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US lawyers attack Israeli security agent "thugs"

Posted on: Friday, 3 March 2006, 16:28 CST

By Michael Conlon

CHICAGO (Reuters) - A confession extracted by torture at the hands of Israeli security "thugs" should not be allowed in an American court, lawyers for a Palestinian immigrant accused of funneling money to Hamas said on Friday.

U.S. prosecutors said the man, Mohammed Salah, was a liar who had information known only to high-level Hamas figures before he made the 1993 confession in question and there was no evidence to support his claims of torture.

The U.S. government considers Hamas a "terrorist organization." In January, it swept to victory in Palestinian elections.

Salah, a U.S. citizen who lives in the Chicago area, is due to go on trial in October on charges leveled in 2004 that he and two other Palestinian immigrants conspired to get hundreds of thousands of dollars to Hamas.

He spent five years in Israeli jails in the 1990s on similar charges, and prosecutors want to use his confession in that case against him at his trial.

In an impassioned pretrial argument before Judge Amy St. Eve of the U.S. District Court, Salah's lawyer, Michael Deutsch, said his prosecution "is nothing more than post-9/11 political propaganda" and the confession was "abhorrent" to the U.S. system of law.

He said the confession, made 30 days after his arrest at an Israeli checkpoint, came after days of sleep deprivation, physical and sexual abuse and being tied for hours to a toddler-sized wooden chair with the front legs shortened to inflict pain.

"It's embarrassing that this kind of argument would be going on in an American courtroom," Deutsch said, comparing the methods used by Israel in its occupied territories in 1993 with those once employed in South Africa and Chile. It violated not only international human rights but the U.S. Constitution's guarantees, he said.

Prosecutors on Monday are bringing in two of the agents who questioned Salah for a closed court session in an unprecedented discussion about the methods they used on Salah.

Robert Bloom, another of Salah's lawyers, told reporters before the hearing the Israelis were permitting "two of their thugs to testify" to try to make the confession credible.

Deutsch later told the judge the Shin Bet agents, whose identities will not be revealed, would testify only to "propagandize, to cover up, to lie about what they do ... it's all part of a continuing lie ... to protect the state of Israel, everything else be damned."

Joseph Ferguson, an assistant U.S. attorney, told the judge that Salah was "a self-admitted member of the Hamas terrorist organization (who) has always been a liar" and news pictures taken of him from time to time after his capture show no physical signs of abuse.

He was seen more than once by U.S. consular officials who did not find him abused, he said.

At one point he was using information he had to bargain for the release of a "terrorist mastermind," he said, and gave the Israelis information about the burial place of a Hamas victim, which was known only to a few people in that organization, which calls Israel its sworn enemy.

His 53-page handwritten confession shows him to be a "high ranking member of Hamas," Ferguson said.

At one point, he added, a Western journalist was brought in to see his interrogation and found nothing unusual.

Deutsch countered that the journalist, former New York Times reporter Judith Miller, "worked closely with the Israeli government" and was permitted to see a "staged interrogation."

The hearing is expected to last for two weeks after which the judge will rule whether the confession can be used at the trial.

Salah, a thin bespectacled man in his 40s with a close gray beard, is free on bond and attended Friday's hearing. He could testify during the hearing, Deutsch said. Ferguson said if he did not testify the torture charges he had made in a written affidavit were suspect.

Source: REUTERS

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