The BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit (ECU) has admitted there were “serious flaws” in a Radio 4 documentary by journalist Chloe Hadjimatheou on the alleged 2018 chemical attack in the Syrian city of Douma.

On 2 September, the UK national broadcaster issued a statement which read: “The ECU found that, although they were limited to one aspect of an investigation into a complex and hotly contested subject, these points represented a failure to meet the standard of accuracy appropriate to a program of this kind.”

The ECU statement came in response to an official complaint by Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens following last November’s broadcast of “Mayday: The Canister On The Bed.”

The documentary in question dealt with an alleged chemical attack in the city of Douma in 2018, and included an account by a former inspector with the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), identified as ‘Alex’ during the program, who expressed concerns about the conclusions of the OPCW on the matter.

In 2019, ‘Alex’ teamed up with Wikileaks to expose the OPCW for allegedly doctoring a report over the Douma chlorine attack, as OPCW officials notably avoided revelations from the fact-finding mission which may point to terror groups having been behind the purported gas attack.

Many believe this was done in order to frame the Syrian government and justify missile strikes launched by the US, UK and France against the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) in April 2018.

But the complaints against the BBC documentary stem from the unsubstantiated insinuation that ‘Alex’ was motivated to go public about his doubts over the attack by the prospect of a $100,000 reward from WikiLeaks.

No such reward was ever paid, according to WikiLeaks.

BBC officials also accepted that Hadjimatheou had no evidence to justify the claim that Alex believed the attack in Douma had been staged, besides his doubts about the actions taken by his OPCW superiors.

Since 2018, Damascus has maintained that no chemical attack occurred in Douma, and that the incident had been staged by foreign intelligence agencies to pressure the government from making military progress against ISIS.

UK journalist Peter Hitchens has welcomed the ruling, saying, “It is astonishingly rare for the BBC to rule against itself. This is a huge development. I hope it represents a wider change of heart in the corporation.” He went on to add that he hopes the BBC and others will now “do some decent reporting of the scandal of what happened at the OPCW, namely the doctoring of a vital report to justify rash military action by the US, Britain and France.”

thecradle.co

After publishing fraudulent claims in a bid to smear OPCW whistleblowers, Bellingcat has been caught in another subterfuge that contradicts its stated allegiance to “transparency and accountability”: a hidden, external author writing its material.

The website Bellingcat promotes itself as a collective of digital sleuths who “pledge allegiance to truth and evidence and abide by the principles of transparency and accountability.” Its self-described “groundbreaking investigations,” especially those aimed at Russia and Syria, have led to fawning Western media endorsements of its claim to be an “intelligence agency for the people.”

But Bellingcat’s carefully crafted public image as an “open source” outlet is belied by its extensive NATO government ties and a conspicuous pattern of conduct in line with its state sponsors’ interests. Bellingcat has hauled in grants from the National Endowment for Democracy, a US government-funded CIA cutout. Leaked documents reported by The Grayzone revealed that Bellingcat has collaborated with a UK Foreign Office operation that aims to “weaken Russia.”

Bellingcat has also been a regular source of interventionist material on Syria, the target of a decade-long, multi-billion dollar proxy war waged by the US, UK, and their allies. This includes participating in a nearly two-year campaign to whitewash a scandal at the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) — one of the most shocking and well-documented pro-war deceptions since the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

A series of leaks has exposed how top OPCW officials censored findings which undermined US-led allegations of a Syrian government chemical weapons attack in the city of Douma in April 2018. Together with its NATO state sponsors, Bellingcat has worked to bury the cover-up and denigrate two OPCW whistleblowers who challenged it from the inside.

Bellingcat’s disinformation efforts resulted in an embarrassing debacle late last year, when the outlet was caught publishing fraudulent material about one of the dissenting OPCW scientists.

Now, emails obtained by The Grayzone reveal that Bellingcat has engaged in more subterfuge than was previously known.

Messages sent months before the “Bellingcat Investigation Team” released its bogus article show that Bellingcat was not the sole author of the now-discredited piece published in its name. It also was not the first one.

The communications show that someone outside the Bellingcat organization composed portions of the fraudulent material that ultimately appeared on Bellingcat’s website. An external author even drafted questions that Bellingcat sent to multiple recipients. Bellingcat’s duplicitous conduct took place in the midst of a poorly coordinated effort involving HuffPost UK and the BBC – two outlets that also enjoy close ties to the British state.

The target of the Bellingcat-led smear campaign is Dr. Brendan Whelan, a 16-year OPCW veteran and member of the mission that deployed to Syria in April 2018 to investigate the alleged chemical attack in Douma.

The Douma team failed to find any evidence of chemical weapons use, shattering the pretext for the US, UK, and French airstrikes on Damascus that same month. But the investigators’ original report was doctored and suppressed, an act of censorship that Whelan protested in an email which was subsequently leaked along with other damning internal OPCW documents.

The leaks also revealed how the Douma inspectors were sidelined from the probe following Whelan’s protest, leading to a final report that excluded their critical findings. That report, released in March 2019, reached the unsupported conclusion that there were “reasonable grounds” to believe that chlorine gas was used in Douma, aligning with the US-led narrative of Syrian government culpability.

Last October, over a year after the cover-up became public, Bellingcat claimed to have obtained a “draft version” of an OPCW letter sent to Whelan that disproved all of his concerns. The Grayzone quickly demonstrated that Bellingcat’s “letter” was a sham.

When The Grayzone obtained the real OPCW letter sent to Whelan, it contained none of Bellingcat’s distorted text. The Bellingcat letter claimed that new scientific “methods” had found “chlorinated pinene compounds” in Douma wood samples that proved chlorine gas use. It also stated that Russia and Syria had secretly accepted the OPCW’s conclusions. However, the OPCW’s own published documents undermined both assertions.

Bellingcat has refused to explain the fraud that it perpetrated. Nick Waters, a Bellingcat staffer who was directly involved in producing the anonymously bylined story, deleted embarrassing tweets in which he gloated about his fake scoop. Since then, Waters has ignored queries from The Grayzone.

Now that @Bellingcat has admitted that it published disinformation (https://t.co/B7WiqyvBJZ), let’s look at those who tried to accuse others of doing what Bellingcat in fact did themselves, and even gloated that the falsely premised article was some kind of vindication.

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) October 29, 2020

Bellingcat has now been caught in another act of deception.

Identical typos reveal Bellingcat’s hidden author

Emails obtained by The Grayzone show that at least eight months before Bellingcat published its fraudulent article impugning the OPCW whistleblower, a staffer for HuffPost UK pursued the same story. He is Chris York, a writer responsible for a consistent stream of attacks on prominent critics of the official story of Syrian government responsibility for a chemical attack in Douma – an odd niche for a reporter who scarcely mentioned Syria before 2017.

Chris York writes for the Huffington Post UK. © Chris York/Twitter

In one such email, York claimed to be on the verge of publication. Then, for some reason, he pulled back.

Bellingcat not only published the story that York claimed he was about to release, but used text that was identical to his in their final product.

In its October 2020 article, Bellingcat quoted the letter that it claimed the OPCW had leaked. A side-by-side comparison of Bellingcat’s transcription of the letter in its article to the screenshot of the letter that it also published reveals two errors: a typographical error, and an omission of one definite article that appears in the original screenshot.

These errors were not made by Bellingcat. Instead, three months earlier, on July 27, Chris York of HuffPostUK sent an email to Wikileaks containing the same two errors in otherwise identical text. This can be seen by comparing York and Bellingcat’s text to Bellingcat’s screenshot:

• Bellingcat’s screenshot says “developed methods for analysing wood”; by comparison, Bellingcat’s article, like York’s email, says “developed methods or analysing wood.”
• Bellingcat’s screenshot says “different types of wood in the signatures of the chlorinated compounds produced”; by comparison, Bellingcat’s article, like York’s email, says “different types of wood in the signatures of chlorinated compounds produced.”

HuffPost UK Chris York Bellingcat OPCW email

Left: Chris York’s July 27 2020 email to Wikileaks erroneously quotes the purported OPCW document. York’s typos are highlighted.

Right: Bellingcat’s October 26 2020 article repeats Chris York’s typos, instead of accurately quoting the screenshot that it published in its article. (The screenshot is in the first table above, as well as here: https://archive.is/1O3Du)

The typos are beyond any possible coincidence, and not the only overlap. Nick Waters of Bellingcat not only published Chris York’s errors, but also copied questions that York had sent months earlier.

Bellingcat “investigator” asks someone else’s questions

In emailing queries to Wikileaks, Whelan, and me, Bellingcat’s Nick Waters once again used text originally sent by Chris York of HuffPost UK. A comparison shows that Waters’ queries in October are near carbon copies of queries that York sent in July.

York’s and Waters’ questions to Wikileaks contain virtually identical structure and verbiage across multiple paragraphs. (Waters also used the same language in emails that he sent to me and to Whelan).

Bellingcat Huffpost UK Chris York emails OPCW

Given that Bellingcat copied someone else’s text and did not write its own questions, the question that now arises is how and where Bellingcat’s material originated.

One option is that Waters received York’s material and copied his entire set of questions, slightly changing the wording in a lazy effort to disguise the copying job. That would raise the question of how Bellingcat ended up with another outlet’s question: did York pass his questions to Waters? Or did someone else?

Another option is that neither Waters nor York wrote their overlapping questions or text to begin with, and received them instead from a mutual source.

What is indisputable is that Bellingcat’s Nick Waters did not write the questions that he presented as his own.

The Grayzone sent multiple queries to Waters and Bellingcat about the overlap between their material and HuffPost UK’s. They have not responded.

“I can’t hold off publishing much longer”: How did Bellingcat get HuffPost UK’s leftovers?

The fact that Bellingcat had its text circulated by another outlet months before raises serious questions about what role Bellingcat played in its “investigation.”

The chain of events began in early 2020, when Chris York of HuffPost UK first referenced the “document” that Bellingcat would later base its story on.

York wrote Dr. Brendan Whelan in February 2020, shortly after the OPCW released an internal inquiry baselessly maligning two whistleblowers it identified as Inspectors A and B. Just days before the inquiry’s findings were announced, the British journalist Brian Whittaker doxed Whelan, whose name he said had been leaked by someone with “access to sensitive OPCW information.” That same month, Bellingcat published an attack piece that identified Whelan as Inspector B.

In light of those attacks, the timing and nature of York’s outreach to Whelan suggests that it may have been a part of a coordinated effort to impugn him.

“I was hoping to speak to you about some documents that Wikileaks do not appear to have released yet,” York wrote to Whelan on February 26, 2020. Whelan did not reply. York followed up again on March 7th, which Whelan also ignored.

