On January 14, 2013, military judge Col. Moshe Tirosh had a full day at the military court of appeals. He heard nine appeals of administrative detention orders issued to Palestinian residents of the West Bank. The orders were signed by Col. Yair Kolas, who is described in the stenographic record as "a military commander in the Judea and Samaria region." All nine orders were confirmed at a previous stage by other military judges (Maj. Aryeh Dorani, Maj. Rafael Yemini, Lt. Col. Ron Daloumi and Lt. Col. Dalia Kaufman ).

In each case, Tirosh heard the military prosecutor, Lt. Eli Citron, explain why the appeal had to be rejected, and heard the various defense attorneys claim the opposite. We are supposed to assume that Col. Tirosh read the classified material in each case file, noted where the various sources match and where they contradict, and ensured their credibility before forming an opinion. That day, Tirosh rejected all nine of the appeals.

One of the appellants was Abd el-Hakim Bawatneh. His attorney, Labib Habib, protested the lower military court's decision not to allow him to question the Shin Bet security service's representative. Regarding this, Tirosh wrote, "Essentially, and in light of the nature of the material, the court of first instance was correct not to allow the appellant's attorney to question the Shin Bet's representative."

He also wrote in his decision, "A study of the classified material, including the raw material, without the parties present indicates that the material was legally defined as classified, and it is correct that it remain so. The material includes a great many items of information, from many sources, that partially correlate with one another and partially confirm one another. Some of the items are of a genuinely grave nature. The information indicates that the military commander had sufficient grounds for assuming, for reasons that were partly security-related and based on the assessment of anticipated future danger, that the security of the area, and alternatively the public's security, required the appellant to remain in detention. The length of the detention is proportionate to the danger the appellant presents."

Now, all that remains to be done is copy and paste, and we have the judge's decision in each of the other eight cases. Word for word. Nine people, nine revocations of liberty without trial, on the same day, and in the same words. Habib says the very act of copying the wording raises the suspicion that "the judge did not employ judgment, all the more so true judgment," which is sufficient grounds for overturning the decision. In this spirit, Habib submitted a petition to the High Court of Justice this week.

The IDF Spokesman's Office commented, "Judge Moshe Tirosh is a veteran jurist who has served in the reserves as a judge on the military court of appeals for many years. Every decision made by him includes a full and detailed discussion of every order, whatever it may be. Although the decisions are constructed in a similar style, each is written in a way that is unique to the case of each appellant. In the nature of things, when secret intelligence that cannot be shared is analyzed, this is done using similar professional terminology."

The military courts are a conveyor belt that convicts every Palestinian in advance, because every Palestinian, in advance, opposes the military regime that has been imposed on him and that has given rise to the military court system. But administrative detention guarantees this military system a particularly easy time. A person is arrested without knowing what the suspicions against him are. The prosecution does not have to bother preparing an indictment, bringing in witnesses and evidence, or dealing with the defense's questions.

Everything is done hush-hush. It's a joint production by anonymous informers (and there is no way to know whether their credibility and interest in incriminating the detainee are ever checked ), the military commander, the anonymous Shin Bet agent, and the rest of the gang - judges at various levels of the military hierarchy, graduates of respected universities, who have become used to taking away people's liberty without trial, but with impressive throughput.