Shock. Disgust.

Those are just two of the adjectives that describe the reported reaction of American and United Nations officials to a new UN report that details torture by the Syrian regime. And the report is graphic. With photos.

The US and UN have reacted with “horror” to allegations in a new report that Syria has systematically tortured and executed about 11,000 detainees since the start of the uprising.

The US said the reports underscored the need to remove the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

A Syrian spokesman said the report had no credibility as it was commissioned by Qatar, which funds rebel groups.

The timing is important:

The report comes a day before peace talks are due to begin in Switzerland.

Delegations are now arriving for the talks, known as Geneva II, which open in Montreux on Wednesday, and continue in Geneva two days later.

The conference is seen as the biggest diplomatic effort yet to end a three-year conflict that has left more than 100,000 dead and millions displaced.

The report, by three former war crimes prosecutors, is based on the evidence of a defected military police photographer, referred to only as Caesar, who along with others reportedly smuggled about 55,000 digital images of some 11,000 dead detainees out of Syria.

US state department spokeswoman Marie Harf said it “underscores that it makes it even more important that we make progress [at Geneva II]. The situation on the ground is so horrific that we need to get a political transition in place, and we need to get the Assad regime out of power.”

She added: “Obviously we condemn these reports in the strongest possible terms.

“These most recent images are extremely disturbing; they are horrible to look at and they illustrate apparent actions that would be serious international crimes, and we have long said that those responsible for these kinds of serious violations in Syria must be held to account.”

But should journalists, diplomats and others exercise a bit of caution for accepting the report and the photos as gospel? The Christian Science Monitor’s Dan Murphy says yes. Don’t forget the agenda, he warns:

When times are good, torture has been a sort of background radiation to the country’s repressive politics. It’s going on, but not so in your face that it gets in the way of doing business with the country. That’s one of the reasons it was possible for the US during the Bush administration to outsource torture and interrogation to Mr. Assad without expecting much of an outcry.

Which leaves me feeling kind of awkward about a report released Monday that alleges 11,000 prisoners have been tortured, starved, or otherwise beaten to death in Syrian government custody since 2011. It’s a believable assertion based on what is known about Syrian government practice and the conduct of the war. But the report itself is nowhere near as credible as it makes out and should be viewed for what it is: A well-timed propaganda exercise funded by Qatar, a regime opponent who has funded rebels fighting Assad who have committed war crimes of their own.

The report was given to The Guardian and CNN yesterday and released in full on the web. It was paid for by Qatar and organized through Carter-Ruck, a London-based law-firm hired by the tiny Gulf monarchy. Three former prosecutors, Desmond de Silva and David M. Crane, who participated in the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and Geoffrey Nice, who prosecuted Slobodan Milosevic at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, were retained, along with forensic experts, to review pictures from a man presented as a former Syrian military policeman identified only as “Caesar.”

He’s not saying disbelieve it — just exercise some caution and be honest about what it is:

Caesar is said to have been a photographer for the military assigned to documenting deaths in detention. It is not unsurprising that someone would have this job. But the report by itself shouldn’t be treated anything like the slam dunk it has been in the press, for a variety of reasons.

This is a single source report, from an unidentified man, who is related by marriage (according to a footnote on page 15 of the report) to a similarly unidentified member of the “Syrian National Movement” who “left Syria five days after the civil war against the current Syrian regime had begun and established contact with international human rights groups.” The Syrian National Movement has been funded by Qatar and is devoted to Assad’s downfall and the source has been working with this unidentified Assad opponent since “around September 2011.”

And yet the report was rushed into publication due to unspecified “time constraints” that made it impossible to “produce a detailed report regarding the exact injuries present in each image for each individual.”

JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief

Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.

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