Josh Landis has a response to the coup rumors up at his site. It starts off like this:

“I spent most of my day trying to deny that a coup had taken place in Syria.” That is how the US military attach????, David Jesmer, accounted for himself yesterday when he came to dinner with a lively crowd. I was gratified he didn’t bring his bullet-proof vest.

If anyone is interested in how a blogger’s hoax can cause a stir, the Syrian coup alarm is a good starting place. Here is the email that greeted me as I began my morning rituals following my first thimble-full of Turkish coffee.

The owner of the Lebanese Foundation for Peace website that posted the rumors made a response in the comments section of the first post.

The last update on the LFP is not a backpedaling move . I am not deying nor retracting anything I posted.

Neither I am spreading any hoax or rumours for any intentional reason. We received these info from a ???????reliable??????? source there. We posted it.

I suggest to give it a little bid of time so we can receive more info and verify few things.

If the shooting didn????????t started yet or Joshua Landis was invited at a dinner party with the Military Attache there without a bulletproof vest doesn????????t mean that the situation is ???????normal??????? within the Syrian Regime.

There are things happening they are not aware and the Baath Regime is not going to tell a US journalist nor brief the Embassy and the CIA station there what is going on within .

We are expected to receive additional information soon, we will publish it .

We believe our ???????sources??????? are good and never betrayed us before???????

and the situation is not ???????normal there, maybe the traffic, yes.

There are things in the making, far from any ???????imaginary??????? senarios.

With all due respect,

I have invited him to a phone conference to share his information with me, as well as his sources.

I have no doubt in my mind that Assad is in a bad position, and that many do not wish to withdraw from Lebanon, and that he is not the kind of hard liner his father was.

But Assad doesn????????t have to tell anyone, journalists or not, anything in order for it to be noticed. Bombings around Damascus? Protests in western Syria? Only a journalist at the New York Times would publish a story based on a single source. That????????s why I????????m that skeptical. Not to mention that no other newspaper has published this with its own independent sources.

Now, if you would like to discuss your information, along with your sources, please feel free to email me and we can set up a telephone call. I don????????t believe much of anything without sources, but if you can reveal to me your sources and all of your information, etc., and it????????s credible, then I will put myself on the line by backing you up without revealing your source.

So feel free to email me.

This is how the blogosphere works everyone. If indeed there is a coup in Syria with regards to the information he has been provided, I will happily admit my fault. But for now, the information has been roundly denied, and in my opinion, should have been verified before being posted at all.

UPDATE: It has been brought to my attention that it is considered a good point by the LFP that sometimes it has taken weeks for information like this to come out of Syria. This isn’t the first time rumors of a coup have been spread falsely. In any case, they have updated the story. Check it out, as it continually seems less dramatic. But even the details suggest less and less like a coup actually happened.

And didn’t Assad meet with Mubarak of Egypt just that day? Heh.