Episode 26: Syrian War Crimes, Country Music, and a Central Park Salad

Summary

The New Yorker Radio Hour — Episode 26: Syrian War Crimes, Country Music, and a Central Park Salad

Date: April 15, 2016
Host: David Remnick
Podcast: The New Yorker Radio Hour by WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

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Overview

This episode weaves together three distinct narratives, highlighting the breadth of The New Yorker’s reporting and storytelling. The show opens with a whimsical audio tour of Todd Neazel’s apartment before shifting to a foraging adventure for wild salad greens in Central Park, led by Patricia Marx. The tone then pivots sharply to an in-depth, harrowing exploration of the Syrian civil war’s war crimes, investigative efforts to document them, and the prospects for future justice. The episode closes on lighter notes, with a book and movie discussion and a celebration of country music.

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Segment 1: The Todd Neazel Audio Tour (00:00–03:18)

Highlights & Key Points

• Comedic audio tour of Todd Neazel’s apartment, narrated by “Debbie” (Stephanie Jansen), satirizing the earnestness and detail-obsession of museum guides.
• Humorous look at everyday clutter, quirky possessions, and neighborly intrigue—e.g., the mysterious presence of a black lace brassiere and faux-marble tables.
• Memorable quote:
  “If you enjoyed yourself, call Todd Neazel and tell him so. He can be reached at 3am; he likes pizza, 10 pies at a time. And Rizzo’s delivers.”
  — Debbie [02:58]

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Segment 2: Foraging in Central Park — “A Central Park Salad” (03:18–10:29)

Main Theme

Patricia Marx and producer Stephen Valentino join naturalist Steve Brill and his daughter, Violet, on a humorous, insightful foraging trip in Central Park, poking fun at foodie trends and city constraints.

Key Discussion Points

• Shift in food trends: Former obsession with exotic imports now replaced by the ultra-local, even “hyperlocal” like ingredients foraged from Central Park.

  • “Today, on the other hand, the most fashionable food is local. In fact, the closer to your apartment that it was born and raised, the better.”
    — Patricia Marx [03:35]

• The foraging tour: Led by Steve Brill (“the Mr. Rogers of Central Park”) and his energetic daughter, Violet.

  • Violet’s nature facts and enthusiasm add levity:
    “She reminded me of a vegan Shirley Temple.”
    — Patricia Marx [05:14]

• Illegality and hazards: Foraging in Central Park is, technically, illegal. Steve Brill himself was once arrested (and released after eating the evidence). Confusion over edible versus poisonous plants, like hemlock and crocuses, brings comedic uncertainty.

  • “With all this hemlock, you'd think there'd be more dead dogs around here.”
    — Patricia Marx [06:59]

• Doubt and bravado:

  • “Can we eat them [crocuses]?... No, they're poisonous.”
    — Violet Brill (by phone) [08:52–09:13]
  • “I don’t believe her. I think we should eat it.”
    — Patricia Marx [09:18]

• City salad economics and social commentary:

  • “Salad bars in Manhattan are like $8.99 a pound. This is why Steven and I returned to Central Park to test our knowledge and save money on greens.”
    — Patricia Marx [05:51]

• Mock dangerous culinary ambitions:

  • “We should have a dinner party and serve this, and people would be so sick. You wouldn't need to have an entrée.”
    — Patricia Marx [10:13]

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Segment 3: The Syrian War Crimes Investigation (10:29–39:10)

Main Theme

A profound, meticulously reported investigation by Ben Taub into the Assad regime’s documented war crimes, the efforts to build legal cases against perpetrators, and the complexities of international justice.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

Syria’s Atrocities and Documentation Effort

• Scale of the catastrophe: Assad’s regime has detained tens of thousands, killed hundreds of thousands, and displaced half the country—sparking a massive refugee crisis engulfing Europe.
  — David Remnick [11:06]
• Failure of global response: Disillusionment among international officials; shifting hope to documentation for future justice.
  • “A large number of high-level UN and government officials...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.”
    — Ben Taub [12:12]