Four months later, York sent Whelan a final message claiming that publication was imminent. “I’ll soon be publishing an article on the Wikileaks Douma leaks, specifically on a document that wasn’t publicly released but appears to contradict some of the points Wikileaks and yourself have put forward,” York wrote on July 16.

During this same period, York also reached out to Wikileaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson. In one email, York shared with Hrafnsson the same error-laden transcription of part of the text of the OPCW draft letter that would later surface at Bellingcat. Just as Bellingcat would do months later, York additionally accused Wikileaks of hiding the document. Releasing it, York alleged on August 17, “would have completely contradicted the narrative you put forward that the Douma attack was staged.”

York was so confident in his false belief that the document disproved the whistleblower – and that others beyond him had actually received it – that he chided Wikileaks for failing to issue a public correction in response. “[A]fter HuffPost UK discovered the existence of this document and questioned Wikileaks about it,” York scolded, “you have done nothing to correct the record and have instead let the disputed narrative about a ‘staged’ chemical attack go unchecked.”

The fact that York claimed to have “discovered” the document suggests that it was only passed to Bellingcat after HuffPost UK dropped the story. Bellingcat’s omission of HuffPost UK’s original role – while simultaneously copying the fraudulent content of its text – demonstrates a flagrant disregard for transparency that stands at odds with Bellingcat’s professed fidelity to “open source,” “verifiable” evidence.

Just as he did with Whelan, York informed Wikileaks that he was on the verge of publishing his story. “I’ll be publishing the article at the weekend so a response before then would be appreciated,” York wrote Hrafnsson on July 22. On August 4th, York followed-up with one final plea: “Could I please get a response to this, I can’t hold off publishing much longer.”

York’s article never appeared at the HuffPost UK.

In a brief phone conservation with me on October 27th, the day after his story surfaced at Bellingcat, York said that he would read the Bellingcat article before responding to my questions. He has since gone quiet and failed to respond to multiple emailed queries from The Grayzone. His editors at HuffPost UK have kept mum as well.

Converging disinformation from Bellingcat and BBC

Although the identity Bellingcat-HuffPost UK’s dodgy source is unknown, the participation of a third outlet in this story – the UK state broadcaster BBC — offers a strong candidate.

Just weeks after Bellingcat’s debunked story appeared, the BBC released a podcast that attempted to advance the same bogus line. Mayday host Chloe Hadjimatheou repeated the Bellingcat letter’s falsehoods about the wood samples and the secret Syria-Russian acceptance of the OPCW’s final report. In yet another uncanny crossover, Hadjimatheou also falsely suggested that one of the OPCW whistleblowers received a payment from Wikileaks. In emails to Wikileaks and Whelan one month before Mayday was aired, Bellingcat’s Nick Waters made the same insinuation.

While her uncritical promotion of the Bellingcat-HuffPost UK letter’s debunked assertions was nothing new, Hadjimatheou did offer one significant contribution. To make her case against the whistleblowers, Hadjimatheou interviewed someone whom she claimed was an anonymous OPCW official operating behind the pseudonym, “Leon.” Hadjimatheou did not specify what role, if any, Leon played in the Douma investigation. The anonymous official also offered nothing of substance beyond what was already claimed in the bogus OPCW letter released by Bellingcat.

It is possible, therefore, that Leon was the real source of the fraudulent information provided to Bellingcat and HuffPost UK. If the BBC is correct that Leon is an actual OPCW official, then the implications are serious. It means that alongside the OPCW’s refusal to account for the Douma cover-up, an OPCW staffer is spreading disinformation about former employees who challenged it.

The OPCW did not respond to The Grayzone’s questions about whether it is investigating the “draft letter,” or Leon’s comments to the BBC. If the OPCW is not probing this defamatory conduct, its inaction could be read as a tacit endorsement.

The Grayzone also asked the BBC’s Hadjimatheou about her recycling of Bellingcat’s debunked claims, Leon’s qualifications to comment on the Douma investigation, and other major lapses in her reporting. Hadjimatheou initially said that she would reply to me in writing. After receiving my questions, she backtracked on that pledge and declined to offer any responses.

In the absence of any explanation from these three outlets – BBC, Bellingcat, and HuffPost UK – on how they have targeted OPCW whistleblowers with identical false material repeated by an unidentified OPCW source, another common denominator might help fill in the silence. Just like the BBC, Bellingcat and HuffPost UK have formal British government ties of their own.

The editor of HuffPost UK, Jess Brammar, has helmed the outlet while simultaneously serving as a member of the UK government’s Defence and Security Media Advisory (DSMA) Committee, which censors journalism on behalf of “UK military and intelligence operations,” in the name of “national security.”

For its part, Bellingcat is a founding “partner” in a UK government propaganda operation, the Open Information Partnership (OIP), funded with $13.7 million in taxpayer money. Bellingcat was enlisted in the OIP even though its UK state partners have privately doubted its credibility. A leaked internal assessment produced for the OIP concluded that:

“Bellingcat was somewhat discredited, both by spreading disinformation itself, and by being willing to produce reports for anyone willing to pay.”

Whoever is behind the attacks on veteran OPCW scientists, Bellingcat’s role in the smear campaign is absolutely clear. While marketing itself publicly as an “open source” collective of crime-solving digital sleuths, Bellingcat has been used as a proxy in a disinformation campaign to whitewash a major global deception and defame the whistleblowers who challenged it. It is duplicitous enough to let someone else write its material, and sloppy enough to get caught.

thegrayzone.com

Exclusive: Documents obtained by The Grayzone show that OPCW executives privately criticized the manipulation of a Syria chemical weapons probe, and supported a dissenting veteran inspector. One official, however, feared helping the “Russian narrative.” These private admissions further expose the public whitewash of the Douma cover-up, and undermine the ongoing attacks on the whistleblowers who challenged it.

Since the explosive revelation that an investigation by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in Syria was manipulated, a smear campaign has been waged against a pair of veteran OPCW scientists who challenged the cover-up.

The two whistleblowers have been dismissed as rogue, uninformed, and duplicitous actors. Their detractors include the current OPCW director general; NATO member state ambassadors; and anonymous, self-described OPCW officials laundering fabricated claims through NATO member state-funded outlets.

OPCW documents and correspondence obtained by The Grayzone offer a stark contrast to these public attacks. Among several revelations, they show that before the attempts to discredit the whistleblowers, OPCW directors privately criticized the chemical watchdog’s suppression of the investigation, and supported the inspector who vocally protested it.

One of these executives, however, feared that raising alarm about the scientific fraud would help the “Russian narrative”— a tacit admission that the organization’s independence and impartiality have become subordinate to geopolitics.

The dissenting inspector, 16-year OPCW veteran Dr. Brendan Whelan, was a member of the OPCW Fact-Finding Mission (FFM) that investigated an alleged chemical attack in the Syrian city of Douma on April 7, 2018. The team’s findings raised major doubts about allegations of Syrian government culpability, the pretext for a US-led bombing of Syria one week later.

But senior OPCW officials, in conjunction with a US attempt to influence the investigation, censored the evidence and released unsupported conclusions. A series of damning leaks later exposed the deception.

Rather than having their complaints addressed, Whelan and the other known dissenting inspector, 12-year OPCW veteran Ian Henderson, have been subjected to a second deceit: false claims about them and their investigation.

Whoever is behind these public attacks, the private OPCW emails and documents obtained by The Grayzone further undermine them. In addition to revealing initial praise by OPCW brass for Whelan’s attempt to protect the investigation, these leaks provide a new window into how other officials compromised it:

• One top official acknowledged the doctoring of the Douma evidence. But rather than order an investigation into how it occurred, this official sought to have an email protesting the censorship erased from the OPCW’s servers.

• Another executive, who appears to have been deeply involved in the scientific fraud, sidelined the inspectors who collected the evidence in Syria. This same OPCW official also engineered a delay that ensured that the most vocal dissenter, Whelan, would no longer be in the picture.

• By contrast, two senior directors praised Whelan’s opposition to the Douma probe subterfuge. (These directors are distinct from the Director General, whom they work under.) The first director criticized the censorship of evidence, and also signaled that it was politically motivated. Yet this same director was also hesitant to press the issue, out of fear that doing so would “feed… the Russian narrative.”

• The second director lauded Whelan’s contributions to the OPCW, as well as his effort to defend the Douma investigation from fraudulent behavior.

These documents show that internal concerns about the Douma cover-up went beyond members of the FFM team to even the highest levels of the organization.

In addition, The Grayzone has previously published an email from a former senior official expressing alarm about the scandal and the intimidation of dissenting voices. A subsequent statement from a separate OPCW official criticized the “abhorrent mistreatment” of the dissenting inspectors.

This account is based on newly disclosed and previously published documents, as well as OPCW sources familiar with the investigation.

“The report was not redacted at the behest of ODG”

A June 22, 2018 email exchange was the opening salvo in the standoff over the Douma cover-up.

Two days earlier, the OPCW’s Fact Finding Mission (FFM) had completed its draft of the Douma investigation report.

The report’s chief author was Dr. Brendan Whelan, a senior member of the FFM and part of the Advance Team that went to Damascus.

A 16-year OPCW veteran, Whelan was widely considered the OPCW’s foremost expert in chemical weapons chemistry and analysis. He presented some of his ground-breaking work on chemical weapons analysis to the OPCW’s Scientific Advisory Board in October 2017.

When the OPCW FFM deployed to Douma in April 2018, Whelan served as the mission’s scientific coordinator. Upon its return to OPCW headquarters in the Hague the following month, he was tasked with delivering a briefing to state representatives on the team’s progress.

The product of more than two months of work, the Douma report’s findings were explosive. With no evidence of a chemical weapons attack, the document failed to support the allegations lodged by a trigger-happy Trump administration that had already bombed Syria, along with the UK and France, before the OPCW could reach Douma in April.

Neither nerve agents nor their degradation products had been detected, and there was no proof of chlorine gas use. A group of toxicologists from a NATO-member state ruled that the cause of death was inconsistent with exposure to chlorine gas, and could find no other chemical agents as a plausible alternative.

In fact, the report considered two alternative hypotheses, one of which included a “non chemical-related” incident— possibly an allusion to the incident being staged on the ground.

Senior management had been given the report’s executive summary and raised no concerns. The document had been peer-reviewed by members of the FFM team, including the team leader, and was being prepared for publication.

But shortly thereafter, Whelan made a shocking discovery: unidentified officials had radically altered the finished product and rushed out a doctored report for imminent publication, all without informing the team.

The doctored version was a whitewash. Key facts were missing or misrepresented, and conclusions had been re-written, to disingenuously suggest that a chlorine gas attack had occurred in Douma.

