The State Department wants you to see the crackdown in Syria. Today, it uploaded eight satellite images showing how President Bashar al-Assad's forces have positioned artillery toward major protest centers.

The release was accompanied by a note by U.S. Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford. "[S]ome try to equate the violence perpetrated by the regime with the violence perpetrated by the opposition," he wrote. "[I]t is unfair to do so when one side is using such heavy weaponry... We are intent on exposing the regime's brutal tactics for the world to see."

That's an argument that seems designed to undermine the case of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who criticized the recent Security Council resolution on Syria for not condemning the violence of armed groups within the country in the same language it used toward the Assad regime.

State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said at a press briefing today that the United States will be releasing more declassified satellite imagery in the coming days. "Our intent here is to, obviously, expose the ruthlessness...of this regime and its overwhelming predominant military advantage and the horrible kinds of weaponry that it's deploying against its people," she said.

More pictures appear after the jump.

Read on

Your news, should you choose to believe it, came in from unnamed "dependable sources:"

"On the morning of February 10th at 2:45 pm, unknown persons broke into the residence of the highest leader North Korea Kim Jong En and shot him dead."

Suspicious traffic patterns had been seen outside of the North Korean embassy in Beijing, and this explanation, it appears, seems as good as any: Users of China's Sina Weibo, the local Twitter clone, forwarded the message more than 10,000 times. One user posted a picture of what Kim Jong Un would look like arrested. Another commented "in this weird country, that's not even strange."  

The chained Chinese media universe means that Weibo rumors are a lot more trusted than their Twitter counterparts. Chinese media coverage of sensitive subjects is often deliberately obfuscating, and Chinese viewers know it. A few days ago, Wang Lijun, one of China's best known gangbusters and the right-hand man of powerful politician Bo Xilai appeared to try to defect at the U.S. Consulate in Chengdu. While official Chinese media covered the defection, they mostly copied the official Xinhua report, which failed to mention the most important point: how it affects Bo's chances of promotion.  

Chinese official media reporting on North Korea is often further removed from reality than the way China reports on its own political process. (My favorite English-language example is a Xinhua article that compares nightlife in Pyongyang with New York and Tokyo.) Besides, North Korea itself is a black box: Even the best American articles often depend on rumors and hearsay to cobble together a portrait of the closed country. 

All these factors combine to give the Sina Weibo rumor -- started, it appears, by a random user with less than 200 followers -- enough traction in China to land on this side of the world wide web and into the pages of Forbes, MSNBC, and Huffington Post. 

It is possible that this Weibo user broke the story of a successful coup in North Korea, though it's extremely unlikely. My favorite explanation on the Twitter side of things comes from Shaun Walker, the Moscow correspondent for the Independent, who wrote "Possible that someone said he 'murdered an enormous family-sized bucket of fried chicken,' and something got lost in translation."

President Bashar al-Assad's assault on Homs continues, and the world has watched it unfold in real time. For the past week, activists have uploaded gruesome videos of indiscriminate shelling and civilian shelling that has given viewers worldwide a ground-level view of the destruction of Syria's third-largest city.

Danny Abdul Dayem, a British citizen of Syrian descent, has been one of the most prominent activists to document the assault on the city. He is a former business management student who, during the past year, has made delivering aid and supplies to protesters his sole profession. He has been a resident of Syria since the 1990s, when his English mother converted to Islam and married his father.

Dayem was shot in August when standing on a Homs street corner - the bullet, he said, went in his waist and came out his back. "A car came by and threw a grenade, which I actually thought was a firework. So I looked at my friend and told him, ‘there's not even time for that kind of stuff,'" he told the BBC. "The car parked right behind me, two meters between me and the car, opened the window and started shooting. I actually didn't feel the bullet at first."

After fleeing with his family to Cairo and then London to recuperate, Dayem is now back in Homs to cover what has been the worst assault since the outbreak of unrest. He has uploaded a series of videos to his Youtube channel showing the destruction of the city. "Is this what the U.N. is waiting for, until there aren't any more children left?" he says in the below video, while standing over a dead child killed in a mortar attack.

