MASS ATROCITIES IN SYRIA; Congressional Record Vol. 160, No. 26

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MASS ATROCITIES IN SYRIA

Mr. McCAIN. Mr. President, I rise to appeal to the conscience of my

colleagues and my fellow citizens about the mass atrocities that the

Assad regime is perpetrating in Syria. When the images and horrors of

this conflict occasionally show up on our television screens, the

impulse of many Americans is to change the channel. But we must not

look away. We must not divert our eyes from the suffering of the Syrian

people, for if we do, we ignore, we sacrifice that which is most

precious in ourselves--our ability to empathize with the suffering of

others, to share it, to acknowledge through our own sense of revulsion

that what is happening in Syria is a stain on the collective conscience

of moral peoples everywhere.

I appeal to my colleagues not to look away from the images I will

show. I want to warn all who are watching these are graphic and

disturbing pictures, but they are the real face of war and human

suffering in Syria today--a war our Nation has the power to help end

but which we are failing to do.

These images are drawn from a cache of more than 55,000 photographs

that were taken between March 2011 and August 2013 by a Syrian military

policeman, whose job it was to document the horrors the Assad regime

committed against political prisoners in its jails. This individual

eventually defected to the opposition along with his photographs, which

were meticulously reviewed and verified by three renowned international

war crimes prosecutors and a team of independent forensic experts. They

compiled their findings in a report late last month that provides

direct evidence that the Assad regime was responsible for the

systematic abuse, torture, starvation, and killing of approximately

11,000 detainees in what amounts to war crimes and crimes against

humanity. These are just a few of those pictures and far from the most

disturbing.

I urge every Member of Congress and the American people to read the

full report, which can be found on both cnn.com and theguardian.com.

Although only a handful of these gruesome images have been released

publicly, the authors have provided their own startling commentary on

what they reveal.

David Crane, the first chief prosecutor of the Special Court for

Sierra Leone and the man responsible for indicting former Liberian

President Charles Taylor for crimes against humanity, stated that many

of the photographs show groupings of bodies in ways that \\\`\\\`looked like

a slaughterhouse.'' Crane characterized the Syrian Government as a

\\\`\\\`callous, industrial machine grinding its citizens'' that is guilty of

\\\`\\\`industrial-age mass killing.''

Professor Sir Geoffrey Nice, lead prosecutor in the case against

former Yugoslav President Milosevic at The Hague, reported that the

systematic way the bodies were cataloged and the effort given to

obscure the true causes of death leads one to \\\`\\\`reasonably infer that

this is a pattern of behavior'' for Assad's forces.

But perhaps most chilling of all, Sir Desmond de Silva, who also

served as a chief prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone,

stated that the emaciated bodies revealed in these pictures are

\\\`\\\`reminiscent of the pictures of those who were found still alive in

the Nazi death camps after World War II.''

Yesterday, in a hearing of the Committee on Armed Services, I asked

the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, whether these

photographs, which clearly depict ghastly

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crimes against humanity, are authentic. The Director said he has \\\`\\\`no

reason to doubt'' their authenticity. The United Nations is now doing

its own assessment of these images, and all of us should fully support

that. It is important to have the broadest possible validation of these

images, and I am confident the U.N. team will validate them. After all,

does anyone seriously believe the Assad regime does not have the means,

motive, and opportunity to murder 11,000 people in its prisons?

Indeed, this kind of inhumane cruelty is a pattern of behavior within

the Syrian Government. According to a detailed U.N. report issued at

the end of January, Assad's forces have systematically, as part of

their doctrine, used children as human shields and threatened to kill

the children of opposition members if they did not surrender. The U.N.

also detailed the arrest, detention, torture, and sexual abuse of

thousands of children by government forces. I will spare you the

remaining details, as they are unspeakable, but again I urge you to

read the entire report which can be found on the Web site of the United

Nations.

