A quick post to correct a major error in “Standard Narrative on Syria Conflict Whitewashes US Role“…. In that post, I wrote:

Indeed, an entire month before the entire Western media says the conflict began with a regime crackdown on peaceful protesters, Egypt’s Al-Ahram Weekly was reporting the existence of the infamous Free Syrian Army (FSA), which was “fighting the Syrian regime using defectors from the regular armed forces.”

And there was already talk “of creating buffer zones around Damascus, near the Syrian-Jordanian border, and on the Syrian-Turkish border.” (Bassel Oudat, “Syria after the veto,” Al-Ahram Weekly, February 9-15, 2011.)

However, these two Al-Ahram articles were misdated. As the original URLs indicated, they were published in 2012, not 2011.

This was pointed out to me by Jonathan Marshall, who further noted that where I quote Arutz Sheva saying the regime “opened fire on armed protesters” (emphasis added), that may very well have been a typo (they might have meant unarmed protesters).

When I read the sentence in the Times article about how anti-regime elements only took up arms after the March protests, I recalled having saved some articles discussing an armed uprising prior to that time. I figured I could quickly find those in my research archive and write up quick post about it. I regret the lack of vigor I put into it and the hasty error.

As you can see here and here, the Al-Ahram article was dated 2011. I should have realized that must have been an error. I missed an opportunity to see the error when I went to find those two articles in the Internet Archive: the original URLs contained the publication year of “2012”, as Jonathan pointed out to me.

In his kind email notifying me of my error, Jonathan added, “That said, there is plenty of evidence that the official story line is wrong.” He shared with me an excellent article on the subject he’d written that was published at Consortium News that I’ll pass along: Click here to read it.