Spring "Planting"

It seems that the "mainstream media" has been caught out again. Syrian resistance poster youth, "Syria Danny" Abdul Dayem, let some damaging video get loose, and he may pay for it with his meal ticket.

Dayem has appeared regularly for months on CNN and other mainstream media 'news' begging for intervention by NATO, the US, Israel, and Great Aunt Sally, to stop Syrian ruler Bashar Assad's very own slaughter of the innocents in Syria. In early reports, Danny was portrayed as a 22-year-old "activist" opposing the Syrian regime. Last month, it was disclosed that our boy Danny is actually a British citizen, born in Cambridge. And this week, video surfaced of Danny waiting to be connected for a phone interview with Anderson Cooper.

The video of Danny's wait for a phone connection includes footage where he seems strikingly calm for someone who moments later breathlessly tells Cooper on air that 200 people have been killed by shelling in the last three hours, and that "an hour ago" he had helped pull people off the roof of a burning house that had been shelled "right over there," only 400 meters (less than a quarter mile) away. Yet before the interview, he's calm. Calm as in, at one point, joking that he needs someone to bring him a mattress.

Most damning, in the video outtake, Danny says to an unknown person off-camera, "Did you tell him to get the gunfire ready?" (HUH?)

All this and more have led Paul Joseph Watson of Infowars.com to conclude that Danny was staging gunfire and hyping the violence of the situation to propagandize the CNN interview and heighten drama backing Danny's customary pleas for help to protect the poor activists fighting the brutal Assad government.

Following these accusations, Anderson Cooper apparently wasn't content to merely look the fool. He could easily have written off the situation as Danny pulling a fast one without his knowledge. But Cooper had to swan dive from the frying pan straight into the fire. He put Danny on an in-person segment on his show to 'refute' the allegations of fakery. Apparently Danny's commitment to the Syrian 'grassroots' isn't so strong that he can't jet out to visit Anderson in his studio.

In that second segment, available here, after insisting that the incriminating video "should have been deleted," Danny offers several explanations that may do more harm than good. For example, he says that the fighting he was referring to was in a different area, 15 kilometers away (almost 9 miles), even though he said on the air that he'd just helped pull victims out a bombed house 400 meters away. And although he's supposed to just be some young idealist in Syria trying to free the people from a repressive dictator, at one point in his refutation, he refers to himself as a "journalist" when trying to explain why the cameraman is prompting him to say they are pulling bodies out of rubble. And finally, while Anderson and Danny go to pains to say that Danny is not paid by CNN for his segments on air, I found it interesting that they didn't even try to say he wasn't paid by someone.

He also didn't explain the quote, "did you tell him to get the gunfire ready?"