The instability in Syria is already straining the resources of Turkey and Jordan; over 2 million refugees have fled Syria to neighboring countries.

This is especially ironic because the US, in the past, provided chemical weapons to another Middle Eastern dictator, even when it was clear that they were being used against civilian targets.

Apparently, when it comes to dictators with whom the US is aligned, it doesn’t constitute a violation of the Geneva Conventions.

Or, in more cases than we’d often like to admit, atrocity-committing dictators rely on powerful nations like the United States or the UK to provide them with the chemical weapons–and then look away.

The President’s statement here is especially ironic as this speech has since been called one of the least effective of his presidency.

This idea, of Syria forfeiting its chemical weapons, was actually posited first by Secretary of State John Kerry in a completely off-the-cuff comment he made during his speech at the British Foreign Office.

Sure, [Assad] could turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week — turn it over, all of it without delay and allow the full and total accounting (of it), but he isn’t about to do it and it can’t be done.”

The SIGINT Enabling Project actively engages the US and foreign IT industries to covertly influence and/or overtly leverage their commercial products' designs. These design changes make the systems in question exploitable through SIGINT collection (e.g., Endpoint. MidPoint. etc.) with foreknowledge of the modification. To the consumer and other adversaries, however, the systems' security remains intact. In this way, the SIGINT Enabling approach uses commercial technology and insight to manage the increasing cost and technical challenges of discovering and successfully exploiting systems of interest within the ever-more integrated and security-focused global communications environment."

Nursultan Nazarbayev has been president of Kazakhstan since 1991 and was elected to another five year term in April of 2011. His regime has been characterized by what Transparency International calls “rampant corruption.” It is suspected that he as siphoned over $1 billion in the country’s oil revenues to his own foreign bank accounts.