The CIJA and Evidence Building

• Introduction to CIJA:
  • The Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA), directed by William “Bill” Wiley, is secretly building war crimes cases using smuggled regime documents.
  • “In secret, this group has built a case that’s ready to go to trial...this has never happened in the history of international criminal justice.”
    — Ben Taub [14:09]
• Risks and methods:
  • Evidence is extracted at great risk; smugglers face death, detention, and suspicion from both regime loyalists and jihadi groups.
  • “Paper’s heavy...We’ve extracted from Syria approximately 600,000 pages...You need vehicles, those vehicles need to get through checkpoints.”
    — Bill Wiley [28:49]

Inside the Assad Regime’s Repression

• Chain of command:

  • CIJA’s evidence traces at-scale atrocities back to documented regime decisions, creating links to the highest officials.
  • “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.”
    — Ben Taub [37:55]

• Testimony of Mazen Alhamada:

  • A survivor of multiple arrests, torture, and imprisonment, Mazen’s story illustrates the horror and bureaucratic perversion of Assad’s apparatus.
  • “There was a 17-year-old boy behind him as he thumbprinted these documents...I promised myself that if I get out from jail, that I will tell everyone what happened just because of this kid.”
    — Mazen Alhamada, translated [32:16]
  • On torture: “They started beating him and demanding the names of opposition leaders…At the beginning, they were using cigarettes...Then they stripped him naked and put a plumbing clamp on his penis.”
    — Ben Taub, Mazen via translator [22:11–23:32]
  • “A UN investigation...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.”
    — Ben Taub [34:15]

• Defector ‘Caesar’ and photographic evidence:

  • A police photographer defected with 55,000 images of corpses, now critical evidence for war crimes investigations.
  • “Bodies...kept in the toilets in other detention facilities…[Caesar] hid flash drives in his socks containing 55,000 photographs.”
    — Ben Taub [35:26, 35:41]

The Elusiveness of Justice

• Building a case without a court:
  • Systematic documentation continues even without immediate legal mechanisms.
  • “When the day of justice does arrive, they’ll have better evidence than anyone has had since Nuremberg.”
    — Ben Taub [38:15]
  • “At some point...the most serious perpetrators in Syria...will be brought to justice.”
    — Bill Wiley [38:43]

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Segment 4: The Politics and Prospects of International Justice (39:10–49:09)

Main Theme

David Remnick interviews Professor Kevin Jon Heller, expert on war crimes trials, discussing the challenges in holding Assad (and similar figures) accountable for atrocities.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

• Limits of international prosecution:
  • “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.”
    — Kevin Jon Heller [40:32]
• Flawed precedents and lessons:
  • The Saddam Hussein trial serves as a cautionary tale—justice can falter, creating martyrs and provoking instability instead of healing wounds.
  • “It ended up turning him really into a martyr and just further destabilizing Iraq. That's the last thing we would want for an Assad in Syria.”
    — Kevin Jon Heller [43:10]
• Examples of successful trials:
  • “Really probably you do look at the Rwanda tribunal and the Yugoslav tribunal...They were credible, effective international institutions.”
    — Kevin Jon Heller [45:41]
• On defending war criminals:
  • “I would absolutely defend him...every defendant deserves a zealous defense...Your job as defense attorney is to ensure that they're convicted of what they actually did and not...what the prosecution says they did.”
    — Kevin Jon Heller [48:26; 48:31]
• Systemic challenges:
  • Justice is slow and often partial—the expectation of swift and total accountability is unrealistic in international law.

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Segment 5: Book, Movie, and Country Music Picks with Kathryn Schulz (49:09–54:42)

Main Theme

A return to lighter fare, with Kathryn Schulz sharing recent cultural delights—books, films, and music.

Highlights

• Elizabeth Bishop’s posthumous poetry:
  • The pleasure of reading her drafts in Edgar Allan Poe and the Jukebox.
• Film recommendation — “The Prestige”:
  • Kathryn is captivated by Christopher Nolan’s magician rivalry period piece, especially its cleverly repeated plot twists.
  • “The inability to solve it was thrilling.”
    — Kathryn Schulz [51:32]
• Love of country music:
  • “I think I might be one of the very few...New Yorker staff writers who is a dyed in the wool country music fan.”
    — Kathryn Schulz [52:03]
  • Country music praised for storytelling—Charlie Parker’s appreciation for “the stories, man.”
  • Recommends Miranda Lambert (with Pistol Annies) and their song “Trailer for Rent.”

