Hamas’s Torture Tactics Are Finally in the Spotlight

By Seth Mandel

Monday, February 10, 2025

 

Now that Hamas’s abuse of Israeli hostages threatens to derail the cease-fire, the subject will get more attention. The hostages, especially those who were freed recently, have been concentrating on recovery. In the future, we expect to learn in much greater detail what happened to the captives in those tunnels and dungeons, but what we know already is troubling enough.

 

This week the attention is on Or Levy, Ohad Ben Ami, and Eli Sharabi because their abuse was evident before they even said a word. But more information has come trickling out: they were, reportedly, burned with hot objects, hung upside down, kept in chains, at times gagged to the point of suffocation, starved and dehydrated.

 

It is not the first shocking testimony from ex-captives.

 

Amit Soussana was chained up in a child’s bedroom. After her captor let her bathe, he stripped her of her towel and sexually assaulted her, Soussana told the New York Times in March. Later, she was suspended in the space between two couches and beaten. According to recently released hostages, Soussana’s captors beat her at gunpoint viciously until another captive convinced the Hamasniks that they had mistaken her for an IDF officer.

 

According to other testimony, sexual assault of the captives was widespread. Hamas also apparently tortured a child with an item similar to a hot branding iron.

 

Physical abuse is common, according to the captives. Yarden Bibas and Ofer Calderon were beaten and kept in cages. Bibas was also subject to the psychological abuse Hamas takes special pleasure in doling out. His wife and two young children were also taken hostage. At one point, Bibas’s captors told him his family had been killed in an Israeli airstrike, and took a video of his anguish. Hamas has not confirmed the fate of Bibas’s wife and children, even after his release. They reportedly tormented Bibas about his family throughout his nearly 500-day captivity.

 

The hostages would often be told they were being freed when they weren’t. Gadi Mozes, an 80-year-old farmer released last month, was at one point kept in a hot pickup truck for 12 hours underneath a Red Cross building in Gaza. He hoped he was being processed for release, but it turned out he was just being moved to a new location.

 

During the initial Oct. 7 attacks, before taking Emily Damari captive, Hamas terrorists shot her dog. While she was comforting the dog as it lay dying, Hamas shot her in the hand, taking off two of her fingers, then dragged her to Gaza.

 

Another form of torture practiced by Hamas was to let serious injuries go untreated and force the captives to watch them deteriorate.

 

Romi Gonen was taken into Gaza with a bullet wound. She was permitted to clean the wound with no painkillers and her captors reportedly laughed at her as she did so. “Her hand is disabled now, she can’t use it,” her mother told the Times of Israel. She has a long road of surgery and physical therapy ahead of her.

 

Daniella Gilboa was taken into Gaza with a bullet in her leg and returned sixteen months later with the bullet still in her leg. Before her release, Hamas had faked her death to torment her family, releasing images supposedly of Gilboa’s corpse wrapped in a burial shroud.

 

Doron Steinbrecher suffered from a condition that required daily medicine, which she was not given in captivity. She and her fellow captives received so little food they would count the grains of rice they would portion out to each person in her hostage group to make sure it was a fair split.

 

We are sure to get much more information once the more recent ex-hostages are ready to talk in detail about their experiences in Hamas’s dungeons. But the strong possibility exists that the emaciated survivors released on Saturday were the healthiest captives Hamas had left. What we already know of the torture and torment amounts to unspeakable crimes, but they may be just the tip of the iceberg.

On the Morality of Waterboarding

By David French

Monday, May 14, 2018

Last week, the Internet briefly lit up with the claim that President Trump’s nominee to run the CIA, Gina Haspel, repeatedly dodged and evaded when asked to opine about the morality of waterboarding and other forms of “enhanced interrogation.” California senator Kamala Harris was particularly tenacious in trying to tie Haspel to a yes or no answer to the question of whether “previous techniques” were immoral.

It’s not a question susceptible to a yes or no response. The true answer is highly dependent on the technique at issue and the circumstances of its use.

Morality in war is a complex and shifting thing. Let’s take, for example, two of the most famous and most successful operations in American military history — Sherman’s March to the Sea and Truman’s atomic-bomb strikes on Japan. Both of them involved deliberate, mass-scale targeting of civilian assets. The atomic bombings also included the deliberate mass killing of innocent men, women, and children. In ordinary times and in more “ordinary” wars, the morality of both actions is clear and unequivocal. They’re wrong. Indeed, in ordinary times and in ordinary wars, they’re more than just wrong — they’re unlawful.

And that’s the proper default position of American arms. Absent extraordinary circumstances, American forces should not deliberately target civilians or civilian assets. That’s also the proper default position regarding enhanced interrogation. Absent extraordinary circumstances, American forces should not engage in “enhanced interrogation.” But these default presumptions should be rebuttable.

