Syria Disintegrating: Part 2

[jimmy olsen]

Turks have moved some forces closer to the border

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/turkey/9360708/Turkey-increases-its-military-presence-at-Syrian-border.html

I hope it's Israeli border. 

Did Turkey gain a border with Israel when I wasn't looking?

[Razgovory]

Stop warfapping over Syria.  Ain't shit going to happen.

Would be fun though.

[derspiess]

Turks have moved some forces closer to the border

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/turkey/9360708/Turkey-increases-its-military-presence-at-Syrian-border.html

I hope it's Israeli border. 

Did Turkey gain a border with Israel when I wasn't looking?

Woosh.

[Razgovory]

Why is Syria trying to bait Turkey?

Disintegrating patrimonial regimes aren't always that coherent far less understandable.  It does seem bizarre.  But I think there's maybe a few possible motivations. 
They're worried about scrambling the jets, which would be a normal response, given the defection to Jordan.
They want to demonstrate they can shoot planes down.  I've read that the relatively modern, Russian, air security in Syria would be a worry for intervention.  They may want to show it's working and ready.
They're scared.  They may well be expecting intervention at any point.

But I agree it's very difficult to understand what's going on and what the Syrians want to achieve.

The motivations could be entirely opaque to us because they are combating schemes that exist entirely in their minds.  Folks in the Middle East aren't good at reality checking.  Remember how Saddam said he didn't think the US would really invade in 2003 because the CIA was so good that it already knew that he had no active weapons programs.  Or how Hamas mentions the Rotary Club as some of it's enemies in it's charter.  Or that Egyptians were blaming shark attacks on the Mossad and Iraqis thought that the UK had released giant man eating badgers to hunt down insurgents.  They may fire on Turkish jets because they think they are actually holograms and the may fire at refugees over the Turkish border in order to stop the Mole people from turning the Euphrates in to whiskey.

[Tamas]

 

The Security Council decided, that the Syrian crisis shall be solved by the Assad regime and it's opposition forming a national unity government. Russia and China also agreed on this.

Now the only small taks which remains is convincing the Syrians on the whole idea.

[The Brain]

What's Vogue's position?

[Darth Wagtaros]

The Security Council decided, that the Syrian crisis shall be solved by the Assad regime and it's opposition forming a national unity government. Russia and China also agreed on this.

Now the only small taks which remains is convincing the Syrians on the whole idea.

It can happen. 

[jimmy olsen]

Disgusting

http://edition.cnn.com/2012/07/03/world/meast/syria-torture-report/

Report describes brutal torture in Syria
By Ivan Watson, CNN
July 3, 2012 -- Updated 1513 GMT (2313 HKT)

Istanbul (CNN) -- "Basat al reeh." "Dulab." "Falaqa." They are Arabic names for torture techniques that send chills through the hearts of Syrians, particularly the untold thousands who are believed to have been detained during the uprising of the last 15 months.

"We suffered torture all the time," said Tariq, an opposition activist from the port city of Latakia who spent 40 days in solitary confinement in spring 2011.

He told CNN he endured "dulab," in which torturers force the prisoner's legs and head into a car tire before beating them, and "basat al reeh," in which the prisoner is tied to a board and beaten.

"They threw cold water on our naked bodies and they also urinated on us ... they are really good at what they do," said Tariq, who now is in Turkey helping mobilize men and weapons to rebels inside Syria.

According to a report published Tuesday by the New York-based human rights organization Human Rights Watch, the Syrian government has been carrying out "a state policy of torture" as part of an effort to crush dissent throughout the unrest.

Human Rights Watch identified 27 detention centers across Syria where torture was systematically inflicted on prisoners, according to testimonies from more than 200 former prisoners and security officers who defected.

Rights group cites 'state policy of torture' in Syria as stream of defectors reported

"It is a network of torture chambers that the authorities are using to intimidate and punish people who dare to oppose the government," said Ole Solvang, a Human Rights Watch researcher.

"Nobody knows how many people are being detained, how many are being tortured," he added. "But one local activist group has collected names of 25,000 people in detention. The numbers are absolutely staggering."

Human Rights Watch titled its report "The Torture Archipelago" in an overt attempt to link the Syrian prison system to the notorious Siberian gulags described in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Soviet dissident novel "The Gulag Archipelago."

The system is being run by at least four intelligence agencies collectively referred to as mukhabarat, or secret police, the report says. Those agencies include the Department of Military Intelligence, the Political Security Directorate, the General Intelligence Directorate and the Air Force Intelligence Directorate.

