The US Justice Department is being sued after failing to adhere to Freedom of Information Act requests for documents on a federal surveillance program that has targeted the email and phone conversations of Americans throughout the last five years. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based advocacy groups that fights to protect civil liberties in the digital age, filed a lawsuit on Thursday this week that names the Department of Justice as the sole defendant. - The EFF charges that the DoJ violated the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, by failing to expedite previous requests filed with the government for documents relating to a 2008 amendment included in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Under that year’s update to FISA, feds were awarded legal wiggle room to collect and comb through any communication originating in the United States that is sent abroad through email or phone, all under the guise of national security. The EFF and others attest that the government has extensively violated the US Constitution by doing as such, though, and is now suing the DoJ not for ongoing abuse of the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable search and seizure, but for the department’s failure to quickly honor the FOIA request and for wrongful withholding of agency records.

“The FISA Amendments Act (FAA) of 2008 gave the NSA expansive power to spy on Americans' international email and telephone calls,” the EFF explains in an official statement to the media that was released in conjunction with this week’s lawsuit. “However, last month, in a letter to Senator Ron Wyden, a government official publicly disclosed that the NSA's surveillance had gone even further than what the law permits, with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) issuing at least one ruling calling the NSA's actions unconstitutional.”

Wired: EFF Sues to Get Secret Court Rulings Showing Feds Violated Spy Law

Paul Ryan’s breathtakingly dishonest speech: Yesterday, at an ABC News panel, Mitt Romney pollster Neil Newhouse said, “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.” Wednesday’s speech from Paul Ryan certainly took that disdain for truth to heart, as his address was filled with falsehoods from start to finish. Let’s start with the chronologically impossible. Ryan spoke about the GM plant in his hometown of Janesville:

A lot of guys I went to high school with worked at that GM plant. Right there at that plant, candidate Obama said: “I believe that if our government is there to support you … this plant will be here for another hundred years.” That’s what he said in 2008.

Well, as it turned out, that plant didn’t last another year. It is locked up and empty to this day. And that’s how it is in so many towns today, where the recovery that was promised is nowhere in sight.

Set aside the fact that Paul Ryan, in a fit of anti-Randianism, asked for government funds to save the plant. Set aside that he voted for the big-government auto bailout. Ryan also conveniently forgot to mention that GM announced the closure of the plant in early June 2008. In fact, Ryan and then-Wisconsin Sens. Russ Feingold (D) and Herb Kohl (D) sent a letter that month to GM CEO Rick Wagoner asking him to reconsider. This was not just before Barack Obama was inaugurated or even elected; it was the same day he won his own party’s nomination. There was no way Obama could have saved that auto plant without also discovering time travel.

Glenn Greenwald: Election 2012 and the media: a vast rightwing conspiracy of stupid - Wednesday night, the GOP's nominee for vice-president, Paul Ryan, delivered a speech loaded with pure, fundamental deceit on its core claims. Yet CNN's Wolf Blitzer chiefly admired 'his beautiful family'.

Joseph Kishore: Romney outlines right-wing agenda in acceptance speech - Apart from this, Romney’s speech, like the convention as a whole, was filled with the vacuous sophisms and insipid rhetoric that are universal in American politics. The speech was broken up by chants of “USA! USA!” from the assembled gathering of right-wing delegates, the semi-fascistic [trash] of American capitalism.

Mark Mazzetti's emails with the CIA expose the degradation of journalism that has lost the imperative to be a check to power. - The rightwing transparency group, Judicial Watch, released Tuesday a new batch of documents showing how eagerly the Obama administration shoveled information to Hollywood film-makers about the Bin Laden raid. Obama officials did so to enable the production of a politically beneficial pre-election film about that "heroic" killing, even as administration lawyers insisted to federal courts and media outlets that no disclosure was permissible because the raid was classified.

Thanks to prior disclosures from Judicial Watch of documents it obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, this is old news. That's what the Obama administration chronically does: it manipulates secrecy powers to prevent accountability in a court of law, while leaking at will about the same programs in order to glorify the president.

