How Forensic Architecture Revealed Details of a Secret Military Prison in Syria | Hacker News Reader

How Forensic Architecture Revealed Details of a Secret Military Prison in Syria

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110 pointsmiraj43 comments

I have problem with these stories. Mainly because I feel they're coming out in concert to form public opinion into taking military action in Syria.

There is a good analysis on Amnesty International faulty reporting on this. [0]

[0] https://timhayward.wordpress.com/2017/01/23/amnesty-internat...

I'd agree with you, except that the truth is so much more grim and obvious... nobody really gives enough of a shit to go to war. "Red lines" and all of that didn't make people care, the depth of the depravity doesn't even make them want to accept refugees, never mind intervene on their foreign soil.

You can relax, Syria is going to remain the hellish proxy war it's always been.

I think it's hard to figure out on whose side to intervene. It's also unclear if the western world should start a military conflict with Russia.

By arming the "rebels" (the Syrian govt calls them terrorists), the "western world" has already intervened.

These type of "intervention" follows a pattern.

1. First we instigate an uprising by exploiting existing tensions or creating one.

2. Then when the local govt reacts like we expected them to, we cry foul, and say we have to defend helpless civilians from a "brutal and authoritarian" regime.

3. We warn members of that regime's police and military that they'll be guilty of war crimes if they act against the "rebels". This is when you come to see the role the International Criminal Court plays in our efforts at global domination. Key members of the govt military will start getting phone calls to defect. And many will defect.

4. At this point all you'll read in the western press about the local govt are just how bad the regime is. Propaganda all the way.

5. If things are not going according to plan, we rush to the UN for permission to establish a "no fly zone" in the country. We'll get our wish, of course. And that's when cruise missiles start taking our the military infrastructure of the local govt. Dams and other civilian infrastructure are fair game too. Everything goes down hill from there.

That was how it played out in Libya. Syria was close to 5 when Russian stepped in. Assad owes Putin big!

While this is going on, we in the west (the rest of us not involved in the war effort) are busy with our lives. We don't bother if it's our govt doing it to others.

And the beat goes on. Until something happens. But it happened because "they hate our freedom".

But the gods are not to blame.

I think it's clear now, that the time for intervention has long since passed, and given our track record we're unlikely to improve the situation. The problem isn't increased interventionism, it's that we've already intervened by arming and funding people.

Far more importantly though, we're the prime architects of how life in the Middle East has proceeded for decades now. We shouldn't make the mistake of intervening in their civil war, but we should take a long hard look at ourselves and plan for the blowback.

>>we're the prime architects of how life in the Middle East has proceeded

This isn't quite true.

Iran goaded the US into invading Iraq, perhaps supplying the fake evidence used to link Saddam Hussein to WMDs. This was at least Hussein's opinion, and why he did not take US threats immediately leading up to the war seriously. Saddam's successor, Chalabi, was an Iranian agent [[1].

Bashar Al-Assad aggressively sponsored terrorism and sectarian violence in Iraq. In the early days, most fighters from Iraq were from Syria, or came through Syria. It was not without irony that the conflict later spilled over into his country.

The leaders of the Middle East are not without fault, they clumsily used the West's domestic insecurities (and Russia's) for their own military gain. In Syria they unleashed forces they could no longer control.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/world/middleeast/26iht-m26...

Oh, now it's Iran that is responsible for Iraq war. How convenient. Maybe US should start bombing Iran now, too?

I'm really afraid at how easily it has become to find any pretext to bomb and destroy any country by the US. All of course in the name of "democracy and freedom". It's a pity that whole generations of people living in destroyed countries are either dead or have no democracy and freedom at all.

And as it was reported here several weeks ago, sometimes pretext is not even necessary. Just send a bomb or rocket any time - it's a thirld world country, no one care about people living in those countries.

> It's a pity that whole generations of people living in destroyed countries are either dead or have no democracy and freedom at all.

The Iraqi Kurds generally seem pretty happy about not being murdered anymore.

(Just saying there's two sides to every story. Giving peace a chance only works if the other party is willing to as well - sometimes they just take the opportunity to invade Poland)

Wow! Just wow! Everything you stated belongs in the "alternative fact" category.

Why? For example, on Wikipedia you can see

    In January 2012, a French intelligence official stated that they believed Chalabi to be an Iranian agent.[8]

There is nothing alternative about saying that Iran and Syria persued aggressive anti-us policy at the expense of the Iraqi and later Syrian people.

Syria pursued "anti-us policy" at the expense of Syrian people?

I think this world is upside down.

I agree with you.

