Disturbing Images: Photo Archive Is Said to Show Widespread Torture in Syria

At the New York Times, "If Genuine, Evidence of Mass War Crimes":

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Emaciated corpses lie in the sand, their ribs protruding over sunken bellies, their thighs as thin as wrists. Several show signs of strangulation. The images conjure memories of some of history’s worst atrocities.

Numbers inscribed on more than 11,000 bodies in 55,000 photographs said to emerge from the secret jails of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, suggest that torture, starvation and execution are widespread and even systematic, each case logged with bureaucratic detail.

This collection of images was identified as having been part of a voluminous archive of torture and execution maintained by the Syrian government and smuggled out by a police photographer who defected and was given the code name Caesar.

So far, only a few photographs have actually been released by lawyers commissioned by the Qatari government, an avowed opponent of Mr. Assad, and the claims about their origins could not be independently verified.

If genuine, the trove is new visual corroboration that Mr. Assad’s government is guilty of mass war crimes against its own citizens, just as it appeared to regain some international standing. The photographs were released as delegates from the Syrian government and the opposition began gathering in Switzerland for long-awaited talks to find a political solution to end almost three years of civil war.

As always, the question is what's going to happen? Clearly, Assad must go, to use President Obama's cheap phrase. But how? The U.S. won't topple him. Neoconservative Robert Kagan is quoted at the piece:

Mr. Assad’s enemies say they hope the leak, first reported in The Guardian and on CNN, will cause enough revulsion in the West to prevent any deal that might leave him in place, or perhaps prod the West into more muscular steps to remove him, just as the disclosure of the Serbian massacre at Srebrenica in 1995 moved NATO to launch airstrikes in the Balkans.

But even the most determined advocates of Western intervention say the images may dramatize the moral cost of inaction but are unlikely to change the policy, especially given the American aversion to another entanglement in the Middle East.

“I feel like we have had at least one or two Srebrenica moments in Syria already,” said Robert Kagan, a scholar at the Brookings Institution who has pushed for American action. “The White House has completely hardened itself to whatever horrendous news might come out of Syria because the president doesn’t want to get involved.”

Continue reading.

And the "Problem From Hell" lady, Ambassador Samantha Power, is fully aware of the latest revelations, but of course can't do a thing to stop the systemic slaughter:

Reports & smuggled-out pics of horrifying, seemingly systemic prisoner executions by Syrian regime. Pure inhumanity. http://t.co/HkOY4RHUIR

— Samantha Power (@AmbassadorPower) January 22, 2014

No one wants U.S. intervention in Syria, and so Assad, whose regime has emerged as the bloodiest in decades, will continue in power, and the country will continue its spiral into what is the most deadly bastion of international terrorism since Iraq in 2006.