Assad sends tanks to crush resistance in Baniyas...

It is now Baniyas’ turn.
Syria army tanks withdrew from Dera’a last Thursday after an eleven-day siege.
Some fifty people were killed during this ordeal, as a result of what activists called indiscriminate shelling.
Tanks continue to surround the city however, thereby sealing it off from the outside world.
On Saturday morning, thirty tanks penetrated within Baniyas, a city located on the Mediterranean coast. An oil refinery is located there, and the town is a major center for the export of Syrian oil.
Residents of Baniyas tried to form human chains to prevent the tanks from advancing inside the city, but to no avail.
The army occupied Sunni districts, but not Alawite neighborhoods.
The Syrian government and its security apparatus are dominated by the Alawite, a Shiite minority sect.
Syrian forces also shot and killed several women on Saturday who were demonstrating against the government outside the city.
Members of the security forces asked them to leave and, when they refused to do so, they opened fire killing three of them and wounding five others who were hospitalized, an activist told Aljazeera.
The city’s electricity was cut, as were all means of communication.
Baniyas is now surrounded from all directions, not a single person can go in or out, a resident told Katherine Marsh, of The Guardian.
Residents are reporting the sound of heavy gunfire and seeing Syrian navy boats off the Baniyas coast. Sunni and mixed neighborhoods are totally besieged now, a human rights activist told Aljazeera.
Basically, we don’t know what’s happening in Baniyas, Wissam Tarif, the director of Insan, a Syrian human rights organization, told Anthony Shadid, of the NYT. Speaking on the phone with a resident of Baniyas, he heard firing, bullets, shooting and screaming, and then we lost contact.
Security forces spread out inside the city, arresting many.
They are conducting search operations in several areas. The army has lists and looking for people based on it, Rami Abdul Rahman, of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, told Reuters.
Over two-hundred were arrested, including a ten-year-old boy. It appears to be designed to punish his parents, Mr. Abdul Rahman told AP.
The military occupation of Baniyas came one day after what activists called The Friday of Defiance.
A Syrian opposition Facebook page called The Syrian Revolution 2011 (with over 170,000 members) and which has been very active in mobilizing protesters, called for Syrians to demonstrate after Friday noon prayers.
We will challenge injustice, we will challenge oppression, we will challenge fear, and we will be freed, one comment on the page read.
According to human rights groups, twenty-seven people were killed throughout Syria during these demonstrations.
The Syrian government is unabashedly attempting to crush the uprising by militarily occupying the centers of revolt, resorting to mass arrests (8,000 Syrians have been jailed or are unaccounted for since the demonstrations began mid March), and firing on protesters.
According to the Committee of the Martyrs for the 15 March Revolution, 708 have been killed during the unrest.
The strategy of Assad’s government is obvious: dissuade Syrians from openly challenging his regime by rendering defiance as onerous as possible.
Today, demonstrating in the streets of Syria’s cities is a life-threatening endeavor.
In Homs for instance, the country’s third largest city and one of the centers of the uprising, those wounded during demonstrations are no longer taken to the hospital by their friends or families. I can’t take him to the hospital, Abu Kami, referring to a friend, told Spiegelonline. Anyone who is brought to the hospital will be arrested. Hence, some activists are left to die at home…
Residents cannot even donate blood. But the police had blocked off the hospital, one angry donor told Spiegelonline. They were literally waiting for the wounded so that they could arrest them.
Moreover, even those who die in the hospital are no longer claimed by their families.
The parents of people who were shot to death were forced to go on television and state that their children were radical Islamists (who the regime blames for the unrest). That’s why no one is coming forward anymore, the frustrated donor added.
The Friday of Defiance was particularly bloody in Homs.
We answered the call to protest today. But the intelligence forces attacked us right away by opening fire on us, one activist told the NYT last Friday.
The violence, the arrests, the intimidation, the harassment are clearly taking their toll.
The protests can’t get the momentum to increase the numbers on the ground, as we saw in Egypt and Tunisia. The collective punishment of cities, mass arrests and the tactics of snipers created some fear, Radwan Ziadeh, a Syrian human right activist, currently a scholar at Georges Washington University in Washington, told Anthony Shadid, of the NYT.
Appalled by the violence, the European Union plans to impose travel restrictions and freeze the assets of fourteen Syrian dignitaries. Alas, Assad is not on the list.
The Facebook group Syrian Revolution 2011 challenged Assad to rise to the occasion:
Stop shooting all demonstrators, allow peaceful demonstrations, release all prisoners, allow political pluralism and free elections in six months, it wrote.
Will Assad have the courage to heed this advice?
This is highly unlikely.
If he had, Syria would be a democratic society and he would no longer be in power.
Assad is only interested in Assad and his wealthy and corrupt clan.
He and they must go.
Let us hope that the brave Syrian people will have the necessary resilience to topple the despicable Assad regime which has been preying on the nation for over forty years…
(the photograph of Baniyas residents demonstrating last Thursday is by AP)

