The New York Times has a front page article (gift article link) about the sophisticated racial recognition technology that Israel uses to find people to detain in Gaza. The article starts with the story of how they identified and detained Mosab Abu Toha, a well-known Palestinian poet in the early ground invasion of Gaza in November. While the article seems to gush about the high-tech methods the IDF uses to find people to imprison and interrogate, it ignores the obvious question: why the hell were they detaining a poet?
It's not in this article, but when it happened the Times reported that he was taken to Israel and beaten, and then only released because of the international outcry. There has never been any explanation for why he was targeted for detention and then abused. But I guess that was really cool how they used computers so they could beat the shit out of a poet.