Dayem's videos also track the rapid deterioration of life in Homs. While his recordings in late January show celebratory anti-Assad street demonstrations, his reports during the past week have grown increasingly urgent and outraged. "This is the life we've gotten used to: Rockets, bullets, killing children, dead in the streets, body parts," he said in the below video, reportedly filmed in the Baba Amro neighborhood of Homs, as a building burned behind him and a rocket crashed in the distance. "Why isn't the world helping us? Where is the humanity in the world? Where is the frickin' U.N.?"

With only a few foreign correspondents being smuggled into Homs, the reports by Syrian citizen journalists has become an increasingly vital source of news about the unfolding destruction of the city. It's dangerous work: One of international news networks' primary sources of news for events in Homs, Mazhar Tayyara, was killed by government shelling in the al-Khaldiya neighborhood of Homs in the early morning hours of Feb. 4. Tayyara, a 24-year old who went by the moniker "Omar the Syrian," was the fourth citizen journalist killed in Syria during the past four months, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Another of those four, Basil al-Sayed, was shot and killed in December at a checkpoint at Homs, while recording security forces opening fire at protesters. This is the last video he filmed.

But despite the risks, such reports have been one of the Syrian opposition's primary tools to spread its message. Another citizen journalist, Khaled Abou Saleh, made waves when he confronted the head of the Arab League observer mission in Syria, Gen. Mustafa al-Dabi, in the streets of Homs. In the video below, he implores the Arab League to stop the killing. In other videos, he is seen delivering a speech to an anti-Assad crowd and carrying the lifeless body of a young girl reportedly killed in Homs on Feb. 5. In the absence of sufficient arms to challenge Assad, these Syrians have only their video cameras.

Santorum's big night
It ain't over yet. Rick Santorum pulled off an unlikely hat-trick on Tuesday night, winning caucuses in Minnesota and Colorado as well as a non-binding primary in Missouri -- a troubling development for frontrunner Mitt Romney, who received lower vote totals in all three states than he did in 2008.
"I don't stand here and claim to be the conservative alternative to Mitt Romney.... I stand here to be the conservative alternative to Barack Obama," Santorum said in a speech to supporters in St. Louis. Once seen as the presumptive challenger to Romney, Newt Gingrich wasn't even on the ballot in Missouri and had disappointing third and fourth-place finishes in the other contests. His campaign is now focused on the Super Tuesday contests on March 6, which will award more than 400 delegates.
Santorum's surprising success is likely to focus more media scrutiny on his foreign-policy views, which have so far received less attention than his socially conservative domestic policies. In particular, Santorum has a long record of hawkish views on Iran and Islam. 

Women in combat
The announcement this week that the Pentagon is easing some restrictions on women in combat is already resonating in the campaign. Santorum expressed concerns about the policy change this week, telling NBC's Ann Curry, "When you have men and women together in combat, I think men have emotions when you see a woman in harm's way.... I think it's something that's natural that's very much in our culture to be protective. That was my concern, and I think that's a concern with all the military.''
Polls, however, show strong support -- even among those describing themselves as "very conservative" -- for allowing women to serve in combat roles.

Release the Bachmann
The Conservative Political Action Conference is meeting this week in Washington, D.C. and while there is reportedly little enthusiasm for Romney's candidacy at the event, former candidate Michele Bachmann fired up the crowd with a withering assault on Barack Obama's foreign-policy record. "After a decade of sacrifice to defeat global jihad, Obama has chosen to hand Iraq to Iran," Bachmann said. "Before Obama was elected, no one had ever heard a United States president say to the world that we are anything but an exceptional nation," she continued. "And before President Obama was elected, we never had a president go around apologizing to the world."
Romney will address CPAC on Friday in what's being seen as a critical opportunity to defend his conservative credentials.

