Surviving Syria's Prisons (BBC2)
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What a strange power the television camera exercises over people. Point a lens at them and they will confess to crimes that, in court or under police questioning, they’d deny to their dying breath.
Filmed in silhouette, their faces in shadow, torturers and prison guards described the atrocities they routinely inflicted on political detainees, in the This World documentary Surviving Syria’s Prisons.
Their testimony was often self-serving. Each one pleaded he had no choice but to mete out brutality and murder. Henchmen took the age-old line that they were ‘only obeying orders’. Officers claimed the men below them were an ill-disciplined rabble who could not be restrained.
