesset (Israel’s Parliament), nothing seriously has been done to suggest that there is a commitment to end these practices,” criminologist Cohen told a news conference.

The government has opened three investigations into torture since B’tselem’s original report. In one, the army probed nine cases and essentially verified B’tselem findings. But the commission concluded its report by suggesting that the army take itself out of the interrogation business and leave it to the Shin Bet. A Justice Ministry probe is being kept secret. Another one by the comptroller’s office is not yet complete.

An army official, operating under rules that forbid his name being printed, said complaints are thoroughly investigated. Palestinian activists, he contended, are trained to make accusations about torture, because “they are trying to make points in the newspaper.”

The official said Palestinians themselves are guilty of torture. There has been an upswing in Arab killings of suspected informers, and the uprising is beset by a dangerous increase in gunfire, he insisted. “We must work very hard,” he said of investigators. “How would you feel if a bus blew up and it was because you had failed to get information from a terrorist in time?”

The Shin Bet, a Hebrew abbreviation for General Security Services, cooperates with uniformed police and the army and answers directly to the prime minister. Its reputation for torture surfaced in the late 1970s in cases dealing with suspected terrorists. The practice expanded in Lebanon where the Shin Bet labored to gather data on anti-Israeli guerrillas and car bombers who bedeviled the army during its occupation of parts of that country.

The Arab uprising in the West Bank and Gaza Strip vastly increased the number of Palestinian prisoners passing through Israeli jails. “What was once an issue potentially affecting treatment of a few hundred prisoners is now multiplied,” said Cohen, a sociology professor at Hebrew University.

As for the controversial detainee Akawi, he belonged to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, had been arrested once before and served 10 months in prison on charges of belonging to an illegal organization. He was arrested again Jan. 22 and held until Feb. 3 without his lawyers receiving permission to visit him.

During a Feb. 3 hearing, he complained of having been beaten and showed the judge bruises. The judge ordered a doctor’s examination and wrote, “There is suspicion in my heart that there is something to what he said.”

After Akawi’s death, a Shin Bet interrogator told investigators that Akawi had been grabbed by the shirt front and shaken, a movement that left punch marks on his chest. The Shin Bet admitted that the detainee was often kept hooded and bound to a chair in the cold hall.

Despite the judge’s order for a medical examination, Akawi was interrogated later the same day. He was finally examined not by a physician but by a paramedic with 40 days’ training.

Michael Baden, a New York forensic expert for the London-based Physicians for Human Rights, concluded that Akawi’s heart attack was “precipitated by the emotional pressure, physical exertion and freezing temperature he was forced to withstand, along with a lack of proper medical care.” Akawi, at 35, suffered from hardening of the arteries.

Police, in response, latched onto a key statement in the autopsy: “These bruises (on the chest) were inflicted more than a week before the death and did not contribute to his death.”

“It’s now obvious that the deceased did not die of any torture,” a police spokesman said, adding that normal “administrative procedures” were used in the interrogation. The case was closed.