These types of reporting will continue until Assad goes the way of Saddam and Muammar Gaddafi. That's been the goal from Day 1. If we really cared about stuff like this, we need to hear about what's going on in Yemen courtesy of our friends over in Saudi Arabia, and in the Gaza strip. Even events in Bahrain deserve attention.

But no, it's about how hard the Syrian army's hitting the terrorist we're arming.

Exactly. It's Afghanistan with the Soviets, all over again... the blowback is going to be ugly and protracted.

Amnesty International works tirelessly to document human rights abuses in all of the other conflicts you mention and has done for many years. What exactly is your point?

Amnesty Internation was duped into false reporting that got us into the first Iraq war. Amnesty later retraced their 84 page report[0].

How is it possible an organization that documents human rights could mislead the world? Any government PR firm, backed by CIA or MI6 can create a list of "witnesses" and have them testify to AI. My point is, just because AI is documenting it, it doesn't mean it's legit. Especially around Syria since there is a lot of documented story fabrication.

[0] https://www.democracynow.org/2003/12/2/a_debate_on_one_of_th...

I think that's a reasonable concern to have. My question was regarding the parent comment's implication that AI themselves are deciding not to publish information on abuses in other areas. The user seems to feel that these things have not been publicised, when in fact there are ongoing awareness campaigns on all of the countries listed.

I think a more charitable interpretation of their point was that AI's information, which is already suspect, is cherry-picked when presented to the US audience(referencing the article in the thread, and many others by US newspapers) to form the narrative that Assad must be ousted.

Well said. As alluded to in your article, a lion's share of Western reporting doesn't take place on the ground from within Syria. Journalists and activists are content to take one faction (the Islamists) at their word and pass it off as fact.

It's sad, but the truth is that Amnesty International has had ample practice over many decades when it comes to the grim business of collecting and correlating detailed accounts of the depths of human misery. It's good to see that modern techniques and tools make it possible to put that to more use than just testimony of what a wretched species we are.

>To aid them with their campaign for independent monitoring of the prison, Amnesty collaborated with Forensic Architecture, a research agency at Goldsmiths, University of London that uses "architectural evidence" to work on behalf of international prosecutors, human rights organizations, and political justice groups. Together, they've created an interactive model of Saydnaya prison—a place completely closed off to outsiders—using only aerial satellite images and the testimonies of former detainees.

Imagine being able to do that with Birkenau or Dachau while it was still in use. If people still can't bring themselves to care enough to at least recognize what's happening, then it won't be for lack of trying or furnishing them with opportunities.

I've been following the Syrian Civil War for the last 5 years. The null hypothesis: every faction has done horrible things. That's what happens in war. It would be an exceptional civil war indeed if the central government (or any other faction of significance) did not commit atrocities. I understand not wanting one's country to be involved in the war. I don't want my country to intervene in the SCW either. I don't understand the resistance to recognizing the horrible things done in Syria (by the central government or otherwise).

Is the idea that if the Syrian government commits atrocities then Western powers have to intervene in the war? So to prevent a probably-disastrous intervention people need to deny that the Syrian government commits atrocities? I don't think that is a logical chain of reasoning, if that is indeed what is going on. There are all sorts of horrors in the world where additional intervention by outside powers is likely to be worse than inaction. It doesn't mean that we should pretend that the horrors don't exist.

There's a false equivalency here: Only one side is barrel bombing people indiscriminately, torturing people by the tens of thousands, and systematically exterminating an entire group of people.

You're right, no war is without war crimes, but the Assad regime has given up on appearances and is simply playing for keeps. They're beyond the point of no return, they're going to end up like North Korea in terms of diplomatic ties, if they survive this rebellion.

> There's a false equivalency here: Only one side is barrel bombing people indiscriminately, torturing people by the tens of thousands, and systematically exterminating an entire group of people.

That seems blatantly false to me. The Assad regime is certainly guilty of all the things on your list, but ISIS are also murdering and torturing people by the tens of thousands and systematically exterminating entire groups of people (has everyone already forgotten about the Yazidis, if nothing else?). Insofar as differences in scale exist, they seem to exist only because ISIS doesn't have the capacity to kill as many people as they'd like. Both groups have institutionalized horrific violence as a matter of policy.

Syrian civil war has much more than just these two actors.

Precisely. ISIS is actually far less of a factor in the overall shape of Syria than they are in Iraq.

That's absolutely true, I merely mentioned the most obvious counterexample in terms of deliberate atrocities. Most of the other actors are also guilty of deliberate human rights violations on a fairly massive scale, but I thought my simple counterpoint was quite sufficient to rebut the parent.