Dan Gillmor: What Mark Mazzetti's Maureen Dowd CIA tipoff means for the New York Times
Mary Louise: Operation Mockingbird: CIA Media Manipulation
Wikipedia: Operation Mockingbird

Apple confirmed Thursday that it has rejected Drones+ from its App Store. The app is designed to alert users whenever someone has been killed in a U.S. drone strike. - Wired’s Danger Room reported that the app, developed by New York-based developer Josh Begley, has been turned down three times. Begley told Wired that he doesn’t understand why the app should be rejected, saying that it’s simply aggregates news that’s already posted elsewhere. When asked for comment, Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr said the app was turned down because it runs afoul of an App Store guideline against apps that have “objectionable content.” While the app is focused on a narrow subset of news that could be found elsewhere, Begley said that he wanted to use the program to raise awareness about U.S. drone activity. He told Wired that he’s “back to the drawing board” on his idea, though he’s considering trying the app on the Android Market.

The 270 workers would be tried under the "common purpose" doctrine because they were in the crowd which confronted police on 16 August, an official said. Police opened fire, killing 34 miners and sparking a national outcry. The decision to charge the workers was "madness", said former ruling ANC party youth leader Julius Malema.

"The policemen who killed those people are not in custody, not even one of them. This is madness," said Mr Malema, who was expelled from the ANC (African National Congress) earlier this year following a series of disagreements with President Jacob Zuma. "The whole world saw the policemen kill those people."

The killing of the 34 was the most deadly police action since South Africa became a democracy in 1994.

Alex Lantier: South Africa to prosecute strikers targeted by police massacre at Marikana

In 1936, William Dodd, the U.S. Ambassador to Germany, wrote a letter to President Roosevelt in which he stated,

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"A clique of U.S. industrialists is hell-bent to bring a fascist state to supplant our democratic government and is working closely with the fascist regime in Germany and Italy. I have had plenty of opportunity in my post in Berlin to witness how close some of our American ruling families are to the Nazi regime.... A prominent executive of one of the largest corporations, told me point blank that he would be ready to take definite action to bring fascism into America if President Roosevelt continued his progressive policies. Certain American industrialists had a great deal to do with bringing fascist regimes into being in both Germany and Italy. They extended aid to help Fascism occupy the seat of power, and they are helping to keep it there. Propagandists for fascist groups try to dismiss the fascist scare. We should be aware of the symptoms. When industrialists ignore laws designed for social and economic progress they will seek recourse to a fascist state when the institutions of our government compel them to comply with the provisions."

The proven record of Prescott Bush's involvement in financing the Nazi war machine dovetails with the fact that he was part of a criminal cabal that actively sought to impose a fascist coup in America.

Once, right-wing thugs only came out to attack immigrants at night. Now they do so in daylight, unafraid of the consequences because there rarely are any. In recent weeks, the number and severity of the attacks have increased – on 12 August, a 19-year-old Iraqi asylum seeker was fatally stabbed by a gang on motorcycles just streets away from the Greek parliament – and if migrants report attacks to police, they risk being arrested. Not only are crimes against immigrants in Greece considered low priority, much of Golden Dawn's support base comes from police ranks. Exit polls in the May 2012 elections suggested that in some urban districts up to 50 per cent of Greek police voted for the racist group, which now holds 7 per cent of the seats in parliament. The stabbings, beatings and motorbike attacks have become so routine that in many parts of the capital, immigrants are afraid to go out alone.

The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), formed in 1961 during the Cold War, is a group of 120 states and 17 observer states not formally aligned with or against any major power bloc. The NAM held its opening 2012 session yesterday under the new chairmanship of Iran, which succeeded Egypt as the Chair. - Significantly, an Associated Press story in the Washington Post headlined, “Iran opens nonaligned summit with calls for nuclear arms ban”, reported that “Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi opened the gathering by noting commitment to a previous goal from the nonaligned group, known as NAM, to remove the world’s nuclear arsenals within 13 years. ‘We believe that the timetable for ultimate removal of nuclear weapons by 2025, which was proposed by NAM, will only be realized if we follow it up decisively,’ he told delegates.” Yet the New York Times, which has been beating the drums for war with Iran, just as it played a disgraceful role in the deceptive reporting during the lead-up to the Iraq War, never mentioned Iran’s proposal for nuclear abolition. The Times carried the bland headline on its front page, “At Summit Meeting, Iran Has a Message for the World”, and then went on to state, “the message is clear. As Iran plays host to the biggest international conference …it wants to tell its side of the long standoff with the Western powers which are increasingly convinced that Tehran is pursuing nuclear weapons”, without ever reporting Iran’s offer to support the NAM proposal for the abolition of nuclear weapons by 2025.

