US Backing for 'Moderate'
Syrian Rebels: Long Reported, Continually
Forgotten
By Adam Johnson
February 25, 2015 "ICH"
- "Fair"
- That the US is arming and training Syrian
rebels has been
well-documented for
over two years, yet Western media have
historically suffered from a strange
collective amnesia when reporting this fact.
As Ian Sinclair noted last September in the
Huffington Post (9/23/14):
In mid-2012, the most
influential newspaper in the world
reported the US was helping to arm the
rebels–a fact
confirmed by
subsequent stories in the
New York Times itself, as well
as
numerous reports in other mainstream
news outlets around the world.
Contrast this publicly
available, easily accessed information
with these summaries from the mainstream
media of the ongoing US role in Syria…:
• New York
Times (5/4/13):
"President [Obama] seems to be
moving closer to providing lethal
assistance to the Syrian rebels,
even though he rejected such
a policy just months ago."
• Guardian
(5/8/13):
"The US, which has
outlawed al-Nusra as a terrorist
group, has hesitated to arm
the FSA [Free Syrian
Army]."…
• New York
Times (9/9/14):
"Mr Obama has resisted
military engagement in Syria for
more than three years, out
of fear early on that arming the
rebels who oppose Mr. Assad would
fail to alter the balance in the
civil war."
• BBC
Today Programme (9/11/14),
presenter Mishal Husein to US
ambassador: "If you [the US]
had helped the moderate Syrian
opposition, the Free Syrian Army,
three years ago, even two years ago,
we might well not be in the position
that we are now. President
Obama's reluctance to intervene
and to take action on Syria has
contributed to what we are seeing
now."
Why are all of these
professional journalists — supposedly a
profession made up of stroppy,
questioning cynics — incapable of
stating the most basic of facts about
the US role in Syria?
This week, it appears, the
media's collective FSA/CIA amnesia has
struck once again, with a series of reports
that make no mention of the CIA's ongoing
operation of arming and training Syrian
rebels that's been
thoroughly documented for over
two years.
Photo of Free Syrian
Army fighters published by the
Washington Post (4/2/13)
to illustrate 2013 story about how "the
United States and Jordan have stepped up
training of Syrian opposition forces."
(photo: Reuters)
These reports were
previewed last month with a report on
CNN (1/16/15)
headlined "Pentagon: US to Begin to Train
and Equip Moderate Syria Rebels." This was
just false: The US isn't "beginning to train
and equip moderate rebels." The
Guardian reported on
March 8, 2013–almost two years ago:
Western training of
Syrian rebels is under way in Jordan in
an effort to strengthen secular elements
in the opposition as a bulwark against
Islamic extremism, and to begin building
security forces to maintain order in the
event of Bashar al-Assad's fall.
Jordanian security
sources say the training effort is led
by the US, but involves British and
French instructors.
The Guardian
story cited the Pentagon in acknowledging
that "a small group of US special forces and
military planners had been to Jordan during
the summer to help…train selected rebel
fighters."
Two days later,
Reuters (3/10/13)
cited a report by the German magazine
Der Spiegel (3/10/13),
"quoting what it said were participants and
organizers," that "Americans are training
Syrian anti-government fighters in Jordan":
Some 200 men have
already received such training over the
past three months and there are plans in
the future to provide training for a
total 1,200 members of the "Free Syrian
Army" in two camps in the south and the
east of the country.
Photo illustrating
CNN's report (1/16/15)
that the US would "begin to train and
equip moderate Syria rebels"–years after
such equipping and training had actually
begun. (photo: Ahmed Deeb/AFP)
Nevertheless, there were a
raft of stories last week that treated US
training of Syrian rebels as a brand-new
initiative–as in NBC News'
"US to Equip Moderate Syrian Rebels: Defense
Official" (2/17/15):
Congress approved
President Barack Obama's request to
authorize training the rebels in
September. The first group of rebels is
expected to begin the six to eight weeks
of training in Jordan by the "middle of
March," the official said.
