that's the. plane. this is g w news live from berlin a landmark verdict has been handed down in germany against date sponsored torture in syria. and it sends them to filter the message that these crimes can be investigated in germany a german court journal's a former syrian agents found guilty of atrocities against civilians activists hope exhibits of precision for other cases of crimes against humanity committed by the assad regime also coming up. a big day out finally

vaccinated spanish pensioners are off to the theatre for the time of their lives after more than a year of lock downs and containment slave truly earned it. plus a huge drug bust a german customs officers seize a record breaking 16 tons of cocaine in teen cans and worth several 1000000 euros. also on the show of vincent van gogh painting like you've never seen before that's because this depiction of a street him paris has been behind closed doors for more than a century we'll tell you how you can see the masterpiece and even if you've got a spare few 1000000 cops. hello and welcome i'm jarid worried it's been the 1st verdict of its kind never before. has a court outside of syria convicted

a syrian government official of crimes against humanity now a german court has found an agent of president bashar al assad's secret police guilty of facilitating torture human rights advocates hope that this ruling is the 1st of many. justice a decade on prosecutors say at al garrett was a former member of syria's secret service who arrested anti-government protesters he took the demonstrators to a detention center where they were tortured a german court convicted algarve of being involved. is what's important is that we have a verdict that the assad government committed crimes against humanity in secret prisons this is the 1st such verdict weald wide and it sends an important message that if these crimes can be investigated in germany torchlight of god that they had

. fled to germany and his crimes came to light when he applied for asylum the judges reduced his sentence to just over 4 years because he testified in another trial that still ongoing. torture victim was seem ok helped bring the case to court he says this is only the beginning of. this is this is to this is the 1st step the road to justice is long and one of the goals is to bring back al assad and his in a circle before a court and it's the shuttle a soft ones and get cries for them get used to getting. the syrian government denies that it tortures prisoners the rules of universal jurisdiction allow german courts to try allegations of serious crimes in other countries if victims or the accused are actually in germany foreign minister heiko mouse welcomed the verdict

steve these trials taking place outside syria are a glimmer of hope and a clear signal to the victims that justice must be done for them. they described their finds. out garrett's lawyer says he plans to appeal the sentence. all victims of the assad regime a hopeful that this verdict will set a precedent for future cases didn't we news spoke with one young syrian here in germany she hasn't seen her father since he disappeared 8 years ago witnesses say he was seized by armed men from his home in damascus there are always fresh flowers next to alley mustafa's portrait he was forcibly disappeared in syria 8 years ago the few remaining photos of him i would start to laugh as most precious possessions just look at them a 1000 times trying to conjure up his presence the day it happened was i was away

her mother then living in northern syria had meant to visit her husband in their mess because they hadn't seen each other in months. 10 minutes before she arrived she called them and said i need to 15 i'll be there in 15 so he said that i clean the house everything is perfect and i'm just waiting for you'll. see our christine minutes later she i've. she called him and he never responded oh all. you know i mean. of the day but i was so calling to neighbors armed men had come to take stuff away while father mother and sisters had to flee syria one week later and leave him behind they still don't know anything about what happened to him. when they actually survived by living theory on not getting killed there maybe i have physically for 5 somehow we

buy you cannot just get used to the fact that you lost your job in one second you know you cannot just use to the fact get used to the fact that he just disappeared for nor isn't. my 1st father is one of 130000 people who have gone missing in syria . ok let's turn our attention now to some of the other stories making news this hour. believed to be the head of the so-called islamic state in germany has been imprisoned for 10 years for recruiting young people into the terrorist group german twin brothers who blew themselves up in a suicide attack in iraq were among those radicalized by. palm and has passed a landmark deal forcing digital platforms like facebook to pay for use of australian news content criticizing the bill facebook last week blocked news links

in the country then restored them the government says the news media will now be fairly paid for their content. has seen fresh protests against the wrist of opposition leader nick and. demonstrate is in convoys to the prison where is being held the political situation there has been tense since last elections opposition feet as say the vote was rigged by the governing party. germany has approved 319 rapid tasteful high end use medical professionals have conducted all of the testing up until now the kids should be available within the next few days officials hope home testing could help ease the national lock down health minister. had been criticised for moving too slowly. now as in germany the vaccine rollout in spain has been criticized as some lucky