Romney readies
While he may be a long way from finishing off his Republican rivals, Romney is apparently already prepping for a foreign-policy debate with Obama. RealClearPolitics reports that for the past three weeks, the Romney campaign has been holding a weekly conference call with the more than 40 experts who are advising the campaign on foreign policy. Romney's campaign argues that despite Obama's generally high approval ratings on foreign affairs, he will be vulnerable on defense spending, tension with Israel, the "reset" policy with Russia, and his inability to halt the development of an Iranian nuclear weapon.

Liberals learn to stop worrying and love drones and Gitmo
Obama may have fired up the base in 2008 by attacking the Bush administration's harsh counterterrorism policies, but with a Democrat in office, these same voters seem to be becoming more comfortable with the war on terror. A new CBS-Washington Post poll finds that 70 percent of voters -- including 53 percent of self-identified liberal democrats -- approve of keeping the detention center at Guantanamo Bay open. Obama signed an executive order closing the prison in the first week of his presidency, but that promise has now been largely abandoned in the face of strong congressional opposition. The poll also found that 77 percent of liberal democrats support drone strikes against suspected terrorists and a majority also support the use of drones U.S. citizens who are suspected of terrorism overseas.

What to watch for
Maine will announce the results of its week-long caucuses on Saturday. The independent-leaning northeast state may be Ron Paul's best chance for a win, as neither Gingrich nor Santorum have campaigned in the low-turnout contest.

On the Election Channel
Uri Friedman reads Santorum's 40+ op-eds on Iran so you don't have to.
Charles Kupchan says Romney should get real and admit it's not going to be an American century. Shadow Government's Will Inboden counters.
David Hoffman lists 5 pressing national security threats that haven't been mentioned in the campaign.
Scott Clement, from the Washington Post's Behind the Numbers team, finds little voter support for a U.S. intervention in Syria.
Joshua E. Keating profiles America's weirdest Super PAC.

Guess it's a slow day in Jackson: 

Mississippi State Rep. Steve Holland, a Democrat, has introduced a bill calling for the part of the Gulf of Mexico that is bordered by Mississippi to be renamed the “Gulf of America.”

The measure, known as HB 150 and introduced to the state House Marine Resources Committee, says the body of water will have its new name beginning July 1.

The bill doesn't give any reason for the change, but one Latino Republican group is proposing changing the name of the Mississippi River in retaliation. 

Also, nobody tell Holland, who probably decorates his office with "American carpets" and refers to his highest quality dishware as "the good America," but arguing over Gulf nomenclature is a longtime Middle Eastern preoccupation.

HT: Nick Miroff

On Monday, we disussed Ruth Bader Ginsburg's now-controversial interview with an Egyptian television station in which she suggested that the U.S. Constitution may not be the best guide for a country writing its own founding document in the 21st century and suggested that the South African constitution, which includes both more enumerated rights and "positive" rights -- such as healthcare and economic equality -- might be a better fit. 

It turns out this may be an increasingly popular view. The New York Times' Adam Liptak summarizes a recent study which found that fewer democracies have looked to the U.S. Constitution as a model in recent years:

In 1987, on the Constitution’s bicentennial, Time magazine calculated that “of the 170 countries that exist today, more than 160 have written charters modeled directly or indirectly on the U.S. version.”

A quarter-century later, the picture looks very different. “The U.S. Constitution appears to be losing its appeal as a model for constitutional drafters elsewhere,” according to a new study by David S. Law of Washington University in St. Louis and Mila Versteeg of the University of Virginia.

[...]

“Among the world’s democracies,” Professors Law and Versteeg concluded, “constitutional similarity to the United States has clearly gone into free fall. Over the 1960s and 1970s, democratic constitutions as a whole became more similar to the U.S. Constitution, only to reverse course in the 1980s and 1990s.”

“The turn of the twenty-first century, however, saw the beginning of a steep plunge that continues through the most recent years for which we have data, to the point that the constitutions of the world’s democracies are, on average, less similar to the U.S. Constitution now than they were at the end of World War II.”

