Blood Brothers

[n2doc]

BEIRUT — As Secretary of State John Kerry delivered his opening remarks at the Syria peace talks in Switzerland on Wednesday, Jan. 22, he expressed outrage at new revelations of the brutal tactics perpetrated by President Bashar al-Assad's regime. Evidence of the execution of thousands of Syrians in Assad's prisons, Kerry said, represented "an appalling assault, not only on human lives, but on human dignity and on every standard by which the international community tries to organize itself."

Kerry was referring to a report released this week based on the testimony of a defector within the Syrian military police, which seem to provide evidence of the systematic torture of thousands of detainees in Assad's prisons. The defector, known only by the code name Caesar, provided roughly 55,000 images showing dead prisoners bearing the tell-tale signs of strangulation, brutal beatings, and starvation. The Assad regime's enforcers had obsessively photographed the murdered men and kept track of them by reference numbers -- in order, the report claimed, to prove to senior officials that the executions had been carried out.

Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian telecommunications engineer, hasn't been able to look at these images, or the other pictures and videos streaming out of his native country over the past three years. They brought with them flashbacks from his own experience: In 2002 and 2003, he was Prisoner No. 2 in an underground cell at Syrian military intelligence's Palestine Branch in Damascus, where he was beaten and whipped with two-inch thick electrical cables until he gave into his interrogators' demands and falsely confessed to having been trained at a terrorist camp in Afghanistan.

The only mystery for Arar is why Americans are shocked at reports of torture in Syrian prisons. "What surprises me is the reaction of some people in the West, as if it's news to them," he told Foreign Policy. "As far back as the early 1990s ... the State Department reports on Syria have been very blunt -- the fact is, Syria tortures people."

more (warning, disturbing image)

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/01/22/blood_brothers_syria_torture_cia

[BlueMTexpat]

1. The fact may well be that Syria tortures people.

But so does the US.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/01/24/3890316/washington-post-cia-paid-15m-for.html

That certainly doesn't justify either practice. But it is our usual neocon suspects who are doing everything they can to thwart Syrian talks. http://www.opednews.com/articles/Neocons-Take-Aim-at-Syrian-by-Robert-Parry-Assad_Attack_Neocons_Obama-140124-500.html

There is also at least one other thread about Parry's article, so I know that there are plenty of DUers who know exactly what's going on.

[malthaussen]

2. All totalitarian regimes torture people.

That's one broad-brush statement I feel pretty comfortable making. Anybody who is shocked that a totalitarian regime tortures people they don't like needs to wipe the Vaseline off his glasses.

-- Mal