Fake PhD Syria ‘Expert’ O’Bagy is Neocon and Israeli-linked Operative

Patrick Henningsen
Activist Post

Every fake war requires a parade of fake experts to help shill for military intervention. Elizabeth O’Bagy is a prime example of one such operative. Beyond her fake credentials, however, her story leads right to the heart of who is really pulling Washington’s strings on Syria.

“Dr” Elizabeth O’Bagy, a Georgetown University alumna, was thrust into the national conversation this past week after she wrote an op-ed piece for Rupert Murdoch’s The Wall Street Journal, an article which was later cited by both US Secretary of State John Kerry and Sen. John McCain, R-AZ, in their case for a military strike in Syria.

The only problem was that O’Bagy, a “senior research analyst” at Washington’s heavily pro-Israeli and neoconservative think tank, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), allegedly landed her job by claiming she had received her doctorate from Georgetown University. She has since been sacked from her role at the think tank.

She will forever be known as Kerry and McCain’s own sexier version of “curve ball” for Syria.

Here McCain is caught leaning on the fake PhD making his distorted case for war in Syria…

Specifically, Kerry sought to support Washington’s own shaky policy thesis by reading a quote from the op-ed in which O’Bagy wrote that Islamic extremist factions are not “spearheading the fight against the Syrian government,” but rather that the struggle is being led by “moderate opposition forces”. Watch…

Through the pro-war Murdoch press, O’Bagy simply delivered the very contrived thesis which Kerry, McCain and Obama were looking for, in order to justify their own sales pitch for intervention and for sending arms to a ‘democracy-loving, moderate rebel army in Syria’.

Even more interesting is who O’Bagy has been working for. The ISW think tank was founded by Kimberly Kagan, a devout neocon, whose fellow experts elevate U.S. military intervention, and provide policy research back-up for U.S. State Department, CIA, AIPAC and large national security defense contractors. The ISW’s board of directors is led by William Kristol. This type of organisation is a nexus which brings together, among other things, support for the Syrian opposition, anti-Castro in Cuba, and pro-Israeli activities.

Shocking enough, but then you discover that O’Bagy is also policy director at an even more questionable Washington DC outfit – a pro-rebel, money-raising and policy promoting nonprofit organisation known as the Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF). Exactly how much money SETF has collected to date (or where it has been spent) is unknown, but following the O’Bagy incident, O’Bagy and the group’s Communications Director Cassie Chesley – have both been pulled down from the SETF website. According to the SETF, Syrian opposition agents have been coordinating with operatives in Washington through “field work” since November 2012, including building a parallel government structures inside rebel-held areas in Syria:

In November 2012, SETF opened a field office, which serves as a headquarters for Syrian activists on the ground, a central training location for opposition members, a working base for transitional justice and civil society groups to collect forensic evidence and testimonials of war crimes, and is a coordinating location for aid into the country. Syrian activist, Razan Shalab Alsham serves as our office manager. 

In the liberated areas in the north of Syria, civilians are finding ways to develop grassroots civilian democratic structures to provide rule of law, basic services such as trash collection, civilian police force, and utilities. These (Civilian Administrative Councils) CACs are being created out of necessity, but they are also the seeds of proto-democratic structures that the Syrian people themselves developed without international help. Defying conventional wisdom, the authority of the CACs is respected by the armed opposition, because they are providing social services and a structure that encourages stability for the families of the men currently fighting the regime. It is important that the funding mechanism being employed helps to further unite the opposition and mitigates financial competition from occurring. Support of CACs helps to stabilize liberated areas and provide civilian oversight and authority.

It’s obvious to see what O’Bagy’s Syrian Emergency Task Force actually is – an essential “Field Office” and resource for regime change agents in Washington, as well as a source of intelligence collection for the CIA. It would be naive to thank that anyone involved in a such a nation-building “field office” as being anything else. Putting this into context of recent revelations that while the US and its allies have been acting out US war plan in Syria, the CIA has been quietly delivering lethal arms to their rebels in Syria, the so-called ‘field offices’ of seemingly innocuous nonprofit NGOs like Syrian Emergency Task Force, would be a key link in the chain which Washington uses to interface with their militants inside Syria.

CIA Journalists and Information Campaigns

In the case of O’Bagy, the fact that Georgetown University is a well-known, rather fertile recruiting ground for the CIA, could give another clue as to who she is working with, or working for. Here we have a super model-type, talking head who has appeared regularly on CNN, FOX, NPR, al Jazeera (Qatar state media) and other networks, as the so-called expert on Syria’s rebel factions. She has also stated on air, “I travel with groups (in Syria) where we actually can kind of identify the more extremist checkpoints”. So … behind enemy lines in an undeclared war, almost certainly escorted by either US special forces, or ex-special forces who are being paid roughly $1,500 per day to ferry around embedded journalists within a hermetically sealed CIA envelope. The only reason this kind of arrangement constructed through the CIA, would be for these pro-rebel ”experts” and Western journalists to formulate politicised ‘intelligence’ so men like John McCain and John Kerry – and President Obama, can make their case for sending arms to insurgents, or even to shill for western military intervention. Which is exactly what we see in the case of “Dr” Elizabeth O’Bagy.