You won't find me defending the crimes of the Syrian government. (Or of anyone else in the war!) But I think that there's a danger of letting your perfectly justified moral outrage distort your ability to predict. I do not think that the Syrian government will be as isolated as North Korea after the war. It's not as isolated as North Korea now and outrage will fade further after the war. I predict that there will be less diplomatic pressure on the government after the war. The EU and neighboring states will be more interested in stopping/reversing refugee flows than in punishing the Syrian government for wartime atrocities. Any stability will be considered good stability.

I predict that Assad, like most heads of state, will never be held accountable for his government's crimes. I do not even see how an outside force could bring him to justice without subjecting the Syrian people to even more misery.

The Allies, Axis, and Comintern all committed atrocities in WWII... but atrocities are not a binary state. The firebombing of Dresden doesn't match up to the Final Solution, for example, and not just in scale - the latter was a formal ongoing policy by the government in charge, not 'soldiers run amok against their training'.

It is good, however, to remind any hawk that atrocities are committed by all sides. If you're advocating for war at any time, you must also accept that your own side is going to engage in atrocities to some degree.

> It would be an exceptional civil war indeed if the central government (or any other faction of significance) did not commit atrocities.

It does not have to be that way. Look at what's going on in the Donbass. It is war, it is happening in a densely populated area. Both sides make heavy of the artillery.

But the death count is like x100 times less.

Because they're not willingly trying to kill as many civilians.

(I agree with the rest of your points though)

See also their site: http://www.forensic-architecture.org

and this interesting movie by the same guy about the architecture in occupied Palestine: http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/rebelarchitecture/2014/0...

It is certainly dangerous to play sounds to someone to try to trigger specific memories. This could prime them to give false information, entirely believing it was true.

Which is a shame, because it's really important to expose the sort of evil that happens at these places.

This is why single accounts aren't taken as gospel, because even at their best, they're not going to be entirely accurate. It's only when you're comparing many different sources who didn't know or contact each other that a pattern emerges. When survivors and guards, and all manner of witnesses all report the same details, those are the details you can have higher confidence in.

Of course, torturers aren't stupid... they've known for a long time that they might end up on the wrong side of a tribunal, or worse. These days you don't get names, you often stay black-bagged and bound, but people still remember voices, they see flashes during moments of struggle or when being "submarined". People remember smells and sensations that meant nothing to them, but which an experienced investigator is trained to recognize.

I'd recommend the book 'Torture and Democracy' to anyone interested in the topic, from any angle at all.

Assad wouldn't have been able to inherit the throne of the Syrian Republic in the first place if not for the green light from all western capitals. This green light lives on for his past and recent atrocities.

