On the 12th day he wrote a confession.
“Make it convincing,” a Capt. Maher told him. “There is someone who drove you. Imagine how he looks. Tall, short, fat?”
Mr. Ghabbash settled on a silver car and “a tall guy, with glasses and light hair.”
“I started to feel my talent in writing,” he said.
Surreal punishment
In March 2012, Mr. Ghabbash was flown to Mezze military air base, named for a well-off Damascus neighborhood nearby.
By then, he and numerous survivors said, there was an industrial-scale transportation system among prisons. Detainees were tortured on each leg of their journeys, in helicopters, buses, cargo planes. Some recalled riding for hours in trucks normally used for animal carcasses, hanging by one arm, chained to meat hooks. Mr. Ghabbash’s new cell was typical: 12 feet long, 9 feet wide, usually packed so tightly that prisoners had to sleep in shifts.
Outside the cell, a man was blindfolded and handcuffed in the corridor. It was Mr. Darwish, the human rights lawyer. He had been singled out for lecturing a judge on Syrian laws guaranteeing fair trials.
He later ticked off his punishment: “Naked, no water, no sleep, forced to drink my pee.”
Prison torture grew more brutal and baroque as rebels outside made advances and government warplanes bombed restive neighborhoods. Survivors describe sadistic treatment, rape, summary executions or detainees left to die of untreated wounds and illnesses.
Mr. Ghabbash soon got his own special punishment. He was interrogated by a man calling himself Suhail Hassan — possibly Suhail Hassan Zamam, who headed Air Force prisons, according to a leaked government database — who asked how Mr. Ghabbash would solve the conflict.
Source : Nytimes
