{"id":66922,"date":"2013-09-08T18:10:04","date_gmt":"2013-09-08T17:10:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/shady-pr-operatives-pro-israel-ties-anti-castro-money-inside-the-syrian-oppositions-dc-spin-machine\/66922\/"},"modified":"2013-09-08T19:04:46","modified_gmt":"2013-09-08T18:04:46","slug":"shady-pr-operatives-pro-israel-ties-anti-castro-money-inside-the-syrian-oppositions-dc-spin-machine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/latest-news\/shady-pr-operatives-pro-israel-ties-anti-castro-money-inside-the-syrian-oppositions-dc-spin-machine\/","title":{"rendered":"Shady PR Operatives, Pro-Israel Ties, Anti-Castro Money: Inside the Syrian Opposition\u2019s DC Spin Machine"},"content":{"rendered":"

During the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Syria on September 3, Secretary of State John Kerry and Senator John McCain both cited a Wall Street Journal<\/em>\u00a0editorial by Elizabeth O\u2019Bagy to support their assessment of the Syrian rebels as predominately \u201cmoderate,\u201d and potentially Western-friendly.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe works with the Institute of War,\u201d Kerry said of O\u2019Bagy. \u201cShe\u2019s fluent in Arabic and spent an enormous amount of time studying the opposition and studying Syria. She just published this the other day. Very interesting [ Wall Street Journal<\/em>] article, which I commend to you.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kerry added, \u201cI just don\u2019t agree that a majority are al-Qaida and the bad guys.\u201d<\/p>\n

What Kerry and McCain neglected to mention was that O\u2019Bagy had been recently hired<\/a>\u00a0as the political director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF), a little known outfit that functions as a lobbying arm of the Syrian opposition in Washington.<\/p>\n

Until today, O\u2019Bagy had failed to note her role as a paid Syrian opposition lobbyist in her Wall Street Journal<\/em>\u00a0byline and did not note the position in her official bio at the Institute for the Study of War. Only after a storm of criticism did the Wall Street Journal<\/em>\u00a0insert a note in O\u2019Bagy\u2019s recent op-ed disclosing<\/a>\u00a0her paid position at SETF. O\u2019Bagy was also compelled to amend her bio with a lengthy clarification<\/a>about her work at SETF.<\/p>\n

But her work at the Institute for the Study of War should have been enough to set off alarm bells.<\/p>\n

\u201cLogrolling for war\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Institute for the Study of War\u2019s (ISW) board of directors is led by William Kristol. Kimberly Kagan, the group\u2019s president, was on General Stanley McChrystal\u2019s strategic review team in 2009, advocating for a dramatic expansion of the US presence in Afghanistan. Her husband is Frederick Kagan, the AEI fellow who is the uncle of fellow neocon Robert Kagan.<\/p>\n

In its 2011 annual report [PDF]<\/a>, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) detailed its close working relationship with Palantir Technologies, a private surveillance firm contracted<\/a>\u00a0by Bank of America in 2011 in an unsuccessful plot to dismantle Anonymous and sabotage Glenn Greenwald.<\/p>\n

The report listed New York Times<\/em>\u00a0reporter Michael Gordon as \u201cISW\u2019s journalist in residence.\u201d Back in January 2013, Gordon published<\/a>\u00a0an article pushing claims that Syrian army forces had used sarin gas, thus crossing Obama\u2019s \u201cred line\u201d and triggering a US intervention. Noting that the State Department could not confirm the information in Gordon\u2019s report, former Defense Intelligence Agency officer Pat Lang accused<\/a>\u00a0Gordon of \u201clogrolling for war in Syria.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite\u00a0his past affiliation with a think tank dedicated to pushing for US intervention in Syria, Gordon remains<\/a>\u00a0on the Times<\/em>\u2019 Syria beat.<\/p>\n

Rebel marketing<\/strong><\/p>\n

When O\u2019Bagy took to Twitter to boast about McCain\u2019s \u201cshout out\u201d to her during the Senate hearing on Syria, the conservative writer Charles C. Johnson (who recently reported<\/a>\u00a0on O\u2019Bagy\u2019s lobbying) asked her<\/a>\u00a0if she was in fact employed by the Syrian Emergency Task Force.<\/p>\n

\u201cYes I do humanitarian aid work through the organization,\u201d O\u2019Bagy told Johnson. \u201cCan\u2019t go to Syria frequently and not help the people.\u201d<\/p>\n

But O\u2019Bagy\u2019s work has less to do with tending to the needs of war-stricken refugees than it does with leveraging the media to agitate for US intervention. Indeed, she has been among the most prominent and widely cited commentators marketing the Syrian rebels as a bunch of America-friendly moderates.<\/p>\n

As she said during an August 26 appearance<\/a>\u00a0on Fox News, \u201cWhat I\u2019ve tried to show through this research and by traveling around with many of these rebel groups is that there are actually a majority of the opposition that would be aligned with U.S. interests.\u201d<\/p>\n

Republished from: AlterNet<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

During the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Syria on September 3, Secretary of State John Kerry and Senator John McCain both cited a Wall Street Journal\u00a0editorial by Elizabeth O\u2019Bagy to support their assessment of the Syrian rebels as predominately \u201cmoderate,\u201d and potentially Western-friendly. \u201cShe works with the Institute of War,\u201d Kerry said of O\u2019Bagy. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":66923,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,18],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-66922","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"category-latest-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66922","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66922"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66922\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66923"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}