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On the futility and necessity of justice:

• “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...your American spy. So one way or another, you’re going to lose.”
  — Bill Wiley [30:05]

On the horrors of the Assad regime:

• “As soon as they touched my backside, I said, I will admit...you've got the worst methods being used against you. You've gotta just, tell them what they want.”
  — Mazen Alhamada, via Moaz Mustafa [24:38]
• “I swore, I promised to myself that...when I get out from jail, that I will tell everyone what happened just because of this kid.”
  — Mazen Alhamada, via Moaz Mustafa [32:33]

On war crimes trials:

• “If we can give the Nazis a fair trial, and many of the Nazi defendants themselves said that they received fair trials, you know, I would like to think that no matter how dangerous the suspect, that we could give them fair trials today.”
  — Kevin Jon Heller [44:12]

On food, humor, and local obsessions:

• “If I die, I think probably the cause would be complications due to lesser celandine. That was too near hemlock.”
  — Patricia Marx [07:33]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:00–03:18 – Todd Neazel audio tour
• 03:18–10:29 – Central Park foraging adventure
• 10:29–39:10 – Syrian war crimes investigation, survivor testimony, evidence gathering (includes explicit torture testimony at [23:03–24:55])
• 39:10–49:09 – Conversation with Prof. Kevin Jon Heller on the challenges of achieving justice
• 49:09–54:42 – Kathryn Schulz’s book, movie, and country music picks

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Episode Takeaways

• Breadth of content: The episode traverses tone and substance—moving from playful lampooning and urban food adventures, through rigorous, urgent investigative journalism on war crimes, and back to culture and personal taste.
• Syrian segment impact: The CIJA’s work showcases both the depth of Syrian suffering and a glimmer of hope for justice, even if only in the long view.
• Sobering realities: Justice for atrocity is rare, slow, and complicated by realpolitik—but documentation and hope persist.
• A touch of joy: Even amid weighty themes, The New Yorker’s curiosity for storytelling—whether in salad, poetry, magic, or song—shines through.

Transcript

[David Remnick]

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

[Debbie (Todd Neazel's specialist)]

Hello and welcome to the rent stabilized department of Todd Neazel. I'm Debbie, a specialist in Todd Neazel, and I'm going to be your guide. Before you begin your journey through the world of Todd Neazel and his stuff, may I ask you to reduce the volume on your acoustiguide player to a polite level? The woman in 12A has had a B in her bonnet about me ever since I, Debbie, while okay, yes, a tiny bit drunk, mistook her door for Todd Neazel's late one night and jimmied it open. You are standing in Todd Kneazel's foyer. The faux faux marble table on your right is attributed to Todd Kneazel's mother, circa last Christmas. Take a moment to look through the mail. There should be a lot of it because Todd Kneazel is away skiing in Vermont with his brother. Is there a letter postmarked Milwaukee? Just curious. Proceed through the foyer and into the master bedroom. Examine the objet in the master bedroom. Here is the famous jar of pennies and the original green shag rug from Todd Neazel's college days. Pay close attention to the black lace brassiere in the bottom drawer of Todd Kneazel's bureau. You may be wondering what that brassiere is doing in this exhibit of the world of Todd Neazel and his stuff, I, Debbie, am wondering this too. We are now in the commodious coat closet in Todd Kniesel's foyer. Our eyes are drawn immediately to the striking composition of the skis and the parka against the back wall. This is a stunning visual statement about a man who is supposed to be on vacation skiing with his brother, isn't it? After you have scrolled through the caller ID log on the phone in the study looking for Todd Neazel's brother's number to see if Todd Niesel really went to Vermont. Place a prank call to Sue Ann Kraftsow. She lives in Milwaukee and she's in the book. Just past the doorway, you'll see a framed photograph. The subject of this photograph has not been identified with certainty, but Todd Kniesel scholars like me Debbie, believe that it depicts Sue Ann Kraftsow. Get a knife from the drawer next to the sink. When you pry the backing from the picture frame, a photograph of me, Debbie, will be revealed. Compare the two images. It would be unscholarly of me, Debbie, to point out the obvious aesthetic differences. But you, the viewer, can draw your own conclusions. We have come to the end of our retrospective of the world of Todd Kneazel and his. You can return your acoustic guide in the foyer. If you enjoyed yourself, call Todd Neazel and tell him so he can be reached at 3am he likes pizza 10 pies at a time. And Rizzo's Delivers.

