Just the fact that the Palestinians in occupied Palestine have a torture chair in their name. The Israelis are really a special kind if evil.
The Jews did more than that: Abu Ghraib was their idea. They not only built it but gave it its code of conduct and trained the gentile Americans in all sort of torture techniques, not just the ‘Palestinian Chair’. Never forgive, never forget.
Army interrogators had learned to use this chair by Israeli interrogators, and the Israeli interrogators presumably called it the Palestinian chair because they were torturing Palestinians in it.
As a former interrogator in Iraq working as a military contractor for the private security firm CACI, Eric Fair was stationed at the Abu Ghraib prison and in Fallujah in 2004. While in Fallujah, he witnessed a torture device known as the Palestinian chair.
He writes in his new book, “Consequence: A Memoir,” that the chair was a way to immobilize prisoners in order to break them down both physically and mentally. He also wrote that the Israeli military taught them how to use the Palestinian chair during a joint training exercise.
“We pass by the interrogation room where Tyner has been working on Raad Hussein. We haven’t heard Tyner scream or throw anything today. The door to the room, a flimsy sheet of plywood, has blown open in the hot desert wind. Inside, Raad Hussein is bound to the Palestinian chair. His hands are tied to his ankles. The chair forces him to lean forward in a crouch, forcing all of his weight onto his thighs.
It’s as if he’s been trapped in the act of kneeling down to pray, his knees frozen just above the floor, his arms pinned below his legs. He is blindfolded. His head has collapsed into his chest. He wheezes and gasps for air. There is a pool of urine at his feet. He moans: too tired to cry, but in too much pain to remain silent.
“Henson comes out into the hallway and walks past the room. He covers the side of his face as he walks by and says, ‘I don’t even want to know.’
“I am silent. This is a sin. I know it as soon as I see it. There will be no atonement for it. In the coming years, I won’t have the audacity to seek it. Witnessing a man being tortured in the Palestinian chair requires the witness to either seek justice or cover his face. Like Henson in Fallujah, I’ll spend the rest of my life covering my face.”
Army interrogators had learned to use this chair by Israeli interrogators, and the Israeli interrogators presumably called it the Palestinian chair because they were torturing Palestinians in it.
The Palestinian chair was simply a confined space. It was a way, rather than putting someone in a box and confining them inside, was to essentially confine them with the chair. And it was designed, like all enhanced interrogation techniques, to simply break the will, to simply break them down physically in this case and then essentially break their will.
We tried the chair
It locks you into what is essentially a squat, a permanent squat, from which you can’t recover. We only lasted about a minute. And physically, we may—we certainly could have lasted longer, but it was the—it’s the overwhelming sense of fear that a horrific sort of pain is on its way. And because your hands are bound, you recognize that there’s no way to recover from it. So, certainly, the physical pain is excruciating, but the mental and sort of emotional strain of knowing that you can’t—there’s simply no way to recover from that is what amounted to torture.