January 08, 2012

MSNBC Fabricates A "Top Syrian General" - Antiwar Promotes The Story

MSNBC writers promotes a colonel of the Syrian army into "a top Syrian general".

Report: Top Syrian general defects with 50 troops

BEIRUT — As Arab League monitors prepared a report on Syria's compliance with its agreement to halt violence against protesters, a senior general reportedly said on live TV he was defecting from the regime's army with up to 50 of his soldiers. Colonel Afeef Mahmoud Suleiman made the announcement live on Al-Jazeera's Arabic News channel on Saturday, the news organization reported.

...

Al-Jazeera reported that Suleiman was in the air force logistics division.

There is nothing in the AlJazeerah report that says anything about a general officer. There is only an alleged colonel. No agency reprorted the defection of a general. MSNBC made that up. In all modern military the rank of a colonel is below the lowest general officer rank. The AlJazeerah video shows the "colonel" together with 14 armed men in quite untidy mixed camouflage. At least two of those wear trainers, not military boots. We can not be sure that they are soldiers at all.

But lets assume that colonel is real. Applying the usual quotas the 600,000+ strong Syrian military will have some 500-600 officers in the rank of a colonel. One of them deserting, especially from a rather irrelevant air force logistic job, is not a sign of those forces weakening.

But why is the supposedly reality based MSNBC making this colonel into a "top general" contradicted one paragraph later in its own piece? Do they believe their readers will not notice such falsehood? Such obvious propaganda is usually reserved to British tabloids.

And why is Justin Raimondo's supposedly honest antiwar.com site featuring this nonsense?

Posted by b on January 8, 2012 at 10:31 UTC | Permalink

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