03/23/16 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
Introducing Gareth Porter, the great author of Manufactured Crisis, the book on Iran's civilian nuclear program, and of course, author of 10 million articles debunking the lies of the war party on Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and now Syria.
Reporting or not, the ties between U.S. armed Syrian rebels and al-Qaeda's affiliate is his latest, originally ran at FAIR, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, and we have it here of course today at AntiWar.com as well.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
How are you?
Thanks, Scott.
I'm fine.
Glad to be back on the show.
Very happy to have you back here, sir.
So a very interesting article.
I'm so glad that you're done with your Iran book and you can focus on Syria for a while because we need your parsing.
Just exactly who counts as a mythical moderate in the American media and in the American government and who doesn't and how can one tell?
Sometimes it seems as though they want to actually include al-Qaeda itself among the mythical moderates.
Other times, not so much, and this is a great article, not just about what's really the reality there, but what are the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and others willing to say about these different relationships at any given time?
So it's really a lot of fun there.
Why don't you take us through, first of all, with, I guess, explaining about al-Nusra and Arar al-Sham and some of these other groups and who they are?
Yeah.
My setup for this article, which was intended to show very clearly how the three major newspapers covering the war in Syria or foreign affairs generally, the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal, covered this question of what is, in fact, the relationship or are the relationships between the U.S.-supported Syrian rebel groups, armed rebel groups, and the al-Nusra Front, al-Qaeda's Syrian franchise.
That, of course, as you know very, very well, is a crucial issue in understanding the politics of the war in Syria and of U.S. policy toward that war.
So I set out to really take a very close look at how the three major newspapers covered this issue, particularly from the beginning, I should say, of the Russian intervention in Syria in September last year.
And then what I did was to show what the pattern was in the early period of that intervention.
And then what happened after Secretary of State John Kerry had negotiated with the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, a ceasefire agreement on the Syrian war in mid-February of this year, how that affected, then, the beginning of a different way of covering the same issue.
So that's the setup.
And in the setup, I show that the regional press, the regional news media, that is al-Arabi, the Qatari royal family-funded newspaper published in London, which is both in Arabic and in English, had a correspondent in Aleppo province last year who published a very revealing detailed article on his visit to Aleppo in which he revealed that as many as 10 or a dozen of the U.S.-supported, CIA-supported armed groups, so-called moderate groups, in Aleppo had actually joined formally a military command structure for the province, which was, again, technically or formally led by Arar al-Sham, the Salafist jihadist group that is closely allied with and almost joined at the hip with al-Nusra Front.
But al-Nusra Front technically, again, formally, was not part of the structure, of the command structure for the province.
Now, the most interesting thing about the article was that the author actually explained why al-Nusra Front was not in the command structure formally.
The reason was that this would allow the United States to more easily provide arms to the so-called moderate groups in the province.
And of course, that's something that al-Nusra Front wanted because that meant getting more tow missiles into the province.
And indeed, there was every reason to believe that Arar al-Sham would get a lot of those tow missiles and al-Nusra Front itself forces would get some of them as well.
So in other words, they weren't even really being coy.
It was just sort of in there that like, oh, yeah, by the way, this is how we get weapons to the terrorists.
Well, you know, they were being coy, I think.
The point here is that it was a major sort of deception on the part of al-Qaeda's- Oh, I'm sorry.
I meant I meant the newspaper.
They just kind of mentioned it, that this is the way that they do their scam.
It's just kind of in there in the middle of the article.
It wasn't the point of the article, the lead of the article or anything.
It was just kind of mentioned it in there.
Again, this is al-Arabi.
Now, we're talking about al-Arabi's coverage from directly from Aleppo last April.
And so the writer- Your point being that Qatar has a vested interest in all of this, obviously.
Well, I wasn't commenting on the Qatari government's interest.
I think that they did not review this article and approve it or anything of the sort.
I think that it was an article written by a guy in Aleppo who was telling the truth.
So that's the most important point.
I gotcha.
Yeah.
So anyway, that is, I think, the key to understanding the whole problem of this complicated relationship between the U.S.-supported groups and al-Nusra Front.
So how, then, did the three major newspapers cover it?
Well, hold on one second.
Go back to the papers in a second, because we've got the time.
But I want to see if you can help clarify something just in my own head here.
