This piece was reprinted by OpEd News with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.
A close look at these operatives and the forces propelling their activities reveals their campaign as a deceptive operation financed by the Qatari government and orchestrated in Washington, raising serious questions about the credibility of "Caesar."
The dubious origins of the "Caesar" fileIn June 2019, The Grayzone exposed a non-profit widely praised in Western media, the Center for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA), as a US- and EU-funded regime-change initiative that aims to destabilize the Syrian government by subverting the international legal system.
As The Grayzone reported, CIJA field investigators worked directly with extremist militants - including Al Qaeda's local affiliate - to gather documents from pillaged government offices and spirit them out of the country. CIJA even "pays rebel groups and couriers for logistical support," the New Yorker acknowledged in a puff piece about the organization.
No trove of documents has been more valuable to regime-change lobbyists in Washington than the so-called "Caesar" file. In another profile of CIJA that omitted the role of the US State Department in establishing the group, the New York Times' Anne Barnard claimed that Caesar "fled Syria with pictures of at least 6,700 corpses, bone-thin and battered, which shocked the world when they emerged in 2014."
Caesar's supposed escape from Syria, and the story of how he obtained the photos, closely mirrored the shady tactics that CIJA investigators used to obtain other documents they planned to exploit for prosecutions of Syrian former officials in Western courts.
According to Vanity Fair, "Caesar" was actively spying for the Syrian opposition since 2011, and working with a "handler" described as "a Syrian academic and human-rights figure named Hassan al-Chalabi." This character (no relation to the late Iraqi con artist Ahmad Chalabi) was himself "running a shadowy intelligence network inside Syria," according to the magazine.
Chalabi told Vanity Fair that he arranged for "Caesar" to be smuggled out of Syria with his files in 2013 with the help of the CIA-created Free Syrian Army and an obscure militia known as the Strangers Battalion. (Observers of the Syrian conflict has since identified the latter group to be a collection of Uyghur foreign fighters allied with Al Qaeda.)
Caesar then passed his files to the Syrian National Movement, a marginal group of Islamists that was funded and overseen by the government of Qatar.
From there, the files went to outfits like CIJA, Human Rights Watch, and the New York Times - and "Caesar" went to Capitol Hill.
Caesar's Qatari connectionThe Caesar files were first brought to the American public's attention in a New York Times article published on January 21, 2014 - a PR stunt carefully timed to coincide with the opening of the UN-backed Geneva II Peace Conference on Syria.
The following acknowledgement was mentioned in passing in the Times article: "only a few photographs have actually been released by lawyers commissioned by the Qatari government, an avowed opponent of Mr. Assad, and the claims about their origins could not be independently verified.
Sir Geoffrey Nice, the lead prosecutor in the trial of the former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, was quoted prominently by the Times. "It was like getting the keys to the Nazi archive," Nice said of the Caesar file.
Nice, who had been charged with authenticating the photographic files, was listed at the time as "an advisor to Qatar in the possible Syria case to come." Desmond De Silva, another British lawyer called in to authenticate the documents, was later described as part of a team of "high profile lawyers instructed by the Qatari government."
The permanent monarchy of Qatar has bankrolled an array of Islamist militias across Syria over the years, including Al Qaeda's ruthless affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra. Carter-Ruck, the law firm employing Nice and De Silva under a Qatari contract, had also been hired by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, another key sponsor of Syria's insurgency and the destabilization campaign against Damascus.
Also quoted on the significance of the Caesar file in the New York Times article was David Crane, who was merely described by the newspaper as "an investigator involved in examining the photos, who previously indicted President Charles G. Taylor of Liberia."
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
1
