09/22/15 – Adam Johnson – The Scott Horton Show

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Okay, next up is Adam Johnson, who has written a ton of great stuff for fairness and accuracy in reporting, fair.org, and this one is down the memory hole, NYT erases CIA's efforts to overthrow Syria's government.
So this is something that obviously just came up in the interview with Landay here, is all the focus on the DOD train forces, some of whom just in the last couple of days have gone over to Al-Nusra, as you could have predicted.
But everybody's ignoring the CIA and the history of the last four years.
Well, Adam Johnson is not ignoring it.
He's reminding us.
Welcome back to the show, Adam.
How are you doing?
How are you doing, Scott?
I'm doing real good.
Well, Landay says as far as he can tell, the CIA train forces, well, he goes with the New York Times number of about 5,000 and says as far as he knows, and he even went and saw these guys in Jordan at one point, that they're basically border guards helping keep the real terrorists out of Syria, out of Jordan and Israel.
And that's basically the biggest role they played.
But then again, of course, as we talked about, a lot of money and a lot of weapons have gone through these moderates, so-called, these American-trained and picked guys, to the guys who were actually perfectly happy to die fighting, and that would be the Al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State, of course.
But anyway, so I guess let's start with that.
Your best information from all the different journalism that you've looked at over this, how many people do you think have gone through the CIA training program in Jordan and or elsewhere?
It's impossible to know.
I know that the Daily Beast and the New York Times use the number 5,000.
I know the Washington Post as a source of the CIA that say it's 10,000.
Usually I don't really think the CIA has an incentive to overemphasize, nor do I think they have one to really underemphasize.
The more starking number to me is the billion-dollar-a-year program, which is, by the way, not based on anonymous sources.
It's actually based on documents the Washington Post has from the Edward Snowden leaks.
They sort of casually bury it in the Beast, but it's there.
It says, we know based on the Snowden documents that roughly $1 in every $15 of the CIA's official budget, and I stress official, went to some activities in Syria, whether that's arms training or some other activity, originally against Assad and now against Assad and more so, I guess, ISIL.
We don't know.
I don't know.
I'm not privy to the information, but all we can know is based on the reporting we know that there is a program.
It has quite a bit of money spent on it and that it has trained anti-Assad rebels and more specifically, in 2012, was helping arm and provide supplies for the rebels, the so-called moderate rebels.
You can see on social media, al-Nusra and al-Qaeda, ISIS, have posted pictures on social media of them holding American-made weapons, American-made supplies in Syria, which of course, in Iraq, you could say they got them from the Iraqi army, but in Syria, it by definition has to have come originally through the CIA and later through the DOD, so this isn't really a mystery.
Mainstream media openly acknowledges it.
I think what's debated, and I think it's debated fairly, is to the extent of the program and the efficacy of the program.
What my piece says is I'm simply asking that we acknowledge it exists, and so far, a lot of the media coverage about America's efforts in Syria has completely omitted it from the record, and I'm simply saying we should at least acknowledge it.
Now, if we want to debate how big it is, that's a different conversation, but so far, the New York Times, Reuters, Vox, the Associated Press have had these long-form discussions of our history in Syria, and they've completely omitted it from the conversation, which to me seems intellectually negligent.
Well, and you know, especially when the New York Times piece you link to here, I'm just going to assume it's got to be the one by Sanger, right?
No, no, no, this is a different one.
Yeah, no, it was the Sanger piece from maybe even earlier, where he says, the arms are all going to the jihadists.
Not that we're giving them directly to the jihadists, but again, you know, moderates sit on their fat asses in hotels in Qatar, while extremists who don't mind dying are the ones out there doing the fighting.
Come on.
Yeah, I mean, the reality is that anytime you pump arms, and you know, anyone can tell you this in the human rights world, but anytime you pump arms into, flood arms into a civil war, they're going to necessarily gravitate towards the more extreme elements.
I think at one point, some were even using the Orwellian term, moderate extremists.
I mean, it's, you know, unfortunately, it's a civil war that's been going on four and a half years.
And unfortunately, in any situation, more extreme elements are going to rise to the top.
I mean, again, imagine if there was a civil war in the United States, I think it's probably fair to say that the more hyper-religious, hyper-hardcore elements would probably be more effective at gauging war.
So you know, that's the logical conclusion of flooding arms into civil wars, and why you probably shouldn't do it.
