Jonathan Cook reports in Middle East Eye 24 May 2024
‘Black sites’ are about reminding those who have been colonised and enslaved of a simple lesson: resistance is futile
On a misty November morning 21 years ago, I was desperately trying to remain camouflaged. Concealed in the foliage of an orange grove in Israel’s rural Galilee, I hurriedly took photos of a drab concrete building not marked on any map.
Even the original road sign identifying the site as Facility 1391 had been removed after a local Haaretz newspaper investigation revealed it housed a secret prison.
I was the first foreign journalist to track down Facility 1391, most of it hidden within a heavily fortified complex built in the 1930s to suppress resistance to British rule in Palestine.
For decades, Israel had secretly held mostly Arab foreign nationals captive at the site, unknown to the Israeli courts, the Red Cross and human rights groups. Many were Lebanese citizens kidnapped during Israel’s 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon. But there were also Jordanians, Syrians, Egyptians and Iranians.
This site would soon be known as a “black site”, a term popularised by Washington’s invasion of Iraq that year. Drawing on techniques refined by Israel at Facility 1391, the US would, in the coming months and years, torture Iraqis and others at Abu Ghraib and Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo.
No one knew how many captives were held in Israel’s Facility 1391, how long they had been there or if there were more such prisons.
However, the first testimonies from inmates revealed horrifying conditions. For most of the time, they were kept in a state of sensory deprivation, made to wear blacked-out goggles, except for when being tortured. In one case that later came to court, a Lebanese captive had been sodomised with a baton by “Major George”, the facility’s torturer-in-chief.
Major George would go on to become head of Israeli police relations with the Palestinian population of Jerusalem.
Another secret prison
It was difficult not to recall Facility 1391 this month, as CNN published an investigation into a new Israeli secret prison, Sde Teiman.
This prison was set up months ago to process not foreign nationals but thousands of Palestinian men and boys, victims of Israel’s occupation, seized from the streets of Gaza and the West Bank since Hamas carried out a one-day attack on 7 October. Some 1,150 Israelis were killed and 250 were dragged back into Gaza as hostages.
As with Facility 1391, revelations of the horrors taking place at Israel’s new black site have garnered barely any attention from the western media establishment.
CNN, known for excising Israeli atrocities from its coverage on the orders of executives, should be applauded for finally doing what western media often falsely claims is its role: holding power to account.
Headlined “Strapped down, blindfolded, held in diapers”, the lengthy article details the degrading, brutal conditions Palestinians kidnapped from Gaza and the West Bank are being subjected to.
The number of Palestinians passing through the secretive detention camp, located in the Negev desert, is unknown. But satellite photos show the site is rapidly expanding, presumably to accommodate ever more “prisoners”.
Some Palestinians who have emerged, utterly broken from this incarceration system – where the world saw men and boys being paraded zip-tied, near-naked and blindfolded in Gaza’s streets and stadiums back in November and December – began telling of their experiences months ago.
Predictably, the western media largely ignored the testimonies.
Even when staff from Sde Teiman started coming forward weeks ago to divulge horror stories, western outlets collectively yawned – apart from CNN.
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