I also recommend that my colleagues read of the war crimes that Human

Rights Watch has been documenting. They have reported, for example, on

how Syrian authorities have deliberately used explosives and bulldozers

to demolish thousands of residential buildings, and in some cases

entire neighborhoods, for no military reason whatsoever, just as a form

of collective punishment of Syrian civilians.

Human Rights Watch researchers have also documented the toll of the

Syrian Government's airstrike campaign against Aleppo and Damascus and,

in particular, the regime's use over the past few months of what has

become known as \\\`\\\`barrel bombs.'' For my colleagues who are not aware

of them, barrel bombs are oil drums or other large containers packed

with explosives, fuel, shrapnel, glass, and all manner of crude lethal

material. Their sole purpose is to maim, kill, and terrorize as many

people as possible when they are indiscriminately dropped from Syrian

Government aircraft on schools and bakeries and mosques and other

civilian areas. In one stark video of a barrel bomb's aftermath, a man

stands in front of a child's body and cries out: Oh God, we have had

enough. Please help us.

These are just some of the many reasons our Director of National

Intelligence referred to the Syrian crisis yesterday as \\\`\\\`an

apocalyptic disaster.'' With more than 130,000 people dead, after more

than one-third of the Syrian population has been driven from their

homes, no truer words were ever spoken.

But this apocalyptic disaster in Syria is no longer just a

humanitarian tragedy for one country, it is a regional conflict and an

emerging national security threat to us. The regime's war crimes are

being aided and abetted by thousands of Hezbollah fighters and Iranian

agents on the ground, as well as Russian weaponry that continues to

flow into the Assad government, even as Russia works with us to remove

the Assad regime's chemical weapons, a truly Orwellian situation.

The conflict in Syria is devastating its neighbors. Lebanon is

suffering from increasing bombings and cross-border attacks by both the

Syrian government and opposition fighters in response to Hezbollah's

role in the fighting. Unofficial estimates suggest that half of

Lebanon's population will soon be Syrian refugees. Similar estimates

suggest that Syrian refugees now represent 15 percent of the population

in Jordan, which is straining to manage the social instability this

entails. Turkey has been destabilized. Perhaps most worrisome of all,

the conflict in Syria is largely to blame for the resurgence of Al

Qaeda in Iraq, which has grown into the larger and more lethal Islamic

State of Iraq and Syria, which now possesses a safe haven that spans

large portions of both countries. Nowhere is this more threatening or

more heartbreaking than in Fallujah, the Iraqi city where hundreds of

U.S. troops were killed and wounded fighting to rid it of the

terrorists and extremists, but where the black flags of Al Qaeda now

hang above the city.

The sanctuary that Al Qaeda now enjoys, thanks to the crisis in

Syria, increasingly poses a direct threat to U.S. national security and

that of our closest allies and partners. The Secretary of Homeland

Security, Mr. Jeh Johnson said, \\\`\\\`Syria is now a matter of homeland

security.'' The Director of National Intelligence has referred to the

Al Qaeda sanctuary in Syria and Iraq as \\\`\\\`a new FATA''--the tribal

areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan where Al Qaeda planned the September

11 terrorist attacks.

Indeed, Director Clapper has warned that Al Qaeda affiliated

terrorists in Syria now aspire to attack the homeland. If the September

11 attacks should have taught us anything, it is that global terrorists

who occupy ungoverned spaces and seek to plot and plan attacks against

us can pose a direct threat to our national security.

This was Afghanistan, September 10, 2001. That is what top officials

in this administration are now warning us that Syria is becoming today.

The conflict in Syria is a threat to our national interest, but it is

more than that. It is and should be an affront to our conscience.

Images such as these should not be just a source of heartbreak and

sympathy, they should be a call to action. It was not too long ago,

just a few months after the revolution in Syria began, that President

Obama issued his Presidential Study Directive on Mass Atrocities. In it

he stated, \\\`\\\`Preventing mass atrocities and genocide is a core national

security interest and a core moral responsibility of the United

States.''

