Trial update; What voters want; Marketing and anti-abortion tactics update

The NYT published a long interview between NYT columnist David French and two experts, Rebecca Roiphe, a former assistant district attorney in the Manhattan district attorney’s office, and Ken White, a former federal prosecutor. Two points about the interview are of interest.  

1. The experts shed light on whether some of the Stormy Daniels testimony that was improperly allowed to get to the jury would be sufficient grounds to overturn a conviction of DJT. One expert said that the error would probably not be sufficient to cause a mistrial and the other did not respond. I assumed that the error would be a good basis to get a mistrial. My assumption was wrong.  

2. Both experts think the prosecution is doing a pretty good job and their assessment of the trial so far regarding one or more felony convictions is positive. They believe the jury will understand the nature of the case because the evidence has been laid out for the jury in a clear way. 

The relevant parts of the interview:

French: Is the judge’s decision to deny the motion for mistrial a reversible error?

Roiphe: I don’t think this will cause a huge legal problem for the prosecution on appeal. Defense lawyers call for mistrials all the time, and judges have a great deal of latitude in dealing with moments like these when testimony slips out that should not have.

French: Let’s end with some lightning round questions. First, since the trial has started, in your view has the chance of conviction gone up or down?

Roiphe: Up.

White: Up significantly.

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A NYT opinion by David Brooks makes an interesting point about poll data suggesting a reason for why DJT is leading Biden in key contested states: 

What do American voters want? The latest New York Times/Siena polls of swing states offer some confusing evidence on this point. Some of the polling results suggest that Americans are in a revolutionary frame of mind: If you ask whether the political and economic system needs major changes, 69 percent say it either needs major changes or should be entirely torn down.

On the other hand, when the pollsters gave voters a choice between a candidate who would bring the country back to normal and one who would bring major changes, 51 percent said they would prefer the back-to-normal candidate and only 40 percent would prefer the major-changes candidate.

So which is it?

Well, different voters want different things. But if I had to write a single sentence that reconciled these diverse findings, it would be this: The people who run America’s systems have led the country seriously astray; we need a president who will shake things up and return the country back to normal.

When they hear “systems,” I assume voters are thinking of the network of institutions run by America’s elite — corporations, governing agencies, higher education, the news media and so on. If voters believe one thing about Donald Trump it’s that he’s against these systems and these systems are against him.

Voters clearly see President Biden implicated in these systems. The heart of Biden’s problem heaves into view when you ask people which candidate will bring about change. Seventy percent of voters believe that Trump would bring about major changes or tear down the system entirely if elected. Yet 71 percent of voters believe that little or nothing would change if Biden is re-elected.

In other words, the evidence suggests that the swing voter wants reactionary change, not revolutionary change. The mood suggested by the evidence is angry nostalgia. That would be my explanation for why Trump is so convincingly ahead in most of the swing states.

That is plausibly part of the reason for support among some voters who might not otherwise vote for DJT. Biden does seem to be both unable and unwilling to change the status quo. DJT will shake things up, but in a very bad way.

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Radical antiabortion influencers are flooding social media with blatant lies about the alleged horrors of using birth control pills: 

US wellness influencers are increasingly targeting birth control pills, pushing their followers to abandon the contraceptives with false claims about infertility and low libido that researchers say leave them vulnerable to unintended pregnancies.

That includes Taylor Gossett, a TikTok influencer with nearly 200,000 followers who explicitly called the medication "toxic" alongside offers to join her "master class" in "natural" birth control.  

Podcaster Sahara Rose called birth control the "divorce pill" in a video viewed more than 550,000 times, claiming it impacts who "you're attracted to" and leads users to choose the wrong mate.

"This spike in contraception misinformation [lies actually] correlates with the restriction of abortion access in a number of states," misinformation researcher Jenna Sherman told AFP, adding that many of the online falsehoods stemmed from "anti-abortion actors."

