US Backing for 'Moderate' Syrian Rebels: Long Reported, Continually Forgotten
http://fair.org/blog/2015/02/22/us-backing-for-moderate-syrian-rebels-long-reported-continually-forgotten/
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 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.
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