Loading ...
The Mukhabarat State: A Palestinian Woman's Testimony
Rosemary Sayigh
America’s recent veto of the Lebanese government’s complaint to the Security Council regarding Israel’s oppressive practices against civilians in occupied South Lebanon points once again to the hypocrisy of President Reagan’s crusade for human rights in Poland, Afghanistan, and selected Latin-American states, while upholding Israel’s conversion of South Lebanon into a liberated zone for the mukhabarat. With access to this zone ever more strictly controlled by the occupying power, the daily acts of intimidation and reprisal carried out there are shielded from legal reaction (whether Lebanese, international or-most importantly-Israeli) as well as from media reporting. The Sohmor massacre of September 20, 1984 is only the most blatant so far in a chain of assassinations, arrests, and the transfer of detainees to interrogation centers in Israel. Although the evidence presented here by one detainee is now slightly outdated, it holds a particular value because of its detail and penetration, as well because of the slightness of information on conditions in South Lebanon outside the Arabic press.
The witness is a Palestinian woman who gives an immediate impression of strength-physical, intellectual, psychological-that grows with longer acquaintance. Salwa Chahid is not one of those people who makes a strong first impression, but whom subsequent encounters blur. Her strength seems to come from deep inside a many-layered but integrated personality, from her identity as a woman, as a Palestinian Arab, as a Muslim; it constantly surprises and moves one with its protean forms,sometimes manifesting itself as a power to penetrate the system of oppressive relations that is Zionism, sometimes as a capacity to stand against it, again as an ability to endure suffering, or take different decisions, yet again in tenderness toward her fellow prisoners, her warmth as a mother . . .
The banal demographic details are nonetheless important inilluminating the precise nature of Mrs. Chahid’s experience at the hands of the mukhabarat. She is of middle age, perhaps close to menopause, but because she married late in life her four children are still young: the oldest was twelve at the time of the invasion, the youngest six. The youngest, Bassil, is mentally handicapped and deeply attached to his mother. What tormented Salwa most throughout her detention was the knowledge that her children were parentless. The mukhabarat must have counted on this fact to weaken her resistance; separation from her children and lack of news of them were a more potent form of torture than prison conditions, though these were harsh enough to leave physical and psychological sequels.
A member of a well-known Haifa family, Salwa left home in 1948 as a “refugee,” ina lorry filled with uncles and cousins, to settle with her parents and brothers inSidon, South Lebanon (one grandmother is Lebanese), and attend aLebanese private school. She was hardly aware of the existence of Ain al-Hilweh camp until her first appointment as an UNRWA teacher. In time she became headmistress of agirls’ preparatory section noted for its high standards. Her marriage to a man from a peasant/refugee family in Ain al-Hilweh, a Resistance group member, cannot have pleased her family, whose patriotism is of the sentimental rather than the active kind.
Salwa did not join her husband’s group upon marriage. Before her imprisonment shewas a patriot, attached to memories of Haifa, but she was not a political person, even less a militant. Running her home and her school left no time for political activities. It is necessary to state at the outset that the mukhabarat arrested her not because of anything they thought she had done, but as a hostage, to put pressure on her husband (who had slipped out of Sidon in the days after its capture in July 1982) to give himself up. Imprisoned under the Administrative Detention Act of 1944, Salwa was never charged by the Israeli state with any hostile act, nor with membership in any “terrorist” (hat is, nationalist) organization. Her hostage status was made clear by the fact that in every interrogation the mukhabarat offered to release her on condition that her husband give himself up, or that she tell them where he was.
One can well imagine the kind of denunciations that would have poured from the Reagan/Kirkpatrick duoif a “white” woman had been held hostage by a Third World state. Their silence at an Israeli instance is not in the least surprising. What is slightly more so is that, during the sixteen months of Salwa’s detention, no effective protest was made by any national or international body, though taking hostages is explicitly banned under the Fourth Geneva Convention. The absence of PLO protest is understandable: it could not make a special case for one prisoner when thousands were being held equally without justification. But it is harder to explain the ineffectiveness of international organizations such as the United Nations (Salwa is a UN employee under local contract), or the International Red Cross.