The war on terror is over. It is time to move on...

Justice was done, President Obama declared last Sunday night in his televised address informing the nation and the world that US forces had killed Osama bin Laden.
Was the killing of bin Laden an act of justice?
He was shot twice in the head.
To date, no photos of his body have been released as they are deemed by the administration to be too gruesome to be made public.
On Wednesday, President Obama decided that none would be issued.
You know, we don’t trot out this stuff as trophies. We don’t need to spike the football, he said. The administration is worried that graphic pictures could further incite violence against Americans.
Yet, could bin Laden have been captured instead of killed?
Initially, the Obama Administration clearly indicated that the answer was no.
He was engaged in a firefight with those that entered, John Brennan, the President’s counterterrorism adviser, told the press on Monday.
In addition, he unequivocally indicated that bin Laden was obviously a coward who preferred expensive mansions to Spartan caves:
Here is bin Laden, who has been calling for these attacks, living in this million-dollar-plus compound, living in an area that is far removed from the front, hiding behind women who were put in front of him as a shield. I think it really just speaks to just how false his narrative has been over the years.
It seems however, that Mr. Brennan spoke too hastily…
The very next day, Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, contradicted this version of events.
In the room with bin Laden, a woman-bin Laden’s wife-rushed the US assaulter and was shot in the leg but not killed. Bin Laden was then shot and killed. He was not armed, he said.
Osama bin Laden did not have a weapon nor did he hide behind a human shield when he was shot and killed by Navy Seals.
He did resist however. The resistance was throughout, as I said, the spokesman indicated.
What was the nature of bin Laden’s resistance, since he had no weapon?
Resistance does not require a firearm, Mr. Carney insisted, but he declined to elaborate.
If bin Laden was killed in the circumstances described by Mr. Carney, then should he not have been captured and brought to justice instead?
Indeed, as The Guardian columnist Gary Younge put it, this was not justice, it was an extra-judicial killing. If you shoot a man twice in the head, you do not find him guilty. You find him dead. This was revenge. And it was served very cold indeed.
That many Americans felt avenged by the killing of bin Laden by US forces was obvious and perfectly understandable given the heinous nature of the crimes committed on 9/11.
As such, shortly after President Obama announced the news, many spontaneously took to the streets of New York and Washington D.C., and chanted USA, USA…
Yet, democracies, by their very nature, are committed to the rule of law.
Professor Nick Grief, an international lawyer at Kent University, told The Guardian that the killing of bin Laden did resemble an extrajudicial killing without due process of the law. It may not have been possible to take him alive, but no one should be outside the protection of the law.
Indeed, laws are surely designed to protect the weak and innocent, but everyone else as well, in a civilized society. As Mr. Grief indicated, even the Nazis were given trials at Nuremberg, after World War II.
Whatever feelings of elation and relief may dominate the airwaves, they must not be allowed to submerge core questions about the legality of the exercise, nor to permit vengeance or summary execution to become substitutes for justice, Michael Mansfield, a leading British defense lawyer, told the paper.
Hongju Koh, a State Department legal advisor, did not share this view.
But a state that is engaged in an armed conflict or in legitimate self-defense is not required to provide targets with legal process before the state may use lethal force, he said.
John Bellinger III, a legal counsel at the Sate Department during the preceding administration, concurred. The assassination prohibition also does not apply to killings in self-defense. The executive branch will also argue that the action was permissible under international law both as a permissible use of force in the US armed conflict with al-Qaeda and as a legitimate action in self-defense, given that bin Laden was clearly planning additional attacks, he told The Guardian.
In any case, after 9/11, the Bush Administration decided to pursue what it branded the war on terror through military means, and military means only.
Afghanistan was invaded shortly after 9/11 in order to punish the Taliban government for harboring bin Laden and al-Qaeda, then Iraq, on the specious grounds that it posed an imminent threat to world peace. Saddam Hussein was actively pursuing the development of weapons of mass destruction, according to the Bush/Cheney narrative, which he would then give to terrorist organizations bent on attacking the US.
In essence, MM. Bush and Cheney transformed al-Qaeda into an existential threat, which had to be annihilated, whatever the cost.
Hence, the US sought to eradicate the terrorists on their own turf, the logic in vogue at the time being that it was preferable to fight them there than here.
The Bush/Cheney administration devised a national security strategy that also militarized the US judicial system.
Guantanamo was transformed into an extra territorial prison for enemy combatants (that only the President had the power to designate as such) who would thus remain beyond the reach of the Geneva Conventions.
Military commissions were set up to try these enemy combatants at Guantanamo, characterized by a drastic curtailment of the rights of the defendant. Detainees could aslo be held indefinitely without trial...