"The authorities also established numerous temporary unofficial holding centers in places such as stadiums, military bases, schools and hospitals where the authorities rounded up and held people during massive detention campaigns before transporting them to branches of the intelligence agencies," Human Rights Watch reported.

The Syrian government routinely denies allegations of such abuses. Recently, Syria's ambassador to the United Nations walked out of a meeting of the U.N. Human Rights Council in protest after the Syrian regime was accused of committing crimes against humanity.

But the eyewitness accounts gathered by Human Rights Watch as well as by CNN throughout the 15-month crisis are overwhelming.

Though most of the torture victims in Human Rights Watch's report were men ranging from 18 to 35 years of age, the organization also interviewed women, senior citizens and children who said they were tortured.

"They electrocuted me on my stomach, with a prod. I fell unconscious," said Hossam, a 13-year-old boy who told Human Rights Watch he was detained in the town of Tal Kalakh in May 2011. "When they interrogated me the second time, they beat me and electrocuted me again.

Clinton: World may not succeed in Syria

"The third time, they had some pliers and they pulled out my toenail. They said, 'Remember this saying, always keep it in mind: We take both kids and adults, and we killed them both.' I started to cry, and they returned me to the cell."

CNN has also interviewed more than a dozen Syrians who described enduring beatings, electrocution and horribly crowded conditions in prison cells.

A dentist who was arrested for secretly providing medical care to wounded demonstrators told CNN in February that he endured beatings, near-drownings in buckets of toilet water and electric shocks to his genitals during 45 days in a prison cell that was built for 60 people but held 130 prisoners.

"They started beating me and asked me, 'Who did you help?' " the dentist recounted. "I said, 'I helped an old lady.' Then they started beating me even harder."

The accounts of brutality match those shared by a former mukhabarat officer who said he was repeatedly ordered to torture prisoners until he defected and fled to Turkey with his family last year.

"Whatever we wanted the prisoner to say, he would say. Not what he wanted to say, whatever we ordered him to say," said the former officer, who spoke to CNN outside a refugee camp in Turkey where he had been living for months.

"We took their fingernails out with pliers and we made them eat them. We made them suck their own blood of the floor," the officer added.

Photos: In Syrian hospital, no escape from war

The officer's descriptions of the detention facility where he worked in Damascus matched the descriptions of a former prisoner who had spent months incarcerated in the same building. That former prisoner's finger was still mangled after it was crushed during a torture session in the Damascus facility.

The officer said prison guards used grim humor during their interrogation sessions.

"We would bring the prisoner and put him in the 'basat al reeh' or the 'dulab' and start beating him," he said. "He would scream 'for God's sake,' and we would say OK, bring the 'for God's sake' stick. He would scream 'for my mother, please" or 'for [the prophet] Mohammed.' And we would bring the 'my mother' stick and the 'for Mohammed' stick. Every stick had a name."

"At the core, the crisis in Syria is about human rights violations," said Solvang, who has traveled into Syria to gather evidence and testimony for "Torture Archipelago." "That is what is driving the crisis and driving people to take up arms."

The Human Rights Watch report includes satellite maps showing the exact location of detention centers. It also lists the names of commanders of individual detention centers.

Human Rights Watch is urging the U.N. Security Council to refer Syrian officials to the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity.

"Those who commit these abuses do so with complete impunity, thinking they will never have to answer for this," Solvang said. "By publishing these names, we are really putting them on notice, saying they will have to answer for these violations."

Syrian military defector: 'Those who were injected are lucky'

[Neil]

No big deal.  No worse than panties on head.

[jimmy olsen]

Could your shtick be more irrelevant if you tried?

Moving on...the death could could be well over 25,000 with 100 dying every day!

http://worldnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/04/12557631-catastrophe-journalist-behind-the-lines-in-syria-sees-no-end-to-war?lite

By msnbc.com

As International Editor at NBC News' British partner ITV News, Bill Neely has covered the Libyan and Egyptian revolutions, the 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai, as well as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He is on his fourth trip in seven months to Syria, a country largely off-limits to Western journalists, where he and his team are covering the war. He spoke to msnbc.com's F. Brinley Bruton from Syria where he was witnesssing what he called "the battle for Damascus."

Q: Are you surprised by the level of violence you've seen on this trip?

