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“Is there anything at this point that his [Bashar Assad’s] government could do or offer that would stop an attack?” came a reporter’s voice at yesterday’s press conference with US Secretary of State John Kerry and Foreign Secretary William Hague. But who asked it?

Step forward CBS’s Margaret Brennan. Kerry’s flip reply, that Assad could give up all his chemical weapons to the international community but that it obviously wouldn’t happen, was seized upon by the previously intransigent Russians as a possible solution to the crisis over intervening in Syria.

Brennan has been with CBS for just over a year, joining from Bloomberg, and is assigned to covering the State Department. She studied Arabic on a Fulbright scholarship and at CNN she used to translate tapes of Osama bin Laden. She has interviewed Tony Blair, Hillary Clinton and IMF boss Christine Lagarde, and was the only US broadcast journalist anchoring in Tahrir Square in Cairo when President Mubarak was deposed.

A further question now arises: did Brennan know what Kerry did not? The State Department said yesterday that Kerry was deploying a rhetorical argument but President Obama admitted he and President Putin had discussed asking Syria to hand over its chemical weapons at the G20 in St Petersburg last week.

CBS is having a good Syria crisis. Its veteran anchor Charlie Rose landed an interview with Assad, which was part-screened last night.