The CIA developed its own network of secret prisons, beyond the reach of the ICRC, where high value targets, ghost detainees, could be robustly interrogated, and tortured if need be.
Evidence obtained in such conditions would be admissible in a military commission.
In an age where terrorists could strike any time, anywhere, information needed to be obtained quickly, by whatever means necessary…
Warrantless wiretapping was secretly authorized by the Bush Administration to ensure the intelligence agencies could expeditiously detect any new potential threat to the homeland…
Fear of a second devastating attack was so pervasive in post-9/11 America that these measures hardly encountered any opposition at all (outside of the lefwing and libertarian blogosphere)…
Hence, the preservation of civil and constitutional rights was no longer a priority but subservient to the demands of national security.
Shielding the homeland from a new 9/11, whatever the cost, even if that meant we have to work the dark side, as Vice President Cheney put it five days after 9/11, had become the obsession of the Bush/Cheney White House.
In such a context, the rule of law, the necessity of respecting international law, was an anachronistic hindrance, a weakness that America’s enemies would surely capitalize on.
Yet, how many people have died, needlessly died, to avenge the 9/11 tragedy, and ensure that America is not attacked again?
In Iraq, according to Iraq Body Count, over 100,000 civilians have been killed since 2003.
The Lancet study estimated that during the 2003-2006 period, 650,000 died.
In Afghanistan, another 10,000 civilians have lost their lives.
In both countries, the casualties keep mounting…
Was the Bush/Cheney militaristic approach, largely co-opted , alas, by Obama, the wisest and most efficient one  in order to honor those who died on 9/11 and seek justice for the unconscionable crimes committed on that day?
Does the shedding of so much blood, so much innocent blood, constitute a fitting tribute to the victims of 9/11?
The Islamic extremists skillfully exploited this brutal, belligerent approach responsible for so many victims.
By what measure of kindness are your killed considered innocents while ours are considered worthless?
By what school [of thought] is your blood considered blood while our blood is water? Therefore, it is [only] just to respond in kind, and the one who started it is more to blame, bin Laden wrote in April 2004.
The extremists are adept at taking advantage of America’s prowess to further their own agenda.
Each civilian casualty at the hands of US forces is a propaganda victory offered to its enemies, who can then exploit it as a recruiting tool.
It is precisely that American capacity, propensity to destroy and kill that bin Laden hoped to harness by attacking the US on 9/11
He knew what the American response would invariably be: to lash out militarily against the ummah (the Muslim world), a senior al-Qaeda operative, Saif al-Adl said.
The Americans took the bait and fell into our trap, he added.
Indeed, two days before 9/11 bin Laden engineered the assassination of the most prestigious and powerful foe of both al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, Ahmad Shah Massoud, the commander of the Northern Alliance, in anticipation of the upcoming invasion of the country…
The Afghan mujahidin had succeeded in defeating the Soviet empire after ten years of war, which eventually led to its collapse.
Such was bin Laden’s interpretation of the Soviet withdrawal and downfall.
If the mighty Soviet empire could be defeated, then there was no reason to believe that the US would not suffer a similar fate on Afghan soil. The strategy that had been so successful once only needed to be replicated. Bin laden defined it thus: employ guerilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers, as we, alongside the mujahidin, bled Russia for ten years, until it went bankrupt.
His objective was, therefore, clear: continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy, he said in 2004.
The mistakes of Brezhnev are being repeated by Bush, he gleefully concluded in 2007.
The paradox here is that bin Laden’s central objective was to drive out all US troops from the Muslim world, and then reestablish the Caliphate. Yet, he considered that only a massive influx of US troops to the region could ultimately bring this about…
Bin Laden believed that the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia, the Muslim Holy Land, Mecca being the birthplace of the Prophet, and Medina the place where he first established an Islamic state, was sacrilegious. But that was not his only grievance.
First, for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples, he wrote in his Fatwa Urging jihad Against America, in February 1998..
The US presence was thus not only sacrilegious, but also posed a threat to the region’s valuable resources and independence.
The fact they had been invited there by the Saudi royal family after Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990 was particularly humiliating, for he had proposed his services to the Saudi leadership: he would lead an army of mujahidin to confront Saddam Hussein…The Saudi leadership ignored his offer, preferring American assistance instead.
Secondly, bin Laden resented America’s policy towards Iraq, where the UN embargo, spearheaded by the US, was progressively strangling the country.
Iraq holds a special status for Muslims, for it was the seat of the Caliphate for some five hundred years.
Thirdly, the US’s indiscriminate and unflagging support for Israel, which was occupying the third holiest Muslim sanctuary, Jerusalem, was unacceptable.
