Nolte: Disgraced CNN Admits It Got Hoaxed by ‘Syrian Prisoner’

CNN is now admitting it got hoaxed by the star of its acclaimed and now disgraced and debunked  “Syrian Prisoner” story.

Last week, CNN released its biggest scoop in years: a dramatic video of the rescue of a prisoner from one of deposed dictator Bashar al-Assad’s infamous torture prisons. What good fortune that Clarissa Ward happened to be right there with her camera crew when a man left behind after the prison’s liberation was found cowering beneath a blanket.

We were told that this man had been locked up in a windowless cell for three months. We were told he’d somehow been forgotten during the liberation and had had no food or water for three days. Nevertheless, his clothes, cell, and fingernails were clean. His beard looked trimmed. Gee, and for a guy locked away in a dark cell for three months, he didn’t even blink in the sunlight.

As I wrote yesterday, there are only two possible explanations for this hoax: either CNN staged the whole thing or CNN knew it was being staged and didn’t care because it is a dying news outlet desperate for anything that might boost the doornail-dead ratings.

The story began to fall apart as soon as it went live. Social media immediately pointed to countless “tells” that this was staged. CNN tried to ignore that. What CNNLOL could not ignore was a local fact-checking site that blew the whole charade wide open.

Turns out our potential Oscar nominee for Best Performance as a Regime Victim was not the regime victim CNN sold him as:

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.”

And now, five days later, CNN has been forced to admit it was all a hoax…

“A man who was filmed by CNN being released by rebels from a Damascus jail was a former intelligence officer with the deposed Syrian regime, according to local residents, and not an ordinary citizen who had been imprisoned, as he had claimed,” reports … … … CNN.

Why didn’t CNN do this before it aired the original report?

Why did a local fact-checking outfit break this news before CNN?

We all know the answer: CNN is fake news. CNN has no desire to be accurate or truthful. No media organization interested in its credibility would have broadcast that video without 1) diligent fact-checking and 2) even more diligent skepticism. Breitbart News operates with a budget and staff dwarfed exponentially by CNN, and I can tell you for a fact that there is no way in hell that video would have passed muster here.

But that’s the difference between CNN and alternative media: we care about our credibility.

You see, CNN and the rest of the regime media are so insulated inside their bubbled echo chamber, they have lost touch with a reality that demands accuracy and accountability. With this ridiculous video, CNN was showing off for the rest of the bubble, unconcerned with its reputation outside of that bubble. Within that bubble, lying and grandstanding in defense of The Agenda will always be applauded.

It’s a freaken cult, is what it is.

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