#Truth smugglers use internet to pressure #Assad

Truth smugglers use internet to pressure Assad

clipped from article: Young activists defy torturers and thugs to reveal the Syrian government's repression, write Christine Marlow and Nick Meo.

Naked on the concrete floor of the interrogation room, hands tied behind his back and a blindfold covering his eyes, the boy listened to the slowly approaching footsteps of the intelligence officer. The screams of his brother came from the next room.

''Where is the media rat? Where is Ali?'' the interrogator rasped into his ears. He felt someone clamp cables to his toes and push him back into the shallow pool of water as the voltage was turned up for his next electric shock.

The two teenagers were detained after Syrian officers found loudspeakers at their home in the Damascus suburb of Douma which, they said, could be used at protests.

Kept in a political intelligence base in the capital for two months, they were alternately interrogated and tortured for information on opposition activists in their town.

Their questioners especially focused, the brothers said, on who was documenting crackdowns on demonstrations for dissemination to the foreign media.

In more than nine months of protest against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, culminating in some of the largest demonstrations two days ago, it is Syria's media activists who have ensured that the outside world knows what is going on.

The number and scale of the protests, and the barbarity with which they have often been suppressed, have been witnessed by hundreds of millions abroad, not least in nearby Arab countries.

Last week, a 66-strong team of Arab League observers was finally admitted into the country, forced on the reluctant government as the price of avoiding tougher sanctions from its neighbours and agreed by Assad in what may yet turn out to be a final gamble to stay in power.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/truth-smugglers-use-internet-to-pressure-assad-20120101-1ph5d.html#ixzz1iImUsGHO