What?.

The US has an ambassador for war crimes???!!!

Well, if not us, who? We're at least as skilled and knowledgeable as anyone else.

You can't make this shit up.

The U.S. State Department has concluded that up to 10 European citizens have been tortured and killed while in the custody of the Syrian regime and that evidence of their deaths could be used for war crimes prosecutions against Bashar al-Assad in several European countries.

  Bloomberg

Unbelievable.

The new claim, made by the State Department’s ambassador at large for war crimes, Stephen Rapp, in an interview with me, is based on a newly completed FBI analysis of 27,000 photographs smuggled out of Syria by the former military photographer known as “Caesar.” The photos show evidence of the torture and murder of over 11,000 civilians in custody.

[...]

While it’s unlikely that multilateral organizations such as the United Nations or the International Criminal Court will pursue cases against Assad in the near term, due to opposition by Assad’s allies including Russia, legal cases against the regime could be brought in individual countries whose citizens were victims of torture and murder.

[...]

For Caesar and his support team, the hope is that European countries will see their citizens’ murders as further evidence that the West must reject any notion of allowing the Assad regime to remain in power or being a de facto partner with the West against extremist groups such as the Islamic State.

This is not – repeat NOT – an Onion article, although it reads like one.

“It’s incredibly important for the international community to treat the fact that Europeans were tortured to death by the Assad regime with the same seriousness that they treated the fact that two American journalists were beheaded for going inside Syria and covering the suffering of the Syrian people,” said Mouaz Moustafa, executive director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, an American nongovernmental group that runs State Department programs inside Syria.

Let me guess, aka the CIA.

The New York Times reported that months after Caesar appeared in Washington and met with top White House officials, there has been little action to follow up on his revelations. The people helping Caesar think the Obama administration has been slow to follow up on the evidence.

I imagine they have more than one reason for that.

Rapp promised that the State Department will continue to fight for the evidence to be verified, exposed and then used to hold Assad and other regime figures accountable.