Lying has truly been normalized in America. It is not confined to just politics. Grifters and radical activists are out there lying for money, fame and influence in the basically unregulated world of advertising and political dark free speech. The bad consequences of lies and grifting is not an obvious concern for morally rotted liars.

About the great replacement theory

An issue that is at or near the top of concerns among voters on the political right (I call the mainstream right the authoritarian radical right) is immigration. An important factor in raising fear and anger about uncontrolled immigration is a bit of powerful, polarizing propaganda called the Great Replacement Theory (GRT). Since this idea has powerful appeal to millions of voters, it makes sense to discuss it. The fear and anger this issue foments could be a necessary factor that gets DJT re-elected in 2024.   

Wikipedia describes the GRT like this:

The Great Replacement (French: Grand Remplacement), also known as replacement theory or great replacement theory, is a white nationalist far-right conspiracy theory espoused by French author Renaud Camus. The original theory states that, with the complicity or cooperation of "replacist" elites, the ethnic French and white European populations at large are being demographically and culturally replaced by non-white peoples—especially from Muslim-majority countries—through mass migration, demographic growth and a drop in the birth rate of white Europeans. Since then, similar claims have been advanced in other national contexts, notably in the United States. Mainstream scholars have dismissed these claims of a conspiracy of "replacist" elites as rooted in a misunderstanding of demographic statistics and premised upon an unscientific, racist worldview. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, the Great Replacement "has been widely ridiculed for its blatant absurdity."

An article the WaPo published in May of 2022 (not paywalled) discusses the GRT and some of the violence it has inspired in recent times:

The man authorities say opened fire in a Buffalo grocery store Saturday, killing 10, appears to have left behind a white supremacist document centered on the idea of a plot to replace the White population with immigrants.

This far-right conspiracy theory, known as the “great replacement theory,” has inspired a lot of recent violence, including the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand, where the shooter warned of “White genocide.” He later pleaded guilty to 51 murders, 40 attempted murders and engaging in a terrorist act.

Some of the torch-bearing “Unite the Right” demonstrators, including Ku Klux Klan members and neo-Nazis, who terrorized Charlottesville in 2017 were also motivated by the theory, which warns that an increase in the non-White population fueled by immigration will destroy White and Western civilization.

But while the great replacement theory has inspired horrific violence in the past five years, it’s a lot older than that. More than 70 years ago, a U.S. senator published a book warning of the same destruction of White civilization.

Theodore G. Bilbo, a Democrat, had twice been governor of Mississippi before he served in the U.S. Senate from 1935 to 1947, when “the growing intolerance among many whites toward public racism and anti-Semitism” led to his fall, according to an account in the Journal of Mississippi History.

An equal-opportunity racist, he addressed some of his letters with slurs against Italians and Jews, depending on the recipient. But the bulk of his loathing and fear was reserved for Black Americans, as spelled out in his 1947 book “Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization.”

A showboater and self-promoter, he began the book with this modest preface: “For nine years I have read, studied and analyzed practically all the records and everything written throughout the entire world on the subject of race relations, covering a period of close on to thirty thousand years.” ( Note: Bilbo was a liar -- the earliest known writing is from southern Mesopotamia ~3400 BC, not ~28,000 BC)

Bilbo saw an existential threat in the growing ranks of American-born descendants of enslaved Africans. His solution? Ship them back.

“The great civilizations of the ages have been produce[d] by the Caucasian race,” he wrote. When Black people moved in, he wrote, mighty societies such as ancient Egypt were destroyed and mongrel races were created. “The mongrel not only lacks the ability to create a civilization, but he cannot maintain a culture that he finds around him,” he wrote.

“A White America or a mongrel America — you must take your choice!”

The GRT is playing a role in the current elections. As usual for America's authoritarian radical right, authoritarian propaganda is mostly fact-free lies and slanders: 

U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake claimed without evidence Sunday that Democrats are allowing undocumented immigrants to flood across the border as part of a nationwide plot to pad voter rolls while registering that group for Medicare and Medicaid benefits.

