Behind the Bastards - Part One: Bashar al Assad: The Eye Doctor Who Murdered a Nation

Episode Date: May 28, 2019

In Episode 63, Robert is joined by Anna Hossnieh (Ethnically Ambiguous) to discuss Syria's President Bashar al-Assad. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. My guest today is Anna Hosnia. Oh good. That was a solid one. We're talking about Bashar al-Assad. Did you like my themed introduction? Yeah, I did actually. That was really wonderful.

Thank you. A lot of war crime stands in the audience today. Anna, a lot of big fans of war crimes. Not really sure where this joke is supposed to go. I guess I could see why you'd be a fan of a war crime. Alright, go on. Weirdly enough, we're talking about a guy who has a lot of fans in spite of his war crimes. How do you feel about Bashar al-Assad? You know, if you ever listen ethnically and be given the podcast, I host. I talk a lot about how I feel like this all...

One, it all comes down to bad parenting and having a small penis that you are ashamed of so you take it out on murdering everyone in your country. Yeah, that seems like a credible explanation for his war crimes. Small penis, bad dead. We'll see if you change your mind at all as we go through the episode and talk about his background. I think this is probably the hardest episode of the show for me to write because I get really angry whenever I read about or think about Bashar al-Assad. I got angry enough that I got on Twitter and provoked a fight with a bunch of tankies

which are people on the left who defend any war criminal who's not American. They're very frustrating people. That's a weird subsection of people on the left. Why? Why would you want to die on that hill? They love Twitter, though. A lot of them on Twitter. I guess I'll start reading from my little scripty dude here. Oh, this is all scripted? I thought you were just kind of like, he just free based it off the dough, man.

I just write some lines down on my hand and then talk for... I have very small handwriting, so you can fit about an hour per hand. Very like memento, but on bastards. It is because I wake up every morning forgetting everything about every bad person in history. I couldn't tell you a single thing about Hitler. Just the names in my head for some reason. It's a total mystery. Yeah, I'm not too familiar, but go ahead. I'm also trying to figure out who killed my wife might have been Hitler.

That's memento, right? Dude, where's my wife? Classic Hitler line? In the summer of 2015, I found myself crossing the Serbian-Hungarian border on foot and walking along what was then known as the refugee trail. That year, more than a million people, mostly Syrians, fled the blood and chaos of war in the hope of a better life. Over the course of several long days, I helped hand out food and water

and advice on where to find holes in the Hungarian border fence. Through it all, I interviewed at least a couple of hundred Syrian citizens, men and women, young and old, anybody who spoke English. They told me horrible stories of barrel bombs killing multiple members of their family in the same day, of torture and regime prisons, of chemical weapons attacks, and the horror of picking at pieces of their neighbors and hauling them away in bags after a bombing.

I did the thing it's my job to do, and I wrote about it, and then I went home and I wrote about other things, completely unaware that, inside of my own country, a sizable number of Americans on the left and the right were already hard at work rewriting the story of the Syrian Civil War into a tale where the dictator Bashar al-Assad was somehow the hero, or at least not the very worst guy involved in the whole thing. Some of my listeners may have and probably have heard variations of that story,

especially if you're on the far left, so if you're a fan of my show and you think Bashar al-Assad's an okay dude, which is a thing for some reason, I just ask that you listen through this till the end and maybe learn a couple of things about this fella. I'm honestly very still stuck on the fact that anyone would think he's a good guy. That's really crazy to me, and I'm gonna need more info on that. Yeah, and I think it's more common to be a little bit fair

that instead of saying he's a good guy, they'll say that he's not nearly as bad as the Islamist or whoever, and it's like, yeah, ISIS is pretty bad, but they didn't kill nearly as many people as Bashar al-Assad. Yeah, I mean, just from what I remember talking about on our own show, it's like, which I'm sure you'll get into, but just like buildings full of body parts of just unexplained missing people. There's a whole genre of pictures from the Syrian Civil War

that's just bags that are very small, that are like, this is a person, this is what's left after. Yeah, anyway, Bashar al-Assad was born on September 11th, 1965, so we're off to a great start with a great birthday. He was the quintessential middle child, the third of five children. His father, a dude named Hafez al-Assad, was a commander in the Syrian Air Force and a powerful man in the Baathist political party

that had come to power in Syria in 1963. Now, the Baathists are a Pan-Arab quasi-socialist party, although trying to equate Baathism directly with any Western political ideology is a little bit of a fool's game, in my opinion. Bashar's mother, Anissa, came from a prominent Syrian family, so Bashar grew up with power, wealth, and influence. Never, never didn't know that. But he also grew up as a member of a persecuted minority.

The Assad's are an Alawite family, which is the Alawites are a sect of Shia Islam that a lot of other Muslims consider heretical for reasons that I don't fully understand. Alawites make up about 10% of the Syrian population. They were traditionally very poor and oppressed, and Bashar's dad, Hafez, is one of those dictators who grew up very, very poor and had to, like,

claw for everything he got in life, kind of like Saddam Hussein. Right, based on my understanding, his family got into power through a coup d'etat, right? Yeah, I mean, sort of. It was a little more gradual than that. So by the time, but when Bashar was born, Hafez was not in power, but Hafez was a prominent man, and the Baathists were in power.

Okay. And because the Alawites, you know, it's the same thing in the United States, members of minority communities, blacks and Hispanics, but also like gay and trans people, serve in the military at a much higher rate than the general population, because it's a route to not only better economic conditions,

but also to, like, societal acceptance for traditionally persecuted groups. And it was the same with the Alawites in pre-Baathist Syria. So the Alawites were only about 10% of the Syrian population. They were really overrepresented in the military. And so that is part of how the Baathist coup was successful in 63. And Hafez wasn't in charge at that point, but during the coup, he wound up in a very high position.

Dude, that's how you do it. That's how you do it. So that's where we are right now. While Bashar was still a mulling little infant, Hafez's father became the Syrian Defense Minister. Now, Hafez was an incredibly smart, hard-fisted political operator. Henry Kissinger considered him a cunning opponent at the negotiating table.

And whatever else you say about Henry Kissinger, that means something. He's negotiated with pretty much everybody who has a Wikipedia page in the 20th century. Hafez seized power gradually in the chaos that came after the disastrous 1967 Arab-Israeli war, and then after a failed attempt to encourage a coup in Jordan in 1970. Hafez's coup at home is generally considered to have been bloodless.

It's euphemistically known as the corrective movement. So that's how Hafez comes to power is like, we tried a bunch of stuff that didn't work. I'm gonna make shit work. I'm gonna fix this stuff. Don't you worry. Yeah, so now Hafez is in power. Bashar's like five years old at this point.

So pretty wee. Yeah, a lot of confidence. To be a man with such confidence, I would never get it. Well, with Hafez, I get the confidence a little bit more because he's this dude who really did grow up like dirt poor and had to like fight for political power and stuff. So you get why a guy like that doesn't survive unless he's got that kind of just like gut level confidence.