The ramifications of this subterfuge were staggering. In effect, the investigation team were blindsided and undermined by an imposter report that would, based on unfounded conclusions, give post facto justification for the US, UK, and French military strikes on Syria on April 14, 2018.

Alarmed at this discovery, Whelan wrote an email of protest on June 22 expressing his “gravest concern.” It was addressed to Robert Fairweather, the then-OPCW chief of cabinet, a position second only in terms of influence to the director general. Fairweather’s deputy and the other FFM team members were copied.

“After reading this modified report, which incidentally no other team member who deployed into Douma has had the opportunity to do, I was struck by how much it misrepresents the facts,” Whelan wrote.

Whelan’s letter was revealed by British journalist Peter Hitchens and published by Wikileaks in November 2019.

Unpublished until now was Fairweather’s response.

Fairweather did not deny that the report had been redacted, but insisted that the censorship was not done on the director general’s behalf. “The report was not redacted at the behest of ODG,” Fairweather wrote. “The only input ODG had was to ask that the report did not speculate.”

Fairweather added, “This is only an interim report which leaves open a large amount of further work on a number of areas.”

OPCW Chief of Cabinet Bob Fairweather acknowledges the redaction of the Douma report, but insists that it was not done at the “behest” of the Director General.

Censoring the censorship protest

Brendan Whelan’s intervention thwarted the publication of the doctored report. But Robert Fairweather’s nonplussed response sent a clear message: while he was prepared to acknowledge the censorship and delay the report’s release, there would be nothing further done about it.

Rather than launching an immediate investigation into the deception, Fairweather was apparently content to leave the inspectors to their own devices.

Fairweather instructed Whelan, the dissenting inspector, to “sit with the [team leader] and the team to discuss.” This team leader, whose name The Grayzone is withholding, appears to have taken part in the fraudulent re-editing that Whelan had protested.

Fairweather was, however, proactive in one respect — he initiated another act of censorship.

Shortly after Whelan sent his letter of protest, Fairweather wrote back to him and the rest of the recipients a one-sentence email: “Robert Fairweather would like to recall the message Grave concern about the ‘redacted’ Douma report.”

Such a request — a rare course of action among OPCW officials — would amount to the OPCW deleting Whelan’s email of complaint from its server and the inboxes of each recipient. This recall request, previously unpublished, suggests that senior OPCW officials were not only reluctant to take Whelan’s concerns seriously: they were intent on erasing them from the documentary record.

The recall request is the exact opposite of the key action Fairweather did not take: launching an investigation into who was responsible for censoring and distorting the findings of the original report.

Fairweather, who now serves as the UK special representative for Sudan and South Sudan, did not respond to emailed questions from The Grayzone about his exchange with Whelan and the doctoring of the initial report.

Fairweather left the OPCW in September 2018. Three months after his departure, the UK government made him an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for “services to international relations.”

“The selective nature of presenting the facts”

Not everyone was satisfied with Robert Fairweather’s response. Emails obtained by The Grayzone reveal that one senior OPCW director was troubled by the events.

This senior official was not directly involved in the Douma investigation, but was kept updated on the internal dispute. The executive was shown Whelan’s complaint before Fairweather requested its recall.

In an email to Whelan, the director voiced concern that Fairweather had belittled Whelan’s complaints of censorship in responding that “this is only an interim report,” and that further work was still to be done.

“I don’t think saying this is an ‘interim report’ quite does it in defending the selective nature of presenting the facts,” the director wrote (emphasis added). “From what I heard, at least some of them should find their way back to the report.”

“You took all the steps to maintain your moral and professional integrity”

The OPCW director also praised Brendan Whelan’s June 22 intervention.

“My respect, I think your email is very carefully crafted, without emotions, not accusing anybody but laying out the facts and concerns very clearly,” the executive wrote. “Really well done.”

In another email, the director told Whelan: “[Y]ou took all the steps to maintain your moral and professional integrity and that’s what matters most.”

“A more professional transparent and sound fact-finding mission”

The OPCW director also responded positively to news that Whelan’s superiors, in response to his email of protest, had agreed to cancel the publication of the doctored report.

“I hope — an important precedent for the future,” the executive wrote. The director continued:

I[t] should serve as an encouragement to future FFM members that it is important to get engaged in drafting and insist that their findings and possible concerns be adequately considered and that simply ignoring mission member’s views is not an acceptable way of doing business. Through your action, you could actually be making the first step toward having a more professional transparent and sound fact-finding mission.

“It would have been easier to simply ‘let it go’”

The director was not the only top OPCW official to praise Brendan Whelan’s efforts.

In August 2018, a second OPCW director wrote a glowing performance appraisal that celebrated Whelan’s contributions to the chemical watchdog. The appraisal came less than two months after Whelan’s June 22 email of protest, and just a few weeks before Whelan’s scheduled departure in early September 2018. (This was Whelan’s second tenure with the OPCW, dating back to 1998.)

“I can say without being unfair to others that you have been the professional in the TS [Technical Secretariat] that has contributed the most to the knowledge and understanding of CW [Chemical Weapons] chemistry applied to inspections,” the second OPCW director wrote. “You produced a lot of knowledge and unselfishly shared every bit of what you know with others, enthusiastically. I thank you very much for this.”

The second director also paid tribute to Whelan’s protest of the Douma probe censorship.

“I want to commend you as well for your character and strong values, which have stood firm at times when it would have been easier to simply ‘let it go’ without fighting for what you believed was right,” the second director wrote. “Thank you for everything, it will be difficult to replace you, now that your tenure is about to end.”

The summer shutdown

While Brendan Whelan’s superior may have lamented his pending departure, the officials who censored his report apparently saw it as an opportunity.

After the pivotal June 22 intervention, the Douma team leader took steps that effectively neutralized Whelan until his scheduled exit in early September 2018, just a few months later.

A compromise “interim” report was published on July 6. The interim report no longer contained the deceptive edits that unknown officials had tried to insert, but, nonetheless, continued to omit several key findings from the team’s original report.

It would soon become clear that this interim report was just a stopgap measure. Issuing the watered-down document, with its uncomfortable facts removed, left the door open for future publication of the doctored findings once Whelan was no longer in the way.

In early July, OPCW officials announced the establishment of a new “core” team that would be selected to write the final report. The so-called “core” team excluded not just Whelan but also the team members who deployed into Douma. There was one exception: a paramedic.

In place of the experienced inspectors, the “core” team now included junior officials who were just beginning their career with the organization.

As the confidentiality officer during the deployment to Douma and the post-mission period, Whelan had up until that point been responsible for management of all of its materials. On July 2, just days before the interim report’s release, Whelan was instructed to hand over all confidential and non-confidential Douma data to the “core” team.

Whelan was also relieved of his duties on the Douma team. “Nominally I continued to be part of the team, but in reality I was now side-lined from any further meaningful contribution to the investigation,” Whelan later recalled, in an April 2019 letter to the Director General. “I was no longer in charge of report writing and my responsibility for sampling and analysis issues was transferred to a member of the FFM Alpha ‘core team’.”

The team leader also announced some news: he would be taking a six-week vacation until September 4, one day after Whelan’s scheduled departure from the organization.

With the nominal leader taking an extended break and responsibility handed to junior officials, some of whom had not even set foot in Syria, the investigation was effectively on pause until such time as Whelan was gone for good.

“Full of skepticism,” but “fear” of the “Russian narrative”

With Brendan Whelan out of the picture and the rest of the Douma inspectors effectively sidelined, it was a small group of so-called “core” team members that produced the scientifically flawed final report of March 1, 2019.

The eight-month interval since the publication of the interim report is notable. The majority of the investigation had already been conducted in advance of the original suppressed report of late June 2018. This includes 70 percent of the chemical analyses, 90 percent of the interview assessments, and, judging from the bibliography, all of the scientific research on the chemical analysis and toxicology.

Despite this, the OPCW leadership, in an attempt to rebut allegations of scientific fraud, has claimed that “the FFM undertook the bulk” of its work in the period after Whelan’s departure. In fact, it appears that the OPCW deliberately procrastinated and prolonged the investigation so as to give the false appearance that significant “work” was taking place.

Freed from the inconvenience of dissenting experts, the final report baselessly claimed that there were “reasonable grounds” to believe that a chemical attack occurred in Douma, and that “the toxic chemical was likely molecular chlorine.”

When the whistleblowers’ concerns about the final report later became public, the OPCW leadership accused Whelan of trying to improperly “influence” the investigation. In reality, Whelan, after departing the OPCW in September 2018, only re-entered the Douma fray after the final report’s publication.

Whelan first wrote the director general, Spanish diplomat Fernando Arias, a private letter on March 25. (Arias had taken over from his predecessor, Ahmet Üzümcü of Turkey, in July 2018, just weeks after the publication of the FFM’s interim report.)

Uncertain that his concerns would ever make it to Arias’ desk, Whelan once again turned to the first OPCW director who had praised his initial intervention back in June 2018.

Whelan wrote on April 4, 2019, over a month after the final report was published. Whelan asked for “advice and assistance” in getting his concerns directly to the director general. He offered to fly to the Hague if Arias would agree to meet.

The director responded promptly, apparently not surprised that Whelan had gotten in touch: “good to hear from you and yes, I actually anticipated to hear from you one way or the other once the report on Douma is out.”

The director seemed equally disturbed by the Douma report. “Frankly speaking, the whole thing keeps confusing me,” the executive wrote. “I can’t make my mind up around many things and that’s an uncomfortable feeling, especially given the hell broken loose about the Douma report.”

The director agreed to help Whelan explore how to deliver his concerns to Arias. The top official also revealed that a senior OPCW colleague with chemical weapons expertise (who was not one of the inspectors) had similarly expressed doubts about the final report.

But despite these misgivings, the director added a telling statement that indicated that the Douma probe had become too politicized for any valid concerns to make a difference:

“He [the senior colleague] is also full of skepticism [about Douma] but … I fear there is little one can do since the report is final and out – unless one wants to feed in the Russian narrative and that I would never do as they really are not bona fide friends of this organization, that’s for sure.” (emphasis added; ellipsis in original)

Despite doubts about the veracity of the published report, the director continued to make it clear it was a fait accompli and beyond reproach. “I suppose we both concur that it is difficult to imagine that the DG would change his mind and order issuing another, revised report or anything of this kind. The report is simply out,” the official wrote resignedly.

These qualms about bolstering a perceived “Russian narrative” after the report’s release stand in stark contrast to the OPCW’s documented willingness to enable a US narrative since the start of the investigation.

