Building a War-Crimes Case Against Bashar al-Assad

Summary

The New Yorker Radio Hour
Episode: Building a War-Crimes Case Against Bashar al-Assad
Date: August 11, 2017
Host: David Remnick
Guests: Ben Taub, Bill Wiley, Mazen Alhamda, Stephen Rapp, Abdul Majid Barakat, Kevin Jon Heller

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Overview

This episode explores the painstaking and covert efforts to document and build a legal case against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his regime for war crimes committed during the Syrian civil war. Reporter Ben Taub details the work of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA), led by Bill Wiley, as it collects documentary and testimonial evidence linking Assad and his top officials to systematic torture, mass murder, and crimes against humanity. The episode also addresses the international legal and political obstacles to holding Assad accountable. It features vivid, harrowing testimony from survivor Mazen Alhamda and closes with a legal and political analysis from criminal law expert Kevin Jon Heller.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introduction: The Syrian War and the Quest for Justice

• David Remnick opens by contextualizing Syria in U.S. politics, emphasizing the Trump administration’s focus on Syrian refugees and the broader tragedy (00:28).
• The regime of Bashar al-Assad is described as responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths and massive displacement, with the international community largely paralyzed.

2. A Vacuum of Accountability

• Ben Taub notes the despair among top UN and humanitarian officials who have left their posts, citing the hopelessness of stopping the killing (02:03).
• He interviews Stephen Rapp, former U.S. Ambassador for war crimes, who describes how international justice has stalled—Russia and China veto Security Council referrals to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for Syria (02:27).

3. The CIJA: A Secretive Evidence Collection Effort

• Introduction to the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA), a clandestine organization conducting independent investigations into war crimes with no court mandate—an unprecedented model (03:05).
  • Quote - Stephen Rapp (03:14):
    “They’ve hired non-Syrians and hired people that worked in tribunals…prepared case dossiers and pretrial briefs…ready to go to court if you had a court to go to.”
• CIJA’s evidence room contains around 600,000 pages of Syrian regime documents (05:34).

4. How the Atrocities Were Systematized

• Bill Wiley explains the importance of tracing crimes up the chain of command, focusing on high-level perpetrators rather than low-level killers (06:24).
  • Quote - Bill Wiley (06:24):
    “International criminal justice is focused on ensuring the accountability of high and the highest level perpetrators. We’re not interested in low-level hands-on killers.”
• In August 2011, a secret Syrian committee codified the strategy of mass arrests and torture, as documented in meeting minutes (07:45—08:37).

5. Insider Evidence and Leaked Documents

• Abdul Majid Barakat, a young government insider and covert mole, leaked crisis cell documents and security briefings guiding repression (08:37–09:40).
• Barakat’s secretary eventually discovered him, leading him to flee, but not before extensive document leakage to CIJA.

6. A Survivor’s Story: Mazen Alhamda

• Former detainee Mazen Alhamda describes the grassroots protest movement, his arrest, and entry into a nightmarish detention system (10:08–11:05).
• He recounts conditions in overcrowded, unsanitary cells, followed by torture designed to force confessions (11:41–13:23).
  • Quote - Mazen Alhamda (13:23):
    “You feel like your penis is going to be cut off. Are you going to admit, or I’m just going to cut it off? No, no, I’ll admit, please.”
• Hamada is subjected to torture so heinous that Taub issues a trigger warning, and Hamada himself tries to maintain humor to cope (13:58).

7. The Origins and Methods of CIJA's Evidence Gathering

• CIJA trains Syrian activists in the collection of regime documents, not just videos—emphasizing legal standards for admissible evidence (15:33–17:28).
  • Quote - Bill Wiley (16:21):
    “The tendency of human rights activists...was to run around with cameras...as criminal evidence, it’s basically useless.”
• Rebels were taught to prioritize seizing and preserving documents during operations, often risking their lives (18:03–19:19).

8. The Enormous Risks and Losses

• Document extraction is perilous; early casualties included deaths and injuries among those moving documents across the country (19:19).
• Unexpected perils: some evidence was destroyed accidentally, as when an elderly woman burned boxes for warmth (20:15).

9. Pattern Evidence and Systematic Crimes

• After analyzing documents and collecting hundreds of witness statements, CIJA builds a case showing these crimes as systemic—not isolated.
  • Quote - Bill Wiley (27:46):
    “Victim witnesses...are a dime a dozen. We don’t need a lot of victims to build a case...A lot of that's designed to secure pattern evidence, the patterns of perpetration and so forth.”

10. The Fate of Detainees and the Caesar Files

• Hamada’s stay at Hospital 601 reveals further horrors: maltreatment by medical staff and the presence of dead bodies stacked in toilets and beds (23:19–25:18).
• These deaths were documented by a military police photographer, “Caesar,” who later smuggled out tens of thousands of graphic photos—now central evidence in human rights investigations (25:18–26:00).
  • Quote (Ben Taub at 25:45):
    “Three prominent international war crimes experts say they’ve received a huge cache of photographs documenting the killing of some 11,000 detainees…”

11. Freedom, Exile, and the Ongoing Pursuit of Justice

• After a judge shows pity and releases him due to his health, Hamada discovers his family is missing and flees Syria, ultimately reaching the Netherlands (26:59–27:46).
• CIJA’s aim is to show these atrocities are linked to explicit top-down instruction—from Assad and his closest circle.

