The BBC has sensationally censored a news story and a video showing
Syrian rebels forcing a prisoner to become a suicide bomber, a war crime
under the Geneva Conventions, presumably because it reflected badly on
establishment media efforts to portray the FSA as glorious freedom
fighters. The video, a copy of which can be viewed above (the original BBC
version was deleted), shows Free Syrian Army rebels preparing a bomb
that is loaded onto the back of a truck to be detonated at a government
checkpoint in the city of Aleppo.
The clip explains how the rebels have commandeered an apartment
belonging to a Syrian police captain. The rebels are seen sneering at
photos of the police captain’s family while they proclaim, “Look at
their freedom, look how good it is,” while hypocritically enjoying the
luxury of the man’s swimming pool. The video then shows a prisoner who the rebels claim belonged to a
pro-government militia. Bruises from torture on the prisoner’s body are
explained away as having been metered out by the man’s previous captors.
The BBC commentary emphasizes how well the rebels are treating the man,
showing them handing him a cigarette.
However, the man has been tricked into thinking he is part of a
prisoner exchange program when in reality he is being set up as an
unwitting suicide bomber. The prisoner is blindfolded and told to drive
the truck towards a government checkpoint. “What he doesn’t know is that the truck is the one that’s been rigged with a 300 kilo bomb,” states the narrator. The clip then shows rebels returning disappointed after it’s revealed
that the remote detonator failed and the bomb did not explode. The BBC narrator admits that forcing prisoners to become suicide bombers “would certainly be considered a war crime.”
New York Times reporters who shot the video claim they had no
knowledge of the plot. A longer version of the clip is posted on the
New York Times You Tube channel. The title of the clip glorifies the rebel fighters as “The Lions of Tawhid”.
Within hours of the story being published, it was subsequently sent down the memory by the BBC. Attempts to reach the
original article URL are greeted with a 404 Not Found page. In addition, a You Tube version of the same video originally posted
on the official BBC News 2012 channel was also removed. Although the You
Tube page for the video states that it was removed after a “copyright
claim by British Broadcasting Corporation” this is a bogus reason,
because the video was not uploaded by a third party, it was posted on
the
official BBC channel, as the screenshot below proves.
“Copyright claim” is a bogus reason for the video’s removal because it
originally appeared on the official BBC News Channel, and was not
uploaded by a third party. It seems clear that the only reason for the video to be removed would
be because senior BBC news editors felt the story reflected badly on
the propaganda campaign to characterize the Syrian rebels as venerable
and proud freedom fighters,
when in reality as we have documented they have been guilty of massacres, kidnappings, torture and other acts of brutality.
This represents a clear effort to hide evidence of Syrian rebels, who the
Obama administration recently pledged to support with taxpayer dollars, engaged in war crimes. In addition, the fact that the rebels,
under the direction of Al-Qaeda fighters, are building bombs and carrying out terrorist attacks is something the NATO-aligned media is keen not to emphasize. This is by no means the first time the BBC has been caught
manipulating the news in an effort to propagandize for western military
involvement in Syria.
Back in May we exposed
how the BBC has used a years-old photo of dead Iraqi children to depict
victims of an alleged government assault in the town of Houla.
The photographer who took the original picture, Marco Di Lauro,
posted on his Facebook page, “Somebody is using my images as a
propaganda against the Syrian government to prove the massacre.”
Di Lauro told the London Telegraph he was “astonished” the BBC had failed to check to authenticity of the image. Should the copy at the top of this article also be deleted, an
alternate version of the BBC video with added commentary under fair use
is embedded below.
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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com.
He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular
fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show and Infowars Nightly News.
(PrisonPlanet.com)
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