[Host/Interviewer (likely David Remnick or another New Yorker Radio Hour host)]

Audio Tour performed by Stephanie Jansen. That's a story written by Patricia Marks, who's been contributing to the New Yorker since 1989. And as a reporter and as a storyteller, she is always game for everything. And we're about to hear just how game she is.

[Patricia Marks]

Patty I'm Patty Marks for the New Yorker Radio Hour. A long time ago, like 2011, it used to be that foodies scored the highest bragging points by eating stuff from impossibly inaccessible corners of the world. Today, on the other hand, the most fashionable food is local. In fact, the closer to your apartment that it was born and raised, the better I like to be up on the latest trends. Call me a follower. This is how a couple of weeks ago, my producer Steven and I found ourselves rooting around for edibles on a foraging tour of Central Park. Here it is.

[Stephen Valentino]

Come back here, you get a whole bunch of shoots.

[Patricia Marks]

So this tour was led by a guy named Steve Brill.

[Stephen Valentino]

Okay, who can tell me which mustard this one is?

[Patricia Marks]

Who's a naturalist who's been taking people on these walks for decades. He is in his 60s and he wears a pith hat.

[Ben Taub]

The leaves and seed pods have very little flavor, but the flower tastes like broccoli.

[Host/Interviewer (likely David Remnick or another New Yorker Radio Hour host)]

Who likes broccoli?

[Patricia Marks]

I think he sees himself to Central park what Mr. Rogers was to the neighborhood. His co guide is his exuberant 11 year old daughter Violet. If you bite right into the middle.

[David Remnick]

Of the plant, then there's a burst.

[Patricia Marks]

Of nectar who knows a lot about edible plants. And when she imparts this knowledge, she tends to jump up on the rocks and the trees.

[David Remnick]

Okay everyone, this is sassafras, the roots you can use to make tea.

[Patricia Marks]

She reminded me of a vegan Shirley Temple. I have to admit that while I like nature, if I'm in it too long, I get a little bored. So foraging adds an element of shopping to just walking through the park. The other thing about foraging that I find appealing is that salad bars in Manhattan are like $8.99 a pound. This is why Steven and I returned to Central park to test our knowledge.

[Ben Taub]

What is that green over there?

[Patricia Marks]

Save money on greens.

[Ben Taub]

I just kind of Feel like a.

[Patricia Marks]

Goat right now and try to build a salad that wouldn't kill us before dessert. Maybe we can get those people to taste it over there and see if they survive. I don't think this is filled garlic. Really?

[Ben Taub]

It sort of smells oniony to me.

[Patricia Marks]

It does. I'm going to taste it. Should I? It's filled garlic. I'll take a little. Let me get the bag out. Okay.

[Ben Taub]

I'll cover you.

[Patricia Marks]

I should say that what we're doing is illegal. You're not allowed to remove plants from Central Park. And in fact, In, I think 1986, Steve Brill was handcuffed and arrested for removing a dandelion from the lawn of Central Park. But he was let off because he'd eaten the evidence. Oh, look, hemlock. It's either hemlock or parsley.

[Ben Taub]

I think that that's hemlock, Baby hemlock.

[Patricia Marks]

Okay. With all this hemlock, you'd think there'd be more dead dogs around here.

[Ben Taub]

All right. This is the day, Lily.

[Patricia Marks]

Well, it's hard to know if it's a day. They're those hollow, dried up sticks. They're something, aren't they? No. You know, I do feel it might be a little early in the season. I feel like we're here before the store opens. I think this is knotwood. And that thing next to it. Hold on. Are these roots that you can get? No, they're not. Oh, yeah.

[Ben Taub]

I can taste the roundup in that. Yeah.

[Patricia Marks]

Like it?

[Ben Taub]

Not particularly, no.

[Patricia Marks]

If I die, I think probably the cause would be complications due to lesser celandine. That was too near hemlock. Burdock. No, I think that's just burdock. Look alike. It could be.

