Inside Syria’s torture chambers

The Guardian reports:

Adnan, a young Syrian professional in his thirties, tells of his experience as one of hundreds detained in President Bashar al-Assad’s crackdown on dissent…

The whole experience is built around humiliation. We were blindfolded. We were shouted at. We were only allowed to the toilet once a day, for three seconds. We had to strip down to our underwear and someone would stand outside the door counting. If you didn’t finish within three seconds you were beaten. I often didn’t go; I was too worried. We were given water and food, but you don’t want to drink when you can’t go to the toilet.

We were taken out of the cell to be beaten and I was interrogated several times. One time they took us to a room with an electric chair. I said no, this is too much, not this. They didn’t use it but they have one – I saw it with my own eyes. They accused me of working for foreign gangs. They were angry about videos of the protests being leaked and they searched everyone’s phones. They finally decided to let me go in the early hours of the morning, exhausted and bruised and battered. It was a horrible experience. This regime is brutal but also stupid. Everyone in there said they were angrier, not more afraid. You cannot forgive a regime that does this to you.”

News of brutality in Syria is regrettably unsurprising and hardly new. But is the international community right to take a much more hand-off approach than it has in Libya and (eventually) in the Ivory Coast? Is this sensible pragmatism about what can or can’t be done or is there more that should be done? Tough decisions.