The New York Times depicts a sad Obama to accompany its story claiming that he trained Syrian rebels against his better judgment. (photo: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP)
FAIR has noted before how America’s well-documented clandestine activities in Syria have been routinely ignored when the corporate media discuss the Obama administration’s “hands-off” approach to the four-and-a-half-year-long conflict. This past week, two pieces—one in the New York Times detailing the “finger pointing” over Obama’s “failed” Syria policy, and a Vox “explainer” of the Syrian civil war—did one better: They didn’t just omit the fact that the CIA has been arming, training and funding rebels since 2012, they heavily implied they had never done so.
First, let’s establish what we do know. Based on multiple reports over the past three-and-a-half years, we know that the Central Intelligence Agency set up a secret program of arming, funding and training anti-Assad forces. This has been reported by major outlets, including the New York Times, The Guardian, Der Spiegel and, most recently, the Washington Post, which—partly thanks to the Snowden revelations—detailed a program that trained approximately 10,000 rebel fighters at a cost of $1 billion a year, or roughly 1/15th of the CIA’s official annual budget.
In addition to the CIA’s efforts, there is a much more scrutinized and far more publicized program by the Department of Defense to train “moderate rebels,” of which only a few dozen actually saw battle. The Pentagon program, which began earlier this year and is charged with fighting ISIS (rather than Syrian government forces), is separate from the covert CIA operation. It has, by all accounts, been an abysmal failure.
One thing the DoD’s rebel training program hasn’t been a failure at, however, is helping credulous reporters rewrite history by treating the Pentagon program as the only US effort to train Syrian rebels–now or in the past. As the US’s strategy in Syria is publicly debated, the CIA’s years-long program has vanished from many popular accounts, giving the average reader the impression the US has sat idly by while foreign actors, Iranian and Russian, have interfered in the internal matters of Syria. While the White House, Congress and the Pentagon can’t legally acknowledge the CIA training program, because it’s still technically classified, there’s little reason why our media need to entertain a similar charade.
Let’s start with Peter Baker’s New York Times piece from September 17 and some of its improbable claims:
Finger-Pointing, but Few Answers, After a Syria Solution Fails
By any measure, President Obama’s effort to train a Syrian opposition army to fight the Islamic State on the ground has been an abysmal failure. The military acknowledged this week that just four or five American-trained fighters are actually fighting.
Notice the sleight-of-hand. There may only be “four or five American-trained fighters…fighting” expressly against ISIS, but there is no doubt thousands more American-trained fighters are fighting in Syria. The DoD’s statement is manifestly false, but because the New York Times is simply quoting “the military”—which, again, cannot not legally acknowledge the CIA program—it is left entirely unchallenged. This is the worst type of “officials say” journalism. The premise, while ostensibly critical of US foreign policy, is actually helping advance its larger goal of rewriting US involvement in the Syrian civil war. A four-year-long deliberate strategy of backing anti-Assad forces–which has helped fuel the bloody civil war and paved the way for the rise of ISIS–is reduced to a cheesy “bumbling bureaucrat” narrative.
Baker went on:
But the White House says it is not to blame. The finger, it says, should be pointed not at Mr. Obama but at those who pressed him to attempt training Syrian rebels in the first place — a group that, in addition to congressional Republicans, happened to include former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.
At briefings this week after the disclosure of the paltry results, Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, repeatedly noted that Mr. Obama always had been a skeptic of training Syrian rebels. The military was correct in concluding that “this was a more difficult endeavor than we assumed and that we need to make some changes to that program,” Mr. Earnest said. “But I think it’s also time for our critics to ‘fess up in this regard as well. They were wrong.”
In effect, Mr. Obama is arguing that he reluctantly went along with those who said it was the way to combat the Islamic State, but that he never wanted to do it and has now has been vindicated in his original judgment. The I-told-you-so argument, of course, assumes that the idea of training rebels itself was flawed and not that it was started too late and executed ineffectively, as critics maintain.
The sleight-of-hand continues: The article presents the training of rebels as a “way to combat the Islamic State,” but repeatedly speaks in general of training Syrian rebels as something “Obama always had been a skeptic of”–which flies in the face of the fact that he did so, to the tune of $1 billion a year over four years, with 10,000 rebels trained.
But the piece goes on to make clear that when it’s talking about “training Syrian rebels,” it’s referring not only to the anti-ISIS program but to efforts to overthrow Syria’s government as well:
The idea of bolstering Syrian rebels was debated from the early days of the civil war, which started in 2011. Mrs. Clinton, along with David H. Petraeus, then the CIA director, and Leon E. Panetta, then the Defense secretary, supported arming opposition forces, but the president worried about deep entanglement in someone else’s war after the bloody experience in Iraq.