PressTV: Iran urges UN to help create nuclear-free Middle East
Finian Cunnigham: Iran NAM summit sends message of peace

Rachel Corrie was a 23-year old American peace activist who was run over and killed by an Israeli on a bulldozer, on March 16, 2003 in Nablus, Palestine. Corrie was protesting Israel's systematic destruction of Palestinian homes.

Gilad Atzmon: Rachel Corrie and the Kosher Legal Stamp
Stephen Lendman: Israeli Court Legitimizes Murder
Jean Shaoul: Israeli court rules army not responsible for Rachel Corrie’s death
Mazin Qumsiyeh/Desert Peace: A reminder that Rachel Corrie was not alone - Video
Gideon Levy/Desert Peace: Despite the verdict, Rachel Corrie was murdered by Israel!

The US is literally training their own Taliban enemies to kill American soldiers. - Three more NATO troops have been killed by a man in an Afghan army uniform, in the latest of such “insider attacks” leaving a bad taste in the mouth of US officials seeking to finish out a lost war for another two years. The number of such incidents, termed “green-on-blue” attacks have been increasing steadily as of late, with 34 of them so far this year, ending with 45 NATO members killed, mostly Americans. The failure of the US mission in Afghanistan – to build up and train a centralized state and security apparatus – is illustrated clearly in the constant killing of US soldiers by their Afghan counterparts. Much of the security force has been infiltrated by the Taliban or Pakistani agents. Earlier this month it was reported that the Taliban’s supreme leader Mullah Omar issued a statement bragging about extensive insurgent infiltration in America’s trained security personnel in Afghanistan.

What a depressing choice the American people are being presented with this year. We are at a point in our history where we desperately need a change of direction in the White House, and we are guaranteed that we are not going to get it. The Democrats are running the worst president in American history, and the Republicans are running a guy who is almost a carbon copy of him. The fact that about half the country is still supporting Barack Obama shows how incredibly stupid and corrupt the American people have become. [...] Republicans are being told that they have "no choice" but to vote for Romney because otherwise they will get another four years of Obama. This "lesser of two evils" theme comes out every four years. We are told that we "must" vote for a horrible candidate because the other guy is even worse. Well, millions of Americans are getting sick of this routine. Perhaps that is why it is being projected that as many as 90 million Americans of voting age will not vote this year. Yes, Barack Obama has been so horrible as president that it is hard to put it into words. But Mitt Romney would be just like Barack Obama. Those that are dreaming of a major change in direction if Romney is elected are going to be bitterly, bitterly disappointed.

ThinkProgress: Condi Rice Can’t Name A Specific Obama Foreign Policy Failure

Enormous quantities of decommissioned Russian nuclear reactors and radioactive waste were dumped into the Kara Sea in the Arctic Ocean north of Siberia over a course of decades, according to documents given to Norwegian officials by Russian authorities and published in Norwegian media. Bellona had received in 2011 a draft of a similar report prepared for Russia’s Gossoviet, the State Council, for presentation at a meeting presided over by then-president Dmitry Medvedev on Russian environmental security.

Not just the Russians: Ocean disposal of radioactive waste

In Feb. Guatemalan President Molina said his country is “not doing what the US says, we're doing what we have to do” — decriminalize drugs. Now US Marines have been sent in to help oust the Zeta Drug Cartel. The US Navy, Coast Guard, & federal agents are also involved. - The Marines are now encamped after having deployed to Guatemala earlier this month, and have just “kicked off” their share of Operation Martillo, or Hammer. That operation began earlier in January, and is much larger than just the Marine contingent and involves the Navy, Coast Guard, and federal agents working with the Guatemalans to block drug shipment routes.