In the context of both the Civil War and World War II, American forces were engaged in an existential struggle. The Civil War was one of the first modern “total wars,” where the resources of the entire society are mobilized to wage war. The South in particular — with its smaller manpower and industrial base — had to mobilize all its resources to stay on the battlefield against the Union. And so, to defeat the South, intelligent Union generals like Grant and Sherman knew that they had to diminish Confederate resources, in both men and material. Thus, the war of attrition against Lee in Virginia. Thus, Sherman’s campaign to rip the heart out of the southern economy in Georgia.

In a very real sense, Sherman and Grant — as brutal as they were — saved lives. They cut short a war that was far bloodier than either side expected, and they ultimately ended the meat grinder of 1861-1864 — when Confederate armies stood toe-to-toe with a larger foe and bested it time and again on the battlefield. Do we condemn Sherman today?

Similarly, imagine the shock and horror in the American public had we chosen not to use the atomic bomb, fought Japan for every inch of the home islands, and then later found out that Truman sat on a war-ending weapon that could have spared the hundreds of thousands of American lives.

Moving back to enhanced interrogation, it’s easy to imagine a very different kind of hearing than the one Haspel endured last week. Think of the hearing that would happen after a catastrophic terror strike that could have been averted through more dramatic interrogation measures. The architects of restraint would face thousands of bereaved families, each of them demanding to know why an interrogation technique (like waterboarding) — long used in training against our own soldiers — was deemed too brutal to use to avert catastrophe. The moral argument would look very different indeed.

The United States should maintain general prohibitions against extreme measures, but it must also leave room for extraordinary circumstances. When it comes to enhanced interrogation, I prefer a solution advanced by Alan Dershowitz during the Obama administration — what he called the “torture warrant.” In other words, prohibit enhanced interrogation except in circumstances defined by law and channeled through the law. Emergency orders can be granted with speed, and the techniques limited by statute. The Dershowitz proposal introduces transparency and accountability to a process shrouded in secrecy — where the secrecy itself often enables grotesque abuse.

“War is hell,” Sherman famously declared, and life in that hell involves making the most challenging of moral decisions with the highest possible stakes. At a minimum, the consequences of failure can mean death and dismemberment. At most, they can mean the end of a civilization. In that circumstance, lines can and must be drawn, but they must often be drawn with pencils, not pens. Our enemies must know that when they violate the laws of war that they cannot rely on the straitjacket we stitch to save them from the fate they so richly deserve.

The CIA’s Gina Haspel Deserves America’s Gratitude

By Deroy Murdock

Wednesday, May 09, 2018

I have just two words for accused waterboarder and CIA-director nominee Gina Haspel:

Thank you.

“Enhanced interrogation” programs in general, and waterboarding in particular, generated the dots that CIA officers and other intelligence professionals connected in order to stop the deadly bloodshed of al-Qaeda.

Al-Who?

As the U.S. and its allies have hammered this vicious, militant-Islamic terrorist group into apparent oblivion, it’s easy to forget that al-Qaeda kept America and the rest of Civilization wide awake every night, asking, “What happens next?” Could Osama bin Laden and his cave-dwelling savages stage another September 11 massacre? After they murdered 2,996 people and wounded 7,356 others among the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and United Airlines Flight 93’s crash site in Shanksville, Pa., Americans fretted that al-Qaeda would return for more carnage — possibly even with chemical, biological, or atomic weapons.

As the ruins of the Twin Towers and the Defense Department’s headquarters smoldered for months, Americans and our leaders — from Capitol Hill to the White House — demanded that the butchers of September 11 be picked up, punished, and prevented from perpetrating fresh mayhem.

So, brave people like Gina Haspel got busy. The 33-year veteran CIA officer (whose U.S. Senate confirmation hearings begin this morning) and her foreign counterparts tracked down al-Qaeda members. Some were killed straight away. Good. Others were captured alive. Even better.

As the righteous desire for vengeance was stilled, intelligence personnel pumped these killers for information: Who were they? Who sent them? Who else did they know? What else did they have in the works?

Some al-Qaeda murderers who were caught spoke readily. Others did so after facing such disincentives to silence as hot or cold detention cells, tobacco smoke in their faces, sleep deprivation, loud music, and — according to one report — “a forced bath using a stiff brush.”

Others resisted, which required additional inducements for them to share their knowledge. This is where waterboarding came in.

Despite what the Left would like Americans to believe, the CIA and other U.S. authorities did not waterboard random Muslim men who were nabbed while strolling home from their local mosques. Nor was footage of their waterboarding hand delivered to the White House so that President G. W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney could enjoy it, along with soda and Jiffy Pop.

