Lame.
Via Daily Beast:
The U.S. military will concede on Monday that, once again, it misspoke when trying to clarify what happened to scores of U.S.-trained fighters who entered Syria earlier this month. And it’s increasingly obvious that the befuddlement in Washington reflects what is even worse confusion on the ground.
The Pentagon, responding to reports in The Daily Beast that a specific U.S.-trained commander had defected along with most of his unit to a group affiliated with al-Qaeda, will now concede that an unnamed commander who actually had been rejected by the U.S. as a possible trainee for the fight against the self-proclaimed Islamic State had somehow acquired access to U.S. equipment that he then handed over to al-Qaeda affiliates.
Right. This was the latest admission by the military in a week-long back-and-forth with The Daily Beast over the fate of some of the 71 U.S.-trained fighters who entered Syria for the first time on September 19. But we’re still just inching toward a full-on admission of how screwed up things really are.