It’s a big shift for U.S. forces in the region. For years, the Pentagon has sent troops to Guatemala, but these missions have been pretty limited to exercising “soft power” — training local soldiers, building roads and schools. Operation Martillo is something quite different. The news comes as two U.S. agents wounded in an attack in Mexico last week were discovered to be likely working for the CIA. The attack appears to be a case of mistaken identity after the agents fled from a Federal Police checkpoint, thinking the plain-clothed Mexican cops were cartel members. Police, seeing the agents’ bulletproof SUV flee their checkpoint, presumably thought the same thing, followed them and shot up their car. The agents have now been discovered as likely working for the CIA, as one of the wounded agents’ false identity was linked to a post office box in Virginia previously tied to CIA rendition flights.

Cryptogon.com/Post-Gazette/NYT: ‘Americans Shot in Mexico Were CIA Operatives Aiding in Drug War’

Nearly two weeks after he was hauled off by authorities and admitted to a psych ward over his own Facebook postings, retired Marine Brandon Raub is speaking out about his detainment and what Americans should know about their right to free speech.

Raub, a 26-year-old decorated military vet that served two tours overseas, was visited by agents with the US Secret Service, the FBI and local law enforcement on August 16 after statements he made on his personal Facebook page raised the eyebrows of authorities. Posts calling for a political revolution and even lyrical excerpts from rap songs placed his social networking profile on the government’s radar, and after briefly questioning him at his house two weeks ago, Raub was handcuffed and hauled off. One week later he was released from custody, but Raub and his attorney say that not only was no crime committed, but that the Marine still has yet to be charged with a crime. “The idea that a man can be snatched out of his property without being read his rights, I think should be very alarming to all Americans,” Raub says in an interview this week conducted by his attorney, the Rutherford Institute’s John Whitehead (YouTube link).

End of American Dream: Why Does The U.S. Government Treat Military Veterans Like Human Garbage?

Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei says the US and its allies abuse the “illogical, unjust and completely undemocratic” structure of the UN Security Council to impose their bullying on the world. - “This is a flagrant form of dictatorship, which is antiquated and obsolete and whose expiry date has passed,” Ayatollah Khamenei said during an inaugural speech to the 16th Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) summit in Tehran on Thursday. The Leader added that the US and its accomplices protect the interests of the West in the name of “human rights”, interfere militarily in other countries in the name of “democracy” and target defenseless people in villages and cities with their bombs and weapons in the name of “combating terrorism”. Ayatollah Khamenei said torture and assassination are condoned if they are carried out by the US, the Israeli regime and their puppets. They (the West) impose their interests on world nations in the name of “international law” and their domineering and illegal demands in the name of “international community”, the Leader stated.

PressTV: Iran urges UN to help create nuclear-free Middle East
Finian Cunnigham: Iran NAM summit sends message of peace

On Tuesday, not far from the beaches of New Jersey, was a sight hundreds of millions of dollars and years of development in the making: the Army’s football-field-size robot spy blimp took to the air for the first time at a military base in Lakehurst. The 90-minute flight of the Long-Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle (LEMV), manufactured by U.K. firm Hybrid Air Vehicles and U.S. aerospace giant Northrop Grumman and allegedly captured in the video above, is only the beginning of a months-long test program; the lighter-than-air ship won’t head to a warzone until next year at the earliest. But it’s still important news. For years, the Pentagon has tried and failed to get next-generation airships off the ground. No longer. [...] Provided further testing goes smoothly, the LEMV could deploy to Afghanistan for combat trials in early 2013, floating thousands of feet over the battlefield for, Northrop hopes, entire weeks on end, scanning for "insurgents". K.C. Brown, Jr., Northrop’s director of Army programs, told Danger Room the LEMV could also pull double duty, hauling military cargo out of landlocked Afghanistan as part of the Pentagon’s war drawdown. It might make for quite the lighter-than-air mule: Northrop claims the LEMV has enough buoyancy to haul seven tons of cargo 2,400 miles at 30 miles per hour.

Egypt's Navy refused a U.S. request to fire on an Iranian weapons ship heading for violence-torn Syria through the Suez Canal, al-Arabiya reported. - "The Suez Canal is a narrow waterway and it is impossible for military action to take place there," Mohab Mamish, recently appointed chairman of the Suez Canal Authority and former Egyptian Navy commander told al-Arabiya. The U.S. request was made recently, the report said. The Egypt Independent had a similar report, saying it was told by Mamish the Navy refused a United States request to "strike" the Iranian ship.

