Down the Memory Hole: NYT Erases CIA’s Efforts to Overthrow Syria’s Government
Down the Memory Hole: NYT Erases CIA’s Efforts to Overthrow Syria’s Government
By Adam Johnson
The New York Times
depicts a sad Obama to accompany its story claiming that he trained
Syrian rebels against his better judgment. (photo: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP)
depicts a sad Obama to accompany its story claiming that he trained
Syrian rebels against his better judgment. (photo: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP)
FAIR has noted before
how America’s well-documented clandestine activities in Syria have been
routinely ignored when the corporate media discuss the Obama
administration’s “hands-off” approach to the four-and-a-half-year-long
conflict. This past week, two pieces—one in the New York Times detailing the “finger pointing” over Obama’s “failed” Syria policy, and a Vox “explainer” of the Syrian civil war—did
one better: They didn’t just omit the fact that the CIA has been
arming, training and funding rebels since 2012, they heavily implied
they had never done so.
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.
