Here’s a bit of reading to start the week.

First, thanks to the media watchdog, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, or FAIR, for pointing out how recent news of a U.S. raid in Syria that killed an ISIS commander was reported in a manner that buried the “real” news (“White House Reveals ‘Boots on Ground’ in Syria, but Media Too Giddy Over Special Ops Porn to Notice“).

FAIR reports:

The real issue is that the White House just admitted it has American ground troops engaged in combat missions in Syria—and no one seemed to notice, much less care.

While it’s true the White House has acknowledged hostage rescue missions in Syria, this is the first time it’s admitted soldiers have been deployed inside Syria for expressly military purposes. As one Defense Department official would explain to the Washington Post:

The raid was only the second time US Special Operations forces are known to have operated on the ground in Syria, and the first “direct action” mission by US forces there. Special operators conducted an unsuccessful mission last summer to rescue American hostages being held by the militants, who later executed them.

Isn’t this important? Isn’t the fact that what began 292 days ago as a “limited,” “humanitarian” mission in Iraq has now expanded (again) to include US ground troops—albeit in a measured capacity—in Syria?

Fair then underscores the point.

As I’ve pointed out previously, only 40 percent of Americans read past the headline, so when everyone from CNN to New York Times to Vox announces it as a military raid to catch a “key ISIS commander,” and puts the fact that it’s the first direct military action in Syria by US troops—if they do at all—in paragraph 12, most people will never notice the expansion in US military objectives.

And then there’s an excellent interview with the NY Times executive editor regarding that newspaper’s decision to publish the names of top CIA officials in charge of the agency’s drone program. The original NYT story naming names was published at the end of April (“Deep Support in Washington for C.I.A.’s Drone Missions“).

The interview, by Jack Goldsmith, a professor at the Harvard Law School, appears on the Lawfare Blog.

From Goldsmith’s introduction:

On April 25, two days after President Obama announced that a U.S. drone strike accidentally killed two innocent hostages, Mark Mazzetti and Matt Apuzzo published a story in the New York Times about congressional and White House support for the CIA’s “targeted killing program.” A major point in the story was that some of the CIA officers who built the CIA’s drone program also led the CIA’s detention and interrogation program. In that connection, the Times identified three men by name: Michael D’Andrea, who was “chief of operations during the birth of the agency’s detention and interrogation program and then, as head of the C.I.A. Counterterrorism Center, became an architect of the targeted killing program” until he was “quietly shifted to another job” last month; his replacement “as head of the drone program,” Chris Wood; and the new chief of the Directorate of Operations, Greg Vogel, whom the Times described as “a former agency paramilitary officer.”

All three men were undercover officers, a status sanctioned by Section 23 of the Central Intelligence Agency Act that indicates that the CIA does not want their identity to be public or acknowledged. The CIA accordingly asked the Times not to identify the three men by name. The Times rejected this request. It explained in the story that it decided to identify the officers by name over CIA objections “because [the men] have leadership roles in one of the government’s most significant paramilitary programs and their roles are known to foreign governments and many others.”

The interview is definitely worth reading.