What is it about the liberal media and how easy it is for charlatans to fake news stories? Is it all coincidence and bad luck? Or have they been allowing fakes to speak to America as experts for years for some yet to be disclosed reason. But fakes they are, as we see with the newest fake to be exposed – ABC’s Alexis Debat:

For six years Alexis Debat, who falsely claimed to have earned a PhD at the Sorbonne and worked as an adviser to the French defence ministry, operated as an expert on national security in the world of Washington thinktanks, US network television and French intellectual journals.

He was a consultant to ABC television, which sent him on trips to Pakistan, Iraq and Iran to guide their coverage on al-Qaida; a senior fellow on terrorism at the conservative thinktank the Nixon Centre; and a regular contributor to the magazine National Interest, whose honorary chairman is Henry Kissinger.
Mr Debat was also a regular in the pages of the French publication Politique International.

But, as is now only emerging, Mr Debat not only lacked the credentials he claimed, he fabricated interviews with such figures as the UN secretary general Kofi Annan, Microsoft’s chairman Bill Gates, New York’s mayor Michael Bloomberg, the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan, and Democrat presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Don’t assume this is a conservative version of the Liberal media liars we have seen much of. Recall Pvt “Scott Thomas” Beauchamp was actually a liberal mole trying to pose as a US soldier and created fantasy stories to undermine the US Military. He was liar living a lie so as to appear to be the enemy of the left.

Alexis Debat may be another well hidden mole, and enemy of conservatives pretending to be a conservative. First off he would be a rare French conservative supportive of Bush policies if he was a true blood conservative. But I don’t see him as all that supportive of the Iraq war. You can read his background from the Nixon Center site (now only available in cache):

Areas of expertise:

Terrorism, Counter-terrorism, Terrorism Financing
Militant ideology, discourse, media strategy
Comparative approaches to counter-terrorism (terrorism in the Transatlantic relation)
Strategies of Mass Mobilization in Islamic groups (Al Qaeda, Hamas, Muslim Brotherhood, Hizb’Allah, Groupe Salafiste pour la Predication et le Combat)
Diaspora Dynamics & Political Activism (focusing on the Shi’a Diaspora)
Social Networks & Augmented Social Networks Theory applied to Islamists activism
Counter-insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan
Islamic Law, Islamic Finance, Islamic Economics
Regions: Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan

Selected Publications

“In Praise of Warlords” (PDF) The National Interest Summer 2006

“America the Vulnerable” (PDF) The National Interest September/October 2006

“Terror and the Fifth Republic” (PDF) The National Interest Winter 2005/2006

“Channel the violence” The International Herald Tribune November 21, 2006

“Hezbollah blinks; Britain leaves Iraq; NATO expansion and Russia” International Herald Tribune February 25, 2007

“Vivisecting the Jihad: Part Two” The National Interest online October 14, 2004

“9/11: Not A Failure. A Choice.” The National Interest online July 2003

At ABC News his reporting seemed to be quite fact based and neutraul, as this story on the successor to Zarqawi’s successor illustrates (again cached). But it was this report on the Iraq Study Group led by Baker-Hamilton that may have tipped Debat’s true views. Most of us supporters of Bush and his efforts on Iraq deride the ISG study as a fig leafed surrender plan to do what Dems want to happen – surrender Iraq. Debat seems way too enamored with the ISG to be a ‘war pimp’ as some reactionaries on the left paint him:

This is first and foremost reflected in the report’s courageous plan for a phased and responsible troop drawdown. As the Los Angeles Times put it yesterday, the Baker-Hamilton commission has provided “a safe and honorable path” out of Iraq by advocating a gradual, responsible troop drawdown, as well as a refocusing of the U.S. military’s mission to training the Iraqi military—which, sadly, features in the report as the most misunderstood actor in the Baker-Hamilton drama.

But the commission scores its highest points in its frequent recognition that America’s struggle in Iraq is eminently political and that America has lost much of its capacity to play in that game. This is an endorsement of the view that National Interest editor Nikolas K. Gvosdev and I have been defending for several years, and which we recently articulated in a column for the International Herald Tribune (available here).

That is not his only echoing of liberal dogma. Here is Debat parroting the left as to the fact Iraq is a magent for al-Qaeda recruits:

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.

Debat is actually a long term pessimist on the war, deriding our future options from very early on:

None of this is good news for the American-led coalition. Not only are terrorist organizations linked to the global mujaheddin underground slowly taking over the insurgency itself, but they are pushing to turn Iraq into what Afghanistan was before autumn 2001: a public relations windfall for their ideologues, a training ground for their “rookies”, and even a safe-haven for their leadership. While this somber horizon is still taking shape, its potential implications must be thought through. Iraq’s transformation into a new “field of jihad” will force the U.S. government to abandon the long-term requirements of building a modern and multi-confessional Iraq and focus on the short-term necessities of waging direct war on terror.

Want to feed the anti-war nuts? Why not claim Bush is planning a massive bombing campaign against Iran – that will set the lefties off and allow them to claim Bush is an out-of-control war monger:

The account cited discussions at a meeting organized by the National Interest, a right-wing foreign policy journal. One participant, Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security studies at the Nixon Center, told the Times that US military planners were not preparing for “pinprick strikes” against Iran’s nuclear facilities. “They’re about taking out the entire Iranian military,” he said.

All these positions echo the leftwing or feed their most ardent paranoia. Why does this smell like a set up? Is it because the structure of these stories are all similar? We have lead paragraphs with substantive information on important matters, with a conclusion paragraph that dashes all hope with a pessimistic twist at the end? Did left leaning sources provide Debat important and sound information to wrap his liberal parrot-lines around? Is this Joe and Val Wilson 2.0, who worked with a Democrat candidate to tip a Presidential election based on CIA intel? Doesn’t the timing seem way to reminiscent to the Foley story last fall? I just find the whole thing way to pat and the timing too convenient.

A supposedly experienced terrorist consultant, exposed as a fraud, is now supposedly a conservative fraud? Is it too coincidental that this charlatan of expertise on terrorism is not only being exposed right now, but exposed as a conservative fraud as well? Is this going to be another round of “Bush Lied, People Died”? Was it meant to be all along!? One has to wonder where did Debat’s loyalties lie – with the far left or Bush and his will to win. Right now it looks like Debat was willing to surrender at any cost and feed the liberal conspiracy nuts – and that makes him look like a liberal sheep hiding out in the costume of a conservative wolf.