But he's the only one in this story who worked for anything. Right, it seems that way. Yeah, now prior to Hafez, Syria had suffered under a revolving door of unstable and effective regimes beset by constant military and domestic defeats and bungles. Hafez promised to change all that, but first he promised himself that he would die

as the supreme ruler of Syria. To do this, he established an intricately interwoven net of 15 security agencies. All of them tasked one way or another with monitoring and crushing dissent, both within the government and within the populace. We'll be referring to this tangled web of secret and not-so-secret police as the Mukhabrat,

which I hope I'm pronouncing close to correct. That's the Arabic word for intelligence. It's used generally in a number of Arabic nations to refer to repressive police state agencies. It's also the specific name of the military intelligence directorate of Syria, but for the purpose of this episode, we'll be using the Mukhabrat as a broader term

for just like the secret police. People in Iraq called Saddam's police by the same thing. It's still one of those terms that if you know any Iraqis since chills up people's spines, just like hearing that word. Yeah, it's a bad word. I'd go so far as to say. Never heard it before.

Mukhabrat, yeah. I'm pretty sure I'm getting it more or less close to right, but it's hard to say Arabic stuff. The only thing, yeah. Anyway, Hafez came to power when, yeah, Bashar was about five years old, so virtually his whole life has been as the son of a man who for all intents and purposes was king of Syria.

I found a Good Financial Times article that discusses a book called The New Lion of Damascus, which was a vaguely pro-Assad book written before the Civil War by an academic named David Lesh, who we'll be hearing from later. In the book, quote, the Syrian leader describes his upbringing as normal, insisting he played soccer with neighborhood children, hung with his father, and his friends' mothers came home

to chat and cook meals with his mother and Nissa. We had two very caring parents, and our happiness derived from having these two caring parents. Assad tells Lesh. But to what extent was Bashar telling the truth, and what did normality mean to him? There was nothing normal about their life. Quips a family friend.

The children rarely saw their father, and they were always protected by bodyguards. Abdel Halim Qadam, the former vice president who resigned and left Syria in 2005, says the Assad children grew up in an atmosphere where there were targets, but also felt as if they owned the country. So, got a few conflicting views there about how the Assad's grew up.

I know which one I find credible. Which one? The one where he and his brothers and sisters felt like they owned the country, and never saw their dad. Hmm, great parenting. Let me tell you. Yeah, shocking that a dictator... You know, you don't run into a lot of dictators

who were super hands-on parents. Yeah, a great way to get your dictator father's attention is to kill everyone. Which is one of the weird things... Yeah, I mean, Assad grew up to kill everyone. They're not the kind of dictator kids... I'll say this for Hafez. They're not the...

Well, it's hard to say. Part of me wants to say that the worst-case scenario for dictator's kids is Saddam's son who was just raping and murdering for years. But he probably never killed more than maybe a couple of thousand people. Like, because he just preferred to rape and murder people with his own hands.

Whereas Assad killed a lot more people. So I guess... So, like, who's chiller, you know? Yeah, who's chiller? Who's the cooler dude? Yeah, do we go with, like, Uday Hussein or Bashar al-Assad? You know, it's really up in the air at this point. Because, like, I doubt Bashar al-Assad's

ever raped anybody at gunpoint, which Uday Hussein did for, like, breakfast. Yeah, honestly, I get Bashar was a little bit more, like, a little more uppity. I can imagine him being very high-maintenance. He's like, oh, no, I need to wash my hands. Like, I imagine him just being very, like... Like, just cry-babying about every little aspect of his life

needing to be exactly how he needs it to be. So does that, yeah, does that make him, like, a worse person than Uday? Who would, like, at least if Uday's going to murder some people, he's going to pick up an AK-47 and, like, shoot them in the face, like, from three feet away, because he doesn't give a fuck. Like, Bashar's...

Yeah, I guess I'm a team Uday. Yeah, are we team Uday or are we team Bashar? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Or, I mean, are we team Saddam's parenting or team Hafez's parenting? Battle of the dictator dads. Yeah.

So, Assad was a Bashar al-Assad, was a child of the Cold War. He grew up knowing that he and his people were, you know, one fairly small player in a game board dominated by the US and the USSR. He also saw two Arab-Israeli wars as a child, both of which were disastrous for the Arab side of that equation. All this had an impact on the growing Assad, but the most significant historical event of his childhood

was probably his father's bombing of the city of Hama. Now, this happened in 1982 at the end of a long and grinding Sunni rebellion. As a way of ending the fighting with an exclamation point, Hafez pounded the city flat with artillery for days and then set bulldozers in to flatten the rubble, and anyone buried underneath it. Roughly 20,000 human beings were murdered

in just a couple of incredibly bloody days. The Hama massacre was, until recently, the single deadliest assault by an Arab ruler on his own people in modern history, beating even the Halabja massacre of Saddam Hussein. A Guardian writer who witnessed some of the massacre titled his coverage, Assad goes beyond the point of no return,

which would not be the last time a reporter mistakenly believed that an Assad had gone beyond the point of no return. Yeah, bummer, how? I feel like that headline could be used 600 more times. Yeah, there's been, what, 300 chemical weapons of strikes in the Assad regime. You could really put that after each one.

This has got to be it. Okay, yeah, copy-paste that. He's done it again. I do feel like, as journalists, we have to retire point of no return, because it's the same thing with Trump, that you keep doing something and be like, oh, there's no coming back from this,

and it's like, stop saying that. You don't know, nobody knows. It's almost tempting them to go further, like, what, no? Yeah, I feel like the only time that's ever been justified is when fucking Hitler shot himself. Okay, fair.

Fair use for that title. God, what a way to go out to be like, oh, I'll just let you shield myself. It's like, oh my God, be a man, come out here and show your face. At least Saddam went out like a G screaming at everybody before they hung him. I guess I'm definitely on Team Saddam

as opposed to Team Hitler. But I feel like nobody but Nazis is ever on Team Hitler. Yeah, you know, that's a tough one. I don't know if I'll touch that one. It's really a bad one to weigh into. You know, what? Who's team am I on?

Yeah, yeah. Oh, I would, you know, if I had a time machine, picking up these people right before their suicides or executions, and then having them fight to the death in a steel cage, would be pretty good TV. It should be all of them,

and then just throw a dragon in there, too. Yeah, yeah, just a fucking... Like a Komodo dragon, too. One of those ones that just, like, bites you with its rotting teeth and so you slowly die over the course of days. Yeah, that's a good way. Yeah, just Saddam bleeding out

from a Komodo dragon bite for three days. People take bets. Tweet at us if you have a time machine. Yeah, if you have a tweet at us or just come visit us in your time machine, assuming it also can travel through

space as well as time. Yeah, no judgment on what area you came from to your personal business. I mean, probably some judgment. Like, if you listening to this, like, built a time machine in, like, 1859 instead of, like,

doing something about slavery, a little bit of judgment. Yeah, don't bring your, like, plague up in here, though. Yeah, don't bring your plague up in here. Yeah, or bedbugs. Neither of those. No cholera, please. A cholera.

Yeah, we already got plenty of measles. I actually have cholera and, like, I found that very offensive for you to ask me not to bring my cholera into the situation. Cholera pride. Yeah. What color rivet is that? I mean, it's a brown one, right?

