By and

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

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?

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.

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. and the’s reports on the US’s Syrian strategy revamp, while they didn’t fudge history as bad as theand, 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

.

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