In early July 2018, just before the release of the interim report, Robert Fairweather, the then-chief of cabinet, summoned the FFM inspectors to meet with a visiting US delegation. The unidentified US officials sought to influence the Douma team into concluding that the Syrian government had committed a chemical attack with chlorine.

The US team promoted this chlorine theory despite the fact that it was still not publicly known that no nerve agents had been found in Douma – an indication, perhaps, that the US played a critical role in shaping the ultimate “narrative.”

“A discussion that is difficult to pursue out in the open”

In a follow-up email exchange on April 17, the OPCW director again intimated that political imperatives would overrule any of the concerns about the Douma probe’s impartiality.

At the bottom of an email, Brendan Whelan mentioned an open-source paper written by a group of British scholars criticizing the Douma report: “PS. A very interesting and insightful article has just been published by a group of UK academics on the Douma report. I can send you the link if you are interested,” Whelan wrote.

Fernando Arias would later suggest in a public statement that this comment implicated Whelan in a breach of confidentiality. But in fact, the director had already seen the UK academics’ paper – and again signaled that political concerns would trump any scientific ones.

“Yes, I have seen the analysis by the UK academics,” the director wrote. “Unfortunately, this is a discussion that is difficult to pursue out in the open, knowing that it is already being played by parties who are decidedly not bona fide supporters of the CWC [Chemical Weapons Convention].”

The director’s comments read as an acknowledgment that the OPCW was now subordinate to geopolitical drama. The OPCW was willing, the executive’s words suggest, to suppress concerns about scientific fraud and political interference if paying attention to them could “feed [into] the Russian narrative” and other undesirable “parties.”

“A fully unbiased take on things”

In another nod to the Douma report’s bias, the executive suggested that, although it was too late to revisit the Douma FFM report, there was another option. Whelan’s concerns, the executive proposed, could be sent to the Investigation and Identification Team (IIT), a separate body within the OPCW tasked with identifying the perpetrators of chemical attacks.

The senior official intimated that this idea had already been discussed among management, and that this new IIT team might be less compromised.

“I am also thinking how things could develop further and basically see just one option that seems realistic, given that we can’t turn back the clock, and which has been already floating around: it relates to all your points being forwarded to the IIT for a fresh and comprehensive assessment by people who are all also newly recruited and should therefore have a fully unbiased take on things,” the executive wrote on April 18.

The possibility that the IIT would be “fully unbiased” was a clear acknowledgment that the FFM had not met that same standard.

An OPCW Director tells Dr. Brendan Whelan that the IIT, unlike the Douma FFM, may be able to “have a fully unbiased take on things.” The Director also says that the Chief of Cabinet “is perfectly OK with receiving your letter” to Director General Arias. The letter expressed Whelan’s concerns about the Douma investigation and its final report.

“There clearly is interest to continue the communication”

Brendan Whelan’s request to meet with Director General Fernando Arias was denied. But the senior executive did arrange to get a letter from Whelan to the OPCW chief.

The Grayzone has previously published Whelan’s April 25, 2019 letter to Arias, outlining his concerns about the Douma investigation in extensive detail.

Arias replied to Whelan five weeks later, on June 7. As had happened with Whelan’s initial protest about the suppressed interim report, Arias ignored Whelan’s concerns about scientific and procedural misconduct throughout the investigation.

Instead, Arias’ only reaction was to reiterate his confidence in the final Douma report, and to falsely claim that the work done after Whelan left the OPCW justified its conclusions.

Bizarrely, Arias would go on to publicly dismiss Whelan’s letter as evidence of a mischievous “desire to have continued access to, and influence on, the Douma investigation.” This contrasts starkly with what the director told Whelan in their correspondence.

The director told Whelan that the chief of cabinet “is perfectly OK with receiving your letter,” and that “there clearly is interest to continue the communication.” The chief of cabinet is Arias’ top deputy, and acts on his behalf.

Public attacks after private praise

Fernando Arias’ disingenuous comment about Brendan Whelan’s “desire” to “influence” the Douma investigation came as part of a February 2020 OPCW inquiry that deceptively characterized the whistleblowers as rogue, uninformed actors.

Since then, the campaign against the inspectors has intensified. At the United Nations Security Council, the US, UK, and France – the states that bombed Syria based on the Douma allegation – have dismissed the inspectors’ concerns as Syrian and Russian “disinformation.”

In October, these same governments even blocked the OPCW’s first director general, José Bustani, from testifying in support of the inspectors, whom he worked with during his tenure.

Bellingcat, a NATO member state-funded website, has published a number of fallacious attacks, including an outright hoax. Shortly after the Bustani incident at the UN, Bellingcat doxxed Dr. Whelan and falsely suggested that he had concealed information that disproved his objections.

In reality, as The Grayzone revealed, a purported letter that Bellingcat claimed was sent to Whelan by the OPCW director general was never actually sent, replete with errors, and may actually be a fake.

In the latest failed attempt to smear the inspectors, a BBC podcast series called “Mayday” recycled Bellingcat’s debunked assertions; made other glaring errors and omissions; and credulously promoted the dubious claims of an anonymous source who claims to work for the OPCW in an unspecified capacity.

Because false information continues to be leaked about the dissenting inspectors and their scientific concerns — purportedly from individuals within the OPCW — it should not be ruled out that the same people have also deliberately misinformed Arias.

Whoever is behind this defamation campaign against the whistleblowers, one fact is certain: the private comments of OPCW executives — who praised one of the inspectors, and questioned the scientific fraud that he challenged — are at direct odds with the public attacks.

thegrayzone.com

A new BBC podcast, “Mayday,” uses smears, gaping omissions, leaps of logic, and factual errors in a desperate attempt to repair the image of late White Helmets founder James Le Mesurier, and discredit the OPCW inspectors who challenged a cover-up of their Syria chemical weapons probe. Mayday’s producer has failed to answer the following questions.

The new BBC podcast Mayday covers the life and death of James Le Mesurier, the former UK military officer who founded the group The White Helmets, which has operated extensively in Syria’s proxy war.

The White Helmets have been marketed to Western audiences as a neutral aid organization conducting rescue operations in opposition-held cities targeted by Syrian and Russian bombings. But as The Grayzone has extensively reported, the White Helmets have worked closely with jihadist groups in Syria, and have been used as a PR tool to whitewash the proxy war against Damascus by their US, UK, Turkey, and Gulf State sponsors.

The White Helmets were established thanks to tens of millions of dollars in funding from the UK, US and Qatari governments. Members of the organization have been filmed and photographed carrying guns and waving Salafi-jihadist flags, and have even participated in numerous public executions of citizens in militant-held territory.

A British former military officer-turned-mercenary, James Le Mesurier founded the White Helmets in southern Turkey in 2014. Le Mesurier died in an apparent suicide in November 2019 after falling from the roof of an Istanbul building where he kept an apartment and office. Days before his death, Le Mesurier admitted to pocketing tens of thousands of dollars in donor funds and committing financial fraud to cover it up. In an emailed confession, Le Mesurier urged Western donor countries to prevent a second forensic audit which, he warned, could uncover further “mistakes and internal failures” and provide “a victory for Russia and the pro-Assad trolls.”

The BBC podcast, “Mayday,” represents a prolonged effort to salvage Le Mesurier and the White Helmets’ tarnished reputations. Despite a forensic audit and Le Mesurier’s own confession, Mayday host and BBC producer Chloe Hadjimatheou makes the implausible claim that Le Mesurier was innocent of all financial wrongdoing. In her view, it was all the result of a misunderstanding. Hadjimatheou goes on to make the equally outlandish suggestion that Le Mesurier was at least partly driven to suicide as a result of the allegations leveled against him by Russia, Syria and critics on social media.

It would take several lengthy articles to detail all of the falsehoods and editorial lapses in Hadjimatheou’s eleven-episode series. These include false statements about The Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal – whom Hadjimatheou never contacted for comment – as well as cheap insinuations about my own reporting as well.

Here, The Grayzone is calling attention to glaring issues surrounding one particular topic: the OPCW’s scandal-ridden Douma investigation.

In an extra episode, “The Canister on the Bed,” Hadjimatheou attempts to refute the OPCW inspectors who have challenged a cover-up of their investigation into an alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma, Syria in April 2018. Hadjimatheou relies extensively on an anonymous source, identified as “Leon,” whom she claims “works for the OPCW.”

Hadjimatheou declined my request for an interview, but did agree to answer questions in writing. A BBC spokesperson also pledged to “endeavour to get you some replies.” I submitted a list of questions to Hadjimatheou and the BBC on Tuesday, November 24^th 2020. Having not yet heard back (I did not even receive an acknowledgment that my questions were received), I have published my questions in full below.

Should Hadjimatheou and the BBC ever respond to me, I will update this article accordingly.

Questions for Chloe Hadjimatheou from Aaron Maté (submitted November 24, 2020)

1) “Leon”

“Leon”, the purported OPCW source whom you interview for the episode “The Canister on the Bed”, tries to diminish and refute two highly experienced OPCW inspectors, as well as the organization’s first Director General, José Bustani. But it is not clear whether Leon had any serious involvement in the OPCW’s Douma investigation – if any involvement at all – or indeed whether he is actually an OPCW official, or just a contractor. It is also unclear what his scientific credentials are.

You claim that Leon “works for the OPCW.” (7:55). Is this something that you have confirmed independently? How did you verify that he “works for the OPCW”? Can you disclose anything about the nature of this work?

Leon’s comments suggest to me that he was not a part of the OPCW FFM team that deployed to Douma. “They had to wait for, like, two weeks,” he says of the Douma team (7:38). This indicates that he was not a part of that team. Can you confirm that “Leon” did not deploy to Douma? Assuming that he did not, what was his actual role in the Douma investigation, if any?

What is Leon’s competence to comment on the chemistry, ballistics and toxicology studies? Did you verify if he had any access to information, data, or evidence regarding the Douma investigation? If so, how?

2) Critical Omissions

Your Extra Episode (“The Canister on the Bed”) on the Douma incident omits critical information about the OPCW investigation that is in the public record. I hope to get your explanation as to why these omissions were made.

A) No mention of the original, censored OPCW report, or the egregious attempts to publish a bogus report

You make no mention of the OPCW FFM team’s original, initial report, which raised serious doubts that a chemical attack had occurred in Douma but was suppressed by unknown persons. This report has been publicly available since December 2019, via Wikileaks.

You omit the fact that this suppressed report was secretively substituted with a new, doctored version, which the Organization attempted to deceptively publish unknown to the inspectors. This doctored report had key facts and findings removed, and unsupported conclusions added, for example: “The team has sufficient evidence at this time to determine that chlorine, or another reactive chlorine-containing chemical, was likely released from cylinders.” This statement was clearly untrue, as the compromise Interim report that was subsequently published on July 6 2018 demonstrated. This doctored report has also been publicly available, via Wikileaks, since December 2019.

