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

Episode Date: April 15, 2016

On this week’s show, Ben Taub shares his reporting on a group that’s gathering top-secret documents tying Bashar al-Assad’s regime to mass torture and killings, and David Remnick talks with a war-crimes expert about how to run a fair tribunal. Plus, Patricia Marx goes foraging in Central Park, and Kathryn Schulz explains her love of country music—it’s the stories, man. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios. Hello, and welcome to the Rent Stabilized Department of Todd Neasel. I'm Debbie, a specialist in Todd Neasel, and I'm going to be your guide. Before you begin your journey through the world of Todd Neasel and his stuff, may I ask you to reduce the volume on your Acousticide player to a polite level? The woman in 12A has had a B in her bonnet about me ever since I, Debbie, well, okay, yes, a tiny bit drunk, mistook her door for Todd Neasles late one night and Jimmy did open.

You are standing in Todd Neasel's foyer. The faux-foam marble table on your right is attributed to Todd Neasel's mother, circa last Christmas. Take a moment to look through the mail. There should be a lot of it because Todd Neasel 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 object in the master bedroom.

Here is the famous jar of pennies and the original green shag rug from Todd Niesel's college days. Pay close attention to the black lace brazier in the bottom drawer of Todd Niesel's bureau. You may be wondering what that brisier is doing in this exhibit of the world of Todd Neasel and his stuff. I, Debbie, am wondering this too. We are now in the commodious coat closet and Todd Neasel'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 Niesel's brother's number to see if Todd Niesel really went to Vermont, place a prank call to Sue and Craftsau. 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 Niesel scholars, like me, Debbie,

believe that it depicts Sue and Craft. SAU. 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 Niesel. and his shi-you can return your acoustic guide in the foyer. If you enjoyed yourself, call Todd Neasel and tell him so. He can be reached at 3 a.m. He likes pizza, 10 pies at a time, and Rizzo's Delivers. 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. 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, Stephen and I, found ourselves rooting around for edibles on a foraging tour of Central Park.

Here they have come back. Here, you get a whole bunch of shoots. So this tour was led by a guy named Steve Brill. Okay, who can tell me which mustard this one is? 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. The leaves and seed pods have very little flavor,

but the flower tastes like broccoli. Who likes broccoli? 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 of the plant, then there's a burst 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. Okay, everyone, this is sassafras. The roots you can use to make tea. 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 Stephen and I return to Central Park to test our knowledge. What is that green over there? Save money on greens.

I just kind of feel like a 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? It sort of smells onion-y to me. 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, I'll cover you. 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. I think that that's hemlock. Baby hemlock, okay. With all this hemlock, you'd think there'd be more dead dogs around here. All right, this is the day lily. Well, it's hard to know. This is the day with a flower. It might be.

They're those hollow, dried up sticks. There's something, aren't they? Mm-mm-mm. 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 not wood and that thing next to it. Hold on.

Are these roots that you can get? No, they're not. Oh, yeah, I can taste the round-up in that. Yeah. Like it? Not particularly. No. No.

If I die, I think probably the cross-reux. cause would be complications due to lesser selendine that was too near hemlock. Burdock? No. I think that's just... Burdock look alike. It could be. Your hands are small in the mind. I think you can reach through the fence and get them. We should get an F in foraging.

Now, there are dandelions. Wait a minute. Are these pansies? No, I think these are crocuses. 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 Well, they're not that pretty

Should we eat one? Well, I would feel more comfortable If we consulted the book or expert Before we try and eat a crocus Yes, let's call Violet and see what she says about crocuses Please enjoy this horizon ring back zone While your party is reached Hi, Violet. It's Patty Marks and Steve Valentino, and we're in the park. We were on your foraging tour.

Oh, yeah. We have a question about crocuses. Can we eat them? Can we eat them? Yeah. Um, no, they're poisonous. They are poisonous. But can we eat them? No, you cannot eat them. I'm kidding. Thanks. Bye. Bye. 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. Yeah, like we could get a tomato, maybe some, like, little mozzarella, you think? Throw away the greens. This is some filled garlic. You want some? It's a really good specimen. It's not as good as a scape.