12. The Grim Realities of Justice—Legal and Political Hurdles

• David Remnick speaks with Professor Kevin Jon Heller about the prospects for Assad ever facing trial (30:32).
• The panel outlines why ICC prosecution is effectively blocked by Russian/Chinese vetoes, and why special tribunals or national prosecutions are improbable as long as Assad remains in power (32:18).
  • Quote - Kevin Jon Heller (30:37):
    “I don’t think we will ever see Bashar Al Assad prosecuted by the ICC...there’s no reason to think that they would change their mind anytime soon.”
• Heller stresses the importance of tempering expectations—many lower-level perpetrators in all factions may one day face justice, but dictators usually evade the dock.

13. Lessons From Past War Crimes Trials

• Hussein’s trial in Iraq is cited as a “missed opportunity” for genuine justice, while the Nuremberg, Rwanda, and Yugoslav tribunals serve as better (if imperfect) models (33:25–35:46).
  • Quote - Kevin Jon Heller (33:32):
    “The Nuremberg trials...really are, are an object lesson in how to do things correctly...if we can give the Nazis a fair trial...I would like to think...that we could give them fair trials today.”

14. The Dilemma and Ethics of Defense

• Heller discusses the ethical necessity to defend even “very, very serious” criminal defendants, emphasizing the importance of fair trials and adequate defense counsel (37:10–38:34).
  • Quote - Kevin Jon Heller (38:34):
    “Every defendant deserves a zealous defense...your role is to ensure that they’re convicted of what they actually did and not convicted of what the prosecution says that they did.”

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Notable Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps)

• On the document trove:
  Bill Wiley (05:34): “There’s about 600,000 pages of material here.”
• On the logic of state violence:
  Ben Taub (06:36): “The system is way more sinister than individual cases of abuse because the chain of command demanded results.”
• On the psychological toll of testimony:
  Mazen Alhamda (23:00): “I can’t say his story without crying.”
• On the staggering risk and creativity of evidence gathering:
  Ben Taub (19:19): “They’ve hidden around half a million pages inside the country, in caves, in abandoned homes, buried in the ground.”
• On the potential for justice despite the odds:
  Bill Wiley (28:34): “At some point...the most serious perpetrators in Syria...they will be brought to justice.”
• On legal reality checks:
  Kevin Jon Heller (30:37): “I don’t think we will ever see Bashar Al Assad prosecuted by the ICC.”
• On the need for fair defense:
  Kevin Jon Heller (38:34): “Every defendant deserves a zealous defense...your role is to ensure that they’re convicted of what they actually did and not convicted of what the prosecution says that they did.”

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [00:28] — David Remnick introduces the Syrian conflict and U.S. politics
• [02:27] — Ben Taub on the lack of justice and the role of the ICC
• [05:08] — Introduction of Bill Wiley and the CIJA
• [08:37] — Abdul Majid Barakat’s infiltration and document leaks
• [10:08] — Mazen Alhamda’s background and activism
• [13:23] — Graphic torture described by Alhamda
• [15:33] — CIJA’s origins and evidence collection strategy
• [19:19] — Dangers and losses in extracting evidence
• [23:19] — Hospital 601 and the “Caesar” photographs
• [27:46] — CIJA’s case-building strategy: pattern evidence over individual stories
• [30:32] — Legal expert Kevin Jon Heller on the limits of war-crimes prosecution
• [33:32] — Nuremberg and the characteristics of just tribunals
• [37:10] — Defense counsel’s ethical imperative in international criminal law

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Tone & Language

The episode alternates between the clinical precision of legal and investigative professionals and the raw emotion of survivor testimony. There’s a clear sense of moral urgency, tempered by realism about the limits of international law and geopolitics. The language is direct, sometimes technical but always accessible, and unflinching in describing atrocity.

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Conclusion

This episode offers an in-depth look at the behind-the-scenes, often heartbreaking work of documenting and prosecuting war crimes. It illuminates the technical, moral, and logistical complexity of bringing leaders like Bashar al-Assad to justice—while centering the lived experiences of survivors and the dedicated, sometimes quixotic drive among investigators to preserve the facts for the day when justice might be possible. The episode closes on both a sobering and hopeful note: justice, where it occurs, is slow and partial—but the buildup of evidence, commitment to fairness, and historical lessons give reason to keep pressing forward.

Transcript

[Bill Wiley]

Floor 38.

[Ben Taub]

They're trying to answer questions about upward mobility in America.

[David Remnick]

As a military strategist, it was profiled brilliantly by somebody.

[Mazen Alhamda]

So I think if you could find.

[Ben Taub]

A subculture of people with a kind of form of life on this planet that we haven't really seen before.

[Narrator/Producer]

From one World Trade center in Manhattan. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker.

[Ben Taub]

David?