You know, I ain't never been to Syria.
I don't know all this stuff myself.
But I've been reading for years now that Arar al-Sham was founded by friends of Osama and leaders of al-Qaeda.
But it's not quite the al-Nusra Front, which we all know there's no question that the al-Nusra Front and their leader Golani, or Jolani, however you say it, has repeatedly sworn his allegiance to Ayman al-Zawahiri, the butcher of New York City.
However, well, you know, of course, we know about the ISIS split off from al-Qaeda and all that.
But what exactly is Arar al-Sham in this?
Are they CIA trained and backed, or America just gives them money and guns, or America even considers them more like al-Nusra and really ends up funneling them money and guns through the other groups more?
I would say technically none of the above are true.
The role that Arar al-Sham plays on one side is that they are the closest ally of al-Nusra Front.
Some of their leaders, certainly as you said, the founders of the organization were al-Qaeda officials.
It is more complicated.
It is independent technically.
It is not directly an outgrowth of al-Qaeda in the sense that the people there, the leaders of Arar al-Sham, owe allegiance to al-Qaeda.
That's clear.
But on the other hand, they share the fundamental tenets of al-Qaeda in terms of the kind of Islamic Syrian regime that they're fighting for.
So I mean, that I think is the key point.
You're saying it's clear though that they are not loyal to Zawahiri and his goals the way al-Nusra are?
That's right.
I don't think there's any evidence that they are under the direct control of al-Qaeda.
But they're not necessarily, or are they, the same guys that the CIA has been training and arming in Jordan for the past four years too?
Okay, no, I mean, Arar al-Sham was not one of the groups that was trained in Jordan.
I've never heard that.
Have you actually seen that in print?
I've read people sort of conceding that some of the people trained in Jordan had even gone off to fight for ISIS.
Not that ISIS was trained in Jordan by the CIA, but some of the fighters at least have gone off to this group and that group.
But I just wonder, you know, because when they sell Arar al-Sham as the moderate version of al-Qaeda that it's okay to arm, I just wonder how far that goes.
That's for us rubes reading the papers, or that's also the CIA's marching orders, that we can work with these guys and give them, obviously we give them tow missiles, but do we train them and feed them breakfast too, or what?
No, I think that there's a conscious degree of separation that is maintained by the CIA and the Obama administration here.
But the relationship is that the allies of the United States, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar have certainly supported Arar al-Sham directly.
They have sent money and arms to Arar al-Sham.
I have no doubt about that.
They are perfectly acceptable to those folks.
And that's why you have this indirect relationship between the Obama administration, CIA, and Arar al-Sham.
It is through the regional allies, the Sunni allies of the United States.
They've always just seemed like basically the name of al-Qaeda's fencing operation or something.
Obviously they have fighters, but for the most part, for years we've read about, hey look, Arar al-Sham is fighting side by side with al-Nusra, and look, they have American tow missiles.
I think I first read that from even a kind of hawkish site, like Blogs of War, one of those things, covered that back years ago.
Right, but of course, even, I mean, al-Nusra Front has tow missiles as well that were poured into the command structure, in effect, that the Sunni allies were supporting consciously beginning in early 2014, late 2013, early 2014.
So what I'm suggesting really is that the Obama administration knew perfectly well that its allies were doing this, that they were funneling the arms to organizations that were unsavory from the point of view of what could be said publicly by the Obama administration, but they were desperate to put some pressure on, to have some leverage politically in Syria to pursue the John Kerry objective of trying to get the Syrian government to say, okay, Bashar al-Assad will have to step down at some point.
That was going to be the feather in his cap, and in order to accomplish that, they were willing to do something that they would not want to admit to.
Right, and this is the subject of our previous interview there, where the support, ratcheting up support in 2013 there, and 2014 for these groups, was sort of meant to play the role of sanctions on Iran, to force them to the table, to bend to our will kind of thing, but it didn't really work, it just made the war worse.
That's right.
Yeah, so to come back then to the Washington Post, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal, what I found was that from early October through, basically through the end of the year, the coverage was basically not willing to get into this whole question of the way in which these U.S.-supported groups were tightly integrated into a military command structure that was clearly dominated by, led by, al-Nusra Front, in conjunction, of course, with Ahrar al-Sham.