In singling out Salwa Chahid as a witness, I do not suggesthat her case is unique, nor that it is an extreme illustration of Israeli practices against the civilian population of South Lebanon. On the contrary, because of her age, her force of personality, and perhaps her class, Salwa was better treated than other women prisoners, some of whom were beaten, or turned over to the Lebanese Forces. What gives her testimony its particular value (apart from her hostage status) is the precise, three-dimensional view she gives of the mukhabarat state. Equally important, she demonstrates, in what she says about herself and her fellow prisoners, the capacity of Arab women for resistance, even without political training. A third value is the light her account casts on the possibility of communication between Arab and Jewish women (prisoners and guards) across artificially created national boundaries.
The Sequence of Arrests
Salwa was arrested and released four times, spending atotal of sixteen months in prison, with one period just short of a year. As a preliminary guide, here is a list of the dates and the places of detention:
- First arrest: July 9, 1982 (soon after the fall of Sidon); Salwa was taken first to Sidon Serail; after her first long interrogation there she was transferred to Safa warehouse, a major sorting center for war captives; subsequently, she was taken to al-Bass, near Tyre, then to Jellameh interrogation center in Israel, where she was held for ten days; released on July 28 after a second long interrogation, and her first hunger strike.
- Second arrest: end of August 1982; again, taken first to the Serail; after a few days there she was transferred to Neve Tertza prison, Israel, where she spent almost three months, being released at the end of October.
- Third arrest: early in December 1982; taken straight to Neve Tertza prison; spent three months there with a growing number of women prisoners from Lebanon, all of whom were transferred suddenly in February/March to a new prison in the Regie tobacco factory at Nabatiya; all were released on November 23, 1983, as part of a general prisoner exchange.
- Fourth arrest: early in December 1983; held in Sidon Serail for about ten days. The mukhabarat made stronger threats than before, and on arriving home she found that her oldest son (just turned fourteen) had been summoned to appear before a military court.
When Sidon fell, Salwa’s husband was rounded up like everyone else, but had the luck not to be recognized by the informers. He was able to slip away before the mukhabarat made their first visit, on July 8, led by a man from her husband’s political group who had turned informer. Salwa had stayed on to look after the children and see to the repairs of their apartment, seriously damaged in the war. She also felt responsible for her mother, as her only daughter. Besides this, there were her duties with UNRWA; her salary would be essential now to supporthe family. Most of all, however, the idea of leaving Sidon was morally repugnant to someone who could remember the flight from Haifa, and the bitter regrethat had followed it. There was no question of following her husband to “safety.”
On the mukhabarat’s first visit, they asked Salwa where her husband was; then, they ransacked the apartment, carrying away papers and photograph albums. The next day they returned to take her to the Serail, where she was interrogated at length: about her life, all her family, all her husband’s family, and their places of residence. At the Safa warehouse she was kept in the open with hundreds of other detainees awaiting interrogation. Here she met A., a young Lebanese woman whom she met again in Jellameh. From Safa she was transferred to al-Bass, and from al-Bass across the border to Jellameh. Here Salwa was kept in solitary confinement, but was close enough to the interrogation room to hear the cries. Here, she saw prisoners chained together being beaten with rubber thongs, and exposed for hours in the sun tied to stakes.
Her second interrogation took place after many days of waiting, beginning at 8 PM and lasting until after midnight; when one interrogator tired, another took his place. The same basic questions would crop up again and again, placed between trivial ones in an attempt to trap her in a contradiction. Here she was presented with sets of photos and ordered to identify them. In Jellameh, one of the interrogators lunged as if to strike her, and another threatened her with rape “by a black man.” After a four-day hunger strike she was allowed to return to Sidon, where she resumed her UNRWA duties.
In less than a month, the mukhabarat were back. As usual, they came late at night, with an armed unit that surrounded the building, probably in the hope of catching her husband at home. They questioned the children about their father (common Israeli practice), and took Salwa back to the Serail, to a zanzaneh (solitary confinement cell) with a chair but no bed, where she spent some four days before being driven in a military jeep to Neve Tertza, passing on the way her former home in Haifa. In this period there were five women prisoners from Lebanon in Neve Tertza prison. By the time of her third arrest (in December), they had increased to nine.
