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CNN Suggests Clarissa Ward Got Duped By Alleged War Criminal
CNN suggested on Monday that a segment that was produced by correspondent Clarissa Ward in Syria last week — where her team helped free a man who was locked inside of a jail cell — was false because Ward had been duped.
The man “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 said.
Verify-Sy, part of Poynter’s International Fact-Checking Network, looked into the man, who identified himself as “Adel Gharbal,” and determined that there was no record of that person existing.
Instead, Verify-Sy says it identified the man as “Salama Mohammad Salama,” a man they say was “a first lieutenant in Syrian Air Force Intelligence, notorious for his activities in Homs.”
CNN acknowledged that Verify-Sy’s reporting was accurate after the network obtained an image of him from a local resident that showed him on military duty at a government office.
The network said that facial recognition showed that the photo was a 99% match with the man who appeared in their segment. They did not release the photo because they wanted to protect the identity of the person who took the photo.
However, Verify-Sy published the purported photo:
@VeSyria reveals a new photo of Salama Mohammad Salama, a former Air Force Intelligence officer, strengthening evidence of his past activities after his appearance in a CNN report.
Read the full story ?https://t.co/5WGHqlGx4I pic.twitter.com/nvSxfvWGPV
— تَأكّدْ EN (@VeSyriaE) December 16, 2024
The report said that “multiple residents” confirmed to the network that he was notorious for “extortion and harassment.”
“It’s unclear how or why Salama ended up in the Damascus jail, and CNN has not been able to reestablish contact with him,” the report added. “Salama’s current whereabouts are unknown.”
Verify-Sy said the residents indicated that the man worked at a checkpoint that was “infamous for its abuses.”
The report continues:
Abu Hamza reportedly managed several security checkpoints in Homs and was involved in theft, extortion, and coercing residents into becoming informants. According to locals, his recent incarceration—lasting less than a month—was due to a dispute over profit-sharing from extorted funds with a higher-ranking officer. This led to his detention in one of Damascus’s cells, as per neighborhood sources.
Despite his seemingly innocent and composed demeanor in the CNN report, Salama has a grim history. He participated in military operations on several fronts in Homs in 2014, killed civilians, and was responsible for detaining and torturing numerous young men in the city without cause or on fabricated charges. Many were targeted simply for refusing to pay bribes, rejecting cooperation, or even for arbitrary reasons like their appearance. These details were corroborated by families of victims and former detainees who spoke with Verify-Sy.
CNN said in a statement on Sunday that no one knew that Ward and her team were visiting the prison featured in the report.
“The events transpired as they appear in our film,” the network claimed. “The decision to release the prisoner featured in our report was taken by the guard—a Syrian rebel.”
“We reported the scene as it unfolded, including what the prisoner told us, with clear attribution,” the statement continued. “We have subsequently been investigating his background and are aware that he may have given a false identity. We are continuing our reporting into this and the wider story.”
Ward was reporting from a secret prison inside the regime’s Air Force Intelligence headquarters, where she claimed that she was looking for Austin Tice, an American journalist held captive in Syria since 2012.
“We don’t find any hints of Tice, but come across something extraordinary,” she claimed as the camera crew and an armed guard — who the network identified as a “Syrian rebel,” many of whom are Islamic terrorists — discovered a prison cell with a blanket inside that was allegedly locked.
She claimed the guard made them “turn the camera off while he shoots the lock off the cell door.”
Then, despite the alleged danger, Ward and her camera crew entered the cell first ahead of the armed guard.
Ward then started calling out in English — in a country where Arabic is the official language — to a person appearing to be hiding under the blanket: “Is there someone there? Is someone there?”
The guard approaches the blanket, and at that point, a man emerges from underneath and raises his hands, claiming to be a civilian.
The man they found hiding under blankets wore relatively nice clothes, looked fairly clean, and did not appear to be starving. His hair and beard appeared to be decently groomed, and he did not appear to have any visible injuries.
He claimed to Ward that he had been locked up for three months and had been without food and water for several days.
Ward then jumps in and plays the role of a caretaker: “You’re OK. You’re OK. You’re OK. You’re OK.”
She dramatically exclaims that he “Clutches my arm tightly with both hands” as she cries out for water for the man.
“Does anyone have any water? Water?” she cries out. “OK. It’s water. It’s water. OK. OK. OK. You’re OK. You’re OK. You’re OK.”
Once they brought him outside, Ward and her crew got him a chair set up so they could interview him.
She claimed that he was so weak that he could “barely lift [food] to his mouth.”
“His body can’t handle it,” she claimed. “OK, you are OK. His captors fled during the fall of Damascus, leaving him with no food or water. That was at least four days ago.”
The man claimed that the Mukhabarat Intelligence Services imprisoned him over something on his phone. He claims that he was beaten and kept in the dark the entire time he was in prison.
When asked during a follow-up interview on the network what more she knew about the man and how he ended up in prison, Ward claimed: “Well, we don’t know that much because you can see from the report that he’s in a deep state of shock.”
WATCH:
“You’re okay, you’re okay.”
A remarkable moment as CNN’s @clarissaward and her team find a Syrian prisoner left behind in a secret prison, alone and unaware the Assad regime was no more. pic.twitter.com/Cz6TBWHvts
— Lauren Cone (@LConeCNN) December 11, 2024
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