美国国家公共电台 NPR Activists Build Human Rights Abuse Cases With Help From Cellphone Videos

 

RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

The war in Syria is a conflict of the social media age. Cellphones are ubiquitous among the rebels, the government, even ordinary citizens. And that means almost no bad deed goes unrecorded. As NPR's science correspondent Joe Palca reports, there's an organization using all those videos to build criminal cases against the perpetrators.

A warning, some of the sounds and descriptions in this story are disturbing.

JOE PALCA, BYLINE¹: The volume of videos is staggering.

MOHAMMAD AL ABDALLAH: We're in the process of downloading almost 2,000 videos a day.

PALCA: Mohammad Al Abdallah is executive director of the Syria Justice and Accountability Centre in Washington, D.C. The center is a nonprofit supported by the U.S. State Department and a handful of European governments. Abdallah was born in Syria but moved to the United States in 2009. He's a human rights lawyer determined² to seek justice for innocent Syrians who have suffered and died as a result of the violence that's gripped their country.

I asked Abdallah how the videos would be used as evidence in a courtroom. And he calls up an example on his computer screen.

AL ABDALLAH: I'll show you this one. It's a bit graphic³. It's a very bloody⁴ video.

PALCA: The video was apparently⁵ taken with a cellphone. It shows men in a room beating five civilians⁶, who Abdallah says worked in a hospital.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Foreign language spoken).

PALCA: One of the men, who seems to be in charge, yells taunts⁷ at the victims and cheers when the attacks are especially vicious.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED PEOPLE: (Cheering).

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Foreign language spoken).

PALCA: "Make sure you're getting this," he yells to the man with the camera. The victims, barely moving, huddle⁸ in obvious agony on the floor of the room. But it's not only the brutality¹⁰ and the graphic images that make this video important to a lawyer. It's what else is on it. The perpetrators turn the cameras on themselves and they're apparently Syrian government agents.

AL ABDALLAH: Naming each other and inviting¹¹ each other to participate in the torture campaign.

PALCA: Abdallah's organization maintains a database of these videos to document the abuses. And their analysts¹² spend hours adding identifying tags to each video so they can more easily search the database. For example, if the video shows an attack, what kind of attack is it? Is there a weapon?

AL ABDALLAH: Is it explosive? Is it nontraditional? Is it (unintelligible) aircraft, car bomb, landmine¹³?

PALCA: Who's in the video? Where was the video taken? Things like that. But the volume of videos Abdallah and his analysts are trying to process threatens to overwhelm them.

AL ABDALLAH: We envision ending up with a million-plus videos.

PALCA: Going through all of them and cataloguing in detail their contents is both crucial and impossible.

AL ABDALLAH: We're not going to be able to do this. We need help.

PALCA: And help may be coming. Jay Aronson is founder¹⁴ and director of the Center for Human Rights Science at Carnegie Mellon University.

JAY ARONSON: What we're trying to do is create tools that allow the human rights community to gather as much information as possible and process and analyze¹⁵ it in a way that never would have been possible by hand manually.

PALCA: For example...

ARONSON: We have technology that allows you to rapidly go through that entire collection of video.

PALCA: And find specific things like, say, a clip with a helicopter in it. That's useful because helicopters are often used to drop makeshift bombs on civilians.

(SOUNDBITE OF HELICOPTER)

PALCA: Or you can build software that can find video clips that have an ambulance in them.

(SOUNDBITE OF AMBULENCE SIREN)

PALCA: This should help automate¹⁶ the process of tagging videos, taking some of the burden off human reviewers. But Aronson admits computers have trouble with context. Is the helicopter delivering supplies or dropping a bomb? Is the ambulance coming in response to a brutal⁹ beating or someone having a heart attack?

ARONSON: There's no magic computer program that you can program and say, hey, computer, find me barrel bombings or find me instances of torture and then have it go through all of the sources and just find those things.

PALCA: Aronson says it will take people to do that. But human rights lawyer Mohammad Al Abdallah says the tools Aronson and his colleagues are developing should make it easier to find videos that are related to one another. And that's essential for amassing¹⁷ the evidence that will be needed in a criminal trial. He calls up another video.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: (Foreign language spoken).

PALCA: This young man is describing the discovery of several badly disfigured bodies.

AL ABDALLAH: It's six dead bodies or five dead bodies burnt and thrown in the street, in Damascus suburbs - city called Atel (ph).

PALCA: And it turns out these are the same men I saw being brutally¹⁸ beaten in that first video Abdallah showed me. He says you can tell that because it was taken the same day as the other video and the victims are wearing the same clothes.

AL ABDALLAH: He is wearing a pajama - blue with three stripes and white. And he's the exact same person that appeared here.

PALCA: Abdallah says these videos came in from different sources. But taken together, they provide a more complete picture of what happened. And he's confident he'll be able to connect more videos and build more strong legal cases with the help of computer science.

AL ABDALLAH: I think technology is going to be the judge in this conflict.

PALCA: There's one problem technology can't solve. Right now there's virtually no legal mechanism¹⁹ to prosecute²⁰ anyone for what's going on in Syria. But this evidence isn't going away. And Abdallah hopes the time will come when the world will insist that there be some kind of accounting²¹ for these crimes. Joe Palca, NPR News.

