Massacre Files from Syria -Part Five

Syrian military victims

Top-secret documents tie Bashar

regime to mass annihilation.

Selected from a shocking report investigation published by New Yorker

The investigation starts narrating the continuous brave triers inside Syria, to collect several documents of torturing and brutal executions inside Bashar administration and his direct ties on them.

Part Five

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 traveled 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.

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