There are lots of possible reasons. The United States Constitution is terse and old, and it guarantees relatively few rights. The commitment of some members of the Supreme Court to interpreting the Constitution according to its original meaning in the 18th century may send the signal that it is of little current use to, say, a new African nation. And the Constitution’s waning influence may be part of a general decline in American power and prestige.

I'm not sure I buy that this is a sign of declining American power. Rather, it seems more like adaptation over time. The most controversial legal battles of American history have involved the interpretation of non-specific language in the constitution -- whether the bill of rights implies a right to privacy, whether the first amendment mandates a complete seperation of church and state, whether firearms laws are prohibited by the second amendment.

If the U.S. were writing a new constitution today, it would likely address these issues in more specificity, and make reference to a number of modern. political issues that weren't concerns in the 18th century. It shouldn't be a surprise that new democracies are attempting a bit more specifity and modernity in their documents. (There is a danger in too much specificity, as the EU's unwieldy, 219-page monstrosity attests.)

The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg is skeptical about the study, but actually makes a stronger case that U.S.-style constitutions have gone out of favor.

The problem is that the study focusses almost exclusively on rights—the individual and civil rights that are specified in written constitutions. But it almost totally ignores structures—the mundane mechanisms of governing, the nuts and bolts, which is mainly what constitutions, written and unwritten, are about, and which determine not only whether rights are truly guaranteed but also whether a government can truly function in accordance with democratic norms. Or function at all with any semblance of efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability.

Even in terms of structure, the U.S. model isn't particularly popular. A U.S.-style chief executive is a popular feature among Latin American governments, but over the years this has proven problematic by facilitating the rise of autocratic caudillos. Far more popular today are "parliamentary systems with some form of proportional representation."

But again, this isn't really a new phenomenon -- there hasn't been a new democracy with an American-style presidential system for over a century so it's hard to attribue it to a loss of prestige. 

Hat tip: Daily Dish

Rioting has erupted in the tiny Indian Ocean island nation after a confusing sequence of events that saw President Mohamed Nasheed resign, then claim a day later that he had been forced from office. Police have now issued a warrant for Nasheed's arrest:

Nasheed had announced he was voluntarily resigning Tuesday after months of protests against his rule and fading support from the police and the army. But the next day, as former Vice President Mohammed Waheed Hassan was forming a new government, Nasheed suddenly announced he had actually been pushed from power at gunpoint.

Thousands of his supporters swept into the streets. They clashed with security forces in Male, the capital, and attacked police stations in remote parts of this 1,200-island archipelago nation off southern India. The new government insists there was no coup.

The dispute threatens the crucial tourism industry of this mostly Muslim nation of 300,000 people, which relies on dozens of high-end resorts that cater to the rich and famous. The developments also raise questions about the future of a democracy that only shed a 30-year, one-man rule with the 2008 multiparty elections that brought Nasheed to power.

Nasheed first came to prominence as a human rights campaigner under the rule of the Maldives former leader, the dictatorial Maumoon Abdul Gayoom. He's best known internationally for his environmental activism, particularly his well-publicized stunt of holding a cabinet meeting underwater to raise awareness of the dangers rising sea levels pose to small island nations like the Maldives. But it's been a rough year for his presidency: 

Over the past year, Nasheed was battered by protests over soaring prices and demands for more religiously conservative policies. Last month, Nasheed's government arrested the nation's top criminal court judge for freeing a government critic and refused to release him as protests grew.

Nasheed's supporters have blamed both military factions tied to Gayoom and Islamist extremists for his ouster. The departed president now believes he will soon be arrested, as he was 27 times under Gayoom's rule. 

Coups are an increasingly rare phenomenon in global politics, and when they do occur, those who take power have been increasingly willing to give it up -- thanks largely to changing international attitudes toward coups in the post-Cold War era. This case is complicated by the fact that it initially appeared that Nasheed had left voluntarily, and even now the facts aren't quite clear. Initially, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon appeared to give tacit approval to the transfer of power, but that could change if it appears that Nasheed was, in fact, forced from power.      

Nasheed was interviewed by FP's Charles Homans about his environmental activism in Dec. 2010.