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| tortureing rooms in Assad prisons |
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 Six
Chris Engels and Bill Wiley inside the evidence room of the
Commission for International Justice and Accountability.
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.
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