Our greatest challenge is to teach the workers of our nation that they
are in a world-wide struggle, not against other nations, but against
those who hold power through Capitalism. We must find ways of uniting
across national borders, as well as across all contrived barriers set
in place to keep us at each others throats.
Workers of the World, Unite! A cry that is even more urgent today
than when it was first uttered.
The political slogan Workers of the world, unite! is one of the most
famous rallying cries from the Communist Manifesto.
popularized in English as "Workers of the world, unite! You have
nothing to lose but your chains!"
Of course the Ruling Classes of the World quickly mounted an attack on
such nonsense, by attacking Communism. The concept of workers uniting
was a total threat to the Ruling Classes control. Running such
thinking into their propaganda machines, the Ruling Classes sold us on
the belief that anything said by Communists must be lies, aimed at
mind control by Uncle Joe Stalin. For some years anything that was
believed to be a threat to the Ruling Classes control, was labelled
"Communism", and those who subscribed to Communism were anti American,
giving witch hunters like our own Joe McCarthy a free hand to destroy
the lives of many caring Americans.
And yet, despite the great power and all the riches of the Ruling
Classes, Liberty keeps popping to the surface.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/15/16, S. Kashdan <skashdan@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi Miriam and all,The old Wobblies had it right. Workers of the World, Unite!
There are many reasons for people interested in the protection of civilians
to be against the Russian government intervention in the Syrian debacle as
well as to be against the U.S. government intervention.
And, unfortunately there are many examples of leftist/progressive
publishers, like the
Nation and related news sites concentrating primarily on one side of
specific stories, although not for the reasons claimed by the
right-wingers.
For me, the most important issue is understanding the problems faced by
ordinary civilians in the U.S. and other countries, and then expressing
solidarity with vulnerable people wherever they may be, and when possible,
helping
civilians to survive and find safety.
The old proverb says:
When the elephants fight, the ants get trampled. Most of us are ants, not
elephants. And, an injury to one is an injury to all, so I am very
interested in what other governments do to the people living in the
territories they rule. I see no reason to be at all confident that
either the Syrian or Russian governments are any better for the vast
majority of people living in Syria than are the U.S. government or the
Saudi
or Turkish or other such governments.
In 2011, large numbers of ordinary Syrian civilians joined the Arab Spring
movements throughout the Middle East in a popular revolution for liberation
from dictatorship. They aimed to establish democracy and equality. The
regime of Bashar al-Assad responded by bombing its own people and dividing
them along ethnic and sectarian lines, and by telling the world that all
those who opposed the regime were religious extremists, despite a great
deal of proof to the contrary.
But the Assad massive repression could not stop the revolt. It took air
strikes and an invasion by Russia, Iran and their allies to shore up the
regime and make it possible for the great powers to begin the so-called
peace talks in Geneva. And, even now, when much of Syria lies in ruins,
whenever
there is a lull in the bombings and shellings, despite great danger,
hundreds and even thousands of civilians come out on the streets to protest
against the dictatorship and against the Islamists too.
Every Friday, they are waving the revolutionary flag, not the black flags
of
various Islamist organizations, and they are repeating the same chants that
they used
in 2011. They are continuing to demand freedom and democracy even at the
risk of their lives.
The original urge for liberation that emerged in 2011 is still alive,
despite the horrendous reality that almost half a
million people have been killed, that half the country is now homeless,
that
millions have become refugees, and
that every city in the country except one has been bombed.
Leila Al-Shami and Robin Yassin-Kassab have written a really interesting
new
book: Burning Country: Syria in Revolution and War, which documents in
detail the history of the Syrian Regime's treatment of the population and
the grassroots movement which emerged against all odds. There are also
several other highly
respected writers and researchers from Syrian backgrounds who have been
providing
information and analyses beyond that being presented by some of the Western
reporters like Seymour Hersh, no matter how reputable and brave the latter
have been on covering past issues.
Seymour Hersh’s article, "Whose Sarin," was originally submitted to the New
Yorker magazine, where Hersh is a regular contributor. But, the editors
found it lacking in some ways, so Hersh offered it to the London Review of
Books. I have a lot of respect for a great deal of Hersh's past
investigative reporting, but, there are several highly respected reporters
and even academics who disagree with Hersh's position on who perpetrated
the
sarin gas attack discussed in the article.
However, well beyond the issue of one specific sarin attack, I think it is
important for all of us who care about possibilities for a better world,
including social justice, to seek out and sympathize with
and even offer solidarity to
people in other places who are attempting to throw off tyranny, if only to
retain our own humanity. We need to recognize the injustices in the ways
other governments treat people rather than overlook them in order to go
along with the compromises of those in power.
Unfortunately for all of us, as Trump's positive rants about Putin and the
Russian regime show, they really do learn from each other! And, sadly, the
Russian regime is also imperialist.
It is no secret that the Russian government has been attempting to help
the
Assad regime regain
control of the whole country. The Russian government wanted to destroy the
democratic opposition so that there really would only be a choice between
the Assad regime and the jihadists. But, this is proving impossible because
the Assad regime has
been deserted by much of the Syrian military. So, in order to counter the
multi-faceted and grassroots democratic opposition, the Putin and Assad
regimes are now opting for sectarian partition, the kind of solution that
has torn Iraq apart. All truly sad.
For justice and peace,
Sylvie
----- Original Message -----
From: "Carl Jarvis" <carjar82@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, April 20, 2016 12:08 PM
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Assad Files
Since governments and organizations will say and do what they must say
and do in order to protect themselves and advance their particular
cause, I only read the broad strokes, at best.
If our goal is to place the blame on others, we are all getting to be
down right experts at it. We go about murdering and plundering and
pointing our fingers at those around us. And the killing goes on.
I've lost all interest in hearing just who is attacking whom, and who
is to blame, and how many innocent people they have killed. It's too
heart numbing. Little children's body parts flung across battle
scarred fields. Today I feel as if it's futile to demand that all
sides stop the murder of others. Just wanting it to happen is not
getting us anywhere. We are bent on taking all life with us when we
finally destroy Mankind.
On other days I'm a bit more hopeful.
Carl Jarvis
On 4/19/16, S. Kashdan <skashdan@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi Miriam and all,
It seems very clear to me that all the governments involved in the Syrian
debacle have undoubtedly engaged in very brutal practices, including the
Russian Government, The Syrian Government, The Saudi Government, The
Turkish
government, the U.S. government, etc., and all the groups motivated by
religious fundamentalism are also brutal.
I don't think any of us should be taking sides for any government's
intervention or debating which
brutal government or group was behind any particular attack, because even
the best investigative reporters and even arms experts can disagree about
various details.
And none of us non-experts can really figure out who has the best
information.
this leads me to oppose U.S. intervention and Russian intervention, as
well
as any compromise with the Syrian dictatorship.
Rather than deciding that one reporter has everything straight and
others
who disagree don't have it straight, we need to wait and see if any
definitive conclusion can be drawn over time about any specific event.
Leaks
of various sorts may very well help to make things clearer.
However, it is pretty sure that the generally brutal practices of all
the
governments and the fundamentalist groups have been corroborated over
time.
As I said earlier, I don't think that it is necessary for us non-experts
to
determine the perpetrator in any specific atrocity to understand the way
that all the state and fundamentalist actors are destroying human
possibilities for those who don't want either religious or secular
dictatorship.
Below, I am giving an example of other reporters challenging some of
Seymour
Hersh's facts, even though I generally respect him and the work he does.
He
is not infallible any more than anyone else. Over the past few years I
have
read articles that present information and interpretations different from
his. Miriam, below is just one example from two other reputable reporters
challenging the article by Seymour Hersh that you cited. And the article
below is not the only one that
takes this position.
For justice and peace,
Sylvie
It's clear that Turkey was not involved in the chemical attack on Syria
The sources and conclusions used to support Seymour Hersh's argument just
don't stack up. The perpetrators lie closer to home
Eliot Higgins and Dan Kaszeta
Opinion, The Guardian, Tuesday April 22, 2014
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/22/allegation-false-turkey-chemical-attack-syria
Last week the London Review of Books published an article by the
respected
Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh, The Red Line and the Rat
Line, in which he details the alleged involvement of the Turkish
government
with the Syrian opposition group Jabhat al-Nusra in last August's sarin
attack in Damascus. Between 1,000 and 1,400 people are estimated to have
died.
The US, Britain and other western governments have pinned the blame on
the
Syrian government; Russia has accused the rebels. Hersh describes this as
part of a "false flag" operation designed to draw the US into a conflict
with Syria.
In his 6,000-word article Hersh relies heavily on single, unnamed sources
for each of his claims, and constructs a narrative in which the Turkish
government was responsible for the largest chemical attack since the one
carried out by Saddam Hussein on Halabja in 1988. But Hersh's story is
full
of holes, and it brings the reliability of his sources and conclusions
into
question.
Hersh makes no mention of the munitions used on 21 August, something that
is
key to understanding the attacks. In an interview for Democracy Now! he
states that the weapons were both homemade and not in Syria's arsenal.
Both
these claims are wrong.
Two types of munitions were used on 21 August and are linked to the
dispersal of sarin gas. Both were recorded in a report by the UN and the
Organisation for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) and tested
positive for signs of sarin. One was a Soviet-era M14 140mm artillery
rocket, certainly not a "homemade" munition, and the second was a
munition
that was widely unknown.