He went on to say:

Our security is affected when masses of civilians are

slaughtered, refugees flow across borders, and murderers

wreak havoc on regional stability and livelihoods.

Last year, speaking at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the

President said:

Too often, the world has failed to prevent the killing of

innocents on a massive scale. And we are haunted by the

atrocities that we did not stop and the lives we did not

save.

Just last September in his address to the U.N. General Assembly,

President Obama said this:

\\\[T\\\]he principle of sovereignty is at the center of our

international order. But sovereignty cannot be a shield for

tyrants to commit wanton murder, or an excuse for the

international community to turn a blind eye. While we need to

be modest in our belief that we can remedy every evil, while

we need to be mindful that the world is full of unintended

consequences, should we really accept the notion that the

world is powerless in the face of a Rwanda, or Srebrenica? If

that's the world that people want to live in, they should say

so, and reckon with the cold logic of mass graves.

That was our President. That was the President of the United States.

I agree with every word of what he said. But how are we to reconcile

these stirring words with the reality of these images from Syria? How

do we explain how the leader of the free world, who says that it is the

moral obligation of the United States to do what we can to prevent the

worst atrocities in our world, is not doing more to stop the atrocities

that are occurring every single day in Syria?

Where is that President Obama today? Where is the President Obama who

spoke so movingly of the moral responsibilities that great power

confers? Where is the President Obama who has said he refuses to accept

that brutal tyrants can slaughter their people with impunity, while the

most powerful nation in the history of the world looks on and stands

by? Where is the recognition that the \\\`\\\`cold logic of mass graves'' is

right there, right in front of us, Syria, today?

Yet our government is doing what we have sadly done too often in the

past. We are diverting our eyes. We try to comfort our guilty

consciences by telling ourselves that we are not doing nothing, but it

is a claim made in bad faith, for everyone concedes that nothing we are

doing is equal to the horrors we face.

We are telling ourselves that we are too tired and weary to get more

involved; that Syria is not our problem; that helping to resolve it is

not our responsibility. We are telling ourselves that we have no good

options, as if there are ever good options when it comes to foreign

policy in the real world. We are telling ourselves that we might have

been able to do something at one point, but that it is too late now, as

if such words from a leader of the world's only global power will be

any comfort to the Syrian mother who will lose her child tomorrow.

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We are telling ourselves what Neville Chamberlain once told himself

about a different problem from hell in an earlier time; that is, and I

quote Neville Chamberlain, \\\`\\\`a quarrel in a far away country between

people of whom we know nothing.'' Where is our outrage? Where is our

shame?

It is true that our options to help in the conflict in Syria were

never good, and they certainly are worse and fewer now. But no one

should believe that we are without options, even now, and no one should

believe that doing something meaningful to help in Syria requires us to

rerun the war in Iraq. That is an excuse for inaction. That is not a

question of options or capabilities; it is a question of will.

These images of the human disaster in Syria haunt me. They should

haunt all of my colleagues and all Americans. But what haunts me even

more than the terror unfolding before our eyes in Syria is the thought

that we will continue to do nothing meaningful about it, and how that

deadens our national conscience, how it calls into question the moral

sources of our great power and the foundations of our global

leadership, and how many years from now an American President will

stand before the world and the people of Syria, as previous Presidents

have done after previous inaction in the face of mass atrocities in far

away lands, and say what all of us know to be true right now: That we

could have done more to stop the suffering of others. We could have

used the power we possess, limited though it may be; we could have

exercised the options at our disposal, imperfect though they may be,

and we could have done something. It is to our everlasting

embarrassment that we did not.

That future President will apologize for our current failure. Shame

on us if we let history repeat itself that way.

The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The majority leader.

Mr. REID. Mr. President, I very much appreciate Senator McCain's

stunning delivery on this horrible situation going on in Syria.

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