Congress was shocked Thursday when a Syrian defector recounted how he documented Assad’s killing of over 11,000 innocents. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg, according to ‘Caesar.’

The regime of Syrian President Bashar al Assad is holding 150,000 civilians in custody, all of whom are at risk of being tortured or killed by the state, the Syrian defector known as “Caesar” told Congress Thursday.

According to a senior State Department official, his department initially asked to keep this hearing -- in which Caesar displayed new photos from his trove of 55,000 images showing the torture, starvation, and death of over 11,000 civilians -- closed to the public, out of concerns for the safety of the defector and his family. Caesar smuggled the pictures out of Syria when he fled last year in fear for his life. Caesar’s trip had been in the works for months.

. . . 

The packed committee room sat in silent horror as new examples of Assad’s atrocities were splashed on the large television screens on the wall and displayed on large posterboards littered throughout the hearing room. Caesar spoke softly to his translator, Mouaz Moustafa, the executive director of the Syrian American Task Force, a Washington-based organization that works with both the Syrian opposition and the U.S. State Department.

“I am not a politician and I don’t like politics,” Caesar said through his translator. “I have come to you honorable Congress to give you a message from the people of Syria… What is going on in Syria is a genocidal massacre that is being led by the worst of all the terrorists, Bashar al Assad.”

The international community must do something now or the 150,000 civilians still held in regime custody could meet the same bleak fate, Caesar said. America had been known as a country that protected civilians from atrocities, he argued, referring to past humanitarian crises such as ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia.

“These bodies that we have (in the photos)… no one here can bring their life back to them, but I am here to tell you there is more than 150,000 people still incarcerated in the jails of Bashar al Assad and their fate will be the same fate as those who I have taken pictures of,” he said. That figure could not be independently verified.

. . . 

“We rarely get smoking gun evidence in my business… but what we found was just that,” said Crane. “The photos show crimes the likes of which we have not seen since Auschwitz.”

Link to images (WARNING: Graphic). For those who want to skip the link, it shows emaciated prisoners naked lying on the ground or dead, with torture marks all over body.

I didn't expect it to be actually be comparable to the Holocaust, but it really looks like someone just took Auschwitz photos in color. Absolutely grotesque. Hopefully this spurs some action.