Google and al-Jazeera participated in Syrian civil war

Wikileaked Hillary Clinton email #12166, dated July 25, 2012, shows Jared Cohen of Google Ideas working with al-Jazeera to develop a list of defecting Syrian officers and to encourage further defections. Quote:

Please keep close hold, but my team is planning to launch a tool on Sunday that will publicly track and map the defections in Syria and which parts of the government they are coming from. Our logic behind this is that while many people are tracking the atrocities, nobody is visually representing and mapping the defections, which we believe are important in encouraging more to defect and giving confidence to the opposition. Given how hard it is to get information into Syria right now, we are partnering with Al-Jazeera who will take primary ownership over the tool we have built, track the data, verify it, and broadcast it back into Syria

Cohen's email was sent to William J. Burns, Deputy Secretary of State; Jacob J. Sullivan, national security advisor to Hillary Clinton; and Alec Ross, Senior Advisor for Innovation in the State Department. Sullivan forwarded Cohen's email to Clinton, who forwarded it to her aide Monica Hanley.

Previously, al-Jazeera hosted exiled Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood leaders who had given al-Qaeda free rein over Egypt. Also, the US support for extremists in Syria got so bad that a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff defected to Russia to try to stop it.

Jared Cohen has a reputation as a loose cannon, "doing things the CIA cannot do", with White House and State Department support. Interestingly, Hamas allowed him to travel to Gaza for reasons that the people at Stratfor were not aware of.