The Republican front-runner echoed the "great replacement theory" favored by white nationalists as she mixed accusations of election fraud with welfare fraud to a credulous Maria Bartiromo on her “Sunday Morning Futures” show on Fox News.

Lake has repeatedly employed these themes, in part to explain her 2022 gubernatorial loss. Lake is currently running for the U.S. Senate seat held by U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz.

The authoritarian radical right Faux News has been a 

major proponent of GRT lies and slanders for years

Part of the loyal Faux News audience 

Some recent research on belief in the GRT suggests that emotions, especially feelings of insecurity and fear, correlate with belief in the GRT. By contrast, reasoned thinking correlates with disbelief in the GRT threat: 

According to the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, mass immigration to Europe and the U.S. is part of a secret plot to replace White and Christian population with non-White and Muslim immigrants. With the aim of exploring psychological factors that play a role in believing in the “great replacement” theory, the present research focused on individual differences in reflective thinking. Using data from a cross-sectional study (N = 906), we found that cognitive reflection [roughly, reasoned thinking] was negatively associated with belief in the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, even when political ideology and sociodemographic characteristics were controlled in the analysis. The findings highlight the key role of reflective thinking in countering conspiracy theories.  

Conspiracy theories can be toxic to democratic political discourse. By insinuating that societal groups or global elites have hidden agendas, they delegitimize certain opinions and political preferences, which harms constructive debates and can facilitate radicalization and evoke acts of political violence, including terrorism (Davey & Ebner, 2019; Marcks & Pawelz, 2022; Obaidi et al., 2022; Rottweiler & Gill, 2022). A globally relevant topic of political discourse where conspiracy beliefs can be particularly harmful is immigration. 

The GRT is a propaganda tactic frequently used by radical right authoritarians in Europe:

The idea that ethnically homogeneous populations in European nations are being demographically ‘replaced’ by people of non-European origin has been propagated by far-right actors for some time (Bjørgo and Ravndal, 2019). However, the idea of a ‘replacement’, orchestrated by liberal and/or left-wing elites, is also being propagated from the top, most notably by (illiberal) leaders such as prime minister Viktor Orban of Hungary and former prime minister Róbert Fico of Slovakia (Plenta, 2020).

The GRT and the insecurity and fear it generates is likely to be one of the top two or three authoritarian radical right propaganda issues that will motivate people to vote for DJT in 2024. 

That is the case because the Republican Party in congress recently killed a border immigration control bill that congressional Republicans themselves wrote. Once DJT realized that proposed legislation would help calm the emotions that border chaos and the GRT could foment (and the credit Biden would get for fixing the border), he ordered his party to block its passage into law. Being morally rotted and authoritarian, the GOP obeyed and killed their own proposed immigration law for purely partisan politics.

Before Faux fired Tucker, he was

a major proponent of GRT lies and slanders

How West Virginia’s first transgender elected official is influencing local politics

 

WHEELING, W.Va. (AP) — When Rosemary Ketchum gets introduced as the first openly transgender person to win elective office in West Virginia, there's often a shocked look that comes across people's faces.

(HOW did she pull it off?)

To her, it doesn't feel like magic. But in some ways, she can understand their surprise. Out of the handful of transgender officials in the U.S., only a few were elected in similarly rural, GOP-controlled states.

Ketchum answers matter-of-factly when people ask her how she got elected as an openly transgender candidate: she put her name on the ballot, knocked on doors, made phone calls to ask residents what they care about, and then trusted them to make a decision.

(Wow, what a novel approach)

“I didn’t pre-ordain or assume what they would think of me — I gave them the opportunity to think for themselves,” she said. “I didn’t walk up to a door, and say like, ‘Oh, this person has a Trump sign, they’re going to hate me.’”

Ketchum said when she’s canvassing, people aren’t talking about what bathrooms they think transgender people should be able to use, or whether kids should be reading books with LGBTQ+ characters in school. People often want to talk about repaving their road or worries about how many young people are leaving the state — one of only two states where the population declined in the 2020 census.