This AI report is all about propaganda, Google maps and military satellite images make everything transparent"the Syrian regime committed and is committing and will continue to commit human rights violations but this is about the Amnesty International report on Syria. Western human rights organizations--specifically Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch--don't have any credibility among most Arabs about human rights. Their reputation has sunk far lower ever since the Arab uprisings in 2011, where they have been rightly perceived as propaganda arms of Western governments. So I saw the report yesterday and read the Methodology section and immediately felt that it is not credible: given the mention of unnamed sources (not one of them willing to be identified and the reference to countries which host Syrian opposition groups). But I am not an expert on those details and specifics. I don't trust the Syrian regime (and its sponsors) and I don't trust the Syrian rebels and their sponsors in the West and East. How to judge the report? I asked a well-known Syrian dissident who, due to his leftist underground activities, served years in Syrian jails and was subjected to torture by the regime. His name is Nizar Nayouf. He wrote me those responses, and I can't judge the validity of the specific answers but given that there is no scrutiny by Western media to anything coming out which is in sync with Western government propaganda on Syria, I thought it would be useful. These are my (rush) translations (edited) of his answers: " The white prison is the one on the shape of Mercedes. It is the main building (the old and big). As for the red prison, it is the new and small [structure], and contrary to what is contained in the report--which it seems does not distinguish between the two. The first was inaugurated in 1988 while the second was not inaugurated until 2001. As for the main White building, it is quite impossible for it to accommodate 10,000 prisoners. We know it inch by inch, and know how much it can accommodate, at maximum, and assuming you put 30 prisoners in a cell like pickles (or Syrian style pickles, makdus), it can't accommodate more than 4500 prisoners (in fact it was designed for 3000 prisoners). The red building is much smaller and is exclusive to public defendants among the military members (traffic, desertion, various criminal offenses, etc), and can't accommodate more than 1800 prisoners, and even if you put 3 on top of one another. Yes, paying money to achieve release is true. I personally documented tense of cases, in which `Ali Haydar (minister of national reconciliation) was the mediator. The talk of rape is lie on top of lie. It has no basis in truth. I challenge them...to show once case, not only now but also from the beginning of the era of Hafidh Al-Asad, whether with women or with men. Yes, there were rape cases with tools (like raping around ten young women from Communist Action Party, and others, with soft drink bottles. There is nothing in official papers which prisoners sign something called Sidnaya prison. This is the popular name and not the official name. And this reveals the lies about them signing papers indicating that they were "from Sidnaya prison". Prisoners are not moved from prisons to On-site Courts in Al-Qabun. The on-site courts move to prisons and hold its trials there, especially now as the Al-Qabun area is targeted by the fire of the rebels and is not safe at all. As for the length of the trials, it is one minute or two, and that is true since the 1980s till now. They admit that on-site trials' rulings require the signature of the president or the Minister of Defense and yet they say in another section that execution is approved only by the members of the court and officers with it. They claim that the second on-site court was formed to accommodate after the crisis, and this is a lie and show ignorance or fabrication. The on-site court (first and second) have been in existence since 1968, and the Palestinian colonel, Salah ad-Din Al-Ma`ani, was chief of the second on-site courts since the 1980s. He was the one who was in charge of trial of Muslim Brotherhood, along with Sulayman Al-Khatib. As for the requirement of confessions by prisoners while they are blindfolded, this was ended by an order from Hafidh Al-Asad in 1998 or 1999, as far as I can remember, but I don't know if this practice was resumed. There is no representative of the mukhabarat in the Hay'at Al--Mahkamah Al-Maydaniyyah, and thus he does not sign on any ruling, contrary to what is claimed by the report. There is a mess in what they say that the head of the on-site court is the military prosecutor, (p. 20) and this is real rubbish. The military prosecutor job is quite different from the chief of the on-site court, and is the chief military prosecutor in the military district administration. They say that those who are on death row are gathered in the red building (section B). But they said that the red boiling (p. 12) which is on the shame pf Mercedes, which is in fact the old building, and is thus baseless as I indicated above. And in the old building there are no cells except solitary confinement cells (one meter by two meters) under ground. And they are for punishment and is limited in numbers. As for the section B, it is like other sections (10 beds on the right and 10 on the left, three stories over ground). The thing that most got my attention was "the transfer of the prisoners form the red building and white building in trucks and cars". When one hears this one thinks that the distance between the two buildings is in kilometers when they are less than 120 meters apart. The report says (p. 2) that the "commander of the southern front group (firqah) attends the executions. There is nothing in the Syrian Army which is called "commander of the Southern Group 13 or northern or Western or any other direction. On page 32, it says that the picture is of the cemetery of martyrs south of Damascus. The report says that it was expanded substantially between 2014 and 2016 and that long tunnels were dug in them, implying that they were used to burry those who were executed. This is silly beyond silly. In the martyrs cemetery no one can be buried there except the martyrs of the army, even if there is an intercession by Muhammad or Jesus or Hafidh Al-Asad himself. And contrary to what they say, and the picture damns them, because it shows the increase in the number of victims of the army. On p. 35, and elsewhere, they talk about forcing "prisoners to rape one another". This is despicable fabrication which is baseless, and is psychologically impossible under those conditions. (Is it possible for any person in the world to get an erection to rape another person who is tied and is under torture?) If the lying witness were too say that he was raped with sticks, i would have believed it because this happened sometimes with public defense prisoners as I indicated above. On page 43, they is a copy of certificate of death which reveals that it belongs to the Minister of Interior, but the certificate says that death was in "Military Tirshrin Hospital", which belongs to the Ministry of Defense. This didn't happen, and can't happen. In cases of death in a military hospital or in detention centers belonging to Military Intelligence, the certificates show "Army or Armed Forces, Directorate of Military Medical Services", or hospital x. One of the most amusing--if there is amusement in tragedies--contents of the report is what appears on page 44, where it talks about "tens of thousands" (i.e. over 30,000 or at least 18,000) who died under torture or for other reasons in Sidnaya prison in five years but it says: "but we only were able to obtain the names of 375 people only". What the report says about the kinds of mistreatment and torture and criminality is generally true. The world has not seen more savage prisons than the 18 prisons of the Iraqi (Saddamist) and Syrian prisons since the times of Nazism and Fascism in WWII. And anything which is reported in this context can be simply believed. We have seen it with our own eyes and lived it personally, although there were orders to--to be fair--that the torture of leftists and nationalists be less severe than the savage torture of Islamists."

I pointed to Nizar this morning that the official Syrian regime statement issued today used the name of Sidnaya prison, and he said that it was the first time as they did not want to use the official name of First Military Prison. http://angryarab.blogspot.ae/2017/02/amnesty-internation-rep...

This is incredibly hard to read, and is just a copy-paste from the blog post linked at the bottom. (The blog post is similarly poorly formatted, unfortunately.) Can you edit this to include just an introduction and the link instead?

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