A: Every day there are surprising things to be seen. On my last trip I was genuinely surprised by the level of destruction in the Baba Amr district of Homs where Marie Colvin (an American correspondent for Britain's Sunday Times) was killed. I think this time it has been really surprising to see three, four miles from the center of Damascus such sustained bombardment. Nobody in Damascus can be unaware of what's happening.

I was surprised to see (the Free Syrian Army) operate quite openly. I mean, on Monday they drove us around for a long time through suburbs of Damascus. There wasn't a sign in sight of any army presence and they weren't hiding themselves, they were driving around with the guns out the window.

A few days ago (I was surprised by) the level of artillery and mortar fire going into Douma. It still has the capacity to shock you that an army will use that level of force to subdue a rebellion.

Q: How do you compare this to other conflicts you have covered in the past?

Follow @msnbc_world

A: My immediate point of comparison would be [Libyan leader Moammar] Gadhafi [shelling] of the town of Zawiya which was 30 miles from Tripoli. Again there was a staggering level of force used in the bombardment.

In Kosovo it was very clear that it was ethnic cleansing, that Orthodox Christian Serbs were ethnically cleansing Muslims, as they had done in Bosnia. It is different here. The suburbs I was in yesterday are Sunni and the regime is not Sunni, it's Alawite, a branch of Shiite Islam, so there is a sectarian element to it. I think the Kosovo thing was even more, well, brutal.

Q: Have we reached a tipping point in the conflict?

A: My view was was that this was a civil war several months ago, and I think if there were any doubt [Syrian President Bashar] Assad answered that question a few days ago when he said this is a war on all fronts.

We don't like to call it a war in the West because we don't have a damn clue what to do about it. At the minute it seems to me it is in the interest of the great powers to almost play this down.

One interesting aspect of this is that the U.N. has now stopped giving casualty figures, it has kind of been stuck for quite a long time at around 10,000. Well, it is way way over that.

Activists appear to have some grounding in fact and are coming up with about 18,600 civilians and rebels killed. The deputy foreign minister told me in May that there were more than 6,000 pro-regime dead. That takes you straight away to 25,000. Hillary Clinton said a few days ago it was 700 in the past week. I just looked at the activists figures and it looks about 100 a day now.

This is now the longest of the Arab revolutions by a long way, it is bigger than Libya, Egypt and Tunisia put together.

And the U.N. keeps warning that if we're not careful this will become a catastrophe. I think if it's 100 a day -- you are talking war, you are talking catastrophe.

And you can talk about talks between the opposition and Assad and a transitional government by mutual consent, and frankly it sounds to the people here on both sides like so much "blah blah blah." In fact, it probably sounds like "blab blah blah" to the citizens of the U.S. and Britain and France as well. But it is it is a [Band-Aid] by embarrassed governments while in reality on the ground there are two sides who are gunning for each other quite literally.

Q: What can the West do?

A: I just came from the U.N. in Damascus and there are dozens of white U.N. Land Rovers lined up there. They are all dressed up with nowhere to go.

It does give a very bad impression of a world that is completely impotent, and secondly of a world that isn't even trying because the U.N. are just sitting in their hotel doing nothing.

Q: What did you think of the recent Human Rights Watch report on widespread torture in Syria, were you surprised?

A: There was a large element of "duh!" when that report came out. You just thought, "Well, what do you expect, this has been a brutal regime for a very long time."

Yes, it's terrible but I don't think it told us anything new. Obviously, Human Rights Watch are trying to get the U.N. to refer Syria to the [International Criminal Court], they're building the evidence up block by block.

Q: Is the risk that Syria could implode?

A: The distinction is that Libya imploded, and the problem with Syria is that it could explode. Someone once said the Middle East is like a series of detonators all strung together. When Syria goes off Lebanon will, Iraq might, Iran, Syria's closest, friend might. And Israel may get tempted.

Q: So you don't see much sign of the Assad government losing?

A: Not much sign of them stopping the bombardment of Homs and Douma because, if that's what they feel they have to do to crush the revolution than that's what they'll do. They've made that absolutely clear. You read the official Syrian news agency and the word "crush" appears many many times.

[The Brain]

Journalists interviewing journalists.

[Neil]

Could your shtick be more irrelevant if you tried?

Just for that, CdM's allowed to rape you.

[Ed Anger]

 

[jimmy olsen]

Could your shtick be more irrelevant if you tried?

Just for that, CdM's allowed to rape you.

And it'll be funnier than you've been in the last five years combined.

[Tamas]

Tim woke up feeling very tough today