recipients have had a chance to experience a little bit of normal life again that pension is in the capital madrid they made their 1st trip out in nearly a year a very special one. now today is cause for celebration. for a 98 year old milagro hernandez it's her 1st time leaving the care home in almost a year milagro caught the coronavirus last spring but has since recovered along with a few friends she strolls along the bustling streets of madrid and heads to the theater . i have any idea i studied so long since i've been to the theater but i love the ground via madrid just like me makes me feel at home battling the going to see a show is always a treat but it's a particularly special one for milagro and the other pensioners freshly vaccinated

and free there are reveling in this. thread those who spent the year cooped up in their care homes today symbolizes a return to normality. for a group that will have. a lot to us a lot of joy and it made us feel a little more alive it was really very good to be a movie a movie and. the chance to reconnect with those in the outside world. here are some of the other developments in the pandemic now u.s. biotech firm says it's ready to stop the clinical trial of a new covert 19 vaccine targeting the highly contagious mutation 1st found in south africa brazil is approaching 250000 coronavirus deaths on wednesday

reported more than 66000 new cases and over 1400 deaths this is the highest daily toll since early january and israeli's aiming to reopen its economy by early when it expects to have vaccinated all of its eligible population so far about half of israel's residents have received at least $1.00 of the buy own take pfizer vaccine here in germany costumes offices in the port of hamburg have seized 16 tons of cocaine is reportedly the most ever taken in a single seizure in europe the drugs were hidden in metal chemist is shipped in from paraguayan as part of the same investigation 7 tons of cocaine were also seized in belgium police have arrested a man suspected of importing the drugs. these canisters imported from paraguayan were supposed to contain putty filler but instead they're stuffed with 16 tons of

cocaine it would have sold for as much as 3500000000 euros that's a big. we were very surprised by the amount after we open the canisters we multiplied the number of canisters by 9 kilos and came up with this unimaginable amount of 16 tons. another 7 tons were intercepted in the belgian port city of antwerp the owner of an import company in the netherlands has been arrested the find is the largest amount of cocaine that has ever been seized in europe politicians believe it's just the tip of the iceberg. billions can be made in the cocaine trade these illegal funds can easily flow into legitimate areas of the economy causing untold damage. organized crime only attracts the attention of politicians when people are lying dead on the streets or when there is campaigns against it normally it's under the radar and that makes it

even more dangerous. experts are calling on politicians to hold a summit on drugs the security problem is huge and police and customs are poorly equipped to deal with it. champions league football briefly and manchester city bade league aside once and glad to nil in the round of 16 but not a silva opened the scoring in the 29th minute and was scored this 2nd made way through the 2nd half also ryall madrid beat asked allowed to kneel adelanto played a man down most of the match body took real madrid until the final minutes to score the game's only goal. a painting by. to be shown to the public for the very 1st time off just spending more than a century in a private collection the late 19th century will go on display for

a month before being sold all of as you might expect for many millions it's titled a street scene in moma it's part of a serious produced between 19861988 when living in paris with his brother taylor the work is one of the artists very few that have not yet landed in a museum. this work by vincent van gogh is a real re discovery in the sense that although he has been listed in the catalogs devoted to the artist it has never appeared on the market since it was acquired by a french family more than a century ago. the painting depicts a couple's romantic stroll in the streets of mumbai at the time the heli parries your neighborhood was becoming home to another very of international artists attracted by its bohemian vibe and cheap rent including himself.

it's a very interesting testimony of what looked like at the end of the 19th century when it was still very bucolic we can see the mills of the moon and then i get a place of leisure very appreciated by presents at the time you know the painting will go on display in amsterdam hong kong and paris before being sold off to a new home auction house saw the beast estimates its value between 5 and 8000000 here is. finally now a mount etna is continuing its spectacular russians of red lava lighting up the sky above the talian island of sicily europe's most active volcano started erupting last tuesday and has been belting lava ash and volcanic rock for over a week authorities in italy say it poses no danger though just surrounding villages botch the nearby qahtani a airport has been closed temporarily. and

you're up to date here on. this will be back in 45 minutes with the headlines of charge rate in building have a greater. value meal and game fishing in those that 72 through the land animals are killed worldwide here but it's not just the animals little suffering it's the environment if you want to know how when you lift up the priest and the cultural so strange to us as we think to listen to our podcast on the green.