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.

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. A small editor's note, some plants were harmed in the making of that story. That's New Yorker staff writer Patricia Marks, along with Steve. and 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 ten times. He's tens of thousands of people, killed hundreds of thousands, and displaced possibly half of the entire country, creating a refugee crisis that is 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 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. Hi, this is Ben.

Yeah, this is Ben. Thanks so much for it. 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 U.S. 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. I don't, I haven't heard of this. 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. Right, right, right. So that's the point. Basically, war crimes are being committed. Everyone knows about them, the barrel bombs, the executions, the torture. but there's just no court to go to, except there is, in theory. It's called the International Criminal Court,

and it was created to handle these kinds of situations. The field of international criminal justice basically came into existence after World War II when Nazi officials were tried for war crimes at Nuremberg. The ICC was formalized in 2002. But Syria isn't a member state of the court, so to get there, you have to go through the UN Security Council. And two years ago, Russia and China blocked an attempt to start that process.

Russia and China vetoed on Thursday a resolution to refer Syria to the International Criminal Court. Russian UN ambassador Vitali Cherkin defended his position. We are convinced that justice in Syria will eventually prevail. Those guilty of perpetuating grave crimes will be punished. But in order for this to happen, peace is for Iran. needed. So the siege just 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. My name is William Wiley. Everyone calls me Bill, and I'm the executive director of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, the CIGA. Wiley worked for the Yugoslavia Tribunal, the Rwanda Tribunal, and the International Criminal Court.

And he brought me to the Siege's evidence room, which is hidden underground. The room was small, lit by fluorescent lights, and packed with cardboard boxes. So what we have here, as you can see, are boxes and boxes. boxes of documents. There's about 600,000 pages of material here. The boxes are stacked neatly on metal shelves. Each of them has its own evidence number. 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 more initial the documents.

and in some cases with comments as they passed them along. Just like any office, except these all came out of Syria and people risked their lives to get them to the siege. Wiley specializes in this type of linkage, how war crimes are institutionalized through a chain of command, 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. But how can Assad and his deputy, 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 Bathurst 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 crisis 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 thing. A couple months ago, I called Abdul Majid Barakot. 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, Barakot drafted a summary that the crisis cell used to guide their meetings. We spoke through a translator named Mariam Buzid.

My official position in this was that I was the head of... Head of Information Office and Documents. But the government made a mistake by giving him that job. Barracott 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. Meeting minutes from that would be written up and that would be sent to Bashar al-Assad. How were those meeting minutes sent to Bashar al-Assad?

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. Then Barakot discovered his own secretary was spying on him. 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. Eventually, Barakot 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 al-Hamara.

He was a field specialist at an oil services company in his hometown, Der Azur, and he comes from an educated middle-class family, which had been open. critical of the government even before the protests began. 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 we're unhappy with the way that the situation was going. I met Hamada last winter at a hotel room near Amsterdam. We spoke through a translator named Muaz 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. They handcuffed us and they pulled our shirts over our hills. They put me in the trunk of the car. They were telling us we're going to let this guy is going to execute you, we're going to kill you, we're going to murder you. Hamada was brought to the Air Force Intelligence Branch at Almaza 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. You're rotting. It's from sitting, you know, our legs would get so swollen. 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. Cleanly list, I mean, we weren't taking showers or anything.

Finally, he was taken out for his first interrogation. They started beating him and demanding the names of opposition leaders. So I gave him the names of my friends that were, martyr during my time in their Zor that I knew we're dead. That's very smart. But eventually they forced a confession out of him.

At the beginning, they were using cigarettes. They would take them out on my body to go to the place. Inside the hotel room, he pulled up his pants like to show me several burns. And he went on to confess that he organized protests, that he took video, stuff like that. Which was true. Right, 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've got to come up with it on the spot

under the cement pressure. 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 wants, 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. About in two to three to four seconds 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, no, I'll admit these. He opens in, he says, what was the type of weapon? I say it was an AK-4-E's heaven.

