By Walid Shoebat and Ben Barrack
**SHOEBAT EXCLUSIVE**
The State Department alleges it has obtained 27,000 photographs showing the emaciated, bruised and burned bodies of Syrian torture victims by using gruesome images that a top official told Yahoo News constitute “smoking gun” evidence that Obama wants to use for the purpose of bringing war-crimes charges against the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad, who is fighting the same war against the same enemy the U.S. is supposed to be fighting against Islamic terrorism.
Any logical person could ask: Were war crimes committed by the U.S. after responding to 9/11/01? Were war crimes committed when the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in which we have a ton of photos to show so-called atrocities that were claimed by the Japanese? Were war crime committed during the bombing of Dresden even though the Germans have thousands of photos of dead civilian Germans? Does Israel commit war crimes when it slaughters scores of Hamas terrorists and civilians are killed in the process and millions of photos are published by the pro-Palestine propaganda machine?
And what is the U.S. doing about Turkey? Isn’t Turkey committing war crimes right now by standing down against ISIS while bombing the Kurds (U.S. ally) who are being slaughtered by ISIS?
The timing of the State Department’s decision to announce it is displaying some of these photos for public consumption, is noteworthy:
The photos are “horrific — some of them put you in visceral pain,” said Stephen J. Rapp, the U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes, in an interview. “This is some of the strongest evidence we’ve seen in the area of proof of the commission of mass atrocities.”
The photos — a small number of which will be put on public display for the first time on Wednesday at the U.S. Holocaust Museum — were smuggled out of Syria by an official regime photographer who has since defected and is known only by his code name, Caesar.
They were shown at a closed-door session of the House Foreign Affairs Committee in July where Caesar, wearing a hood, testified. They are now being analyzed at Rapp’s request by the FBI in part as an effort to determine whether any U.S. citizens may have been among the victims — a finding that could be the basis to bring criminal charges in the U.S. against officials of the Assad regime.
And who is entrusted to make the case against Assad? A man with a hoodie and this bearded Muslim who is not foreign to Shoebat.com’s investigations, the man seated next to “Caesar” who is identified in the story only as an interpreter. In reality, the interpreter is Mouaz Mostafa, Executive Director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF), an organization that has distinct connections to the Muslim Brotherhood, a convicted terrorist, and the former chairman of perhaps the most notorious mosque in the U.S. Moustafa is far from being apolitical. Before heading the SETF, he led the Libyan Emergency Task Force (LETF) that helped put Libya where it is today, as Shoebat.com reported.
Mouaz Moustafa (L) and the hooded “Caesar”.
The mosque Moustafa is connected to is Dar al-Hijrah. It’s a mosque with an extremely extensive rap sheet we’ve chronicled in the past but two of its biggest claims to fame are that three 9/11 hijackers attended the mosque and that Anwar al-Awlaki was the Imam there. The chairman of the mosque at the time was Bassam Estwani, who not only welcomed Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi into Dar al-Hijrah but sits on the Board of SETF today. So does Dr. Yahya Basha, who once was President of the now-defunct American Muslim Council (AMC), founded by convicted terrorist Abdurahman Alamoudi.
Moustafa (L) and Dar al-Hijrah Imam Johari Abdul Malik.
Despite all of this, there seems to be far more of an appetite among U.S. politicians to have Assad removed from power – and now by focusing on war crimes committed by his regime – than in the atrocities committed by ISIS, like human slaughterhouses, as Shoebat.com revealed last March.
The authenticity of the photos purporting to show the Assad regime’s victims notwithstanding, why does the agenda of the SETF continue to get voice with members of Congress? For one thing, the SETF is a group with 501(c)(3) status and Moustafa works a short walk from the White House. He’s been lobbying Congress for Syrian opposition support for years now and is adept when it comes to charming those politicians.
Another aspect that must be factored in is the foreign fighters that have gone into Syria since the Arab Spring began. Without context, we cannot know who is in the 27,000 photos. Moreover, people like Moustafa cannot be trusted to provide the proper context.
For example, last January, Shoebat.com presented documents that appeared to come from the Saudi regime from 2012. It appears to detail the release of more than 1000 hardened criminals from Saudi prisons, who had been sentenced to death and let go to fight the Assad regime:
Saudi Document shows terrorists with death sentences freed to fight in Syria.
