In a wild story that’s still mostly to be expected from CNN, one of its reporters went on X (formerly Twitter) to admit that she had been duped by a Assad regime torturer pretending to be a prisoner when CNN went to a prison from which the Assad forces had retreated. However, though she admitted who the person actually was, she didn’t provide the necessary details, leading to her getting fact-checked in a big way.
As background, that reporter is CNN correspondent Clarissa Ward. After the Assad government fell, she and others with CNN entered a prison in Damascus and, while in it, freed a man she claimed was named Adel Ghurbal, saying that he had been found locked in a dungeon-like, windowless cell in the Damascus prison.
The problem was that the “prisoner” wasn’t really a prisoner. He was just pretending to be one. In reality, he was notorious intelligence service torturer Salama Mohammad Salama. An officer in the Syrian Air Force intelligence who was well-known for horrifically torturing men, particularly for things like not paying bribes.
Ward took to X on the evening of December 16 to admit that fact, posting, “We can confirm the real identity of the man from our story last Wednesday as Salama Mohammed Salama.” Notably, however, she didn’t include in her post itself that what that meant is that a torturer, not a prisoner, had been assisted by CNN. However, the article she included with the post did include that fact.
As could be expected, that detail-devoid post by Ward led to immense backlash. For one, the X community note fact-check on her post provided, “Ms. Ward’s post is missing context: ‘Salama Mohammed Salama’ is no ordinary person as she may portray. He was an intelligence officer of the Assad regime, who operated checkpoints in Homs notorious for ‘theft, extortion and coercing residents into becoming informants’.”
Chiming in on the issue in the comments of Ward’s post was former Mediaite Editor Jon Nicosia, who noted that CNN had let Ward, whether through “journalistic laziness or unwittingly,” be manipulated by an Assad-regime torturer. He said, “It seems @CNN skipped some crucial fact-checking before jumping on the ‘heartwarming moment’ bandwagon. They frame Ward as a hero, but through either journalistic laziness or unwittingly, she along with the entire editorial side of CNN may have been manipulated by someone with far darker intentions.”
Similarly, another commenter on Ward’s post noted that she hadn’t even bothered to ask why the supposed prisoner didn’t look in the least bit like one, saying, “Way to go. You weren’t the least bit curious as to why he was well groomed and not dirty?” Similarly, a commenter on that comment said, “And well-fed! For a guy who’d supposedly been abandoned in a windowless cell for days, he was surprisingly chunky. He didn’t even look dehydrated.”
Yet another commenter argued that Ward had been repeatedly discredited and, in this case, had pushed a story without at all bothering to check into the featured individual’s claims, saying, “Are you seriously claiming that you “discovered” his identity, after producing this story without corroborating his claims? It seems, Clarissa, you’ve been discredited yet again.”
Watch the video of Ward freeing the supposed prisoner here:
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