And I go into some, a few examples here, which I find to be the most important exemplary instances of the way in which these newspapers avoid the issue.
The New York Times and Barnard came closest to touching on it in one article at the end of the article, not at the very end, but very close to the end.
She essentially acknowledges that the al-Nusra Front was able to take advantage of the U.S. program of sending TOW missiles into northwestern Syria last year, or sorry, not last year, in 2013-2014.
And in doing so, she undercut the major theme that she was putting forward in her article, which was that the U.S.-supported groups in Syria were being forced into a closer relationship with the, were cooperating more with the al-Qaeda franchise than they had before the war started because of the Russian strikes against the, against so-called moderate groups.
Instead of acknowledging that they were so closely intermingled in northwestern Syria that it was really not realistic to expect that the U.S.-supported groups were not going to get hit because they were so closely involved in that area and working and fighting side by side with al-Nusra Front.
As they had been for years, long before the Russian intervention.
That's right, exactly.
And that was never pointed out in any of these stories.
And the New York Times, I'm sorry, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal were even worse.
Wait, stick with the New York Times for a second.
So it's funny what's going on here, right?
Is there basically, they've made an editorial decision that for whatever reason, maybe you, maybe you think you have a theory for the reason.
Okay, we're going to go ahead and be a little bit more honest about this, but only under the cover of a lie.
We're not, we can't come right out and admit what's going on here.
We're going to begin admitting what's going on here by saying that, well, it's because Russia has forced them together.
Well, that's kind of neat.
You're right.
I mean, the point here is that none of these major newspapers would really consciously publish a story that would be so violently in conflict with the official line of the U.S. government and the national security state.
I mean, I think that's the bottom line here.
That they, you don't have to, you don't have to have an explicit understanding that that's the case.
It's always implicit.
It's always unspoken.
It's always unwritten.
I shouldn't say always.
I mean, there are obviously examples in previous wars and other situations where there, you know, there is a very explicit intervention by the White House or by CIA or whatever to get the newspapers to avoid or to stop saying anything that is in conflict with their interests.
But in this case, I think it's fairly clear that it's the silent dog whistle effect that is at work here that prevents the newspapers from publishing stories that reflect the reality on the ground.
And to some extent, I mean, this effect works out in the following fashion.
The reporters may hear one thing or another in Turkey, in Syria, in Beirut, but they dismiss it if it doesn't fit the paradigm that they've accepted.
And so what they end up publishing is only those bits of information from the sources that are acceptable, which which they they understand without being told is within the parameters that are acceptable.
Right.
And starting with Secretary Clinton has decided we're overthrowing Assad for Israel.
So everybody get to work.
Yeah, I mean, you know, it's it's again, it's an implicit understanding that that, yes, there there is some there's some cooperation, of course, between the U.S. supported groups and Arar al-Sham and al-Nusra Front.
They are they're both part of a coalition.
Both both groups, both kinds of groups are in a coalition.
That that is the language that has been used in the quality, quote, unquote, news media, that that there is a coalition against the Assad regime that involves these these so-called moderate groups.
But but that is a very vague formula, which, of course, allows for a wide, wide range of understandings and doesn't pin down the reality that, in fact, these groups are fighting under the leadership of under the command of al-Nusra Front.
They are carrying out military missions which have been assigned them, which have been coordinated with al-Nusra Front.
And that is the part of it that's going farther than any of these news organizations have been willing to go.
Right.
Yeah, I love it.
It's I should have saved this one on my desktop just so I always have it handy.
The email from a staffer to Hillary saying, hey, look, boss, AQ is on our side in this one from February of 2012.
Where, you know.
Oh, I guess.
Yeah.
No, not that we're on their side or anything, but they're on ours.
How nice.
All right.
I'm sorry.
Go on, if you would, to to Liz Sly, because one thing about Liz Sly is she actually does go to Iraq and stuff.
You know, she is a little bit of a real reporter compared to some of these hacks.
But what about her?
Well, I mean, Liz, Liz Sly is is a real reporter.
All right.
Definitely.
But at the same time, I mean, I've seen her in the past on on the very issue that Anne Bernard, at least accurately reported that that TOW missiles had, you know, ended up in the hands of Al-Nusra Front and Bar Al-Sham.
Liz Sly is actually in The Washington Post has denied that.
So I'm not really.
Yes.