Neve Tertza is part of Israel’s civilian prison system, not that of the Military Police or the mukhabarat. This had several implications for the captives from Lebanon: here the mukhabarat’s access to them was limited by legal procedures, and Salwa underwent no interrogations during this period. Second, there were other women prisoners in Neve Tertza, Jewish and Arab; and although the “Lebanese” captives were carefully segregated from the Arab “politicals” (siyassiyat), this did not stop communication between them, and a build-up of solidarity. Finally, the presence of the “Lebanese” group could not be kept a secret; news about them began to appear in the Israeli press, and certain Israeli lawyers began to try to gain access to them. In a face-saving move to legitimize their detention, the Israeli authorities brought them before a military court in Ramallah where they were sentenced to indefinite detention on grounds of Israel’s security. However, the authorities must have feared that Israeli lawyers would gain signatures from the prisoners’ families that would make it hard to continue to deny access. The urgency of their transfer back to Lebanon (the law-free zone) is clear from the unfinished state of the prison being prepared for them in Nabatiya.
In Neve Tertza, the prisoners from Lebanon were grouped with Jewish women prisoners, and though Arab “politicals” often protest at being forced to share prison space with “criminals” (who may be drug-dealers or prostitutes), especially as warders are known to incite Jewish prisoners to attack them, Salwa made use of this opportunity toget to know more about Jewish women’s lives. Communication did not spring up overnight-at first the two sets of prisoners kept to their separate refectory tables-and later a fight broke out in which Salwa got badly scratched, and was forced to spend the night in a punishment cell. Yet she established bonds with several Jewish prisoners, based on things they shared: missing their children, boredom with the monotony of prison food, oppression by patriarchal family laws. It surprised Salwa to find that traditional Jewish family law is in many ways more oppressive to women than the Muslim shari’a.
Transfer to “Ansariya”
It was still winter-the end of February or early March-when the nine women from Lebanon were moved from Neve Tertza. Probably to avoid protest, the guards pretended that they were about to be released. When they were ordered down from the bus, and found themselves ina military base under the eyes of hundreds of Israeli soldiers, they were so scared that some cried, others fainted. Inside, they were completely stripped and subjected to anal examination by rubber-gloved military policewomen. The first sight of their new cells was even more of a shock: the walls were wet, the floors ankle-deep in water and builders’ rubble; there were no windows; light and water supplies had not been fixed. For three weeks the captives were too terrified to protest about anything, even at having to defecate in an open WC, with a guard watching them.
Conditions in Ansariya gradually improved, but the basement cells continued to be damp and cold long after winter ended, while at the beginning the cold was so severe that six blankets were not enough. The older prisoners (besides Salwa there was a woman of sixty) suffered arthritic pain for which the only treatment they could get was aspirin. Perhaps because they were lower than the rest, two cells remained permanently wet; they were used for punishment. There were stoves for the guards, but not for the prisoners.
After three weeks, the International Red Cross (IRC) began visiting Ansariya regularly. It is important, therefore, to consider whether conditions there conformed with international lw; and, if they improved in some respects, whether this was due to IRC pressure, to the occasional humane Israeli officer, or to the strikes and struggle of the prisoners.
Each cell measured about 21/z-by-2 meters-just room for two bunk beds-and prisoners were strictly forbidden to keep anything in them except clothes; breaking this rule meant five days in solitary confinement. Except for recreation periods in the corridor or the outside yard, from 10:30 AM to 12:00 AM, and from 4:30 PM to 6:00 PM, prisoners were shut in their cells (only toward the end of their period of imprisonment was reading material allowed). Between 8:00 PM and 7:30 AM there was no leaving the cells, even to use the WC. At 7:30 AM prisoners were given half an hour to wash, with late-comers punished.
Food was brought in three times a day and was eaten at a table in the corridor. It came in cartons from the kitchen, and was shared with the guards, who sometimes stole from the prisoners’hare. It was not seriously insufficient but very monotonous: every day there was rice and stew, except for Friday when there was chicken, and Saturday when all food was canned. Arabs dislike canned food, especially meat, because its origin and mode of slaughter is not guaranteed, and the prisoners begged to be given foul and hummos (beans and chickpeas) instead, but in vain. Bread was plentiful at the beginning, and fruit was given two or three times a week (the cigarette ration was ten a day). As the occupation dragged on, however, coffee, sugar and bread were more strictly rationed. To keep the Ramadan fast, prisoners would have needed to eat at night in their cells; but no change of rule made this possible.