Yeah. God. That's great. So, the Hama massacre helped to ensure Hafez al-Assad nearly 20 more years of uninterrupted rule. It would not be until 2011 that the Syrian state would

next face serious resistance. Bashar was 16 years old when his father flattened Hama. The lesson would have been clear to him, but he was not at this point being groomed to rule. That pleasure went to his younger brother, Rafat, who was the heir apparent. Young Bashar's favorite parent was clearly

his mother Anissa. One western politician described him as a mama's boy more than a papa's boy. Now, there's a lot of debate as to whether or not Assad's mom has been one of the secretly dominant forces in his regime, but it's pretty agreed upon that he was a mama's boy. Up until her probable death

in 2016, he was said to call her multiple times a week. This was actually something of a running joke in Syrian society. Syrian internet satirist call him Bishow, or baby Bashar. Or at least they did before he had them all murdered. For real.

That was hilarious until they all died. And now their body parts exist in small bags. Yeah, and now they are filling small sacks. When Bashar was 19, his dad had a heart attack and Rafat tried to seize power. Unfortunately for Rafat, Hafez

recovered and sent his eldest boy into permanent exile for his crimes. Bashar's older brother Basil became their father's next successor. Now, Basil al-Assad seems to have been an interesting dude. I found one psychology today article which is written by a couple of

PhDs and makes the case that Basil's bullying was a major influence on young Bashar. I don't consider that article super credible because it's written like shit and it doesn't gel with what people who are close to the family report. But they're doctors, so I'll include their opinion on here. Now, young Bashar does seem to have had

issues with his brother. I'm an Abdel Noor who knew Bashar when he was a young adult told Financial Times. Growing up Bashar was overshadowed by Basil. That seemed to be a complex. He didn't have the charisma of Basil, who was sporty, was liked by girls and was the head of the Syrian computer

society. I'm in claims young Bashar was shot. He used to speak softly with a low voice. He never asked about institutions or government affairs. Yeah, Bashar was too much of a nerd to be president of the computer society. It's kind of unfair

that his sexy athletic brothers also gets to be the computer guy. Because that's one thing everyone agrees on is Basil was also the smartest of the Assad boys. He seems like he really got it all. It's so interesting families like that

in power. They're so easy. There's no empathy that's so easy for them to just drop people out of their family. It's like, how dare you try and seize power. You ain't ever coming back here again. It's like, it's your son. You know, I mean

Momar Gaddafi would agree with you. He had a kid who tried to overthrow him who he exiled for a while and then invited back in. But just ground him for a while. Take away his phone. I don't know. I feel like if my son tried to overthrow

me and take over the house I would exile him. Yeah, I would exile my son. Yeah, I would exile him forever. Exiling is so aggro. It's pretty aggro but I've always wanted to exile someone. Official stance.

So, I mean you and I are going to have an issue at some point because it's always been a dream of mine to exile somebody. I'm not surprised by that whatsoever. I really am a big, big fan of exiling. It's an art more than a science, but

you know, I love it. I love the craft. Bajar himself would later claim that his father didn't talk about work at all with his kids. There was a complete separation between politics and family relations in our house. My parents were very keen to make us live as normal lives as we can.

So, I don't believe that at all. Yeah, I mean, you were the son of the king of Syria. Yeah, it does seem like most of the people who knew them at that time said like, I mean, it's one

of those things maybe they think they were normal because they don't have any basis for comparison because they grew up the heirs to the throne of Syria, but yeah. I see you, Sophie. Sophie's signaling that it's time for an ad break and I see her. I was just trying to finish my sentence. This is

Sophie's in a way exiling me before well, I'm actually going to be exiling all of our listeners to an ad break. So, enjoy your exile into the green and bountiful land of capitalist products

and services. Products! During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what?

They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation.

In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced, cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse

was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And on the gun badass way. Nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the I Heart Radio Apple Podcast or wherever you

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it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman.

Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize

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band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine I heard some pretty wild stories.

But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Kreklev is floating in orbit when he gets a message

that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union is falling apart. And now he's left in the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space.

313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back! We're talking about Bashar Al-Assad

B to the A Bishu, yeah Baby Bashar If I was him, that would be my Twitter handle. It would be amazing to get into

Twitter fights about Bashar Al-Assad with Bashar Al-Assad. At Baby Bashar, you fucking loser! He's like, leave me alone block! Oh boy, he would definitely be a blocker. Now, Bashar

did not grow up wanting to be a dictator, or at least he gave no impression of having that desire. According to an article in the Atlantic based on interviews with people who knew him at the time, Bashar did not seek out recognition or popularity. He had no interest in being in the middle of politics, as his brother did.

In his school days, he was perceived by the Syrian society as a shy, reserved, weak, hesitant child who did not inherit any of his father or brother's intelligence and leadership. Whoa, that's like, just reminding me of the godfather, Al Pacino's character how he's like, I'm not going to be involved in his mafia business.

And then next thing you know, he's slapping Michelle Pfeiffer around. A lot of people have actually compared him to Michael Corleone. Some people compare him to Frito. Because he kind of was. He was the heir to a lot of money and stuff.

But he was not the heir. He was never considered for power. He was literally his dad's last choice, essentially. And so he didn't really... We'll get into that a little bit more later. But that is a really apt comparison. Now, Basil

meanwhile was exactly the kind of kid you'd expect to be a dictator's son. He was an avid parachutist. He was an infamous ladies man. And a huge facet of nightlife in Damascus. Did he upgrade hair? The pictures I've seen of him, he was a reasonably decent looking dude.

He was a fit athletic and charismatic. Pictures of Basil playing sports and looking fly as hell were slathered over many a wall in Syria. Basil owned a stable of sweet sports cars and Taurus around town on a regular basis. He had a person... Oh yeah, he loved driving real fast.

Which we'll talk about a little bit more in a second. He had a personality cult that rivaled his father's. Majid Rafizada the author of that Atlantic article and a guy who grew up in Syria around this time recalled when I was a student in high school

I would walk the busy streets of Damascus Aleppo or Latakia and find the walls and windows of shops and buildings papered with posters and photographs of Basil. His images were even plastered across cars but there was not a trace of Bashar's presence. So it's all about Basil in these days.

All about Basil. It's interesting that having a good set of hair is so key to being a dictator. Because Bashar not a good looking dude. Not a good looking dude.

If you have any latent bully instincts you look at a picture of the kid and you kind of want to give him a swirly. Especially when he had that little pencil thin mustache just such a nerd looking kid. Which is weird because Basil was apparently better at computers too.

Yeah. Now for what it's worth it seems like Basil Al-Assad was one of the better case scenarios for a dictator's son. He wasn't a mass rapist and murderer or at least not based on what I've read. I haven't read any allegations like that. It's entirely possible that he was doing a bunch

of terrible shit. But it's not like it's he's certainly not like Uday Hussein where you hear these stories about him machine gunning people at parties and stuff. And he seemed to be more honest in interviews. Like in 1988 Basil gave an interview that I think

he was telling the truth. We saw a father at home but he was so busy that three days could go by without us exchanging a word with him. We never had breakfast or dinner together and I don't remember ever having lunch together as a family. Or maybe we did once or twice when state affairs were involved. As a family we used to spend a day or two

in Latakia in the summer but then too he used to work in the office and we didn't get to see much of him. Like that seems totally, totally likely. Yeah. That seems like a credible representation of growing up as a kid whose dad was a workaholic. Which Bashar

will never admit to. So I don't know. Basil seems like he was as decent a dude as it's possible to be and be the son of a brutal dictator who murders 20,000 people to make a point. I guess that's how I'll describe him.

