US - Doubting Farris Hassan's Story?

Remember the recent story about a college kid who was supposedly visited by the FBI for checking out Mao's little book? The media ate it up and the Democrats went on the warpath over it. Ted Kennedy even wrote and op-ed about it. Problem was it was all a fake.

I'm not saying Hassan's story is fake but when I first read about it, it sounded too good to be true. And you know what they say about that.

Newsbutsers raised some suspicions yesterday.

While Hassan’s words were all well and good, had he himself been a Christian or a Jew, he certainly wouldn’t have come out of that meeting alive, let alone yucking it up with a terrorist. Hassan told the AP that he doesn’t have "any religious affiliation," but Islamists aren’t too fond of secularists either.

Interestingly, during his interview with Rita Cosby, Hassan described his ability to transform himself into whatever identity was needed to fit his environment. While in Lebanon, he apparently also visited Christians and "Palestinian refugees," as he put it, and in both cases, he pretended that he was one of them in order to blend in. Such skills would certainly come in handy as a journalist, but they also provide a glimpse into Hassan’s propensity for deception.

To be fair, he came across as very patriotic in the interview and also enthusiastic about helping people. One has to wonder why he didn’t simply join a humanitarian organization in the U.S. and go to Iraq that way. Or even better, eventually join the U.S. military, for which he professed to have a lot of respect.

It’s possible that Hassan was either an aspiring journalist whose trip to Iraq turned out to be something of a publicity stunt or, as the media portrayed him, just another American kid acting out his dreams.

But there’s something fishy about this whole story and it could be that the media and, by extension, American viewers, may have been taken for a ride. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time.

I wonder just how much checking the media did given the way they were taken in by the fake Mao story.

Now comes something more suspicious from Harry's place.

HASSAN: Interesting figures. I interviewed a media relations officer for Hezbollah for about two hours and I prepared probably about 20 questions for him, asked him everything ranging from Iraq to America to Israel to in-depth Lebanese politics. I actually sort of nailed him on one point. He told me that Palestine belongs to the Palestinians because they’ve been there for centuries and all the Jews there should go back to Europe. And I told him, well, the Christians have been in Lebanon long before the Muslims, and 50 years ago, they were indisputably the majority. Under your same premise, shouldn’t the Shiite newcomers return to their homelands? And he, in fact, was stumped by that. We both knew I had got him, and for and I’m not exaggerating. For the next 30 seconds, we both started cracking up and laughing.

Now comes the mysterious part: The sentences in boldface above appeared in the original transcript and video of the interview on MSNBC's website, but not in the current transcript and video.

I followed the link to the original transcript that Harry provided above but it didn't work. So I searched google with the original headline and found the the cache copy here. Guess what? Hassan's words in bold above have been edited from the cache copy as well.

The New York Daily News quoted Hassan from the interview using the exact words Harry notes - two days ago.

Why would MSNBC edit those words out of the original and cached webpages? Are they starting to doubt some or all of Hassan's story.

Come on blogsphere let's do MSM job once again and get to the bottom of this story.

UPDATE:

I just watched the video of the interview on the MSNBC website that Harry linked to above. The part in question begins about 8:30 into the video and at about 8:40 the video switches to footage of Hezbollah marching in the streets and doesn't return to Hassan and Cosby till after where the passage in question should be.

I didn't see the original video but it would be interesting to see the original to see exactly what took place. Did MSNBC edit the video footage as well and insert the Hexbollah scenes to cover up editing Hassan's remarks? Were the words accidently left in the origianl transcript and later edited out to match the video?

Somethings up and inquiring minds want to know.
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