You also omit that one of the dissenting investigators, described by the OPCW as “Inspector B”, was the original report’s chief author, a fact that has been public knowledge (I reported it this July in The Nation, for example) for a long time. That Inspector B is Brendan Whelan is also now public knowledge; it has been the subject of public speculation for over a year and I reported it at The Grayzone last month, after he was doxxed by Bellingcat (with the help of a fake document allegedly leaked from the OPCW; more on that below).

You also failed to mention that Whelan/Inspector B protested the censorship of the initial report in a June 22, 2018 letter to the Chief of Cabinet. In this letter, published in November 2019 by Wikileaks, Whelan expressed his “gravest concern” about the doctored report that was about to be published. He alleged that it “misrepresents the facts,” thereby “undermining its credibility.” Because of this intervention, the imminent publication of this doctored report was thwarted just hours before it was due for release. The OPCW has never denied that this incident happened. Even OPCW Director General Fernando Arias, in his response (published on October 28 2020 at The Grayzone) to a letter of complaint Whelan sent to him (see below) detailing these events, does not deny the suppression and the failed attempt to publish a bogus report.

Critically, a number of key facts and findings contained in the original, censored report never made their way back to the final report. As Whelan wrote in his April 2019 letter to the DG, also published last month at The Grayzone: “Having read in detail the Final FFM Report issued on 1 March 2019, I am very concerned at the way the facts have been misrepresented and highly questionable conclusions drawn. The final report, in grand part, is the original report I had written (the same report that had been heavily redacted in June) but in which key conclusions have since been altered to contradict those of the original report. This is despite the fact that no substantive or valid new information, particularly with respect to the sampling and analysis results, has been gathered since the interim report was issued.”

Whelan’s letter also discloses that the initial report was “reviewed and agreed among 4-5 team members in mid-June” 2018. This, among other known facts, contradicts your claim that “there was a scientific consensus among investigators that a chlorine attack had very likely taken place.” Again, none of this is denied or challenged by the Director General in his response to Whelan.

Why did you make no mention of any of this? Given that you attempt to refute the dissenting inspectors and claim that their concerns were addressed, how can you exclude the incident that set off the entire dispute: the deceptive editing and censorship of the original team report, and subsequent attempts to publish a bogus replacement?

The omission of any mention of the doctored initial report is particularly glaring in light of the fact that you include a clip of “Leon” – a purported OPCW official – claiming that “there was no tampering, there was no doctoring.” (25:01) The redacted OPCW report is incontrovertible proof that there was indeed tampering and doctoring. You have thus aired without challenge a statement that is contradicted by the censorship that you ignored.

B) No mention that all but one of the Douma team members were sidelined and replaced by a so-called “core” team

You omit that the inspectors involved in the on-site Douma investigation were sidelined and replaced by a so-called “core” team. Those sidelined included Whelan – the mission’s scientific coordinator, the chief author of the initial report, and the author of the email of protest that challenged the initial report’s censorship.

The only member of this “core” team who set foot in Douma is a paramedic with no scientific expertise. It was this “core” team — not the inspectors who deployed to Syria, including some who signed off on the original report — that produced the final report of March 2019.

This fact alone should raise an automatic red flag about the final report’s credibility.

Why did you not mention it?

C) No mention of the toxicology assessment that doubted chlorine gas exposure

Experts from a NATO-member state conducted a toxicology review at the OPCW team’s request. They concluded that observed signs of the civilians in Douma, particularly the rapid onset of excessive frothing, as well as the concentration of victims filmed in the apartment building so close to fresh air, “were inconsistent with exposure to chlorine, and no other obvious candidate chemical causing the symptoms could be identified.” Yet this critical assessment was excluded from the final report.

Why did you omit this critical assessment, and also omit the fact that it was kept out of the OPCW’s final report?

D) No mention of your own BBC colleague Riam Dalati’s reporting on “staged” events

Incredibly, in an episode that attempts to refute the argument that the Douma incident was staged, you make no mention of the reporting of your own BBC colleague, Riam Dalati, that the hospital scene in Douma was staged. (This omission is made throughout your entire podcast series, including in the episode that discussed the Douma hospital scene, episode 7 “Managed Massacres.”)

As you are well aware, Riam has claimed, based on six months of his own research, that the scene in the Douma hospital was staged. If the hospital scene was staged, then this automatically raises doubts about the entire incident, including at the apartment block, where Riam also said that activists were “manipulating the scene” and “[used] corpses of dead children to stage emotive scenes for Western consumption.”

Truth is @James__Harkin got the basics right in terms of #Douma‘s “propaganda” value.
The ATTACK DID HAPPEN, Sarin wasn’t used, but we’ll have to wait for @OPCW to prove Chlorine or otherwise.
However, everything else around the attack was manufactured for maximum effect. https://t.co/abRvSIMV1L

— Riam Dalati (@Dalatrm) February 13, 2019

The Douma hospital staging also raises serious questions about the role of the White Helmets, the subject of your series. As you report in episode 7, the White Helmets were clearly involved in the events at the Douma hospital. The fact that they took part in a potentially staged incident could implicate them in a crime. You even report yourself that the White Helmets played a role in giving witness testimony and evidence to the OPCW. How credible are the White Helmets, and their “evidence,” if they may have been involved in staging a hospital scene used to allege a chemical weapons attack by the Syrian government? Only by ignoring your own colleague’s reporting can you ignore this critical question.

Given the significance of your own BBC colleague Riam Dalati’s reporting, and its profound relevance to the topics you’re reporting on, why did you omit any mention of it?

3) “Alex’s” non-existent Wikileaks award

You strongly imply that “Alex” leaked documents to Wikileaks in return for a $100,000 reward. Did you first check with Wikileaks, as a minimum journalistic step, whether they ever paid out such a reward, and particularly if they paid “Alex”?

By the way, in trying to falsely insinuate that “Alex” received money, you misrepresented the nature of the Wikileaks offer itself. You state that it was “for any leaked material relating to the Douma incident.” In fact – quoting the actual offer – Wikileaks sought “confidential information (intercepts, reports) showing who is responsible for the alleged attack in Douma.” Wikileaks tweeted this offer out on April 9, 2018, before the OPCW investigation had even begun. It appears that it was clearly aimed at government officials who would be in a position to possess intercepts or reports assigning responsibility.

A source close to Wikileaks told me that they have not paid this award to anyone. They also said there is no record of you contacting them to inquire about whether “Alex” was paid this award.

Will you issue an update to inform your audience that you made this false insinuation?

4) Hypotheses Regarding Staging

You state: “But reading the OPCW report, it’s clear that the inspectors took the idea that the attack might have been faked very seriously. They discussed it as a scenario and tested their evidence against that possibility.”

What is your evidence for this assertion? Can you show where such an alternative was discussed in the final report?

From my reading, any statements in the original report that might suggest a faked attack – such as that the victims may have died in a “non-chemical related” incident – were removed from the final report.

5) José Bustani

You: “Bustani was the director general of the OPCW back when the Iraq War started. Then in 2003, he was removed from his position, something he believes was the result of pressure from the US. And it’s unusual for a former Director General to weigh in like this. And Leon tells me he thinks Bustani might have an axe to grind with the Americans. Even so he says Bustani isn’t in a position to comment.”

That Bustani was removed under US pressure isn’t something he “believes”, it’s a documented fact. Bustani was personally threatened by John Bolton (“We know where your kids are“, Bolton said) and the US also threatened to cut the OPCW’s budget. The International Labor Organisation, a UN agency, sided with Bustani and ruled against his “unlawful dismissal.”

Why did you omit these critical facts, and instead portray them as merely a “belief” by someone who “might have an axe to grind with the Americans”?

Leon: “The work back then was completely different from today. In those days, the main point of the OPCW was to make sure that the massive stockpiles of the US and Russia were being destroyed. There was no mission to investigate the actual use of chemical weapons. This only really started with Syria. So how can Bustani say whether things are done properly or not?”

Apart from the fact that his statement is irrelevant, Leon seems unaware that the methodologies and procedures for investigations of alleged chemical weapons uses (including large field exercises) were developed under Bustani’s watch. Bustani explained this in his recent statement to the UN Security Council (a statement that the US, UK, and France blocked him from delivering – another fact that you have managed to omit).

Quoting Bustani: “More recently, the OPCW’s investigations of alleged uses of chemical weapons have no doubt created even greater challenges for the Organization. It was precisely for this kind of eventuality that we had developed operating procedures, analytical methods, as well as extensive training programs, in strict accordance with the provisions of the Chemical Weapons Convention. Allegations of the actual use of chemical weapons were a prospect for which we hoped our preparations would never be required. Unfortunately, they were, and today allegations of chemical weapons use are a sad reality.”

Additionally, you and Leon also omit that Bustani worked with the dissenting OPCW inspectors when Bustani headed the organization. If Leon – someone whose qualifications are kept hidden, along with his actual proximity to the Douma probe – is qualified to comment on the dissenting inspectors, why isn’t the first Director General of their organization?

As someone who worked with the two dissenting inspectors, Bustani is certainly qualified to comment on their level of expertise, integrity and credibility, as he has already publicly in effusive fashion, but which you also failed to include. “They are extremely competent,” Bustani said of the inspectors, in an interview with me at The Grayzone. “All of them. In fact, they always impressed me because they were extremely professional and extremely reliable.”

6) Bornyl chloride

You:

“I’m not an expert in chemistry. So I checked with actual chemists, who told me that what Mate suggests seems highly unlikely. I was told that heavily chlorinated water couldn’t have caused that chemical compound to penetrate the surface into the deeper layers of wood. Only a gas could have done that.”

This isn’t a question, but a correction. You and your sources are confused here. I never claimed that bornyl chloride was in the chlorinated water (to penetrate the wood). “Alex” never made that claim either. So you’re making a counterpoint to an argument that was never made.

I also should point out that the way that you and Leon address the bornyl chloride issue is illogical and contradictory.

At one point you say that there “was one specific piece of evidence that convinced the team that chlorine gas had been used.” You then quote Leon: “There is a chemical in wood samples, which is formed when the wood is exposed to chlorine gas. Those wood samples, they show that a chemical attack happened.”

