Free Republic

A story last week on CNN about a Syrian "prisoner" who the network claimed had been held for years and that correspondent Clarissa Ward called one of the most extraordinary moments I have witnessed” in her 20 years as a journalist turns out to have been a notorious torturer for the Assad regime. He told CNN his name was "Adel Gharbal" from Homs and claimed he was arrested three months earlier after his phone had been searched. He was taken to Damascus, he says, and thrown in prison. He claims not to have seen sunlight for three months when the...

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. CNN initially found the man while pursuing leads on the missing US journalist Austin Tice. In a video report, chief international correspondent Clarissa Ward and her team, accompanied by a rebel guard, came across a cell in a Damascus jail that was padlocked from the outside. The guard blew off the lock with a gun, and the man...

The prisoner CNN helped free from a secret facility in Syria was actually a notorious member of Bashar al-Assad’s forces known to torture those who refused to pay him off, according to a shocking local fact check. The network went viral last week with footage of the startled prisoner being led from the prison by journalist Clarissa Ward, who called it “one of the most extraordinary moments I have witnessed” in her 20 years of reporting. But “independent and unbiased” fact-checkers Verify-Sy published a detailed report Sunday saying that the seemingly innocent prisoner was actually Salama Mohammad Salama — a...