Yes.
In fact, I quoted that in a previous article.
Oh, she just said that that just is not true, that Nusra has or she actually she actually quoted Ambassador Robert Ford as denying that any more than one or two TOW missiles had been had fallen into the hands of Al-Nusra Front as the result of the takeover of Harakat Al-Hazm, the one of the so-called moderate organizations that that Al-Nusra Front essentially attacked and took over in in 2015.
I guess she doesn't have YouTube.
Well, I thought it was an astonishing piece of reportage for her to to quote Ford without saying anything to the contrary.
When she knows perfectly well, she actually reported it previously to that that that that it wasn't true that, in fact, that Al-Nusra Front did, in fact, get many, many TOW missiles as a result of that takeover.
So, I mean, she was she was sort of trimming her sails in this story for whatever reason, not reporting what she knew to be true.
Yeah, that's too bad.
I wonder how much of that is done by the editors back home and and to the disgruntlement of the reporters out there when they work for major papers like that.
That happens a lot.
You know, I've I've heard stories of a plenty of her names on the byline.
So that's part of the contract.
But I can imagine you write something for The New York Times and then it comes out and you read it and you just want to hang yourself, you know, or something like that.
Cut out.
It gets cut out by an editor or, you know, the editor says you can't say that or or in a dozen other ways, it gets it gets dropped in the process of interaction between the two.
So now parse for me here, this Jaysh al-Fattah, Fatah, whatever group.
Yeah, we.
Hey, look, just like in Osama's papers, what we need is new names for our group because al-Qaeda has Zarqawi's reputation now.
And so let's change it.
Well, you know, this is this is really a key point that you've just referred to in the context of the recent events in Syria, because as I point out in this article, there's another there's another article that I cite I'll monitor an article by a Turkish freelance journalist who was in Aleppo as well last year who said that this was late.
No, actually, it was written earlier this year.
He he points out that essentially Al-Nusra Front has gone underground in the sense of trying to hide its presence, its military presence in in in northern Syria, particularly Idlib, specifically Idlib and Aleppo provinces because of the sensitivity now of its relationship to the.
It's close relations with the so-called moderate groups and the fact that there's a ceasefire in the making and that that it's important politically then to be able to make the argument that the Russians are attacking these poor, innocent, moderate groups rather than Al-Nusra Front.
And therefore, what they've done is to essentially hide their troops under Arar al-Sham in northern Syria, northwest Syria.
And this is a key point because it shows that Al-Nusra Front is, in fact, consciously playing a much bigger political diplomatic game.
It is it is essentially doing things that will make it easier for the United States to pursue the policy that it has been pursuing in the last year or two, which is to essentially use Al-Nusra Front's forces as part of the power equation in Syria.
So so I think that this is really a key part of the story of what's been going on.
All right.
And well, and so how much of that has changed?
I mean, that's a kind of general way to say it.
Use them as part of the equation.
But right now we got a ceasefire and the ceasefires worked better than anyone imagined, at least as far as it goes.
That's what everybody keeps saying, that at least all the so-called mythical moderate groups, maybe they really are moderate and they're not fighting.
And Assad and his guys have quit bombing except for Islamic State targets.
They're not even bombing on Al-Nusra targets at this point.
Correct?
As far as I can tell, you know, it's it's a little bit I mean, obviously, yes, I'm oversimplifying from Austin, Texas here, you know, but I'm saying by and large, I think you're right.
I think you're right.
There are some exceptions, but generally that is the pattern.
Now, I think at this point, both sides, for their own political reasons, political military reasons, on the side of the Al-Nusra Front and its close ally, Ra' al-Sham, I think they are they are sort of pausing in their war.
And I think the the Assad regime and the Russians are pausing and, of course, the Iranians are pausing to some extent on their side as well.
But but that obviously does not mean the war is over.
There there is a there is a political process of some sort that's underway, but I think that it's within the context of a larger sort of political diplomatic picture where the Assad regime and the Russians want to be on the side of peace.
They don't want to be blamed for the resumption of the war.
And so at this point, everybody has an interest in sort of pausing.
And under those circumstances, it's it's still impossible to know to what extent, if at all, the any of these moderate groups that have been fighting alongside Al-Nusra Front in northern Syria have really changed their their policy, have really decided to to end their war.
