#Syria, ASSAD’S REGIME SHOWS JUST HOW THEY PROTECT THE CHILDREN..this picture speaks volumes..you don’t EVER put a child thru this trauma..much less video it! 

The Addounia reporter has an interview with two little girls laying next to their dead mother.

(Reuters) - Syria’s state media is fighting hard to cast the country’s unrest as an Islamist terrorist conspiracy rather than a popular uprising against the dynastic rule of President Bashar al-Assad.

State television airs interviews with men confessing to acts of violence, sullying the image of Assad’s opponents. But the interviews are mocked by many Syrians and an ex-producer says that many confessions are bogus.

Although an ardent supporter of Assad, the former employee said she is distressed by what she describes as a campaign of misinformation waged by the official “Suriya” television channel.

“I used to arrive at work and one of the editors would tell us that we have a person to confess,” she told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals from her former employer.

“Some of the men are just normal people who were arrested in anti-government demonstrations and others were thieves and criminals who were nearing the end of their sentence,” said the producer, in her late twenties. “They were told they will be set free if they confess to the made-up crimes.”

One confession was that of Qusai Shaqfeh from Hama, a city that has seen fighting between rebels and government troops in recent months and has a long history of dissent against the Assads - Bashar’s late father Hafez sent troops to crush an uprising there in 1982, killing thousands.

Shaqfeh, 29, said in the aired programme that rebels killed members of the security forces and threw them off a bridge. He also said he contacted journalists working for foreign media and sent them footage of faked peaceful demonstrations to use as propaganda against Assad.

Another confession gained particular fame in Syria when the confessor, Ghassin Selawaya from the coastal city of Lattakia, appeared to be playing to the demands of the producer.

“Er…we burned buses…er…we resisted security patrols, it was all rioting,” he muttered, sitting in a T-shirt surrounded by a shotgun and pistols, weapons the presenter said police found on him.

Opposition activists said that Selawaya’s family said he was in fact arrested before the uprising for unrelated crimes. The Syrian government restricts media access, making it hard to verify reports.

REPORTS OF TORTURE

For more than a year, peaceful protesters demanding Assad’s overthrow have been arrested, tortured and killed, human rights groups say. But dissidents have increasingly resorted to armed ambushes and bomb attacks on elements of state security, and a recent Human Rights Watch report accused the armed opposition of kidnappings, torture and executions.

State media has never reported on government abuses but aired “terrorist confessions” early last year when activists posted videos of Assad’s troops firing on demonstrations and there was little evidence of an armed uprising.

For many Syrians, pro- and anti-Assad, the confessions are a running joke.

“I do not think that Syrian television lies in all its stories, but the information in these confessions is really conflicting and confusing,” said Rami, 33, a government worker who, like other ordinary Syrians quoted in this article, was interviewed via Skype from Damascus and asked to be identified by his first name only, for security reasons.

Reem, a 32-year-old journalist, said she never trusted state media, seeing it as a mouthpiece of Assad’s inner circle, but the TV confessions were a new low.

“If they were actually criminals, they should be sent to courts, not to a TV studio,” she said.

“The confessions can be pretty funny,” the producer said. “They are clearly illogical.”

“Our editors would ask us to think up stories that will be believable. For example, if we had a man who was from a certain city, we would tell him to talk about specific streets or confess to a crime committed recently in that city,” she said.

“There were some confessors who seem to have signs of torture but I did not ask too many questions,” she said.

DRAMATIC MUSIC

In late April, pro-government news channel “Addounia” aired what it said was a confession by “terrorist” Ali Othman, who activists say was arrested in March after he helped foreign journalists escape from the besieged city of Homs.

The interview, which was over an hour long, was publicised a few days beforehand.

In the teaser, the Addounia interviewer walks through dark corridors as tense music plays. He creaks open a metal-barred door and walks inside a prison cell, where Ali Othman sits with his head in his hands.

Othman rises and the next shot shows him sitting opposite the presenter, both spotlighted in a dark room.

“Stay tuned… Inside Baba Amr,” words on the screen read, referring to the district in Homs that was heavily shelled by the Syrian government because it was supposedly swarming with “armed terrorists.”

In the interview, Othman said that people attending anti-Assad protests pretended to be peaceful but had hidden guns under their jackets to attack security members.

He also described running a media centre in Baba Amr, smuggling foreign journalists in and out of the country and organising dissident protesters.

Fellow activists said the interview was conducted under duress and Britain’s Foreign Secretary William Hague said in a statement just after Othman was arrested that there were reports that he had been tortured.

Suriya’s ex-producer said that many who confessed appeared afraid.