[David Remnick]

I'm David Remnick. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. A cornerstone of Donald Trump's campaign for President in 2016 was the promise of protecting Americans from people coming to our shores that he deemed dangerous, particularly refugees from the civil war in Syria. And that country has consistently been part of his immigration orders that are being fought out in the courts. Syria's refugees have been fleeing isis, but they're also fleeing the brutal regime of President Bashar Al Assad. Assad has framed the revolution in his country as a conspiracy fueled entirely by foreign powers. His security forces have killed hundreds of thousands and displaced possibly half of the country. The tragedies that we've seen in places like Aleppo are unfathomable. In April, the Trump administration turned its attention to Syria with a single missile attack to punish Assad for using chemical weapons. But since then, the President's attention has been elsewhere. This is, without a doubt, a tragic, hugely consequential, and seemingly hopeless situation. But not everyone is giving up entirely. Ben Taub spent months reporting on a group of investigators gathering evidence of the Assad regime's crimes should Assad or his henchmen ever go to trial. He brought this story to the Radio Hour in April of last year. Now, this is a very difficult story. We're going to hear some accounts of torture that are incredibly upsetting, and we'll give you that warning before that happens. Here's Ben Taub.

[Ben Taub]

I'd been following the Syrian war since the beginning. Last fall, I noticed that a large number of high level UN and government officials who had devoted their lives to solving humanitarian crises had left their positions. It's as if this conflict was so hopeless and so politically messy, there was just nothing they could do to end the killing. So I called up a prosecutor named Stephen Rapp.

[Stephen Rapp]

Hello? Hello, this is Ben.

[Ben Taub]

Yeah, this is Ben. Thanks so much. I wanted Rapp to explain how Syria exists in a vacuum of accountability. He had led prosecution teams for the tribunals in Rwanda and Sierra Leone, and then he became the US Ambassador at large for war crimes issues. But last summer, he resigned, partly over frustrations with the obstacles to pursuing justice in Syria. Then he told me about a war crimes investigation I'd never heard of.

[Stephen Rapp]

You know, the Bill Wiley program, the organization called the cija.

[Ben Taub]

I haven't heard of this.

[Stephen Rapp]

To the Commission on International justice and Accountability Headquarters.

[Ben Taub]

Sorry, I have to cut in here. The siege's location is a secret for security reasons, but it's in Western Europe, and the group employs about 150 people.

[Stephen Rapp]

They've hired non Syrians and hired people that worked in tribunals, and they've, you know, prepared case dossiers and pretrial briefs and indictments and all sorts of stuff that would be ready to go to court if you had a court to go to.

[Mazen Alhamda]

Right, right, right.

[Ben Taub]

So that's the point. Basically, war crimes are being committed. Everyone knows about them, the barrel bombs, the executions, the torture, but there's just no court to go to. Except there is, in theory. It's called the International Criminal Court, and it was created to handle these kinds of situations. The field of international criminal justice basically came into existence after World War II, when Nazi officials were tried for war crimes at Nuremberg. The ICC was formalized in 2002. But Syria isn't a member state of the court. So to get there, you have to go through the UN Security Council. And two years ago, Russia and China blocked an attempt to start that process. Russia and China vetoed on Thursday a resolution to refer Syria to the International Criminal Court. Russian UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin defended his position. We are convinced that justice in Syria will eventually prevail. Those guilty of perpetuating grave crimes will be punished. But in order for this to happen, peace is first needed. So the sieges stepped into the void. In secret, this group has built a case that's ready to go to trial. This kind of independent investigation, funded by governments but without a court mandate, has never happened in the history of Internet criminal justice. I wanted to book a flight to Europe right away, but you can't exactly knock on the front door of this commission, let alone find the right building or even the right city or even the right country. But Stephen Rapp arranged for me to meet the group's founder.

[Bill Wiley]

My name is William Wiley. Everyone calls me Bill, and I'm the executive director of the Commission for International justice and Accountability, the cija.

[Ben Taub]

Wiley worked for the Yugoslavia Tribunal, the Rwanda Tribunal, and the International Criminal Court, and he brought me to the sieges evidence room, which is hidden underground. The room was small, lit by fluorescent lights, and packed with cardboard boxes.

[Bill Wiley]

So what we have here, as you can see, are boxes and Boxes of documents. There's about 600,000 pages of material here.

[Ben Taub]

The boxes are stacked neatly on metal shelves. Each of them has its own evidence number.

[Bill Wiley]

Oftentimes with Syria, because the, if you will, the informational systems are not as advanced as you would find in the West. So a piece of paper is generated and then it's passed from desk to desk or office to office. And each recipient or each reviewer of that will sign or initial the documents and in some cases with comments as they pass them along.

[Ben Taub]

Just like any office. Except these all came out of Syria and people risked their lives to get them to the sija. Wiley specializes in this type of linkage. How war crimes are institutionalized through a chain of command.

[Bill Wiley]

And that's really important because international criminal justice is focused on ensuring the accountability of high and the highest level perpetrators. We're not interested in low level hands on killers.