Studying videos and photographs posted by opposition and pro-government
sources has allowed researchers to piece together a great deal of
information about these rockets. We know they are referred to as
"Volcano"
rockets and come in at least three sizes: 107mm, 122mm (as used on 21
August), and a much larger type based on a 220mm rocket motor. It is also
clear that there are both explosive and chemical versions, as well as
evidence of their use by the Syrian military from late 2012.
Videos and photographs from 21 August show at least eight examples of the
chemical type of Volcano rockets. There are three videos from an alleged
chemical attack in Adra, Damascus, on 5 August showing the same type of
Volcano rockets; one video from Adra in June showing a chemical Volcano
rocket; and videos and photographs from December 2012 to January 2013
showing the remains of chemical Volcano rockets. In all examples the
rockets
have been fired at the opposition and appear to share an identical
design,
down to the smallest details.
Photographs and footage going back to November 2012 filmed by opposition
activists shows Volcano rockets being launched. Eight videos from Mezzeh
airbase, near Daraya, from December 2012 show Volcano rocket launches;
and
from October 2013 the rockets and their launchers began to show up from
videos posted by the Syrian government's National Defence Force.
Eventually,
even pro-Hezbollah sources started posting images of Volcano rockets in
action. It is quite clear that no matter how "homemade" Hersh believes
the
rockets to be, they have been used by the Syrian military for more than a
year.
When questioned about this in a recent interview with the Turkish website
Diken Hersh dismissed the Volcano rockets, seemingly because he believes
a
range of "a mile" somehow means they should be discounted as important to
his narrative. Hersh refers to the work of Ted Postol and Richard Lloyd
who
believe the range of the rockets is about 2km. But this range issue isn't
the problem Hersh appears to think.
Video footage from both sides of the conflict has allowed researchers to
accurately find the positions of government controlled areas on 21
August.
The Russian-language news site ANNA News posted two dozen videos showing
"Operation al-Qaboun", a Syrian government military operation running
from
June to August 2013. Embedded with Syrian forces, they were able to film
the
progress of the operation to clear positions between Jobar and Qaboun, a
strip of land about 2km away from the 21 August impact sites.
Videos from opposition groups show the other side of the fighting,
including
attacks on checkpoints and government movements. Based on this
information
it appears that the front lines were about 2km away from the furthest
impact
sites of rockets used on 21 August. Only two rockets landed at the 2km
maximum range described by Lloyd and Postol, with the reported impact
sites
of the remaining rockets being between 1.5km-1.8km away. It has been
possible to confirm the precise impact locations of some of the rockets
by
a
combination of GPS information, satellite map imagery, photographs and
videos, and around a dozen impact sites were reported by local groups in
eastern Ghouta. Hersh's belief that the 2km rocket range is enough to
dismiss them from his narrative is clearly misguided.
Despite Hersh's claims we can clearly see that the rockets were used by
the
Syrian government, and within range of government controlled territory.
Seven issues to address
But what about his claim of Turkey helping Jabhat al-Nusra, which is
linked
to al-Qaida, to produce sarin in Aleppo? Seven issues need to be
addressed:
difficulty of manufacture, quantity, choice of weapon, economics,
logistics,
concealment, and the specificity of the product.
Firstly, sarin is difficult to make. Anyone who claims otherwise is
oblivious to both history and chemical engineering. Germany, the US and
the
former Soviet Union took years to perfect the process. Its production
requires a number of complex steps and the ability to handle highly
dangerous chemicals at very closely controlled high temperatures and
pressures. There is no evidence anyone has come up with any sort of
streamlined method to manipulate the molecules to make sarin.
Second, quantity. Perfecting the process isn't enough--there is a
difference
between making a spoonful and enough for the August attacks, which would
have needed about half a ton. This assumes a scale only reached by big
state
production programmes. To put it in perspective, the one verified example
of
non-state production of sarin was the Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan. Their
many millions of dollars, very large purpose-built manufacturing facility
and highly qualified staff got them the ability to make single batches of
perhaps 8 litres of short shelf life Sarin. The alleged Aleppo plant
wouldn't need to be the size of the Rocky Mountain Arsenal in the US, but
it
would have needed to be closer to that than the size of a house.
Third is the choice of weapon. Of the panoply of chemical warfare agents
available to modern science and engineering, sarin is one of the hardest
to
make. So why was this one chosen? Even its nerve agent kin, Tabun and VX,
are arguably easier to produce; mustard or lewisite are easier and use
less
technology. Numerous toxic industrial chemicals which might "fly under
the
radar" of non-proliferation regimes could be used as weapons. So why pick
the hardest?
Fourth, economics. To make this operation work it is going to take a lot
of
highly trained people, raw materials, and specialised equipment, as well
as
a facility. It would cost many tens of millions of dollars. When the
rebel
factions are so stretched for resources, does it make any sense to spend,
say, $50m on a weapon of limited utility? Lavish expenditure must raise a
paper trail somewhere; there would be order books and receipts. Let's see
them.
Fifth is logistics. You don't turn precursor material magically into
sarin:
you need about 9kg to end up with 1kg of sarin. This stuff has to come
from
somewhere, but where? Hersh omits these details, as do most of the
alternative narratives. It is simply assumed that things like phosphorus
trichloride and thionyl chloride just get summoned up in vast quantities
without someone noticing. Most commentators on this issue have also
forgotten about something called conservation of mass. If you use 9kg of
material to synthesize 1kg of sarin you end up with 8kg of waste, rather
a
lot of which is very dangerous, smelly and corrosive. This waste stream
has
to go somewhere, and someone will notice. There are also the logistics of
getting a lot of sarin into rockets and getting those rockets from Aleppo
to
Damascus.
Sixth, concealment. How do you hide all of this? The building, the supply
chain, the people, the money, and the very smelly waste stream. Where are
they? They need to be concealed not just from the Syrian regime but from
other rebel factions, western intelligence agencies, the Russians, and
perhaps even your own people who might desert, get captured or say silly
things on YouTube videos. There is deathly silence from Aleppo and we
only
find out about it from Hersh?
Lastly is the specificity of the product. There are important physical
clues
found in the traces of sarin at the impact sites of the 21 August rocket
attack. One of these is the presence of hexamine, a chemical with no
history
of use in nerve agent production. But hexamine can be used as an acid
scavenger, and thus its presence could be explained due to its use as an
additive to the sarin. This idea has been reinforced by both the
admission
of the Syrian regime that they used hexamine as part of their formula,
and
by Syria's declaration to the OPCW of an inventory of 80 tonnes of
hexamine,
specifically as part of their chemical weapons program. Surely, as an
uncontrolled substance, they could have omitted it from their
declarations.
But they didn't. Hexamine in field samples plus hexamine in Syrian
inventories, plus an admission that hexamine was in their recipe, seems a
compelling case for tying the Sarin in the field to the Syrian regime.
How
would an Aleppo-based rebel factory somehow come up with the same exact
idea?
Taken cumulatively, all these points add up to a very high degree of
improbability. Isn't it more probable that the Sarin came from the people
who confessed to having a Sarin factory, fired from areas controlled by
the
government 2km away from the impact sites, in munitions the government
had
been using since 2012?
----- Original Message -----
From: "Miriam Vieni" <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, April 14, 2016 6:55 PM
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Assad Files
One of the problems that arises when we talk about this situation, and
several other international conflicts, is that the real issues are
usually
used by people in our government to support US aggression. And so then,
the
reactions of people who are opposed to US aggression, are sometimes to
over
react in the other direction. And then we're caught in a thicket or swamp
or
something. However, from my point of view, it does really matter that,
that
sarin attack, very likely, given all of the evidence that I've read,
didn't
come from the Assad forces, particularly because the Assad regime is
known
for its brutality, and that attack, which most likely came from a rebel
group, could have been the spark for a war in 2013.
There is, of course, an issue which underlies what Sylvie is saying and
it
has to do with what our country's response should be to brutal regimes.
It
is most distressing to hear the stories of those who are being brutalized
and I think that we all want to do something. But the thing that our
country
does, that all countries seem to do, is to resort to armed conflict, as
if
war actually resolves problems. It may resolve some, but it causes
others.
Personally, I don't believe that we should be intervening in foreign
conflicts. When we do, the motive usually has to do with demonstrating
our
country's power and control, although we use the welfare of people as an
excuse. However, the dictators whom we have chosen to topple, and Assad,
all
happen to be enemies of Israel and have all been choices of the Neo Cons
and
Neo Liberals. Notice that we're not concerned about the dictdator in
Egype
nor the one in Barraine. And we certainly didn't help the Libyan people
or
the Iraqi people by doing what we did.
So yes, certainly, we should be shining a light on the brutality,
torture,
and illegal imprisonment of people that occurs in all countries,
including
our own, and we should be finding peaceful and constructive ways to
pressure
countries to act more humanely.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of S. Kashdan
Sent: Thursday, April 14, 2016 9:06 PM
To: Blind Democracy List
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Assad Files
Greetings all,
The Syrian government's use of torture and brutality is as undeniable and
as
important as the U.S. government's use of torture and brutality. And that
use of torture
has also been verified numerous
times through numerous sources of information. So, it is important to not
lose track of it while debating which
government or terrorist organization may or
may not be responsible for any one particular sarin attack, etc.
A wide variety of human rights organizations, including several with very
good reputations, such as the International
Rescue Committee, have recorded many stories of the torture of Syrian
refugees that match the
information in the documents discussed in the article. I have heard very
similar ones from Syrian refugees who are friends. And some Syrian
Americans
living here for many years who I know have also told very similar stories
about the brutality used against their relatives still there. Last week I
went to a
fund raiser for Syrian refugees in the United States who are being
sponsored
by the International Rescue Committee, and once again heard some very
similar stories
from several refugees who spoke there.