He decreed these policies to be a clear declaration of war on God.
As such, he issued the following fatwa to all Muslims:
The ruling to kill Americans and their allies-civilian and military- is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque (in Jerusalem) and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim.
Hence, and contrary to what is often stated, bin Laden did not target the US because he hates our freedom and is jealous of our way of life.
He did so because of its policies and their effects on Muslims…
After all, other democracies such as Switzerland or New Zealand share America’s values and way of life, yet have never been attacked by al-Qaeda…
They have no troops in Muslim lands and therefore have never harmed the local populations.
It must be made clear however, that nothing and certainly not US foreign policy, no matter what we may think of it, can ever justify mass terrorist attacks againstg civilians…
Nevertheless, It is important to place al-Qaeda’s agenda in its relevant political context.
Has bin Laden’s strategy succeeded, and is the American empire wobbling?
According to Nobel recipient, Joseph Stiglitz, the Iraq War will eventually cost the nation over $3 trillion and the conflict in Afghanistan slightly less
Homeland Security, a direct legacy of 9/11, has probably cost another trillion since September 2001.
The rise in oil prices also should be noted, as well as the economic slowdown that followed the attacks.
The US debt now stands at $14.3 trillion (compared to $9.8 in 2000), and the debt ceiling will have to be raised soon, otherwise the US will have to default in early August 2011.
Bin Laden did not fully succeed, yet neither did he utterly fail…
At this stage, it seems obvious that, ten years on, the US can no longer afford to sustain several major military conflicts simultaneously and for a long duration.
That phenomenon was precipitated by the al-Qaeda strategy, and Washington‘s reckless reaction to it…
US troops have not been driven form Muslim lands however, and al-Qaeda no longer has its charismatic leader to pursue its delirious agenda…
To return to our question posed earlier, could the Navy Seals have captured bin Laden?
It is difficult to say.
But this is a guy who’s extremely dangerous. If he’s nodding at someone in the hall, or rushing to the bookcase or you think he’s wearing a suicide vest, you’re on solid ground to kill him, suggested John Bellinger III, a legal counsel at the State Department during the Bush Administration.
According to new details on the raid issued on Wednesday, bin Laden did have an AK47 and a Makarov pistol in the vicinity when the Seals entered the room
Yet, would the Obama Administration really have relished the prospect of trying bin Laden?
Probably not, if the administration’s handling of the Khalid Sheik Mohammed trial is any indication…
As such, it seems evident that the founder of al-Qaeda would not have been tried in a civil court, but before a military commission in Guantanamo where he no doubt would have been held…
Criticism from within some circles in the US and from abroad would have been withering and thus unpleasant.
Yet, a fair and public trial given to bin Laden would have offered a powerful display of democracy and justice at work.
It would have demonstrated to the world what the rule of law signifies, and that even the most evil of men is treated in a civilized way, his fundamental rights as a human being (albeit, that he may not deserve) protected.
That our values are universal, that they apply to all and not only to some (the chosen few to which we belong) and that even our enemies are treated in accordance with them, a civil trial of bin Laden would have made obvious to all, including America’s enemies…
This will never happen, but, alas, the US is no longer equipped to hold such a trial, its judicial system having been grievously undermined by the Bush/Cheney and now Obama national security agenda.
If the war on terror had not so completely eroded the US judicial authority it is wholly plausible to conceive that bin Laden could have been tried exactly the same way as Sheikh Omar, mused Robert Lambert in The Guardian.
Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind sheikh, was arrested in 1993 and convicted of seditious conspiracy in Federal District Court in Manhattan, after issuing a fatwa encouraging militants to bomb targets in New York City.
Is the war on terror over now that bin Laden is dead?
It must be.
The militaristic strategy recklessly followed these last ten years has engendered much too much death and destruction.
Why stay in Afghanistan now that the central objective there has been achieved, the eradication of al-Qaeda and the death of its founder and leader?
What, precisely, is the US currently accomplishing in Iraq?
War has never been the most efficient method to promote peace, progress and prosperity.
What are we waiting for to propose such an agenda?
Through arms sales and giveaways, its military presence and its propensity for intervention, the US has for decades underwritten and encouraged violence as the main stay of Middle East politics. Washington has talked peace while promoting war, Andrew Bacevich wrote in The LAT.
It is high time to pursue different policies and the Arab Spring offers us an opportunity to do so.
The revolt of the people across the Middle East clearly shows that they yearn for peace, progress, prosperity, and the opportunity to choose their own leaders…
Let us help them do just that, but not by resorting to Apache helicopters and the 82nd Airborne.
It is time to talk peace, but promote it as well…
(the photograph above is by Ng Han Guan/AP Photo)
 