1 byline   

n.署名；v.署名

参考例句：

• His byline was absent as well.他的署名也不见了。
• We wish to thank the author of this article which carries no byline.我们要感谢这篇文章的那位没有署名的作者。

2 determined   

adj.坚定的；有决心的

参考例句：

• I have determined on going to Tibet after graduation.我已决定毕业后去西藏。
• He determined to view the rooms behind the office.他决定查看一下办公室后面的房间。

3 graphic   

adj.生动的，形象的，绘画的，文字的，图表的

参考例句：

• The book gave a graphic description of the war.这本书生动地描述了战争的情况。
• Distinguish important text items in lists with graphic icons.用图标来区分重要的文本项。

4 bloody   

adj.非常的的；流血的；残忍的；adv.很；vt.血染

参考例句：

• He got a bloody nose in the fight.他在打斗中被打得鼻子流血。
• He is a bloody fool.他是一个十足的笨蛋。

5 apparently   

adv.显然地；表面上，似乎

参考例句：

• An apparently blind alley leads suddenly into an open space.山穷水尽，豁然开朗。
• He was apparently much surprised at the news.他对那个消息显然感到十分惊异。

6 civilians   

平民，百姓( civilian的名词复数 )； 老百姓

参考例句：

• the bloody massacre of innocent civilians 对无辜平民的血腥屠杀
• At least 300 civilians are unaccounted for after the bombing raids. 遭轰炸袭击之后，至少有300名平民下落不明。

7 taunts   

嘲弄的言语，嘲笑，奚落( taunt的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• He had to endure the racist taunts of the crowd. 他不得不忍受那群人种族歧视的奚落。
• He had to endure the taunts of his successful rival. 他不得不忍受成功了的对手的讥笑。

8 huddle   

vi.挤作一团；蜷缩；vt.聚集；n.挤在一起的人

参考例句：

• They like living in a huddle.他们喜欢杂居在一起。
• The cold wind made the boy huddle inside his coat.寒风使这个男孩卷缩在他的外衣里。

9 brutal   

adj.残忍的，野蛮的，不讲理的

参考例句：

• She has to face the brutal reality.她不得不去面对冷酷的现实。
• They're brutal people behind their civilised veneer.他们表面上温文有礼，骨子里却是野蛮残忍。

10 brutality   

n.野蛮的行为，残忍，野蛮

参考例句：

• The brutality of the crime has appalled the public. 罪行之残暴使公众大为震惊。
• a general who was infamous for his brutality 因残忍而恶名昭彰的将军

11 inviting   

adj.诱人的，引人注目的

参考例句：

• An inviting smell of coffee wafted into the room.一股诱人的咖啡香味飘进了房间。
• The kitchen smelled warm and inviting and blessedly familiar.这间厨房的味道温暖诱人，使人感到亲切温馨。

12 analysts   

分析家，化验员( analyst的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• City analysts forecast huge profits this year. 伦敦金融分析家预测今年的利润非常丰厚。
• I was impressed by the high calibre of the researchers and analysts. 研究人员和分析人员的高素质给我留下了深刻印象。

13 landmine   

n.地雷

参考例句：

• A landmine is a kind of weapon used in war.地雷是一种运用于战争的武器。
• The treaty bans the use,production and trade of landmine.那条约禁止使用生产和交易雷。

14 Founder   

n.创始者，缔造者

参考例句：

• He was extolled as the founder of their Florentine school.他被称颂为佛罗伦萨画派的鼻祖。
• According to the old tradition,Romulus was the founder of Rome.按照古老的传说，罗穆卢斯是古罗马的建国者。

15 analyze   

vt.分析，解析 (=analyse)

参考例句：

• We should analyze the cause and effect of this event.我们应该分析这场事变的因果。
• The teacher tried to analyze the cause of our failure.老师设法分析我们失败的原因。

16 automate   

v.自动化；使自动化

参考例句：

• Many banks have begun to automate.许多银行已开始采用自动化技术。
• To automate the control process of the lathes has become very easy today.使机床的控制过程自动化现已变得很容易了。

17 amassing   

v.积累，积聚( amass的现在分词 )

参考例句：

• The study of taxonomy must necessarily involve the amassing of an encyclopaedic knowledge of plants. 分类学研究一定要积累广博的植物知识。 来自辞典例句
• Build your trophy room while amassing awards and accolades. 建立您的奖杯积累奖项和荣誉。 来自互联网

18 brutally   

adv.残忍地，野蛮地，冷酷无情地

参考例句：

• The uprising was brutally put down.起义被残酷地镇压下去了。
• A pro-democracy uprising was brutally suppressed.一场争取民主的起义被残酷镇压了。

19 mechanism   

n.机械装置；机构，结构

参考例句：

• The bones and muscles are parts of the mechanism of the body.骨骼和肌肉是人体的组成部件。
• The mechanism of the machine is very complicated.这台机器的结构是非常复杂的。

20 prosecute   

vt.告发；进行；vi.告发，起诉，作检察官

参考例句：

• I am trying my best to prosecute my duties.我正在尽力履行我的职责。
• Is there enough evidence to prosecute?有没有起诉的足够证据？

21 accounting   

n.会计，会计学，借贷对照表

参考例句：

• A job fell vacant in the accounting department.财会部出现了一个空缺。
• There's an accounting error in this entry.这笔账目里有差错。