I mean, I suggested in a tweet that there's this one one group that organized anti-Al-Nusra Front demonstrations in one of the village in one of the towns that it controls, and that that was a possible indication that it may be changing its its role in the war.
But that is uncertain.
And so I think we just have to wait and see at this point, you know, whether this is having a significant effect on splitting any any of the non non-jihadist, non-Salafist armed groups away from the Al-Nusra Front, Arar al-Sham combination.
Yeah.
Or, you know, like you're talking about earlier, ones who are at least willing to play that stuff down while they're getting along with our side, as opposed to those who would rather just stick with the Islamic State or something like that.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, that's what Patrick Coburn has said for years about, you know, these so-called mythological moderate groups.
They do exist.
But if they're so moderate, then you go report from the towns they control.
And how come, you know, everybody calls them a moderate won't go and meet with them because they're terrified to.
So, yeah, they exist.
No, they're not moderates.
They exist.
And, you know, their their politics is in a way irrelevant to the to the underlying reality that they are too weak to fight on their own.
That is the fundamental problem that they have been facing ever since 2012.
I mean, this has always been.
And, you know, we talked with David Enders, who used to report from Iraq.
I've been talking with David Enders since 2005 or something like that.
And he used to always explain that the Sunni based insurgency in Iraq, that the Al-Qaeda guys, Zarqawi's guys and the foreign fighters, et cetera, were the smallest percentage of the Sunni based insurgency.
Even the generals would admit that.
I think the highest number I ever saw was seven percent or something of the Sunni based insurgency was made up of these Al-Qaeda guys.
But in Syria, it was just the other way around.
The entire thing was dominated by jihadists and including a bunch of Saudis and a bunch of, you know, Saudi money from the very beginning.
And now these Al-Qaeda guys were a bit nicer than than Zarqawi's guys.
They kidnapped David Enders and then they let him go.
You know, meanwhile, Tice, I guess, got kidnapped by another McClatchy reporter, got kidnapped.
They say, I guess everything's by Assad and he's still being held.
But they didn't cut David Enders head off.
Thank God they let him live.
So they were already even even Al-Nusra themselves were trying to kind of rebrand a little bit there.
And even for Zarqawi's guys, they're focusing on this particular jihad for now.
Yeah, I mean, the Al-Nusra Front is run by some very smart guys who have a very different strategic angle on on gaining power and what to do with it.
I mean, you know, they have a different set of interests and and that really calls for a different, a whole different political military strategy from that of ISIS.
And so, you know, they are, in fact, willing to work with at arm's length the United States in order to gain power.
And that means playing down, you know, the the international terrorist angle of the of their their program, which which hasn't disappeared, but they're not talking about it.
And it means that, you know, they're not going to carry out the kinds of sort of terrorist actions, beheadings and so forth that ISIS carries out.
That's that's simply not the not of Americans anyway.
No, I don't think they're not.
They're not doing beheadings.
I don't think I haven't heard of any.
Well, maybe not this year, but they have in the past.
Sure.
Even even the so-called FSA groups were cutting off ISIS heads and things like this.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I guess you're right.
One should be careful not to make a blanket statement.
But I think they have they have followed a very conscious policy of avoiding that sort of thing in the last couple of years.
Yeah.
Well, I think it's fair to say that they were better at PR.
They were more savvy at PR from the beginning and that the and, you know, the Islamic State, they're good at PR, too.
But they had a different message that they were sending, which was don't dare resist us.
You know, be terrified because it's a force multiplier for that.
So ISIS works on on terror.
Essentially, that's their modus operandi.
Al Nusra Front works on trying to integrate itself into the broader Syrian landscape, which means working with people who are non jihadist, not not not hardcore Islamist, you know, jihadist people.
Right.
Yeah.
That's what Mitchell Prothero would say about them, too, is that, yeah, they are who they are, but they play well with others.
Yes.
Yes.
Exactly.
So just because they're intelligent.
All right.
Well, listen, I've kept you way over here.
I'm very glad that you did the show again, Gareth.
I really appreciate it.
And I will direct everyone over to this great piece.
It's at, of course, original dot antiwar dot com slash Porter reporting or not the ties between U.S. armed Syrian rebels and Al-Qaeda's affiliate.
Thanks, Gareth.
Thank you, Scott.
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