Military doctors at the base gave prompt but minimal medical treatment. Once when Salwa went into shock after areally tough interrogation in Tyre, the prison doctor’s examination was so perfunctory that even the Israeli officer accompanying her was shocked. Prisoners suffering from arthritis were refused, as already noted, recognized treatment. More serious, at least three of the prisoners suffered some form of chronic sickness that, if the IRC had pressed their cases, should have guaranteed their release. One of these had TB (and shared a cell with three other prisoners); one had a heart defect; another had high blood pressure and headaches so severe that they sometimes caused convulsions. M., who became very seriously ill after sustaining a month-long hunger strike, resisting forcible feeding and losing fourteen kilos, was not released until long after she had lost mental balance. IRC efforts to gain the release of prisoners with health problems were lukewarm; Salwa says that some of them were “no better than Israelis.”
Physical conditions are more easily subject to inspection than psychological ones. For the women prisoners of Ansariya, what oppressed them most, since all but four were mothers, was separation from their children. Their letters were held back by the mukhabarat as a form of pressure: Salwa received no letters from her children until her last few weeks in prison, though they wrote to her regularly. A Syrian woman with a baby less than one year old received no news of her all the time she was in prison. IRC officials carried out the first exchange of messages between prisoners and their families, but after this initial effort they lost zeal. The IRC also failed to protest effectively against the mukhabarat’s withholding of family letters. The prisoners became so angry about this that they took a decision to boycott the IRC.
Another invisible form of oppression was change and arbitrariness in rules and punishments. A good-tempered officer might allow time extensions for washing or recreation; a bad-tempered one could eliminate in a moment a whole card-castle of small “rights” won through negotiations and strikes. Salwa said that the prisoners preferred the strict officers tothe lax ones: at least the prisoners knew where they stood. She also thought that the prison authorities intended to create a climate of uncertainty.
A third torment about which the prisoners complained fruitlessly was noise made by the guards inside and outside the jail: singing, shouting, turned-up radios. Noise at night made it impossible to sleep, yet prisoners who overslept were punished.
Other behavior that brought punishment was hiding the smallest scrap of food in the cells, or a needle and thread; going to the WC from the corridor or yard without first asking permission; being slow to obey orders, or obeying them incorrectly; strikes. The most usual form of punishment was confinement in the punishment cells, which could last as long as fifteen days, the first night being spent without bed, sitting or standing on the damp floor. Physical force was used rarely, though the guards once rushed a prisoner who had lost control and started banging her cell door, throwing her on her bed and overwhelming her with tear-gas. But jail was a haven of security compared with the interrogation centers of the mukhabarat.
The Mukhabarat
The mukhabarat’s control over Ansariya was spatially symbolized by their office just outside the prison door, from which all entries and exits were observed. They were given detailed daily reports on everything that went on inside the prison. They often entered, and their entries were always followed by oppressive new measures: cell-searches, punishments, switches of cell-mates. Once, they even tried to prevent the sun from entering the recreation yard with a tarpaulin. (IRC protests in this case were effective.) Regular individual interrogations of the prisoners were held in the office next to the prison, or in military headquarters in Tyre or Sidon. Although according to the Geneva Conventions, a woman should always be present when a woman prisoner is interrogated, this rule was only observed once with Salwa in Jellameh.
Salwa was interrogated around sixteen times, on average once a month. Except for the two earliest sessions (in Sidon and Jellameh), all centered on the whereabouts of her husband. There were always two or more mukhabarat present at interrogations. Physical force was not used against her though she was often threatened. Once, in Tyre, she was put in a very small zanzaneh after having lost her temper with an interrogator who tried to force her to take a lie detector test without the presence of a Red Cross doctor. Other women were beaten by the mukhabarat, however, some of them badly. Usually such beatings took place soon after arrest, in the military headquarters which the IRC does not visit. Two women told Salwa that they had been stood in closets and hosed with cold water after beatings. Others had been sprayed with urine. The mukhabarat used beating and threats of beating to extort “confessions” regarding fellow prisoners, or people still at large. Such measures could be momentarily effective in that fear, or an intense desire to get out of prison, made women yield morsels of evidence incriminating one another. But Salwa is sure that none of the Ansariyah group became collaborators.