[Ben Taub]

Your hands are smaller than mine. I think you can reach through the fence and get them.

[Patricia Marks]

We should get an F in foraging. Now there are dandelions. Wait a minute. Are these pansies?

[Ben Taub]

No, I think these are crocuses.

[Patricia Marks]

Yeah, they are crocuses. What do you think about crocuses? I think I've seen crocuses on plates, but somehow it seems maybe kind of crossing the line to eat a crocus. They're so pretty. They're not that pretty. Should we eat one?

[Ben Taub]

Well, I would feel more comfortable if we consulted the book or expert before we try and eat a crocus.

[Patricia Marks]

Yes. Let's call Violet and see what she says about crocuses.

[Host/Interviewer (likely David Remnick or another New Yorker Radio Hour host)]

Please enjoy this horizon, Rainbow, while your party is reached.

[Ben Taub]

This is Violet Braille. How may I help you?

[Patricia Marks]

Hi, Violet. It's Patty Marks and Steve Valentino and We're in the park. We were on your foraging tour, and we have a question about crocuses. Can we eat them? Can we eat them? Are they. Yeah. No, they're poisonous. They are poisonous. But can we. But can we eat them?

[Ben Taub]

No, you cannot eat them.

[Patricia Marks]

I'm kidding. Thanks. Bye.

[Ben Taub]

Bye.

[Patricia Marks]

I don't believe her. I think we should eat it. So are you feeling good about this salad? Yeah, I'm feeling pretty good. What should we put in it? Mayonnaise, croutons.

[Ben Taub]

Yeah, like, we could get a tomato. Maybe some, like, little mozzarella, you think?

[Patricia Marks]

Throw away the greens. This is some field garlic. You want some? Really good specimen. It's not as good as a scallion. Well, no, it's as good as a scallion, but a lot of effort to get a scallion. You could serve it at a dinner party and people would just think it was so expensive. It didn't taste good. It looks delicate. I could see that on a plate, couldn't you? Yeah, that would plate.

[Ben Taub]

It would plate beautifully.

[Patricia Marks]

It would plate beautifully. We should have a dinner party and serve this, and people would be so sick. You wouldn't need to have an entree.

[Host/Interviewer (likely David Remnick or another New Yorker Radio Hour host)]

A small editor's. Some plants were harmed in the making of that story. That's New Yorker staff writer Patricia Marks, along with Stephen Valentino. And this is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. Welcome back to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Now, admittedly, we started the show off on a very lighthearted note, but we're going to turn now to much more serious stuff. Infinitely more serious. For the last five years, Syria's President, Bashar Al Assad has framed the revolution in his country as a conspiracy fueled entirely by foreign powers. His security agencies have detained tens of thousands of people, killed hundreds of thousands, and displaced possibly half of the entire country, creating a refugee crisis that has absolutely engulfed the European continent. And while ISIS commits its atrocities in public, the Syrian regime is engaging in violence and repression of its own people. That is the stuff of nightmares. This is without a doubt a tragic and seemingly hopeless situation. But there are people out there who are not giving up. Ben Taub has 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. Now, this is a very difficult story, and we're going to hear some accounts of torture that are upsetting. We'll give you that warning before it happens. But here's Ben.

[Ben Taub]

I've 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.

[Host/Interviewer (likely David Remnick or another New Yorker Radio Hour host)]

Hello?

[Translator (Mariam Basid or Moaz Mustafa)]

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.

[Translator (Mariam Basid or Moaz Mustafa)]

You know, the Bill Wiley program, the.

[Ben Taub]

Organization called the cija. I haven't heard of this. To the Commission on International justice and Accountability.

[Translator (Mariam Basid or Moaz Mustafa)]

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. They've hired non Syrians and hired people who've worked in tribunals and they've prepared case dossiers and pretrial briefs and indictments.

[Translator (Mariam Basid or Moaz Mustafa)]

And all sorts of stuff that would.

[Stephen Valentino]

Be ready to go to court if.

[Patricia Marks]

You had a court to go to. 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.

[Debbie (Todd Neazel's specialist)]

Russia and China vetoed on Thursday a.

[David Remnick]

Resolution to refer Syria to the International Criminal Court.

[Debbie (Todd Neazel's specialist)]

Russian UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin defended his position.

