Code Name Caesar

The timing of a report released by a team of lawyers paid for by the government of Qatar, an early backer of the jihadi pipeline into Syria, accusing the Syrian government of widespread use of torture is highly suspect coming as it does at the beginning of the Geneva II round of talks.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in his opening remarks today reiterated the Western / Sheikhdom position that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad must step down before the violence can stop, saying “The right to lead a country does not come from torture." Thus, the Qatari-commissioned report was put to use right away.

The origin of the photographic documentation that forms the basis of the report is described in a story today by Ben Hubbard (a reporter who I thought did decent work in Cairo in the run up to the Sisi coup before he was sent to Lebanon to help Anne Barnard hew to the anti-Assad / pro-Saudi line) and the great David Kirkpatrick, "Photo Archive Is Said to Show Widespread Torture in Syria":

The photos were made public by an anonymous military policeman who had a grim role in the bureaucracy of the Syrian security apparatus, according to the lawyers’ report assessing the photos’ veracity. 

The photos were used to provide death certificates to the families of the victims without turning over the bodies, and were archived as a record that the men had been killed. 

After “psychological suffering” caused by his job, Caesar saved the photos on a portable disk drive, and he and the disk were smuggled out of the country by antigovernment activists, the report said. The activists contacted the Qatari government, Qatar hired a London law firm, and it commissioned a team of legal and forensics experts to assess the credibility of Caesar and his photos.

Two of the Qatari hired-gun lawyers, David Crane and Geoffrey Nice, are no stranger to high-profile, empire-approved political investigations. Nice prosecuted Slobodan Milosevic; Crane is a spook-lawyer (he worked as assistant general counsel of the Defense Intelligence Agency) who helped prosecute Charles Taylor. Crane provides the obligatory quote comparing Assad's Syria to Nazi Germany: “It is very rare to have this kind of government-backed, industrial, machinelike, systematic torture and killing of human beings, the likes of which we haven’t seen since Nuremberg.”

No doubt horrible things are happening in Syria today. But if you look at what is happening in prisons in any country horrific things will jump out at you. One can only wonder what kind of brutality and perversion is sanctioned in Saudi jails. The important thing to remember is that the United States had no problem with the Syrian "torture factories" when we needed a post-9/11 location for our rendition of terror suspects.

The timing of the report's appearance by an anonymous defector with code name Caesar (can you say, "Curveball"?) allows Kerry to assume the high ground the West has lost since Al Qaeda assumed the leading role in the Syrian "rebellion."

It is a pathetic attempt, a thin sheet meant to obscure the monstrous U.S. policy of fomenting jihad only to have its citizens surrender life and liberty to fight it.