In 2014, however, after the Islamic State had swept through parts of Syria and Iraq, Mr. Obama reversed course and initiated a $500 million program to train and arm rebels who had been vetted and were told to fight the Islamic State, not Mr. Assad’s government.
This is outright false. These two paragraphs, while cleverly parsed, give the reader the impression Obama parted with the CIA and Mrs. Clinton on arming opposition forces, only to “reverse course” in 2014. But the president never “reversed course,” because he did exactly what Panetta, Petraeus and Clinton urged him to do: He armed the opposition. Once again, the Pentagon’s Keystone Kop plan is being passed off by journalists who should know better as the beginning and end of American involvement in the Syrian rebellion. Nowhere in this report is the CIA’s plan mentioned at all.
The whitewashing would get even worse:
Some Syrian rebels who asked for American arms in 2011 and 2012 eventually gave up and allied themselves with more radical groups, analysts said, leaving fewer fighters who were friendly to the United States.
But the US did get arms to Syrian rebels in 2012. In fact, Baker’s own publication reported this fact in 2012 (6/21/12):
CIA Said to Aid in Steering Arms to Syrian Opposition
Indeed, according to a rather detailed New York Times infographic from 2013 (3/23/13), shipments began, at the latest, in January 2012:
Note that this map accompanied an article headlined “Arms Airlift to Syria Rebels Expands, With Aid From CIA.”
The CIA’s program, when discussing a fraught foreign policy issue like Syria, is simply thrown down the memory hole. How can the public have an honest conversation about what the US should or shouldn’t do in Syria next when the most respected newspaper in the US can’t honestly acknowledge what we have done thus far?
Vox depicts Free Syrian Army fighters–without acknowledging that the CIA helped to arm the rebels. (photo: STR/AFP/Getty Images)
The New York Times wouldn’t be alone. Comcast-funded Vox would also ignore the CIA rebel training program in its almost 4,000-word overview of the Syrian civil war. Again, the Pentagon’s program would be the sole focus in regards to funding rebels, along with reports of Gulf states doing so as well. But the CIA funding, training and arming thousands of rebels since at least 2012? Nowhere to be found. Not mentioned or alluded to once.
Reuters and the Washington Post’s reports on the US’s Syrian strategy revamp, while they didn’t fudge history as bad as the Times and Vox, also ignored any attempts by the CIA to back Syrian opposition rebels. This crucial piece of history is routinely omitted from mainstream public discourse.
As the military build-up and posturing in Syria between Russia and the United States escalates, policy makers and influencers on this side of the Atlantic are urgently trying to portray the West’s involvement in Syria as either nonexistent or marked by good-faith incompetence. By whitewashing the West’s clandestine involvement in Syria, the media not only portrays Russia as the sole contributor to hostilities, it absolves Europe and the United States of their own guilt in helping create a refugee crisis and fuel a civil war that has devastated so many for so long.
Adam Johnson is an associate editor at AlterNet and writes frequently for FAIR.org. You can follow him on Twitter at @adamjohnsonnyc.
You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com, or write to public editor Margaret Sullivan at public@nytimes.com (Twitter:@NYTimes or @Sulliview). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.
Then there was a secret agreement in 2001 with the National Archives allowing the Central Intelligence Agency to reclassify some public records. In this case, though, the New York Times did not need a secret agreement with the CIA. Perhaps the NYT’s forgetfulness of longtime CIA involvement in training Syrian rebels was an investment in being first in line for future government propaganda programmed to massage public opinion and redact policy blunders.
Peter Baker, the Times reporter, lies. Just a week or so before this Syria article, Baker reviewed the Cheney book and stated as a matter of fact that “faulty intelligence” lead the US to invade Iraq in 2003. And no, Baker was not simply quoting some BS assertion by the Cheneys.
Baker was claiming that BS as fact.
In short Baker is not to be trusted. He’s worse than Michael Gordon. And Gordon is pretty bad about simply passing off, sans obvious questions, whatever Washington and the Pentagon claim as established fact.
Do you know anything about the Syrian government?
Why shouldn’t the CIA overthrow the government of Syria.
In the long run everyone would be better off, except those
who get caught up in the mess … which the Syrians do not
give a damn about anyway. Haven’t you people seen what
the Syrian government does to its people? What on Earth
is wrong with your values?