It is also important to understand that it is misleading to use a blanket
all-encompassing term such as "the rebels" when referring to the
opposition
against the Assad regime, because there are definitely a
diversity of rebels, ranging from the secular non-military, to the
secular military, to the Syrian Kurdish non-military and the Kurdish
military,
to the religious fundamentalist groups fighting the Syrian Assad
dictatorial government. Some of the latter may very likely be getting
help
from
the Turkish
government or the Saudi government.
So, we should not forget and we should not agree to the playing down of
the
fact that Assad's regime is a brutal dictatorship. This
definitely does not
justify supporting U.S. military intervention on behalf of regime change.
But neither should we support
a political compromise in which peace with the Assad regime is brokered
with
the help of the Russian and Iranian governments, and all opposition to
Assad
and all aspirations for democracy are crushed.
ISIS thugs are not the only killers. Assad has killed too many Syrians to
be
helped to stay in power.
Unfortunately, as things stand, it is a fantasy to imagine that the
Russian
or Iranian
governments will work to remove Assad from
power. Moscow and Tehran have been backing Assad and his genocidal
campaign
completely. There is virtually no hope that they will change their minds
soon.
Below is a link to a video talk about the situation in Syria that deals
with
the
plight of victims of the Assad regime repression.
"Syria: 'Burning Country' book launch at Amnesty International UK"
video URL
https://youtu.be/rvUdW3NVKEg
For justice and peace,
Sylvie
----- Original Message -----
From: "Carl Jarvis" <carjar82@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, April 13, 2016 4:46 PM
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Assad Files
Such atrocities create the fertile fields from which Heroes spring.
Carl Jarvis
I'd like to point out that there is real controversy as to whether it was
the Syrian government or the rebels who was responsible for the Sarin gas
attack. Seymour Hersh wrote an article about the situation in the London
Review of Books and Robert Perry has written about it several times.
The article also causes me to wonder about just which countries are held
to
account by international law and which countries appear to be immune from
its judgments. After all, our government has been very much aware of the
kinds of torture used in Syria and has taken advantage of Syrian torture
techniques for years. The CIA sent many of the people whom it kidnapped
to
Syria to be questioned so that those techniques would be used. But no one
is
collecting the names of the people in our government who are responsible
for
that so that they may be held accountable.
Miriam
On 4/12/16, S. Kashdan <skashdan@xxxxxxx> wrote:
The Assad Fileshttp://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/04/18/bashar-al-assads-war-crimes-exp
Capturing the top-secret documents that tie the Syrian regime to mass
torture and killings.
by Ben Taub
A Reporter at Large
The New Yorker, April 18, 2016 Issue
osed
Syria's
The investigator in Syria had made the drive perhaps a hundred times,
always
in the same battered truck, never with any cargo. It was forty miles to
the
border, through eleven rebel checkpoints, where the soldiers had come to
think of him as a local, a lawyer whose wartime misfortunes included a
commute on their section of the road. Sometimes he brought them snacks
or
water, and he made sure to thank them for protecting civilians like
himself.
Now, on a summer afternoon, he loaded the truck with more than a hundred
thousand captured Syrian government documents, which had been buried in
pits
and hidden in caves and abandoned homes.
He set out at sunset. To the fighters manning the checkpoints, it was as
if
he were invisible. Three reconnaissance vehicles had driven ahead, and
one
confirmed by radio what the investigator hoped to hear: no new
checkpoints.
Typically, the border was sealed, but soldiers from the neighboring
country
waved him through. He drove until he reached a Western embassy, where he
dropped off the cargo for secure transfer to Chris Engels, an American
lawyer. Engels expected the papers to include evidence linking
high-level
Syrian officials to mass atrocities. After a decade spent training
international criminal-justice practitioners in the Balkans,
Afghanistan,
and Cambodia, Engels now leads the regime-crimes unit of the Commission
for
International Justice and Accountability, an independent investigative
body
founded in 2012, in response to the Syrian war.
In the past four years, people working for the organization have
smuggled
more than six hundred thousand government documents out of Syria, many
of
them from top-secret intelligence facilities. The documents are brought
to
the group's headquarters, in a nondescript office building in Western
Europe, sometimes under diplomatic cover. There, each page is scanned,
assigned a bar code and a number, and stored underground. A dehumidifier
hums inside the evidence room; just outside, a small box dispenses rat
poison.
Upstairs, in a room secured by a metal door, detailed maps of Syrian
villages cover the walls, and the roles of various suspects in the
Syrian
government are listed on a whiteboard. Witness statements and translated
documents fill dozens of binders, which are locked in a fireproof safe
at
night. Engels, who is forty-one, bald and athletic, with a precise,
discreet
manner, oversees the operation; analysts and translators report directly
to
him.
The commission's work recently culminated in a four-hundred-page legal
brief
that links the systematic torture and murder of tens of thousands of
Syrians
to a written policy approved by President Bashar al-Assad, coordinated
among
his security-intelligence agencies, and implemented by regime
operatives,
who reported the successes of their campaign to their superiors in
Damascus.
The brief narrates daily events in Syria through the eyes of Assad and
his
associates and their victims, and offers a record of state-sponsored
torture
that is almost unimaginable in its scope and its cruelty. Such acts had
been
reported by survivors in Syria before, but they had never been traced
back
to signed orders. Stephen Rapp, who led prosecution teams at the
international criminal tribunals in Rwanda and Sierra Leone before
serving
for six years as the United States Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes
Issues, told me that the CIJA's documentation "is much richer than
anything
I've seen, and anything I've prosecuted in this area."
The case is the first international war-crimes investigation completed
by
an
independent agency like the CIJA, funded by governments but without a
court
mandate. The organization's founder, Bill Wiley, a Canadian war-crimes
investigator who has worked on several high-profile international
tribunals,
had grown frustrated with the geopolitical red tape that often shapes
the
pursuit of justice. Because the process of collecting evidence and
organizing it into cases is purely operational, he reasoned that it
could
be
done before the political will exists to prosecute the case.
Only the U.N. Security Council can refer the crisis in Syria to the
International Criminal Court; in May, 2014, Russia and China blocked a
draft
resolution that would have granted the court jurisdiction over war
crimes
committed by all sides of the conflict. Nevertheless, Wiley told me, the
commission has also identified a number of "quite serious perpetrators,
drawn from the security-intelligence services," who have entered Europe.
"The CIJA is very much committed to assisting domestic authorities with
prosecutions."
Counting Syria's dead has become nearly impossible--the U.N. stopped
trying
more than two years ago--but groups monitoring the conflict have
estimated
the number to be almost half a million, with the pace of killing
accelerating each year. The war has emptied out the country, with some
five
million Syrians escaping to neighboring countries and to Europe,
straining
the capacities of even those countries which are willing to provide
asylum
and humanitarian aid. The chaos has also played a fundamental role in
the
rise of ISIS, the bloodiest of the jihadi groups that have used Syria as
a
staging ground to expand the reach of terrorism.
Last fall, Wiley invited me to examine the commission's case at its
headquarters, on the condition that I not reveal the office's location,
the
governments assisting with document extraction, or, with few exceptions,
the
names of his staff.
The Insurrection
In December, 2010, a twenty-six-year-old fruit seller in rural Tunisia,
fed
up with a life of harassment and extortion by venal government
officials,
doused himself in paint thinner, struck a match, and unwittingly ignited
the
Arab Spring. Hundreds of thousands of citizens in the Middle East and in
North Africa, sharing his rage and despair, rose up against an
assortment
of
autocrats and kings. They demanded democratic reforms, economic
opportunities, and an end to corruption. In late January, 2011, Bashar
al-Assad told the Wall Street Journal, "What you have been seeing in
this
region is a kind of disease." Syria remained stable, a fact that Assad
attributed to his attention to the "beliefs of the people." He added,
"This
is the core issue. When there is divergence between your policy and the
people's beliefs and interests, you will have this vacuum that creates
disturbance."
In fact, Assad's confidence was likely rooted in the proficiency of
Assad's
security-intelligence apparatus, which had kept his family in power
since
1971. Other autocrats in the region placed similar trust in their own
security forces. Then Egypt's dictatorship collapsed, and the U.N.
Security
Council voted to refer the situation in Libya, where Muammar Qaddafi had
ruled for forty-two years, to the International Criminal Court. In
March,
NATO forces launched a bombing campaign in Libya. In Syria, people began
calling for concessions by the government--timidly, at first. The
country
had spent forty-eight years under martial law, and the notion of public
demonstration was unfamiliar. The protests were met with tear gas and
bullets, but were soon attracting tens of thousands of people.
On March 30, 2011, Assad addressed the nation from the rotunda of the
Syrian
parliament building. He had just sacked his cabinet, and many people
expected him to announce liberalizing reforms. Instead, he declared his
intention to suppress dissent in the brutal tradition of his father,
Hafez
al-Assad. "Syria is facing a great conspiracy, whose tentacles extend"
to
foreign powers that were plotting to destroy the country, he said.
"There
is
no conspiracy theory," he added. "There is a conspiracy." He closed with
an
ominous directive: "Burying sedition is a national, moral, and religious
duty, and all those who can contribute to burying it and do not are part
of
it." He emphasized, "There is no compromise or middle way in this."