But I never knew the guy. Like any dictator kid are sources and how Bashar and his son are the same. We never crossed paths. Weirdly enough I was pin pals with Jifal Islam, Qaddafi's

son. We used to play Sudoku over the mail. That is so you. I've never heard anything more Robert Evans than what you just said. I don't truck with Sudoku. I'm not Keanu Reeves. Okay.

Like any dictator kid are sources and how Bashar grew up are incomplete at best. The official party line at least is that the Assad children had a modest upbringing. It's emphasized that Bashar's mother thought this was the right way to raise children. However modest their upbringing, Bashar and his siblings lived in almost total privacy.

Pictures and reports of their lives were kept fairly mum with the obvious exceptions of Rafat and then Basil. All the Assad kids went to college in Syria which is something of an oddity among an Arab dictator's children. It's more common for them to go to Europe or whatever. But Hafez was insistent that they do

their college in country. Bashar went to medical school as a young man. According to Ed Schulenberg, Bashar's former supervisor at the western eye hospital in London, Bashar decided to become an ophthalmologist and eye doctor after reading a book.

He wrote a book about blindness and the treatment of blindness and I think the psychology about being blind many years ago and it impressed him so much that he thought he wanted to become an ophthalmologist. Now Bashar Al-Assad himself claimed quote, I like the idea of working in the humanitarian sector so medicine was the best thing

to take up. The question that I asked my father was, I would like to be a doctor. What do you think? He told me it doesn't matter what you do. The most important thing is if you succeed or not. So whatever you do, just make sure that you succeed. Holy shit. What a way to turn your child

into a fucking dictator. No matter what you do, just succeed at it. If you're going to be an eye doctor, you better be the fucking best eye doctor in Syria. I don't want there to be any blind people in the world for an eye doctor.

Are you kidding me? Get the fuck out of here. Now some experts on Syria and the Assad suspect that Bashar may have had a different motivation. Dr. I.L. Zizer of Tel Aviv University believes that Bashar's medical ambitions were actually pushed on him

by his father. One can only assume that Assad, who himself wanted to be a doctor when he was young, pushed him in that direction. So I don't know. There's three different totally credible, all of those sound very believable to me. Growing up in a Middle Eastern family, you don't

got to tell me that I was supposed to be a doctor. My father said it pretty quickly that I need to go to med school and I was like, I can't look at blood and he was like, you're going to need to get over that. Tell your dad what I tell my parents, which is that podcasting is the medicine of the 21st

century. That's so true and it's funny because I'm such a dictator of this office now. I'm just a monster. You are. Go on before I kill you. You do say that a lot. We're getting t-shirts

printed up. Go on before I kill you. I'm a podcast dictator. That's fun. I like that. It's a fun theme for a podcast. Now, whatever the truth about why he got into it,

Bashar al-Assad seems to have had a real passion for being an eye doctor. From everything I've read, it seems like he was legitimately good at it. This is not one of those stories where a dictator's kid becomes the head of the port system, like Gaddafi's kid and has no idea how to do anything.

Bashar moved to London and practiced medicine. He wasn't under daddy's care, but he was in London. He was working at a real hospital and doing real medical work. From everything I've read, it seems to have been really good at it and seems to have loved it.

Yeah, he was a pretty solid eye doctor. He adapted fully to life in the western world. You want to guess what his favorite musician is? Leonard Skinner. Phil Collins. That is

so funny. Nothing annoys me more than him. What band was Phil Collins in again? Shit. Oh boy, now we're going to... The band that Peter Gabriel originally was in? I think so. I know he's one of the musicians that

my mom listens to. And your mom is a classic dictator type? Yeah, she is the a dictator of... Genesis. Fucking Genesis. A band so bad we forgot it.

A band so bad people who liked it became bad people. Yeah, I hate to say this, but his second favorite, or at least one of his other favorite bands is a legitimately great band, the Electric Light Orchestra, which does break my heart a little bit.

Well, I mean, everyone likes ELO. Everybody likes ELO. But now I have this picture in my head of Bouchard ordering the carpet bombing of Aleppo while listening to Mr. Blue Sky, and it kills me a little bit inside. But I know it happened.

I'm going to disregard that thought. Yeah. Now, the young doctor fell in love with London and he says that seeing the West helped him to open his horizons. He has a lot of positive stuff to say about travel, which I guess is appropriate because he inadvertently caused millions of Syrians

to travel and see Europe themselves. A little bit of a... horrible thing that happened. Anyway, one day, on a foggy morning in January 1994, Basil Alasot was tearing ass through Damascus in his sports car.

I said he liked driving fast in his sports car on the way to the airport. His car skidded off the road and he crashed at high speed, dying instantly. Now, yeah, that's the end of Basil. Now, whenever the heir apparent of a dictator, especially a dictator

first heir apparent had tried to overthrow him, is killed mysteriously in a car crash, it's natural to be suspicious. But all the credible sources I found seem to agree that this was really just one of those freak accidents that happens from time to time and changes the world forever.

Sounds like the son of a king in a regime thought he was invincible. Does sound like that. He got himself killed because he... What do you know? Not invincible. Nope. Turns out

that if you crash a sports car with a shitty safety rating at like a hundred miles an hour, the same thing happens to everybody. The only one of us that's invulnerable is Keith Richards. He should have known that. Now,

that same January day in 1994, Basil Alasot got a phone call in his London flat. He was told that his brother had died and that he was now the successor to Hafez Alasot and that he would have to return home to take up the family business. There's a lot of debate as to why Hafez

didn't pick Bashar's other brother, Mahir, to rule instead, since Mahir was a lot like Basil and Bashar had expressed zero interest in ever holding power. But for whatever reason, Hafez picked Bashar. Wait, was Mahir the daughter? No, Mahir is his other brother

and he's in charge of the Syrian Republican cards. So he's been one of the bloodiest military leaders of the Syrian Civil War. But there's kind of a mystery among people who knew the family as to a lot of them had expected that Hafez was going to pick Mahir

to run the country. But he went with Bashar for some reason. We don't really have a clear idea why. At this point, it seemed to many Syrians and much of the outside world almost like this might be the plot of an unusually gritty Disney movie. You can kind of see the upbeat version

of this where a brutal dictator picks his shy bashful eye doctor son to rule instead and the kid has to fly back from his life in London and learn how to rule. You make a really fun movie with that premise where he realizes that he only ever wanted to be a doctor and he gives his country back to its people and establishes a democracy

and he and his dad fight it first, but then his dad comes to love freedom and probably rides a skateboard at the end. I'm imagining this is a 90's movie. It's like the Goofy movie. Yeah, it's like the Goofy movie, but with a brutal dictator. Yeah.

It's like a cross between the Goofy movie and that really bad Michael Caine movie about a dictator who hides out in a 10 year old girl's house. What? What is that? Yeah, it's a fun premise. This girl becomes a pin pal with a brutal dictator of a Caribbean

nation played by Michael Caine and he gets overthrown and he flees and winds up hiding in her toolshed, I think. Oh, Dear Dictator? Dear Dictator. It should have been a good movie, but it was just kind of bad. Oh.

Michael Caine playing a dictator who's best friends with a little girl. It seems like it could be a really good movie, but it was not a good movie. I'm sorry. People are going to watch Dear Dictator and they're not going to find it very good because it's not very good.