[Ben Taub]

But how can Assad and his deputies be held accountable? Even if they haven't explicitly told their subordinates to torture and kill people, it's because they presided over the system that perpetrated these crimes. And that system is way more sinister than individual cases of abuse because the chain of command demanded results. And in the pursuit of those results, these crimes were carried out on a massive scale. Bill Wiley's group actually has the minutes from the meeting when the plan to stamp out the revolution was devised on August 5, 2011. Imagine this. It's a warm summer evening in Damascus, one of the oldest cities in the world. Inside the Ba' Athist Regional Command, Assad's security chiefs are gathering for a meeting of the Central Crisis Management Cell, which is a secret committee established by Assad specifically to tackle the revolution. This is five months in dictatorships in Egypt and Tunisia have collapsed. A lot people thought Assad would be next to fall. So that evening, the members of the Kreis, its cell, decided that the best way to end this revolution was to target specific categories of people for arrest and interrogation. The plan was set in motion and they documented the whole. A couple months ago, I called Abdul Majid Barakat. He's a young guy who was hired to read security briefings that were coming from all over the country and delivered back to the capital, about 150 pages a day. After reading everything, Barakat drafted a summary that the crisis cell used to guide their meetings. We spoke through a translator named Mariam Bazid.

[Abdul Majid Barakat]

My official position in this was that I was the head of head of Information Office and documents, but the government.

[Ben Taub]

Made a mistake by giving him that job. Barakat was a mole from day one. He joined the crisis cell for the purpose of leaking information to the opposition. He wasn't allowed inside the meeting room, but he had access to what they said.

[Abdul Majid Barakat]

Meeting minutes from that would be written up and that would be sent to Bashar Al Assad.

[Ben Taub]

How were those meeting minutes sent to Bashar al Assad?

[Abdul Majid Barakat]

So it's actually a physical messenger would take the report, take it to Bashar Al Assad, who would sign it and then bring it back.

[Ben Taub]

Then Barakat discovered his own secretary was spying on him.

[Abdul Majid Barakat]

So he went in one day into the offices of some of these. The members of the cell collected the documents and went directly from there to the border with Turkey.

[Ben Taub]

Eventually, Barakat let Bill Wiley's team photograph all the files he stole. These documents tell a story of lives disrupted and destroyed. One of the people who appeared on an arrest list was a 34 year old man named Mazen Alhamda. He was a field specialist at an oil services company in his hometown, Deir Ezor. And he comes from an educated middle class family which had been openly critical of the government even before the protests began.

[Mazen Alhamda]

You know, you could see the poverty, although we have oil. You could see the mistreatment, the lack of rights. And we were outspoken and were unhappy with the way that the situation was going.

[Ben Taub]

I met Hamada last winter at a hotel room near Amsterdam. We spoke through a translator named Mouaz. Mustafa Hamada says that when the Arab Spring started back in early 2011, he started organizing protests at a local mosque about a month in. Hamada was briefly detained, but he wasn't tortured. Security agents were still trying to squash the revolution without violating the law. So he was set free after just a week. But when he found out his name was on another arrest warrant, he fled to Damascus, thinking he could blend in more easily in the capital. But he continued supporting anti government movements. In 2012, he helped a friend smuggle baby formula into a neighborhood under siege. The security services arrested him at the drop off point, a cafe.

[Mazen Alhamda]

They handcuffed us and they pulled our shirts over our heads. They put me in the trunk of the car. They were telling us, we're going to let this guy is going to execute you, we're going to kill you, we're going to murder you.

[Ben Taub]

Hamada was brought to the Air Force Intelligence branch at Al Mezza military Airport. This was one of the most notorious detention facilities in Syria. After a couple of weeks, the conditions took a toll on his health.

[Mazen Alhamda]

You're rotting from sitting. Our legs would get so swollen.

[Ben Taub]

This went on for months. So many people had been rounded up that the security agents couldn't really process all the detainees. Mazen shared his cell with 170 other people.

[Mazen Alhamda]

Cleanliness. I mean, we weren't taking showers or anything.

[Ben Taub]

Finally, he was taken out for his first interrogation. They started beating him and demanding the names of opposition leaders.

[Mazen Alhamda]

So I gave him the names of my friends that were martyred during my time in Deir EZ Zor that I knew were dead.

[Ben Taub]

That's very smart. But eventually they forced a confession out of him.

[Mazen Alhamda]

At the beginning, they were using cigarettes. They would take them out on my body.

[Ben Taub]

Inside the hotel room, he pulled up his pants leg to show me several burns.

[Mazen Alhamda]

He went on to confess that he organized protests, that he took videos, stuff like that.

[Ben Taub]

Which was true, right?

[Mazen Alhamda]

Exactly. And he was saying that, but that obviously wasn't enough. So what he's saying is, at this point, they're asking me specifically, how many people from the Syrian Arab army did you kill? And then he's saying, the challenge here is, how do you make up a story that you killed these people? Because you got to come up with it on the spot under this immense pressure.

[Ben Taub]

Here is where the details get very graphic and upsetting, especially if you're listening with children. This part is not for them. The interrogators asked Hamada what kind of weapon he used in making up this story. He said it was a hunting rifle because his family actually owns one. But the interrogator wanted him to confess to using a Kalashnikov. So to get him to say that, they stripped him naked and put a plumbing clamp on his penis.