“That gives me more respect, frankly, for my neighbors,” Ketchum said. GOP lawmakers’ focus on books bans and bathroom access may attract attention statewide and nationally, but “it doesn’t work at a local level -- it doesn’t register,” she said.

(Is that true or just a quaint saying?)

She said many people have developed an apathy or distrust of government. But she doesn't engage with cynicism. Instead, she gives constituents her personal phone number and holds regular office hours at a local market where anyone can come by to speak with her.

More on her story:

https://www.courthousenews.com/how-west-virginias-first-transgender-elected-official-is-influencing-local-politics/

BUT this won't work on the national level. So I've heard. You can NOT appeal to those on the Right on the national level. 

So, let's hang this out there:

Could the methods Rosemary Ketchum is using to win local elections in a red district be used effectively on a national level? 

Russian social engineering; Netanyahu defends Gaza war

Since late in 2017, it seemed that global authoritarianism has sharpened its focus on attacking democracies everywhere. The most potent authoritarian forces come from within the border of democracies. In the US it is DJT and his Republican Party. The WaPo published an article about Putin mobilizing his entire society into an aggressive military force built to attack democracies everywhere by any means possible. In essence, what Putin is doing now looks a lot to me like what Hitler did with German society to prepare for war. The WaPo writes (not paywalled):

Under Putin, a militarized new Russia rises to challenge U.S. and the West

 

As Vladimir Putin persists in his bloody campaign to conquer Ukraine, the Russian leader is directing an equally momentous transformation at home — re-engineering his country into a regressive, militarized society that views the West as its mortal enemy.

Putin’s inauguration on Tuesday for a fifth term will not only mark his 25-year-long grip on power but also showcase Russia’s shift into what pro-Kremlin commentators call a “revolutionary power,” set on upending the global order, making its own rules, and demanding that totalitarian autocracy be respected as a legitimate alternative to democracy in a world redivided by big powers into spheres of influence.

“Russians live in a wholly new reality,” Dmitri Trenin, a pro-Kremlin analyst, wrote in reply to questions about an essay in which he argued that Russia’s anti-Western shift was “more radical and far-reaching” than anything anticipated when Putin invaded Ukraine but also “a relatively minor element of the wider transformation which is going on in Russia’s economy, polity, society, culture, values, and spiritual and intellectual life.”

In “Russia, Remastered,” The Washington Post documents the historic scale of the changes Putin is carrying out and has accelerated with breathtaking speed during two years of brutal war even as tens of thousands of Russians have fled abroad. It is a crusade that gives Putin common cause with China’s Xi Jinping as well as some supporters of former president Donald Trump. And it raises the prospect of an enduring civilizational conflict to subvert Western democracy and — Putin has warned — even threatens a new world war.

The WaPo article cites some of the efforts Putin is employing to re-engineer Russian society. For example, he is building an ultraconservative, puritanical society indoctrinated against liberal freedoms. That movement is very hostile to gay and transgender people. Putin is also reshaping all levels of education to indoctrinate hyper-patriotism among the young. Textbooks have been rewritten to reflect Putin's propaganda and re-written history. The state now requires compulsory military lessons to be taught by soldiers called “Basics of Security and Protection of the Motherland.” That education includes training with handling Kalashnikov assault rifles, grenades and drones. 

In addition to those efforts, Putin (i) is poisoning cultural life using blacklists of liberal or antiwar performers, directors, writers and artists, and (ii) abolishing women’s reproductive rights and access to abortions. Putin's anti-abortion demands are backed by constant propaganda about the need of young women to give birth often. Feminist activists and liberal female journalists are being arrested and charged with terrorism, extremism, discrediting the military and other offenses. Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center commented on Putin's preparation for war, “they need cannon fodder for the future.”

Q: Is it just me, e.g., self-delusion, or does the morally rotted, dictator DJT and his morally rotted, authoritarian Repub Party look a way too much like the morally rotted, murdering dictator-thug Putin and his murdering dictator enabling thugs and military? 