According to the CIA, a grand total of three al-Qaeda leaders were waterboarded: Abu Zubaydah, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, and Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM). And how beautiful that they were. Those three, who most likely wanted you dead, sang like Grammy winners after interrogators held them down and poured water over their rag-covered faces — a procedure that produces neither injury nor permanent physical damage. What it does yield is invaluable information:

Zubaydah was an al-Qaeda operations specialist and aide to Osama bin Laden. He dummied up during questioning, but waterboarding loosened his lips. He then surrendered the names and whereabouts of USS Cole bomber al-Nashiri (17 Americans dead, 40 wounded), 9/11 conspirator Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and KSM — helping snare all three.

KSM masterminded 9/11. He also bragged, “I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew Daniel Pearl in the City of Karachi, Pakistan.” Before his ultimately fatal kidnapping, Pearl was a well-regarded Wall Street Journal correspondent.

Interrogators initially got nowhere with KSM. He replied to their questions with Koranic verses. Eventually, he was waterboarded, reportedly for 90 seconds.

KSM “didn’t resist,” one CIA veteran explained in the August 13, 2007, issue of The New Yorker. “He sang right away. He cracked real quick.” Another CIA official told ABC News: “KSM lasted the longest under water-boarding, about a minute and a half, but once he broke, it never had to be used again.”

Among others, KSM ratted on Hambali, the organizer of the October 2002 Bali nightclub explosions. That attack killed seven Americans, 88 Australians, and 107 others, and injured 209 more. KSM outed Iyman Faris, who was caught plotting to use acetylene torches to sever the Brooklyn Bridge’s cables, so that the landmark would tumble into the East River. KSM gave up Yazid Sufaat. Page 151 of The 9/11 Commission Report elaborates: “Sufaat would spend several months attempting to cultivate anthrax for al Qaeda in a laboratory he helped set up near the Kandahar airport.”

KSM also pointed authorities to the 17-member Guraba Cell. These Malaysia-based Jemaah Islamiyah agents planned to commandeer jets and pilot them into Los Angeles’s 1,018-foot Library Tower (now called the U.S. Bank Tower). The goal: Roast the men and women inside the West Coast’s tallest skyscraper, in a de facto 9/11 West.

“The most important source of intelligence we had after 9/11 came from the interrogation of high-value detainees,” Robert Grenier, former chief of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, told The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer. He called KSM “the most valuable of the high-value detainees, because he had operational knowledge.”

As the Washington Post reported on January 25, 2017, “senior current and former CIA officials said the agency’s interrogation program, including the use of waterboarding, had produced actionable intelligence that among other things led to the identification of Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan.”

Gina Haspel’s role in these priceless efforts is, by definition, ill-defined. Most of her work was clandestine and should remain so. News reports indicate that she ran four overseas CIA stations, managed covert operations, and closely watched Russia. If approved, Haspel will become the first CIA chief in 52 years to have climbed the ladder from, metaphorically, the mail room to the office of Director of Central Intelligence.

One might expect that Senate Democrats, reputedly the vanguard of “the Party of Women,” would help Haspel shatter the glass ceiling at the CIA, an historically male-dominated institution in an historically male-dominated profession. But Democrats are all too eager to lock arms and block this highly qualified and widely praised woman so that they can high-kick President Donald J. Trump in the teeth. So, high-kick the donkeys do. If that means that the first woman nominated to run the CIA never does so, then too bad for Gina.

Democrats now weep like widows over how terribly mean Haspel was to those poor, defenseless al-Qaeda volunteers. But soon after the September 11 slaughter, Democrats’ eyes were drier than Dubai. Rather than the retroactive mercy that they now show al-Qaeda, these very same Democrats back then wanted to squeeze these Islamofascist scum until they squealed.

As early as September 2002, top congressional leaders from both parties and chambers, were given “graphic and detailed” briefings on the CIA’s interrogation techniques — including waterboarding, the Washington Post reported on December 9, 2007. Participants included House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California. During one key update, according to the Post, “No objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder.”

“With one known exception,” the Post added, “no formal objections were raised by the lawmakers briefed about the harsh methods during the two years in which waterboarding was employed, from 2002 to 2003, said Democrats and Republicans with direct knowledge of the matter.” Then-representative Jane Harman (D., Calif.) advised caution. Otherwise, the idea was to keep calm and waterboard on.

“Among those being briefed, there was a pretty full understanding of what the CIA was doing,” Porter Goss, who was then-chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and later the director of Central Intelligence (2004 to 2006), told the Post. “And the reaction in the room was not just approval, but encouragement.”

One official at these congressional briefings recalled that “there was no objecting, no hand-wringing. The attitude was, ‘We don’t care what you do to those guys as long as you get the information you need to protect the American people.’”