[Ben Taub]

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 international 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.

[Stephen Valentino]

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 sija's evidence room, which is hidden underground. The room was small, lit by fluorescent lights, and packed with cardboard boxes.

[Stephen Valentino]

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.

[Stephen Valentino]

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 assign or initial the documents and in some cases with comments as they pass.

[Ben Taub]

Them along, 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.

[Stephen Valentino]

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 of 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 Basid.

[David Remnick]

My official position in this was that I was the head of Ultani Malish, head of Information Office and Documents.

[Ben Taub]

But the government 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.

[David Remnick]

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?

[David Remnick]

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.

[David Remnick]

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.

[Translator (Mariam Basid or Moaz Mustafa)]

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 Moaz 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.

[Translator (Mariam Basid or Moaz Mustafa)]

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 gonna let this guy is gonna execute you, we're.

[Ben Taub]

Gonna kill you, we're gonna. 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.

[Translator (Mariam Basid or Moaz Mustafa)]

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.

[Translator (Mariam Basid or Moaz Mustafa)]

No 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.

[Translator (Mariam Basid or Moaz Mustafa)]

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.

[Translator (Mariam Basid or Moaz Mustafa)]

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

[Ben Taub]

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

[Translator (Mariam Basid or Moaz Mustafa)]

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

[Ben Taub]

Which was true, right?

[Translator (Mariam Basid or Moaz Mustafa)]

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 gotta 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.

[Translator (Mariam Basid or Moaz Mustafa)]

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. He opens it. He Says, what was the type of weapon? I say it was an AK47. He says, how many clips did you have? Tell him, how many clips do you want me to have? You're the one that has to confess. I said, 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 sp 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.

[Translator (Mariam Basid or Moaz Mustafa)]

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

[Host/Interviewer (likely David Remnick or another New Yorker Radio Hour host)]

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 Mazen went through. Ben Taub continues our story.

[Ben Taub]

The 60th'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.

[Stephen Valentino]

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.

[Stephen Valentino]

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 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.

[Stephen Valentino]

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.

[Stephen Valentino]

Smartphones would come out, there'd be great joy and shouting 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 who 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.

[Stephen Valentino]

But take the documents first and set them aside till they can be moved 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.

[Stephen Valentino]

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 know 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.

[Patricia Marks]

But.

[Ben Taub]

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 and buried in the ground. And they're waiting until it's safe to bring them out. Jihadi groups are extremely hostile to the CIJA investigators. The concept of international criminal justice is totally lost on them.

[Stephen Valentino]

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.

[Stephen Valentino]

She didn't know what it was. Someone asked her to keep it. Nobody bought it, explained to her what it was. No one showed up to tell, 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 CEJA headquarters in Europe, a team of translators, analysts and lawyers poured through them. Then the SIJA investigators in Syria took hundreds of witness statements with 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 refer to the courts.

[Translator (Mariam Basid or Moaz Mustafa)]

You'Re sick of the 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.

[Translator (Mariam Basid or Moaz Mustafa)]

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. You know, 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 back. Animals. Take this, take this pig inside him, inside his face. I mean, it was fire. It was melting. It was this kid, it was this child that I promised myself. I. I swore, I promised to myself that Bashar said when. 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 so sorry, Moaz. I. I don't know what to say.

[Translator (Mariam Basid or Moaz Mustafa)]

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

[Ben Taub]

Hamada's health got worse and worse. 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 Meza in Damascus. Assad's presidential palace sits on top of the. 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.

[Translator (Mariam Basid or Moaz Mustafa)]

You're saying you are a terrorist? A terrorist.

[Patricia Marks]

Terrorist.

[Translator (Mariam Basid or Moaz Mustafa)]

Like screaming back at them, I'm not a terrorist. Luck, 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.

[Translator (Mariam Basid or Moaz Mustafa)]

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. I 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.

[Translator (Mariam Basid or Moaz Mustafa)]

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.

[Translator (Mariam Basid or Moaz Mustafa)]

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.

[Patricia Marks]

They say they're sorest is a defector who had been in the Syrian military.

[Host/Interviewer (likely David Remnick or another New Yorker Radio Hour host)]

Police, an insider they've code named 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.