[Mazen Alhamda]

About in two to three to four second stops, you feel like your penis is going to be cut off. Are you going to admit, or I'm just going to cut it off? No, no, no, I'll admit, please. He opens it. He says, what was the type of weapon? I say, it was an AK47. It says, how many clips did you have? Tell him how many. How many clips do you want me to have? You're the one that has to confess. I had five bullets. He says, no, I need two magazines.

[Ben Taub]

It's amazing. Hamada can laugh at this because it was hard for me to hear. The details of his torture are as personal as they are horrifying. And the interrogator still wasn't happy with his confession. So he took a metal rod which had been sharpened to a point, and started pushing it into the base of Hamada's spine. Hamada knew of this weapon. He had watched another interrogator sodomize one of his cellmates with it, pushing it until it poked through his abdomen. It took several days for the man to die of infection.

[Mazen Alhamda]

As soon as they touched my backside, I said, I will admit you've got, you know, you've got the worst methods being used against you. You've gotta just say, tell them what they want.

[David Remnick]

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. We're hearing a man named Mazen Al Hamada talking about the false confession he gave under torture to Syrian interrogators. There were thousands and thousands of false confessions just like his. This gave a kind of legal sheen to the practice of locking up non violent protesters and prosecuting them as terrorists. A group of independent investigators is collecting evidence for crimes like these against the Assad regime. They're trying to build the most comprehensive war crimes case since Nazi officials were tried at Nuremberg more than a half century ago. Again, a warning. There are some very graphic and upsetting descriptions of what Masin went through. Ben Taub continues our story.

[Ben Taub]

The sietch's investigation began in the most unlikely way. Bill Wiley was meeting with a Libyan exile in Niger and his phone rang on the other end of the line. An old friend told him that the British government was looking for someone to train Syrian activists to document human rights violations.

[Bill Wiley]

And my answer was, no, I don't want to do that. And the reason was I'm a criminal law guy, not in the pure sense, a human rights guy. But what I offered in the alternative was to provide these activists with a basic understanding of what sort of information and evidence informs international criminal investigations and prosecutions.

[Ben Taub]

So Wiley's contact recruited a number of young Syrian activists and lawyers, and he traveled to meet them at a discreet location in Istanbul.

[Bill Wiley]

The tendency of human rights activists in those days was to run around with cameras, video cameras, smartphones, now being so sophisticated, and photograph regime attacks and in built up areas, urban areas, and then put this stuff on YouTube and so forth. And one of the first things we did is explain to them that as criminal evidence, it's basically useless. You're running tremendous risks. And indeed, a lot of young people, principally young people, were getting killed and wounded, generating video or visual images, really to no end.

[Ben Taub]

Instead, Wiley wanted them to focus on capturing Syrian government documents. After several training sessions, the Syrian investigators returned to their home country to begin collecting evidence.

[Bill Wiley]

The first order of business was to make alliances with the opposition to armed groups that were overrunning regime facilities and to sensitize them to who we were what we wanted and why we wanted.

[Ben Taub]

This material, because most of the rebels didn't see the value in documents. Wiley says that after they would go in and capture a regime facility, the.

[Bill Wiley]

Smartphones would come out, there'd be great joy and shouting and. And firing in the air. They would loot the place looking for weapons and ammunition because that's what they needed. And then they would set the place on fire, dance around, film themselves, and put it on YouTube. And we said, look, capture the places, loot the places for whatever you need militarily, weapons, munitions. Remove the documents, and then if you feel like doing it, set the place on fire, dance around and put it on YouTube.

[Ben Taub]

But take the documents first.

[Bill Wiley]

But take the documents first and set them aside till they can be moved out of the country. And make a note, very simple note, where the documents were acquired, on what date. Box them up, seal the boxes to the best of your ability with Saran Wrap or something like that. And that as those materials move, chart that move.

[Ben Taub]

They had to take everything because in court, a defense lawyer could argue that they had selectively weeded out exculpatory evidence. But carrying a huge amount of documents, many of which weren't all that important, created its own problems.

[Bill Wiley]

Paper's heavy, you know, for those who work in offices, they should think in terms of a box of paper that sits next to the photocopier. That box has five bricks, if you will, each with 500 pages in it, and it weighs 10 kilos, about 22 pounds. And that's only 2,500 pages. We've extracted from Syria, approximately 600,000 pages. You need vehicles. Those vehicles need to get through checkpoints. You need to do reconnaissance. You need to. What kind of checkpoints you're going to run into.

[Ben Taub]

The work of extraction is extremely dangerous. It's the whole point of the project. At the beginning, there were casualties. One man was killed, three were wounded, and several were abducted for brief periods of time. But more recently, they've gotten much better with operational security. No one has been injured or captured in the last two years, even as the SIJA continues to move documents. In fact, they've hidden around half a million pages inside the country, in caves, in abandoned homes, in. Buried in the ground. And they're waiting until it's safe to bring them out. Jihadi groups are extremely hostile to the SIJA investigators. The concept of international criminal justice is totally lost on them.