Two days later, protests across the country grew larger. Assad had
already
formed a secret security committee, called the Central Crisis Management
Cell, to coordinate a crackdown. Its chairman was Mohammad Said
Bekheitan,
the highest-ranking official in the ruling Baath Party, after Assad; the
other members--who were all Assad-dynasty confidants--were routinely
shuffled among the top positions in the military, the ministries, and
the
security-intelligence apparatus.
Every night, the Crisis Cell met in a drab office on the first floor of
the
Baath Party Regional Command, in central Damascus, and discussed
strategies
for crushing dissent. This required detailed information about each
protest,
so the cell requested reports from security committees and intelligence
agents in the most rebellious provinces. The group decided to hire
someone
to process all the paperwork.
One of the applicants was Abdelmajid Barakat, a twenty-four-year-old
with
slicked-back hair. Barakat, who had recently finished a master's degree
in
international relations, was working for the education ministry. At his
interview, in April, a high-level official named Salaheddine al-Naimi
examined his resume and asked whether he could use a computer. Next,
Naimi
asked how he would resolve the developing crisis. Barakat replied that,
in
order to avoid an armed response, the government should make some
concessions and enact moderate reforms.
Barakat was surprised to be hired. In college, he had been questioned by
military-intelligence agents about suspicions that he and his friends
were
involved in anti-government political activities. Early in the unrest,
he
had joined one of Syria's first organized revolutionary bodies. Now, in
the
regime's haste to make the Crisis Cell more efficient, it was employing
a
member of the opposition to process confidential security memos from all
over the country. On most days, more than a hundred and fifty pages
arrived
at Barakat's desk, cataloguing the minutiae of perceived threats to
metaphor--they're
rule--graffiti, Facebook posts, protests--and, eventually, actual
threats,
like the existence of armed groups. Barakat read everything and drafted
summaries, which Naimi delivered to the members of the Crisis Cell to
guide
each meeting.
Barakat was never allowed into the meeting room, but he saw the members
walk
in, and Naimi kept detailed minutes on Baath Party letterhead.
Occasional
guests of the group included high-ranking Baathist officials, Syria's
Vice-President, and Assad's younger brother, Maher, a short-tempered
military commander, whom the European Union identified in a sanctions
list
as the "principal overseer of violence against demonstrators."
At the end of each meeting, the Crisis Cell agreed on a plan for every
security issue. Then Bekheitan, the chairman, signed the minutes, and a
courier delivered them to Assad at the Presidential palace. Barakat
learned
that Assad reviewed the proposals, signed them, and returned them to the
Crisis Cell for implementation. Sometimes he made revisions, crossing
out
directives and adding new ones. He also issued decrees without
consulting
the Crisis Cell. Barakat was certain that no security decision, no
matter
how small, was made without Assad's approval.
Shortly after Barakat began working for the Crisis Cell, he started
leaking
documents. Though the regime publicly claimed that it was allowing
peaceful
demonstrations, security memos showed that intelligence agents were
targeting protesters and media activists, and shooting at them
indiscriminately. Barakat photographed the memos in the bathroom, and
sent
the pictures to contacts in the Syrian opposition, who forwarded them to
Arabic news organizations. His plan was to steal as much information as
possible and then leave the country. But each leak heightened suspicion
within the office, increasing the chances that, sooner or later, the
regime
would discover that he was the mole.
The Investigators
One day in October, 2011, while Bill Wiley was visiting a Libyan exile
in
Niger, he received a phone call from a friend, relaying a request from
the
British government: as the crisis in Syria spiralled into civil war, it
was
looking for someone to train activists to document human-rights
violations.
Wiley told the caller that plenty of groups were already cataloguing the
abuses. But he had a counter-proposal: he could train Syrians to collect
the
type of evidence that would better serve a prosecution, tracing criminal
culpability up as high as it went. It was a novel approach--instead of
raising awareness of crimes, he intended to pin them on state actors,
whether or not the international community sanctioned the investigation.
The
British government approved of the idea.
Wiley's career had intersected with a resurgence of the field of
international criminal law; since the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials, there
had
been no major international investigations until the atrocities in the
Balkans, in the nineteen-nineties, led to the Yugoslavia tribunal.
Wiley,
who had completed a Ph.D. in international criminal law at York
University
while serving in the Canadian Army--he wrote his dissertation on war
crimes
and the evolution of international humanitarian law--became an analyst
at
the tribunal. In 2002, he travelled to Kigali to investigate war crimes
in
Rwanda, and the following year he moved to the eastern region of the
Democratic Republic of the Congo, where he was the first investigator
retained by the International Criminal Court.
Wiley, who considers himself "a field guy, not an office guy," is tall,
with
reddish-blond hair, and handles the considerable stress of his
profession
with Cuban cigarillos, gallows humor, and exercise. (At the age of
fifty-two, he bench-presses more than three hundred and fifty pounds.)
While
working for the I.C.C., he came to believe that the international court
system was often afflicted by upper-management "incompetence." Since its
launch, in 2002, the I.C.C. has opened nine investigations, spent more
than
a billion dollars, and secured convictions against three men: two
warlords
and a former politician, all from Congo. After two years, Wiley became
disillusioned, and he applied to become a human-rights monitor for the
United Nations, in Iraq.
On October 19, 2005, Wiley sat in a hangar at a military base in Amman,
Jordan, awaiting transport to Baghdad. A television showed Saddam
Hussein
in
a heated exchange with a judge, insisting that he was still the
President
of
Iraq. It was the former dictator's first day on trial. "I paid no
attention
to it whatsoever," Wiley recalled. The multinational coalition had
established a special tribunal, staffed by Iraqi judges and prosecutors,
to
hold legal proceedings in accordance with international standards. But
the
Iraqi government replaced judges who seemed sympathetic to the defense,
and,
days after Saddam's lawyers appeared in news broadcasts, two of them
were
assassinated.
In early 2006, the coalition hired Wiley to advise Saddam's lawyers,
whose
principal argument was that the court itself was illegal. They regularly
boycotted proceedings, leaving Iraq and watching the hearings on
television.
To Wiley, the trial was "not about Saddam, per se," but "about sending a
signal to a conflict-affected society that, from here on out, this
nation
will be governed on the basis of the rule of law." He urged the lawyers
to
come back to Baghdad and defend their client.
Eventually, Saddam's defense team returned to court, but shortly before
the
hearings concluded a third lawyer was kidnapped; his bullet-riddled
corpse
was found the next day. The remaining members of the team blamed the
Iraqi
government and did not show up for the closing arguments. Wiley drafted
Saddam's defense, and a court-appointed Iraqi lawyer read it out in
court.
Saddam protested, declaring, "A Canadian wrote this closing argument. I
know
he's a spy." It was clear that the court would convict Saddam, but Wiley
argued that his life should be spared. Instead, seven weeks later, at a
military base called Camp Justice, Saddam was hanged while Shiite guards
taunted him. His body was delivered to the Prime Minister's residence
for
display at a party.
Wiley stayed in Baghdad for another two years, filing defense motions
for
former members of Saddam's regime. An American justice official told me
that
Wiley's efforts to bring due process to the tribunal were "practically
heroic." When Wiley left Iraq, in 2008, he launched a private
consultancy,
called Tsamota, which assists Western governments and U.N. agencies in
preventing war crimes in troubled countries by training police, as well
as
members of the military, security, and intelligence services, to act in
accordance with international law.
In November, 2011, Wiley travelled to Istanbul with two Tsamota
colleagues
to train Syrians to collect evidence that would be useful in war-crimes
prosecutions. A security consultant whom he knew had selected some young
Syrian activists and lawyers, who were invited to recruit trusted
friends.
Wiley was impressed by their bravery, but he thought that their methods
were
ineffective. "Their tendency, in those days, was to run around with
cameras,
video cameras, smartphones, and photograph regime attacks in urban
areas,
and then put this stuff on YouTube," he told me. "One of the first
things
we
did was explain to them that, as criminal evidence, it's basically
useless"
without corroboration. "You're running tremendous risks--and, indeed, a
lot
of young people were getting killed and wounded generating video or
visual
images--really to no end." Filming an air strike on a hospital, for
example,
offers no evidence that the attack was planned by the kinds of
high-level
officials who draw the interest of the international justice system.
"One
needs to establish their individual criminal culpability," Wiley said.
Thousands of Syrian government troops had defected by then, joining
ragtag
brigades of local farmers, students, and hairdressers. Some fighters
made
their own explosives and launched grenades from giant slingshots. The
Syrian
Army bombarded what little territory these rebels controlled. Several of
the
activists attending the training session in Istanbul lived in besieged
areas; Wiley and his colleagues taught them to photograph and measure
artillery craters, assess angles of impact, collect shell fragments,
identify the types of weapon used, and calculate launching points. But,
he
said, "the big thing we wanted them to focus on was documentation
generated
by the regime," which he called "the king or queen of evidence in
international criminal proceedings."
After the first few training sessions, Wiley invited Stephen Rapp, at
that
time the U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues, to speak to the
Syrians, who now numbered in the dozens. The two men had met a decade
earlier, while working for the Rwanda tribunal. Over drinks in Istanbul,
Wiley and Rapp discussed the prospect of creating a hub to house
captured
documents that could one day be used in trials. The United Nations had
set
up a commission of inquiry to investigate human-rights abuses in Syria,
but
its mandate didn't extend to prosecutions, and, rather than dealing with
documents, the U.N. relied mostly on witness interviews conducted in
refugee
camps and by Skype. "Almost all the evidence that they're collecting
won't
be available for prosecution," Rapp told me, because the U.N. promised
witnesses indefinite confidentiality, and trials are public.
