US covert war on Syria


 * ''This article is about the US war against the Syrian government. For the US war against ISIS, see U.S. Air Strikes in Syria.



What we know

 * ''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.
 * — Down the Memory Hole: NYT Erases CIA’s Efforts to Overthrow Syria’s Government, FAIR, September 20, 2015

2011

 * BFP Exclusive: Syria- Secret US-NATO Training & Support Camp to Oust Current Syrian President, Sibel Edmonds, November 21, 2011
 * BFP Exclusive: US-NATO-Chechen Militia Joint Operations Base, Sibel Edmonds, November 22, 2011
 * BFP Exclusive: Developing Story: Hundreds of US-NATO Soldiers Arrive & Begin Operations on the Jordan-Syria Border, Sibel Edmonds, December 10, 2011

2013

 * Arms Airlift to Syria Rebels Expands, With Aid From C.I.A. - C. J. Chivers and Eric Schmitt, The New York Times, March 24, 2013
 * BFP Syria Coverage Track Record: What & When We Exposed, and the MSM- Quasi Alternative Culprits Who Fought Our Exposés, Sibel Edmonds, August 29, 2013

2015

 * Exclusive: Obama Cuts Off Syrian Rebels’ Cash - The Daily Beast, January 27, 2015
 * Secret CIA effort in Syria faces large funding cut - Greg Miller and Karen DeYoung, The washington Post, June 12, 2015
 * Dodgy Turks: ‘NATO Ally’ Helped al Qaida To Kidnap New US-trained Rebel Fighters - 21WIRE, August 26, 2015
 * ''The House Intelligence Committee recently voted unanimously to cut as much as 20 percent of the classified funds flowing into a CIA program that U.S. officials said has become one the agency’s largest covert operations, with a budget approaching $1 billion a year.
 * 'The devil made me do it': Obama's foreign policy just reached a new low - Michael B Kelley and Brett LoGiurato,  Business Insider, Sep. 19, 2015
 * Down the Memory Hole: NYT Erases CIA’s Efforts to Overthrow Syria’s Government, FAIR, September 20, 2015
 * Obama's Islamic State War Czar Stepping Down - Josh Rogin & Eli Lake, September 22, 2015

ACLOS and Related

 * Robert Ford, Weapons Inspector: The Rebellion Begins in Hama, Part 2 Adam Larson (Caustic Logic) Monitor on Massacre Marketing, July 26, 2015. Detailed relation of US. ambassador Robert Ford, arrived just ahead of the first protests, met with ... activists, egged them on, emphatically denied or glossed over their first militant victories (of great barbarity, by the way...)
 * Exactly where Ford needs a certain effect, he conjures the right words, even when those words are the most opposite of true. As soon as he saw clear evidence in the July 31 attacks that the violent insurrection in Hama was really underway, he needed all the cover he could find to help the seeds take root. So as soon as there were armed gangs running streets and bridges in Hama, he became more vocal than ever about this being a regime lie, by definition.