(CNN)
“Activists and lawyers argue that the regime’s top brass was well aware of the crackdowns on non-violent participants in Syria’s uprising, despite government denials.
Human rights lawyer Scott Gilmore who leads Syrian cases for DC-based Center for Justice and Accountability says he’s pored over the evidence. Government documents from 2011, he says, showed that arrests ordered at “the highest levels” targeted journalists, demonstrators, and “anyone tarnishing the image of Syria in the foreign media.”
“In the early years of the revolution, the regime was really engaged in liquidating the intelligentsia, liquidating civil society so you see this rounding up of lawyers, doctors, journalists, human rights activists,” Gilmore tells CNN.”