That's too bad. Yeah, it really is. Now, according to Financial Times in the real world, and not the fake world of the Disney movie that I invented about this, but the real one in which hundreds of thousands of human beings have been killed in the most brutal ways possible,

Hafez al-Assad basically tried to remake his nerdy doctor son into the spitting image of his dead brother, Basel. Hafez al-Assad underwent a crash course in military and political affairs and a successful image-making exercise that would make him palatable to Syrian society. He inherited Basel's friends, Basel's office in Mount Qasiyun, overlooking Damascus, and even the Syrian Computer Society,

a critical tool that would help him create an image as a man who could bring progress to a country that seems stuck in the 1970s. Bashar disappeared from view. We only started seeing him again in 1996 and he had changed, even his voice had changed, recalls Abdel Noir. He was more confident, more muscular

in his appearance. They made him go away and get a gym membership? Yeah, it's the male version of that makeover scene where the curly-haired girl who becomes a princess gets her hair straightened and stuff. They made him take his glasses off and they're like

you're gorgeous now, Bashar. You're really gonna kill running this country. Literally kill. More than anyone in this century. I wonder if they're like, dude, Bashar, I heard the country said you weren't cute and he was like, oh, get out of the mouth.

Yeah, maybe, because he's not cute. Yeah, but I mean, of course, he has good hair. Not really. It's like, I mean, who knows how real it is. Maybe he lost some of it and it's hair plugs now. That statement alone is probably gonna get me killed by Bashar all of a sudden.

Oh yeah, no, he's got a strike cruiser heading to your house right now. I heard she said I had hair plugs and she's dead. Yeah. I mean, he has a full set of hair I'm assuming is real, so that's usually, that's enough. Yeah, I just don't

notice his hair. Like, it's one of those things we'll say on this podcast if a brutal dictator is hot. Like Saddam Hussein, good-looking young man, fucking Joseph Stalin, good-looking young guy, Hitler, always super weird looking. But, you know.

Yeah, Hitler, dude. You have to be honest about the hotness of terrible people. Otherwise, what are your standards? And, you know, Bashar al-Assad is a not in the hot or not category. I'm sorry. That's the hill I'll die on.

He's not. Good set of hair, but a face that looks like an ass crack. Yeah, face that looks like an ass crack. Ass crack face being another one of his popular nicknames. As the 1990s end, Hafez al-Assad was increasingly

sick and clearly nearing death. He began filling Damascus in other cities with posters of Bashar al-Assad labeled Hope, which is not unlike an Obama campaign poster. Is that where Shepard Ferry got the idea? Yes, Shepard Ferry is a famed Hafez al-Assad

stan, really a big fan of his marketing prowess. While Hafez battled leukemia, diabetes and a shitty heart, he trained his son and stalked the heads of his security intelligence agencies with men he could trust. Bajat Suleiman, one of his head spies, was a guy who was picked

to sell Bashar as the Hope of Syria. He did this by making deals with businessmen who wanted more opportunities for financial gain than the nation's socialist structure would allow. According to Rula Kalef of the Financial Times, Bashar al-Assad became a vociferous critic of bureaucratic corruption and those he recommended were placed

in key positions in government. It was during this period that I first met him in Damascus a few months before his father died. He was casual and inquisitive, particularly interested in whether living abroad had diluted my Arab roots. He spoke about the scourge of corruption and Syria's economic stagnation and was sympathetic to the cause

of an outspoken businessman who was being harassed by the regime for his political and anti-corruption views. It was impossible to know whether he was sincere. So... I don't know. Late 90s Bashar, he's saying the right things. Yeah.

One of Qaddafi's kids was sort of doing the same thing when he got famous for like, I think it was Scythe actually, where he got famous for like, criticizing the Qaddafi regime to the international press while he was the heir to the regime. And some people thought he was a real reformer, but like

it's become increasingly obvious through time that like, no, he was just he knew his dad was going to die eventually and wanted to be set up to be in charge and maybe... He was playing the long game. Playing the long game, yeah. See, I don't know if Bashar started out being like, oh, I could be a good leader

and then just went full psycho or if he was just full psycho. Like, I don't get it. Because it sounds like he could have been a decent person, but then like, you know, just in the Michael Corleone way of like, what

tipped him over the edge? Like, was it just his father being like, this is how it needs to be. You need to be strong and not weak. Like, you need to stand up to your people and I don't know, like, cut their heads off if they don't listen to you. Like, I don't... I mean, I guess that's why it's so secretive. We don't know.

But like, I want to know so bad. Yeah, nobody really knows the answer to that question. I mean, one of my theories is just that like, there's a lot of people walking around who could murder millions if you put them in the position where their continued comfort was

dependent upon them maintaining in power of a regime like this. Yeah, you know, I actually now that I realize it, like, I've always said I should never be in power because I would take a bribe within seconds and be like, yeah, sure, what do you need? Nobody should be in power.

That's really the lesson of guys like Bashar al-Assad because if he just stated ophthalmologist probably would have just helped people have better eyes. Probably would have done that for decades and it would have been fine. Power is a hell of a drug, man. It's the worst. And I'm a big pro drug guy, but not power.

That's the only drug that I think the DEA ought to go after. Yeah, that's me. I'm always like, no, thanks, dude. If that's what the DEA was for, I would be pro DEA. Yeah. If they were just like, busting guys who were power-tripping like, sorry, sir, nope, you're clearly way too high on your own supply.

We need like a, literally a group in the DEA that's like, you power-tripping, dude, because we're coming for you. The day after Trump gets elected, they arrest all of America. Like, you guys are dealing power to a vulnerable man. Like, he clearly can't handle this. Yeah, our president's arrested

for just power-tripping way too hard. No, no, no, I mean, you'd have to bust us all for dealing, you know? We sold him the power. Yeah. If you want to get high as fuck, uh, consider getting high as fuck on the products

and services that support this program and or show. That was a good segue, right, Sophie? Loved it. Beautiful. All right. Products! During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI

had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes,

you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy. The reason will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story

is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not in the good-bad-ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then,

for sure, he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual

science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole.

My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science

in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast,

or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space.

And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Kreklev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last

outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your

podcasts. We're back skis! I say skis now sometimes because I'm a cool dude. I'm a ski man, I've heard. No, I actually don't think anyone should ski. Dude, Robert, come on man, you don't have to hide it.

I've seen those pics of you. Everyone send in photoshop photos of Robert's ski. It's funny you say that because when I have a bad day, the only thing that calms me down is watching hours of ski fails. You just typed that on YouTube and it's people getting horribly injured.

But ski fails and base jumping fails are like I wonder I wonder if most of those people are dead. We're like ha ha sucker and then we just don't know they never made it. I'm fine with it. I spent all week this week

watching God knows how many videos of barrel bombs detonating in Syrian cities and horrible things happening to people who did nothing. If you're going out there to go base jumping, you know you might fuck up and kill yourself. So I feel like it's fine for me to watch videos of people hurting themselves.

If they're putting themselves in that situation. I wouldn't watch videos of people getting hit by cars and laugh. That's horrible. But if you're going into that situation and that's something like you crashing and hurting yourself is an integral part of the sport

then it's fine for me to laugh at it. Yeah I mean that's the risk. I wouldn't laugh at somebody getting hurt playing golf because that's not part of the sport. If you get hit in the face of the club playing golf that's just a horrible accident. That's kind of funny. It is a little bit funny right?

