[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 26 (Wednesday, February 12, 2014)]
[Senate]
[Pages S916-S918]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        MASS ATROCITIES IN SYRIA

  Mr. McCAIN. Mr. President, I rise to appeal to the conscience of my 
colleagues and my fellow citizens about the mass atrocities that the 
Assad regime is perpetrating in Syria. When the images and horrors of 
this conflict occasionally show up on our television screens, the 
impulse of many Americans is to change the channel. But we must not 
look away. We must not divert our eyes from the suffering of the Syrian 
people, for if we do, we ignore, we sacrifice that which is most 
precious in ourselves--our ability to empathize with the suffering of 
others, to share it, to acknowledge through our own sense of revulsion 
that what is happening in Syria is a stain on the collective conscience 
of moral peoples everywhere.
  I appeal to my colleagues not to look away from the images I will 
show. I want to warn all who are watching these are graphic and 
disturbing pictures, but they are the real face of war and human 
suffering in Syria today--a war our Nation has the power to help end 
but which we are failing to do.
  These images are drawn from a cache of more than 55,000 photographs 
that were taken between March 2011 and August 2013 by a Syrian military 
policeman, whose job it was to document the horrors the Assad regime 
committed against political prisoners in its jails. This individual 
eventually defected to the opposition along with his photographs, which 
were meticulously reviewed and verified by three renowned international 
war crimes prosecutors and a team of independent forensic experts. They 
compiled their findings in a report late last month that provides 
direct evidence that the Assad regime was responsible for the 
systematic abuse, torture, starvation, and killing of approximately 
11,000 detainees in what amounts to war crimes and crimes against 
humanity. These are just a few of those pictures and far from the most 
disturbing.
  I urge every Member of Congress and the American people to read the 
full report, which can be found on both cnn.com and theguardian.com. 
Although only a handful of these gruesome images have been released 
publicly, the authors have provided their own startling commentary on 
what they reveal.
  David Crane, the first chief prosecutor of the Special Court for 
Sierra Leone and the man responsible for indicting former Liberian 
President Charles Taylor for crimes against humanity, stated that many 
of the photographs show groupings of bodies in ways that ``looked like 
a slaughterhouse.'' Crane characterized the Syrian Government as a 
``callous, industrial machine grinding its citizens'' that is guilty of 
``industrial-age mass killing.''
  Professor Sir Geoffrey Nice, lead prosecutor in the case against 
former Yugoslav President Milosevic at The Hague, reported that the 
systematic way the bodies were cataloged and the effort given to 
obscure the true causes of death leads one to ``reasonably infer that 
this is a pattern of behavior'' for Assad's forces.
  But perhaps most chilling of all, Sir Desmond de Silva, who also 
served as a chief prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, 
stated that the emaciated bodies revealed in these pictures are 
``reminiscent of the pictures of those who were found still alive in 
the Nazi death camps after World War II.''
  Yesterday, in a hearing of the Committee on Armed Services, I asked 
the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, whether these 
photographs, which clearly depict ghastly

[[Page S917]]

