Essentially the most heartbreaking story out of the Syrian revolution final week was the opening of the prisons. Over 130,000 folks had disappeared into the Syrian jail system, infamous for torturing and killing inmates. As rebels started liberating prisoners who had been held incommunicado for years or even many years, the households of different lacking individuals scoured authorities buildings, desperately making an attempt to search out out if their family members have been nonetheless alive.
Final Tuesday, CNN claimed to have captured the second one such lacking individual was discovered. Whereas touring the basement of Syria’s Air Power Intelligence Directorate alongside Syrian rebels, CNN Chief Worldwide Correspondent Clarissa Ward noticed one thing beneath a blanket in a locked cell. One among her insurgent escorts shot the lock off the door and lifted the blanket, revealing a terrified man who shouted, “I am a civilian!”
Embracing Ward and the insurgent fighter, the prisoner informed his story. His identify was Adel Ghurbal, he mentioned, and he had been arrested within the metropolis of Homs three months in the past for his social media exercise. Ghurbal defined that his captors had crushed him, then fled in a rush, leaving him within the cell with no meals or water for days. Solely because of CNN and rebels was he in a position to see the daylight once more.
If the story sounded too good to be true, that is as a result of it was. On Sunday, a Syrian diaspora information outlet known as Confirm-Sy got here ahead with a stunning revelation: “Adel Ghurbal” doesn’t exist. As a substitute, the outlet mentioned, the person from the CNN section was First Lieutenant Salama Mohammad Salama of the Air Power Intelligence Directorate, the identical company operating the jail. (Regardless of its identify, the directorate was a secret police pressure quite than an aerial reconnaissance department.)
The subsequent day, Confirm-Sy printed a photograph of Salama in uniform, sitting behind his desk. After the photograph was printed, CNN admitted that the person was the truth is Salama and that he was certainly an intelligence officer. Confirm-Sy‘s crew of 12 citizen journalists had caught CNN, the large of broadcast journalism, in a grievous mistake.
Nameless sources from Homs informed Confirm-Sy (and later, CNN) that Salama was an notorious torturer and extortionist. Based on Confirm-Sy, he had ended up in jail for “lower than a month…on account of a dispute over profit-sharing from extorted funds with a higher-ranking officer.” A resident of Homs mentioned in an interview posted by Confirm-Sy to YouTube that “this man was a tyrant, and an oppressor, an oppressor, an oppressor,” and that everybody within the neighborhood knew him as a sinister presence at checkpoints.
Even earlier than Confirm-Sy printed its claims, Syrians had voiced their suspicions concerning the CNN story. The “prisoner,” they mentioned, was too well-groomed and did not act like somebody who had been locked in a dungeon for 3 months.
“Your 1st intuition as a detainee when somebody walks into your cell is to freeze. You do not say a phrase. ‘I’m a civilian’ appears to be one thing somebody pretending to be a civilian would say,” Qutaiba Idlbi, a former Syrian prisoner who now works for the nonprofit Atlantic Council in Washington, wrote on social media on Wednesday. “One thing solely torture survivors would know: we’re not huge on bodily contact. In jail, the one contact you get is the one out of your torturers. It takes time to regulate to the true world.”
Idlbi speculated that the person from the clip was “an intelligence officer who did not escape in time and was hiding since.” He was proper about Salama’s job, if not the circumstances underneath which he ended up in that cell.
It would not be the primary time CNN was apparently bamboozled in its warfare reporting. Final 12 months, CNN correspondent Nic Robertson, who was embedded with Israeli forces in Gaza, was led to imagine that they have been sizzling on the path of Israeli hostages. An Israeli military officer confirmed Robertson a chart hanging in a hospital basement, claiming that it confirmed the names of Hamas members assigned to protect hostages. The chart was, the truth is, a calendar with the times of the week written in Arabic. CNN aired the section, then quietly edited out the dialogue concerning the calendar in on-line variations of the video.
After all, warfare reporting is troublesome, and it is arduous to confirm each single declare in a chaotic, quickly growing scenario. However the story of the prisoner in Damascus wasn’t an offhand remark. CNN not solely produced a section primarily based on the premise that he was telling the reality but additionally marketed it as an “extraordinary second” in CNN historical past. The fiasco demonstrates the hazard of overseas reporters parachuting into a spot they do not perceive searching for a sensational scoop.
Ward is not the one journalist to take action. Bloomberg reporter Sam Dagher complained on social media concerning the exploitative habits of the overseas press corps after Syrian President Bashar Assad fled the Syrian capital: “Distressing studies from buddies in Damascus about a number of the journalists and social media influencers which have actually flooded town after Assad’s fall who know little or no about Syria and are, to present one instance, chasing victims of regime torture and rape that ideally communicate English!”
The story additionally demonstrates of why giant establishments aren’t essentially the very best judges of “misinformation.” CNN employs hundreds of individuals and, in some ways, has set the usual for contemporary American warfare journalism. But just a few locals had an instinct that CNN’s reporting was off. And that instinct turned out to be fully right.
