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The Wild, Wild West: eat your heart out edition

The Wild, Wild West: eat your heart out edition


by digby

Mother Jones reports on how efficiently the US is managing our millions of dollars of support for the allegedly moderate Syrian rebels. We’re awesome:

In recent weeks, the Obama administration and hawks favoring a strike on Syria have called for the continued support of supposedly moderate rebels fighting Bashar al-Assad’s regime. The United States has been sending millions of dollars in nonlethal aid to the rebels since February, and in June President Obama authorized secretly supplying weapons to opposition fighters…

The Syrian Support Group, a US-based nonprofit that is the only organization the Obama administration has authorized to hand out nonlethal US-funded supplies to the rebels, insists it keeps track of who’s receiving this assistance based on handwritten receipts provided by rebel commanders in the field. According to Dan Layman, a spokesman for the group, this level of oversight is sufficient to guarantee US assistance is going to the right rebels and is being used appropriately. “What we’re getting from [FSA commanders] in receipts directly reflects what’s been given out and to whom, I’m very confident,” he says. “The government regularly asks us for updates and new receipts, often faster than we can produce them.” Layman doesn’t know if or how the US government verifies these receipts.

[…] Relying on local commanders to guarantee US assistance is managed effectively could lead to “massive corruption,” warns Aki Peritz, a senior policy adviser for Third Way and a former CIA counterterrorism analyst. Peritz notes that the supplies being handed out by the Syrian Support Group can be sold for cash or traded for weapons and ammunition.

Charles Tiefer, a law professor at the University of Baltimore and a former commissioner for the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan, says that in war zones, “it’s in a commander’s interest to give exaggerated numbers. We often see situations where a commander starts out with, say, three brigades, and then drops to one brigade, and continues to faithfully give receipts for the other two missing units. We call them ‘ghost employees.'” He adds, “I think Syria is the Wild, Wild West as far as knowing who is doing what.”

I know it’s verbotten to talk about Iraq in the context of Syria but I cannot help but be reminded of the “issues” we had with disappearing cash during that debacle. We don’t seem to be very sophisticated about this. But then we have money to burn so it’s no biggie, right? (The savings from kicking kids off food stamps ought to pay for a week or so anyway.)

It’s worth it even if it gets into the hands of folks like this?

This spring, one militia leader affiliated with the FSA—his brigade has since been kicked out—was filmed eating a dead soldier’s heart. “This stuff happens rarely, but it’s unfortunate,” Layman says. “With the guy who was eating a heart, he was part of a moderate faction…We work with Idriss and let him know that he needs to prevent these things.”

Well that’s a relief. We definitely don’t need any more “moderates” eating human hearts. It really hurts the image of our freedom fighters.

This has all the markings of the kind of foolishness we embarked upon in Afghanistan during the 80s. We helped organize and arm the fighter that turned into ad Qaeda. It worked out very well for us.

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