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At about 1:52 of this 3 minute video (produced by the Times of India) Netanyahu, defends his and Israeli government treatment of Palestinians in Gaza. In essence he refers to the holocaust of the 1940s and a current existential threat to Israel's existence. He says he will defeat Israel's “genocidal enemy” with or without foreign aid from any country and in the face of international criticism of how Israel conducts the war.

It is interesting that Netanyahu points to past history and the holocaust as part of the justification for what is happening in Gaza. One can wonder if Palestinian civilians point to history since ~1947 as justification for resisting Israel, but not justification for the Oct. 7 attacks, murders and kidnapping by Hamas. No one cannot justify the Hamas killings and kidnappings of Oct. 7. 

But does the horrible wrong by Hamas justify the horrible wrong Israel is committing in Gaza? Do two horrible wrongs make a right?

Opinions will differ.

News bits: Israel violated Int'l Humanitarian Law?; Trial update; A partisan reality check

An AP article reports about possible law violations by Israel's use of US weapons:

The Biden administration said Friday that Israel’s use of U.S.-provided weapons in Gaza likely violated international humanitarian law but that wartime conditions prevented U.S. officials from determining that for certain in specific airstrikes.

The finding of “reasonable” evidence to conclude that the U.S. ally had breached international law protecting civilians in the way it conducted its war against Hamas was the strongest statement that the Biden administration has yet made on the matter. It was released in a summary of a report being delivered to Congress on Friday.

But the caveat that the administration wasn’t able to link specific U.S. weapons to individual attacks by Israeli forces in Gaza could give the administration leeway in any future decision on whether to restrict provisions of offensive weapons to Israel.

The first-of-its-kind assessment, which was compelled by President Joe Biden’s fellow Democrats in Congress, comes after seven months of airstrikes, ground fighting and aid restrictions that have claimed the lives of nearly 35,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children.  

While U.S. officials were unable to gather all the information they needed on specific strikes, the report said that given Israel’s “significant reliance” on U.S.-made weapons, it was “reasonable to assess” that they had been used by Israel’s security forces in instances “inconsistent” with its obligations under international humanitarian law “or with best practices for mitigating civilian harm.”  

Rep. Michael McCaul, the Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said the review “only contributes to politically motivated anti-Israel sentiment” and should never have been done.

“Now is the time to stand with our ally Israel and ensure they have the tools they need,” he said in a statement.  

The U.S. “treats the government of Israel as above the law,” Amanda Klasing of the Amnesty International USA rights group said in a statement.

Israel has blocked access of journalists and observers to the war, just like it has blocked the flow of humanitarian aid to Gaza. Because of the information blockade, it is impossible to get unspun detailed information about the war. That is Israel's fault. That leads to the question, what is Israel hiding? I think it is hiding genocide. The burden of proof is solely on Israel to allow the gathering of unspun evidence by independent third parties that disproves that belief. Israel's claims of honesty in war are not credible. 

My biggest worry now is that Trump, the morally rotted GOP and their demagoguery Leviathan, e.g., Faux News, will use Biden's "inadequate" response to the Gaza war to win enough votes in close states to help him win the 2024 election. After that, it is pretty clear that DJT will kill what is left of our democracy as quickly as he can. After American democracy falls, other democracies are likely to follow, leading to a worldwide collapse of democracy, which gets replaced by some form of kleptocratic authoritarianism (dictatorship, plutocracy and/or theocracy).

How ironic. Israel is now in a position to kill democracy worldwide. Since 1948, the US has been Israel's greatest defender and supporter. Key reasons for that defense and support, often to the serious detriment of US interests, is that Israel is an ally, shares our values and is a democracy. That is bullshit. Israel mostly adheres to morally rotted Trump style values. It is inherently more authoritarian than democratic. Given the record, Israel arguably is more enemy than ally. 

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Multiple sources are reporting about an odd defense tactic that DJT's attorneys used when Stormy Daniels was testifying. The odd tactic was to (i) allow some of the prosecutor's sex-related questions to Daniels to be asked without objection, and (ii) allow Daniels to respond to those questions without objection. On its face, Daniels' testimony were damaging to DJT. 

