Horrors of Syria's
prisons visit Geneva

"If the regime admits to the presence of detainees, it would be condemning itself in front of the international community.
This is simply because the regime killed a lot of them under torture. The rest of the detainees will be used as a bargaining chip."
As nothing has been done to allow Syrians to stop this madness, the situation grows more complicated. Those members of the government forces that have not defected know that they are more complicit in the régime's crimes as time goes on, and so more fearful that they will be held accountable.

This is not an argument that nothing should be done; it is Assad's doomed fight for survival that produces the spiral of atrocity, it is ignoring the problem that has let it fester. It is not an argument for a US invasion, though many Syrians would prefer that to what they've got now. Firstly, put the blame where it lies, on the Russians who could pull the plug now and could have done so much earlier.
When Assad is gone, the truth about the torture and the rape and the chemical attacks will come out. The people who have claimed that they were just Western propaganda to drag us into another Middle East war will look like fools. But if no alternative way of helping the Syrian people resist the genocidal attentions of its government has structured the public debate, full-scale Western interventions, with all their ulterior motives, will have been rehabilitated.

Bassam Imadi: "Any authority that is taken away from this régime, it will crumble. It is based on corruption. After Gadaffi fell, we found out how many people actually supported him [not many].The only people who support it [the Assad government] are those benefiting from its corruption. There are Alawite villages now under siege." On al-Jazeera's Inside Syria.