🧵The man featured in Clarissa Ward's @cnni segment has been identified by @VeSyriaE as a first lieutenant in Syrian Air Force Intelligence. He is believed to have killed civilians, detained and tortured young men in Homs, and now seems to be trying to rehabilitate his image. (1) 
🧵Now, even more so, @cnni has an immediate responsibility to investigate this coverage and to issue a public statement. It is very well possible that CNN may have unintentionally platformed this story and been misled, but it maintains a professional duty of care to clarify. (2)
@cnni 🧵Particularly when arriving in a new context like Damascus, closed off for so long, it is @cnni's responsibility to check and triple check its sources, fixers, and understanding. Syria is an exciting story and we must tell it, but "parachuting in" can create more harm. (3)
@cnni 🧵Rushing to produce a story like this has obfuscated the truth, created a false equivalency between detainees and regime officers & is deeply disrespectful to the thousands of legitimate stories of prisoners who suffered at the hands of men like the one @cnni featured. (4)
@cnni 🧵The story was already distasteful and orientalist (Western woman swooping in to save a brown man, days after the Syrian people had already saved themselves) & more about breaking a crazy headline than providing an alleged victim with urgent medical and psychosocial care. (5)
@cnni 🧵Ultimately, it will be up to the Syrian people to come together and decide how to reconcile as a society, how to seek accountability for the horrific crimes committed, how to forge a path forward for transitional justice, and who to grant amnesty to from the regime. (6)
@cnni 🧵In the meantime, the least non-Syrian journalists, researchers, civil society & intl orgs can do is to support Syrian efforts to uncover the truth, to provide a platform for these convos to be had, and to not add to the already rampant misinfo and disinfo out there. (7)
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