Brux, have you seen what has happened in Libya and Iraq? The Pentagon has done the same thing there of overthrowing a dictatorship, and now look what’s happening…militias filling in the power vacuums that has created, leading to an infestation of terrorism. That is what fostered the growth of ISIS. Now they are doing the same thing in Syria, except they’ve gotten even heavier with their propaganda—-that, unfortunately, being the only thing they’re doing different. They do not seem to learn from their mistakes. Or, there is something really driving them to overthrow other countries’ regimes just to make things worse in the long run.
You’re joking, right Brux? Like countless neocons before you, you’re asserting that “only the exceptional United States” is allowed to know what governments worldwide are permitted, and any others are deemed “evil” and the Great American Good Fairy comes in with her beneficent Pentagon and CIA, taps her wand, and the awful bad government immediately changes into Jeffersonian democracy. Oh yes indeed, that’s how it has happened time & time again, hasn’t it. Maybe we’ll be lucky and get a President Hillary, who will show us what a paradise Libya is now, since Truth Justice and the American Way removed that dastardly fashion-plate Ghaddafi.
@Brux:
Because though totalitarian, the Syrian government is protecting many religious minorities, and has done so since at least the 1970s. That’s a good reason not to make things worse by getting in bed with Sunni extremists as CIA has done.
@Brux, how well did that work out for the Iraqis, Libyans, Ukrainians and the people of every other country in which the West has overthrown their democratically-elected leader to install a capitalist-friendly puppet? If a country’s leader is not willing to “play nice” with the West (i.e. succumb to capitalist imperialism), that leader is slated for “regime change.” This is what the West does, and has done throughout history. This is what the CIA was *really* created for. There are countless examples.
America has not been supporting the moderate jihadists… I mean pro-democracy rebels in Syria. And even if the USA has, this support is just a well-intentioned but misguided mistake…just like America’s “faulty intelligence” about Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction, or the USA’s arming of the Afghan Jihadists (and Usama Bin Laden) against the Soviet Union in the 1980s, or the unfortunate event called the Vietnam War, or the peculiar American instituion of Chattel Slavery, or America’s theft and occupation of Native Indian lands, or any “bad thing” that America has ever done.
Remember, America is the Good Guy no matter how many people or nations we bomb, invade, and genocide around the world!
Maybe we can all pitch in and buy the financially strapped FAIR a subscription to the WSJ that found the CIA program to aid the rebels to be a fiasco. Frankly, I don’t mind that people like Johnson or Naureckas write Assadist nonsense but for the sake of the credibility of a media watchdog that did outstanding work in the past, they might at least balance their propaganda with allusions to this side of the reporting ledger even if meager:
It didn’t take long for rebel commanders in Syria who lined up to join a Central Intelligence Agency weapons and training program to start scratching their heads.
After the program was launched in mid-2013, CIA officers secretly analyzed cellphone calls and email messages of commanders to make sure they were really in charge of the men they claimed to lead. Commanders were then interviewed, sometimes for days.
Those who made the cut, earning the label “trusted commanders,” signed written agreements, submitted payroll information about their fighters and detailed their battlefield strategy. Only then did they get help, and it was far less than they were counting on.
Some weapons shipments were so small that commanders had to ration ammunition. One of the U.S.’s favorite trusted commanders got the equivalent of 16 bullets a month per fighter. Rebel leaders were told they had to hand over old antitank missile launchers to get new ones—and couldn’t get shells for captured tanks. When they appealed last summer for ammo to battle fighters linked to al Qaeda, the U.S. said no.
All sides now agree that the U.S.’s effort to aid moderate fighters battling the Assad regime has gone badly. The CIA program was the riskiest foray into Syria since civil war erupted in 2011.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/covert-cia-mission-to-arm-syrian-rebels-goes-awry-1422329582
@Louis nothing you said contradicts anything I wrote. All you can do is follow me around the Internet and handwring because nothing I said is factually inaccurate or uncorroberated by the very sources I now criticize.
The CIA had a billion dollar a year program to train anti-Assad rebels. This has been largely erased from the narrative. These facts are not in dispute. If you wish to parse the efficacy of the CIA’s program that’s fine but I am asking for a simple acknowledgment of its existence not demanding outlets declare it the single most important part of the civil war.
Unlike you I’m not an unhinged partisan who has to spin away inconvenient truths. I openly acknowledge Russia plays a role in the civil war – as all thinking persons do – yet you seem entirely incapable of admitting the US has as well because it doesn’t fit your black and white “popular uprising vs evil dictator” worldview. Unfortunately, reality is a bit messier than that as evidenced not by me, not by “Assadists” (whatever that means), but by a half-dozen major newspapers and over four years of reporting. If you have a problem with this reporting take it up with Der Speigel and the Washington Post, not FAIR.