ready. if anybody's been trapped in an elevator 20 minutes could be a pretty long time right ed alone. trapped in an elevator. for 20 minutes not knowing what's going to happen not knowing where you are a sense of sensory deprivation. figure that is your life 20 minutes out an hour not the only guy on the intercom is nothing i was trying to get you out of i was keeping you. is your communication. less existence. do you think a lot more of the belief. but

it does not end there. it will not end until every terrorist group. has been found. dumped. in defeat. i think you lost more than one term. so you know in person to plan resort to torture and i think it gives them the admission of mouse free dominance and control by torturing essentially we blind ourselves but we could in fact create a democratic society which actually has consistently valuable and effective

techniques to fight terror the fact that we don't is more an expression of our own anxieties and fears. so-called confessed interrogation techniques used by the us officials were basically designed as techniques to break down the human mind and therefore also the body because they are very connected. and leave no physical traces in the cynics. stream li. destructive practice torture. on of course on those who receive this pain and suffering but also on the society that becomes a society of cruelty what we've done is we've not so much lost the war on torture as we've won the war on democracy and that through terrorizing

a population over a period of decades said that there's nobody in this country he didn't grow up with some bogeyman some danger 1st it was communism then it was terrorist. obviously in. many facets of what is generally called the cold war. which communist policy is force. but they had no doubt as to see a gauge of any political activity or any intelligence but. it was not approved at the highest level.

there was a concern that emerged at the 1st start of the cold war in the late 19th for us that the soviets had cracked the code of human consciousness. that they knew how to apply pressure upon the human mind and break the human mind and it was that that set off this whole pursuit that little tamil it to the the creation of the doctrine of psychological torture this was a time of the brainwashing scare they were show trials in eastern europe and hungry in poland which. aroused a lot of vomit concern in the west because people seem to be confessing to crimes that they hadn't committed. most importantly was the trial of cardinal mines and skiing in hungary and as he

was already and afterward to quite famous because he was known for having resisted the nazis and their occupation of hungary. and then after the worry became the card on the primary literature. they arrested him they can find him those kids are being an aristocrat he became a kind of target of the regime. and then he was put on trial were publicly from fast to the charges against him and there was this fear in washington that prince of the church a minute for a man known for his courage under nazi pressure that if he could be broken the clearly the soviets were in the position of techniques.

for. as michael far as it starts in 1950 this was a project of that involved a $1000000000.00 a year. there was a formal creation of british finance american cooperation at the highest levels in order to mobilize the level scientists of these 3 countries in order to kind of crack the code of the consciousness. that lone wolf were medical doctors for cornell university medical school in new york city. they got access. to some of the more classified material on people that escaped from the service and have been tortured in the soviet. walls who's a very well known neurologist he had a personal relationship with allen dulles the head of the cia and with the human

ecology fine wolf offered to this cia essentially a friends in order to study questions of brainwashing what they discovered. was $11.00 of the 2 foundational techniques in the cia doctrine of psychological torture they discovered. self-inflicted pain if you force a human being to stay in a certain position especially a position that puts a little stress on weight comments or muscles or bones joints it doesn't take very long for the pain involved to become absolutely excruciating but nobody is laying thank you finger on you you are doing it to yourself. that was one of the it's the over technique they discovered was from the way. the

fine medical research. there was work he was the chair of the psychology department and the go to university in canada. students volunteered to participate in the study of human behavior under extreme prolactin monotony their hands and arms were softly covered to muffle the sense of touch our stride subdued biomass comfortable baron's quiet and yet it was impossible for most of these to be used to take it for more than 24 or 48 hours sensory deprivation really is a way of producing dreama not it's her bush variance getting worse and worse some brossard be talked about cruelty. what they said was that the degree of boredom became intolerable and it was one sided said as bad as anything that the hitler ever done to any of us to his victims as we know from almost any

basic medical understanding human contact is what makes us human and unable a person to have a sense of normalcy in their lives and when they are completely isolated from any human contact and often kept in this sensory isolation you will literally easily become severely mentally impaired. became a pit consoled the cia continued to work for them is really for gender and psychological torture. that project funded another guy mcgill named dr who on camera. what cameron. was. was close to monstrous.