"The first group"? They're
rather late for that.
Reuters
had "US to Train and Equip Moderate Syrian
Rebels" (2/17/15)
and "US, Turkey to Arm and Train Syrian
Rebels" (2/19/15)–the
former of which reported that "three US
officials, speaking to Reuters
on condition of anonymity, said the training
could begin in mid-March."
"Could begin"? It's not
"beginning," it's being reassigned.
The Associated
Press (2/18/15)
reported that
the US has been
talking about training moderate Syrian
rebels for months, but has been moving
very slowly to identify groups and
screen the fighters in an effort to
ensure that enemy insurgents aren't
brought in.
The US hasn't been
"talking about" training "moderate" Syrian
rebels for months–it's been actually
training them for years, as the
Guardian and Der Spiegel
revealed.
Even political puff pieces
let this trope go unchallenged, as in
Politico's "Marco Rubio
Sharpens Commander-in-Chief Pitch" (2/20/15),
which said Rubio
was right, he said,
when he warned the US to immediately arm
moderate Syrian rebels two years
ago–before the radicals in the Islamic
State of Iraq and the Levant began
beheading hostages and declaring a
caliphate.
But this is the exact
opposite of reality: Rubio was "warning" the
US ought to do something he, as a member of
Congress, very well knew they've already had
been doing for some time. And, of course,
Politico makes no mention
of the CIA's ongoing operation of arming and
training Syrian rebels, allowing this
nonsensical talking point to go
unchallenged.
Some articles, even while
mentioning this fact, seem to contradict
their own lead while doing so. The
Wall Street Journal (2/17/15),
writing about a decision to provide US air
support to Syrian rebels, writes that "the
plan comes as the US prepares to start
training moderate rebels, who are waging a
two-front fight against the extremists and
the Syrian regime." But in paragraph 12, the
article acknowledges:
The Central
Intelligence Agency began a covert
program to train and arm moderate Syrian
rebels in 2013, providing ammunition,
small arms and antitank weapons to small
groups of trusted fighters. While that
program continues, some officials and
administration critics say it has fallen
well short of its aims.
So, which is it? Is the US
"preparing to start training moderate
rebels," or has the CIA been doing so since
2013? What they mean to say, of course, is
that the US isn't "preparing" to "train and
arm moderate rebels" but rather–now that the
war effort is
popular–transferring the duty over to
non-clandestine operations in the Pentagon.
This isn't the announcement of a new policy,
but rather a bureaucratic restructuring.
Indeed, even the
oft-referenced congressional approval of
funds for Syrian rebels in September 2014 (Reuters,
"US Congress Approves Arming Syrian Rebels,
Funding Government,"
9/19/14) was merely a formal sanctioning
of a secret congressional approval that
occurred nine months prior (Reuters,
"Congress Secretly Approves US Weapons Flow
to 'Moderate' Syrian Rebels,"
1/27/14):
The weapons deliveries
have been funded by the US Congress, in
votes behind closed doors, through the
end of government fiscal year 2014,
which ends on September 30, two
officials said.
The media's insistence on
framing these policies as if they are
revelations of anything new–and the omission
of the crucial fact that such training and
arming has been going on since at least June
2012–is the awkward by-product of a war
that's being done in secret first, only to
be formally sanctioned by our institutions
of power after the fact. Just as Obama
asked Congress to "authorize" airstrikes
that began
over six months ago, the media is
tasked, once again, with acting as if the
US's training and arming of Syrian
"moderate" rebels is something new.
It's not. It's a years-old
political reality that should be treated as
a run-of-the-mill government reshuffling
rather than the democratically sanctioned
shift in policy it almost certainly isn't.
Adam Johnson is a
freelance journalist; formerly he was a
founder of the hardware startup Brightbox.
You can follow him on Twitter
at
@adamjohnsonnyc. A version of this post
appeared on his blog Citations
Needed (2/22/15).