CNN Presented a Syrian Jailer as a Torture Survivor
The most heartbreaking story out of the Syrian revolution last week was the opening of the prisons. Over 130,000 people had disappeared into the Syrian prison system, notorious for torturing and killing inmates. As rebels began freeing prisoners who had been held incommunicado for years or even decades, the families of other missing persons scoured government buildings, desperately trying to find out if their loved ones were still alive.
Last Tuesday, CNN claimed to have captured the moment one such missing person was found. While touring the basement of Syria’s Air Force Intelligence Directorate alongside Syrian rebels, CNN Chief International Correspondent Clarissa Ward saw something underneath a blanket in a locked cell. One of her rebel escorts shot the lock off the door and lifted the blanket, revealing a terrified man who shouted, “I’m a civilian!”
Embracing Ward and the rebel fighter, the prisoner told his story. His name was Adel Ghurbal, he said, and he had been arrested in the city of Homs three months ago for his social media activity. Ghurbal explained that his captors had beaten him, then fled in a hurry, leaving him in the cell with no food or water for days. Only thanks to CNN and rebels was he able to see the sunlight again.
If the story sounded too good to be true, that’s because it was. On Sunday, a Syrian diaspora news outlet called Verify-Sy came forward with a shocking revelation: “Adel Ghurbal” does not exist. Instead, the outlet said, the man from the CNN segment was First Lieutenant Salama Mohammad Salama of the Air Force Intelligence Directorate, the same agency running the prison. (Despite its name, the directorate was a secret police force rather than an aerial reconnaissance branch.)
The next day, Verify-Sy published a photo of Salama in uniform, sitting behind his desk. After the photo was published, CNN admitted that the man was in fact Salama and that he was indeed an intelligence officer. Verify-Sy‘s team of 12 citizen journalists had caught CNN, the giant of broadcast journalism, in a grievous mistake.
Anonymous sources from Homs told Verify-Sy (and later, CNN) that Salama was an infamous torturer and extortionist. According to Verify-Sy, he had ended up in prison for “less than a month…due to a dispute over profit-sharing from extorted funds with a higher-ranking officer.” A resident of Homs said in an interview posted by Verify-Sy to YouTube that “this man was a tyrant, and an oppressor, an oppressor, an oppressor,” and that everyone in the neighborhood knew him as a sinister presence at chec
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