crimes against humanity, are authentic. The Director said he has ``no 
reason to doubt'' their authenticity. The United Nations is now doing 
its own assessment of these images, and all of us should fully support 
that. It is important to have the broadest possible validation of these 
images, and I am confident the U.N. team will validate them. After all, 
does anyone seriously believe the Assad regime does not have the means, 
motive, and opportunity to murder 11,000 people in its prisons?
  Indeed, this kind of inhumane cruelty is a pattern of behavior within 
the Syrian Government. According to a detailed U.N. report issued at 
the end of January, Assad's forces have systematically, as part of 
their doctrine, used children as human shields and threatened to kill 
the children of opposition members if they did not surrender. The U.N. 
also detailed the arrest, detention, torture, and sexual abuse of 
thousands of children by government forces. I will spare you the 
remaining details, as they are unspeakable, but again I urge you to 
read the entire report which can be found on the Web site of the United 
Nations.
  I also recommend that my colleagues read of the war crimes that Human 
Rights Watch has been documenting. They have reported, for example, on 
how Syrian authorities have deliberately used explosives and bulldozers 
to demolish thousands of residential buildings, and in some cases 
entire neighborhoods, for no military reason whatsoever, just as a form 
of collective punishment of Syrian civilians.
  Human Rights Watch researchers have also documented the toll of the 
Syrian Government's airstrike campaign against Aleppo and Damascus and, 
in particular, the regime's use over the past few months of what has 
become known as ``barrel bombs.'' For my colleagues who are not aware 
of them, barrel bombs are oil drums or other large containers packed 
with explosives, fuel, shrapnel, glass, and all manner of crude lethal 
material. Their sole purpose is to maim, kill, and terrorize as many 
people as possible when they are indiscriminately dropped from Syrian 
Government aircraft on schools and bakeries and mosques and other 
civilian areas. In one stark video of a barrel bomb's aftermath, a man 
stands in front of a child's body and cries out: Oh God, we have had 
enough. Please help us.
  These are just some of the many reasons our Director of National 
Intelligence referred to the Syrian crisis yesterday as ``an 
apocalyptic disaster.'' With more than 130,000 people dead, after more 
than one-third of the Syrian population has been driven from their 
homes, no truer words were ever spoken.
  But this apocalyptic disaster in Syria is no longer just a 
humanitarian tragedy for one country, it is a regional conflict and an 
emerging national security threat to us. The regime's war crimes are 
being aided and abetted by thousands of Hezbollah fighters and Iranian 
agents on the ground, as well as Russian weaponry that continues to 
flow into the Assad government, even as Russia works with us to remove 
the Assad regime's chemical weapons, a truly Orwellian situation.
  The conflict in Syria is devastating its neighbors. Lebanon is 
suffering from increasing bombings and cross-border attacks by both the 
Syrian government and opposition fighters in response to Hezbollah's 
role in the fighting. Unofficial estimates suggest that half of 
Lebanon's population will soon be Syrian refugees. Similar estimates 
suggest that Syrian refugees now represent 15 percent of the population 
in Jordan, which is straining to manage the social instability this 
entails. Turkey has been destabilized. Perhaps most worrisome of all, 
the conflict in Syria is largely to blame for the resurgence of Al 
Qaeda in Iraq, which has grown into the larger and more lethal Islamic 
State of Iraq and Syria, which now possesses a safe haven that spans 
large portions of both countries. Nowhere is this more threatening or 
more heartbreaking than in Fallujah, the Iraqi city where hundreds of 
U.S. troops were killed and wounded fighting to rid it of the 
terrorists and extremists, but where the black flags of Al Qaeda now 
hang above the city.
  The sanctuary that Al Qaeda now enjoys, thanks to the crisis in 
Syria, increasingly poses a direct threat to U.S. national security and 
that of our closest allies and partners. The Secretary of Homeland 
Security, Mr. Jeh Johnson said, ``Syria is now a matter of homeland 
security.'' The Director of National Intelligence has referred to the 
Al Qaeda sanctuary in Syria and Iraq as ``a new FATA''--the tribal 
areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan where Al Qaeda planned the September 
11 terrorist attacks.
  Indeed, Director Clapper has warned that Al Qaeda affiliated 
terrorists in Syria now aspire to attack the homeland. If the September 
11 attacks should have taught us anything, it is that global terrorists 
who occupy ungoverned spaces and seek to plot and plan attacks against 
us can pose a direct threat to our national security.
  This was Afghanistan, September 10, 2001. That is what top officials 
in this administration are now warning us that Syria is becoming today. 
The conflict in Syria is a threat to our national interest, but it is 
more than that. It is and should be an affront to our conscience.
  Images such as these should not be just a source of heartbreak and 
sympathy, they should be a call to action. It was not too long ago, 
just a few months after the revolution in Syria began, that President 
Obama issued his Presidential Study Directive on Mass Atrocities. In it 
he stated, ``Preventing mass atrocities and genocide is a core national 
security interest and a core moral responsibility of the United 
States.''
  He went on to say:

       Our security is affected when masses of civilians are 
     slaughtered, refugees flow across borders, and murderers 
     wreak havoc on regional stability and livelihoods.