So yeah, invariably, the more radical elements are going to get those arms.
Now, we know for sure that Al-Qaeda is now fighting alongside the FSA.
This has been reported by even neoconservatives, like Michael Weiss of the Daily Beast.
This is not a new revelation.
Now, they'll say it's a marriage of convenience, and I'm not going to dispute that, but at the same time, it's a law of averages, and on average, if you flood one side of a civil war that's aligned against, you know, anti, I guess you could say more secular, more Shia elements, you're going to embolden and strengthen radical Sunni extremists, and that's what you've seen happen.
Well, and of course, and this is exactly the point, it's been going on for years, and even David Sanger, in my confirmation bias mode, even David Sanger at the New York Times warned us years and years ago that guns and money to the FSA equals guns and money to Al-Qaeda.
And come on, that's who's fighting this civil war is a bunch of bin Ladenites, and the FSA, they're head choppers and suicide bombers, too.
They're not any more moderate than the Al-Qaeda forces.
I'm willing to concede for the sake of argument, and maybe this is true, that there is, or especially in the early days, there was a legitimate sort of moderate secular force that did have more secular elements, even members of, you know, people that defected from the military and the Communist Party that were more, that were by no means radical.
I think as the work goes on, you see less and less of that, and I see less and less evidence for that.
And I actually think there's kind of a third, there's kind of a third analysis that kind of lets a lot of the pro-FSA crowd kind of compromise with, I guess, the more, I guess my position, which is, I do think to the extent there was an organic rebellion, it has been eroded and commandeered by both Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Contras, and also just radical jihadists that have come in from Iraq and from elsewhere.
And so to the extent that it is real and does exist, I think it's just been completely overwhelmed by these other forces.
And, you know, that's not necessarily anyone's fault, it's just what happened.
Well, I mean, it is someone's fault.
I mean, somebody wrote those checks, right?
I mean, ISIS is the best paying army in the Middle East, and somebody's writing those checks and that money comes from somewhere.
Yeah, and hey, look, Phil Giroldi published in Antiwar.com and the American Conservative Magazine in December of 2011, and it was already reported, some other things, but he reported that Obama just signed a new finding authorizing the CIA to expand covert operations in Syria.
That's the end of 2011.
Yeah, I mean, Obama's handed a lot of this over to the CIA.
He puts a lot of trust in the CIA.
We know this from, obviously, his dealings with Bin Laden and those types of things.
The power shifted from the DOD to the CIA.
But again, I don't want anyone to think that this is purely an Obama thing.
Actually, it's funny.
I had a friend who, a little bit of a tangent here, but I had a friend who's, I guess, right-wing grandfather passed along my article in FAIR and said, look at this, the media's in bed with Obama.
And I thought it was hilarious because he didn't know it was me.
And I said, hey, email him back, tell him I'm a Marxist, because I am, by the way.
And tell him that it's not about Obama, per se, it's about the New York Times is going to kiss the butt of anyone in power, whether it's Bush or Obama.
So I don't want to think it's just Obama, but I do think Obama's, the idea that Obama's hand's off is totally bogus.
I mean, the CIA is pretty much fun- He absolutely, you know, has signed on the dotted line and very well could have said no instead.
Now we've got to stop right there for a minute, but we'll be right back with more from Adam Johnson at FAIR.org.
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All right, you guys.
Welcome back to The Dang Thing, man.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show, talking with Adam Johnson from FAIR.
And we're talking about the media blackout.
We have the ridiculous farce of the paltry number of DOD-trained mythical moderates either kidnapped, killed, or immediately on their bellies swearing loyalty to Ayman al-Zawahiri and what's-his-name Golani, the leader of Syria and Al-Qaeda.
And in the midst of all this coverage comes all this mythology that, yeah, Obama, the Ron Paul-ian, isolationist, non-interventionist peacenik, hasn't done a thing in Syria this whole time because he's been so skeptical and reluctant.
In fact, Landay even engaged in a little bit of that conventional wisdom, even though he's reported the exact opposite himself about all the CIA training this whole time.
But there's a bit of truth in it, a kernel of truth in it, that they twist, which is that Obama, I don't think, has been reluctant to back al-Nusra.
He has just had a goal or their combined movement, however you want to splice it exactly.
He just has a different goal in mind.
