“We have a little bit of freedom,” said Khaled al-Ekhetyar, a 29-year-old journalist for a Web site whose business card shows a face with hands covering up the eyes and mouth. “We can say things that can’t be said in print.”

But that slim margin is threatened by an ever present fog of fear and intimidation, and some journalists fear that it could soon be snuffed out. A draft law regulating online media would clamp down on Syrian bloggers and other journalists, forcing them to register as syndicate members and submit their writing for review. Other Arab countries regularly jail journalists who express dissident views, but Syria may be the most restrictive of all.

Most of the Syrian media is still owned by the state. Privately owned media outlets became legal in 2001, as the socialist economy slowly began to liberalize following the accession of President Bashar al-Assad. But much of the sector is owned by members of the Syrian “oligarchy” — relatives of Mr. Assad and other top government officials. All of it is subject to intimidation and heavy-handed control.

“The first level is censorship,” said Ayman Abdel Nour, the founder of All4Syria.info, the independent Web site where Mr. Ekhetyar works. “The second level is when they send you statements and force you to publish them.” Like many other journalists and dissidents, Mr. Abdel Nour has left the country and now lives abroad.

The Khmer Rouge, I understood later, intended to eliminate the rich, the intellectuals, and anyone educated – like doctors, engineers and professors, the majority of whom tended to live in the city. For the Khmer Rouge these people were part of a dictatorial and corrupt regime that exploited the poor, and they sought to destroy everything they thought belonged to this world: buildings, luxury cars, villas, refrigerators.
…Everyone became quiet for a long time while wondering who would be the next victim. My heart was heavy with sorrow for the families of the deceased. Moreover, I had almost lost my daughters in the jungle during this same journey – a story too long to describe here.
With time, more and more of the new people died – from hunger, disease, from a plague of sheer exhaustion, but most of all from the massacres perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge. They killed people on perfectly ridiculous pretexts: wearing spectacles, knowing how to read or how to open the door of a car, even for having a white mark on the wrist (a sign of having worn a watch). For the Khmer Rouge, these were all signs that the person concerned belonged to a rich, dictatorial class.
It was common to see a man whose face was pale, trembling with fear, being paraded through the village with his hands bound behind the back, guarded on either side by Khmer Rouge cadre carrying large machetes. It was terrifying: everyone knew that they were going to decapitate this man. The scene served its purpose of warning us that the Khmer Rouge wielded absolute power. We lived from one day to the next. We had no idea what might happen to us in the night or on the following day.

that the U.S. had carried out the attacks with the aim of forcing Russia into making concessions to help resolve the crisis with Iran, and also to push Russia into signing the arms reduction treaty: "Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov declared that regional and international elements may have been behind the criminal operation that caused... the killing of 40 innocent civilians...

"Like the innocent victims of terror operations in Moscow, Dagestan, and other places in the world, the perpetrators of these operations also did not know the political goals of the operations [that they carried out]. [These perpetrators are] young men or women, in the full flower of their youth, who have been brainwashed with hatred and whose minds have been filled with elements of religious and ideological consciousness removed from the textual context of the books [holy to] the monotheistic religions – particularly [those] of the religion of Islam [i.e. the Koran] that bans the killing of innocents.

"But the planners of the terror operations know full well how to exploit the religion to accomplish their unique goals. It is they who are the most distant from Islam and its commandments... [The fact is that] the leader of the terror operations in the Caucasus, who was killed by Russian intelligence about a month before the recent Moscow operations, was... Sa'id Buryatsky, a Russian whose real name is Alexander Tikhomirov, who was connected to several foreign intelligence networks, particularly the American CIA.

"The U.S.'s condemnation of this does not mislead us. Many terror organizations have weapons and explosives... manufactured by the U.S. and Israel, sent to them via Georgia and other countries close to the U.S.

"Against this backdrop, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's trip to Venezuela to sign 30 agreements with President Hugo Chavez can be understood. Several U.S. and Western newspapers [saw these agreements] as Russia's response to Washington, and as an indirect accusation against it, vis-à-vis the two Moscow subway bombings... [Washington had] hoped that this terror operation would pressure the Russian leadership to make many concessions in all things regarding the signing of the Strategic Missile Arms Limitation Treaty – SALT II [sic][1] with Russia not demanding that the U.S. stop its missile defense project in Eastern Europe and change its position towards Iran, and [forcing] Russia to impose harsh sanctions on Iran [in accordance with Washington's wishes]...