Sunday, February 19, 2012

THIS IS HOW ASSAD TORTURES HIS OPPONENTS.

This article is from the UK's Independent newspaper.

It was a single egg that made Jolan, a 28-year-old activist, realise he was going to survive Syria's notorious torture chambers. He was blindfolded and locked in what he describes as a metal coffin, and each morning his tormentors would push a small piece of bread and a hard-boiled egg through a narrow opening by his head. But his cramped box – so short he could not straighten his legs – was tilted and his hands were bound, so for five days the egg would simply roll away and drop to the floor through a hole by his feet.

Days earlier, Jolan had been sitting in a park in Damascus on a sunny morning, waiting for a friend from the burgeoning protest movement aimed at forcing President Bashar al-Assad from power.  Instead, about 30 regime security personnel surrounded him. Before he could even think about fleeing, a rifle butt to the back of the head knocked him out cold.

Trussed and forced to relieve himself where he lay, Jolan did not know how long he would be there. He did not know how he could survive. But he knew that somehow he must eat the egg. "So the fifth day," he says, "I put my heel in this hole and I stopped the egg rolling out. I managed to push the egg all the way up my body to my mouth. It was filthy, it still had the shell on it, but I ate it and, when I did, I knew I was going to live."

Jolan, who gave a pseudonym because he remains active in Syria's protest movement, is one of thousands of political prisoners who human rights groups say have been thrown in jail by a regime determined to use its full force to crush the biggest threat to its rule since the Assad family took power 41 years ago.

From a secret location in Damascus, Jolan gave a detailed testimony to The Independent on Sunday of his torture during 21 weeks in detention. Although his full account is impossible to corroborate independently, Human Rights Watch, the international watchdog, confirmed that many of the torture techniques he described are commonplace. Many Syrian rights groups have also documented Jolan's time in detention.

The regime has denied the allegations of torture in its prisons. Its spokesmen say they are fighting an armed uprising sponsored by Islamist groups. But Human Rights Watch has interviewed more than 100 people detained since the protests began in March last year, and the group has collected harrowing testimony of torture against children as young as 13 and of deaths in custody.

For Jolan, his seven days in the metal box was the first of dozens of humiliations and torments. Next, still blindfolded, he was put in a tiny room just one metre high, where he was forced to stand, bent double, for another seven days. Then his captors finally started to interrogate him.

"For eight hours a day they asked me everything about co-ordination, about the people of the revolution. They wanted to know how they worked, how they take the injured from place to place," he says.

Jolan refused to talk, causing the torment to become even more cruel. He was given 50 lashes with a metal cable in the morning and 50 in the evening. He was then subjected to what Nadim Houry of Human Rights Watch describes as the "dulab" method. A tyre is forced over the victim's neck and his legs so he is folded forward. He is then tipped on his back, immobile, and beaten. Another day, Jolan says, he was suspended from the ceiling by a cable. On his 45th day in detention, they finally took the blindfold off. But Jolan was not prepared for the sight that greeted him. "When I opened my eyes, I could see two girls who were taken from the demonstrations. They were religious girls – usually they would wear the veil – but they were totally naked: the only item they were wearing was a blindfold," he says. "From this moment, I started crying."

With this image etched on his mind, he was taken back to the interrogation room and told that unless he talked, his mother and sister would be hauled in, also stripped naked and tortured in front of him. The UN report details similar "psychological torture, including sexual threats against them and their families".

But still Jolan refused to talk. Exasperated, his captors transferred him to the Adra civilian prison in Damascus, where he was kept in filthy, cramped surroundings. Over the next few months he was called before a court to answer a litany of charges, including attacking the standing of the state, encouraging problems with minorities, going to a protest without a permit, and setting up an unlicensed field hospital. He was allowed a lawyer, but says his statements were ignored in the court. Jolan says he was saved only by pressure from some international human rights organisations. Eventually, towards the end of December, he was freed with a 1,000 Syrian pound (£11) fine.