He agrees, as Jody Ruderin wrote, quoting Israeli officials in the New York Times, the strategy is to bleed both sides permanently, not to overthrow Assad.
If he wanted to overthrow Assad, he could have just carpet-bombed Damascus the same way he did Tripoli.
But instead, he has gone about just weakening Assad and, as David Wormser put it in Coping with Crumbling States, expediting the chaotic collapse.
That doesn't necessarily mean that he ever thought it was a good idea to completely overthrow the government, because that would make him look bad if al-Qaeda rules Damascus and murders hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Shia and Druze and Alawites and Christians.
So go ahead and just split the state into pieces, I guess.
Seems pretty obviously what's been the plan here.
Yeah.
So I don't think that I actually do think the actual policy is to overthrow Assad.
I think sometimes a cigar is a cigar.
And when the CIA and the White House and the State Department say the official U.S. policy is to overthrow Assad, and it's a program they've had on the books since 2006, 2007, when it was sort of spirited by Bush, I do think that's the end goal.
I think it's an issue of political will.
And I do think Obama, to his credit, has been far less, I guess, bellicose than a Clinton and certainly a McCain would have been.
I think that he does the bare minimum one can do when you live in a national security state and still remain relevant and not be harassed and undermined by his Defense Department, which he is right now to some extent, with all these recent revelations about him so-called cooking the books on ISIS.
So I think, relatively speaking, Obama is not as militant.
But when you live in a national security state, relative doesn't mean much to the people in Syria who are living in a civil war that's partially, and I stress partially, fueled by the United States.
Yeah.
On the other hand, it'd be so easy.
It's the same thing with how he could have won easily on Afghanistan in 2009 and opposed the surge then.
Same thing here.
All he has to do is tell the simple truth.
Hey, look, Americans, there's a lot of things to not like about Assad.
But here's one thing to like about him.
It's the same reason Bill Clinton and George W. Bush hired him to torture jihadis for us for all these years.
He's against the jihadis.
He shaves his chin every morning, he wears a three-piece suit, and he's against the Bin Ladenites.
And even though our allies, the Israelis and the Turks and the Saudis, want us to back the Bin Ladenites against them, the Bin Ladenites are the ones who knocked our towers down.
And so I've decided as our president that's against our interests, and the Turks and the Saudis and the Israelis are just going to have to deal with it.
But that would have been the end of that.
Who could have argued with that?
Even John McCain would have had to shut his fat mouth after that.
The military sort of, you know, it's nebulous when you talk about these things, but the military industrial complex, the sort of powers that be, I don't think would have liked it.
Al-Qaeda's only a bad guy when we need it to be, and otherwise it's – I mean, again, look at what happened in Libya, which is a crime that people still haven't really been called to attest to.
And it's the same people that were doing it last time, you know, Nicholas Kristof and Reese Water, a lot of the ex-Clintonites in the State Department, they speak in a language of humanitarianism, but really it's just nonstop regime change.
If you don't fall within the capitalist neoliberal order, we send in the cruise missiles and you're toast.
And that's what you see again.
Simple as that.
And then, again, back to the blackout.
Here's a story that's been reported 10 million ways from Sunday, and in the age of Twitter and Facebook, and everybody knows about this.
And how dare Zach Beauchamp try to pretend that this doesn't exist?
Zach Beauchamp?
Yeah, it's weird.
Is that how you say that?
I hate that guy.
Every article I've ever read by him has some horrible, evil, stupid war party lie baked in.
Some ridiculous, unproven, fake, false premise.
He basically follows the State Department line to the T. It's very cartoonish.
I mean, look, the guy's not very bright.
He thought there was a bridge between Gaza and West Bank, which if you've ever been to Israel, it's like saying there's a bridge between, you know, Newark, New Jersey and Brooklyn.
It's ridiculous.
Yeah, I mean, look, it's a bit of a cheap shot, but he does suck.
Yeah, I mean, the fact that you could write a 4,000-word piece and not mention the CIA program, at least, again, at least in passing, like, you get Nancy Yousef of The Daily Beast is actually a really good journalist.
I mean, she does do a lot of propaganda because it's The Daily Beast, but a lot of what, every time she writes about this, every time she mentions the CIA program, because, like, you have to mention it.
It's the big 400-pound gorilla that this program existed, and again, we can debate how effective it was, but it existed.
But for some reason, in the last week or two, there's been this really bizarre inability to mention it.