It’s easy to be a spook
When the truth doesn’t stand a ghost of a chance
Louis Proyect:
There’s little evidence that there are moderate rebels fighting Assad, and there never were.
There’s even some evidence that the 2011 rebellion against Assad was instigated by outside forces–not Sunnis from Iraq either.
A good article which shows, among other things that Orwell stupid horror story had nothing to do with reality of big business media working hand with hand with “democratic” rulers of imperialist states to erase the imperialist crimes from public’s view. Who needs farcical “Big Brother” when “free media” do the work very well.
Of course, Louis Proyect always whines that USA imperialists do not enough support Ukrainian Nazis or Wahhabis and so on and not enough bombs.
http://claysbeach.blogspot.com/2015/09/is-memory-corruption-behind-yet-another.html
Is memory corruption behind yet another un-FAIR Syria story?
This is the fun part for me because to make my point and show that Adam Johnson is falsely crediting sources, all I have to do is quote extensively from his own provided and approved source. I don’t even need to bring into the discussion anything but the material he himself has provided. From his link we read this:
With help from the C.I.A., Arab governments and Turkey have sharply increased their military aid to Syria’s opposition fighters in recent months, expanding a secret airlift of arms and equipment for the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad, according to air traffic data, interviews with officials in several countries and the accounts of rebel commanders.
So the weapons were coming from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Libya and Turkey, not from the US. Johnson might argue that the US was “really” behind the weapons supplies but there’s no proof of that. What niether the NY Times nor FAIR say is that support for the Syrian rebels was very popular among the Arab masses. The Libyan General National Congress voted $100 million in aid to the rebels in response to popular demand and even in the Arab monarchies, the decision to provide weapons to the anti-Assad rebels is one of the most popular made by these governments. The NY Times piece continues:
And even as the Obama administration has publicly refused to give more than “nonlethal” aid to the rebels, the involvement of the C.I.A. in the arms shipments — albeit mostly in a consultative role, American officials say — has shown that the United States is more willing to help its Arab allies support the lethal side of the civil war.
So, according to the article cited by Johnson, the CIA was involved “mostly in a consultative role” in any arms shipments. So was it fair to use this article to prove the CIA is supplying arms to the rebels? The article goes on to say they:
[H]ave vetted rebel commanders and groups to determine who should receive the weapons as they arrive, according to American officials speaking on the condition of anonymity.
But what about those 10,000 that have been trained, armed, funded and fighting in Syria, according to a now much beloved Washington Post quote? Why aren’t they even hinted at in this very extensive New York Times article about CIA activities in Syria? The veracity of this piece has been certified by a “fair” minded author. Were these 10,000 CIA fighters so secret that they didn’t come up even in extensive discussions about the CIA’s secret involvement in the arms shipments?
OOPS! General Wesley Clark: Wars Were Planned – Seven Countries In Five Years
“This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.” I said, “Is it classified?” He said, “Yes, sir.” I said, “Well, don’t show it to me.” And I saw him a year or so ago, and I said, “You remember that?” He said, “Sir, I didn’t show you that memo! I didn’t show it to you!”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RC1Mepk_Sw&feature=player_embedded
General Wesley Clark Asked About 7 Country War Plan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pGkFMho6Co
05/14/2015 Former NATO Commander, Presidential Candidate Makes Millions Pushing Penny Stocks
Plato-quoting, West Point valedictorian, Rhodes scholar, former NATO Supreme allied commander, and one-time Presidential hopeful Gen. Wesley Clark had a carefully laid, three-point plan for life after public service.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-05-14/former-nato-commander-presidential-candidate-makes-millions-pushing-penny-stocks
Compared to the Saudis and Israel Assad’s Syria is a version of Sweden in the Middle East.
The US doesn’t want ISIS to go away.
They are being used to isolate Assad.
The US is sponsoring terror, not fighting it.
All you can do is follow me around the Internet and handwring because nothing I said is factually inaccurate or uncorroberated by the very sources I now criticize.
—
No, you don’t lie. You cherry pick just like Time Magazine or Robert Parry or Seymour Hersh who had long careers working for outfits like Time. It is a skill learned in journalism school and sad to see someone from FAIR doing the same thing. A real press critic would at least acknowledge countervailing reports such as the WSJ item I referred to that regarded the CIA training program for Syrian rebels as a total fiasco with bullets being doled out as if from an eyedropper. If you want to be taken seriously, you have to make more of an effort. Your problem is that you are so cloistered in an ideological comfort zone that you probably have a very limited ability to even realize that there is material that makes your articles look propagandistic. It is really sad how you, Naureckas and Rendall have decayed. This Baathist boosting is terminal, I’m afraid.