“I sometimes used to wonder why Suriya wanted people to make these confessions,” she said.

“My managing editor once told us that the goal is to show people that the government is in control and also so that parents see what happens if they let their children oppose the government.”

Aisha, a 42-year-old housewife who comes from the same minority Alawite sect as President Assad, said that although she does not trust the confessions, she knows they have a use.

“I watch the confessions in front of my children and try to convince them that they are real because I want them to be scared of what will happen if they look for trouble,” she said.

Baba Amr was stormed this morning at 8am with both security forces and army forces. They stormed homes and led all the males aged 14 and over to the consumer corporation. Syria TV and Addounia TV cars were seen entering into Baba Amr from the bridge side.

The estimated number of civilians remaining inside Baba Amr and Jobar is around 4000.

The Red Cross promised to enter at 11am but we demand they enter now to protect us from a massacre - as with no one to see it, the regime can do anything now and get away with it.

#Syria: We would like to use this opportunity to shame Addounia TV aka Syrian State TV with the kind of desperate tactics they use for propaganda.

This was by far the stupidest act this pro-Assad channel has ever made.

English translation:

Reporter asks name of the interviewee. He tells her his name. Reporter THEN tells him “We won’t ask you on what you have voted” - fine.

Later, she then asks him “isn’t the referendum a good step in the direction of the road to democracy for a good political life that is demanded by the Syrian people?”. He answers, “Yes” and smiles awkwardly at her. A big UH-OH moment here as you can see.

The reporter further went on to ask whether he read the constitution. The man replies “yes” and said it is good.

No comment on the stupidity of pro-Assad supporters. They try not to be biased and they slam other channels for it but they have failed even with the simplest act of voting.

A defector in Aleppo talks about the explosions carried out by Air force Intelligence #Syria

Brief English Translation:

Defector:
My name is Ali Taha Shabaan from Air Defense (military number 8754-541).  I am joining the FSA because Airforce Intelligence sent us to fire at protestors in neighborhoods of Aleppo (Hanano and other areas).
(Names of officers who commanded this are mentioned)

Film Crew: Were you a witness to the Aleppo explosions ?

Defector: Yes, under the command of the 80th brigade.  Airforce Intelligence informed us there was an explosion at 9AM, .  A second explosion occurred 10 minutes later, and after a while shooting began.  The shooting was to give us the impression that there were battles with the FSA.
…
A car was sent from the 80th brigade, ladden with explosives.  Under the order of commanders Khalifa Hama Mustafa and Salaah Omran. (2 other names and ranks mentioned)
The explosives were dynamite sticks and pepsi bottles filled with shrapnel and gun powder (and silver nitrate).  They then called Dunya and State Television to come and film the capture of terrorists who carried out the explosion.

AP 08/02/12

Younes al-Yousef rarely goes outside in Cairo, fearful that even here someone will recognize him and word will get back to Damascus. He stays in a simple, rented apartment with his wife and children, smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee and watching TV for the latest from the homeland he fled, Syria.

Al-Yousef is waiting for the fall of a regime that he once believed in. He served as a cog in its machine, as a cameraman for a pro-government television station that showed Syrians “the reality” of the uprising.

“I was a supporter and I benefited from the regime, I can’t deny it,” the 35-year-old told The Associated Press in an interview in his apartment. “I tell you the truth, I was with the regime heart and soul.”

But he said that as he watched security forces blast towns where protesters took to the streets to demand the ouster of President Bashar Assad, he could no longer believe the line he was helping bring to the public, that “terrorists” were tearing apart the country.

He expressed his doubts to a colleague. Then, fearing retaliation, he packed up his family and fled the country.

Al-Yousef’s account of his experiences could not be independently confirmed, given the chaos in Syria and the limitations put on journalists by the government.

But his story gives a glimpse into how the regime has used one of its most powerful tools on the home front, the media, to keep the broader public on its side as it faces the greatest internal challenge in 40 years of rule by the Assad family.

Since protests began in March, the government has insisted they were not a popular uprising like those that toppled dictators in Tunisia and Egypt but the work of terrorists and armed groups in a foreign-backed plot to tear Syria apart. For Syrians watching the influential pro-regime media, this has been the cause of the daily bloodshed.

The message resonates among Syrians who have been taught for years that the Assads’ secular, nationalist rule is what keeps the country together. There is particularly fear among minorities - the Alawites, a Shiite Muslim offshoot, and Christians - that Sunni Muslim fundamentalists will take over and retaliate against them. Even among the Sunni majority, which has been the backbone of the uprising, some fear the country will be torn apart if Assad goes.

Al-Yousef says he never had any reason to doubt the government’s version.