Translated into English, the document reads:
The dignified Saud al-Thanian
Peace be with you and the mercy of Allah.
Regarding the transmission from the King’s Court (No. 112) 19/4/1433, which points to the inmates in the Kingdom’s prisons, who have been sentenced to death by the sword according to the Sharia. We ask that you communicate to these inmates that have been accused of multiple crimes, to include drug smuggling, rape, and murder (105 Yemeni, 21 Palestinian, 212 Saudi, 96 Sudanese, 204 Syrian, 82 Jordanian, 68 Somali, 32 Afghans, 194 Egyptian, 203 Pakistani, 23 Iraqi, and 44 Kuwaiti. It’s been agreed that they be released from Sharia-mandated death sentences. Each prisoner will receive a monthly stipend for their families and loved ones.
These freed prisoners will not be permitted to leave Saudi Arabia. In exchange, they will be rehabilitated and sent to be trained for jihad in Syria.
Please accept our greetings.
Signed,
Abdul Allah bin Ali Al-Zahran
President of the Committee for the promotion of virtue and the prevention of vice (Saudi Arabia)
cc: General Intelligence
Bear in mind, this was just one letter. Were there more just like it? If so, how many? Would the release of such prisoners constitute war crimes on Saudi Arabia’s part? Were any of the victims in the photographs presented by “Caesar” actually former prisoners who had no business being in Syria?
And of course, would someone like Moustafa care?
“Caesar” allegedly smuggled the photos out of Syria in the same month that the highly suspicious chemical attack occurred in Syria last year. As Shoebat.com reported, evidence suggests that the Assad regime was not behind that attack but that the rebels, along with the Government of Turkey carried it out in order to declare Obama’s ‘red line’ crossed and get the U.S. to take out Assad.
While all that was taking place, “Caesar” was apparently enroute to Doha, Qatar (yes, Qatar) then onto Europe, where he currently resides:
…by the summer of 2013, Caesar has told investigators, he was so sickened by what he was seeing that he made contact with Syrian rebels. “I can’t do this anymore,” he told them, according to David Crane, a former war-crimes prosecutor for Sierra Leone who spent hours interviewing Caesar as part of a separate review of the photos commissioned by the government of Qatar.
Caesar began smuggling his photos to the rebels, providing them with thumb drives concealed in his shoes, Crane said. To protect his family, Caesar faked his death, staging an elaborate funeral, before he escaped from Syria in August 2013. He is now in hiding in Europe.
Qatar?
Really? As a country that harbors Muslim Brotherhood terrorists, to include the group’s leader al-Qaradawi and Hamas commanders, is not Qatar guilty of war crimes by aiding and abetting terrorists? Then again, the U.S. has had very cozy relations with Qatar anyway, particularly through the annual U.S.-Islamic World Forum (US-IWF) co-sponsored by the Brookings Institute and the government of Qatar.
Nonetheless, “Caesar” fled Syria in August of 2013. A chemical attack occurred there that same month. U.S. politicians went to great lengths to convince the American people that Assad was responsible. They weren’t able to effectively do so but insisted they had ‘smoking gun’ evidence that convinced them but could not be revealed. The strikes against Assad never came, which greatly angered the Turks.
Still, not a peep from Caesar or from government officials about all these photos.
Then in July of this year, “Caesar” gives closed-door testimony to the House Foreign Affairs Committee with an SETF lobbyist doubling as an interpreter for him. In September, the U.S. starts air strikes against ISIS in Syria. As the weeks pass, the strikes are not stopping ISIS from advancing.
Turkey positions tanks on its side of the border with Syria and essentially watches ISIS besiege the town of Kobane. Kurds are being attacked by ISIS while Turkey not only stands idly by but goes as far as bombing the Kurds for protesting Turkey’s inaction against ISIS.
According to Yahoo, the decision to suddenly display the photos produced by “Caesar” a year ago was made by the U.S. State Department.
That would be the same State Department that’s been infiltrated by Muslim Brotherhood operatives.
Rashad Hussain a high level State Dept employee.