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http://syriancrisis.wordpress.com/2...onymousemojk-who-migrated-for-jihad-in-syria/

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21 January 2014 Last updated at 20:00 ET

US and UN express horror at Syria torture report


Leaked pictures 'show evidence of starvation, beatings and strangulation'

The US and UN have reacted with "horror" to allegations in a new report that Syria has systematically tortured and executed about 11,000 detainees since the start of the uprising.

The US said the reports underscored the need to remove the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

A Syrian spokesman said the report had no credibility as it was commissioned by Qatar, which funds rebel groups.

The report comes a day before peace talks are due to begin in Switzerland.

Delegations are now arriving for the talks, known as Geneva II, which open in Montreux on Wednesday, and continue in Geneva two days later.

The conference is seen as the biggest diplomatic effort yet to end a three-year conflict that has left more than 100,000 dead and millions displaced.

'Extremely disturbing'

The report, by three former war crimes prosecutors, is based on the evidence of a defected military police photographer, referred to only as Caesar, who along with others reportedly smuggled about 55,000 digital images of some 11,000 dead detainees out of Syria.

US state department spokeswoman Marie Harf said it "underscores that it makes it even more important that we make progress [at Geneva II]. The situation on the ground is so horrific that we need to get a political transition in place, and we need to get the Assad regime out of power."

She added: "Obviously we condemn these reports in the strongest possible terms.

"These most recent images are extremely disturbing; they are horrible to look at and they illustrate apparent actions that would be serious international crimes, and we have long said that those responsible for these kinds of serious violations in Syria must be held to account."

Earlier, UK Foreign Secretary William Hague expressed similar sentiments, telling the House of Commons: "I've seen a lot of this evidence, it is compelling and horrific. And it is important that those who have perpetrated these crimes are one day held to account."

Rupert Colville, spokesman for UN human rights chief Navi Pillay, told AFP: "This report is extremely alarming, and the alleged scale of the deaths in detention, if verified, is truly horrifying.

"Allegations this serious cannot be ignored and further investigation is clearly necessary."

The photographer, "Caesar", said his job had been to take photographs of corpses, both to allow a death certificate to be produced and to confirm that execution orders had been carried out.

"There could be as many as 50 bodies a day to photograph which require 15 to 30 minutes of work per corpse," he is quoted as saying.

The photographs cover the period from the start of the uprising in March 2011 until August last year.

All but one of the bodies shown are male. Investigators say most were emaciated; many had been beaten or strangled. Some had no eyes, and some showed signs of electrocution.

One of the authors of the report, Prof Sir Geoffrey Nice, told the BBC's Newsday programme that the scale and consistency of the killings provided strong evidence of government involvement that could support a criminal prosecution.

However, a spokesman for the Syrian ministry of information, Bassam Abu Abdullah, questioned the report's evidence, telling the BBC it was unclear where the information had come from or if the photographs were "from Syria or from outside Syria".

He said he was "astonished" at the figure of 11,000 victims, saying it had not been raised before this report.
He said: "I doubt this report. We should check these photos. Who are these people? Where are the names? From which prisons? Who is this person who has the authority to have these photos?"

Mr Abdullah said the international courts should direct their questions to Qatar: "If Qatar financed this report, there is no credibility because Qatar is one of the states who financed international terrorism and who sent killers to Syria."

'Constructive'

Ahead of the talks in Switzerland, US President Barack Obama telephoned Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin to "discuss the issues of the conference", the Kremlin said.

It said the conversation was "businesslike and constructive".

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and his US counterpart John Kerry late on Tuesday in Montreux.

Meanwhile, the UN defended its decision to withdraw an invitation to Iran - a key ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad - over its refusal to endorse the Geneva Communique , the plan for a transitional governing body agreed at a UN-backed meeting in 2012.

The UN said an oral understanding did not become a written one.

"In fact the opposite is what happened, that Iran stated the same positions that it had held previously," UN deputy spokesman Farhan Haq said.

The invitation to Iran had angered the US, while the main Syrian opposition National Coalition had threatened to pull out if the invitation was not rescinded.

Iran's Foreign Minister Javad Zarif said the withdrawal was "beneath the dignity of the UN's secretary general".

This is related to the post above and murderous Amerikkka's 'outrage'.


Blood Brothers

When Assad's horrific prisons were the CIA's dumping ground.



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."