However, I think that in reality letting Daniels off the leash was a brilliant strategy, probably enough to kill the case on appeal. The sex part of Daniels' testimony had nothing at all to do with the fraudulent documents. What DJT's attorney did was allow Daniels' testimony evidence into the trial court record. An appeals courts can now find that evidence was too objectionable (too prejudicial), creating a basis to overturn any guilty verdicts the jury might come back with. If that is true, and I think it is, the prosecutors in this case made a gigantic mistake.

I base my analysis on reporting about Daniels' testimony. The Hill reports: 

New York judge scolds Trump attorney over not 

objecting to Stormy Daniels testimony

Judge Juan Merchan, who oversees former President Trump’s hush money trial, scolded his defense team Thursday for not objecting more during porn actor Stormy Daniels’s most salacious testimony.

On the stand this week, Daniels went into graphic detail about her alleged sexual encounter with Trump at a 2006 golf tournament, which he denies happened. Citing those comments, Trump’s lawyers at the end of proceedings Thursday renewed their demand for a mistrial.

Merchan again denied the motion, sympathizing with the defense’s concerns but chastising Trump attorney Susan Necheles for not objecting when prosecutors asked Daniels whether Trump had used a condom during their alleged encounter.

“This is extremely prejudicial testimony,” Trump attorney Todd Blanche told the judge. “This isn’t a case about sex. This isn’t a case about whether this took place or didn’t take place. We completely deny it.” 

“I agree, that shouldn’t have come out. I wish those questions hadn’t been asked, and I wish those answers hadn’t been given,” Merchan said.

“But for the life of me, I don’t know why Ms. Necheles didn’t object,” the judge continued. “Why on earth she wouldn’t object to a mention of a condom, I don’t understand.” 

That judge Merchan does not understand why DJT's attorney did not object is discouraging. DJT is obviously setting up his case for an appeal if he gets convicted of anything. If nothing else, DJT's attorneys immediately made another demand for a mistrial and that should have made clear what the defense was up to. This time DJT has a damn good reason to demand a mistrial. The prosecutors blew it bigly.

Like with lots of people who should know better, Merchan truly does not understand who and what DJT really is.  Far too many Americans cannot grasp the awful reality that DJT actually is. Despite the rotten apple that the prosecutors have now stupidly tossed into the apple barrel, Merchan is pressing ahead with the case. He knows there is a solid ground on which to overturn guilty verdicts, but there isn't anything he can do about it now but finish the case. The rotten apple is in the barrel.

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A long article the NYT published (not paywalled) focuses on memories by people about DJT's time as president. This is sobering to say the least:

What one thing do you remember most 

about Donald Trump’s presidency?

In April as part of the New York Times/Siena College survey, we called about 1,000 voters across the country and asked for their most prominent memory of the Trump years. Here’s what they said, in their own words

The 2024 election will be in part a battle over memories, perhaps more than in previous presidential races because it’s a rare rematch. And memories aren’t necessarily static — what is happening today can influence those memories.

• “His honesty”

  Trump supporter in 2024

• “His lies”

  Biden supporter

• “He had the country headed in the right direction”

  Trump supporter

• “America was going in the wrong direction”

  Biden supporter

• “He was a crook”

  Biden supporter

• “He couldn’t be bought”

  Trump supporter

• “Efficient”

  Trump supporter

• “Incompetent”

  Biden supporter

• “Less division”

  Trump supporter

• “Divided the country”

  Undecided

• “He was the biggest liar ever”

  Biden supporter in 2024

• “His dislike for Black people”

  Biden supporter

• “The terrible things he did to women”

  Biden supporter

• “Chaos and corruption”

  Biden supporter

• “The disgrace he brought to this country”

  Biden supporter

• “His direct way of doing business”

  Trump supporter

• “I remember him using Twitter a lot”

  Undecided

• “He got things done and fulfilled campaign promises”

