Syria's Bodies: 'The Stench Was Unfathomable' ***GRAPHIC ***

[unhappycamper]

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/spiegel-reporting-supports-accounts-of-torture-and-execution-in-syria-a-945760.html



Photos released last week show that the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad tortures, starves and murders its prisoners. The images provide grisly evidence to support what witnesses have been telling SPIEGEL for months.

Syria's Bodies: 'The Stench Was Unfathomable'
By Christoph Reuter and Christoph Scheuermann
January 27, 2014 – 03:52 PM

He says he was never witness to executions, nor did he see torture taking place. That wasn't his job. His task was that of taking photos of the corpses afterwards. He would snap four or five images per body -- of the face and other parts of the person -- documenting the cause of death, insofar as it was possible to determine. He did so tens of thousands of times between March 2011 and August 2013 -- when he finally fled Syria, taking some 55,000 photos with him on a USB stick. The images are of starved, strangled and tortured men, primarily young and mostly naked. Some have no eyes. The defector, who has been cited under the alias "Caesar," worked for Syrian security, and says that he and his colleagues were called on up to 50 times a day to photograph corpses, each of which was given a number for documentation purposes.

Caesar provided his testimony and photographic evidence to lawyers and forensic experts at a British law firm. Together, says Sir Desmond de Silva, former chief prosecutor at the Special Court for Sierra Leone in The Hague, the defector's evidence shows the "industrial scale" of the killing perpetrated by the Syrian regime. In addition, the photos provide a horrifying explanation for what might have happened to the 50,000 or more missing people in Syria -- those who were abducted by the regime of the course of the past two years. They are not included in the casualty figures, which assume a total of some 130,000 killed in the civil war. But prior to last week, there had been no clear indication as to where they might be.

The British experts randomly chose 5,500 photos for analysis. More than half of them depicted emaciated corpses, many of them showing signs of torture. By extrapolation, the images that Caesar brought with him could document the murders of some 11,000 people. The three prominent attorneys involved believe both the testimony and the photographic evidence to be authentic. In a report, they said there is "clear evidence … of systematic torture and killing of detained persons." The report notes that "such evidence could also support findings of war crimes against the current Syrian regime."

The investigation and report undertaken by the British law firm was financed by Qatar, which likely explains the fact that it was made public concurrently with last week's Syria conference in Geneva. Qatar backs the Syrian rebels, but the country's stance does little to take away from the power of the images provided.

[pampango]

1. But "you are with me or you are with the terrorists".

No matter how horrible Assad's record is, you have to admit he has been very good at changing the choice from "it's me or the peaceful protesters" to a choice between "the lesser of two evils".