I just happened to catch this tweet before it vanished down the memory hole.

So who did we risk a shooting war with Russia for? Amnesty International released a report over the weekend.

Syrian rebel groups backed by the U.S. and its allies “have committed serious violations of international humanitarian law, including abductions, torture and summary killings,” according to Amnesty International.
A report by the leading human rights organization details how extremist rebel groups have taken over large parts of major Syrian cities, in which they have created repressive theocratic regimes where critics are violently silenced and where religious and ethnic minority groups fear for their lives.
...
In Idlib, it looked at the crimes of the rebel groups Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham, both of which are extremist Islamist militias that are party of the Army of Conquest coalition.

I want to call attention to Ahrar al-Sham on this list.
Late last year, American custom agents waved through Labib al Nahhas, foreign affairs director for the Islamist fighting group Ahrar al Sham. He also had a Muslim name, but he wasn't a humanitarian. He was a terrorist.

A senior figure from a Syrian rebel group with links to al Qaida was allowed into the United States for a brief visit, raising questions about how much the Obama administration will compromise in the search for partners in the conflict.
His previously undisclosed visit is a delicate matter for both sides – the conservative Salafist insurgents risk their credibility with even perceived ties to the United States, and the U.S. government risks looking soft on screenings by allowing entry to a member of an Islamist paramilitary force.

To be fair, Ahrar al Sham is not blacklisted as a terrorist group. That being said, the only reason that they aren't blacklisted is because the Obama Administration has deliberately blocked Russian attempts to do so.

Ahrar al-Sham is an ultra-orthodox Salafist group and has fought as part of a military alliance including the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front, which was not part of a cessation of hostilities agreement brokered in February.
Ahrar al-Sham, whose late leader fought alongside Osama bin Laden, last year denied sharing al Qaeda's ideology or having organizational ties to the group.

Russia didn't give up. They urged us to join them in bombing al-Qaeda. We turned them down.

Now to be fair, Secretary Kerry has stepped back from defending Ahrar al Sham, but he may have been "off script" based on the blowback.

But then Kerry, perhaps accidentally, threw two other Syrian rebel groups under the bus by calling them “subgroups” of the terrorists.
“There are a couple of subgroups underneath the two designated — Daesh and Jabhat al-Nusra — Jaysh al-Islam, Ahrar al-Sham particularly — who brush off and fight with that — alongside these other two sometimes to fight the Assad regime,” he said, referring to two rebel groups that the United States has not named as terrorist groups until now.
The remark, which went largely unnoticed by the media in Aspen, nonetheless set off alarm bells inside the Obama administration. Two administration officials who work on Syria told me that Kerry’s naming of the Jaysh al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham as “subgroups” of the terrorist organizations was not only inaccurate but potentially harmful to U.S. government efforts to convince the Russians and the Syrian government not to attack them.

I guess this was a Joe Bidenesque gaff (i.e. telling the truth in public).

“For months, we’ve been arguing to make sure the Russians and the Syrian regime don’t equate these groups with the terrorists,” one senior administration official told me. “Kerry’s line yields that point.”
Another U.S. official simply emailed, “Baffled. SMH[Shaking my head].”

How dare Secretary Kerry call a terrorist group a bunch of terrorists merely because they are committed to terrorism!

To be fair, it isn't about just stopping terrorism. It's also about stopping Russian aggression.

But there have been a few moments when the truth has surfaced. For instance, in the days leading up to the just-completed NATO summit in Warsaw, General Petr Pavel, chairman of the NATO Military Committee, divulged that the deployment of NATO military battalions in the Baltic states was a political, rather than military, act.
“It is not the aim of NATO to create a military barrier against broad-scale Russian aggression, because such aggression is not on the agenda and no intelligence assessment suggests such a thing,” Pavel told a news conference.

When it comes to Russia, there obviously two opposing camps in Washington. In one camp is Kerry and Pavel, and in the other there are people like Gen. Philip Breedlove.

Retired U.S. Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove, until recently the supreme commander of NATO forces in Europe, plotted in private to overcome President Barack Obama’s reluctance to escalate military tensions with Russia over the war in Ukraine in 2014, according to apparently hacked emails from Breedlove’s Gmail account that were posted on a new website called DC Leaks....
“I think POTUS sees us as a threat that must be minimized, … ie do not get me into a war????” Breedlove wrote in an email to Harlan Ullman, senior adviser to the Atlantic Council, describing his ongoing attempt to get Powell to help him influence Obama.

Just how close to treason is this?