He says, how many clasel? He says, how many clips did you have? I 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. It's amazing how Madra 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 Hamara's spine. Hamara 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. As soon as they touched my backside, I said, I will admit.

They've got, you know, these, you've got the worst methods being used against you, you've got to just say, tell them what they want. This is the New Yorker radio hour. We're hearing a man named Mazin al-Hamata 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 nonviolent 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's some very graphic and upsetting descriptions of what Mazen went through. Ben Taub continues our story. The Sieges' investigation began in the most unlikely way. Bill Wiley was meeting with the Libyan exile in Niger, and his phone rang. On the other end of the line, an old friend told him that the government was looking for someone to train Syrian activists to document human rights violations. 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 of 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. 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. 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 useful.

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. 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. The first order of business was to make alliances with the oppositioned armed groups that were overrunning regime facilities. and to sensitize them to who we were, what we wanted, and why we wanted 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 smartphones would come out, would 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, 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. But take the documents first. But take the documents first. And set them aside till they can be moved out of the country. And make a note, very simple note, where the documents were acquired, on what date, box them up, seal the boxes to the best of your ability with saran wrap or something like that,

and that as those materials move, chart that move. 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. 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 need to know what kind of checkpoints you going to run into? The work of extraction is extremely dangerous. It's the whole point of the project. At the beginning, there were casualties. One man was killed, three were wounded, and several were

abducted for brief periods of time. But more recently, they've gotten much better with operational security. No one has been injured or captured in the last two years, even as the siege of 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 there are, you in a lot of waiting until it's safe to bring them out. Jihadi groups are extremely hostile to the Sijah investigators. The concept of international criminal justice is totally lost on them. 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. But that's not the only threat to the documents, a large load was left with a very old woman a little while back. She didn't know what it was. Someone asked her to keep it, and no one bothered to explain to her what it was. No one showed up to take it away, and she thought, well, it's just paper. And in fairness, she was cold. And so she burned a whole lot of it as fuel. And so that was the end of that load. Once the documents finally made it back to the SIGA headquarters in Europe, a team of translators, analysts, and lawyers poured through them. Then the SIGA investigators and SIGA investigators and Syria took hundreds of witness statements, which reinforced the documents and sound a lot like

Mazan al-Hamara's experience. After Hamada was forced to confess to using an AK-47 to kill members of the Syrian army, he spent a year in an overcrowded cell. Then he was taken to a room and forced to ink his thumbprints onto documents, likely containing his false confession. This routine allowed the Syrian government to lock up activists for years. These confessions were used as evidence that these people had participated in terrorism, sedition, and treason, when detainees were referred to the courts. The torture, you're sick of the sleeping and waking up

and going through this every single day. But what really haunts Hamara 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 Dariah, a rebellious suburb of Damascus, they started beating him mercilessly. 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 animals, take this. They take this big inside. Brought 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 swore, I promised to myself that Basharla, 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 did it for him. I think we might need to take a break. Hamada left the room at this point

I'm so sorry Moazza I don't know what to say I don't know either man I can't say his story without crying 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. 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. You're saying you're a terrorist, a terrorist. Terrorist. I'm like screaming back at them.

I'm not a terrorist. 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. And about midnight, I needed to go to the bathroom. I go and I open the first bathroom door. I saw two or three dead bodies. I opened the second bathroom stall.

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. 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.

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. Hamara 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 hit flash drives in his socks containing 55,000, photographs, which he later gave to international investigators and forensic analysts. Three prominent international war crimes experts say they've received a huge cash of photographs documenting the killing of some 11,000 detainees. They say their source is a defector who had been in the Syrian military police, an insider. They've codenamed Caesar.

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 Hamara 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. Hamara thought he would die in Hospital 601. But after a couple of days, a doctor came to see him.

