Russian President Vladimir Putin didn’t mince words today at a meeting of his human rights council in the Kremlin regarding the use of US force against the Syrian regime.

Reuters reports that he declared “anything that is outside the U.N. Security Council is aggression, except self-defense. Now what Congress and the U.S. Senate are doing in essence is legitimizing aggression. This is inadmissible in principle.”

And he also accused US Secretary of State John Kerry of outright lying to Congress about al Qaeda’s role fighting on the rebel side of the Syrian civil war.

He said, “they lie beautifully, of course. I saw debates in Congress. A congressman asks Mr Kerry: ‘Is al Qaeda there?’ He says: ‘No, I am telling you responsibly that it is not,'”
“Al Qaeda units are the main military echelon, and they know this,” he said, referring to the United States. “It was unpleasant and surprising for me – we talk to them, we proceed from the assumption that they are decent people. But he is lying and knows he is lying. It’s sad.”

Wow, huh?

In an exchange with a senator at the hearing, yesterday, Kerry was asked whether it was “basically true” that the Syrian opposition had “become more infiltrated by al Qaeda over time. Kerry had answered: “No, that is actually basically not true. It’s basically incorrect”.