Inner City Press -- Investigative Reporting From the United Nations to Wall Street to the Inner City

By Matthew Russell Lee

UNITED NATIONS, September 10 -- On Syria, PBS at 11 pm on Monday belatedly ran the full hour of Charlie Rose's Sunday morning interview with Bashar al-Assad. Much had changed in the interim, not least the proposal that Syria let the UN oversee or destroy chemical weapons.

  But there was Charlie Rose, reading questions off a list with little follow up. And here Inner City Press is putting online a transcript -- with a few lines in Russian -- of Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin's response. Talk about weird timing.

   Rose repeated that Syria delayed the UN inspectors, with Inner City Press' follow up questions with the UN showed that the UN only formally requested access to Ghouta on August 24, granted the next day.

   In a telling moment, when Assad noted that the US used depleted uranium in Iraq (the effect in Fallujah were shown by VICE last season) and Israel used white phosphorus in Gaza, Rose just moved on to the next question. Next!

   Same when Rose intoned that people don't want one family running a country. What about Saudi Arabia? What about Qatar? What, as one Inner City Press follower chimed in, about the Bushes?

   Rose seemed to leer when he asked Assad if he was worry about what happened to Gaddafi -- visions of gun butts dancing in his head. Is this the West's accountability?

Showing his crack knowledge of Syria's divisions, Rose called it a minority sect dictatorship. But what about Bahrain?

Anyway, the news cycle had moved on. Here though is a transcript of Churkin with some Russian. Here now is PBS', to watch. Watch this site.