An act of betrayal...

Guantanamo is a particularly significant issue because it demonstrates Obama’s fundamental lack of core convictions, contrary to what he had led us to believe during the 2008 Presidential campaign.

We were told to expect change, that the Bush/Cheney world view and approach belonged to the past…The rule of law, and civilized behavior worthy of a great democracy  would now be a political imperative for Obama’s America…

We were evidently misled…

The absolute ethical necessity to close Guantanamo may have reflected a belief he held at the time Bush/Cheney still wielded  (many would have said, abused) power in Washington.

Once he arrived in the nation’s capital, however, the issue was less significant because he was now in charge, presumably. The concept of justice for all was once again in safe hands, that is to say, his own...Those who took human and constitutional rights seriously no longer had anything to worry about…This conviction was so universally engrained that Obama actually won the Nobel Peace Prize his first year in office.

Closing Guantanamo, the modern-day Bastille, and an infamous symbol of abuse and of arbitrary detention, demanded the new President’s undivided attention and wholehearted support…Since the Obama Administration claimed that the facility was a recruiting tool for terrorists, many assumed the new President would not relent until he had reached the intended objective. Obama had vowed to close it at the conclusion of his first year in office.

The new, excessively popular president could have exerted the necessary pressure on a Democratic Congress to ensure this blight on America’s reputation would be forever obliterated….

And yet, he failed to do so…

The rule of law was no longer a priority, but conditioned by politics…

The rule of law was no longer a popular, political issue, thus expendable…

The notion of trying terrorist suspects in civilian courts, of transferring those held in Guantanamo to the US mainland, ceased to make political sense. It seemed more politically savvy to cater to the people’s fear, than  cultivate or educate their sense of justice and fairness…

We had hoped that a former professor of constitutional law would have done his utmost to promote the cause of justice, and not chosen the facile path of political expediency.  

He had too much else to do than to fight for such fundamental principles, we were told.

Pardon my naiveté, but what is more important than that?

Similarly, the trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed was to have been a defining event, according to Attorney General Holder.

Our nation has had no higher priority then bringing those who planned and plotted the attacks to justice, Holder also recklessly declared.

Justice?

Caving in to pressure from local NY politicians ( including, alas, the Mayor of New York)  more interested in public opinion polls than principles, Holder relented.

KSM will be tried in Guantanamo, where justice is an alien concept, defiled by water-boarding, forced sleeplessness, other various “enhanced interrogation techniques” and arbitrary and indefinite detention...

Some have been held for nine years without charge, and will neither be tried nor released, thanks again to Obama who did not se fit to abolish the precedent set by his reckless predecessor …

Who would have thought that MM. Bush and Obama’s America would have resurrected les lettres  de cachet abolished by revolutionary France in 1789? Can anyone, alas, now take the US seriously when it sees fit to lambast another nation’s human rights record?

This, also, shall be part of Obama’s legacy…

How many of us shall be able to forget and forgive this grievous act of betrayal?

(the photograph of Guantanamo can be found here)

Assad sends tanks to crush uprising in Dara'a

In this military assault on Dara'a this morning, the Syrian army killed 25 protesters and left their bodies in the streets, according to a report by Euronews...
The army then combed the streets in an attempt to round up all potential demonstrators.
They are entering houses, they are searching houses. They are carrying knives and guns, one witness told The Guardian...
Assad has clearly opted for the Libyan option in response to his people's demand for freedom....
He is clearly his father's son, and reports that he was in fact a reformer capable of gradually transforming his country into a democracy were clearly misguided...
Assad and his clique must go and then be held accountable for their numerous crimes...
Some 400  Syrians have been killed since the beginning of the uprising last month...