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

       Too often, the world has failed to prevent the killing of 
     innocents on a massive scale. And we are haunted by the 
     atrocities that we did not stop and the lives we did not 
     save.

  Just last September in his address to the U.N. General Assembly, 
President Obama said this:

       [T]he principle of sovereignty is at the center of our 
     international order. But sovereignty cannot be a shield for 
     tyrants to commit wanton murder, or an excuse for the 
     international community to turn a blind eye. While we need to 
     be modest in our belief that we can remedy every evil, while 
     we need to be mindful that the world is full of unintended 
     consequences, should we really accept the notion that the 
     world is powerless in the face of a Rwanda, or Srebrenica? If 
     that's the world that people want to live in, they should say 
     so, and reckon with the cold logic of mass graves.

  That was our President. That was the President of the United States. 
I agree with every word of what he said. But how are we to reconcile 
these stirring words with the reality of these images from Syria? How 
do we explain how the leader of the free world, who says that it is the 
moral obligation of the United States to do what we can to prevent the 
worst atrocities in our world, is not doing more to stop the atrocities 
that are occurring every single day in Syria?
  Where is that President Obama today? Where is the President Obama who 
spoke so movingly of the moral responsibilities that great power 
confers? Where is the President Obama who has said he refuses to accept 
that brutal tyrants can slaughter their people with impunity, while the 
most powerful nation in the history of the world looks on and stands 
by? Where is the recognition that the ``cold logic of mass graves'' is 
right there, right in front of us, Syria, today?
  Yet our government is doing what we have sadly done too often in the 
past. We are diverting our eyes. We try to comfort our guilty 
consciences by telling ourselves that we are not doing nothing, but it 
is a claim made in bad faith, for everyone concedes that nothing we are 
doing is equal to the horrors we face.
  We are telling ourselves that we are too tired and weary to get more 
involved; that Syria is not our problem; that helping to resolve it is 
not our responsibility. We are telling ourselves that we have no good 
options, as if there are ever good options when it comes to foreign 
policy in the real world. We are telling ourselves that we might have 
been able to do something at one point, but that it is too late now, as 
if such words from a leader of the world's only global power will be 
any comfort to the Syrian mother who will lose her child tomorrow.

[[Page S918]]

  We are telling ourselves what Neville Chamberlain once told himself 
about a different problem from hell in an earlier time; that is, and I 
quote Neville Chamberlain, ``a quarrel in a far away country between 
people of whom we know nothing.'' Where is our outrage? Where is our 
shame?
  It is true that our options to help in the conflict in Syria were 
never good, and they certainly are worse and fewer now. But no one 
should believe that we are without options, even now, and no one should 
believe that doing something meaningful to help in Syria requires us to 
rerun the war in Iraq. That is an excuse for inaction. That is not a 
question of options or capabilities; it is a question of will.
  These images of the human disaster in Syria haunt me. They should 
haunt all of my colleagues and all Americans. But what haunts me even 
more than the terror unfolding before our eyes in Syria is the thought 
that we will continue to do nothing meaningful about it, and how that 
deadens our national conscience, how it calls into question the moral 
sources of our great power and the foundations of our global 
leadership, and how many years from now an American President will 
stand before the world and the people of Syria, as previous Presidents 
have done after previous inaction in the face of mass atrocities in far 
away lands, and say what all of us know to be true right now: That we 
could have done more to stop the suffering of others. We could have 
used the power we possess, limited though it may be; we could have 
exercised the options at our disposal, imperfect though they may be, 
and we could have done something. It is to our everlasting 
embarrassment that we did not.
  That future President will apologize for our current failure. Shame 
on us if we let history repeat itself that way.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The majority leader.
  Mr. REID. Mr. President, I very much appreciate Senator McCain's 
stunning delivery on this horrible situation going on in Syria.

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