Syrian abuses captured in satellite photos
In 1995, U.S. spy satellites photographed telling moments in the massacre over four days of an estimated 7,800 Bosnians by Bosnian Serb forces near the town of Srebrenica. But these photographs were not publicized by U.S. officials until nearly four weeks after the massacre had ended. Intelligence analysts did not circulate the evidence to senior officials for 22 days, even though two U.S. diplomats had picked up and circulated warnings about the killings on the first day and again 12 days later (“New Proof Offered of Serb Atrocities,” The Washington Post, Oct. 29. 1995, read an article excerpt on Highbeam).
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In 2012, the public picture of what’s happening in Syria — where 9,000 people have been killed so far,according to the UN — literally looks different, due to an unusual agreement brokered by White House aides between the intelligence community and the State Department. For more than a month, U.S. intelligence analysts have been declassifying satellite photos depicting the movement of Syrian armor and the destruction of Syrian villages so the department’s Human Rights Bureau can plaster them on its website.
The idea for the display came from officials on the National Security Council, including some with Bosnia experience. Samantha Power, a senior NSC director for multilateral affairs and human rights, is a former reporter in Bosnia who wrote a much-praised book about genocide; she has been a strong advocate for U.S. intervention to stop humanitarian crises. Derek Chollet, a senior NSC adviser for strategic planning who will shortly move to the Pentagon, is a former speechwriter for U.S. ambassador Richard Holbrooke and the author of a book about the Bosnian peace agreement in Dayton, Ohio.
“You can see some changes,” said Michael Dobbs, a fomer Washington Post correspondent and fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum who has been chronicling the trial of Ratko Mladic on genocide charges for Foreign Policy magazine. “It seems to have become easier bureaucratically to release some of this stuff … They have learned some of the lessons from Srebrenica.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/the-center-for-public-integrity/syrian-abuses-captured-in_b_1406590.html?
