Photo credit: AP
A Syrian boy carries a banner during an anti-government demonstration in the coastal city of Banias, Syria.
Washington: The Obama administration first learned in November about a harrowing trove of photographs that were said to document widespread torture and executions in Syrian prisons when a State Department official viewed some of the images on a laptop belonging to an anti-government activist, a senior official said Wednesday.
The U.S. did not act on the photos for the past two months, officials said, because it did not have possession of the digital files and could not establish their authenticity. Nevertheless, they said, the administration believes the photos are genuine, basing that assessment in part on the meticulous way in which each of more than 11,000 bodies were numbered.
The photographs, some of which were released this week on the eve of an international peace conference on Syria, have helped prompt the administration to heighten its demand that President Bashar Assad release political prisoners and allow Red Cross inspectors access to the prisons.
But it seems clear that the photos that appear to document the torture and executions will not fundamentally alter U.S. policy, which is to push for a political settlement that will remove Assad from power but to avoid direct military intervention in the conflict.
Opponents of Assad said the cache of images was smuggled out of Syria by a police photographer who defected and was given the code name Caesar. Lawyers commissioned by the Qatari government, an avowed opponent of Assad, to work with the photos did not make Caesar available or offer independent proof of their origin.
Some supporters of Assad raised questions about their authenticity while insisting that the government is fighting foreign-backed terrorists. At the same time, the three-year civil war has often been defined by competing images of atrocities committed by both sides.
For now, the White House and the State Department are expressing outrage over the images, even as they caution that the U.S. has not independently authenticated them. At the peace conference in Montreux, Switzerland, Secretary of State John Kerry endorsed a demand by Syrian opposition groups that the U.N. investigate the portfolio.
"The questions raised by this require an answer," Kerry said. "I can't tell you exactly what all of it is except that I know that they are people who have suffered egregious torture and death."
At the White House, the press secretary, Jay Carney, said: "These photos cannot be ignored or dismissed. They suggest widespread and apparently systematic violations of international human law and demonstrate just how far the regime is willing to go in harming its own people. They're very disturbing images."
A top official in the Syrian group that helped smuggle the trove said that a private legal team was examining and categorizing the photos to be used in future war crimes trials of Syrian officials.
The man, Emad ad-din al-Rashid, the head of the political office of the Syrian National Movement, said that the group had not shared its reported archive of 55,000 photos with any other organization, but that it was starting to make contact with international human rights groups.
"We will do all that we can to make sure that people get what they deserve," Rashid said in a telephone interview from Montreux. "The only path is to take the files and documents to the international criminal court."
The existence of photos came to light with the release of a report by a six-person legal and forensics team that was commissioned to assess the credibility of the photos as evidence by Qatar, a major backer of Syria's rebels.
Syrian officials said the photographs had been fabricated, either by the opposition or by Persian Gulf countries. "They have been fabricating such mages for the last three years, and this is not new to us," Syria's deputy foreign minister, Fayssal Mekdad, said in an interview in Montreux. The publication of the photos, he added, had no effect on the talks.
Russia's prime minister, Dmitry A. Medvedev, said an interview with CNN that no conclusions could be drawn about the photos.
"I know there are a lot of victims, and that's very sad, but that does not mean that the existence of victims or victims in a particular place is the proof that those are the victims of the regime and not the bandits who were doing something or any other force," Medvedev said.
The report on the photos, though led by three experts with experience in international war crimes trials, also raised some questions. While claiming that the full archive consists of about 55,000 photographs, indicating the execution of about 11,000 people, the investigators acknowledged they examined only 5,500 photos, which contained images of 835 individuals.
The timing of the report's release also suggested that it had been deliberately timed to undermine Assad's government as talks began. The report says investigators interviewed the photographer, Caesar, on Jan. 12, 13, and 18 - meaning the report was prepared within days of the last interview.
One of the investigators said the timing of the report's release had no bearing on the credibility of its findings.
"Whether it was a month ago or a month from now, this is clear and convincing evidence of an industrial killing machine that is indicative of what Assad is doing in this civil war," said David Crane, who previously indicted President Charles G. Taylor of Liberia.
Much also remains unclear about how the photos made it out of Syria and what will be done with them now. Rashid, whose group helped smuggle them out of Syria, said it had worked for months with contacts inside Syria and in unnamed "neighboring countries" to get the defector and his photos out of Syria.
He played down the role of Qatar, which commissioned the report, and denied that the release of the report before the conference was political.
"That report is to serve the rights of the victims, but we see this as a legal, humanitarian document," he said. "It is not political at all."
Administration officials said the State Department official, whom they did not name, viewed the photos in Turkey during a meeting with the representative of an anti-government group.
A senior administration official said the photos led the United States to "bolster our repeated demands that the Assad regime grant immediate and unfettered access for the ICRC and the U.N. Commission of Inquiry, and lend force to our calls for prisoner releases."
Rashid, a former dean at the Islamic law college of Damascus University, said that a legal team with members in France, the U.S. and other countries were working to examine and categorize the photos so that they could be used for future war crimes prosecutions.
"It is a huge project and it will not go way because there are more issues in there than you can imagine," he said.
While his group has so far not shared the photos with anyone, he said that they met with the International Committee of the Red Cross on Tuesday and would meet with representatives from the U.N. Human Rights Council on Thursday.
A U.S. official said that U.S. intelligence agencies had not yet seen the photographs, other than those published in the media, and could not independently verify them. But this official added, "we have no reason to doubt them."
The official said the three legal experts hired to authenticate the photos smuggled out of Syria all had "good reputations" and had prior experience dealing with large-scale human-rights violations.
"The idea of this kind of massacre is consistent with allegations we've heard before," the official said. "That the Syrian government would commit such atrocities wouldn't shouldn't surprise anyone."