He seemed like somebody like us. He had, I could see he was human. I was a 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, I'm totally cured. The doctor released him from the hospital.

Eventually, Hamara'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. My legs and I showed him my hand. He's saying that he denies, denies, or pledged, not guilty, not guilty, not guilty. He said, you know what, you are free to go. Hamada returned to Derizor. 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 Hamadas are horrible, Bill Wiley and the investigative team at the Sijja 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 cells instructions. 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. 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. 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 and intelligence services,

and so forth, they will be brought to justice. 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 article at new yorker.com. 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 Karzich of the Bosnian Serbs, and he worked for human rights watch during the trial of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Heller is a professor of criminal law at the University of London. Is there any likely scenario in your mind where we're going to turn on a television and see a trial of Bashar al-Assad? At the International Criminal Court or anywhere?

Well, anywhere, really. 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, you know, maybe not equally deserving a 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 it's so often the case, the very, very higher-ups somehow, you know, escape the news. You served as Human Rights Watch as 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? 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's

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 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. Can you give me an example of justice being brought to a dictator the right way? Is it Nuremberg? I do in many ways think that the Nuremberg trials, both the big one and the, the,

12 American 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, I would like to think that no matter how dangerous the suspect that we could give them fair trials today. 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?

It's an extremely fair question. And the more multilateral response is probably the more credible it's going to be. I understand why so many people think that the proper venue for any kind of trial of Assad or any other member of his regime is the international criminal court because it is certainly a troubled project, but it is a project that represents the aspirations of now more than 125 countries. So, you know, it is difficult to look at an institution like that and say, this is just 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. 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 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, you know, 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, Radavankaradich. 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, you know, our criteria of success for international criminal justice.

Because that, to me, is the danger, expecting it to do too much too quickly and then only being disappointed in what it fails to do. 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? 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 crimes is probably quite overwhelming. How does the use of chemical weapons affect or not affect an international prosecution? 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 sorted history of the prohibition of chemical weapons at the International Criminal Court. Whether you could actually charge, say, Bashar al-Assad with using a prohibited chemical weapon, the answer is really no at the International Criminal Court. Does systematic torture change the picture at all? 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 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. Would you defend him? Oh, I would absolutely defend him. I would defend him in a heartbeat. And you would do it on what basis? 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 innocent 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 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. 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, Catherine 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. And I think it was Wyoming, right? That's correct. 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? 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 in 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 dressy, I found it very charming to see her in this kind of more fully human, less kind of chiseled to perfection mode. And while you were reading that, you were also... 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. No, not this movie. 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 late 19th century. And part of the pleasure of it is just like period piece pleasure. Michael Kane is in it and Hugh Jackman. In fairness, Michael Kane's in everything. Michael Kane is in everything. He's like totally playing Michael Kane, but he's, you know, doing it well as he does.

And midway through all of a sudden, David Bowie shows up playing Nicola Tesla, which is a very surprise. turn of events in the plot. What's conducting the electricity? Our bodies, Mr. Angie, are quite capable of conducting and indeed producing energy. 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 they're going to 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 singered David.

And 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. And what's your other pick? 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 died-in-the-world country music fan. There's a few around the joint. Okay, I'm happy to hear that. I'm going to take them all out for drinks. You probably know this, that Charlie Parker was awesome. so a huge country music fan. And when someone asked him why, he said, quite wonderfully, he said, for the stories, man.

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 Annies, and they have a wonderful song called Trailer for Rent, see if you can cure that up.

Let's pull that up on spot if I see what we got here. I've got David dancing, you guys. Really, it's a good sign. Drove down to the jump bill, and her into the man. 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.

Pretty Craigslist. Or just in a not very Craigslist-friendly part of the country. Setting is everything. Fantastic. Thanks a lot, Kathy. My pleasure. Staff writer Catherine 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. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios

and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Toon Yards. Our story about the Commission for International Justice and Accountability was produced by Ave Carrillo, Karen Frillman, and Eric Marquis.

with original music by Alexis Quadrata. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.