wilmott.com

Get hold of yourself!

I think there may have been an opportunity around 2009 to support the uprising against Assad and maybe replace his regime with something more democratic and -- more importantly, of course -- more aligned with the West.

In any case, not much if anything was attempted along that line, and in the end Assad sent tanks and chemical weapons in and demolished the resistance.

Here in America my perception is that at the time far too many significant people had a hard-on that they were on the verge of toppling the Iranian government (spoiler alert: they weren't), and all of the oxygen that would have been needed to do anything with regard to Syria was sucked out of the room.

Discovery of vast Syrian drug lab reveals secrets of illicit captagon trade


https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-ea ... 024-12-13/

“Humanity will be shocked when it hears the stories coming out of Sednaya.”

Torture wheels. Mass executions. Bodies crushed with industrial presses or burned in makeshift crematoriums.
Lashings to the brink of death. Those are some of the horrors thousands of prisoners endured in the vast
underground dungeons of this death camp

Sednaya Prison (Wikipedia)

“Humanity will be shocked when it hears the stories coming out of Sednaya.”

Torture wheels. Mass executions. Bodies crushed with industrial presses or burned in makeshift crematoriums.
Lashings to the brink of death. Those are some of the horrors thousands of prisoners endured in the vast
underground dungeons of this death camp

Sednaya Prison (Wikipedia)

Did you not know that already? 

The whole of the Middle East is littered with places like that.

“Humanity will be shocked when it hears the stories coming out of Sednaya.”

Torture wheels. Mass executions. Bodies crushed with industrial presses or burned in makeshift crematoriums.
Lashings to the brink of death. Those are some of the horrors thousands of prisoners endured in the vast
underground dungeons of this death camp

Sednaya Prison (Wikipedia)

Did you not know that already? 

The whole of the Middle East is littered with places like that.

Frankly, no -- until Assad fell.
Where else?

The usual suspects: throw a dart at a map of the Middle East and there is a 99% chance of a torture chamber.

And the West Bank
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/ ... y-arrests/

Amnesty International has for decades documented widespread torture by Israeli authorities in places of detention across the West Bank.  However, over the past four weeks, videos and images have been shared widely online showing gruesome scenes of Israeli soldiers beating and humiliating Palestinians while detaining them blind-folded, stripped, with their hands tied, in a particularly chilling public display of torture and humiliation of Palestinian detainees.

More, known for many years

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_ch ... _civil_war

Frankly, no -- until Assad fell.
Where else?

The SAVAK secret police of America's good friend the Shah of Iran were infamous for their torture practice of inserting glass bottles into the rectums of victims and then breaking the bottles.

Trained by Israelis, by the way, which may be part of the reason Iran would be so happy to see Israel erased from the map

Frankly, no -- until Assad fell.
Where else?

The SAVAK secret police of America's good friend the Shah of Iran were infamous for their torture practice of inserting glass bottles into the rectums of victims and then breaking the bottles.

Trained by Israelis, by the way, which may be part of the reason Iran would be so happy to see Israel erased from the map

You took the words out of my mouth. The Shah was a puppet of the West; he overthrew the democratically elected government Why ? Oil, mainly for the same reasons the French and  British carved up the Middle East all those years ago by drawing vertical lines in the sand. You reap what you sow.
After Suez, the French and  British were shanghaid. Demise of two empires but it took another 10 years for the former to realise it.

Tid-bit; my erstwhile PhD supervisor was in Tehran when the revolution broke out...

In this photo I can see Princes Philip, Ranier and Sultan Qaboos (it could be his father whom he overthrew in 1970) of Oman.
And our very own Bernhard Leopold Frederik Everhard Julius Coert Karel Godfried Pieter, Prins der Nederlanden, Prins van Lippe-Biesterfeld is lurking around there.
Faux royalty, like Mohomad Reza.

BTW is that Spiro Agnew bottom right?

In this photo I can see Princes Philip, Ranier and Sultan Qaboos (it could be his father whom he overthrew in 1970) of Oman.
And our very own Bernhard Leopold Frederik Everhard Julius Coert Karel Godfried Pieter, Prins der Nederlanden, Prins van Lippe-Biesterfeld is lurking around there.
Faux royalty, like Mohomad Reza.

BTW is that Spiro Agnew bottom right?

The Headwaiter. Some of the most illustrious names on the invitation list failed to make it. Regrets were sent by President Nixon (who dispatched Spiro Agnew instead), Queen Elizabeth II (who was represented by Prince Philip and Princess Anne) and, in the unkindest cut of all, French President Georges Pompidou, who sent Premier Jacques Chaban-Delmas. What was particularly grating was the fact that the Shah had given the affair such a heavily French accent. Taking note of this, Pompidou is reported by a Western diplomat to have said: “If I did go, they would probably make me the headwaiter.”