[Translator (Mariam Basid or Moaz Mustafa)]

He seemed like somebody like us. He had. I could see he was a 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.

[Translator (Mariam Basid or Moaz Mustafa)]

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

[Ben Taub]

Hamada returned to Deir EZ Zor. 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.

[Stephen Valentino]

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.

[Stephen Valentino]

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 Defense, senior military leaders, the leaders of the security intelligence services, and so forth. They will be brought to justice.

[Host/Interviewer (likely David Remnick or another New Yorker Radio Hour host)]

Bill Wiley of the Commission for International justice and Accountability. There's more reporting from Ben Taub on the siege of efforts in Syria in this week's issue of the New Yorker. You can find his [e-mail] I'm David Remnick. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. 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 we 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.

[Kevin John Heller]

Bashar al Assad at the International Criminal Court or anywhere?

[Host/Interviewer (likely David Remnick or another New Yorker Radio Hour host)]

Well, anywhere, really.

[Kevin John 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 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, you know, escape the noose.

[Host/Interviewer (likely David Remnick or another New Yorker Radio Hour host)]

You served as Human Rights Watch's external legal advisor 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 John 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 ever expected. And it is a warning lesson because it ended up turning him really, 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.

[Host/Interviewer (likely David Remnick or another New Yorker Radio Hour host)]

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

[Kevin John 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 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, you know, I would like to think that no matter how dangerous the suspect, that we could give them fair trials today.

[Host/Interviewer (likely David Remnick or another New Yorker Radio Hour host)]

Well, that leads to the question of who judges? Who gets to judge? You know, 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 John Heller]

It's an extremely fair question. And the more multilateral a 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 neocolonialism, or this is just, you know, the west using an institution as a puppet to further its economic interests. You know, that is the advantage of that kind of venue.

[Host/Interviewer (likely David Remnick or another New Yorker Radio Hour host)]

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 John 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 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 just a couple of weeks ago, he was eventually convicted. So it can happen. It's just we really need to temper our expectations and temper 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.

[Host/Interviewer (likely David Remnick or another New Yorker Radio Hour host)]

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 John 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 crime crimes is probably quite overwhelming.

[Host/Interviewer (likely David Remnick or another New Yorker Radio Hour host)]

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

[Kevin John 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. That the answer is really no at the International Criminal Court.

[Host/Interviewer (likely David Remnick or another New Yorker Radio Hour host)]

Does systematic torture change the picture at all?

[Kevin John 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 prosecution. You have, you know, 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.

[Host/Interviewer (likely David Remnick or another New Yorker Radio Hour host)]

Would you defend him?

[Kevin John Heller]

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

[Host/Interviewer (likely David Remnick or another New Yorker Radio Hour host)]

And you would do it on what basis?

[Kevin John 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.

[Host/Interviewer (likely David Remnick or another New Yorker Radio Hour host)]

Professor Heller, thank you very much. Thank you, Kevin. John Heller is an academic and criminal lawyer, and he's the author of a book about the Nuremberg Tribunals. Now, I think we're all ready to take a break from war crimes, so let's pop in on one of my colleagues, Kathryn Schultz. Catherine won a National Magazine Award recently for an article about an earthquake or a potential earthquake that threatens the Pacific Northwest. And she's just come back from a reporting trip in, I think it was Wyoming, right?

[David Remnick]

That's correct.

[Host/Interviewer (likely David Remnick or another New Yorker Radio Hour host)]

I don't know when you have time to read all the books that you're not reviewing, but you seem to read them by the boatload. What's been the latest?

[David Remnick]

You know, a book that is not new to the world, but is new to me, which is a 2006 posthumous volume of Elizabeth Bishop poetry called Edgar Allan Poe and the Jukebox. Elizabeth Bishop was famously a perfectionist. I mean, famously someone who would literally spend decades trying to get one poem just absolutely perfect. So there's something very pleasing, especially for an inferior but fellow perfectionist, to see the messy drafts. I found it very charming to see her in this kind of more fully human, less kind of chiseled to perfection mode.

[Host/Interviewer (likely David Remnick or another New Yorker Radio Hour host)]

And while you were reading that, you were also.