My principles aren't ironclad. We're all a little bit of a monster. This is why I shouldn't be a dictator because I would make people ski just to watch them hurt themselves. That would be funny. You're like alright set up the skis. I'll stay here.

Set up the skis. Bury the bananas in snow. Yes. Set up the path. It's fine. It was clear from the beginning that the young despot in waiting was insecure. One of his friends while Bashar was being groomed

later said, quote, in his early years he was learning on the job and he wasn't confident. He spoke about some of his father's aides as enemies and he didn't have his own advisors. The security people would tell him it would be a threat to him because they wanted to control him. So Bashar's kind of a paranoid scared guy. There's one story I heard from a guy who interviewed him

who like took out his microphone and flinched away from him. The microphone looked just enough like a gun that he freaked out because he was just so high strung and paranoid. So you'll hear that a lot that he was like incredibly high strung and paranoid

and scared all the time. It does really seem like he didn't want the job at least at first just because the risk of getting murdered was so high he'd rather be back in London listening to ELO and cutting open eyes. Jesus Christ. That's the feeling you get.

Hafez al-Assad died on June 10th, 2000. His son assumed power shortly thereafter. This was actually forbidden by the Syrian constitution which required presidents to be at least 40 but the constitution was quickly amended to allow 34 year olds to serve which was Bashar's age. That's handy. Very nice.

Wow, it's as if your family runs everything. Yeah, yeah. Why even have a constitution if you like, come on. Hafez, don't play that bullshit. Bashar gave an inaugural speech that was everything you'd want to hear from the new dictator who was replacing the old dictator.

He said it was time to modernize Syria to open up the economy to new businesses and new ideas and to institute a raft of political reforms that would allow political parties and previously unheard of levels of dissent maybe even something that vaguely approached freedom of speech. His inaugural speech promised democracy,

transparency and touted the desperate need for constructive criticism and creative thinking. And to back that up, it even included criticisms of Hafez al-Assad's regime. The international media, obligingly, ate this up. I found an article published the day after his inauguration

by Mid-East Realities. It was titled, Bashar al-Assad, they say he's a gentle man. Okay. Sounds like some Prop propaganda. Prop propaganda. Um, quote,

he's a 35 year old media shy ophthalmologist who loves Phil Collins, speaks fluent English and is in no rush to get married and expresses a keen interest in Israeli high tech. Although he was never the favorite son, Bashar al-Assad next week will be declared heir to his father Hafez.

Is this his Tinder profile? Sounds a little bit like fucking Perez Hilton wrote this. Yeah. What occurred next has been dubbed by some saying, which is accurate in that it did not last very long. Political prisoners were freed.

European advisors were brought in to help perform the government. Young technology-minded Syrians who happen to be friends with Bashar will brought into exciting new positions within the regime. For the first time, Syria's new ruler allowed his people to access the internet, such as it existed at the turn of the millennium.

New political parties were allowed to form and liberal intellectuals were allowed to form political discussion groups and even publish documents. After Assad's inauguration, were proved to be the absolute high point of Syrian civil liberties. According to Joshua Landis of the University

of Oklahoma's Middle East Study Center, quote, Of course, it didn't take more than a few weeks before people were demanding regime change because the regime was so corrupt. It stunk. The whole thing stunk. So any kind of critique had to lead to regime change. Basically,

if you start picking at the problems where the corrupt criminal regime isn't charged, so like, you really can't allow criticism. Sorry, this just back to the Tinder profile thing. If Bashar was on Tinder, he would probably have every woman

murdered who swiped no on him. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. Could you imagine? I think that would be punishable by death. Yeah, I could imagine. I can imagine about half of the men on Tinder being dictators. Follow that She Rates Dogs

account on Twitter, where it's just women getting threatened with murder by guys they turned down after a bad date. Oh, fucking boy. I believe that exists, but I feel like for my own sanity, I should not check it out. You don't need to, but I think there's a lot of people out there,

a lot of men, some women I'm sure to, but a lot of men who, if they had an air force, would absolutely bomb a lot of people. Yeah. I should have an air force, except for that air force pilot who drew the sky dick of Washington.

That guy gets an air force. He knows what to do with him. He's chill. About six months into the Damascus spring in January of 2001, Syria's information minister declared the idea of civil society to be an American term.

President Assad warned the reformist movement quote, when the consequences of an action affect the stability of the homeland, and the possibility of an action on behalf of a foreign agent, or a simple person acting unintentionally. In both cases, a service is being done

to the country's enemies, and consequently both are dealt with in a similar fashion, irrespective of their intentions or motives. So anyone who is attacking the regime in any way is either a foreigner trying to bring us down or a dumb person but I have to deal with both

foreign spies and dumb people the same way. Pay attention to that reasoning. That reasoning will come back a little bit later in this time. A couple of months later, Bashar imprisoned 10 members of Syria's extremely milquetoast political opposition.

A lot of these were like the people he'd freed at the start of the Damascus spring. This started a trend of Syria's president re-imprisoning all the people he'd freed. One year after assuming power, he approved a new press law which gave the government total control over everything printed in Syria from magazines to pamphlets.

Many experts now say the whole idea of the Damascus spring was never more than a PR move to gain international support for the regime in its early days. Others say it was undertaken earnestly, but resistance from old hardliners within the Syrian government forced Bashar to back off on his youthful dreams.

It's hard to say where the truth lies, but there was evidence from the earliest days of Bashar's presidency that he was going to be just as brutal as his dearly departed dad. One of his first moves was to send 30 forces into the city of Latakia, which was a stronghold for his exiled brother, Rafat, who, for some reason,

was allowed to remain the vice president despite being kicked out of the country forever. Bashar had many of Rafat's supporters disappeared. He also deposed the prime minister, Mahmoud al-Zawabi, and charged him with corruption, which was probably true, but no truer for Mahmoud than for any other high-ranking Syrian official.

Mahmoud committed suicide in his cell within weeks of Bashar's inauguration. So, you know, starting things off with some murder. Okay. It's almost as if it's foreshadowing. Almost as if it's foreshadowing, but I don't foreshadow.

Subtext is for cowards. The Damascus Spring was short-lived, but the American September of 2001 would go on to have a much longer lasting impact on Bashar's regime. Like all Arab leaders in the wake of 9-11, he was forced to make some difficult decisions. Bashar had to thread the needle

of working with the U.S. just enough to not get regime changed himself, while also standing up to America enough to maintain support at home, and most importantly, doing his part to ensure that Iraq was enough of a debacle that Bush wouldn't have the political capital to fuck with the Syrian regime.

Bashar al-Assad was, by all accounts, very successful in this. In 2004, the Bush administration started to slam him hard for allowing his country to basically act as a highway for foreign fighters to enter Iraq. This was somewhat overblown since only 5-10% of Iraq's insurgents

were foreign fighters, but those foreign fighters tended to be the ones who actually killed the most people. They were the most of the suicide bombers and the really dedicated fighters. So, some reason to be pissed at that. He definitely led a lot of people through. By the time W came down really hard on Syria,

he had his hands so full with the disastrous occupation of Iraq that there was really fuck all he could do to Bashar al-Assad, which made Assad feel safe saying things like this. Some see me as bad, some see me as good. We don't actually care what terms they use. It is not right to apply this term to Syria.

I mean, look at the relationship that Syria has with the rest of the world. If you have good relations with most of the world, you are not a rogue state just because the United States says you are. Which, you know, given the timing, not totally unfair, but anyway.