Jose Rodriguez, the CIA’s then-director of clandestine services, told Chris Wallace about these Capitol Hill sit-downs on the December 14, 2014, edition of Fox News Sunday. Rodriguez said that members of Congress told him: “You got to go out and use the authorities that you’re given to protect America.’. . . So, all of these people knew exactly what we were doing.” Rodriguez estimated that congressional leaders attended at least 40 briefings about these interrogations between 2002 and 2009.

None other than Senator Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) said in May 2002, that when it came to smashing al-Qaeda: “We have to do some things that historically we have not wanted to do to protect ourselves.”

On waterboarding, Democrats have gone from pom poms yesterday to brickbats today. Such naked hypocrisy — fueled by an unbridled, white-hot hatred for President Trump, America’s national security be damned — leaves Democrats in an increasingly typical state of disgrace.              

On the morning of September 11, I witnessed a low-flying American Airlines jet roar over my balcony in Manhattan’s East Village. Within hours, I learned that the man at the controls was not a star-crossed aviator struggling to keep his aircraft aloft. Rather it was Mohamed Atta guiding a missile full of innocent travelers into a skyscraper full of innocent workers.

That was as close an encounter with militant Islam as I hope ever to experience. If so, I — like 325 million Americans — will be grateful to Gina Haspel.

Tortured Discussion about Torture

By Bruce Bialosky

Monday, December 29, 2014

There is an argument put forth among some in Los Angeles whenever there is an eruption coming from Gaza of rockets fired into Israel. We love to hear the restraint that certain people suggest to the Israelis about the level of their military reaction to the terror raining down on their civilian population. We ask these people what would happen if there were random killer rockets landing in Brentwood or Westwood or Malibu. We are certain that limousine liberals would be demanding annihilation of the perpetrators.

In the same manner it is easy for those who never have to confront evil to demand that we here in the United States should play by a different rulebook than the murderous enemies that challenge civilization.

First of all, all Americans who are in favor of torture raise your hands. That is a small number, if any. Our culture has risen above that and justifiably that should be our policy and our goal.

There are certainly individuals who honestly and courageously are against the use of torture. Senator John McCain is a perfect example. People across the political spectrum have expressed that torture should not be part of our lexicon and I have read their thoughts on this subject.

But for us to completely abandon techniques to extract essential information from combatants would be unilaterally disarming.

What seems to be forgotten is that we are at war. We have been at war with Islamic terrorists for at least two decades if not longer. The way things are going, we will be at war with these malcontents for a long time. Until they are wiped out, this conflict will continue because groups like the Taliban, ISIS, Boko Haram and Hamas will not relent until totally defeated. We are reminded of that whenever they show us another beheaded American, but we seem to forget about it when it is over “there,” in Afghanistan or Israel.

The recent report released by Senator Dianne Feinstein is a very sad event in our history. Feinstein has been a stellar grown-up amongst a group of misguided Democratic Senators, with only a few exceptions such as Senator Robert Menendez. Some consider this report a badge of honor for her; while others like me consider this a black mark on an otherwise fine career.

There has been a lot thrown around about this matter and there are glaring assertions in the Feinstein report. There are two points on which to focus. The first is I am almost absolutely sure that there were some excesses in the interrogation even if our people followed the rules that they were told were in place. This was in the middle of a war, and, as much as we attempt to meter the behavior of our personnel, there will be things done that should not have been done. I would not want to be the person judging that behavior ten years after the fact. The question becomes: was clear malicious intent applied as opposed to an attempt to garner information to protect our country? That is what the bosses were there for at the time – to protect against the excesses.

The second point is you will never convince me that solely using conversation and positive encouragement will elicit information from our enemies. I agree that sometimes the techniques used will gain us false information, but that would happen in either case. There will be situations where prisoners will break and provide us with valuable information through the coercion -- whatever the methods used. There will always be times where we need to do what we need to do to win a war.

The sanctimonious attitudes toward what was done by the CIA over ten years ago (yes, waterboarding stopped in 2004) flummoxed many people. The same people decrying the actions of the CIA are not marching in the streets demanding President Obama stop using unmanned drones from annihilating terrorists and anyone hanging with them. Personally I think that anyone hanging out with well-established terrorists get what they deserve and are not actually collateral damage or innocent. If you don’t believe we should be using torture or drones then you ignore the dangers in this worldthat have existed for millenniums and I would not want you in a position of power.

I am against torture. I also would love to not have a military. I am also a realist. It can be an ugly world beyond our borders. The current danger principally comes from maniacal Islamic terrorists. There will be another danger after that challenging our country and our allies. They hate us not because of what we do, but because of who we are and what we stand for as they attempt to impose their will on us. We need brave souls willing to protect us and I am glad we have them.

We want them on that wall and we need them on that wall.