Next month’s IAEA meeting in Vienna is going to have the same fight that has so often been present at other such meetings, as Israeli officials are expressing outrage at the idea that a vote might be held at the meeting to criticize Israel for its nuclear weapon arsenal. - The vote, which is backed by several of Israel’s neighbors, calls on the nation to declare its nuclear activists and join the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), which Israel has ruled out ever doing. Instead, Israeli officials say that the whole vote is a plot by Iran to distract attention from its own program. Iran has no nuclear weapons, and is a member in good standing of the NPT. Indeed, it does not appear that Iran had anything to do with this initiative, which is instead a product of the “nuclear-free Mideast” initiative that the Obama Administration initially endorsed, and then later condemned after Israel expressed opposition. Israel is the only nuclear weapons power in the Middle East.

52-year-old Ram Kishen with his government provided
ration card in Satnapur Village, Uttar Pradesh, India.

Poor in India Starve as Politicians Steal $14.5 Billion of Food -- "The theft blunted the country’s only weapon against widespread starvation -- a five-decade-old public distribution system that has failed to deliver record harvests to the plates of India’s hungriest."

Ram Kishen, 52, half-blind and half- starved, holds in his gnarled hands the reason for his hunger: a tattered card entitling him to subsidized rations that now serves as a symbol of India’s biggest food heist. Kishen has had nothing from the village shop for 15 months. Yet 20 minutes’ drive from Satnapur, past bone-dry fields and tiny hamlets where children with distended bellies play, a government storage facility five football fields long bulges with wheat and rice. By law, those 57,000 tons of food are meant for Kishen and the 105 other households in Satnapur with ration books. They’re meant for some of the 350 million families living below India’s poverty line of 50 cents a day.

Instead, as much as $14.5 billion in food was looted by corrupt politicians and their criminal syndicates over the past decade in Kishen’s home state of Uttar Pradesh alone, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The theft blunted the country’s only weapon against widespread starvation -- a five-decade-old public distribution system that has failed to deliver record harvests to the plates of India’s hungriest.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu has pulled out of an international summit because he doesn't want to share a platform with the "morally indefensible" Tony Blair, it emerged yesterday. - The retired archbishop, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his campaigning against apartheid, said that he had withdrawn from the event because he believed the former Prime Minister had supported the invasion of Iraq "on the basis of unproven allegations of the existence of weapons of mass destruction." In a statement, Archbishop Tutu's office added: "The Discovery Invest Summit has leadership as its theme. Morality and leadership are indivisible. In this context, it would be inappropriate for the Archbishop to share a platform with Mr Blair." Mr Blair and Archbishop Tutu, alongside the chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, were due to appear at the leadership summit in Johannesburg later this week. The Muslim political party Al Jama-ah has already said that it will attempt to arrest Mr Blair when he arrives in Johannesburg for "crimes against humanity".

Gambia's President Yahya Jammeh came under attack for sending nine prisoners to the firing squad, leaving the tiny nation jittery as another 38 convicts await execution in the coming weeks. - The 47-year-old former soldier, who seized power in a 1994 coup, dismissed concerns expressed by the African Union and rights bodies that had urged him not to carry out his plans. He executed a first batch of prisoners on Sunday night. On Tuesday amid a chorus of calls to halt further killings, Amnesty International said many of the 38 people "at imminent risk of execution" had faced politically motivated charges and had not been given a fair trial. Gambia's interior ministry announced Monday that nine death row prisoners had been executed by firing squad the night before, a week after Jammeh vowed to carry out all death sentences by mid-September.

CNN: U.N. slams 'stream of executions' in Gambia
Washington Post: Gambia uses firing squad to execute 9 death row inmates; US expresses concern

Ukraine's former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko will remain in jail, as the country's High Specialized Court dismissed the cassation appeal against her seven-year prison sentence. - The ex-prime minister was arrested and jailed last October for abusing the powers of her office, most notably in the 2009 gas import deal she signed with Russia. Tymoshenko was also ordered to pay $190 million in fines. The appeal was a last-ditch attempt by Tymoshenko’s defense attorneys to overturn the verdict. In the wake of this defeat, the defense may take their case to the European Court of Human Rights.