But just a few lines later, you acknowledge something contradictory: “the report says this doesn’t definitively prove that the wood came into contact with chlorine gas, the investigators concluded, and check out the very careful language they use, that there were reasonable grounds to believe a chlorine attack had taken place and that the attack had come from the air.” (14:36)

So, putting aside your skewed definition of “the team” – which requires excluding the actual team that deployed to Syria in favor of the “core” team that did not (see “2b” above) – which one is it? Was the team “convinced… that chlorine gas had been used”, or did they only conclude that there were “reasonable grounds” to believe so?

This also contradicts your statement at the end, where you state that “all the evidence needs to be seen together, not in isolation” (29:13) Again, which is it? Was it that “one specific piece of evidence” – the wood samples, or was it “all the evidence… seen together, not in isolation”?

Contrary to what you and Leon claim, the presence of bornyl chloride does not confirm the presence of chlorine gas. As the original report states, it merely indicates that the wood was exposed to hydrogen chloride, which can come from chlorine gas but can also come from other benign sources.

This is why the final report also acknowledged the uncertainty about what the wood samples were exposed to: “Based on these findings alone, it cannot be unequivocally stated that the wood was exposed to chlorine gas, rather than to hydrogen chloride or hydrochloric acid.” It is curious then that Leon is now trying to revise the final report’s own words, and now tell your audience that the wood samples “show that a chemical attack happened.”

If you had been willing to acknowledge the initial, censored report, and Whelan’s letter to the DG expressing his concerns, you might have been able to catch Leon’s egregious error.

7) Note Verbal

Quoting you:

(32:02)

“But here’s something interesting: the OPCW leaker Alex has spent time and energy disputing the idea that there was ever chlorine gas released from those canisters in the two apartment buildings. But when the OPCW reached its conclusions, the Russian and Syrian states didn’t dispute those findings. I’ve managed to see their notes verbale. Those are the responses from member states to the final conclusions of the OPCW. And the OPCW answers all the Syrian and Russian representatives’ questions. But at no point do either the Russian or the Syrian states argue about the Bornyl Chloride found in the wood samples, or the idea that chlorine gas was present at both locations. And maybe that’s because in the document I’ve seen, it’s made clear that the Syrians were given samples from all the evidence gathered in Douma. And so they know the facts of what that evidence shows.” (33:03)

Your attempt to suggest here that Russia and Syria “didn’t dispute those findings” that “there was ever chlorine gas released from those canisters in the two apartment buildings” is deceptive.

First, you falsely insinuate here that you are seeing some kind of damning secret document – “I’ve managed to see their notes verbale”; “…in the document I’ve seen.” But anyone can “manage” to see the notes verbale – they’re freely available on the OPCW website. And reading the Russian note verbal, you’ll see that it undermines your characterization:

“The Russian Federation does not challenge the findings contained in the FFM report regarding the possible presence of molecular chlorine on the cylinders.  However, the parameters, characteristics and exterior of the cylinders, as well as the data obtained from the locations of those incidents, are not consistent with the argument that they were dropped from an aircraft. The existing facts more likely indicate that there is a high probability that both cylinders were placed at Locations 2 and 4 manually rather than dropped from an aircraft. Apparently the factual material contained in the report does not allow us to draw a conclusion as to the use of a toxic chemical as a weapon. On that basis, the Russian Federation insists on the version that there was false evidence and on the staged character of the incident in Douma.”

So Russia does not challenge the claim that there is a “possible” presence of molecular chlorine in the cylinders found in Douma. And that is for obvious reasons: no one has argued that there was no possibility of a chlorine presence. The issue is whether there is evidence to demonstrate that chlorine gas was used as a weapon with any level of confidence. Hence why Russia said – which you omitted – that “the factual material contained in the report does not allow us to draw a conclusion as to the use of a toxic chemical as a weapon,” and that it believes that “that there was false evidence” and a “staged character of the incident in Douma.”

This is clearly contradictory to your claim that Russia and Syria “didn’t dispute those findings” that “there was ever chlorine gas released from those canisters in the two apartment buildings”, because “they know the facts of what that evidence shows.”

8) Repeating Bellingcat’s dubious claims

Your deceptive and false claims, outlined in 6) and 7), happen to mirror the dubious claims recently published by Bellingcat, a website funded by NATO member states. Another supposed OPCW source tried, via Bellingcat, to launder the same deceptive arguments that you have made: that the bornyl chloride constituted a smoking gun (section 6, above), and that Russia and Syria did not challenge the report’s findings (section 7, above).

But as I exposed, the Bellingcat ploy turned out to be a hoax. A purported OPCW letter that made these claims, which Bellingcat claimed was sent to Whelan, was in fact, at best, only a draft that was never actually sent, or at worst a fake from someone outside the OPCW.

The fact that Bellingcat’s text was never sent to Whelan suggests that the OPCW itself might not even stand behind the arguments that Bellingcat’s source and your source, Leon, have each made.

Were you aware of the Bellingcat letter fraud before you published an “extra episode” that made the same dubious claims, and does it give you any pause about airing them?

My hope is that you did not knowingly take part in promoting the deceptive Bellingcat/Leon claims that you aired, and that you will now endeavor to confront your source(s) about how you were misled.

The Bellingcat connection here also raises another issue. The chemist who you interviewed in your attempt to refute me, Andrea Sella, did not actually challenge anything that I have said. But more importantly, Sella has previously contributed to Bellingcat’s attempts to prove that chlorine gas was used in Douma. Did Bellingcat play any role in connecting you with Sella?

9) A researcher with a conflict of interest

The Mayday: Intrigue credits state that Abdul Kader Habak conducted “Arabic translation and additional research.” According to Mr. Habak’s Facebook page, he has worked for the UK-led contractor ARK from 2013 to 2019. This poses a serious conflict of interest.

According to a 2018 report from the British journalist James Harkin in The Intercept, ARK “branded the White Helmets and provided its training and equipment.” ARK was also “funded by the U.S. State Department and the British Foreign Office.” Harkin additionally reported that “ARK was also gathering intelligence on Islamist groups in [Syria], and those reports were being privately forwarded by a British Army liaison officer to U.S. Central Command, with an email recommending additional funding for the organization’s filmmaking arm.” I believe that your researcher, Mr. Habak, worked for this filmmaking arm in Syria.

As the Guardian recently reported, James Le Mesurier – the subject of your “Mayday” series – previously worked for ARK, before taking the White Helmets project with him to his venture, Mayday Rescue.

And as my colleague Ben Norton at The Grayzone has reported based on leaked documents, ARK has also played a critical role in branding and marketing not just the White Helmets, but Syria’s Salafi-jihadist armed opposition:

In a leaked document it filed with the British government, ARK said its “focus since 2012 has been delivering highly effective, politically-and conflict-sensitive Syria programming for the governments of the United Kingdom, United States, Denmark, Canada, Japan and the European Union.” ARK boasted of overseeing $66 million worth of contracts to support pro-opposition efforts in Syria.

…ARK played a central role in developing the foundations of the Syrian political opposition’s narrative. In one leaked document, the firm took credit for the “development of a core Syrian opposition narrative,” which was apparently crafted during a series of workshops with opposition leaders sponsored by the US and UK governments.

…The firm even oversaw the PR strategy for the Supreme Military Council (SMC), the leadership of the official armed wing of Syria’s opposition, the Free Syrian Army (FSA). ARK created a complex PR campaign to “provide a ‘re-branding’ of the SMC in order to distinguish itself from extremist armed opposition groups and to establish the image of a functioning, inclusive, disciplined and professional military body.”

ARK admitted that it sought to whitewash Syria’s armed opposition, which had been largely dominated by Salafi-jihadists, by “Softening the FSA Image.”

…The leaked documents show ARK ran the Twitter and Facebook pages of Syria Civil Defense, known more commonly as the White Helmets. ARK took credit for developing “an internationally-focused communications campaign designed to raise global awareness of the (White Helmets) teams and their life saving work.”

All of this poses a major conflict of interest. The White Helmets is the topic of your podcast. Your researcher, Abdul Kader Habak, worked for a UK government contractor, ARK, that, among other things, branded the White Helmets; ran the White Helmets’ social media accounts; promoted the White Helmets to the public; and [may have] used the White Helmets to gather intelligence for the UK and US militaries.

Were you aware of your researcher’s work for ARK, and ARK’s critical role in establishing and promoting the White Helmets – the very topic of your series? What steps will you be taking to address this serious conflict of interest?

thegrayzone.com

It’s been over 72 hours since The Grayzone published new leaks further exposing how the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has been lying about its investigation into an alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria two years ago.

These new documents make it abundantly clear that OPCW leadership were just plain lying when they claimed that a ballistics expert named Ian Henderson was not a part of the Fact-Finding Mission (FFM) in Douma and played only a “minor supporting role” there. Henderson disagrees with the organisation’s official findings implicating the Syrian government in a chlorine gas attack, finding instead that the gas cylinders on the scene were “manually placed”, indicating that the crime scene was staged and the dozens of civilians killed were the victims of a still-unsolved mass murder.

The silence on these revelations from the OPCW and its usual narrative managers has been deafening.

No reply yet from “OPCW public affairs, to my query about Greyzone allegations,m devastating if true both to official position of OPCW and to lapcat @Bellingcat. : https://t.co/aDYLiy7YQw

— Peter Hitchens (@ClarkeMicah) May 8, 2020

Peter Hitchens, one of the only high-visibility journalists to cover the OPCW scandal, tweeted when the documents first emerged: “I have today formally requested OPCW public affairs to comment on these allegations, which call into question an important statement made by the organisation’s chief and retailed by lapcat Bellingcat about the status of Inspector Ian Henderson.”

“No reply yet from OPCW public affairs, to my query about Greyzone allegations, devastating if true both to official position of OPCW and to lapcat Bellingcat,” Hitchens tweeted a day later.

This silence makes it clear that the OPCW, Bellingcat, and all the other empire-aligned propagandists responsible for managing the mainstream narrative about Syria have opted for the strategy of simply not responding to the damning leaks in order to avoid drawing attention to them. This is actually a very clever (albeit sociopathic) tactic, because western mass media have already clearly demonstrated a collective conspiracy of silence on the OPCW scandal, which is its own scandal in itself. They know they can keep these leaks out of mainstream attention, thereby nullifying their massive implications for western imperialism going forward, simply by ignoring them.

You can understand their frustration, then, when an immensely popular celebrity uses her giant platform to amplify this highly unauthorized news story.

“The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons has made false and misleading statements about two veteran inspectors who challenged a cover-up of their investigation in Syria, leaked documents show.”https://t.co/k8ziZSPVVt via @TheGrayzoneNews @aaronjmate

— Susan Sarandon (@SusanSarandon) May 8, 2020

Actress Susan Sarandon has highlighted the latest revelations in the ever-mounting OPCW scandal on Twitter, and the frantic reaction from Syria spinmeisters makes a perfect illustration of the primacy of narrative control for western warmongers.