All the mukhabarat spoke fluent Arabic and bore Arabic pseudonyms such as “Abu Musa.” Such “Arabization” seems widespread throughout the Israeli control apparatus, obviously intended to hide real identity, but also perhaps to demonstrate contempt for the folkways of the “under-race.” They relished abusing the women prisoners, calling them ‘akrootah and sharmootah (pimp, prostitute). To a woman pleading to be released who used the customary Arabic phrase expressing submission to authority-“I kiss your hand”-one of the mukhabarat replied, “I wouldn’t let you kiss my penis.” Unlike her contacts with other Israelis, Salwa did not find a single one of the mukhabarat who could be called decent or human, except perhaps the one in Jellameh who gave her the information that Jewish Israeli children learn from birth (min teez immu), to be strong and to build a strong army. If, occasionally, one interrogator appeared kind, telling her, “Don’t worry, relax, I’ll get you out of here,” it was only as a prelude to new questions about her husband. Salwa diagnosed such episodes as part of a system to put prisoners off balance, raising false hopes, the frustration of which would make them desperate.
From indications of language, name and appearance, the mukhabarat Salwa encountered were Sephardic Jewish in background. This tentative observation points to a structural principle of Israel’s control apparatus which draws on several ethnic groups, but maintains boundaries between them through specialized functions, like earlier colonialist systems. Though Arabs of Druze and Bedouin origin are recruited into the Israeli armed forces (Salwa spoke with several at the Nabatiya base), they do not show up in the mukhabarat or the Military Police. That higher levels of the mukhabarat system may be dominated by Ashkenazi Jews is suggested by one of Salwa’s last encounters with them, in Sidon Serail in December 1983, when she was taken before a group of oldish-looking, clearly senior mukhabarat who asked her questions through an interpreter. Though there was no way she could distinguish between the different branches of Israel’s intelligence “family,” of which three-Mossad, AMAN and Shebak -are known to be active in South Lebanon, Salwa grasped much about the way they work, and about their interrogation techniques, especially the one that leads captives through a long series of apparently trivial questions in order to trap them in an inconsistency. Salwa said that her long experience of dealing with children made her expert in such labyrinthine methods. Her own way of resistance was to argue back, raise broad political issues, such as the rationale of the invasion of Lebanon, and accuse her persecutors of inhumanity. Probably, it was this capacity for defiance and resistance that led the mukhabarat to escalate their threats. During her last encounter with them in Sidon, they told her, “Next time your husband telephones you, tell him that you and your children will never be in safety until he gives himself up.”
The close involvement of the mukhabarat in Israel’s invasion of Lebanon is clear from the rapid establishment of mass interrogation centers through which passed practically the whole male population, both Palestinian and Lebanese. Mossad’s directing role in the Sabra/Shatila massacres is established in the Kahane Report. While Israel appears to be preparing for formal withdrawal from South Lebanon, its use as a free zone for the occupying power’s information-gathering and control agencies (summarized here by the term mukhabarat) presages an extension of these activities deeper into Lebanon, and through Lebanon into Syria and Jordan.
Forms of Resistance
From the prisoners’ first arrival in Ansariya, Salwa was picked by the prison commander to act as shaweesh; yet, in spite of the ambiguity of this role, she was accepted as a leader by the other prisoners, and not just a leader, but mother-figure, friend and confidante. Being shaweesh put a large part of the day-to-day running of the prison on her shoulders: she had to organize meals, divide out food, supervize cleaning cells, recreation area and washrooms. In all disputes and negotiations, she represented the prisoners, and she had the right to be present during all searches of cells, or IRC visits. With Salwa, the women fought an unceasing struggle against abuses and arbitrary punishments; over and over again, they gave up food and recreation to show solidarity with sisters put in solitary confinement. Because she had daily contact with the prison bosses, I asked Salwa if the other prisoners ever accused her of playing their game. She replied that there had been times when they disagreed on actions to take; for instance, she had opposed a proposal to drop fat-soaked ignited rags onto military vehicles standing close to the latrine window. She had also opposed prisoners who had wanted to trash their food rations as a symbolic blow to the Israeli economy. In general, she had opposed all spontaneous and individualistic types of resistance, such as that of one of the prisoners who “stole” a knife and stabbed herself. She supported and led strikes that protested arbitrary measures and unfair punishments, or that made political points, such as the celebration of Ramadan with a demonstration against their detention, held in the prison yard, and heard by the people of Nabatiya. There was never any difficulty in obtaining support for strikes, even though these were usually punished by long periods of confinement to cells.
