Syria Special: Syrian Ambassador to US Responds to Accusations

As we noted yesterday, the Syrian Ambassador to the United Nations, Imad Moustapha, spoke on NPR, and he tells a very different story than the evidence that we have collected here. In our conversation with NPR's Andy Carvin and Foreign Policy's Blake Hounshell, none of us have seen any video evidence that would support the Syrian government's claims, despite the fact that Moustapha claims there are hundreds of videotapes that the Syrian government has collected which show armed gangs killing innocent civilians.

Below we have posted the audio, one of our favorite excerpts (of which we have hundreds or thousands of counterexamples), and a link to the full transcript.

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Syria Special: US Ambassador Ford - "Protesters, Not Terrorists"

US Ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, is no stranger to getting directly involved in affairs in Syria's Arab Spring uprising. Ford has repeatedly tried to put himself in the line of fire, in places like Hama, in order to stop what he has described a the brutal killing of civilian protesters. Two weeks ago, Ford traveled to Jassem, another town that has been embattled for some time.

Just this morning, Ford released this statement on his Facebook page, stating unequivocally that the people being killed in Syria are primarily unarmed protesters, and not terrorists. Ford also acknowledged that some Syrian soldiers have been killed, though he did not say who killed them, and he argued that the scale of the crackdown far exceeded the scale of the threat:

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