Channel 4 reporter says Syrian rebels set him up to die to claim propaganda victory

Alex Thomson blogs about his experience of being set up by rebels to be shot by the Syrian army. He relates his story and concludes:

I’m quite clear the rebels deliberately set us up to be shot by the Syrian Army. Dead journos are bad for Damascus.

This would fit the theme of rebels committing or staging atrocities , such as the massacre in Houla or alleged massacre in Hama last week, in order to create a pretext for another Western military intervention to overthrow the regime, which I’ve written about repeatedly in recent weeks.

Thomson’s experience, though, somehow doesn’t seem to have made him any more skeptical of claims from the rebels (I wrote about some of his earlier coverage here). He closes his post with:

In a war where they slit the throats of toddlers back to the spine, what’s the big deal in sending a van full of journalists into the killing zone?

But if you follow the link, there is no support for that assertion in the article, which is about the Houla massacre. Rebels did make such claims. But the BBC’s Paul Danahar reported:

Members of the international community in Damascus say that, contrary to initial reports, most of the people in Houla were killed by gunfire spraying the rooms, not by execution-style killings with a gun placed to the back of the head. Also people’s throats were not cut, although one person did have an eye gouged out.

So even after they tried to have him killed, Thomson still seems perfectly willing to peddle their false propaganda claims. This is very puzzling to me. You’d think his experience would have made him exercise just a bit more skepticism and caution about the claims he parrots without verification as though it was confirmed fact.