thing when 1st sight of therapy i was just crying crying crying. it was hopeless i didn't know what to expect they said i was going to say get to court. you had that on that camera and that's when cameron yes i met him and we were always terrified of him why we also fear we all had a fear of him and we didn't want to him to notice us because whatever he did it would never there was a pace and put them the patient was always screaming these are the days and i was obviously a professor ewen cameron was a very famous psychiatry is t.

was head of the american psychiatric association and the world psychiatric association he was the top of the field at the same time he seemed pretty much willing to do anything and to the cia to find a doctor who didn't have limits in a nearby capital with lots of patients to work with lost as does subjects was somebody they were interested in supporting patients would come them. with ordinary and psychological emotional problems they'd sign their waivers and then know a bit subjected to this bizarre version of extreme sensory deprivation and isolation for for up to a month. one of his favorite things was he had a sort of a football helmet with a tape recorder in it that would play a tape and look up to 500000 times say things like my mother hates me and he

would let the brain with rogue stench of deprivation and kind of psychological emotional assault well. what's working i mean it's garbage. was he would put people in your man's simple lecture shack and he would give each of the men a full on basis along with what he called sleep fair play his ideal was once you wake up the brain clean you could wipe out the sight of the a buried behavior in the bad ideas the ideas that were messing up people's minds and you could program in their ideas. i was 1st hospitalized. i was about 16. 16 half

the doctors closely into its leap their baby. and that was it for about 3 weeks in in this sort of a deep sleep but i don't remember getting up to go to the washroom i don't i just remember that the doctor came in occasionally to feed me and that was it and then suddenly after a while there was another case and it came in and she was an older one insists left in the other bed when i started to wake up i saw these patients and these patients were in tears some of them they had earphones and headphones i don't know if they did any of that to me because when i was the 1st 3 weeks i don't know what happened but this was the pattern in. this doctrine of psychological torture that the. through research and the death of

the 19 fifties and was codified in the khobar counter-intelligence interrogation manual. has 2 basic techniques on which all the rest of the procedures to run one is sensory deprivation and the other is self inflicted pain. the cia trained allied agencies in the techniques so in effect you know knowing about dissemination about if you just send these techniques to other armies could you take an ordinary individual like a drafting or recruit and make a person become an affective interrogator. and it seems that milgram experiment

was likely part of this project. but i learned of incidents such as the destruction of millions of men women and children for betrayed by the nazis in world war 2 i was a possible ask myself that ordinary people will courteous and decent in everyday life can actually sleep in you mainly without any limitations of conscience. under what conditions would a person obey authority who commanded actions that went against conscience these are exactly the questions that i want to investigated yeah university. at the moment sperma very simply was similar to torture this was one not all the research we've been describing is the impact of interrogation upon the subject. had another agenda the impact of interrogation upon the interrogator if he were going to get

the wrong answer he would say wrong then tell him the number of balls you're going to get and. then give him the punishment. and read the correct word pair ones in ordinary people who fit by all the regular scales very normal americans and then he subjected them under false color to just doing what he called an educational experiment in trying to encourage people to apply ever higher voltages as a false patient kept on getting making mistakes. in fact milgram was able to encourage at least in his 1st experiments i think close to 70 percent to go on to apply highly dangerous and sometimes fatal shocks to get that man think that. do you mean that. you know what i mean i mean time did i learn or likes it or not we must go on until then i don't

know i've used to take the responsibility and get hurt and that. i'm not meet under our. international essential if you continue teaching this to lead to life period i mean jeez eager to get it wrong just to let him watch. i mean i'm going to take responsibility for any i was and i don't know i'm responsible for anything that happens to continue. next will slow lap dance track music answer plays. 95 miles dance. he did this simply with a very simple thing putting the person behind a wall and having a person with a white lab coat telling them that they needed to continue very ordinary people can be influenced by situations and it's one of the implications of both the milgram

experiment the zimbardo it's. the stanford prison experiment was i think a unique attempt to answer that question of what makes some people behave in a good way but what makes some people behave in a bad way and so the idea was. let's. let's find an evil place and present everywhere in the world the evil places and let's fill this evil place was only good people. to get the students and volley i had convinced the palo alto police department to make mock arrests of all the students who were going to be prisoners and then they came down to the basement of sanford

