The only scenario I can think of that's merely incompetence is that someone outside of ABC sent them the video, claiming that it came from Syria, and ABC made n

The only scenario I can think of that's merely incompetence is that someone outside of ABC sent them the video, claiming that it came from Syria, and ABC made no effort to validate that person's credibility. If the video was produced anywhere inside ABC's organization, it would be dishonesty rather than incompetence. Anyone who downloaded a video from YouTube and edited out the people with phones at the bottom would have known that the video was not footage of a battle.