Manning transferred to Fort Leavenworth

Bradley Manning, charged with providing the WikiLeaks whistleblowing site with thousands of classified US government documents, was transferred last Wednesday to Fort Leavenworth's Joint Regional Correctional Facility. He had previously been held in harsh conditions at Quantico Marine Brig, in Virginia, since May of last year.
Earlier this month, 250 distinguished legal scholars condemned the military's treatment of Manning, characterizing it as not only shameful but unconstitutional.
Mannign was being held in solitary confinement 23 hours a day, and deprived of his underwear every night, purportedly for his own safety.
Juan Mendez, the UN special rapporteur on torture, has been trying to evaluate Manning's conditions, but prevented from doing so by US authorities, who refuse to allow him an unmonitored visit with him.
I am acting on a complaint that the regimen of this detainee amounts to cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment or torture...until I have all the evidence in front of me, I cannot say whether he has been treated inhumanely, he told The Guardian earlier this month...
Mendez would be authorized to meet with Manning, but only with a guard also present.
At such meetings, anything the prisoner says can then be used against him during his court martial...
Manning will be placed in a single cell in Fort Leavenworth, and he would not receive abusive treatment, officials said, according to Reuters.
It seems therefore, that the Obama administration no longer considers it useful to abuse Bradley Manning, as the young man's case receives ever gretaer attention...
It is also evident however, that it is convinced that Manning is guilty as charged, even though his trial is still many months away, and that, as such, he is considered innocent.
On Thursday, President Obama made this extraordinary statement: we're a nation of laws. We don't let individuals make their own decisions about how the laws operate. He broke the law.
Can we now reasonably expect Manning to receive a fair trial, since the verdict is already known?
Is the US still a nation of laws, when serious offenders such as those responsible for Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, "enhanced interrogation techniques", indefinite detention, warrantless wiretapping, secret prisons, ghost detainess and so forth are not prosecuted, let alone investigated, while a Private First Class accused of revealing information that the State Department itself concluded did little lasting damage to the US is already considered guilty before his trial has even begun?
(the photograph of an activist protesting against Manning's detention is by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Things you should know, take two

The Assads do not take lightly any concerted attempt to question their authority.
In 1982, President Hafez al-Assad sent 12,000 soldiers to besiege the city of Hama in open revolt against his regime.
The Muslim Brotherhood had taken control of the city, and declared it liberated.
Assad, a member of the Alawite, a Shiite minority in Syria, shelled the city for weeks.
His troops then entered the town, eliminating all Muslim Brotherhood militants that they could find.
Some 1,000 were slaughtered.
Overall, Assad killed approximately 40,000 Syrians, displaced another 100,000 others, in order to reassert his authority.
Some 15,000 still remain unaccounted for…
The foreign policy analyst Robin Wright called the Hama Massacre the single deadliest act by any Arab government against its own people in the modern Middle East. That is no small achievement in a region that has had to endure the regimes of thugs the likes of Saddam Hussein and Qaddafi…
In many ways you can look at the Arab world over the last few decades and really if you want a turning point, I think the turning point was the terror unleashed on the Syrian people in the city of Hama in 1982.