psychology department the place where the prison study was done. the idea is prison is made to feel inferior insignificant worthless the most important thing is to take away their name they become a number and of course given they have smocks it with no underpants they're behind it showing. my 1st hour in there it was humiliating was also abrupt was quick it was just you know take them off put this on and then i got dusted with baking soda which was supposed to be easy to delouse or and i was limited to sell what zimbardo did was a very cheap dollar cost of. the kind of thing that milgram was doing

nunnally zimbardo. i think you know the guard called john wayne believed that ethics don't matter it's the environmentalists are the sissel and that's not true all life is real life it's. we need to get tougher with the prisoners. and it could well be that we were instructed by the experimenters to get tougher in fact i don't think we considered ourselves to be a subject of the experiment we were merely a tool of the researchers to get the results they wanted from the real subjects which we thought were the prisoners and i decided to become the nastiest prison guard that i could make myself where i am wilder than i am sitting here it isn't running or you want to sleep and i. will get off get off.

and then you will use my magic with your. 345 and. i was responsible for coming up with all of these routines that i would put the prisoners through or i'd have them stand in a line recite their numbers do pushups do jumping jacks. and i had never once stopped to think that these prisoners were suffering any harm or any damage were not or not beating anybody were just sort of applying psychological pressure on them come on yeah that was. pretty cool. it harmed me how did that. how does it harm just a feeling that you know. people can be like and yeah and let me in on some

knowledge that i've never experienced 1st hand i've read about and i've read a lot about it but i've never experienced it firsthand i've never seen someone turn that way and i know you're a nice guy you know. just what would you have. i don't know it might play out spectacularly in the military so the connections would be much further down the road it would be particularly. in the iraq war and in the setting up of moet all of that. and by the time you get to 2001 it's already this cultural artifact and so it is going to be picked up by. by anyone for any permanent.

kind of people held on condoms are not there because they stole because. they are not common criminals. their enemy combatants and terrorists who are being detained for acts of war against our country and that is why different rules have to plug. and i do. the continuity is extraordinary. if you look at a sketch of the cubicle and of the student volunteer at mcgill university and then if you look forward to 2002 when the 1st al qaeda suspects are

being confined at camp x.-ray at montana most of us there in goggles gloves and air most of that look like god trust like that 957 sketch. after $911.00 all of us working at ph our realized that there would very likely be a huge problem of interrogation gone wild meaning torture cruel inhuman and degrading to treatment. the years of extreme isolation was one of the reams of techniques that were employed by a fish oils interrogators and so forth literally starting all the way back in 2002

for many many days and that is just unbelievably destructive. and they began confining people on and on they moved to. having psychologists do interviews with patients as cover initial flaws individual sources of trauma and security and then they they also discovered because they were down and with muslims . muslim males are. upset by nudity

and also by female physical contact and fear of don't. race has always played a role in american torture it's the american torture techniques are part of old military punishments punishments that were used on slaves. and. and you might find that strange but there was one area where slaves were never whipped but you use clean techniques on them so they didn't leave marks and that was if you're going to sell a slave because a slave that had wit marks means that they were not going to obey and so a clean slave was so got a higher price. the cotton industry in the southern delta states of the united states depended completely on torture. over the course of 4 decades human beings

by using their bodies as a technological form as a technological machine were able to multiply by 8 times the amount of cotton an individual person could pick in a single day so the use of torture is absolutely tied at the moment from the very canny. in these kinds of cases. many people in the system. of the people who are imposing these conditions to believe that ordinary punishment is too good for these people and a lot of it is about the other disadvantage religiously ethnically. nationally

culturally it's easier than it would be to sub from your own community to do that so. in guantanamo. secretary defense rumsfeld appointed a commander jeffrey miller whose job it was to extract information and geoffrey miller made up a cd or staffed it. and in flew to iraq and under the. with the permission of the commander there general sanchez the then comprende training sessions for the interrogators and the stuff at abu ghraib prison where he transmitted the guantanamo and techniques to the abu ghraib stuff

basically the restraints were removed and they were told to get results the thing that became so clear is that what the united states was doing was not a secret it was hidden in plain sight it wasn't really until the photographs from abu ghraib were released which were just you know the tip of the iceberg of what was actually happening that people in this country began actually talking about it. but we didn't know what it was exactly the right thing to do and if i had to recommend all of the i think exactly the right signals that. we didn't satisfy them.