Before the uprising, he had a store selling camera equipment in Kfar Takharim, a town amid hills of olive groves in the northwestern province of Idlib, near the Turkish border. He did video work, filming weddings. He had good relationships with local officers in the security apparatus, a necessity for anyone trying to get ahead.

He occasionally did video work for the Dunya satellite TV station, which is majority owned by Rami Makhlouf, a cousin of Assad and one of Syria’s wealthiest men. His work for the station alongside its local Idlib correspondent picked up when the uprising began.

He said he would see demonstrations in the area but wouldn’t film them because he knew the channel didn’t want that. The protests were put down by security forces with tear gas and clubs.

It wasn’t until May that he encountered shootings. There was a giant demonstration in the city of Idlib, the provincial capital, and al-Yousef said he heard gunfire and saw ambulances wailing by. Later, locals told him security forces had killed a dozen people.

“It was understood that those people are saboteurs, terrorists,” he said. “That was our idea about them, and the journalist or correspondent was like a security officer in his relationship with the security services and the army.”

As time went on, the protests grew larger and more frequent. Al-Yousef said that when he and the Dunya correspondent would hear about a planned demonstration, they would show up early to film it when only a few dozen people had arrived and use that footage even if it grew larger later on.

Then came the siege of Jisr el-Shughour, a town just over the hills from the Turkish border that in June rose up and virtually drove out regime police. 

Several dozen soldiers and police joined protesters in the town, the first significant instance of armed defectors siding with the uprising. Regime forces responded with a heavy siege.

The days of heavy fighting that lasted until the regime retook the town gave the small-town wedding videographer his first real look at such violence. It rattled him.

“People got killed and I saw dead bodies. I wasn’t used to that. So I started wondering how that happened,” he said.

At one point, he entered the town to get some of his relatives out. He found it nearly empty of people, but intact. A few days later, the security services brought him in to film. He found destruction everywhere.

“The city was a wasteland, stores had been burnt and smashed,” he said. He asked a security officer what happened. The officer said gunmen and terrorists had attacked the town. “We believed what he said.”

But his suspicions grew. Each time he was taken into town, he would film pro-regime “residents” - mostly brought in from outside town. When the security forces took him to film mass graves they said were full of people killed by the terrorists, al-Yousef was convinced that they were faked - saying he recognized bodies that were dug twice out of different locations.

“This is when I started thinking about a conspiracy. I hadn’t seen any gunmen or terrorists and I was hearing army officers tell me that we came here because of gunmen and terrorists,” he said. “So where is the conspiracy that you kept telling us about, the big conspiracy against Syria?”

In August, he decided that he couldn’t go on with the job. He told the Dunya correspondent; they argued and parted ways. He soon heard that the correspondent told the authorities he was helping the terrorists.

On Sept. 2, he took his wife, Fatima, and two kids, aged 2 and 3, across the border to Turkey. They left so fast they barely carried more than the clothes they were wearing.

While in Turkey, a security official he knew back home contacted him and tried to coax him back, saying nothing would happen to him. He didn’t believe him. Twice, Syrians he didn’t know in Turkey tried to meet him. He shunned them, fearing they would kidnap him.

He moved on to Cairo in late October, and he says the efforts to get him back to Syria have continued. He said he frequently receives phone calls from Syrians who want to meet him. One recently said he had brought him money from his brother, but his brother had never heard of the man, al-Yousef said.

“If the want to get me, they’ll get me. It’s an issue of revenge now,” he said.
With his savings running out, he struggles to pay rent with support his family sends him.

He thinks about Syria all the time, he said. He’s convinced Assad will eventually fall.

“Before, we had no one in Syria who dared to call for freedom,” he said. “The people will not go back. It’s impossible for them to go back.”

FAKE ALERT, Midan, Damascus, #Syria: Injured man in today’s bombing tells the cameraman to stop shooting the video & then jumps up.

Another miserable play written by the Syrian regime and directed by Al Dounia and other pro-Assad networks: The regime brought some shabiha from one of western towns in Hama to the Assi Square where they met with another group of thugs who were present there originally. They exchanged their traditional thugs’ clothes and started cheering for the butcher. As they say, the show must go on; Al Dounia videotaped them in front of the delegation! (as if a blind man can see!!). Proverb: For every disease there is a medicine, except stupidity, it will cause you disease in case you wanted to treat it. This stupid foolish regime is making fun of the people thinking that we can actually believe these kinds of sick plays. This Square is ours; this land is ours and we will continue our fight till the end with power and strength. NOTE: TO THIS MOMENT THE SQUARE (LOCATION) REMAINS CLOSED TO THE OPPOSITION