Bashar's regime did, of course, allow Salafist insurgents to pass through the country. These Sunni extremists gradually built up support in parts of Syria. More than a decade later, they would wind up forming the foundation of the terrorist group ISIS. At the time, letting them fester seemed like a smart way for Bashar to attack America

while maintaining plausible deniability. Assad was also willing to work with the United States, though. Particularly when it came to exercising one of his regime's great strengths. Its ability to torture the fuck out of people. See, in the wake of World War II, an SS man, Alois Brunner,

immigrated to Syria in an effort to escape being hung for his many, many, many war crimes. Brunner was the number one aid and the very best man of Adolf Eichmann, the single dude most responsible for executing the Holocaust. Brunner himself

was wanted for his direct complicity in the murder of 130,000 Jews. Bashar's father, Hafez Al-Assad, welcomed Brunner into the Syrian intelligence establishment with open arms. They later fell out, and Brunner did fortunately die horribly in a Syrian prison.

But for years, he was an integral part in building up Syria's intelligence infrastructure. And most importantly, he taught the Syrian government how to torture people. So that's cool. Literal Nazi helping build the bones of your torture department. Now, where this gets even more fucked up,

is because the Syrian intelligence agencies learned Brunner's lessons about how to torture people well enough that the CIA eventually came to them for help. A lot has been written about the CIA's own terrible torture programs, but most people don't know that we outsourced an awful lot, probably even the majority

of the torturing we did to other nations. Syria was considered the very best of these. Robert Baer, a former CIA agent who worked extensively in the Middle East, later told the Guardian, quote, If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan. If you want them tortured, you send them to Syria.

If you want someone to disappear, never to see them again, you send them to Egypt. So Syria is the CIA's these guys. We can torture, not trying to be humble here. We can torture some dudes, but these guys, they're the

the CIA's the Karim Abdul-Jabbar of torture, but Syria's the Michael Jordan. That's so fucking crazy. Why would you ever say that shit out loud? Is that wild? Wait, Robert Baer? He's been very critical of a lot of aspects of the intelligence.

I think he's trying to be a decent person to tell people about things they need to know about. Okay. It felt like he was bragging, like, let me tell you what we do. I think he's very sort of cogently and honestly talking to the Guardian about, like, this is how

the torture program works. You go to Syria if you want people to... I'm glad he said it. Someone needs to. I'm not going to say everything Robert Baer's done in his career has been fine and above board, but I'm glad that information's out there. That's terrifying. Oh, it gets worse.

The U.S. would regularly send people that apprehended to Syria with lists of questions for the interrogators to work through while they brutally tortured our captives. One of these people was Mahir Arar, a Syrian and Canadian citizen. On his way home to Canada after a vacation in Syria in 2002,

Mahir was detained by U.S. authorities at JFK airport under charges of being brown. Mahir was not a terrorist, but the U.S. intelligence agencies thought he might be, so they sent him over to Syria. Here's how a U.S. judge later summarized what happened to him. During his first 12 days in Syrian detention,

Arar was interrogated for 18 hours per day and was physically and psychologically tortured. He was beaten on his palms, hips, and lower back with a 2-inch thick electric cable. His captors also used their fists to beat him on his stomach, his face and the back of his neck. He was subjected to excruciating pain

and pleaded with his captors to stop, but they would not. He was placed in a room where he could hear the screams of other detainees being tortured and was told that he, too, would be placed in a spine-breaking chair, hung upside down in a tire for beatings, and subjected to electric shocks. To lessen his exposure to the torture,

Arar falsely confessed, among other things, to having trained with terrorists in Afghanistan, even though he had never been to Afghanistan and had never been involved in terrorist activity. Cool. So... Yeah, cool. Fuck. That's one of those things.

It's both like if you on the U.S. if you're, like, a patriotic American who gets, like, two up your own ass about how bad these Arab dictators are, like, our government was happy to use them to torture people, but also, like, if you're a leftist getting too uppity about Bashar al-Assad

being an anti-imperialist, he was fined to torture people for the CIA. Fuck all of them. Like, fuck all of them. Well, I mean, just getting picked up for being brown is just, you know... Yeah....the fuck. Yeah, it's all very frustrating.

Over the early aughts, Bashar gradually grew into his role as supreme ruler of Syria. He allowed the U.S. to forces... Yeah, there we go. There's our boy. Uh... He allowed the U.S. to forces soldiers out of their years-long occupation of Lebanon,

something he felt he should have received more international gratitude for doing. In 2006, Hezbollah, a group heavily supported by the Syrian government, went to war with Israel. Well, but Hezbollah survived, which was widely seen as a victory. Uh, Bashar saw this as proof

that his regime was now safe. If America and Israel could not take out Hezbollah, they surely would not be able to remove him from power. This wound up being a completely accurate guess. Uh, David Lesh, a professor of Middle East history who met with Bashar dozens of times during this period, recalls his evolution.

In May 2007, amid Bashar's reelection and a referendum to another seven-year term, I noticed something in him that I had not detected before. Self-satisfaction. Maybe this is inevitable in a neo-patrimonial authoritarian state, and maybe he was getting his due after such a tough ride. But Bashar has been a very unpretentious leader, even self-deprecating. Despite being surrounded by very dangerous circumstances,

he never seemed to take himself too seriously. Indeed, one time I asked him to talk about his greatest accomplishments to date, and he responded that perhaps we should spend more time on his biggest failures. He is not a commanding figure at first glance. Soft-spoken, gregarious. With a childlike laugh, he does not fit the typical profile of a dictator. This was even the case when he ran on a post in a referendum.

Visiting a polling station, I observed that each voter had to check the yes or no box in public amid a band playing in people singing pro-Bashar tunes. It would be an intrepid voter who would check no, especially with security personnel, no doubt watching closely. The Bashar posters draped over almost every standing structure, and out of every window, and the I Love Bashar, and English and Arabic pens, pendants, and billboards,

belied his eschewing of such cultish popular behavior to date. Bashar understood that the 97% vote to reelect him was not an accurate barometer of his real standing in the country. He said it was more important to look at turnout rates for voters, as those who did not vote were more than likely to have voted no. According to Syrian estimates, the voter turnout rate was 75%, still a very favorable response for Bashar. I'm so stuck on how they just described him.

Self-deprecating? Lesh is an interesting figure, because he wrote a very pro-Bashar book before the Civil War, and then after the Civil War, wrote some really anti-Bashar stuff. Came around to be like, this guy's a monster, and has been one of the more useful figures in trying to analyze the question you asked earlier. Was he always a monster? How did this happen?

What was the switch? How did that guy describe him? He's like a real Jekyll and Hyde character. Who the fuck? There's literally a study called Bashar al-Assad, Jekyll and Hyde, or something like that. What you're saying is really valid, because a lot of people have had these same sort of realizations.

Childlike giggle. It's like, get the fuck out of here. But there's enough stories about him that paint him in that light and say, well, they're probably not... They have no reason to lie, because Lesh has been pretty decent about, yeah, I got him wrong and stuff. Either it was a facade he deliberately put up, or a guy like that is perfectly capable of killing half a million people.

