Everyone is wondering how Alexis Debat could lie so well, and fool so many people for so long? How did Joe Wilson lies work so well? Easy, they were laced with enough factual basis to hide the lies and fool the media into thinking he was legitimate. Recall Wilson went to Niger to supposedly debunk rumors of Saddam’s quest for WMD materials. Wilson claimed to have exposed Niger documents on a suppsed deal with Niger and Iraq, claiming also that Bush knew the documents were fakes.

It took years to learn the truth – that Wilson could not have debunked the forgeries because they would not show up at his wife’s place of work for 6 months after his visit. His wife sent him to Niger, and supposedly she told him of the forged documents. But the fact is Wilson was sent to confirm HIS OWN initial reports from his 1999 visit to Niger for the CIA. Joe Wilson was a sock puppet for disgruntled intelligence officials. So disgruntled they decided to rig Presidential elections while working for the Democrat candidate (something the media NEVER repeats anymore).

Debat is much more skilled than Wilson – who was a blabber mouth and buffoon who couldn’t keep his stories straight. Debat fooled a lot of people, as this retrospective notes:

How did Alexis Debat, a self-proclaimed expert on terrorism, manage to build such a career for himself –as a regular contributor to the foreign affairs reviews Politique Internationale and National Interest, as a consultant for ABC News and an analyst of the prestigious Nixon Center attending conferences with the cream of the crop of American foreign policy circles?

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Over the years, Debat was a source for many ABC News scoops: on Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan… Like its competitors, the network has strict ethical rules, with a director of “standards and practices”. Information is supposed to be vetted or reliably confirmed. But fact-checking was not easy with Debat’s scoops as they were always attributed to anonymous sources hiding from within the shadowy world of secret services in Pakistan, France or the US.

In my first reaction to this news, and reviewing Debat’s writings, I noticed a clear pattern to his work. He would begin his pieces with amazing details about what was going in behind security doors, thus giving the impression of someone in the know and tapped into the highest levels of the administration. For example, take this lead-in from one of his writings I analyzed:

On March 19, the second anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq, a 38-year-old Egyptian computer expert detonated his explosives-laden Land Cruiser inside the compound wall of the Players Theater in the Farij Kulaib neighborhood in Doha, Qatar, setting off a massive explosion that killed one British national and wounded twelve other attendees of the play. The name of the group that claimed responsibility for the bombing was Jund as-Sham, “Soldiers of the Levant.”

This little-known organization first surfaced on the global terrorism scene in 1995 as a splinter from the Palestinian terrorist group Asbat al-Ansar (“League of the Followers”), a small, salafi-inspired network loosely affiliated with Al-Qaeda and based in the Ayn al-Hilwah Palestinian refugee camp near Sidon, in southern Lebanon. Following a string of assassinations of Lebanese religious leaders and small-scale bombings in the early 1990s, the group split into three factions: Asbat al-Nour, Jama‘at al-Nur and Jund as-Sham, the latter retaining only a small part (no more than thirty) of the group’s original members and operational capabilities.

According to Jordanian government sources and European intelligence documents, Jund as-Sham and many of its members then resurfaced in Afghanistan in 1999, when the group was given $200,000 of Al-Qaeda’s money and placed by one of Osama bin Laden’s key lieutenants, Abu Zubaydah, now in U.S. custody, under the command of fellow Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Amazing background detail – something that cannot be made up. If it were there would be reactions in the intel community about what a joke this guy was. Word would get out. So we must assume these details are fairly accurate – and I would suspect broadly known in the intel community so that sources couldn’t be easily tracked down. So these are the real facts that set the stage for Debat’s exaggerated BS. After paragraphs of amazing detail Debat pulls a U-turn and claims, in essence, all is lost:

But while this increased pressure on Al-Qaeda’s leadership both in Pakistan and Iraq could signal a very encouraging tipping point in the ongoing campaign against the organization, it may also emphasize a set of harsh realities for the not-so-distant future of America’s War on Terror. By opening a new front in the global jihad, which serves as the lifeline of Al-Qaeda’s ideological staying power, the Iraq War, despite its many accomplishments, has provided the organization with a much-needed replacement for its Afghan base. There is ample evidence that the same magnetic force that drew so many jihadis to Afghanistan in the 1990s has re-emerged in Iraq, with greater stealth and amplitude, as well as potentially deadlier consequences. At any given moment, these young recruits will return to their home countries in Europe and the Middle East with not just the crude and generic guerrilla training the was dispensed in Afghanistan, but a deep, battle-tested knowledge of urban terrorist operations and a far greater understanding than their predecessors of clandestine network management, the opportunities presented by the privatization of mass destruction capabilities, and the techniques of a deadlier, stealthier and more global societal warfare.

He builds his bona fides by exposing exquisite details that can only come from CIA or equivalent files on these group an players. Then, at the end, he declares the futility of all this by claiming this shows a resurgent al-Qaeda. The pattern is the same in all his works. He summarizes his writings by parroting leftwing lines or views. So why is the man an accomplished liar with detailed intel at his fingertips. Well, that is a good definition of a clandestine operative: a an accomplished liar with detailed intel and friends in high places which can help him keep his cover. Debat is not a fraud like Pvt Scott Thomas who made things up about our brave military. He apparently has access to a lot of top secret intel. The question is are the people who gave him the intel his sources, our are they his masters? The strings are there, is there a puppet master at the end of them?