In addition, Elizabeth O’Bagy was drafted in to help defend the alleged CIA American al Qaeda fighter recently detained by the FBI for working with al Qaeda in Syria, by working to shift opinion over his jihadist affiliations. FOX News reported:

O’Bagy was fired earlier this week by the Institute for the Study of War for allegedly lying about her academic credentials. Her writings had been used by U.S. officials to bolster their case for military action against the Assad regime. 

O’Bagy discussed the rebel group in question in a June 19, 2013 signed affidavit filed in the case of American Eric Harroun, who was indicted for fighting alongside the terror group al-Nusra in Syria.O’Bagy’s signed declaration, which included a breakdown of rebel groups and their varying degrees of affiliation to Al Qaeda-linked terrorists, was used by Harroun’s defense to argue that the former Army medic had actually fought with a splinter group and not a terrorist one – a group tied to the one O’Bagy described.It actually turns out that “Dr” O’Bagy’s rigorous study of militant group’s Facebook page (this is what passes for intelligence in 2013 – Facebook pages) forgot to mention images of the U.S. Capitol building on fire, with extremist fighters depicted, as well as al Qaeda-style, black and white flags in other images.

Was the American al Nusra fighter Eric Harroun working on a mercenary contract, paid by either the US, Saudi Arabia, or Qatar, or was he simply a CIA agent? One of the above is likely when considered alongside many other reports already existing on private contractors and special forces working inside Syria. According to his father, Darryl Harroun, his son was an American ‘patriot’ who would never get involved with al-Qaeda, and claims he was gathering intelligence for the US inside Syria:

“I know he was doing some work for the CIA over there,” the man’s father said. “I know for a fact that he was passing information onto the CIA.” See his interview below…

Israel’s Motivation for a US Intervention in Syria

Aside from O’Bagy’s position at Kagan’s Institute for the Study of War, it’s even more interesting to note that one of her mentors is none other than Michael Weiss, Research Director at the British-based Henry Jackson Society, a key Israeli and neoconservative foreign policy think tank. To understand who is really pulling Washington’s strings regarding military intervention in Syria, one only has to read the joint article written by Michael Weis and Elizabeth O’Bagy, published in The Atlantic on June 14,2013, entitled:

“Why Arming the Rebels Isn’t Enough: We need to dismantle Assad’s air capability to really give the opposition a leg up.”

When you combine their own analysis in this article along with who is paying for their foreign policy advocacy careers, it’s fairly easy to see what Israel’s motivation is in Syria: using the US to destroy Syria’s airforce and air defenses, leaving Israel as the sole military power in the region. Together, O’Bagy and Weis reveal the agenda here:

Any swift and decisive decision to materially aid the Free Syrian Army will necessarily include degrading or destroying the runways and infrastructure of Syria’s military airbases and commercial airports.

Follow the money trail behind policy hacks like O’Bagy, and you will eventually learn who is ultimately pulling Obama’s chain towards Syria.

The O’Bagy is also symptomatic of the amateur hour America has come to know as the Obama administration. It’s embarrassing to see heads of state relying on a fraudulent expert, yet, it’s appropriate to mention here that President Obama himself went so far as to seal and protect his own academic records and qualifications from public view. Executive Order 13489, banning the release of his records, was the first thing Obama did when he arrived in office in 2009.

It should be no surprise that absolutely nothing about Washington, London and Paris’s dirty clandestine war effort in Syria is transparent, and the public know it. How long until our own political operators in the west are brought to book for their deception?

Inquisitr.com original report on O’Bagy below…

Syrian Writer Elizabeth O’Bagy Fired After Kerry And McCain Cite Her Work
Inquisitr

Syrian analyst writer Elizabeth O’Bagy has lost her job after she was quoted by Secretary of State John Kerry and Senator John McCain.

Both politicians quoted an op-ed O’Bagy wrote for the Wall Street Journal. O’Bagy, an analysts at the Institute for the Study of War, received her job after telling her bosses that she had received her doctorate from Georgetown University.

In a statement released on Wednesday, the institute writes:

The Institute for the Study of War has learned and confirmed that, contrary to her representations, Ms. Elizabeth O’Bagy does not in fact have a Ph.D. degree from Georgetown University. ISW has accordingly terminated Ms. O’Bagy’s employment, effective immediately.

Elizabeth O’Bagy had worked for the institute for the last year and spent her first few months as an intern. She excelled as a researcher for the institute and moved through the ranks quickly. The piece quoted by John Kerry and John McCain was titled “On the Front Lines of Syria’s Civil War.”

In the piece, Elizabeth O’Bagy wrote about how extremists and moderates exercise control over distinct areas of the country and how checkpoints are often set up to define territory. O’Bagy also wrote about distinct areas where moderate rebels are in control and can keep weapons out of the hands of extremists.

O’Bagy was originally listed as a “senior analyst” at the institute, and later her affiliation with the Syrian Emergency Task Force, a non-profit organization based in Washington, was revealed. On Twitter, O’Bagy said she never attempted to conceal her ties with opposition and rebel commanders. She also noted that she was never paid to advocate her views on Syria.

On September 7, O’Bagy tweeted: “I’m not trying to trick America here.”

At this time, it is not known if O’Bagy still holds her original position with SETF.

Patrick Henningsen’s many articles and latest video reports can be found at 21st Century Wire where this article first appeared.