Guest post by Joe Newby

We still haven’t gotten to the bottom of the Fast and Furious scandal, and now comes word of possibly another, very similar, scandal. On Sunday, the New York Times reported that weapons sent by the CIA and Saudi Arabia to arm the Syrian rebels may have been stolen by Jordanian intelligence operatives and sold to black market gun dealers. Those weapons, in turn, were apparently used to kill Americans.

The Times reported:

Some of the stolen weapons were used in a shooting in November that killed two Americans and three others at a police training facility in Amman, F.B.I. officials believe after months of investigating the attack, according to people familiar with the investigation.

The existence of the weapons theft, which ended only months ago after complaints by the American and Saudi governments, is being reported for the first time after a joint investigation by The New York Times and Al Jazeera. The theft, involving millions of dollars of weapons, highlights the messy, unplanned consequences of programs to arm and train rebels — the kind of program the C.I.A. and Pentagon have conducted for decades — even after the Obama administration had hoped to keep the training program in Jordan under tight control.

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Allies, indeed…

The Times further added:

President Obama authorized the covert arming program in April 2013, after more than a year of debate inside the administration about the wisdom of using the C.I.A. to train rebels trying to oust Mr. Assad.

The decision was made in part to try to gain control of a chaotic situation in which Arab countries were funneling arms into Syria for various rebel groups with little coordination. The Qataris had paid to smuggle shipments of Chinese-made FN-6 shoulder-fired weapons over the border from Turkey, and Saudi Arabia sent thousands of Kalashnikovs and millions of rounds of ammunition it had bought, sometimes with the C.I.A.’s help.

Cross-Posted from Conservative Firing Line