It's a history that the U.S. government knows all too well -- because, at times, it has exploited the Assad regime's brutality for its own ends. Arar was sent to Assad's prisons by the United States: In September 2002, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) detained him during a layover at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport. U.S. officials believed, partially on the basis of inaccurate information provided by Canada, that Arar was a member of al Qaeda. After his detention in New York, Arar was flown to Amman, Jordan, where he was driven across the border into Syria.

"Successive U.S. administrations may not agree with the politics of Bashar al-Assad, but when you have a common enemy called al Qaeda -- that changes everything," Arar said. "ince 9/11, Assad's regime has been used for what the media now calls ‘torture by proxy.'"

In Arar's case, however, he had no actual ties to al Qaeda to confess. He was eventually released in October 2003, and both Syria and Canada admitted that they had no evidence tying him to terrorism. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper issued a former apology to Arar, and announced that the government would pay him a settlement of almost $10 million for his ordeal. Arar currently resides in Canada.

After the 9/11 attacks, the CIA's use of extraordinary rendition -- the practice of sending terrorism suspects to a third country for interrogation, including the use of methods that may be illegal in the United States -- "expanded beyond recognition," journalist Jane Mayer wrote in the New Yorker . In addition to Syria's prisons, detention facilities in Egypt, Morocco, and Jordan were also key destinations for such subjects, who were flown around the world on private jets registered to dummy American corporations, according to Mayer.


Arar was far from the only detainee that the CIA threw in Assad's prisons. In December 2001, the United States requested that Moroccan authorities arrest Mohammad Haydr Zammar, a German citizen suspected of aiding al Qaeda's Hamburg cell, which was a key player in the 9/11 attacks. Once Zammar was apprehended, according to information obtained by British journalist Stephen Grey, he was interrogated by CIA officers in Morocco and then flown to Damascus, where -- like Arar -- he was held in the Palestine Branch.

The cooperation between the American and Syrian intelligence agencies was close enough that the CIA even offered German intelligence officers the opportunity to put specific questions to Zammar while he was in Assad's prisons, according to Grey's book, Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Rendition and Torture Program . Nothing is known of Zammar's whereabouts or health since he sent a letter to his family in Germany in 2005.

"Globalizing Torture," a report published by the Open Society Justice Initiative, provides the names of 136 detainees who were subjected to extraordinary rendition or secret detention. Of those detainees, at least eight were sent by the CIA to Assad's jails. They include people who seemingly posed little or no danger -- such as Noor al-Deen, a Syrian teenager captured with Abu Zubaydah, who the United States initially believed was a top al Qaeda operative but would later admit had never been a member of the terror group. They also include legitimately dangerous figures such as Abu Musab al-Suri, who was released by the Assad regime and subsequently became one of the world's leading jihadist ideologues.

Despite the wide range of disagreements between the Bush administration and Assad, U.S.-Syrian intelligence cooperation in pursuit of al Qaeda represented a détente of sorts between the two governments. When ties soured in 2006, a parliamentarian close to Assad's feared domestic enforcer, Assad Shawkat, told U.S. diplomats that Shawkat "still considered himself a friend of the United States." In February 2010, when U.S. officials were trying to persuade Assad to stem the flow of jihadists into Iraq, intelligence chief Gen. Ali Mamlouk told a U.S. delegation in Damascus: "President Assad wants cooperation, [and] we should take the lead on that cooperation."

The Syrian regime is once again trying to repair its relationship with the United States and Europe by invoking their shared intelligence goals: Before the Syria peace talks began, Assad said that their main objective should be "the fight against terrorism," while top Syrian diplomats have loudly trumpeted visits by Western intelligence officers to Damascus to discuss the fight against Islamist extremists.

But while rendering detainees to Syria is out of the question these days, President Barack Obama's administration has not repudiated the Bush-era practice to the extent that civil rights activists would have liked. The Obama administration announced that it would continue rendition, but promised to ensure that detainees would not be tortured. According to a report published in The Nation , the CIA still funds a Somali-run prison in Mogadishu, where U.S. intelligence officers can interrogate suspected members of al Qaeda-affiliated al-Shabab terrorist group captured in Somalia or rendered from Kenya.

The U.S. government has also never apologized to Arar for rendering him to Syria, or admitted that he was tortured in Assad's jails. So it's no surprise, perhaps, that Arar believes U.S. officials' surprise at the latest revelation is more than a little hypocritical.

"Of course, the U.S. government will always ask for assurances for people not to be tortured," he said. "But they know that those assurances are not worth the ink they're written with. They know that once a person gets there -- they know what's going to happen."