The United Nations Security Council was given a ghastly tour through the Syrian Civil War via images smuggled out of the country by a defector from the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.  The purport to show victims of the government, tortured, beaten, and mutilated.

France is asking the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate the photos, some of which were released in January, and compiled into a report authored by three experienced war crimes prosecutors.  It says the images were provided by a person identified only as “Caesar”, a former military police photographer.  They showed the dead bodies of emaciated prisoners who went through various tortures allegedly at the hands of Bashar’s forces.

Among the new photos was an image of at least a dozen bodies laid out on the floor of a warehouse, in the process of being wrapped in plastic sheets, with men in military garb standing among them.  One of the authors of the report, former Sierra Leone Special Court prosecutor David M. Crane, said it was firm evidence of “industrialized systematic killing.”

But any action by the ICC is in doubt, because Syria’s one ally on the Security Council is Russia, which is in no mood to cooperate with the major powers these days.