This week, The New Yorker published “The Assad Files,” by Ben Taub, an extensive look at a trove of six hundred thousand Syrian government documents that link the country’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad, to a campaign of detention and interrogation that resulted in mass torture and murder. It’s the clearest proof we have that the cruelty visited on activists and rebels in Syria has been state-sponsored, with orders signed by Assad himself. The leaders of the organization that has recovered these documents, the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, believe that, should Assad end up in court, they have sufficient evidence to convict him and his associates of crimes against humanity. Stephen Rapp, who led prosecution teams at the international criminal tribunals in Rwanda and Sierra Leone, said that the documentation “is much richer than anything I’ve seen, and anything I’ve prosecuted in this area.”

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