If you're really against torture...

[Undertoad]

...you're angry at the Obama administration and Clinton's State Department for re-engaging with Syria in 2009, creating a closer relationship between the US and these people:

That allowed me -- despite orders to keep my head down so that my interrogators should remain out of view -- to see a hooded man screaming in pain in front of me.

When they told him to take down his pants, I could see his swollen genitals, tied tight with a plastic cable.

"I have nothing to tell, but I am neither a traitor and activist. I am just a trader," said the man, who said he was from Idlib province in the north west of Syria.

To my horror, a masked man took a pair of wires from a household power socket and gave him electric shocks to the head.

At this point the State Department has figured it out, but when you read this, you realize they seem totally certain they will change Syria by isolating it. Two years ago they were totally certain they could change Syria by engaging with it. Ah, well. you make mistakes, you learn.

The United States is upping pressure on Lebanon to reduce its ties to neighboring Syria in an effort to further isolate President Bashar Assad as his security forces violently suppress a pro-democracy movement, according to diplomats and officials.

Visiting Beirut last week, the State Department's Middle East envoy, Jeffrey D. Feltman, bluntly warned Lebanese officials that the tide had turned against the autocratic four-decade-old Damascus regime and urged them to distance themselves from a nation that has long been a major player in Lebanese political life, a Western diplomat and Lebanese officials said.

"There is no return back to the bad old days. Syria is going to change," a source with knowledge of the talks said, characterizing the U.S. message to Lebanon.

Also seeking to influence the cast of a new government in Beirut, Feltman warned that Lebanese leaders "risk being as isolated as Syria," which he characterized as "potentially the North Korea of the Middle East," said the source, who requested anonymity because of the private nature of the talks.