[Bill Wiley]

You just can't. You just don't want to be found with this stuff. You have this regime material IPSO facto, you work for the regime. Conversely, you have this regime facto. Ipso facto, you are an American spy. So one way or another, you're going to lose.

[Ben Taub]

But that's not the only threat to the documents. A large load was left with a very old woman a little while back.

[Bill Wiley]

She didn't know what it was. Someone asked her to keep it. No one bothered to explain to her what it was. No one showed up to take it away. And she thought, well, it's just paper. And in fairness, she was cold. And so she burned a whole lot of it as fuel. And so that was the end of that load.

[Ben Taub]

Once the documents finally made it back to the SIJA headquarters in Europe, a team of translators, analysts and lawyers poured through them. Then the SIJA investigators in Syria took hundreds of witness statements which reinforced the documents and sound a lot like Mazen Al Hamada's experience. After Hamada was forced to confess to using an AK47 to kill members of the Syrian army, he spent a year in an overcrowded cell. Then he was taken to a room and forced to ink his thumbprints onto documents likely containing his false confession. This routine allowed the Syrian government to lock up activists for years. These confessions were used as evidence that these people had participated in terrorism, sedition and treason when detainees were referred to the courts.

[Mazen Alhamda]

Sleeping and waking up and going through this every single day.

[Ben Taub]

But what really haunts Hamada is the many murders he witnessed inside. There was a 17 year old boy behind him as he thumbprinted these documents. When the guards found out the boy was from Daraya, a rebellious suburb of Damascus, they started beating him mercilessly.

[Mazen Alhamda]

That wasn't enough for them, so they went and got a tool used for welding. I used to work when I worked in the oil rig. We would weld together the different pipes for oil. He used it and he burned his face from here and from here. And then he turned him around and he burned him from his neck and his entire back. And they told me if I had come, animals, take this pig inside. Brought him inside, his face, I mean, it was fire, it was melting. It was this kid. It was this kid, child that I promised myself, I swore, I promised to myself that Basharla said if I get out and when I get out from jail, that I will tell everyone what happened just because of this kid. It was this kid that really, that. That did it for him.

[Ben Taub]

I think we might need to take a break. Hamara left the room at this point. I'm sorry. So sorry, Moaz. I. I don't know what to say.

[Mazen Alhamda]

I don't know either, man. I. I can't say his story without. Without crying.

[Ben Taub]

Hamada's health got worse and worse than. His legs were gangrenous, his eye was dripping pus. The head of the interrogation section told him that he would be taken to Hospital 601, a military hospital at the base of Mount Mezeh in Damascus. Assad's presidential palace sits on top. The interrogator told Hamada to forget his name and instead to go by the number 1858. Other detainees had told him that it was less of a hospital than it was a slaughterhouse. As soon as he arrived, the doctors and nurses started hitting him with their shoes.

[Mazen Alhamda]

They're saying, you're a terrorist. A terrorist, terrorist. Like screaming back at them, I'm not a terrorist. One of them is telling me, shut up.

[Ben Taub]

A UN investigation published later that year said that the medical staff at Hospital 601 had been co opted into the maltreatment of detainees. It also said that many patients had been tortured to death in this facility.

[Mazen Alhamda]

In about midnight, I needed to go to the bathroom. I go in, I open the first bathroom door, I saw two or three dead bodies. The second bathroom stall, I saw two bodies. The sink, there was a body. Started feeling like I was, you know, I'm disconnecting. You know, I'm losing consciousness. I'm not understanding where I am.

[Ben Taub]

He wasn't hallucinating. That same UN investigation found that bodies were also kept in the toilets in other detention facilities in Damascus. Hamada returned to his hospital bed, which he shared with another patient.

[Mazen Alhamda]

The other guy on my bed was telling me, hey, did you see? Did you see what's in there? I swear to God. This is verbatim. Every two to three days, we load up an entire car and we load it up with bodies, and where it goes, no one knows.

[Ben Taub]

Hamada didn't know that near the garage bay outside the hospital, a team of military police photographers were taking pictures of the mutilated corpses before they were hauled away. One of these photographers defected in 2013. He goes by the alias Caesar. When Caesar escaped, he hid flash drives in his socks containing 55,000 photographs, which he later gave to international investigators and forensic analysts.

[Mazen Alhamda]

Three prominent international war crimes experts say.

[Ben Taub]

They'Ve received a huge cache of photographs documenting the killing of some 11,000 detainees. They say their source is a defector who had been in the Syrian military.

[David Remnick]

Police, an insider they've codenamed Caesar.

[Ben Taub]

The UN investigation found that after these pictures had been taken A doctor at the hospitals usually wrote heart attack on the death certificate. Then the bodies were loaded into trucks and hauled away just as Hamada was assigned the number 1858. Each corpse in the file was photographed with a unique four digit number written on the forehead or on a piece of paper. Hamada thought he would die in Hospital 601. But after a couple of days, a doctor came to see him.

[Mazen Alhamda]

He seemed like somebody like us. He had. I could see he was human. Doctor, for the love of God, for the sake of your family, I just want to leave this hospital. He said, okay, no problem. But you're not better. You're still sick. He's like, no, no, no, no, no, I'm totally cured.

