First rat off the ship

Rick Gladstone and David Goodman have an article in The New York Times about Syria:

A senior Syrian official appeared to switch to the insurgent side, compounding the plight of the embattled government, which has seen the country’s currency plunge to levels of roughly half the value of a year ago when the uprising began.
In a video posted on the internet (above), Abdo Hussameldin, the deputy oil minister, said he had defected from President Bashar al-Assad’s government, making him one of the highest-ranking civilian officials to desert Assad in the increasingly chaotic insurgency, which the United Nations estimates has left at least 7,500 people dead.
The video, which first surfaced early Thursday in the Middle East, did not specify where or when it had been made, and Hussameldin could not be reached to verify it.
“I recommend for all my friends who are still working for the regime to follow my self and leave the broken ship of the regime,” said Hussameldin, 58, who had worked in Assad’s government for more than 33 years, according to a translation of his message provided by the Syrian Expatriates Organization, an anti-Assad group.
He praised the Free Syrian Army, an armed contingent of mostly former soldiers, and castigated Russia and China, Assad’s most powerful international supporters, saying they had proven themselves “unfriendly to the Syrian people,” according to the translation. “I do not want to end my working life serving in the crimes of this regime,” he said, acknowledging that with such a choice, “the regime will chase me and my family and will accuse me with fabrication accusations.”
Eiad Shurbaji, a prominent Syrian dissident and journalist who said he had worked with Hussameldin in 2004 and 2005, when Shurbaji worked as the head of the media department of the oil ministry, confirmed that Hussameldin was the man in the video.
Shurbaji said Hussameldin, a friend, had served as deputy under at least four different oil ministers. While Shurbaji worked at the ministry, the two had long conversations over coffee that mostly focused on Hussameldin’s complaints about corruption in the ministry, Shurbaji said.
“He was a clean person,” said Shurbaji, who left Syria for the United States several months ago after he had been arrested and released by the authorities. “I am so pleased to hear about this defection. He became aware where things are heading in Syria.”
Western officials who have sought to isolate Assad, one of the Arab world’s most resilient autocrats, considered the defection a significant event, if true.
In Washington, Victoria Nuland, the State Department spokeswoman, told reporters she could not yet confirm that the defection of Hussameldin was genuine. But she noted that “he would be well placed, this particular individual, to understand the impact that the sanctions that the Europeans, the Arab League, and other countries are now beginning to put on Syria, are having for the regime, are having for the health and welfare of Syria and the Syrian people. So, you know, this particular individual is privy to a lot of information about what Assad has really done to his country.”
In London, a spokesman for Prime Minister David Cameron, Steve Field, told reporters such a defection would make the deputy minister the highest-ranking civilian so far to resign in the Syrian uprising.
Syria’s state-run media made no mention of Hussameldin’s video, which came against a backdrop of Assad's deepening isolation, new reports of armed clashes and deaths in the devastated central city of Homs and elsewhere in Syria, and a public debate in the United States over possible military intervention in Syria. The Local Coordination Committees, an anti-Assad group, said on its Facebook page that at least 56 Syrians were killed on Thursday, a figure that could not be corroborated independently.
Statements in Washington in recent days, most notably by Senator John McCain, the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, calling for aerial bombardment of Syria’s military apparently contributed to a demand for dollars by nervous money traders in Syria. That demand put new pressure on the Syrian pound, which has been eroding for months. Although senior Obama administration officials said they opposed military intervention in Syria, they did not rule out such an option.
Quoting currency dealers in Damascus reached by telephone, Reuters reported the Syrian pound had lost about thirteen percent of its value in the past few days and was trading at about a hundred pounds to the dollar, compared with 47 pounds to the dollar in March of 2011, when the anti-Assad uprising began.
President Abdullah Gul of Turkey, Syria’s northern neighbor and former ally that is now one of its most strident critics, also seemed to signal some support for armed intervention in Syria. He indicated such military action should not come from “outside the region”, apparently referring to the NATO aerial campaign against Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya last year. Gul, whose country is now home to twelve t Syrian refugees, made his remarks during a visit to Tunis.
International diplomatic efforts in Syria have focused mainly on how to provide emergency relief to civilians in Homs and other cities whose lives have been upended by the violence. Large areas of the country are bereft of food, water, and medical supplies, activists say.
Valerie Amos, the top United Nations relief official, upon arriving in Syria to assess those needs, said she was overwhelmed by the destruction she saw from a monthlong military assault on Homs, an epicenter of armed resistance to Assad. She saw very few inhabitants, particularly in the ravaged neighborhood of Baba Amr, and wondered where they had gone.
Amos’ visit came as her subordinates were preparing food supplies for as many as 1.5 million Syrians as part of a ninety-day emergency plan. John Ging, director of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, told a meeting in Geneva that “there is a huge amount of concern” about the adequacy of those supplies, Reuters reported.
Amos was preparing to depart Syria as Kofi Annan, the new special envoy on Syria representing the United Nations and the Arab League, was preparing to visit. He told reporters in Cairo that he would be urging Assad and his antagonists to stop fighting and seek a political solution.
But Assad has already declared that he considers his opponents to be foreign-backed terrorists, while many Syrian dissidents and protesters say the time for dialogue with him has long since past.

Rico says he's still voting for flying the cruise missile into Assad's bedroom window... (And what self-respecting dissident organization doesn't have a Facebook page these days?_