For about 25 years the Arab people have been terrified of their rulers and the security states have really marginalized them and demolished their sense of dignity, Fouad Ajami, of John Hopkins University, told PBS.
It is that sense of dignity that the Syrians, following the lead of the Tunisians, Egyptians, Yemenis, Bahrainis and Libyans, are seeking to retrieve.
Yet, they are still facing the same ruthless regime, now led by Bashar al-Assad, who succeeded his father after his death in 2000.
The revolt against the Assad tyranny began some five weeks ago in Deera, a city near the Jordanian border.
Last Friday, thousands of Syrians took to the streets anew, after prayers, to demand the fall of Assad.
The people want the overthrow of the regime, they chanted near Abbasside Square in Damascus.
Security forces shot and killed 109 demonstrators, clearly not hesitating to fire into the crowd.
Demonstrators raised their hands to show that they were unarmed. The fire intensified, wrote Reuters’ Khaled Yacoub Oweiss.
Many were shot in the head and chest, wrote Katherine Marsh of The Observer.
Yesterday, funeral processions for the preceding day’s fallen turned into angry demonstrations against the regime in Damascus, Douma, Barza, Maadamiah and Qabon, according to the NYT.
Bashar al-Assad, you traitor! You coward. Take your soldiers to the Golan, many chanted on Saturday (The Golan Heights were seized by the Israelis during the 1967 war, and remain under Israeli occupation).
In Barza, a witness who wished to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal said that at least 1,000 mourners came under fire as they prepared to bury four men and two children, one 7 years old and the other 14. The witness said security forces aimed directly at the mourners, many of whom sought shelter in the nearby Al-Salam mosque, wrote Anthony Shadid of the NYT.
A further 11 were killed on Saturday, throughout Syria.
To date, 280 demonstrators have been killed since the beginning of the Syrian uprising.
Coverage of the events by traditional media has been difficult, as foreign journalists are not authorized to operate freely in Syria.
Yesterday, Carl Perry of Aljazeera was expelled from the country.
Hence, most reports of the events originate from the Syrian activists themselves.
Satellite phones, laptops and modems have been donated by the Syrian Diaspora to ensure that Assad’s brutal repression does not remain unreported.
The opposition movement also has a Facebook page, Syrian Revolution, to rally its supporters.
Assad has made several attempts to assuage the anger of the demonstrators.
He abolished the state of emergency in place since 1963, did away with the security courts, fired several provincial governors and released some political prisoners…
Yet, the fact that his security forces are unabashedly firing on unarmed demonstrators and that activists are still being arrested in midnight raids clearly evince the fact that Assad is more interested in saving his regime than reforming it…
In any case, since Assad has shed the blood of his own compatriots, and considering the brutal legacy of his Baath Party regime, nothing short of its elimination is likely to quell the unrest…
We want the toppling of the regime, a resident of Ezraa told The Observer.
The blood of our martyrs makes this our responsibility now.
Can Assad survive?
How many Syrians is he willing to kill in order to do so?
Will the Syrians persist and topple his regime?
Not all Syrians welcome the uprising.
Several religious minorities, including the Christians, fear that a post-Assad regime could be even worse…
Nevertheless, Assad is clearly unfit, both morally and politically, to rule Syria.
His fate, as well as the nation’s, is in the hands of the Syrian people…
(The photograph above of a demonstration in the Syrian city of Banias on Friday is by AFP)

