[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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