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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsSyria's Detention Centers: Torture Tactics Reported By Organizations (MAP)
Horrific accounts of torture and ill-treatment suggest that abuse runs rampant in Syria's detention facilities, rights organizations report. According to a report released last month by the activist group Avaaz, Bashar Assad's regime uses at least 416 detention centers to torture its opponents.
Avaaz estimates that some 69,000 people have been detained since the start of the uprising last March. 32,000 have been released, many after being subjected to torture and violence.
In this branch, one of the techniques is that they put the head of someone and squeeze it between two iron walls, and this sometimes smashes their heads in -- some people have died from that. Another is a wooden bed of two pieces that folds together at the middle. It's called the German Chair. Sometimes they put you on your stomach and fold it so that your legs reach your head and your spine is broken and you are paralyzed.
Human Rights Watch also has accused the Syrian regime of widespread torture in detention centers, including against children. The organization warned that children were being held in solitary cells or overcrowded group cells, sometimes deprived of food and water. "Children, some as young as 13, reported to Human Rights Watch that officers kept them in solitary confinement, severely beat and electrocuted them, burned them with cigarettes, and left them to dangle from metal handcuffs for hours at a time, centimeters above the floor," the organization writes.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/09/syria-detention-center_n_1266085.html
Warren Stupidity
(48,181 posts)I guess torture is ok when we do it, or when it is done on our behalf.
tabatha
(18,795 posts)It is bad whoever does it - especially to children.
I hope Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and the others pay.
joshcryer
(62,276 posts)There are still prisons in Afghanistan where torture is carried out.
tabatha
(18,795 posts)nadinbrzezinski
(154,021 posts)and since The Situation Room has not told us.