When Saudi media (and An-Nahar) engage in pyschological warfare: Bashshar's "secret" plan to flee to a Russian base

This is a comedy feature: we have become familiar with US-style psychological operations from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  We read about the planting of stories (prepared by the Lincoln Group in Washington, DC) in the Arabic press (after translating it).  I mean, Saudi and Qatari media are willing to render propaganda services for the US for free.  So now, Saudi media and An-Nahar newspaper (An-Nahar as you all know, until the 1990s, was a respected and smart newspaper that was widely read: its heyday was in the 1950s, 1060s, 1970s until the civil war, when its decline started. But its dramatic decline has been accelerated with the death of Ghassan and Jubran Tuwayni.  It is now considered the epitome of yellow journalism (comparable to the Kuwaiti press) and it is now considered largely a propaganda joke, where headlines and stories are now cooked and designed by the two brothers, Marwan Hamadi and Ali Hamadi.  There is not one single columnist left in An-Nahar who is actually read.  Anyway, An-Nahar (the right-wing, racist paper) published a story about a "secret plan" for Bashshar to flee to a Russian base in Tartus as soon as US bombs fall on Syria.  Typical of the Kuwaiti press standards of Hariri media, it cited a source as in "the source derived his information from Lebanese and Syrian sources"--I kid you NOT.   So the unnamed source has unnamed sources.  So Al-Arabiyya (the sleazy news station of King Fahd's brother-in-law) carried the story and featured it as one of its top stories yesterday. But it then abruptly removed it.   You can still read the headline of the story in the link although the page has been removed.