BREAKING-John Kerry’s Syria ‘Expert’ Fired for Falsely Claiming to Hold a Ph.D.

McCain and Kerry rely on a 26 year old so-called expert that turns out to be a fraud.

PJ Media reports

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.

O’Bagy is the Syria “expert” Secretary of State John Kerry and Sen. John McCain cited in their pro-rebel Syria talk last week. We were among the sites that questioned O’Bagy’s connection to the Syrian Emergency Task Force, which has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, which is not “mostly secular.”

I guess this is why we’re not seeing O’Bagy on TV this week.

Speaking of the SETF, Walid Shoebat noticed that their web site is going through a bit of a makeover. O’Bagy is still listed there, but a “Research Associate” by the name of Ahmad Soliman is not. References to him have been deep sixed.

I’m sure his public connections to the Muslim Students Association and the Islamic Society of North America — Muslim Brotherhood fronts — have nothing to do with that.
Read Shoebat’s post. It’s interesting. He notices some other digital shredding going on over at SETF.

Exit question: Did Johns Kerry and McCain knowingly participate in Islamist disinformation to goad America into striking Syria, or were they just dupes?
More: A commenter at Politico sums things up nicely:

Another 26 year old “senior analyst.” Miley Cyrus wasn’t available?

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Outclassed by the Master: Putin Didn't Save Obama, He Beat Him

Game, set, and match for Vladimir Putin!

Weekly Standard reports with the Russian proposal on Syrian chemical weapons, the United States is being escorted out of the Middle East.  Maybe Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin really did discussthe idea of putting Syrian chemical weapons under international control last week on the sidelines of the G20 conference. Putin sure doesn’t care that Obama’s taking credit for the proposal, or that the administration is posturing like a Mob enforcer.  “The only reason why we are seeing this proposal,” saidWhite House spokesman Jay Carney, “is because of the U.S. threat of military action.”

Right, Putin is laughing to himself. Whatever. If Obama wants to sell it like a Christmas miracle on Pennsylvania Avenue that’s fine with Putin, because Putin won.

Reset with Russia was originally a strategic priority for the Obama administration because it saw Moscow as the key to getting Iran to come to the negotiating table. Putin, from the White House’s perspective, was destined for the role of junior partner. Now Putin has turned “Reset” upside down. By helping Obama out of a jam with Syria, Putin has made himself the senior partner to whom the White House is now beholden.

Accordingly, when Putin proposes the same sort of deal with Iran, with Russia having established its bona fides as an interlocutor for Syria, Obama is almost certain to jump at it.

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The corrupt media may spin this foreign policy fiasco in Obama’s favor.  But, the world sees it for what it is.  Putin mastered the political chessboard while Obama was figuring which pieces were his. 

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White House: Strike on Syria sends message to Iran

How about attacking Iran directly?  The Obama regime is grasping at straws now!

NBC News reports White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough said Sunday that an impending U.S. attack on Syria would send a message to Iranian leaders that they should not feel free to develop nuclear weapons.

McDonough said on NBC’s Meet the Press that “to communicate with them we have to be very clear, very forthright. This is an opportunity to be both with the Iranians....”

He said, “nobody is rebutting the intelligence; nobody doubts the intelligence” that is the basis for President Barack Obama pinning the blame for an August 21 chemical weapons attack in Syria on President Bashar Assad's regime which is fighting to suppress a rebellion that began

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Why isn’t the Obama regime showing the American people what proof they have? Instead they show videos of the pictures we’ve already seen. The only thing they’re doing is scare tactics instead of proving their case.

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Chris Wallace to Obama Chief of Staff: Where Are the Benghazi Arrests?

 Isn’t it very suspicious how the Obama regime seems to have so much information as who used chemical weapons in Syria, but when it comes to getting any information as to what really happened in Benghazi they’re not forthcoming any details other than blatant lies. 

Mediaite reports following up on multiple questions regarding the proposed Syrian intervention and its fate in Congress, Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace invoked the approaching one year anniversary of the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, and asked White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough why the perpetrators had not been brought to justice. 

Wallace was especially interested in why the U.S. had not arrested Ahmed Abu Khattala, who has been charged with the crime but not arrested, despite having given interviews to several news outlets.