  Trump supporter

• “He saved our country and closed the border”

  Trump supporter in 2024

• “The wall”

  Trump supporter

• “Started the wall on the border”

  Trump supporter

• “His promise to build a wall”

  Trump supporter

• “He did attempt to start building the wall”

  Trump supporter

• “He did something about the border”

  Undecided

• “Putting children in cages”

  Biden supporter

Because of recency bias — a tendency to focus on recent events instead of past ones — people typically feel their current problems most sharply. And they tend to have a warmer recall of past experiences, which can lead to a sense of nostalgia. Like past presidents, Mr. Trump has enjoyed a higher approval rating of his time in office in retrospect.

The Dems need to sharpen their messaging to try to address some of the false beliefs that DJT supporters hold. How to do that is unclear to me.  

New CNN report of horrific torture of Palestinians imprisoned without charges in Israel

Palestinians imprisoned en masse without charges by Israeli forces are subject to constant torture, amputations due to prolonged confinement, and “revenge” beatings in an Israeli prison camp established after October 7, a harrowing new report by CNN reveals.

Three Israeli whistleblowers spoke of the horrific conditions imposed by Israeli soldiers at the Sde Teiman camp, which is located in the desert, 18 miles from Gaza. There, among other detention facilities, Palestinians are constantly blindfolded and handcuffed with zip ties. In one facility, they are forced to sit on the ground in painful positions; in a field hospital, they are forced to strip down, blindfolded and are strapped to beds wearing only diapers.

The whistleblowers described horrific, inhumane conditions in the prisons. Sometimes, Palestinians are forced to have limbs amputated due to injuries sustained from being handcuffed for long periods of time. These and other medical procedures are often done without anesthesia and by people without training, the report found. The camp — which is said to smell of wounds left to rot by unqualified medics — has a reputation for being “a paradise for interns.”

The soldiers incessantly dehumanize the prisoners, sources said, often holding them for weeks or more, even if they are eventually cleared to leave after Israeli guards find them to have no connections to Hamas in interrogations. While imprisoned, Palestinians face severe beatings for infractions such as speaking or moving.

The beatings “were not done to gather intelligence. They were done out of revenge,” one whistleblower told the outlet. “It was punishment for what they (the Palestinians) did on October 7 and punishment for behavior in the camp.”

The warehouse-style room where Israeli forces detain Palestinians looks like an animal pen, CNN said. A leaked photo obtained by the outlet shows prisoners sitting on an extremely thin mat on the ground with their heads down, the facility surrounded by barbed wire.

At night, troops at the prison unleash “large dogs” on the prisoners while they are sleeping and barge into enclosures while releasing sound grenades, a whistleblower told CNN.

At night, troops at the prison unleash “large dogs” on the prisoners while they are sleeping and barge into enclosures while releasing sound grenades, a whistleblower told CNN.

This account was corroborated by Mohammed al-Ran, a Palestinian who formerly headed the surgical unit at Gaza’s Indonesian Hospital in the north. In December, Al-Ran was arrested, blindfolded and handcuffed, and sent to a detention camp in the desert, where prisoners were forced to endure desert heat in the day and cold in the night. After being cleared of links to Hamas, al-Ran was picked to be a prisoner representative to act as a liaison between prisoners and guards.

For this, al-Ran was allowed to take off his blindfold — but this was another form of anguish, he said.

“Part of my torture was being able to see how people were being tortured,” al-Ran said. “At first you couldn’t see. You couldn’t see the torture, the vengeance, the oppression. When they removed my blindfold, I could see the extent of the humiliation and abasement … I could see the extent to which they saw us not as human beings but as animals.”

Al-Ran was released after weeks of being the prison liaison, but was mute for a month due to the emotional trauma of the detention. When he was about to be released, he said, another prisoner asked him to find his wife and children when he returned to Gaza. “He asked me to tell them that it is better for them to be martyrs,” al-Ran said. “It is better for them to die than to be captured and held here.”

