teaching others how to torture

It was in Mandate Palestine that British soldiers and police after 1938 subjected prisoners to forced standing, forced sitting and choking with water, exposure to extremes of heat and cold, and suspension. These tortures were clean and allowed for plausible denial; today the interrogation style of the Israeli GSS – called ‘shabeh’ by its victims – continues to draw on them and on the techniques used by the British in Northern Ireland. They include sleep deprivation, positional tortures, exhaustion exercises, exposure to extremes of temperature, the use of noise and ‘chair’ torture. It is from these and their predecessors that the Americans have drawn for the last seven years.