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Foreign Policy - Israel's Khiam torture facility.
It's a rare chance when you can transmit material that really strikes at the heart. Material that can turn even the hardest right wingers and occasional fascists' stone hearts into a jello type of experience.
As I watch the Bush league administration and FOX NEWS fascists and the US Jewish infested media condemn a people under occupation and the severest subjugation any human can experience this types of materials that beg not only be read---but understood.
The following is such material--it cover's JEWISH STATE SPONSORED TERRORISM at it's worst and reminds us that the CHOSEN have now become the devil's apostle's.
Read & weep!
KHIAM PRISON
Israel's Torture Den
Khiam prison was a detention and interrogation camp during the years of the Israeli occupation in Southern Lebanon. From 1985 until the Israeli defeat in May 2000, thousands of Lebanese were held in Khiam without trial. Most of them were brutally tortured - many of them died.
The prisoners included members of the resistance, their relatives, civilians by the dozen whose crime was innocence, who would not collaborate with the Israelis or the SLA, who refused to join the murderous little militia, who declined to give the Israelis information about the Lebanese resistance.
Israel ran the prison using the militia they had created from the Maronite Christian community - the SLA. The SLA provided Khiams guards and interrogators whilst Israelis held the top positions. They provided the training for the torturers and lead the torture sessions. They paid the salaries and provided all the equipment. They commanded, the SLA followed.
Men women and even several children were locked up without trail, some spent decades here.
Children Tortured
Ali Kashmar was fourteen when he became caught up in the conflict that was to cost him his youth. Ali was simply a schoolboy.
'I was like everyone else; all I could think about was playing. At that stage if I thought about the future at all it was about passing my exams and waiting for the results of my studies.'
This picture was taken just two weeks before Ali disappeared from his family's life.
Ali Kashmar, aged 14, was imprisoned & tortured at Khiam
No one really seems to know why he was arrested. He thinks it may have been because he made anti-Israeli remarks in the school playground.
It happened the night he'd chosen to sleep alone for the first time.
'I thought that that night I'd become a man. I was asleep when suddenly I had guns pointed at me and my mother and sister were crying.
There were armed men everywhere - outside the windows, in the street and on the roof.
Ali Kashmar's Mother Sobiyeh:
'He got to the front door, hugged me and said goodbye Mother. I collapsed against the wall. After a while I looked around and he was gone. I ran outside and saw the cars speeding away.'
It would be ten years before Ali was back here with his mother Sobiyeh.
In prison:
'Alone I fought with time. I thought about my parents and my friends. I got mange for five years because of a lack of cleanliness, so I used to spend my time scraping my scabs waiting for the time when they offered me food. I tried to sleep as much as possible to make the time pass.'
Ali Kashmar was now seven years into his detention.
Ali Kashma's mother Sobiyeh without her son for 10 years
Each night his mother would lay an extra place at the table for her missing son. And as she went about those daily rituals that bind a family together, she was constantly reminded of the place that had swallowed him up.
The Kashmar family home is in the town of Khiam and from her roof she could see the prison.
'I used to take my cigarettes, go up to the roof and sit there. I used to imagine I was talking to Ali. I'd say; 'my son, my beloved son, what are you doing now, what are they doing to you, where have they put you?' I'd think that I was talking to him and that he was going to answer me. When the neighbours heard me they'd come to take me down.'
The interrogators were looking for intelligence about anti-Israeli resistance operations. But after eleven days of torture in Khiam the fourteen year old Ali Kashmar, with no real secrets to tell, remembers desperately making things up.
'I tried to convince myself that I was someone important. I told myself I must be stupid, I probably am involved, I've probably done many things against them and worked for other people without being aware of it. In the end I made up story after story after story. Later my conscience started bothering me but I ignored it because I just couldn't think straight anymore.'
The interrogators forgot about Ali, once they realised he had nothing to tell them. But there were no courts to rule on his guilt or innocence, no one to appeal to for release. So Khiam kept Ali anyway. Through his teens and into his twenties.
Freedom could be as arbitrary as detention. In 1998 in an exchange between Israel and Lebanon, fifty-five Khiam prisoners were freed and forty-four Lebanese corpses were handed over. The remains of three Israeli soldiers were delivered in return.
After a decade Ali Kashmar had served his purpose - one of those bargaining chips in this grim trade in the living and the dead.
Ali Kashmar upon release after 10 year of imprisonment without charge.
Compare this photo taken upon his release with the one aged 14 which
was taken just before his arrest. The years in between were lost at Khiam.
Ali Kashmar's Mother on seeing Ali after years or imprisonment:
'I stared at him and said to myself; 'this man has a beard, in my imagination my son was standing right before my eyes looking lika an aged old men that had been to hell and back...[Message truncated]
TheAZCowBoy,
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