[Ben Taub]

The doctor released him from the hospital. Eventually, Hamada's case was referred to the judiciary. He spent a few months in civilian prison and then was brought before a judge. The judge took pity on him.

[Mazen Alhamda]

My legs and I showed him my hands. He's saying that he denies, denies or pled. Not guilty, not guilty, not guilty. Then he said, you know what? You are free to go.

[Ben Taub]

Hamada returned to Deir Ezzor. He found the city destroyed and his family was missing. By this point, ISIS controlled much of the area. He decided to flee. He took the refugee migration route through Turkey, then by boat to Greece, then by land to the Netherlands, where his sister has lived since before the war. While the particulars of cases like Hamada's are horrible, Bill Wiley and the investigative team at the SIJA are looking for something different. They want to show that these crimes are happening across the country in all security branches, and that they link back to the Crisis Cell's instructions.

[Bill Wiley]

Victim witnesses. If I could use a rather cold metaphor, they're a dime a dozen. We don't need a lot of victims to build a case. Whilst we have interviewed several hundred. A lot of that's designed to secure pattern evidence, the patterns of perpetration and so forth.

[Ben Taub]

From a political standpoint, it's difficult to see how Assad is going to end up in a courtroom. Yet in that first phone call months ago, Stephen Rapp told me that when the day of justice does arrive, they'll have better evidence than anyone has had since Nuremberg. Bill Wiley is convinced that the siege's linkage evidence is sufficient to convict Assad and his deputies for crimes against humanity, including murder, torture, persecution of political opponents, and other inhumane acts.

[Bill Wiley]

And then here's where the idealism kicks in. At some point, and it won't be long. The most serious perpetrators in Syria, President Assad, the Minister of Interior, the Minister of Defence, senior military leaders, the leaders of the security intelligence services, and so forth. They will be brought to justice.

[David Remnick]

Bill Wiley of the Commission for International justice and Accountability, CEJA is still gathering evidence to use against Bashar al Assad, although the idea of prosecuting Assad or his administration probably grows more and more distant as time goes on. Ben Taub's story first aired on the radio hour in April 2016. You can read his reporting on Syrian war [e-mail] welcome back to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Now, before the break, we heard about a dangerous effort to gather evidence against Bashar Al Assad and his regime for a possible war crimes trial. I wanted to find out more about the politics of that, how a war crimes trial might work. So he called Kevin John Heller. Heller was on the defense team for the criminal trial of Radovan Karadzic of the Bosnian Serbs, and he worked for Human Rights Watch during the trial of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Heller is a professor of criminal law at the University of London. Is there any likely scenario in your mind where we're going to turn on a television and see a trial of Bashar Al Assad.

[Kevin Jon Heller]

At the International Criminal Court or anywhere?

[David Remnick]

Well, anywhere really.

[Kevin Jon Heller]

Well, I mean, why don't we start with the International Criminal Court? Because that seems to be the loudest chorus of voices. I don't think we will ever see Bashar Al Assad prosecuted by the icc. Obviously that would require a referral from the Security Council and Russia and China have already vetoed one attempt to do that. And there's no reason to think that they would change their mind in anytime soon. Could you create a special tribunal? Same kind of problem. They're either created by the Security Council, like the Yugoslav tribunal or the Rwanda tribunal, or they're established with the consent of a state and the United Nations. Looking at the Cambodia tribunal, and clearly Syria, as long as Assad is in power, is never going to create that kind of institution. So really I think all you have is the prospect of a national prosecution. But even if he isn't the head of state, it is very difficult to see where the venue or the mechanism is to give him a prosecution. Again, I don't really see a scenario in which he ever ends up in the dock. But does that mean that there aren't many, many other players in the Syrian government, many other players in ISIS among the Syrian rebels who maybe not equally deserving of punishment, but certainly deserve punishment? And there with the slightly lower ranking war crimes perpetrators there, I think we could see something after the conflict ends in terms of genuine accountability. So perhaps it's a question of kind of scaling back what our expectations for accountability are, and then we won't be quite as disappointed when, as is so often the case, the very, very higher ups somehow escape the noose.

[David Remnick]

You served as Human Rights Watch's external legal adviser on the trial of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. Their final report on the trial cited a failure to disclose key evidence, important gaps in the evidence. In short, it was a mess. Does that shape how you look at what may or may not be justice for Assad and his deputies?

[Kevin Jon Heller]

It's a very complicated question. I think that the Hussein trial was really a missed opportunity. It is very easy to understand why the Iraqis wanted to try their own former dictator themselves. But anybody who kind of followed the Iraqi criminal justice system, anyone who is aware of what Saddam Hussein did to the Iraqi criminal justice system, the idea that they were going to hold a fair and credible trial I don't think was ever particularly convincing. That said, I think it was even worse than those of us who are quite pessimistic, pessimistic ever expected. And it is a warning lesson because it ended up turning him really into a martyr and just further destabilizing the situation in Iraq. And that's the last thing we would want for an Assad in Syria.