When the activists and the lawyers--now investigators--returned to
Syria,
Wiley drafted a plan to create the Commission for International Justice
and
Accountability, and drew up a budget. Although Britain continued its
support, finding other donors proved challenging. Western governments
allot
hundreds of millions of dollars to human-rights projects each year, but
Wiley told me that their typical response to his requests for funding
was
"What you're proposing to do is something that governments do, or the
United
Nations does, and the International Criminal Court does." Eventually,
with
Rapp's backing, the CIJA secured three million euros from the European
Union. After that, Germany, Switzerland, Norway, Denmark, and Canada
also
pledged consistent funding.
Capturing the Documents
The war was going poorly for Assad. In 2012, the number of high-level
defections from the military and from civilian ministries rose
dramatically.
The defectors joined the Free Syrian Army, a loose organization of rebel
groups. They hoped to transform Syria into a democracy, but jihadis
started
appearing on the battlefields, too. Generally, they proved to be more
capable in combat than the Free Syrian Army. Various insurgents captured
key
crossing points into Turkey, and pushed government troops out of much of
northern Syria, including parts of Idlib and Aleppo, Syria's largest
city.
By that February, the head of the Central Crisis Management Cell had
questioned Barakat about the leaks. Another employee of the Crisis Cell
told
Barakat that his secretary was spying on him. Barakat decided to escape
the
country, but not before securing the minutes of the meetings, which were
stored in the members' offices. He also planned to steal correspondence
between the Crisis Cell and the Presidential office, the Prime Minister,
and
the minister of the interior. On a day off, Barakat ransacked the
offices,
taking as many documents as he could, before driving some two hundred
and
fifty miles north from Damascus, to the Turkish border.
Syrian troops controlled the crossing point. But, with more than a
thousand
pages taped to his body, Barakat managed to slip through and check into
a
hotel under a false name before anyone in Damascus realized that he was
gone. The next month, once his mother had safely left Syria, Barakat
went
public. He told Al Jazeera that he wanted the documents to go to the
International Criminal Court.
Shortly after Barakat fled, the Crisis Cell moved its meetings from the
Baath Party Regional Command to the heavily guarded premises of the
National
Security Bureau. In July, amid rumors of an impending coup, a blast
inside
the meeting room killed the chairman of the Crisis Cell; the head of the
National Security Bureau; the minister of defense; and Assad's
brother-in-law Assef Shawkat, who had recently taken over as the deputy
minister of defense. (At least two rebel factions claimed credit for the
attack, but they offered wildly inconsistent accounts of the logistics
behind it.) The next day, a headline in the Times read, "Washington
Begins
to Plan for Collapse of Syrian Government." Then Assad's Prime Minister
defected to the opposition. So did the spokesman for the Foreign
Ministry.
Even the top general responsible for preventing defections accused the
military of "carrying out massacres against our innocent civilian
population," and announced, "I am joining the people's revolution."
The commission's Syrian investigators forged alliances with key Free
Syrian
Army brigades as they gained territory. The rebels initially "had no
interest in the documentation," Wiley said. "They would go in, capture a
regime facility. The smartphones would come out. There would be great
joy
and shouting and firing in the air. They would loot the place, looking
for
weapons and ammunition, because that's what they needed. And then they
would
set the place on fire." All potential evidence would be destroyed.
Wiley says that the commission told the rebels, "Take the documents
first,
and set them aside until they can be moved out of the country. And make
a
note--a very simple note--of where the documents were acquired and on
what
date. Box them up. Seal the boxes to the best of your ability with Saran
wrap, or something like that--whatever's at hand. And then, as those
materials move, chart that movement. But don't tamper with or rifle
through
the materials," because in court a defense lawyer could argue that
exculpatory evidence had been discarded.
Often, Syrian investigators accompanied moderate rebel groups as they
attacked security-intelligence buildings, but government forces
attempted
to
destroy any files that they couldn't bring with them. In the days after
a
retreat, "there would be relentless shelling" at key sites, the CIJA's
chief
investigator, a Syrian, told me. Water pipes would explode, destroying
hundreds of thousands of pages before he and his colleagues could enter.
Sometimes armed groups would call them to come and collect the files
after
a
firefight ended. "Chain of custody is important, but it's not a deal
breaker," Wiley said. "It's not worth getting--Well, people have been
killed
and wounded moving this stuff."
The first casualty was a courier, shot and wounded in 2012 as he ran
toward
a smuggling route out of Syria with a suitcase full of documents. Since
then, two others have been injured during extractions, and one--the
brother
of the commission's deputy chief investigator--was killed in an ambush
by
Syrian troops. Also in 2012, a courier and his wife came to an
unexpected
checkpoint outside Aleppo. It was manned by fighters belonging to Jabhat
al-Nusra, a jihadi group that later revealed its affiliation with Al
Qaeda.
The militants discovered the courier's documents in the back of his car.
They let his wife go, but took him into custody. "They were threatening
to
put him on trial and execute him as a regime spy," Wiley told me. "We
worked
out a deal where he was convicted of something by the Sharia court and
the
fine was five thousand dollars. So we paid the fine."
Several CIJA investigators have been kidnapped by jihadi groups, but all
of
them are free today. Radical Islamists pose as great a threat to their
work
as the regime does. These groups regard Western affiliations, as well as
the
often unfamiliar concept of international justice, with deep suspicion.
And
yet, in the pursuit of documents, many investigators made their mission
known to rebel commanders with murky connections. "Our people are
extremely
well trained on what to do if they're captured," Wiley told me. "The
equipment they have is encrypted and sufficiently sophisticated that
anyone
going through it would not find any evidence of the work they're doing."
Only one investigator, a Syrian woman, who was captured more than two
years
ago, is currently detained by the Syrian regime.
Moving documents to the international borders is by far the most
dangerous
step in the CIJA's operation. Paper is heavy and incriminating for the
carrier; on the other hand, photographs, while more portable, can be
difficult to authenticate in court. Bundles of up to fifty pounds
typically
arrive "in a dizzying array of crappy suitcases" smuggled across
borders,
Wiley told me, while large loads demand more intricate planning. "Think
in
terms of a box of paper that sits next to the photocopier," he
explained.
"That box has five bricks, each with five hundred pages in it," weighing
a
total of about twenty pounds. "And that's only twenty-five hundred
pages.
We've
extracted from Syria approximately six hundred thousand pages"--several
tons. "So you need vehicles. Those vehicles need to get through
checkpoints.
You need to do reconnaissance. You need to know what kind of checkpoints
you're
going to run into." The commission pays rebel groups and couriers for
logistical support. "We burn enormous sums of money moving this stuff,"
he
said.
Large extractions often depend on friendly countries to negotiate
openings
in otherwise sealed borders, so captured documents can remain hidden for
months. On one occasion, several thousand pages of evidence were left
with
an old woman in a remote farmhouse in southern Syria, but the
investigator
didn't explain the significance of the files. When winter came, Wiley
said,
"in fairness, she was cold, so she burned the whole lot of it as fuel."
The
commission's chief investigator told me that in exceptionally hostile
areas
he and his colleagues hide boxes in caves or bury them in the ground,
log
the location, and hope to retrieve them months or years from
now--whenever
the killing stops. Wiley said, "We have enormous quantities of material
still in Syria that we're not moving," because it's too dangerous.
"Probably
up to half a million pages."
As the Syrians collected documents, Wiley hired military and political
analysts, investigators, translators, and lawyers in Europe. By 2015,
the
CIJA's budget had grown to eight million dollars a year, and its staff
to
around a hundred and fifty, including employees at the headquarters and
at
a
video-analysis office elsewhere in Europe, in addition to the
investigators
in the Middle East. The CIJA employs about as many investigators as the
International Criminal Court has working on all its cases combined.
Many of the documents have come from security-intelligence facilities
far
from the capital. These pages often refer to decisions made by the
Central
Crisis Management Cell, but to complete the chain of command the
commission
needed notes from those meetings. Barakat, who now lives in Istanbul,
told
me that in 2014 Chris Engels and an analyst visited him to examine his
documents from the Crisis Cell. (The CIJA, which doesn't publicly
identify
witnesses, refused to acknowledge this.) "They spent three days here,
asking
me in very great detail about the work I did, details about how the
meetings
would go," he said. They also photographed the smuggled papers, and
Barakat
promised them that he'd supply the originals if the case went to trial.
As Barakat and I spoke through a video feed, he lifted up a heap of
files,
which are usually kept in a secure facility. "These are the meeting
minutes
for the Central Crisis Management Cell," he said. He pulled out a page
and
pointed to the embossed emblem at the top. "As you can see--that little
gold
hawk? These are the original documents, and they're signed in green."
The
commission began sifting through Barakat's files, analyzing connections
between the Crisis Cell's decisions and the criminal behavior of
security
agents in distant provinces.
The task of tracking down former regime agents who were willing to
explain
their roles in the system was simplified by the fact that so many had
defected from the government. Analysts for the CIJA found wealthy
defectors
in the Gulf states, Turkey, and Europe. They also took witness
statements
in
southern Turkey, in a heavily guarded refugee camp called Apaydin, which
is
wholly populated by former regime officers and their families. (None of
them
are listed as suspects in the case, which focusses on higher-level
officials.)