Through months of close interaction, the prisoners succeeded in creating a psychological “liberated space” within the prison. Spontaneous songfests were one way of expressing their identity and resistance; drawing nationalist emblems on the wall and refusing to wash them off was another. In spite of the power of the mukhabarat tomanipulate the prisoners through their intense desire to return to their families, Salwa affirms that no one turned collaborator. This capacity for struggle was not the product of training, since few of the prisoners had been members of political groups; it transcended national barriers, since many of the women were Lebanese, and one was Turkish; it went across barriers of age (the oldest prisoner was sixty, the youngest sixteen), as well as lines of class/education, for few of the other women were as educated as Salwa, and some were illiterate (these were mainly women from camps arrested on suspicion of bringing money or arms from the Resistance Movement in the Beqaa). In spite of the petty quarrels natural under conditions of tension, no major issues arose to divide the prisoners. Their number had grown to thirty-five by the time of the prisoner exchange in November 1983.
Relations with the Guards
Living side by side with the prisoners, sharing the same food and washrooms, were the shurtayat, the women military police drawn from Army conscripts, who form the lowest level in the prison administration. Almost the most interesting part of Salwa’s testimony concerns them. Because of her long stay in prison and her shaweesh role, she was able to observe the shurtayat and their officers at close hand, establishing close bonds with a few. Most were Sephardic in origin, Arabic-speaking, not far removed from the prisoners in culture. Their living conditions were not much better than those of the prisoners; they could not leave the base except for home leave. Poorly paid, they accepted gratefully small gifts of T-shirts, panties or sweets that the prisoners sometimes received from their families. It was clear to Salwa that the shurtayat were terrified of the mukhabarat who effectively controlled the prison, though it was officially the domain of the Military Police. Their mere entry caused visible nervousness; dozing or negligence brought them severe punishment.
Like the soldiers outside the prison, the shurtayat greatly enjoyed Arabic singing. Once, the prisoners held an impromptu concert, with each prisoner improvising a song about her own family and home. This was so popular that the shurtayat asked for more concerts, and many evenings were spent listening to songs, with one of them posted at the door to give warning of approach. The prisoners even taught the shurtayat Palestinian political songs, though singing these was strictly forbidden and several prisoners were put in solitary confinement for singing them. The shurtayat also enjoyed having their fortunes told through interpretation of the grounds left in their coffee cups.
At the end, when it was known that the prisoners were about to be released, prisoners and guards exchanged gifts, and tears were shed. One of the guards told Salwa that her dream was to buy a farm, and have both Israelis and Palestinians work together in it.
On nights when she could not sleep, Salwa would stand on the urine container in her cell, and talk to the guards through the small barred window. She would ask them where they came from, and they would tell her Tunis, Yemen, Morocco . . . She would say, “I am from Haifa,” and tell them how she had left home at sixteen in a crowded lorry, eating a bread-and-onion sandwich and weeping; how her husband had been so poor that he had only one shirt which he used to wash every night, and put on damp in the morning. They would talk for hours. Salwa was not so naive as to believe that such dialogue could have immediate political effects. But she sensed that the invasion of Lebanon had created in ordinary Israelis a new sense of the reality and intractability of the Palestinians’ existence as a people without a country.
Salwa did not have utopic visions of all Sephardic Jews-or even Israeli Arabs serving in the Armed Forces-becoming allies of the Palestinians in reaction to their subordination in Israel’s ethnic/class system. She understood the way members of subordinate ethnic groups may choose brutality to “enemies” to demonstrate their loyalty: colonial systems breed such pressures. But growing questioning at lower levels of the Israeli armed forces, generated by a long occupation, may erode the elan on which the expansionist plans of the Israeli Right depend.
Conclusion
Since the release of the Ansariyah prisoners, both resistance and arrests in South Lebanon have escalated, with changes in methods and the location of detention centers. There is no longer a women’s prison in Nabatiya. Ansar is now used mainly as a sorting center, and for holding less “dangerous” prisoners. Those suspected of membership in the Lebanese National Resistance Movement are being transferred to interrogation centers in Israel, mainly Atlit. Although the closing of the South and the atmosphere of fear that reigns there make it harder than before to obtain testimonies, it seems that new methods of torture are being used, for example, wrapping suspects for hours in damp cloth, which leaves no scars, but permanently damages the bones. Detailed evidence of such methods should be available shortly from the Paris office of the International Center for Information on Prisoners and Missing Persons in Lebanon.