[David Remnick]

Can you give me an example of justice being brought to a dictator the right way? Is it Nuremberg?

[Kevin Jon Heller]

I do in many ways think that the Nuremberg trials, both the big one and the 12American trials that I wrote my book about, really are, are an object lesson in how to do things correctly. But, you know, if you look at the problems that the military commissions have had at Guantanamo Bay, compare those to the trials that the Nazis had 75 years ago, and the trials of the Nazis come across looking pretty good in terms of their overall fairness. And I think it's very difficult to argue that terrorism in any form poses the kind of existential threat that the Nazis did. So if we can give the Nazis a fair trial, and many of the Nazi defendants themselves said that they received fair trials, I would like to think that no matter how dangerous the suspect, that we could give them fair trials today.

[David Remnick]

Well, that leads to the question of who judges? Who gets to judge? If you are as harsh on Guantanamo, as many people are, as I am, if you say to yourself, the United States has more prisoners than any other country in the world by leaps and bounds, how can Any country, major country, major power, not only lecture other nations in the realm of human rights, but put other leaders in the dock.

[Kevin Jon Heller]

It's an extremely fair question. And the more multilateral response is, probably the more credible it's going to be. I understand why so many people think that the proper venue for any kind of trial of Assad or any other member of his regime is the International Criminal Court, because it is certainly a troubled project, but it is a project that represents the aspirations of now more than 125 countries. So, you know, it is difficult to look at an institution like that and say, this is just neo colonialism, or this is just, you know, the west using an institution as a puppet to further its economic interests. That is the advantage of that kind.

[David Remnick]

Of venue in the past generation. Where can you point to a success? A place where the process went reasonably smoothly and justice was done? I think if you want to look.

[Kevin Jon Heller]

At success stories, I mean, really, probably you do look at the Rwanda Tribunal and the Yugoslav tribunal, and I certainly don't want to imply that they were perfect tribunals. I certain. I certainly don't want to imply that they delivered perfect justice. But they were credible, effective international institutions. The Security Council created them. The Security Council gave them some teeth. They were able to arrest the suspects. They were able to conduct investigations. And by and large, they've been able to hold extremely credible trials and convict hundreds of very important criminal perpetrators of very serious international crimes. So, you know, we can have some hope that there is eventually going to be a time of reckoning. You know, a man that I represented for a couple of years, Radha Van Karadic, he managed to escape being caught for 12 years, but he was eventually caught, he was eventually prosecuted, and he was eventually convicted. So it can happen. It's just we really need to temper our expectations and temper, you know, our criteria of success for international criminal justice. Because that, to me, is the danger. Expecting it to do too much too quickly and then only being disappointed in what it fails to do.

[David Remnick]

Professor Heller, how could you imagine defending Bashar al Assad? What would a lawyer do to defend him, and on what basis? What would be the legal defense for him?

[Kevin Jon Heller]

I don't envy the attorney who ends up defending Bashar al Assad. I do think the evidence of his responsibility for very, very serious international cross is probably quite overwhelming.

[David Remnick]

How does the use of chemical weapons affect or not affect an international prosecution?

[Kevin Jon Heller]

That's a very complicated question to answer, and the answer really depends on what institution we're talking about. There is a very long and sordid history of the prohibition of chemical weapons at the International Criminal Court, whether you could actually charge, say, Bashar Al Assad with using a prohibited chemical weapon, the answer is really no. At the International Criminal Court.

[David Remnick]

Does systematic torture change the picture at all?

[Kevin Jon Heller]

Oh, absolutely. I mean, that's a classic war crime at any international tribunal, if any member of the Assad regime that was responsible for torture ended up at the icc, I would think that those charges would figure very, very prominently. The fact that you might not be able to charge them specifically with the use of chemical weapons certainly wouldn't handicap a prosecution. You have murder as a crime against humanity. You have extermination as a crime against humanity. You have all kinds of war crimes, of deliberately attacking civilians and humanitarian assistance organizations. There would be plenty in an indictment of any senior member of the Assad regime.

[David Remnick]

Would you defend him?

[Kevin Jon Heller]

Oh, I would absolutely defend him. I would defend him in a heartbeat.

[David Remnick]

And you would do it on what basis?

[Kevin Jon Heller]

I would do it on the basis that just at the domestic level, every defendant deserves a zealous defense and that International Criminal Law is predicated on the need for an effective defense counsel representing his client to the best of his ability. It's very common that it's not a simple black and white guilt or innocence situation, but it's a situation in which a defendant is guilty of some things and not guilty of others. And your job as a defense attorney is really, you know, almost a technocratic one where your role is to ensure that they're convicted of what they actually did and not convicted of what the prosecution says that they did.

[David Remnick]

Professor Heller, thank you very much. Thank you, Kevin. John Heller is a professor and criminal lawyer and the author of a book about the Nuremberg Trials. That's the show. Thanks a lot for listening and I hope you'll join us next week.

[Narrator/Producer]

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards. Our story about the Commission for International justice and Accountability was produced by Ave Carrillo, Karen Frillman and Eric Malinsky, with original music by Alexis Cuadrado. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Churina Endowment Fund.