Since then, he has continued his work, moving around by night to safe houses to collect supplies, trying to gather more crowds for the weekly demonstrations after Friday prayers. There are physical signs of his time behind bars – he is gaunt, and is missing four front teeth from the beatings. He chain smokes nervously. But he is determined to fight on. Fifteen days ago, the authorities told his uncle that Jolan must stop his activism or face "a bullet in the head". So he switched mobile phone numbers and went underground for 10 days.

Mr Houry says: "Syria's torture chambers belong to the Middle Ages. The security forces believe that by torturing people, including children, they will reinstate the wall of fear in Syria. But these torturers should know that their methods have only served to energise the protesters and that it is only a matter of time until they face accountability."

Thursday, February 16, 2012

A history of seductive drugs.



By Jacqueline Detwiler, The Fix

1) Alcohol: Ancient SumeriaThisFans of alcohol are in good company; this is a drug that's been in use since the dawn of human time—if carbon dating of jugs found in Jiahu, China to around 8,000 BC is to be believed. But it wasn’t until we settled into agricultural societies that the wine really got flowing. Written records from ancient Sumeria document the uses and quantity of the beer—called "kash"—that was brewed. They even indicate that Sumerians had regulated drinking places similar to modern-day bars. The booze, for its part, was considered worthy of offering to the gods, and even thought to have a civilizing effect: The Epic of Gilgameshmentions a wild man named Enkidu who was seduced to join civilization after he drank seven jugs of beer, “became expansive and sang with joy.” (A harlot was also, apparently, involved.)
2) Peyote: Mexico
Mescaline—the psychoactive ingredient in the peyote plant that's native to Mexico and the Southwest US—has probably been used in religious ceremonies since 3780–3660 BC, according to carbon dating of dried buttons found in a cave on the Rio Grande in Texas. Written records began once Catholic Spanish conquerors arrived in Mexico and were alarmed by the practice of eating or drinking peyote during religious festivals. In an effort to discourage use, priests were in the habit of asking their new congregationalists to confess to having experienced the drug’s hallucinogenic effects, right after they asked “Have you eaten the flesh of man?” and “Do you suck the blood of others?”
3) Marijuana: Siberia
Think medical marijuana is a new phenomenon? Not exactly. Chinese emperor Shen Nung first recommended brewing the leaves into a tea to relieve the symptoms of menstrual cramps, rheumatism, gout, malaria and even—hilariously—absentmindedness back in 2737 BC. Scythians, a people that lived in Siberia around the 7th century BC, were more into the drug for the fun; they were known to throw marijuana seeds onto stones that were heated during funeral ceremonies, inhaling the fumes to become intoxicated. Russian archeologists began to suspect that both male and female Scythians smoked marijuana regularly for pleasure when they found primitive pot pipes in tombs in 1929.
4) Opium: Greece
Those Sumerians were really into their substances. In addition to brewing beer, they also cultivated the opium poppy, which they called “the joy plant.” The Sumerians passed on their knowledge of opium-induced joy to the Assyrians, who in turn passed it on to Babylonians, Egyptians and Greeks. By the time of the Greek classical period, farmers on the island of Cyprus had invented harvesting knives of surgical quality to get the most out of the poppies, and extracts of the flower were a common additive to the poison hemlock cocktail used in executions. During this period, poppies were considered of such usefulness in inducing sleep and forgetfulness that they are often depicted as part of the clothing or possessions of three gods of the Greek pantheon: Hypnos (sleep), Nix (night), and Thanatos (death).
5) Coco: Peru
Early use of coca leaves resulted from a fortuitous correlation between optimal growing weather and the high altitudes in the South American Andes Mountains. From the reign of the Inca until the South American revolutionary wars, native laborers and soldiers chewed the leaves to increase alertness and oxygen intake, helping them fight, ferry goods or messages over long distances, or mine without requiring much food or rest. As one European visitor noted in later years, “Where Europeans would have halted and bivouacked, the ill-clad, barefooted Indians merely paused, for a short interval, to chew their Coca.”
6) Laudenum and Morphine: Great Britain/USA
