Syrian Military Police: Bashar Assads

Bashar Assads: 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 Assads 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 regimes 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. Related Items Articles Syrian government and opposition to meet together 'in the same room,' UN mediator says , according to Winnipeg Free Press. 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 its 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." As U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry delivered his opening remarks at the Syria peace talks in Switzerland on Wednesday, he expressed outrage at new revelations of the brutal tactics perpetrated by Syrian President Bashar Assads regime. Evidence of the execution of thousands of Syrians in Assads 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." Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian telecommunications engineer, hasnt 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 intelligences 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. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.