What Is Dennis Kucinich Doing Meeting With Assad?

What exactly is Dennis Kucinich doing meeting with Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad? He's gone to Syria ostensibly on a fact-finding mission, but it's all too likely that he'll be used as a useful idiot by Assad's regime to spread the regime's propaganda.

Sana said al-Assad has briefed the two men on the current events in Syria and the process of an overall reforms Syria is passing through, underscoring the importance to "distinguish between the people's righteous demands, which the government is meeting through the endorsed laws and decrees, and the armed groups that take advantage of these demands to foment anarchy and destabilize the country."

It added that the two men have expressed keenness about Syria's security and stability "which is the basic pillar of the entire region's stability."

Syria has been gripped by more than three months of anti- government protests, however, the protestors' demands have snowballed from modest reforms to the downfall of the leadership who ruled the country for about four decades.

Syria blames the unrest on "armed extremist groups" that aim at toppling Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and establishing an Islamic emirate instead.

The Syrian government said 1,300 members of security forces have died since the eruption of protests in mid March, including 120 last week in north Syria, meanwhile, according to activists, more than 1,400 civilians have died and some 10,000 have been detained during the government's alleged crackdown on protests.

Assad continues his brutal crackdown against opposition protesters and for all the talk about reforms, Assad's actions show the cynical hypocrisy at work. Everything Assad does is in furtherance of trying to remain in power. Everything he's saying and doing is to remain in power. Leaked documents show just how Assad was trying to control the flow of information by limiting Internet accessibility.

The meeting with Kucinich was a calculated move to try and curry favor with the US that the regime is engaging in as brutal a crackdown as Khadafi's in Libya.