U.S. Says Europeans Tortured by Assad’s Death Machine by Josh Rogin.
From the post:
The U.S. State Department has concluded that up to 10 European citizens have been tortured and killed while in the custody of the Syrian regime and that evidence of their deaths could be used for war crimes prosecutions against Bashar al-Assad in several European countries.
The new claim, made by the State Department’s ambassador at large for war crimes, Stephen Rapp, in an interview with me, is based on a newly completed FBI analysis of 27,000 photographs smuggled out of Syria by the former military photographer known as “Caesar.” The photos show evidence of the torture and murder of over 11,000 civilians in custody. The FBI spent months pouring over the photos and comparing them to consular databases with images of citizens from countries around the world.
Last month, the FBI gave the State Department its report, which included a group of photos that had been tentatively matched to individuals who were already in U.S. government files. “The group included multiple individuals who were non-Syrian, but none who had a birthplace in the United States, according to our information,” Rapp told me. “There were Europeans within that group.”
The implications could be huge for the international drive to prosecute Assad and other top Syrian officials for war crimes and crimes against humanity. While it’s unlikely that multilateral organizations such as the United Nations or the International Criminal Court will pursue cases against Assad in the near term, due to opposition by Assad’s allies including Russia, legal cases against the regime could be brought in individual countries whose citizens were victims of torture and murder.
Is this a “heads up” from the State Department that lists of war criminals in the CIA Torture Report should be circulated in European countries?
Even if they won’t be actively prosecuted, the threat of arrest might help keep Europe free of known American war criminals. Unfortunately that would mean they would still be in the United States but the American public supported them so that seems fair.
I first saw this in a tweet by the U.S. Dept. of Fear.