Free Republic

Members of the Free Syrian Army reportedly attacked the Christian-dominated al-Duvair village in Reef on the outskirts of Homs on Monday, where they massacred its citizens, including women and children, before the Syrian Army interfered. This reported attack comes shortly after intense fighting in the city of al-Qusseir over the weekend, in which Bashar Al-Assad’s forces inflicted heavy casualties on the rebels. Assad’s forces launched an offensive in April in an effort to cut off supply lines to the rebels by taking the city and its surrounding areas from the rebel groups that had been entrenched there since last year....

Syrian state-run television reported Thursday that forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad killed three Westerners, including an American woman and a British citizen, who they claim were fighting with the rebels and were found with weapons and maps of government military facilities. Syrian TV identified the woman, releasing what it claimed were images of her Michigan driver's license and U.S. passport. It also released what is said was the name and passport of a British citizen. It did not identify a third person who it claimed was a Westerner.

Sen. John McCain Monday became the highest-ranking U.S. official to enter Syria since the bloody civil war there began over two years ago, The Daily Beast has learned. McCain, one of the fiercest critics of the Obama administration’s Syria policy, made the unannounced visit across the Turkey-Syria border with Gen. Salem Idris, the leader of the Supreme Military Council of the Free Syrian Army. He stayed in the country for several hours before returning to Turkey. Both in Syria and Turkey, McCain and Idris met with assembled leaders of Free Syrian Army units that traveled from around the country to...

WASHINGTON — Senator John McCain’s office is pushing back against reports that while visiting Syria this week he posed in a photo with rebels who kidnapped 11 Lebanese Shi’ite pilgrims. The photo, released by McCain’s office, shows McCain with a group of rebels. Among them are two men identified in the Lebanese press as Mohamed Nour and Abu Ibrahim, two of the kidnappers of the group from Lebanon.

WASHINGTON — Senator John McCain’s office is pushing back against reports that while visiting Syria this week he posed in a photo with rebels who kidnapped 11 Lebanese Shi’ite pilgrims. ( Image by Handout/Reuter / Reuters ) The photo, released by McCain’s office, shows McCain with a group of rebels. Among them are two men identified in the Lebanese press as Mohamed Nour and Abu Ibrahim, two of the kidnappers of the group from Lebanon.

You don’t really need more than that headline, do you? Watch McCain’s interview about his Syria trip below and count how many bad arguments there are for intervention. One, at around 2:40, has him arguing that we can “handle” this because, after all, we have the world’s greatest military. That implication, that we should take this challenge on in part to show that we’re equal to it, is both very McCain-esque very unconvincing. If Russian-made Syrian missiles end up shooting down a few American planes, what’s the next step in the challenge that we’re required to accept? If we succeed...

Of all the inexplicable Beltway media fetishes, none is more bizarre than the undying love affair with Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). So there he was, yet again, on a Sunday morning talk show, pretending to be relevant in a world that has long since passed him by. And how could any right-thinking (in the most nonpartisan sense) person take him seriously? The topic this Sunday, on CNN’s “State of the Union” program, was Libya, and specifically, how imperative it was for the U.S. to more forcefully engage in yet another expensive war. “If we have a stalemate, I think it’s...