CNN's version, partner with The Guardian on the "exclusive":

EXCLUSIVE: Gruesome Syria photos may prove torture by Assad regime
By Mick Krever and Schams Elwazer, CNN, Jan. 20, 2014

[....] A complex numbering system was also used to catalog the corpses, with only the relevant intelligence service knowing the identities of the corpses. It was an effort, the report says, to keep track of which security service was responsible for the death, and then later to provide false documentation that the person had died in a hospital.

One of the three lawyers who authored the report -- Sir Desmond de Silva, the former chief prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone -- likened the images to those of Holocaust survivors.

The emaciated bodies were the product of starvation as a method of torture, "reminiscent of the pictures of those [who] were found still alive in the Nazi death camps after World War II," he said in a CNN interview.

"This evidence could underpin a charge of crimes against humanity -- without any shadow of a doubt," de Silva told CNN's Christiane Amanpour. "Of course, it's not for us to make a decision. All we can do is evaluate the evidence and say this evidence is capable of being accepted by a tribunal as genuine." [.....]

According to the report, Caesar worked as photographer in the military police. Once the war broke out, his work consisted entirely of documenting "killed detainees."

He claimed to have photographed as many as 50 bodies a day.

At one point he took the unusual step of photographing a group of bodies to show that it "looked like a slaughterhouse," according to the report.

The fact that all the bodies were photographed, the report's authors say, strongly suggests that "the killings were systematic, ordered, and directed from above."

"It's a callous, industrial machine grinding its citizens," Crane said to CNN. "It is industrial age mass killing." [....]

Syria Photo Archive Seems Unlikely to Alter U.S. Policy
By Mark Landler and Ben Hubbard, New York Times, Jan. 22/23, 2014

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration first learned last November about a harrowing trove of photographs that were said to document widespread torture and executions in Syrian prisons when a State Department official viewed some of the images on a laptop belonging to an antigovernment activist, a senior official said Wednesday.

The United States did not act on the photos for the past two months, officials said, because it did not have possession of the digital files and could not establish their authenticity. Nevertheless, they said, the administration believes the photos are genuine, basing that assessment in part on the meticulous way in which the bodies in the photos were numbered.

The photographs, some of which were released this week on the eve of an international peace conference on Syria, have helped prompt the administration to heighten its demand that President Bashar al-Assad release political prisoners and allow Red Cross inspectors access to the prisons.

But it seems clear that the photos that appear to document the torture and executions will not fundamentally alter American policy, which is to push for a political settlement that will remove Mr. Assad from power but to avoid direct military intervention in the conflict [....]

For now, the White House and the State Department are expressing outrage over the images, even as they caution that the United States has not independently authenticated them [....]

Syrian officials said the photographs had been fabricated, either by the opposition or by Persian Gulf countries. “They have been fabricating such images for the last three years, and this is not new to us,” said Syria’s deputy foreign minister, Fayssal Mekdad, in an interview in Montreux. The publication of the photos, he added, had no effect on the talks.

Russia’s prime minister, Dmitri A. Medvedev, said in an interview with CNN that no conclusions could be drawn about the photos.

“I know there are a lot of victims, and that’s very sad, but that does not mean that the existence of victims or victims in a particular place is the proof that those are the victims of the regime and not the bandits who were doing something or any other force,” Mr. Medvedev said. [....]