I don't know if Amiram Ben-Oliel, who is accused of murdering members of the Dawabsha family in Douma, actually committed the horrible act.
I don't know and I will never know.
In truth, none of us will ever be able to know this, because his confession was extracted from him through torture.
Torture is a necessity and it is used in the event that it is required, for the purpose of neutralizing ticking bombs.
The only justification for using "this horrible barbaric practice" - as one of the greatest fighters against torture in Israel, Menachem Begin, put it - is as part of our duty to save lives in the near future.
But the Duma case has nothing to do with that.
No one claims that Ben-Oliel possessed information about a terrorist infrastructure that is organizing to commit more murders, and no one actually believes that he meets another definition of a ticking bomb.
Therefore, the purpose of using torture was purely investigative, to uncover the past and find out what happened and who committed the crime - and this is absolutely forbidden.
This is forbidden for the obvious moral reason, but also for reasons of maintaining public safety.
As we know, torture leads a person to incriminate himself just to stop it.
And so, the innocent admits to what he did not commit, and the real criminal, who is a danger to the public, remains free outside.
Particularly disturbing is the reasoning found by the Supreme Court to qualify a confession obtained by torture: the passage of time between the torture and one confession that was not disqualified.
As argued by attorney Avigdor Feldman, who represented Ben-Oliel at the hearing, studies show that the horror of torture does not pass a person either after 36 hours (as here) or after 36 weeks. The body remembers well, and the mind will never forget the feeling of paralysis and helplessness.
The Supreme Court's determination that the effect of torture wears off after a day and a half actually qualifies the use of torture as a means of investigation and cancels the previous laws that prohibited it, for example in the High Court the Public Committee Against Torture (in 1999 the High Court disallowed the use of various torture methods and stated that the (2) To carry out an investigation without cruel, humiliating or inhumane treatment towards the interrogated).
This is despite the fact that these are much more severe means of torture than those discussed in the same case, and even though it was hinted that if Ben-Oliel does not repeat the confession that was extracted from him near the torture, he may return to meet Menu.
It is evident that the Supreme Court understood this itself.
It was not for nothing that the author of the verdict, Judge Elron, noted that "the decision on this appeal is not simple and was even accompanied by a difficult debate regarding the admissibility of the subsequent confessions. This is an extreme case, both in terms of the seriousness of the offense attributed to the appellant, both in terms of the severity of the measures applied to him, and in terms of the factual sequence of events during The first 21 days of the investigation of the appellant... I remain somewhat troubled by the future, given the message that will be received by the investigative bodies in view of this result."
All of these should have led the court to determine that the confessions were inadmissible.
Not 36 hours "after the end of the torture" and not 36 months later.
Any researcher who uses physical or mental torture should know that the fruits of his criminal actions will not be able to help him in his work.
Therefore, we cannot know now whether the accused Ben-Oliel actually committed the criminal act.
But without difficulty, we can know what will happen if the law established by the Supreme Court remains unchanged based on past experience on the subject.
When in 1987 the Landoi Committee gave permission for the use of "moderate physical pressure" in the Shin Bet investigations, which was supposed to be limited and controlled, the exception became the rule and the mild was severe and the officer so much so that the Supreme Court in the case of the Public Committee Against Torture was forced to cancel it.
In clearer words - if this erroneous ruling remains, Ben-Oliel will not be the only interrogated person who will suffer torture in the future.
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