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As Rick Sterling noted, "nearly half the [Caesar] photos show the opposite of what was alleged. These photos, never revealed to the public, confirm that the opposition is violent and has killed large numbers of Syrian security forces and civilians."
HRW openly acknowledged its wholesale disinterest in this explosive fact, stating, "This report focuses on deaths in detention." However, the organization's researchers were unable to prove that the photos they were focused on showed the bodies of those who died in government prisons and not on the battlefield, or in other circumstances. In fact, it was able to verify only 27 cases in which individuals who appeared in the photos had been arrested.
The initial Qatar-sponsored Carter-Ruck investigation falsely claimed that the 11,000 individuals who appeared in the Caesar file had been killed in Syrian government custody. In an interview with France24, David Crane, the lead author of that report, noted that the bogus number was a only a "statistical estimate."
HRW also revealed that though its researchers "sought an interview with Caesar through groups that identified themselves as representing him, the organization did not manage to meet with him."
Despite these disclosures, HRW's hyper-interventionist director Ken Roth continued to rattle off calls for US military intervention in Syria.
Others entities and individuals promoting the Caesar file, such as the New York Times and the directors of CIJA, similarly omitted HRW's stunning revelation that at least half the photos depicted government soldiers killed in the hands of foreign-backed opposition militias. In doing so, they preserved the Western narrative of the Syrian conflict as a one-sided, unprovoked slaughter carried out by President Assad against the whole of "the Syrian people."
As Caesar works Congress, sanctions begin killing the Syrian peopleIn November 2016, Congress expanded its sanctions on Syria while authorizing more funding for groups like CIJA focused on planning the prosecution of Assad and his officials. Co-sponsored by Rep. Eliot Engel, the aggressively pro-war, AIPAC-backed Democrat serving at the time as ranking chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the bill was called the Caesar Civilian Protection Act.
"Caesar" was shepherded by his handler, Mouaz Moustafa, to meet personally with Engel and his Republican counterpart on the Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Ed Royce, in July 2018. As usual, the mysterious figure was shrouded in his blue Patagonia hooded jacket.
The meeting in Washington coincided with several new rounds of unilateral sanctions on Syria, meting out unprecedented economic punishment on the country's civilian population.
Nabih Boulos of the LA Times documented how the US and EU economic war against Syria had been especially harsh on the medical sector, making radiology equipment, chemotherapy drugs, and even basic pharmaceuticals increasingly difficult to obtain. One doctor told Boulos that 10 percent of his kidney patients had died due to faulty or inaccessible dialysis machines.
Sanctions also spurred a fuel crisis that made heating oil difficult to obtain during the winter of 2018, and brought ground traffic in several cities to a near-hault by the following Spring.
Rebuilding the war-torn country had also been slowed by the impact of the coercive measures, as the Caesar Act explicitly imposed costs on companies that participated in reconstruction, even threatening to punish Gulf states which dare to normalize relations with Damascus.
Congress signs off on Syrian misery, plunging the country's currencyOn March 11, 2020, the usual suspects of the Caesar production assembled on Capitol Hill for one final lobbying push. This time, the full-time regime-change lobbyist Mouaz Moustafa delivered a self-described former prisoner from Syria's Saydnaya complex named Omar Alshogre to the House Foreign Affairs Committee to make the case for escalating the economic war.
Alshogre's dramatic performance demonstrated his background as a business consultant at the Boston Consulting Group and a motivational speaker managed by an elite speaker's bureau to secure Ted X lecture gigs. (Back in March 2019, Alshogre was brought onto CNN to attack Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, the maverick Democratic presidential candidate who had made opposition to regime-change wars a centerpiece of her campaign.)
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