Benji X - more questions

The real question is ... Why is the country allowed to get away with all the crimes, including crimes against humanity, that it commits? 

And why is its modus operandi  becoming the role model for other countries. 

Prisoner X throws spotlight on Israel's treatment of those it regards as enemies

Ben Zygier case suggests Israel going back on 2006 promise not to hold prisoners in secret outside of international legal norms

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• • Peter Beaumont
  • guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 13 February 2013 09.48 EST

Ayalon prison near Tel Aviv, where Prisoner X was held in solitary confinement. Photograph: Nir Elias/Reuters

The infamous case of Prisoner X – revealed this week to be Australian dual national and Mossad agent Ben Zygier, who killed himself in solitary confinement in an Israeli prison in 2010 – has once again focused attention on how the country treats those it regards as enemies of the state.

Following the revelation of the existence of a detention facility known as Camp 1391 in 2003, Israel said three years later that it no longer held prisoners in secret outside of international legal norms. The Zygier case suggests the Israeli government has not stuck to that promise.

Even the location of Camp 1391 was airbrushed from aerial images. An Israeli court ruled at the time that the facility – run by Israel's domestic intelligence agency Shin Bet, used to house Palestinian prisoners with no access to their families and designated a military secret – held its inmates in substandard conditions.

In some respects the Zygier case raises even more serious questions.

As Bill van Esveld, a Human Rights Watch researcher who has been following the case, told the Guardian secret detention without trial and without access to family and lawyers is a serious breach of Israel's obligations under international law.

Israeli journalists, too, have raised questions over how a prisoner who was supposed to have been monitored 24 hours a day was able to kill himself and in what circumstances.

What has made the Prisoner X case even more serious is that the office of Israel's prime minister attempted to coerce journalists into not reporting on the case for no better reason than to save the "embarrassment of a certain agency" – in other words Mossad.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/13/prisoner-x-spotlight-israel-enemies