“Why is it that reporters seems to be able to find this guy, who the government is charging with involvement in Benghazi, but law enforcement can’t find him?” Wallace asked. “It’s been a year, sir.”

You know what the United States does?” McDonough said. “We track every lead until we find and can accomplish what we do.”

“Not to belabor it,” Wallace said, “but why can AP find him, why can the New York Times find him, and not our government?”

“The United States government does what it says, and we will do what we say in this instance, as we do in every other instance,” McDonough replied.

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The Obama administration has no credibility whatsoever. I wouldn’t believe Barack Obama if he told me water was wet!

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Alan Grayson: ‘They have no smoking gun that the attack was ordered by Assad’

Ezra Klein interviews Democrat Rep Alan Grayson, one of the most vocal opponents of military action against t Syria in the Democrat Party.   

From Wornblog

Alan Grayson is a Democratic congressman from Florida and a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. He’s also one of the House’s most vocal skeptics of striking Syria. We spoke on Friday. A transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity, follows:
Ezra Klein: Let’s begin at the beginning. Give me your broad thoughts on intervening in Syria.

Alan Grayson: The great uncovered story at this point is there’s no practical way for military action to significantly deter the use of chemical weapons. What I’m hearing from other members is that the efficacy isn’t there. There’s no connection between what’s being proposed militarily and what’s happened. This is weighing heavily on internal discussions among members. For people who have to vote on this, it’s another mismatch between means and end.

The ideal attack would be some kind of magical-wand attack where you eliminate the chemical warfare capability. But there is this practical fact that if you blow up a chemical weapon, you spread poison gas in the immediate vicinity. It’s even worse than an attack on a nuclear facility: Then there’s some risk radioactivity will spread. If you attack a chemical stockpile, it’s guaranteed it will spread.

EK: But the Pentagon knows that, right? My understanding of the target plan is that it focuses on military infrastructure: Things like rocket launchers and runways and aircraft. In theory, the idea is this is the infrastructure that delivers chemical weapons, but in practice, it’s punishing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad by degrading his general military capabilities.

AG: Well, first you can see that’s not ideal. Talk to people in the public about this and say we’re not going to do anything to prevent a future chemical attack but do this other thing; you’ve lost them. But there are other problems:

One problem with that scenario is he has more-than-adequate resources. He completely controls Syrian airspace. He has enormous staggering stockpiles of ammunition collected over 41 years. He and Saddam Hussein were in some kind of competition to see who could roll up the biggest supply of munitions. Enormous resources there have been devoted for decades to getting the latest weaponry from the Russian. It’s actually a significant source of foreign exchange for the Russians at this point! So, there’s so much there that the idea that you can eliminate it with a few missiles and bombs is not right.
Then you run into the second problem, which is that the Russians will replace the weapons immediately. They’ve said it on the record. They’ve suggested they might even replace it with better stuff.

Third, the administration won’t do anything that will degrade Assad’s capability to the point where he’d be unable to withstand the attacks from al-Nusra, the radical fundamentalist group composed of al-Qaeda graduates. [President] Obama and [Secretary of State John F.] Kerry have specifically said in public that the purpose is not regime change. They’re not going to hit Assad so hard it would change the result of the war. Despite the fact they were backed into a corner by [Sen. John] McCain [R-Ariz.] to change the language of the resolution, it has not in any way altered the military plans. So, a) Assad has so much stuff, b) the Russians will replace it, and c) we don’t want to weaken him too much. Sometimes there is no solution to the equation.

EK: It seems to me that “c” is the biggest problem there. The kind of calibration required to hit Assad hard enough that he won’t use chemical weapons again and maybe will come to the negotiating table, but not so hard that he’s actually weakened in his civil war, seems to suggest you can use military force, which is a very blunt object, in a very precise way.

AG: It’s beyond calibration. It’s more like titration. You can’t do that in warfare. It doesn’t work that way. The one thing you can be sure of in warfare is you can’t be sure of anything. This is reminiscent of President [Lyndon B.] Johnson picking out individual bombing targets in the war in Vietnam.

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If Obama wants war with Syria he needs to produce smoking gun evidence that Basher al Assad was responsible.  So far we've seen nothing close to that. 

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