BBC Censors Video Showing Syrian Rebels Forcing Prisoner to Become Suicide Bomber

Broadcaster attempts to hide clear evidence of war crimes

Paul Joseph Watson -  Prison Planet.com - August 23, 2012

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.

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BBC In “War Crime” Cover-Up Controversy

Broadcaster lies in claiming its reporter didn’t characterize forced suicide bomber incident as “war crime”

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Friday, August 24, 2012

The BBC has dug itself a deeper hole in the aftermath of a censorship controversy which saw the broadcaster pull a video about Syrian rebels forcing a prisoner to become an unwitting suicide bomber, with the BBC claiming its reporter never characterized the incident as a “war crime” when in fact the opposite is true.

As we highlighted yesterday, a video clip showing a prisoner being made by Syrian rebels to drive a truck full of explosives to a military checkpoint in Aleppo was pulled from both the BBC website and the official BBC channel on You Tube hours after it was published. Bloggers were able to capture and upload a copy of the video which can be viewed above.

BBC World News editor John Williams responded to the controversy in a blog post on the BBC News website by noting that “the story has generated much interest across the Arab World and beyond.”

Though Williams fails to address why the BBC has sent the story down the memory hole, he does attempt to explain away the fact that the events depicted in the footage clearly represent a war crime, noting that the attempted murder of a captive has been defined as such by Amnesty International.

“Some pro-government news agencies in Syria have suggested the BBC and the New York Times have termed the act as a “war crime”. This is not true,” claims Williams.

And yet it is true.

At the 2 minute 13 mark in the clip embedded above, BBC reporter Gordon Corera clearly states, “Using prisoners as suicide bombers would certainly be considered a war crime.”

So in fact yes, the BBC did term the act as a “war crime” and John Williams is being brazenly dishonest.

Why is the BBC lying in claiming they didn’t characterize the act as a war crime? Perhaps it’s because their removal of the story constitutes covering up for a war crime. Maybe it made the lawyers and senior editors nervous.

Recall that this is not the first time the BBC has been caught manipulating reporting of events in Syria to push a pro-NATO regime change agenda. 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.

The BBC’s excuse for removing the shocking story about how western-backed Syrian rebels are using unwilling prisoners to carry out terrorist attacks is shaky to say the least.

“Under the terms of the agreement with the New York Times we only had the rights to use the material on broadcast outlets. However the material was used online in error. As soon as we realised the error we immediately took steps to remove the online material,” responded the BBC.

So we’re being asked to believe that the world’s largest news organization doesn’t have a procedure in place where it checks with other major news organizations before using their material.

Even if we are to accept this dubious explanation, the fact that the BBC is now openly lying to its audience in claiming its reporter never characterized the incident as a “war crime” when the opposite is true emphasizes once again how the NATO-aligned media is desperate to uphold the image of Syrian opposition forces as glorious freedom fighters when in fact they are being led by Al-Qaeda terrorists while metering out acts of brutality on a par with anything Assad’s forces have been accused of.

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Source: http://www.prisonplanet.com/bbc-in-war-crime-cover-up-controversy.html