[David Remnick]

While I was reading that. Well, one thing I was doing is I was watching a movie that actually came out that same year that I'd missed, which is the Christopher Nolan movie, the Prestige. Have you seen this movie, David? Ah, well, I have an activity for you for tonight.

[Host/Interviewer (likely David Remnick or another New Yorker Radio Hour host)]

No, not this movie.

[David Remnick]

So I not only had I not seen this movie, I had never even heard of it. And it is, it's so wonderful. It is a movie about a rivalry between two magicians. It's set in the kind of leap 19th century. And part of the pleasure of it is just like period piece pleasure. Michael Caine is in it and Hugh Jackman.

[Host/Interviewer (likely David Remnick or another New Yorker Radio Hour host)]

And in fairness, Michael Caine's in everything.

[David Remnick]

Michael Caine is in everything. He's like totally playing Michael Caine, but he's, you know, doing it well as he does. And midway through, all of a sudden, David Bowie shows up playing Nikola Tesla, which is a very surprising turn of events in the plot.

[Ben Taub]

What's conducting the electricity? Our bodies, Mr. Angier, are quite capable.

[Stephen Valentino]

Of conducting and indeed producing energy.

[David Remnick]

What's great about this movie is that it is a magic trick, or the kind of contemporary magic tricks where they tell you what you're gonna what they're gonna do and you still can't see it. You can't understand it. I mean, it tells you exactly what it's doing and you don't understand that. That's what's telling you. Hook, line and synchrony. Here's the best part. It literally, plot wise, it does the exact same thing to you twice. And you fall for it as bad the second time as you do the first time. And I just found it as someone who watches movies for the pleasure of solving them, the inability to solve it was thrilling.

[Host/Interviewer (likely David Remnick or another New Yorker Radio Hour host)]

And what's your other pick?

[David Remnick]

My last pick, David. I think I might be one of the very few. I could be wrong, but I think I'm one of the few New Yorker staff writers who is a dyed in the wool country music fan.

[Host/Interviewer (likely David Remnick or another New Yorker Radio Hour host)]

And there's a few around the joint.

[David Remnick]

Okay, I'm happy to hear that. I'm gonna take them all out for drinks.

[Debbie (Todd Neazel's specialist)]

Yeah.

[David Remnick]

You probably know this, that Charlie Parker was also a huge country music fan. And when someone asked him why, he said quite wonderfully, he said for the stories, man. And that. And he's right. Right. They're narratively brilliant. You get, you know, this kind of three minute story arc. That's perfect. So here's one I've been listening to lately. I'm a big Miranda Lambert fan. I am eagerly awaiting what I'm sure is going to be her slam bang breakup album that should be out soon. But she used to be with this band called the Pistol Annie's and they have a wonderful song called Trailer for Rent. See if you can cue that.

[Host/Interviewer (likely David Remnick or another New Yorker Radio Hour host)]

Let's pull that up on Spotify. See what we got here.

[David Remnick]

I've got David dancing. You guys. Really, it's a good sign.

[Patricia Marks]

I said to the man I need.

[David Remnick]

To play some ad. It is, as you can guess from the title, it is about a woman who's marched down to the local newspaper to take out a wanted ad or not a wanted ad. I guess a classified putting her trailer up for rent because her relationship has fallen apart.

[Ben Taub]

No down payment.

[David Remnick]

Comes with some holes and dance where.

[Ben Taub]

I got tired of his.

[Debbie (Todd Neazel's specialist)]

Call.

[David Remnick]

If you're interested Trailer friend. It's pre craigslist or just in a not very Craigslist friendly part of the country setting is everything 10,000 years. He's still sitting right there on the couch.

[Ben Taub]

I play the Mrs. I've done the dishes. About time somebody got the hell out. My phone ought to be ringing right about me.

[Host/Interviewer (likely David Remnick or another New Yorker Radio Hour host)]

Fantastic. Thanks a lot, Kath.

[David Remnick]

My pleas.

[Host/Interviewer (likely David Remnick or another New Yorker Radio Hour host)]

Staff writer Kathryn Schultz on a book by Elizabeth Bishop, the movie the Prestige and country singer Miranda Lambert. That should keep you busy this weekend. That's the show. Thanks a lot for listening and I hope you'll join us next week.

[David Remnick]

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 Toon 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 Churrina Endowment Fund.