Wiley said of the witnesses, "If I could use a rather cold
group's
a dime a dozen." The CIJA preferred to interview victims who remained in
Syria and had never spoken to reporters, human-rights groups, or the
U.N.
commission of inquiry. (A defense lawyer could suggest that, inside
crowded
refugee camps, testimonies might unfairly converge on a damning
narrative.)
So the CIJA's Syrian investigators interviewed roughly two hundred and
fifty
victims across several provinces, to secure "pattern evidence" showing
that
crimes had been perpetrated in a systematic manner, in accordance with
evidence in the documents. The goal was to draw strong links, through
regime
documents and testimony by witnesses and victims, between Syrian
government
policies and their effects on individuals.
The Activist
One afternoon this winter, in a hotel room near Amsterdam, I met a gaunt
thirty-eight-year-old Syrian activist named Mazen al-Hamada. The story
of
Hamada, who is not a CIJA witness--those people's identities will remain
secret unless they are called to testify--offers an opportunity to trace
the
specific effects of the Syrian regime's policies on the citizens that it
was
trying desperately to subdue.
Hamada was born in 1977, the youngest of seventeen children in an
educated,
middle-class family in the eastern city of Deir Ezzor. His siblings grew
up
to be pharmacists, teachers, and lawyers, and he became a field
specialist
at Schlumberger, the international oil-services company, which operated
in
the rich oil fields around Deir Ezzor. Members of Hamada's family were
outspoken critics of the government, and even before the revolution they
were routinely followed and periodically arrested. They were especially
outraged by the government's failure to do anything about the widening
gap
between the rich and the poor. "It was all organized to benefit the
elites,"
Hamada told me. In 2011, the head of the National Security Bureau wrote
a
secret memo to the chairman of the Crisis Cell, attributing the scarcity
of
patriotism in Deir Ezzor to "the corrupt judicial system, long delays in
adjudicating lawsuits, nepotism, and the resort to bribery to restore
rights."
The security-intelligence agencies in the district were competent, and
loyal
to Assad. Beginning with the earliest hints of unrest, in February,
2011,
the head of Deir Ezzor's military-intelligence branch, Brigadier General
Jameh Jameh, sent instructions to all of his subordinates to "prepare
cameras... in order to film the participants and instigators so they can
be
identified and held accountable in the future." (CIJA investigators
later
retrieved this order, among many others related to the crackdown, from
the
military-intelligence headquarters in Deir Ezzor, after it was
abandoned.)
Deir Ezzor's security agents carried out even the most trivial orders
from
their superiors. On February 4th, the head of the National Security
Bureau,
in Damascus, signed a directive "to investigate, search for, and arrest"
whoever had written "Down with Bashar" on a ten-inch water pipe along a
remote stretch of highway near Deir Ezzor. The head of political
security
for the province spent a month investigating the incident, then replied,
"We
did not have any information about the perpetrators."
On March 18th, there was a soccer match in Deir Ezzor between the home
team,
Al Foutoua, and Tishreen, from Latakia, the team Assad favored. Hamada
lived
next to the stadium, and could hear the noise from the spectators.
"People
in the crowd started chanting for reforms, against the regime," he
recalled.
Assad's team won. The crowd was upset, but Hamada just laughed. He
figured
that the match was fixed. "As soon as the referee blew the whistle to
stop
the game, everybody came out to the streets," he said. It was the first
substantial protest in Deir Ezzor. All soccer matches were cancelled for
the
rest of the season.
Through most of March, security-intelligence officials in Deir Ezzor
described the unrest in straightforward terms. In a cable to his
subordinates throughout the province, Brigadier General Jameh explained
that
the protests in Syria were influenced by "some Arab countries witnessing
youth revolutions calling for change, democracy, freedoms, and reforms
aimed
at creating job opportunities for young men, improving living standards,
and
fighting corruption." But by the end of the month the provincial
security
chiefs had adopted the language of conspiracy which emanated from
Damascus.
Hours after Assad gave his televised speech at the parliament building,
on
March 30th, the members of the Deir Ezzor security committee agreed to
consider it "a reference and a pillar in our work," and most of the
we've
future discussions were infused with anxiety over treachery, sedition,
foreign infiltration, and "the Zionist American project."
Hamada and his friends were excited by the prospect of revolution, and
every
Wednesday they began meeting inside the neighborhood mosque, the Othman
bin
Affan, to organize protests that would take place after Friday prayers.
"It
was a logistical issue," he told me. "Everyone went to the mosque on a
Friday, everyone came out." He laughed, and added, "If we could have
come
out of churches, we would have come out of churches!"
According to captured minutes from the Deir Ezzor security committee,
its
members decided to infiltrate the mosques with Baath Party loyalists,
"an
average of two hundred comrades per mosque, to deal with any case that
incites sedition." The committee divided each group into three teams:
one
inside the mosque, one doing "reconnaissance" just outside, and the
third
on
standby. But the plan backfired: the following week, the governor of
Deir
Ezzor informed the committee that "most of the men who were arrested by
the
security apparatus were Baathist comrades" who had abandoned the Party
to
join the protesters.
Hamada often videotaped protests as well as the security response. The
regime had cut off the Internet in his neighborhood, so he uploaded the
videos to YouTube at a relative's workplace. Some of them ended up in
Arabic
news broadcasts. To counter such activities, the governor told the
security
committee, "We should nominate Internet experts among our comrades to
deal
with hostile Web sites spitting out their venom in the country, such as
Facebook." Even as the committee discussed the importance of showing
restraint, the violence escalated. Jameh said that protesters were
courting
"bloodshed, in preparation for summoning a foreign military
intervention,"
an outcome that he said he desperately wanted to avoid. Early the next
morning, he sent a one-sentence cable to all military-intelligence
sections
in the province: "You are requested to instruct your agents to strictly
refrain from opening fire indiscriminately and killing people."
In May, security in the province rapidly deteriorated. Men armed with
bats,
pistols, and incendiary bombs burned two police stations, four police
cars,
and six police motorcycles. Intelligence agents learned that someone had
tried to recruit volunteers to detonate a car bomb outside Jameh's
house.
The head of the Deir Ezzor political-security branch warned, "There may
be
a
wave of assassinations."
Hamada, who was briefly detained twice, continued to organize protests,
but
he started spending nights in safe houses with other activists. One of
his
brothers had been arrested and hadn't been released. In a meeting with
the
security committee, Jameh warned that the detentions could be "a
double-edged sword," increasing the number of angry people demanding
their
family members' release. In late May, Jameh sent several cables
expressing
his outrage that interrogators were giving detainees electric shocks,
putting out cigarettes on their flesh, beating them "on all parts of the
body, in a disgusting manner," and sodomizing them by forcing them to
sit
on
soda bottles. He said that his jail would "refuse to take custody" of
torture victims "unless there is a written report about the detainee's
health condition... that includes the names of those responsible for
beating
him."
Jameh's scruples apparently waned in the summer of 2011. Evidence
obtained
by the CIJA shows that detainees at his military-intelligence branch
were
beaten with fists, cables, and sticks until they were unconscious, their
bones were broken, and their teeth fell out; stuffed into car tires and
beaten until their feet bled; given electric shocks after having water
poured on them; abused until they urinated blood; and beaten to death.
Jameh
personally participated in many of the interrogations.
The Orders
On the evening of August 5, 2011, the Central Crisis Management Cell
held
its usual meeting at the Baath Party Regional Command. In five months of
revolution, the protests had spread to several more provinces, which
members
of the committee attributed to "the laxness in handling the crisis,"
according to documents captured by the CIJA. They blamed "weak
coordination
and cooperation among security bodies." That evening, they devised a
plan
to
target specific categories of people.
First, all security branches were to launch daily raids against protest
organizers and "those who tarnish the image of Syria in foreign media."
Next, "once each sector has been cleansed of wanted people," security
agents
would coordinate with Baathist loyalists, neighborhood militias, and
community leaders to insure that opposition activists could not return
to
those areas. Third, they would "establish a joint investigation
committee
at
the province level," made up of representatives from all of the security
branches, which would interrogate detainees. The results "shall be sent
to
all security branches, so that they can be used in the identification of
new
targets that need to be prosecuted."
This policy became the linchpin of the CIJA's case against officials in
the
Syrian regime. Between Barakat's documents from Damascus and the
commission's
own six hundred thousand pages, retrieved from all over the country,
analysts in Europe were able to trace the dissemination of these orders
down
multiple parallel chains of command from the Crisis Cell. Hisham
Ikhtyar,
the head of the National Security Bureau, sent the instructions to
regional
secretaries of the Baath Party, who chaired each province's security
committee, with additional orders to "implement what is requested of
you,
so
as to speed up putting an end to the crisis." The heads of the four
security-intelligence agencies--military intelligence, Air Force
intelligence, political security, and the general-intelligence
directorate--sent the instructions to the provincial and regional branch
heads, who passed them on to local security agents. Members of the
Crisis
Cell travelled to problematic provinces to oversee the formation of
joint
investigation committees. For the CIJA, identifying suspects was easy,
Wiley
said, because "their names are all over those documents."
"If those are orders that are sent down, but no one acts on them, then
it
doesn't really tell us much," Chris Engels told me. "So it was equally
important for us to see reports coming back up the chain of command,"
confirming that those categories of people had been targeted for
detention
and interrogation, and that the leadership in Damascus remained informed
of
the abuses in detention facilities. "A consistent failure to control
one's
subordinates who are behaving in a criminal manner will be prosecuted,"
Wiley said. "The law of command and superior responsibility is extremely
well evolved." The Crisis Cell even demanded lists of all arrestees.
