Free Republic

Syrian President Bashar Assad said his nation would give up its chemical arms only if the United States ends any weapons deliveries to opposition forces and ceases its "threatening" behavior. The Damascus leader made the remarks in a Russian television interview quoted on Thursday by the Washington Post. "When we see the United States really wants stability in our region and stops threatening, striving to attack, and also ceases arms deliveries to terrorists, then we will believe that the necessary processes can be finalized,” Assad reportedly told Rossiya-24 television. He said Damascus would start disclosing details about its chemical assets...

The head of the opposition Free Syria Army, General Salim Idriss, told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Thursday that he has intelligence that the Assad regime is moving its chemical weapons out of the country. “Today we have information that the regime began to move chemical materials and chemical weapons to Lebanon and to Iraq,” General Idriss told Amanpour from inside Syria. It’s a huge claim that would fundamentally shift everything U.S. intelligence officials have in the past said they believe about the situation in Syria, CNN Pentagon Correspondent Barbara Starr reports.

Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in Geneva today for talks with Russia about Syria's chemical weapons and was met by a statement from the Syrian president that he was not surrendering the arsenal because of any U.S. threats. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad told the Russian state-run news channel Rossiya-24 that his regime decided to hand over his massive cache of sarin, VX and mustard gas at Russia's suggestion. "Syria is handing over its chemical weapons under international supervision because of Russia. The U.S. threats did not influence the decision," Assad told the Russian TV. He said his government is...

I was looking for the news article where Rand Paul was talking about the atrocities being committed in Syria, the beheading of priests,children, etc, and stumbled upon this on Google - Twitchy posted this about Parish Match about one and a half hours ago. I won't provide a link to it, but thought people needed to know And now weapons are being provided by the CIA to Syrian rebels (WaPo article)?

Syrian rebels claim that the army of President Bashar Assad again used poison gas in an attack on rebel forces in the Damascus area Thursday, an Israel Radio report said. The report was based on rebel sources, who said the attack took place in the Jobar neighborhood of the capital. The rebel sources said they could not tell what kind of chemical weaponry had been used, but that it was a poison gas of some kind, and was causing injuries, including breathing difficulties.

“The Red Queen shook her head. "You may call it 'nonsense' if you like," she said, "but I've heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary!” ― Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass   I did take notes during Big Guy’s Syrian argument/rebuttal last night. I must apologize, as they are a little sketchy; I figured that, as usual, I’d have a full hour of repetition in order to fill in the details. How did I know that he was going to wrap up the much-hyped contrapuntal speech on Syria in a mere 15 minutes?...

A flurry of diplomatic activity has overtaken the Senate debate on the use of force by the United States against Syria as punishment for/deterrence against the use of chemical weapons. The world awaits the next meeting, the next announcement, the next slip-of-the-tongue, or the first bomb. The interregnum is a good time to note that the president has been blaming the Iraq war for American reticence on war in Syria. "I'm not sure that we're ever going to get a majority of the American people -- after over a decade of war, after what happened in Iraq," he told PBS....

(CNSNews.com) – Pushing ahead his proposal to avert military strikes against his ally in Damascus by having it surrender its chemical weapons stocks, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday the initiative would only be feasible if the U.S. pledges not to use force. The plan will only work, he said in a statement released on the Kremlin website, “if the United States and other nations supporting it tell us that they’re giving up their plan to use force against Syria.” “You can’t really ask Syria, or any other country, to disarm unilaterally while military action against it is being contemplated.”...

Even before President Barack Obama put his plans to strike the Syrian regime on hold, he was losing the battle of public opinion about military intervention. Part of the credit, no doubt, goes to a successful media blitz by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime and its supporters. In an interview aired on Monday night, Assad himself advanced his government's case to Charlie Rose, saying that the United States had not presented "a single shred of evidence" proving the Syrian military had used chemical weapons. Assad has always been able to skillfully parry Western journalists' criticisms of his regime -- and,...

Cairo: The Arab League will back a Russian plan to place Syrian chemical weapons under international supervision for eventual destruction, its secretary general said on Tuesday. Nabil al-Arabi told reporters in Cairo the League will 'soon issue a statement announcing its support officially' for the Russian plan... "If you remember, I always insisted that (the Syrian conflict) needs a political solution" Arabi said. But they fell short of calling for military strikes as proposed by Washington, with several members opposed to foreign intervention in Syria.

We rejoin Alice just after she drank the potion that made her small enough to slip down the rabbit hole: Since then, we marched to the brink of war with Syria only to be yanked back when Secretary of State Jean Carré downgraded it to le petit guerre. He advised us, and the world at the same time, that what we really had planned was not a war-war, butt an “unbelievably, small, limited” strike on Syria. More of a timeout than an armed conflict you see. And he promised we would only use very little planes, and the tiniest of...

Despite serious public opposition to involvement in another quagmire in the Middle East, chances are the United States will soon be involved in the two-year-old civil war in Syria. While there are many questions regarding how this will help or hinder national foreign policy aims, few have considered how a shift in power could affect the religious freedom of the people of Syria. Religion in Syria Syria is a nation of 22.7 million people covering 184,180 square km, approximately the size of the U.S. state of Washington. The population is predominantly Muslim, with 59-60% identifying as Sunni and 13% identifying...

With all of the attention focused on Barack Obama’s plans to use military strikes to hasten regime change in a country with al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist networks operating on a large scale, let’s not forget the last time this strategy was put in place. A year ago tomorrow, terrorists sacked our consulate in Benghazi and killed four Americans, including our Ambassador to Libya. Despite claims that the Obama administration would seek out the culprits, the New York Times reports that the successor government in Libya has refused to cooperate with the US on making arrests: A year after the attacks in Benghazi...

This was linked from Yahoo's front page as titled. DB headline: Enough Already: Syria Wasn’t a False-Flag Operation(snip)But conspiracy theories have never been about plausibility. More than anything, they reflect our uneasiness with the modern world, its complexity, and often its capriciousness. And at times, they’re a natural consequence of past actions. Given the circumstances of the war in Iraq—where high-level officials, up to and including the president, misled the public—it’s not a surprise that some people are paranoid about the situation in Syria. Still, for any given situation, the best we can do is evaluate the evidence we have...

If we give Obama the benefit of the doubt, he and Putin worked this out on the sly at the G-20 summit. If not, Kerry is just a frigging blowhard idiot who made policy up on the run. Either our national leadership is comprised of some cagey guys who figured out a way to back off from an unpopular and unwise position, or we got absolutely pantsed by Putin and Assad. Either way, we win. And by that I mean, we don’t go to war in Syria. Here’s the background. In an earlier demonstration of freelanced policy, Obama told some...

More at Reaganite Republican...

"The horrifying pictures of dead children being used by the Obama administration to justify an attack on Syria, with the claim that the Assad regime carried out the chemical attacks that killed those children, while emotionally heartbreaking, do not tell the story of those children and do not tell you the main point the Obama administration is trying to coverup. Those children were kidnapped over a week earlier, before they were slaughtered . . . by the Obama backed Syrian rebels."

Video at link.

Bashar al-Assad didn’t look like a thug in his interview with Charlie Rose. He isn’t a thug; he has thugs and murderers who can do his dirty work for him. His brother, Maher al-Assad, commands the regime’s Republican Guard and controls the Syrian Army’s 4th Armoured Division. It is they that the opposition and Western governments both suggest were behind the chemical weapons attack on August 21. Like most tyrants, Assad keeps his own hands clean and leaves the blood to the butchers. Maher is a butcher. Maher’s record as a military strong man is long and brutal. Most infamously,