18, April 2015 NBC
& Richard Engel
NBC and their chief foreign correspondent, Richard Engel,
is at the center of a raging new controversy. In 2012 he and five members of
his team claimed they had been kidnapped by armed gunmen loyal to the Assad
regime. He has now admitted that his captors were, in fact, Sunni militants affiliated with the U.S.- backed Free Syrian Army. NBC knew at the time that Engel and the others were held on a
chicken farm widely known to be controlled by a Sunni criminal group but chose
to deliberately mislead its viewers expressing certainty that they were
kidnapped by Shia hoodlums trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and
allied with Hezbollah. The controversy over Engel’s kidnapping comes just three
months after NBC suspended Nightly News anchor
Brian Williams after admitting that he had grossly inflated a story he told about
coming under fire in a helicopter during the Iraq War. Engel’s false narrative
of his kidnapping is far more serious than Williams puffing his chest like a
bloated peacock. It calls into question our media reports that have wrongly
portrayed the free Syrian army as a disciplined coordinated opposition group
when in fact they are no more than coterie of criminal gangs and thugs that are
running amok throughout the area of the so-called liberated sections of Syria.
Reports by Engel and other correspondents are serving the ‘war lobby’ anxious
to move us deeper into the Syrian conflict and support the Saudi sectarian
conflict in Yemen.
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