Russia Today: Human rights court begins hearings on Tymoshenko case

Courts are supposed to check the abuse of executive power, not cravenly serve it. But in the US and Israel, that is now the case. - The US military announced on Monday that no criminal charges would be brought against the US marines in Afghanistan who videotaped themselves urinating on the corpses of Taliban fighters. Nor, the military announced, would any criminal charges be filed against the US troops who "tried to burn about 500 copies of the Qur'an as part of a badly bungled security sweep at an Afghan prison in February, despite repeated warnings from Afghan soldiers that they were making a colossal mistake".

Parallel to that, an Israeli judge Tuesday dismissed a lawsuit against the Israeli government brought by the family of Rachel Corrie, the 23-year-old American student and pro-Palestinian activist who was killed by a military bulldozer in 2003 as she protested the demolition of a house in Gaza whose family she had come to befriend. Upon learning of the suit's dismissal, Corrie's mother, Cindy, said: "I believe this was a bad day, not only for our family, but for human rights, humanity, the rule of law and also for the country of Israel."

Stephen Lendman: Israeli Court Legitimizes Murder

BETHLEHEM (Ma'an) -- Palestinian leaders and factions on Tuesday slammed an Israeli court's decision which rejected accusations of negligence over the 2003 killing of American activist Rachel Corrie.

An Israeli court had cleared Israel's military of any blame for the death of Corrie, who was crushed by an army bulldozer while trying to stop the demolition of a home in Rafah in southern Gaza. The PLO executive committee deplored what it described as "a miscarriage of justice." "Despite the testimonies of eyewitnesses, the audio-visual evidence and the overwhelming proof that Rachel was deliberately murdered, the Israeli court insists on victimizing her again in her tragic death," senior PLO official Hanan Ashrawi said in a statement. "This proves that once again the occupation has distorted the legal and judicial systems in Israel and that the lack of accountability for its violence and violations has generated a culture of hate and impunity," she added. Ashrawi said Israel's practice of blaming the victim now applied to international activists and all victims of Israeli violence, and not just Palestinians.

Stephen Lendman: Israeli Court Legitimizes Murder
Chris McGreal: Rachel Corrie verdict exposes Israeli military mindset

'Free Syrian Army chosen proxies of Foreign powers’ – activist Brian Becker, director of the ANSWER anti-war coalition, told RT that Western states are pushing forward the idea of a proxy government as a part of their colonial agenda in the Middle East. And such a move would lay a strong basis for a full-scale military intervention, he added.

RT: The French leader has called on the Syrian opposition to form a provisional government, saying France would recognize it… What do you make of this?
Brian Becker: It’s most important to remember that France is the former colonizer of Syria, the colonizer along with the British in the Middle East. It is very odd and ironic, in fact completely hypocritical to have the French government saying to the Syrian opposition ‘you form a government and we will recognize you.’ I mean that’s just a script from the good old days when the colonial powers operated through proxies in Syria, Egypt, wherever the colonialism was, and that was most parts of the world. What we are seeing now is an escalation of foreign intervention. If France, and if Britain and the United States, if the NATO powers in fact recognize this government by the Syrian opposition, by French colonialism in its new form, then we will see the basis being laid for downright full-scale military intervention to defend this new government which the West will say is the legitimate voice of the Syrian people.

Jason Ditz: Syria FM: US Is Major Player in Civil War
RIANovosti: Syrian Opposition Asks U.S. to Introduce No-Fly Zone
PressTV: Egypt opposes foreign military intervention in Syria

Alex Lantier: French President Hollande calls for formation of Syrian opposition government - Hollande’s move comes one week after US President Barack Obama threatened to invade Syria if Syrian President Bashar al-Assad appeared ready to use chemical weapons against US-backed anti-Assad fighters. This marked the first open threat of direct military intervention into Syria by the imperialist powers. Until then, they had organized the funding and arming of their proxy forces, largely Sunni Islamist fighters, through the offices of the Saudi and Qatari monarchies and the Turkish government. Hollande’s comments addressed a range of international issues, but centered on the crisis in Syria and the Middle East. They amount to an official declaration by the French government, worked out with Washington, that it is pursuing regime-change by military force in Syria.