I BEHIND THE HEADLINES I ■ 1111•11111111111 ■ Tamarack Camps Adventure Center Tel-12 Mall (Between Montgomery Wards and Toys 'IV Us) Shin Bet Disclosures Force Reexamination HELEN DAVIS Jerusalem Correspondent I FOR ALL AGES OF CHILDREN AND TEENS • New activities and projects each week! • Exciting Crafts Projects • The thrill of the ROPES Course • Animals you can pet • Pioneer Skills Projects to take home • Giant Indoor Playground OPEN: Days Hours Open to: Wednesday-Friday 10-3:00 Wednesday 3-5:30 Children who must be accompanied by adults Children in grades 2-5 Special weekly programs (new this year) Thursday 3-5:30 Saturdays 12-5:00 Sundays 12-5:00 Preteens & teens in grades 6-8 Special weekly programs (new this year) All ages, ten & under only must be accompanied by adult All ages, Ten & under only must be accompanied by adult Members* Non members Fees - $3.00 Weekdays: Kindergarten & younger First grade & older (before 3:00) $4.00 (after 3:00) $3.00 Saturday and Sunday Kindergarten and younger $3.00 $4.00 First grade and older $4.00 $7.00 $4.00 $4.00 $7.00 *Members of Tamarack Camps, U.H.S., J.C.C., Synagogues, Temples or Jewish Youth Groups. Facilities and Program open for group rental. Great birthday packages. Call 350-8710 or 661-CAMP and leave message. THE FIJI\ IS ABOUT TO BEGIN. AGAIN 20 FRIDAY, NOV. 20, 1987 sraelis were handed a bombshell this month when they were told that their domestic intelligence service, the fabled Shin Bet, has been systematically beating information out of suspects and routinely com- mitting perjury to obtain convictions. This is not the first time that the Shin Bet has been ac- cused of maltreating security prisoners. But in the past, most Israelis have taken com- fort in the knowledge that the allegation came from foreign organizations which, they persuaded themselves, must be fundamentally hostile to Israel. This month's charges, how- ever, allowed no recourse to righteous indignation or in- jured innocence by either Israeli officials or the Israeli in the street. This time, it was not Amnesty International or some harebrained United Na- tions committee that had laid the charges. The rude shock was ad- ministered in a report by a judicial commission of in- quiry headed by a respected former President of Israel's Supreme Court, Judge Moshe Landau. Moreover, the Shin Bet's ex- ecutives and agents conceded that the allegations against them were essentially true. As the report noted rather quaintly: "They opened their hearts to us and admitted their errors without hiding a thing." The Israeli public might have been expected to have reacted to the report with furious outrage. After all, their blind faith in the essen- tial integrity of the Shin Bet had been cruelly abused. But they had already been psycho- logically prepared for the shock by two earlier revelations. The first involved the disclosure in the Israeli media that two Palestinian prisoners had been beaten to death in April, 1985 after the bus they had hijacked was stormed by an Israeli com- mando unit. In that case, Israelis might have been able to forgive and forget. While they were deep- ly disturbed by the notion of prisoners being killed in cold blood, there was little public sympathy for the Palestinian hijackers. A prisoner exchange (1,150 Palestinians for three Israelis) around the same time also gave rise to a widespread feeling that the government had "gone soft" on terrorists and that the Shin Bet agents were somehow justified in meting out instant justice. The second disclosure of Shin Bet excesses, however, was of an entirely different order: It involved an Israeli Army officer, Izat Nafsu, who had been sentenced to 18 years imprisonment on charges of treason and espionage. Earlier this year — after he had spent eight years in jail — the Supreme Court ruled that the charges against Naf- su were groundless. His con- fession, decided the court, had been brutally extracted and his interrogators had lied to the court when they denied he had been mistreated. It was impossible for the political masters of the in- telligence community to close their eyes any longer, and "How is it possible that for 16 years, not a single judge, prosecutor or attorney general was aware of the systematic deception . .?" Judge Landau was charged with conducting a thorough housecleaning. "Regrettably and shameful- ly," his report confirmed that the Shin Bet had been indulg- ing in excesses for the past 16 years. But the report did not stop there. Such conduct, it said, had placed Israel's democracy in mortal danger. lithe Shin Bet continued to operate outside the law, warn- ed the report, "control is one day liable to fall into the hands of an unscrupulous per- son." And the distance from there to the despotism of a police state, it added, "is but a hair's breadth!' The commission grappled with two fundamental ques- tions that affect not only Israel's security services, but also the intelligence agencies of other Western states which face the threat of terrorism against their civilians: • Permitting extra-legal measures without eroding the moral and democratic prin- Continued on Page 22