Now, one of the reasons is that the program's still technically classified, so the White House, you know, the State Department, Congress can't really talk about it because it's classified.
And so what you have is you have journalists that are basically doing official state journalism.
Now, because the people they're talking to literally can't mention it, that's one of the reasons it doesn't make its way into the report, but the problem is that the media is not, at least in theory, subject to the same kind of restriction.
So, you know, the fact that they wouldn't mention it is, to me, really bizarre and really notable, which I think is why my piece kind of struck a chord, because I'm simply pointing to the same, you know, outlet thing here.
The New York Times, Breitbart, The Washington Post reported it, Reuters reported it, Der Spiegel reported it.
It's not a mystery.
Even John Kerry has passively acknowledged its existence a couple times, but yet we have to run through this charade where we act like it never happened, and it's really weird to me.
I don't think you can have an honest conversation about what to do next in Syria or do anything at all in Syria without acknowledging what we've done so far, and the media has failed to do so.
Yeah.
Well, you've got to give him credit, though, that the simplest little kind of narratives win out over all this complicated truth, and as long as you have Hillary and Petraeus playing bad cop and saying Obama's not doing enough, then that's cover for whatever he does.
Yeah.
And if the New York Times wanted to say that Obama did not back enough CIA rebels and Clinton and Petraeus thought he should do more, that's fine.
Have that conversation.
But when they say that it didn't happen at all, I mean, that to me, that's a memory hole.
That is complete erasure of history, and the reason why they don't want that narrative is because then that begs the question, what have we done so far?
And now we have to have that conversation, and that's a conversation they don't really want to have.
Right.
Because it's messy.
It messes up the narrative.
Yeah.
But I have a real simple narrative about all this.
George Bush turned all of Western Iraq into jihadistan, and then Obama spread it to Libya and Syria.
It's both their fault, completely.
It's been reported a million ways.
There's no denying any of it, and there's no denying why either.
Obama told Jeffrey Goldberg, yeah, that's right, because Israel wants to weaken Iran's position over here, and so, okay, good.
Let's take Iran down a peg by getting rid of Assad, or whatever.
It's not even a secret.
That's partially it.
It's also a proxy.
It's also about Hezbollah as well, which is sort of the last real threat to Israel in any meaningful way, because they're ...
Unlike Hamas, Hamas is basically ...
Hamas is incredibly weak.
Hamas is not a real threat to anybody, but Hezbollah was the last military to actually defeat Israel, and so a lot of it, of course, has to do with that as well.
Yeah.
It's all in the clean break.
It's all about weakening Hezbollah, and you weaken Hezbollah by neocon logic, by overthrowing Saddam and then bringing chaos to Syria, and so it took a little while, but they're getting it done.
Well, what you want to get rid of is any competition in the Middle East to American and Israeli hegemony, and once you knock off Assad, or weaken him to the extent he may as well be knocked off, and you effectively get rid of Hezbollah, then the only thing left standing is Iran, and then once they're gone, it's pretty much ...
I mean, that's it.
That's complete hegemony.
It's all about the governments of NATO, and that's it.
You got it.
All right, man.
You know what?
I've always loved Thayer, ever since way back, and I ain't no Marxist.
And ...
Well, you're in bed with Marxists now.
No, I ...
No, I totally am, and I totally am, because I only care about empire.
That's the only thing.
We have a ...
Sorry about that.
I agree with ...
I probably disagree with most of your stuff, but we have agreements, at least, when it comes to this kind of thing, because people ...
Yeah, of course.
Well, and ...
Yeah.
And, you know, more importantly, the thing is about Thayer, and before you ever started writing there either, is that they don't do this kind of, oh, gee, but I am kind of loyal to the Democrats, so let me fudge this a little bit, or whatever.
They're always just as good during Democrat times, whether it's Bill Clinton or Barack Obama as they are during George W. Bush, and you can't say that about a lot of liberal outlets, but always really good and on point, and doing stories like this, hey, hey, hey, don't forget about the CIA.
It is very important work that you're doing there, Adam, and I really appreciate it.
Appreciate it.
All right, man.
Thanks a lot.
All right, y'all.
That's Adam Johnson.
He's at FAIR, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
FAIR.org.
This one is down the memory hole.
New York Times erases CIA's efforts to overthrow Syria's government.
We'll be right back in a sec.
Hey, y'all.
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