Al-Ran’s and the whistleblowers’ accounts of the prisons line up with other reports on the conditions that Israeli troops are imposing on Palestinian prisoners who they have arrested arbitrarily. Israeli forces have detained and imprisoned thousands of Palestinians since October.

Other reports have found that Israeli troops routinely beat and humiliate prisoners; some Palestinians who have been released say that Israeli officers urinated on them, refused them medication they needed, and killed prisoners. One human rights expert said that what rights groups have seen from Israeli prisons has led them to believe that torture is a policy of these facilities.

by Sharon Zhang, Truthout/ 5/10/2024

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The much longer CNN Report (which contains disturbing images and interviews) can be read here.

CNN also published the following video report covering much of what is contained in the more detailed written one. (It is ~7 minutes and contains disturbing scenes).

 

Note: These detainees are rounded up arbitrarily. They are not held on the basis of any evidence, and they are not charged with any crimes. Indeed, this has already been reported on by Human Rights groups and media outlets in the middle east, as CNN acknowledges. However, the details had not been confirmed by Israeli whistleblowers coming forward with photographic evidence until now.  Further, CNN focuses on only one detention center. There are at least 2 other military bases that are functioning as detention camps in Israel.  As the CNN report itself states:  

"The Israeli military has acknowledged partially converting three different military facilities into detention camps for Palestinian detainees from Gaza since the Hamas-led October 7 attack on Israel...These facilities are Sde Teiman in the Negev desert, as well as Anatot and Ofer military bases in the occupied West Bank." 

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Additionally, while some detainees are released back into Gaza after 45 days, others are incarcerated in Israel's prison system which has long been known for holding hundreds of uncharged Palestinians indefinitely. Israeli Human Rights organization B'Tselem placed the number of  "administrative detainees" (those imprisoned without charges and indefinitely)  at 1,310 as of Sept. 2023-- before the Hamas attack of October 7. BBC, in an article last month, stated that administrative detainees were up to 3,600--NOT including those being held in separate military facilities, such as the one described in this OP by CNN. BBC, in a harrowing article on bruises, broken bones and deaths in Israeli prisons,  then stated:

"Israel currently holds more than 9,300 security prisoners, the vast majority of whom are Palestinians according to the Israeli rights group HaMoked, including more than 3,600 people in administrative detention.

These figures do not include detainees from the Gaza Strip being held in separate facilities by the Israeli military. [such as the one described by CNN in this post]"

The BBC article can be found here, for those interested.

Related links/sources:

>>A Human Rights Watch report released on May 8, 2024, details the dramatic rise in the IDF's "unlawful killings of Palestinians" in the West Bank. According to the report:

"Israeli forces in 2023 killed 492 Palestinians, including 120 children, in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). That figure is more than twice as many as in any other year since the UN began systematically documenting fatalities. About 300 were killed in the nearly three months following the October 7 Hamas-led attacks on Israel, though the increase in killings dates back to 2022. Between January 1 and March 31, 2024, Israeli forces killed 131 Palestinians in the West Bank....

Between October 7, 2023, and March 18, 2024, Israeli forces conducted a monthly average of 640 search-and-arrest and other operations in the West Bank, nearly double the 340 such operations during the first nine months of 2023, according to OCHA. These operations resulted in the killing of 304 Palestinians, out of a total of 409 killed by Israeli forces during this period."

An alarming proportion of the victims, according to the study are unarmed children. 

>>BBC released an investigative on-the-ground report from the West Bank showing some of the violence and intimidation of both Palestinian children and adults in the West Bank. It is called "The Other War -  2024"and can be viewed (for now at least) here on youtube free. 

>>Meanwhile, as I write,  Israel's newspaper of note, Haaretz, says that 300,000 people have evacuated Rafah ahead of the Israeli invasion there. They are being told to go to Mawasi, a thin and barren strip of coastal land with a few makeshift tents. There is no food or medical help there. Nor is there room for all those fleeing. The Rafah crossing-- vital to humanitarian aid getting in-- has been closed by Israel, as airstrikes and ground operations increase.