"5 MINUTE" INTERROGATION LASTS 9 MONTHS

By Hugh Dellios

Cosette Ibrahim became a cause celebre for human-rights campaigners after six soldiers from the South Lebanese Army took her from her home in September for "five minutes" of questioning.

The Israeli-backed militiamen took her to Khiam prison. There, she said, they put a blue canvas bag over her head, shackled her ankles and wrists and began daily interrogations and beatings that would last a month.

Freed only when villagers stormed the prison as the Israeli army retreated from Lebanon in May, the Lebanese journalist is trying to begin a new life while still unsure about why she was incarcerated for nine months.

"From the moment I was taken to Khiam, I was told there are no lawyers and no courts," said Ibrahim, 25, her smile forced and her hands shaking. `Here,' they said, `you defend yourself.'"

Now a national monument where Hezbollah guerrilla flags fly and families come for outings, the notorious Khiam prison was rock bottom in the lawless limbo that developed during Israel's two-decade occupation of south Lebanon.

The hilltop complex, originally built as horse stables by French colonial soldiers, became the focus of global condemnation for how prisoners were tortured, confined in isolation and held indefinitely without ever being charged with crimes.

To this day, Israel denies responsibility for the prison, insisting it was operated exclusively by the now-collapsed SLA, even though the militia was completely financed and supplied by Israel.

Nevertheless, resentment over the abuses committed in Khiam's dank and darkened cells is a force that may come to confront Israel and its former SLA allies as the world waits to see if hostilities erupt anew along the Israeli-Lebanese border.

Former inmates converged on the prison in the days after it was liberated, offering tours of where they said they were hung from light poles and given electric shocks. One said he only regretted not finding the warden so he could do the same to him.

When the Lebanese courts began handing out 1-year prison terms to former militiamen last week, another former inmate angrily condemned the courts' leniency in a column in As Safir newspaper, asking why the collaborators should not suffer as much as he did.

"I don't know how I feel. I can't figure it out," said Ibrahim, who hopes to publicize some of the Khiam abuses. "It feels as if my life is the nine months I spent in that prison."

Five miles from the Israeli border, Khiam prison held some 2,000 prisoners over the last 20 years. On May 24, 144 were still there when frenzied relatives and friends broke down its doors among shouts of "God is great!"

What they found was a dozen inmates packed into each windowless cell, 3-foot-by-3-foot isolation rooms and tales of insufficient food.

Only after Red Cross officials visited in 1995 were toilets built to replace buckets emptied once a day.

Among the tales of torture: Hanging by the wrists. Dousing with very hot and then very cold water. Electric shocks on the ears, tongue and genitals with the cables of a portable military telephone. Threats of harm against an inmate's family.

Over the years, Israeli and other human-rights activists complained that the detainees were denied legal rights, access to lawyers and visitors. They said four prisoners had died at Khiam since 1985.

The prison became so notorious that the United Nations made the prisoners' release one of four conditions before it would certify that Israel had completely withdrawn from Lebanon.

Critics say Israel had the power to stop the abuses at Khiam. Human-rights groups say the Israeli army delivered the prison staff's $30,000 per month payroll. In 1998, the SLA agreed to release 50 prisoners in exchange for the body of one Israeli soldier.

Visitors on the day it was liberated could plainly see Hebrew writing on the prison's water tanks and other equipment. And several of the former inmates said Israelis were at least present when they were interrogated.

Consistently, however, the Israeli government has denied it had any control over the operation.

"The Khiam facilities are administered, operated and protected by Lebanese serving in the South Lebanese Army," an Israeli government attorney said at a 1998 hearing in Israel over a lawsuit by Israeli civil rights attorneys. "The interrogators operating in the facility are also members of the SLA."

In some cases, but not all, the Khiam inmates had ties to the armed Islamic resistance movements fighting against the occupation. Most of the interrogations sought information about the resistance.

That is what the guards wanted from Ibrahim when they brought her to Khiam on Sept. 2 last year and took her into what the inmates knew as "Office No.1" with the bag over her head.

"We were talking calmly, and then suddenly I found myself on the ground," Ibrahim said. "They started kicking me, and with this wooden stick, they hit me on the head. There was also this sort of mental torture: They would make all these horrid sounds, as if they were going to attack me."

Ibrahim said she had taken part in protests in Beirut against the Israeli occupation. Before beginning her professional journalism career, the Lebanese University graduate had written several stridently anti-Israel articles for the school newspaper.

She denied having links to the resistance, although she had a brother-in-law who was a member of a branch of the Hezbollah guerrilla movement. Many questions focused on him.

Ibrahim said she never saw or heard an Israeli. But the guards often gave her the impression the Israelis were in charge, telling her the Israelis thought she was with Hezbollah and that the Israelis resented a campaign to win her freedom by human-rights and journalists groups.

"The guards would talk about the Israelis as if they were brothers," she said.

Already suffering from an ulcer, Ibrahim developed other intestinal problems and had to be hospitalized while a prisoner. Friends said she came out of prison frail enough to evoke their concern.

In her cell, where a cellmate who missed her children had painted a blue "Smurf" cartoon character on the wall, Ibrahim left behind a pile of books that included Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables" and the Bible's Old Testament.

In the Bible, Ibrahim, a Christian, said she had searched for some understanding of the Jews and why the Israelis would have imprisoned her.

Ibrahim said she knew of one woman who was repeatedly raped. And she said a Khiam doctor tried to make all newly detained female prisoners submit to an examination to verify if they were virgins or not. She refused.

"My answer was: `Does this really affect Israeli security?'"