The administration’s attempt to “vet” Syrian rebels is unsurprisingly hopeless:

“We’re completely out of our league,” one former CIA vetting expert declared on condition of anonymity, reflecting the consensus of intelligence professionals with firsthand knowledge of the Syrian situation. “To be really honest, very few people know how to vet well. It’s a very specialized skill. It’s extremely difficult to do well” in the best of circumstances, the former operative said. And in Syria it has proved impossible.

The report details how many of the people assigned to this work lack the relevant regional experience and linguistic expertise, which reflects poorly on the CIA, but that is not the only thing wrong with the “vetting” process. In fairness to the people that have been assigned this task, the preoccupation with “vetting” insurgents in a brutal civil war has always seemed absurd. There is never going to be a suitably reliable, “moderate” armed group that the U.S. can support in such a conflict. All insurgent groups always have their own agendas and priorities, and those will often not align with Washington’s and sometimes will be directly at odds with what the U.S. is trying to achieve. Insurgent groups will tell the would-be patron whatever the patron wants to hear in order to acquire weapons and supplies, and then they would do whatever they please with the arms and supplies that the patron has provided.

The Newsweek report recalls a scene from the recent Theo Padnos/Peter Curtis article about his captivity in Syria:

A particularly vivid example was provided recently by Peter Theo Curtis, an American held hostage in Syria for two years. A U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) unit that briefly held him hostage casually revealed how it collaborated with Al-Qaeda’s al-Nusra Front, even after being “vetted” and trained by the CIA in Jordan, he wrote in The New York Times Magazine. “About this business of fighting Jabhat al-Nusra?” Curtis said he asked his FSA captors. “Oh, that,” one said. “We lied to the Americans about that.”

The failure of “vetting” in Syria is just a symptom of the foolishness of U.S. policy there. It is the product of a policy that is trying to “shape” and influence a foreign civil war by finding the “right” kind of rebels to support and then assuming that “our” rebels will act as Washington wishes them to just because the U.S. offers them some assistance. Even if the U.S. could successfully “vet” insurgents, it would never have the degree of control or knowledge that advocates of this policy predict, and as it turns out the U.S. can’t even get the first part right.