War reporter Janine di Giovanni, whose promotion of imperialist narratives and fawning puff pieces over the White Helmets propaganda operation have seen her showered with access and awards by establishment institutions, admonished Sarandon to “refrain from talking about Syria”, making no other argument than the fact that the two have mutual celebrity acquaintances.

“Susan, you are one of my favorite actresses,” said di Giovanni in a now-deleted tweet. “We have friends in common in France via Louis Malle. Please, please refrain from talking about Syria — those of us who worked on the ground documenting war crimes for years (NOT on the regime side) find it excruciatingly. Please stop.”

Again, this is an award-winning professional reporter who frequently publishes in some of the most high-profile outlets in the world like The New York Times and The Guardian. The fact that someone so elevated and so esteemed would find it perfectly normal to publicly cite her friendship with celebrities as a reason for a Hollywood actress to be silent about western imperialism tells you everything you need to know about the state of journalism today, and the “authoritative sources” that are being amplified by Silicon Valley tech giants over voices which actually challenge power like The Grayzone.

When di Giovanni was called out for her freakish behavior, her response was to accuse every single one of her critics of being “Russian trolls” and delete her post.

The regime changers are desperately lobbying @SusanSarandon to refrain from sharing journalism that contradicts their pro war narrative about Syria. Others are resorting to bullying. It’s pathetic. These people can’t engage with the facts, all they can do is try to silence https://t.co/CAatf0ZnJk

— Rania Khalek (@RaniaKhalek) May 9, 2020

Di Giovanni babbled about Russian trolls and cited her friendship with mutual celebrity friends of Sarandon because she did not have any actual facts or arguments to cite against the information Sarandon was sharing. This is because such facts and arguments do not exist. There is no legitimate reason why people should not be publicly discussing and amplifying important authentic documents, so all they’re left with is various iterations of “shut up”.

And indeed if you look at what people are saying about Sarandon’s post on Twitter right now, that is all you will find: mountains of vitriol and precisely zero facts or arguments. These people have no interest in truth, only in controlling the narrative about what’s happening in a nation that has long been targeted for regime change by the US-centralized empire.

“I’m sorry it has come to this, Susan. But having explained to you many times why your conspiracy theories are wrong, dangerous, and hurtful, I can say without a shadow of doubt that you are an idiot without a conscience,” said the despicable Idrees Ahmad, whose narrative management on Syria is so insanely aggressive that it has literally seen him threaten oppositional journalists with menacing phone calls in order to scare them away from reporting on Syria.

A quick glance through Ahmad’s previous tweets to Sarandon reveals that the reasons he has been giving her for why her “conspiracy theories are wrong” are actually “reasons” which are debunked in the very article Sarandon just shared.

“Ian Henderson, a disgruntled OPCW employee, sent his speculative assessment to the ‘Working Group’. But when the working group tried to establish his credentials, the OPCW confirmed that he was NOT part of the Fact Finding Mission,” Ahmad tweeted at Sarandon when she shared an article of mine on the Henderson leak last year.

“Did you read the OPCW statement where it says the man who wrote it is not part of the fact finding mission? Which means he had no direct access to evidence or the site,” Ahmad tweeted to Sarandon elsewhere.

Where is the statement from OPCW that Ian Henderson’s report is just his personal dissenting opinion? The only statement I’ve seen is this one they gave saying they’re looking into how his report got leaked. pic.twitter.com/VWu1rdYGbn

— Susan Sarandon (@SusanSarandon) May 18, 2019

Ahmad has no interest whatsoever in truth or facts, but only in trying to mitigate the damage done to the establishment narrative control agenda that Sarandon’s tweet caused. Which will surprise no one who knows anything about him.

The only narrative manager who to my knowledge has made any attempt at all to even address the contents of the new OPCW leaks has been Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins, who took the somewhat bizarre approach of telling people that they cannot see the evidence that is directly in front of their faces.

“No, it doesn’t show he was in the FFM, this issue is addressed in the OPCW report, he was asked to support the work of the FFM, but he wasn’t part of the FFM,” Higgins tweeted about Henderson under Sarandon’s post.

This claim is of course directly refuted by the leaked mission personnel list in the Grayzone article Sarandon shared which very clearly and explicitly lists Ian Henderson as “FFM” under the column labeled “Title”.

So it’s been a very revealing ride. We were lied to about Syria, and the narrative managers responsible for manipulating public perception of that lie have been falling all over themselves trying to conceal this obvious fact. Here’s hoping the truth keeps coming into the light, and that those with platforms large enough to punch through the propaganda matrix continue to do so.

medium.com

Readers may remember that previously, towards the end of 2019, leaked emails from two key OPCW investigators who were dispatched to Douma in Syria in 2018, revealed that their original remarks – which indicated that the Assad regime could not have orchestrated the chemical attack – were removed from the final edited report. This act alone was the starter’s pistol on a rebellion which is threatening to severely damage the organisation’s credibility in the field and confirms to many that the role of it is purely as an apparatus for the West’s agenda in the field of conflict around the world, against those who stand up to the giants of NATO.

A fourth whistleblower has now emerged from the farcical debacle which will surely reach a tipping point soon either threatening to remove OPCW’s Spanish chief – the main culprit who tarnished the two officers who kicked off the scandal in the first place – or for the organisation itself to have a world-wide identity problem which will manifest itself in many countries simply refusing to allow it entry into hotspots. It’s hard to see how Syria’s Assad would continue to allow OPCW inspectors into Syria following another chemical attack after the organisation has been “hijacked” by western interests who appear to go to extraordinary levels to falsify evidence to serve a narrative.

The latest OPCW official to step forward and support the findings of the two initial inspectors, whose scandal was revealed in a series of leaked emails in May 2019, has spoken of the culture of intimidation within the organisation and how the two inspectors have been dealt a grave injustice in their work and in their determination to salvage credibility for their employer.

“The mistreatment of two highly regarded and accomplished professionals can only be described as abhorrent,” the OPCW official wrote in an email to The Grayzone website. “I fully support their endeavours, in that it is for the greater good and not for personal gain or in the name of any political agenda. They are in fact trying to protect the integrity of the organisation which has been hijacked and brought into shameful disrepute.”

Central to the dispute surrounding the two officers who have had their conclusions dismissed by OPCW’s chief, is the discovery by one of the investigators that the gas canisters on the ground appeared not to have been dropped from an aircraft but rather placed there. This finding is important as it destroys the West’s assertion that the attack at Douma was made by the Assad regime which it alleges dropped the chemicals from a plane or a helicopter.

This incendiary finding was removed from the final redacted report which leans more on the Assad theory and keeps a safe distance from the distinct possibility that the entire attack was staged by western-backed extremist groups in the area.

One of the two whistleblowers and former inspectors is believed to be Ian Henderson, a 12-year veteran of the organization and weapons expert. According to the Grayzone, “Henderson led on-the-ground inspections in Douma and conducted a detailed engineering study of gas cylinders found at the scene” and concluded that the cylinders were likely “manually placed” rather than being dropped by air. The second officer is not named but it believed to be of higher rank who wrote one version of a final report, which was ultimately rejected for a redacted version which failed to acknowledge the findings of the two investigators – ultimately that it could not have been an attack by Assad’s forces.

Their work continues to draw wrath from the OPCW’s boss General Fernando Arias who remarkably seems to be conducting a smear campaign against them slamming their work as “erroneous, uninformed, and wrong,” believed to be what has sparked a new whistleblower – believed to be British – to come forward with startling new allegations which cast a shadow over the integrity of the organisation.

“It is quite unbelievable that valid scientific concerns are being brazenly ignored in favour of a predetermined narrative,” the email reads. “The lack of transparency in an investigative process with such enormous ramifications is frightful.”

Yet the culture of arbitrary vengeance against those who question the biased narrative or working practices of its chief, is deeply worrying, as the latest whistleblower reveals in the email.

“I am one of many who were stunned and frightened into silence by the reality how the organisation operates,” the official wrote. “The threat of personal harm is not an illusion, or else many others would have spoken out by now.”

It’s unclear what “personal harm” means. But even if it is punitive measures which mean blocked promotion or even constructive dismissal, it raises a number of questions as to the integrity of the OPCW itself which will reverberate around the world’s so-called democratic centres of debate and will spark a new debate among those corridors. Does the OPCW have any credibility left?

More evidence has emerged to indict the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in carrying out a despicable cover-up in Syria. Even more damning is that the cover-up appears to have been orchestrated at the highest ranks of the organization in response to political pressure from the United States and Western allies.

This is a grave matter considering the UN-affiliated body is supposed to be a neutral, technical watchdog overseeing the implementation of the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention banning the use of such weapons of mass destruction. The seeming politicization of the OPCW means that it has become a propaganda tool for Western powers which can be used to advance nefarious geopolitical agendas. The erosion of its authority is thus a serious setback to global efforts aimed at non-proliferation and maintaining security.

The incident in question relates to an alleged chemical weapon (CW) attack in Douma, a suburb near the Syrian capital Damascus, on April 7, 2018. The incident was followed a week later by up to 100 airstrikes against Syria carried out by the US, Britain and France on April 14. Those airstrikes were said to be in retaliation for the alleged use of CW by Syrian state forces in Douma. Video footage taken by anti-government militants of the CW incident in which children were seen being doused with water, ostensibly in a hospital, was widely circulated by Western news media. The Syrian government was accused of dropping toxic material from helicopters on to the civilian population. President Donald Trump quickly vilified Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad as being an “animal”; Trump also condemned Russia and Iran for being allies of Assad.

Subsequent OPCW reports, in July 2018 and March 2019, while not directly blaming the Syrian government, did however suggest that the Western and militant narrative was essentially correct. Namely, that reactive chlorine was dropped on civilians from the air. In that way, the OPCW was giving retrospective justification for the US, British and French airstrikes against Syria.

Over the past year, several leaked documents from OPCW insiders published by Wikileaks have shown a very different picture. The alternative perspective is that the OPCW’s official reports were doctored in such a way as to portray a false account of what really happened in Douma. The leaks claimed that technical assessments by OPCW experts who were on the ground were omitted. In particular the finding that gas cylinders were not dropped from the air, but rather were put in place in buildings by persons who were in the location. Furthermore, the leaks indicated that the cover-up implicating the Syrian government was sanctioned by senior OPCW officials based at the organization’s headquarters in The Hague.

Last week, the OPCW director-general Fernando Arias published an extraordinary statement in which he excoriated the inspectors behind the leaks. He accused them of “egregious behavior” and denigrated them as being disgruntled employees who were in breach of professional standards.