Some
members of the provincial security committees took preemptive steps to
satisfy their superiors. A copy of the Crisis Cell's instructions was
found
in Raqqa with a handwritten note: "We did that a long time ago."
Under international law, governments are obligated to investigate
reports
of
human-rights abuses. In September, the public attorney in Deir Ezzor
sent
three faxes--later retrieved by the CIJA's investigators--to the
governor,
the Syrian minister of justice, and the head of the province's joint
investigation committee, urging them to stop violating Syrian law. In
one,
he wrote, "Parents and relatives of the arrested persons are asking
daily
about the fates of sons, fathers, and brothers. You ought to listen to
what
they have to say. The hospital refrigerator is full of unidentified
corpses
that have disintegrated, since they have been there for a long period of
time."
Detention
Mazen al-Hamada's name soon appeared on an arrest list in Deir Ezzor.
Two
of
his brothers were also wanted, as was one of his brothers-in-law. One
day
in
March, 2012, a doctor asked Hamada if he would smuggle baby formula to a
woman in Darayya, a rebellious suburb of Damascus. He and his nephews
gathered fifty-five packages of formula, hid them under their clothes,
and
travelled to meet her at a cafe. As soon as Hamada handed over the bags,
security agents handcuffed him and his nephews, pulled their shirts over
their heads, and shoved them into an S.U.V. "I had no idea where we were
going," Hamada said. "The whole way, they were telling us, 'We're going
to
execute you.' "
After they were stripped to their underwear, beaten, and thrown in a
holding
cell, about twelve feet square, with some forty other detainees, they
learned that they were in the Air Force-intelligence branch at al-Mezzeh
Military Airport, one of the most notorious detention facilities in the
country.
Two weeks later, the prisoners were put in a small hangar, a little more
than forty feet long and twenty feet wide. A hundred and seventy people
were
packed inside, their arms wrapped around their legs, chins on their
knees.
"You're rotting," Hamada told me. "There's no air, there's no sunlight.
Your
nails are really long, because you can't cut them. So when you scratch
yourself you tear your skin off." The prisoners weren't able to wash
themselves or to change their underwear. The sores of scabies and other
skin
ailments covered their bodies. Throughout the country, detainees
routinely
drank water out of toilets and died from starvation, suffocation, and
disease. "People went crazy," Hamada said. "People would lose their
memories, people would lose their minds." Eventually, he was transferred
to
a solitary-confinement cell, which he shared with ten people.
One day, Hamada was blindfolded and dragged to another room for
questioning.
The lead interrogator, whom Hamada knew as Suhail, began by establishing
Hamada's identity. (Some people were detained and tortured by accident;
their names were similar to those on wanted lists.) When Suhail asked
for
information about other opposition activists he had met in Damascus,
Hamada
hesitated. The torture began. "At the beginning, they were using
cigarettes," he said. "They would stub them out on my legs." He rolled
up
his jeans to the knee and showed me four round scars on his left leg,
five
on his right. There were burns on his thighs, too. They also poured
water
on
him, and shocked him with wires and prods. To end the abuse, Hamada gave
up
the names of friends who had already been killed in Deir Ezzor.
The names were only the beginning. "How many people from the Syrian Arab
Army did you murder?" Suhail asked. Hamada had already confessed to
organizing protests, uploading videos, and speaking to the foreign
press.
"The challenge here is: how do you make up a story that you killed these
people?" he said. His hands were cuffed to a pipe near the ceiling. "My
feet
were sixteen inches above the ground, so all of the weight was on my
wrists," he said. "I felt like the handcuffs were sawing my hands off. I
stayed for more than half an hour, and then started screaming. Because I
kept screaming, they shoved a military boot in my mouth and said, 'Bite
on
this so you don't scream.' " This method of torture was used in most
Syrian
security-intelligence detention facilities, with creative variations.
Many
detainees had their wrists bound behind their backs before being strung
up
by them; some were left hanging for days, others until they stopped
breathing.
Suhail's assistants told Hamada that if he admitted to carrying weapons
he
would be released. He didn't confess, so they cracked four of his ribs.
At
that point, he agreed that he had been armed with a hunting rifle, and
they
let him down. But, to better suit terrorism charges, Suhail wanted the
confession to include a Kalashnikov. Hamada refused, so, he said, "they
stripped me out of my underwear and brought a plumbing clamp," of the
kind
typically used to moderate pressure in hoses. "They put it on my penis,
and
started tightening it." Hamada recalled Suhail asking, "Are you going to
admit it, or shall I cut it off?" Hamada agreed that he had carried a
Kalashnikov, so Suhail released the clamp and asked how many clips of
ammunition Hamada had carried. "How many clips do you want me to have?"
Hamada asked. Suhail reminded him that he had to confess on his own, so
Hamada said, "I had five bullets." That wasn't good enough, Suhail told
him:
"I need two magazines." The torture escalated until Hamada confessed to
everything they asked.
In hundreds of witness interviews, the CIJA found consistent patterns in
interrogation practices across all branches of the security agencies.
People
were detained following the Crisis Cell's policy. Besides identifying
"new
targets," the results of these interrogations were shared among the
agencies. Detainees were routinely kept in inhumane conditions for
months
or
years without entering the judicial system.
Coerced confessions served no apparent intelligence-gathering purposes,
but
they did lend a legalistic veneer to the detention process. After
confessing
to violent crimes, anti-government activists could face serious charges,
and, if convicted, be kept in detention for years. The confessions also
perpetuated the illusion of a vast conspiracy against Syria, as
detainees
admitted to engaging in sedition or treason.
The brutality took a toll on many interrogators, too. In at least one
case,
an interrogator begged a detainee to admit to a crime so that he could
stop
hurting him. "They were very much of the opinion that they had to
produce
results," Chris Engels told me. "The ramifications of not doing their
job
well were real, and there's evidence of what happened to people who did
not." The final line of the Crisis Cell's targeting policy ordered the
heads
of security branches to "periodically supply the National Security
Bureau
with the names of security agents who are irresolute or unenthusiastic."
Some of them ended up in Hamada's cell.
Several months after first being tortured, Hamada stood in line with his
nephew Fahad to ink their fingerprints onto their reports. Hamada
assumed
that his included his confession; he didn't know, because reading the
report
was not an option. A seventeen-year-old boy stood in line behind Hamada
and
Fahad. When the guards learned that he was from Darayya, the suburb of
Damascus, they knocked him to the ground. One fetched a welding torch
and
burned the boy "from here to here," Hamada said, tracing a finger along
his
jawline. "And then he turned him around and he burned his neck and his
entire back.... His face--I mean, it was fire. It was melting."
Recalling the event, Hamada's eyes grew damp and red. His voice
faltered,
and he sobbed desperately. For two days, he and other prisoners in the
hangar tried to soothe the boy's injuries as he was dying. When the
guards
came to retrieve the corpse, Hamada yelled at them. In response, they
hung
him by his wrists for several hours. He told me, "You want them to kill
you
anyway, so you can be done with this. You're sick of the torture. You're
sick of the sleeping, and waking up, and living every single day."
Hospital 601
In early 2013, after nearly a year of detention, Hamada lay on the floor
of
the hangar. He had been interrogated and tortured seven or eight times.
An
infection in his eye was dripping pus. The skin on his legs was
gangrenous.
Prisoners were supposed to stand when a guard entered the cell, but on
this
day Hamada didn't. "I'm urinating blood," he said. The next day, the
head
of
interrogation came to the cell and informed Hamada that he was being
sent
to
Hospital 601, a military hospital that sits at the base of Mt. Mezzeh;
the
Presidential palace is perched at the top. The head of interrogation
also
told Hamada to forget his own name: "Your name is 1858."
Hamada had heard of Hospital 601. Several other detainees had been sent
there, and the few who had returned, Hamada said, had cautioned, "This
is
not a hospital--this is a slaughterhouse." Despite Hamada's condition,
guards hit him during the drive to the hospital. One used a green pipe;
in
Arabic, al-akhdar refers to a green object, so security agents all over
Syria taunted detainees by calling this weapon Lakhdar Brahimi, who was
then
the U.N. special envoy for Syria.
In the hospital corridor, male and female nurses started hitting Hamada
with
their shoes and calling him a terrorist. When he got to the ward, he was
tied to a bed with two other prisoners. A nurse asked him about his
symptoms, then beat him with a stick. A U.N. report from later that year
notes, "Some medical professionals have been co-opted into the
maltreatment"
of detainees at Hospital 601. Hamada was in disbelief as much as he was
in
pain.
That night, Hamada woke up needing to use the bathroom. A guard hit him
all
the way to the toilets, but he went in alone. When he opened the first
stall, he saw a pile of corpses, battered and blue. He found two more in
the
second stall, emaciated and missing their eyes. There was another body
by
the sink. Hamada came out in panic, but the guard sent him back in and
told
him, "Pee on top of the bodies." He couldn't. He started to feel that he
was
losing his grip on reality. According to the U.N. inquiry, dead
detainees
were "kept in the toilets" at multiple security branches in Damascus.
Later that night, two drunk soldiers walked into the ward. One of them
bellowed, "Who wants medicine?" Several detainees lifted their hands.