Yeah. Pick which one you want to believe, but one of the two seems to be the case. Now, Bashar al-Assad was optimistic about his ability to keep assodding during the Obama administration. U.S. foreign policy and public will had turned hard away from intervention. The new president had promised to withdraw troops from Iraq. Senator John Kerry was sent to Damascus to meet with Bashar

and restart Syrian-Israeli peace negotiations. Over the next few years, Kerry and Assad hung out a lot, speaking regularly on the telephone. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie also became friends with the assads. This was revealed... Your face? What the fuck? Yeah, you didn't call that one, did you?

What the fuck? Oh, you are about to get what the fuck here. This next bit is quite the ride. Wait, what year was this? This is 2011. That is the fuck, Brad Angelina, dude. They deserve to meet him. I hope Bashar broke them up.

I hope so too. I hope so too, and I hope that he provided no emotional support when they were going through that. Jesus Christ. Now, Brad Angelina's friendship with the assads was revealed in a February 2011 Vogue article titled, A Rose in the Desert about Asma al-Assad Bashar's wife. Oh, the fucking pros you are about to hear.

Jesus Christ. Oh, it's bad. When Angelina Jolie came with Brad Pitt for the United Nations in 2009, she was impressed by the First Lady's efforts to encourage empowerment among Iraqi and Palestinian refugees, but alarmed by the assad's idea of safety. My husband was driving us all to lunch, says Asma al-Assad, and out of the corner of my eye could see Brad Pitt was fidgeting.

I turned around and asked, is anything wrong? Where's your security? Asked Pitt, so I started teasing him. See that old woman on the street? I told him, and that old guy crossing the road. That's the other one. They both laugh. The president joins in on the punchline.

Brad Pitt wanted to send his security guards here to come and get some training. Isn't that funny? I, you know, these people can all fuck themselves. I hate everybody in that story. That's the worst thing. That old lady. It's like, are you fucking kidding me? You're gonna murder all these people soon. Yeah, all of these people will be dead from barrel bombs in like a year and a half.

Now, the whole article was filled with fawning praise for Syria's First Lady. In case that excerpt doesn't give you a clear idea of the tone, here's the opening paragraph. Fucking strap in on a, quote, Asma al-Assad is glamorous, young, and very chic. The freshest and most magnetic of First Ladies. Her style is not the coutre and bling-dazzle of Middle Eastern power, but a liberate lack of adornment.

She's a rare combination, a thin, long-limbed beauty with a trained analytic mind who dresses with cunning understatement. Paris Match calls her the element of light in a country full of shadow zones. She is the First Lady of Syria. What are you doing there? What the fuck? I know, that is... Is this article still online?

No, no it is not. I think they should have left it up so they could be eternally shamed. There are copies of it and I will link you to the Wayback Machine archive because people should read it and throw shame on Vogue for the rest of time. That is such a dangerous description of a human being who is basically involved in some monstrosities. That is the journalistic equivalent of getting blackout drunk and then driving a truck down the main thoroughfare of town.

That's morally equivalent to drunk driving. I hope... Honestly, if I saw Brad Pitt and he looked like shit and he was like, yeah, I'm just not going through a good time, I'd be like, yeah, you should never go through a good time ever again because you were fucking friends with that fucking couple. Yeah, gross. And it gets grosser.

The Vogue article praised Syria for being the safest country in the Middle East. In August 2011, the Hill reported that lobbying firm Brown Lloyd James had been paid $5,000 a month by the Syrian regime to publish and manage that Vogue article. That makes sense. The puff piece ended with a few paragraphs about the Assad celebrating Christmas in Damascus. I think you'll find this very heartwarming, Anna. Quote,

I'm sorry, okay. Let's dissect. First, he says all these styles are from Syria? Well, I mean, Syria has, like, it's got Christians and it has, you know, Arabs and rapping and stuff. I think he was trying to say that, like, all of these religions are part of our culture. I mean, Syria has, like, it's got Christians and it has, you know, Arabs and rapping and stuff. I think he was trying to say that, like, all of these religions are part of our culture.

Okay, okay. I thought he was being, like, rapping. We made that Broadway. No, to be honest, if he had actually opened up Syria and not murdered hundreds of thousands of people, it would be a heartwarming story. Yeah. But, you know, on January 27th, 2012, less than one year and exactly one Christmas after the publication of that Vogue article, Syrian regime forces shot 102 people dead in protests across the country.

They shot 98 more people dead on January 28th. On February 4th, 2012, almost exactly a year after that Vogue article, Bashar al-Assad ordered his artillery to fire indiscriminately at the city of Homs, killing more than 400 civilians in a single bloody day. Now, we're getting a little bit ahead of ourselves. On part two, we'll talk about the Arab Spring and how Bashar's regime went from playing it openness to murdering hundreds of thousands of people. For now, I want to note that Vogue eventually pulled their profile of Asma al-Assad.

In an interview with The Atlantic, the story's editor, a guy named Chris Nudson, said, quote, we felt that a personal interview with Syria's first lady would hold strong interest for our readers. We thought we could open up that very closed world a little bit. Are you fucking kidding me? Yeah. Fuck off, man. Yeah.

I have an idea. Suck my dick. Sorry. I don't know. But fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you. The closest thing that article gets to acknowledging the horribly dark side of the Syrian regime

is by saying that there are shadow zones in Syria, but it only mentions shadow zones to talk about how pretty Asma al-Assad is. So it doesn't really count. Yeah, it's like, wow, she's so gorgeous around all these body parts. Yeah, she looks so pretty next to these mukhabarat police torturing people. God, look at her compared to that severed head. Isn't she gorgeous? Doesn't she look good next to this pile of limbs?

Oh my god. Everyone involved in that article should take a strong, hard look at themselves in the mirror. Yeah, they really ought to. Now, Anna, you feel like plugging your plugables? I feel like dying. You can find me, Anna hosts me on Twitter, A-N-N-A-H-O-S-S-N-I-H. I will be tweeting nonstop at Angelina and Brad asking to explain themselves. You can also listen to my podcast with Shireen Younes.

We host a podcast that they're called Ethnically Ambiguous. Check it out. It's all Middle Eastern news and politics. Maybe we'll get in depth on how to get Angelina and Brad on the show and corner them. Yeah, oh man. That could be our new podcast is just cornering Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie and making them feel bad. I do wonder if he ever got his bodyguards out there to train and if they're all psycho killers now. Yeah, I hope so.

I hope for Brad's sake he did. Because we are going to be throwing some rotten food at him. That is the plan. So, I'm Robert Evans. You can find me on Twitter at IWriteOK. You can find this podcast on a twinstagrams, the both theSoche Meads at atbastardspod. You can find us on the web at behindthebastards.com. I have another podcast called It Could Happen Here, which is about what if a civil war but in America.

And it's also a real bummer like this podcast. So if you like being bummed out, maybe you like it. Let me guess. Angelina is running like a confederate army now. Yes, yes, yes. Angelina Jolie, head of the neo confederate forces. Oh my god, that is so her. Yeah, it's the obvious play.

It's the obvious play. Could you imagine a tabloid headline being like, Angelina in charge of the confederate army? We're like, tabloids, such lies. Also T-shirts, T-public, behind the bastards. Design me a go on or I'll kill you shirt. Yeah, yeah, we need to get a podcast dictator. Podcast dictator shirt. Uh, Daniel, play me off.

I'm not hearing anybody playing me off. I don't know. Play some music in your head and go do something besides listen to this podcast because it's over. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them?

He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.