So now we know that Elizabeth O’Bagy, the “expert” cited by Secretary Kerry, Senator McCain, and others as an important impartial source claiming that moderates, not radicals, dominate among Syrian insurgents is a liar.
Her padded resume was a convenient excuse for her termination from her main job at Kimberly Kagan’s Institute for the Study of War (where arch-neocon William Kristol is Chairman).
However the real scandal is not O’Bagy’s falsely claimed PhD, but rather that at her other job, for the Syrian Emergency Task Force, she had been at the enter of a massive propaganda and influence campaign aimed at the American people, pushing the idea that there were moderates in Syria who the US should be supporting. O’Bagy played a key role in that influence campaign and she was being paid to lie about the insurgents by the US government itself! Yes, the real scandal is that O’Bagy was being paid as a State Department contractor to pose as a Syria expert and convince Americans that the Syrian insurgents should be supported.
The media largely ignores this huge story preferring the easier and less dangerous story that she faked her PhD.
O’Bagy has a senior position in the US-government funded Syrian Emergency Task Force, headed by the very shady Mouaz Moustafa. Moustafa’s SETF is the organization that organized Senator McCain’s disastrous visit to Syria in May, where he met with thugs and kidnappers while claiming that they were moderates who deserved support. McCain was so taken by the Syrian insurgent kidnappers he met that he proposed a pajama party at their house and had to be dragged away by his security detail. You can see McCain and Moustafa, along with the Syrian insurgent kidnappers, in this now-famous photo.
Moustafa has a bizarre resume of his own. Before heading up the US-government funded Syria regime change lobbying group, he was Executive Director of the Libyan Council of North America, pushing for regime change in Libya. Was he on the US government payroll in that position as well?
More strange — or not — he has a long history with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), known as “AIPAC’s think tank,” even once (since scrubbed) being listed as an “expert” for that pro-Israel neoconservative “policy institute.”
Who are these people and why is Washington paying them to covertly influence public opinion in the United States in favor of regime change overseas?
And more importantly, now that their lies about the non-existent “moderates” among the insurgent groups fighting to overthrow the Syrian government have been exposed, why is the US government delivering weapons anyway to the radicals, jihadists, and criminals fighting in Syria?
How many of these new US-provided weapons will end up in the hands of the vicious jihadist thugs now laying siege to Maaloula, home of some of the last people on earth to still speak the native tongue of Jesus Christ? However, small arms are not as useful to them in their ethnic cleansing of Christians. They prefer dull knives for beheadings.
We are being lied to about Syria, and to add insult to injury we are being forced to pay for the privilege. The myriad of cut-out NGOs pose as independent voices but in fact are on the payroll of the US government. That is the scandal. Not fake PhD’s.
