Despite the bodies of Red Shirt civilians and numerous video clips which showed soldiers shooting unarmed civilians, Prime Minister Abhisit and all government representatives repeatedly denied that pro-democracy demonstrators had been deliberately shot down by soldiers. The Department of Special Investigation seemed to be “unable” to carry out post-mortems or to release any reports about the causes of death. The response of Abhisit was little different from Bashar al-Assad's bare-faced lies, denying any shootings in Syria a couple of years later. In December 2011 Abhisit told police that “the previous government's handling of last year's red shirt protests was based on tolerance and complied with international standards”.The fact of the matter is that if armed combat troops and snipers are deployed against unarmed civilian demonstrators, along with tanks and heavy caliber machine guns, people are being treated as military targets. Such actions cannot be deemed an attempt to keep the peace or disperse crowds with minimal risk of injury. The Thai State has a long history of killing pro-democracy demonstrators