Things you should know, take one...

Is Misrata the new Sarajevo?
If so, then we should already be ashamed of ourselves.
How many times can the civilized world make the same mistake?
That it is a chillingly dangerous place, furthermore,  was made abundantly clear yesterday for those not paying attention...
Two prominent and intrepid war photographers, Tim Hetheington and Chris Hondros were killed in a rocket-propelled grenade attack instigated by pro-Gaddafi forces, according to the BBC.
Xan Rice, of The Guardian, manages to convey the current horrendous conditions in Misrata...
To date, some 1,000 have been killed, 90% of which are civilians, the journalist reports...
President Obama yesterday authorized US forces to use drones  in order to enhance NATO's camapaign to protect Libyan civilians...
Some, including Glenn Greenwald, construed this move as an escalation of the war in Libya.
As the war in Libya escalates on a seemingly weekly basis,  I think it's time for another urgent speech about how imperative it is we all tighten our belts. It's also probably time for another Nobel Peace Prize (and yes, I know: these drone attacks are designed to bring about peace-because War, as we know, is Peace),  he wrote in his blog...

Al Jazeera reported the following today:Predator drones have routinely been flying surveillance missions in Libya, Robert Gates, the US defence secretary, said at a Pentagon briefing on Thursday.

He said the US will provide up to two 24-hour combat air patrols each day by the unmanned Predators.

Is the introduction of two drones an escalation?

In essence, what is the welfare of the people of Misrata and Libya worth?

Is it our problem, and if so, how far should we go?

As Chirac said in 2003, shortly before the invasion of Iraq, war is always the worse solution...

Yet, after Bosnia, Srebrenica and Rwanda, can we simply remain on the sidelines and watch a ruthless thug resort to heavy weaponry and cluster bombs in order to submit a people that is courageously fighting for its freedom and dignity? 
(the photograph above of a Libyan revolutionary on the front line in Misrata is by Chris Hondros)