The opium poppy may have been discovered in the Near East, but the processing of it into innocuous-seeming salts, injections and liquids was a product of the industrial revolution in the West. In the 1800s, white women in particular were fond of a liquid opium preparation called laudanum that was sold through mail order companies and at local apothecaries. This preparation was also a favorite of English writer Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who may have been inspired to pen his poem Kubla Khan while in a laudanum-induced dream. After the US civil war, injured soldiers with morphine habits expanded the need for opium products, and opium-smoking dens started popping up in major cities like New York and San Francisco.
7) Cocaine: Austria
Once Coca was synthesized into cocaine and introduced to the world at large in the late 1800s, it found an unlikely proponent in the world’s most famous psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud. Even after attempting to cure a friend’s morphine habit by introducing him to the drug (the man died, addicted to both drugs, within seven years), Freud touted cocaine as a cure for everything from headaches to depression to sexual impotence. Not unexpectedly, he used quite a bit of the white lady himself, writing licentious letters to his fiancée containing such passages as: “When I come, I will kiss you quite red and feed you till you are plump. And if you are forward, you should see who is the stronger—a gentle little girl who doesn't eat enough, or a big, wild man who has cocaine in his body... I am just now busy collecting the literature for a song of praise to this magical substance.”
8) Amphetamine: Germany
German scientist Lazăr Edeleanu first synthesized amphetamine in 1887, and it became a useful cold remedy and diet pill throughout the world over the next 50 years. Once World War II broke out, however, amphetamine—along with injectable methamphetamine produced in Japan—became a weapon on a par with submarines and fighter planes. Thousands of soldiers on all sides of the conflict were issued drugs to keep them awake during all-night bombings, and Japanese kamikaze pilots used methamphetamine before every flight. The German blitzkreig, in particular, is well known for having been influenced by the use of meth among pilots. By the end of 1940, however, the German army had cut back substantially, having determined that the substance was incredibly addictive.
9) MDMA: USA
Though it was discovered in 1912 by a chemist working for Merck, not much was known about the psychoactive effects of MDMA until an eccentric chemist named Alexander Shulgin synthesized it as part of a pet project at Dow Chemical in 1967. When Shulgin gave a small gift of the drug to a psychologist friend, it became the focus of therapeutic zeal in the psychology community, with one doctor even calling it “penicillin for the soul.” Soon after, MDMA popped up in the club dance scene in Dallas, and the DEA held hasty meetings to add the drug to the illegal schedule—fighting tooth and nail with psychologists all the way. Shulgin, meanwhile, wrote and published a book called PIHKAL, short for Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved, which is still known worldwide as a club drug cookbook.
10) Benzodiazepines: New Jersey
While researching potential tranquilizers for Hoffman-LaRoche in New Jersey in the 1930s, Polish American scientist Leo Sternbach discovered the benzodiazepine that came to be known as Librium. Next came Valium and Klonopin—both of which were also discovered by Sternbach. Before long, the high anxiety culture of the mid-20th century led to increased use of benzos and thousands became addicted. Sternbach, meanwhile, continued his successful career, likely because he never developed an addiction to the drugs himself. “My wife doesn't let me take [them],” he once told the New Yorker.



Former neuroscientist Jacqueline Detwiler edits a travel magazine by day, but moonlights as a science writer. Her work has appeared in Wired, Men's Health, Fitness and Forbes.

Monday, February 13, 2012

The hypocracy of believers.

Did you see the photo of the Syrian president Assad praying to his Allah? Does he and millions of other Muslims really believe that God is so stupid that He wouldn't have noticed the horrendous crimes they have committed against their fellow humans and if He did that he could be placated by praying to him? By flattering him with such utterances as GOD IS GREAT or by bowing to him in a mosque?
 
I have met quite a few hypocrites in my life (some closely related to me) so I don't really need to be made aware of bastards like Assad, Bush, Blair, Gaddafi, the catholic priests, and all the monks and imams who deface our planet!

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AZIZ ANOM