Nolte: ‘Syrian Prisoner’ Bombshell Smells Like Another CNN Hoax

CNN’s biggest scoop in years, its viral “Syrian Prisoner” video, is looking like one more heaping helping of this disgraced outlet’s fake news.

CNNLOL’s Clarissa Ward’s video of the alleged rescue of a “Syrian prisoner” from one of deposed dictator Bashar al-Assad’s infamous torture prisons went super-viral last week. There’s no question that the video is dramatic. A supposed prisoner rescued live on camera. Padlocks shot off of prison doors. A man found trembling under a blanket. This poor man, we are told, was a prisoner for three months in a windowless cell. This poor man, we are told, was left behind without food or water for three days after the prison was liberated.

From the word “go,” the whole thing stank to high heaven. Watching it, I was reminded of Chris Cuomo infamously staging his exit from a self-imposed coronavirus quarantine, when we all knew he’d been out and about while infected.

CNN is fake news. Period.

There is no lie CNN will not tell.

There is no barrel CNN will not happily scrape the bottom of.

So, yeah, I was skeptical just because it was CNN. Isn’t that enough?

Still, there are so many more reasons to smell bullshit…

Why was this particular “prisoner” left behind during the prison liberation?
If he was in a windowless cell for three months, why didn’t light blind him? Why didn’t his eyes water? Why didn’t he shield himself from the sun? Good grief, he looks directly up at the sky without blinking.
Three days without food and water and he looked pretty healthy to me when he should’ve been near death. Watch him stand up.
Did you see how clean he looked, especially his hands?
Why were his clothes so clean?
Why did his beard look trimmed?
Why is the cell so clean? Where’s the human waste that would accumulate after three days?

Do I think CNN would deliberately stage something like this, would go this far to try and prop up its dying ratings? Allow me to answer that this way…

CNN may or may not have had a hand in spreading all of these “news stories” that ended up being hoaxes, but at a minimum it spread a whole lot of them:

At best, and this is just my opinion, Clarissa Ward knew she was getting hoaxed and went along with it. There is just no way someone could fall for what I see as a painfully obvious set-up.

Officially, outside of my opinion, my colleague John Hayward lays out how CNN’s latest humiliation is falling apart at the hands of local fact-checkers:

On Sunday, a Syrian independent news platform called Verify-SY called CNN’s report a hoax, identifying the “prisoner” as a Syrian air force intelligence officer named Salama Mohammad Salama, also known as “Abu Hamza.”

Verify-Sy described Salama as a “notorious” operative of the Assad regime who “managed several security checkpoints in Homs and was involved in theft, extortion, and coercing residents into becoming informants.”

Salama’s activities included killing and torturing civilians, some of whom were arrested “without cause, or on fabricated charges.” Some of his victims were “targeted simply for refusing to pay bribes, rejecting cooperation, or even for arbitrary reasons like their appearance.”

Question: When’s the last time CNN broke a major story that didn’t end up being a hoax?

Answer: LMAO.

And I will say it again… If CNN wasn’t part of staging a hoax, there is simply no way anyone with an IQ over 70 could not have known they were being set up. Still, the original video expressed zero skepticism, even though it surely must have gone through many editorial hands at CNN before exploding online. If one of our reporters sent that video in — that exact video — being just a regular guy who never attended capital “J” journalism school, there is no way I would give it a passing grade.

But my credibility means something to me.

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