The
doctors hadn't given Hamada any drugs--only a mostly empty bag of
intravenous fluid--but one of his bedmates, who had been in the ward for
several days, warned him not to volunteer. The soldier selected an eager
prisoner. With the inmate kneeling at his feet, head facing the floor,
the
soldier grabbed a sharp weapon and started hacking at the base of his
skull,
severing the spinal cord from the head. Then he ordered another patient
to
drag the body to the bathroom. The U.N. report says of Hospital 601,
"Many
patients have been tortured to death in this facility." The soldier
called
himself Azrael, after the archangel of death; other survivors recall him
murdering patients in similarly horrifying ways.
"When I saw this, I swear--that's when I thought this was my fate,"
Hamada
told me. "I would die here." On the second day, he begged a doctor to
send
him back to the Air Force-intelligence branch. The doctor noted that
Hamada
was still sick. "No, no, no, I am totally cured," he said. On the fifth
day,
he was escorted out of Hospital 601 by the same guards who had deposited
him
there. "You animal, you son of a bitch," they said. "You still didn't
die."
They hit him all the way back to the branch, then strung him up by his
wrists for four hours.
In June, 2013, Hamada's case was referred to the judiciary. He was
transferred to Adra Prison, in Damascus, where he filed an application
for
proof of the charges against him. (Syrian prisons are nominally subject
to
judicial oversight; the security agencies are not.) The written reply
said
that he had been arrested "for the crime of terrorism and has been
deprived
of his liberty since June 5, 2013"--the same date that the charges were
filed. Officially, his fifteen months in the Air Force-intelligence
branch
at al-Mezzeh Military Airport didn't exist.
In the early hours of August 21st, the Syrian government launched
rockets
carrying sarin gas into densely populated neighborhoods in Damascus,
killing
more than fourteen hundred people. In response, President Obama, who had
earlier committed to a "red line" should Assad use chemical weapons,
announced, "I have decided the United States should take military action
against Syrian regime targets." He said he would wait for congressional
approval, but, he continued, "what message will we send if a dictator
can
gas hundreds of children to death, in plain sight, and pay no price?"
Shortly after the chemical attack, Hamada and many other prisoners were
transported to al-Mezzeh, without explanation. Agents moved the
detainees
to
a large, empty hangar on the base. At least one of the sarin-gas rockets
is
believed to have been launched from the base at al-Mezzeh--it was a
logical
target for an American strike. Inside the hangar, guards jeered at the
detainees. They said that when the Americans bombed Syria all of them
would
be killed.
In early September, the United States backed away from the prospect of a
military campaign, and Hamada was returned to the terrorism court in
Damascus, where his case was finally heard. The judge noted that he had
confessed to attacking checkpoints and killing soldiers. Hamada rolled
up
his pants and showed the judge the cigarette burns. He held up his
wrists,
revealing deep purple scars. He showed the black-and-blue welts on his
torso. It was a familiar scene inside the courtroom. To each charge, the
judge said, "Not guilty."
Before Hamada was freed, he was interrogated by agents from the
political-security department. They asked him about protests he had
attended
two years earlier. He immediately confessed: "I said, 'Yes, I was at
protests. I called the President an asshole!' " He added, "I had been
through hell already. If it's this, I'll admit to everything." When the
agents brought Hamada back to the courtroom, the judge recognized him
and
immediately dismissed his case.
Hamada returned to Deir Ezzor, which he described as "a ghost city." Two
years of intense combat and air strikes had destroyed many of the
buildings.
The minaret of the Othman mosque had been shelled. His two nephews were
still detained in the Air Force-intelligence branch in Damascus. Other
family members had disappeared in security facilities.
During Hamada's detention, the revolution had become a sectarian war.
Jabhat
al-Nusra had established itself as a powerful force, eclipsed in
brutality
only by ISIS. Moderate rebel groups still existed but were often led by
corrupt warlords, and lost fighters to more competent jihadi factions.
Many
of the revolutionaries who once fought for freedom had been radicalized
or
killed. Pro-Assad militias arrived in Syria from Iraq, Lebanon,
Afghanistan,
and Iran. ISIS had a significant presence in Deir Ezzor. Hamada said,
"They
were killing all of the media activists and the democratic activists,
and
every time they did it in a different Hollywood way."
He fled to Turkey, boarded a smuggler's raft to Greece, and travelled
more
than seventeen hundred miles to the Netherlands, where his sister had
moved
before the war. He recalled the migration with a shrug, in a single
sentence, as if it were nothing.
Hamada's account of atrocities at Hospital 601 was later corroborated by
approximately fifty-five thousand photographs, smuggled out of Syria by
a
military-police officer known by the name Caesar, an alias. Before the
war,
Caesar and his colleagues had documented crime scenes and traffic
accidents
involving military personnel in Damascus. He uploaded pictures to
government
computers, then printed them and stapled them to official death reports.
Beginning in 2011, however, the bodies were those of detainees,
collected
each day from security branches and delivered to military hospitals.
At Hospital 601, Caesar's team photographed bodies in the morgue and in
a
garage bay. Each corpse that was photographed had a unique number,
usually
four digits--like Hamada's 1858--scrawled on paper, tape, the chest, or
the
forehead with a thick marker. Another number signified the intelligence
branch in which the patient had been killed. There were about eleven
thousand bodies. Caesar's team sometimes catalogued more than fifty
corpses
a day--emaciated, mutilated, cut, burned, shot, beaten, strangled,
broken,
melted.
According to a U.N. report, after Caesar's team had finished their
documentation a doctor at the hospital usually wrote "heart attack" on
the
death certificate. Then the bodies were loaded onto trucks and hauled
away.
In rare cases, family members have been able to retrieve a body, but the
report noted that in each known instance it "bore marks of extensive
torture." The report continued, "Some bodies were returned from hospital
morgues to their family only after the family agreed to sign a statement
confirming that the deceased had been killed by 'terrorists.' "
Caesar fled Syria in August, 2013, with flash drives hidden in his
socks.
The photographs remained a secret until after he had spoken to a team of
international prosecutors and forensic experts, the following January.
Without a key connecting detainee names to the corpse numbers,
identifying
the dead is difficult. Many of the faces were thoroughly destroyed, or
the
eyes were gouged out. Syrian activists close to Caesar published several
thousand pictures online, allowing family members to search for missing
loved ones. The photographs also circulated in refugee camps. Some
families
discovered that they had been paying bribes to insure decent treatment
for
relatives who had been killed long before. So far, about seven hundred
and
thirty victims have been identified. Hamada recognized several of his
cellmates in the files.
Endgame
Between Caesar's photographs and the CIJA's case, Stephen Rapp told me,
"when the day of justice arrives, we'll have much better evidence than
had anywhere since Nuremberg." Wiley and Engels believe that, should the
case go to court, the CIJA has sufficient evidence to convict Assad and
his
associates on several charges of crimes against humanity, including
murder,
torture, and other inhumane acts.
Last year, when Assad was asked about the Caesar photographs during an
interview with Foreign Affairs, he said, "Who said this is done by the
government, not by the rebels? Who said this is a Syrian victim, not
someone
else?" In 2011, the U.N. commission of inquiry alleged that a
thirteen-year-old boy named Hamza al-Khateeb had been tortured to death
in
detention. In response, a Syrian investigation concluded that, shortly
after
the boy died, a "forensic photographer" took "six colored photos" of the
corpse. "We attributed the number twenty-three to it." The Syrians
determined that the pictures showed "no beating marks, no traces of
torture," and that the boy had been killed by gunfire, "most probably by
his
fellow-terrorists." The investigation also found that a doctor who had
reported that the boy's penis had been cut off "had misjudged the
situation
in an earlier examination." Caesar's collection contains six images of
Hamza
al-Khateeb's body. His eyes are swollen shut, and his head is a deep
purple,
from being beaten. His penis is missing. In every picture, there is a
bloodstained note card bearing the number twenty-three.
In a formal response to a U.N. inquiry, Syria's permanent mission to the
U.N. wrote a letter citing Syria's constitution and domestic laws as
evidence that allegations of arbitrary detention and torture are "no
longer
plausible." The letter continued, "We have no detainees unlawfully
arrested
with regards to peaceful demonstrations. If your question concerns
individuals who have used weapons or terrorist acts against the state,
it
is
an entirely different matter." A few months later, Assad told Barbara
Walters that Syria's participation in the United Nations was "a game we
play. It doesn't mean you believe in it."
This week, a new round of negotiations between the Syrian government and
the
opposition is set to begin in Geneva, where U.N. officials will shuttle
between delegations that still refuse to meet in person. In advance of
the
negotiations, Barakat, the former mole in Damascus, told me that the
opposition delegation asked him for copies of the documents he stole
from
Assad's government; the delegation failed, however, to arrange a pickup.
In the past few months, as the Syrian Army has regained territory it had
lost to rebel forces, it has come to seem increasingly unlikely that
Assad
will step down. His foreign minister, Walid al-Muallem, recently
announced,
"We will not talk with anyone who wants to discuss the Presidency."
Wiley
and the CIJA staff avoid comment on regime change. He told me, "We don't
get
too caught up in the policy agony" of the efforts to end the Syrian war.
"We're
simply confident--and I don't think it's hubris--that our work will see
the
light of day, in court, in relatively short order."
In the Netherlands, Hamada attends physical-therapy sessions to
rehabilitate
his scarred limbs. He studies Dutch and organizes anti-Assad protests in
public squares, though attendance is sparse. He wonders about his
nephews,
his brother, his brother-in-law, and many missing friends. "Where are
they?"
he cried. "Are they alive? Are they dead?" His sister in Syria asks the
military police for death certificates, to no avail. Every day is
"misery,"
Hamada said. "It's misery. It's misery. It's death. It's a life of
death."