“The OPCW is, and will remain, the global institution mandated to deal with chemical weapons in an impartial and independent manner,” wrote the director-general in a high-profile statement published on February 6.

Subsequent leaks from OPCW personnel, cited in an exclusive report this week by the Grayzone independent journalist site, have shown director-general Arias’ remarks to be disingenuous. The inspectors he sought to undermine were highly regarded within the organization and were closely involved in the field work pertaining to the Douma incident. The leaks confirm earlier exposés pointing to a cover-up by OPCW senior staff at the behest of American political pressure. The conclusions made in the official OPCW report were at odds with the field research which indicated that the CW incident was a staged provocation carried out by the anti-government militants. The official report contradicted the field research and implied the culprit was the Syrian government, and in that way was a retrospective justification for the Western military offensive against Syria.

A third OPCW whistleblower cited by Grayzone corroborates previous leaks that the UN body distorted the incident in Douma. The third source also attests that the inspectors denigrated by the OPCW chief were impeccable scientists adhering to professional standards. Moreover, the latest whistleblower also speaks in chilling terms of a culture of intimidation and fear within the OPCW to toe the line in order to avoid retribution and even “personal harm”.

This OPCW source is quoted as saying: “I fear those behind the crimes that have been perpetrated in the name of ‘humanity and democracy’… they will not hesitate to do harm to me and my family, they have done worse, many times, even in the UK… I don’t want to expose myself and my family to their violence and revenge, I don’t want to live in fear of crossing the street!”

Note the comment, “even in the UK”. Is that an oblique reference to British spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter who were mysteriously poisoned in Salisbury in March 2018, and have never been seen since, presumably held to this day in British state custody?

As Aaron Maté at Grayzone documents, American government officials such as John Bolton have a long and sordid history of threatening the OPCW personnel going as far back as the spurious allegations of chemical weapons in Iraq leading up to the 2003 US-led war.

What this means is that the UN-affiliated OPCW has become fatally compromised as a political tool for the US and its Western allies. Its reports on Syria in particular are discredited, attributing blame to the wrong parties while whitewashing the real culprits – the jihadist militants and their media agents in the White Helmets. What’s more, an organization which is supposed to be dedicated to upholding international security is actually allowing itself to be used for propaganda purposes leading to aggression.

As things stand, the US, British and French airstrikes on Syria in April 2018 were an unprovoked aggression against a sovereign nation – a war crime. And the OPCW is complicit in that war crime.

Ben NORTON

Video and a transcript of former OPCW engineer and dissenter Ian Henderson’s UN testimony appears at the end of this report.

A former lead investigator from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has spoken out at the United Nations, stating in no uncertain terms that the scientific evidence suggests there was no gas attack in Douma, Syria in April 2018.

The dissenter, Ian Henderson, worked for 12 years at the international watchdog organization, serving as an inspection team leader and engineering expert. Among his most consequential jobs was assisting the international body’s fact-finding mission (FFM) on the ground in Douma.

He told a UN Security Council session convened on January 20 by Russia’s delegation that OPCW management had rejected his group’s scientific research, dismissed the team, and produced another report that totally contradicted their initial findings.

“We had serious misgivings that a chemical attack had occurred,” Henderson said, referring to the FFM team in Douma.

The former OPCW inspector added that he had compiled evidence through months of research that “provided further support for the view that there had not been a chemical attack.”

A former OPCW inspection team leader and engineering expert told the UN Security Council that their investigation in Douma, Syria suggested no chemical attack took place. But their findings were suppressed and reversed

Read more here: https://t.co/HI028MZl0k

via @BenjaminNorton pic.twitter.com/rmaSzWzs5Z

— The Grayzone (@TheGrayzoneNews) January 22, 2020

Foreign-backed Islamist militants and the Western government-funded regime-change influence operation known as the White Helmets accused the Syrian government of dropping gas cylinders and killing dozens of people in the city of Douma on April 7, 2018. Damascus rejected the accusation, claiming the incident was staged by the insurgents.

At the time, Douma was controlled by the extremist Salafi-jihadist militia Jaysh al-Islam, which was created and funded by Saudi Arabia and formerly allied with Syria’s powerful al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra.

The governments of the United States, Britain, and France responded to the allegations of a chemical attack by launching airstrikes against the Syrian government on April 14. The military assault was illegal under international law, as the countries did not have UN authorization.

Numerous OPCW whistleblowers and leaks challenge Western government claims

In May 2019, an internal OPCW engineering assessment was leaked to the public. The document, authored by Ian Henderson, said the “dimensions, characteristics and appearance of the cylinders” in Douma “were inconsistent with what would have been expected in the case of either cylinder having been delivered from an aircraft,” adding that there is “a higher probability that both cylinders were manually placed at those two locations rather than being delivered from aircraft.”

After reviewing the leaked report, MIT professor emeritus of Science, Technology and International Security Theodore Postol told The Grayzone, “The evidence is overwhelming that the gas attacks were staged.” Postol also accused OPCW leadership of overseeing “compromised reporting” and ignoring scientific evidence.

In November, a second OPCW whistleblower came forward and accused the organization’s leadership of suppressing countervailing evidence, under pressure by three US government officials.

WikiLeaks has published numerous internal emails from the OPCW that reveal allegations that the body’s management staff doctored the Douma report.

As the evidence of internal suppression grew, the OPCW’s first director-general, José Bustani, decided to speak out. “The convincing evidence of irregular behavior in the OPCW investigation of the alleged Douma chemical attack confirms doubts and suspicions I already had,” Bustani stated.

“I could make no sense of what I was reading in the international press. Even official reports of investigations seemed incoherent at best. The picture is certainly clearer now, although very disturbing,” the former OPCW head concluded.

OPCW whistleblower testimony at UN Security Council meeting on Douma

On January 20, 2020, Ian Henderson delivered his first in-person testimony, alleging suppression by OPCW leadership. He spoke at a UN Security Council Arria-Formula meeting on the fact-finding mission report on Douma.

(Video of the session follows at the bottom of this article, along with a full transcript of Henderson’s testimony.)

China’s mission to the UN invited Ian Henderson to testify in person at the Security Council session. Henderson said in his testimony that he had planned to attend, but was unable to get a visa waiver from the US government. (The Trump administration has repeatedly blocked access to the UN for representatives from countries that do not kowtow to its interests, turning UN visas into a political weapon in blatant violation of the international body’s headquarters agreement.)

Henderson told the Security Council in a pre-recorded video message that he was not the only OPCW inspector to question the leadership’s treatment of the Douma investigation.

“My concern, which was shared by a number of other inspectors, relates to the subsequent management lockdown and the practices in the later analysis and compilation of a final report,” Henderson explained.

Soon after the alleged incident in Douma in April 2018, the OPCW FFM team had deployed to the ground to carry out an investigation, which it noted included environmental samples, interviews with witnesses, and data collection.

In July 2018, the FFM published its interim report, stating that it found no evidence of chemical weapons use in Douma. (“The results show that no organophosphorous nerve agents or their degradation products were detected in the environmental samples or in the plasma samples taken from alleged casualties,” the report indicated.)

“By the time of release of the interim report in July 2018, our understanding was that we had serious misgivings that a chemical attack had occurred,” Henderson told the Security Council.

After this inspection that led to the interim report, however, Henderson said the OPCW leadership decided to create a new team, “the so-called FFM core team, which essentially resulted in the dismissal of all of the inspectors who had been on the team deployed to locations in Douma and had been following up with their findings and analysis.”

Then in March 2019, this new OPCW team released a final report, in which it claimed that chemical weapons had been used in Douma.

“The findings in the final FFM report were contradictory, were a complete turnaround with what the team had understood collectively during and after the Douma deployments,” Henderson remarked at the UN session.

“The report did not make clear what new findings, facts, information, data, or analysis in the fields of witness testimony, toxicology studies, chemical analysis, and engineering, and/or ballistic studies had resulted in the complete turn-around in the situation from what was understood by the majority of the team, and the entire Douma [FFM] team, in July 2018,” Henderson stated.

The former OPCW expert added, “I had followed up with a further six months of engineering and ballistic studies into these cylinders, the result of which had provided further support for the view that there had not been a chemical attack.”

US government pressure on the OPCW

The US government responded to this historic testimony at the UN session by attacking Russia, which sponsored the Arria-Formula meeting.

Acting US representative Cherith Norman Chalet praised the OPCW, aggressively condemned the “Assad regime,” and told the UN that the “United States is proud to support the vital, life-saving work of the White Helmets” – a US and UK-backed organization that collaborated extensively with ISIS and al-Qaeda and have been involved in numerous executions in Syrian territory occupied by Islamist extremists.

The US government has a long history of pressuring and manipulating the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, the George W. Bush administration threatened José Bustani, the first director of the OPCW, and pressured him to resign.

In 2002, as the Bush White House was preparing to wage a war on Iraq, Bustani made an agreement with the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein that would have permitted OPCW inspectors to come to the country unannounced for weapons investigations. This infuriated the US government.

Then-Under Secretary of State John Bolton told Bustani in 2002 that US Vice President Dick “Cheney wants you out.” Bolton threatened the OPCW director-general, stating, “You have 24 hours to leave the organization, and if you don’t comply with this decision by Washington, we have ways to retaliate against you… We know where your kids live.”

Attacking the credibility of Ian Henderson

While OPCW managers have kept curiously silent amid the scandal over their Douma report, an interventionist media outlet called Bellingcat has functioned as an outsourced press shop, aggressively defending the official narrative and attacking its most prominent critics, including Ian Henderson.

Bellingcat is funded by the US government’s regime-change arm, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and is part of an initiative bankrolled by the British Foreign Office.

Following Henderson’s testimony, Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins tried to besmirch the former OPCW engineer’s credibility by implying he was being used by Russia. Until 2019, Higgins worked at the Atlantic Council, a pro-war think tank financed by the American and British governments, as well as by NATO.

Supporters of the OPCW’s apparently doctored final report have relied heavily on Bellingcat to try to discredit the whistleblowers and growing leaks. Scientific expert Theodor Postol, who debated Higgins, has noted that Bellingcat “have no scientific credibility at any level.” Postol says he even suspects that OPCW management may have relied on Bellingcat’s highly dubious claims in its own compromised reporting.

Higgins has no expertise or scientific credentials, and even The New York Times acknowledged in a highly sympathetic piece that “Higgins attributed his skill not to any special knowledge of international conflicts or digital data, but to the hours he had spent playing video games, which, he said, gave him the idea that any mystery can be cracked.”

In his testimony before the UN Security Council, Ian Henderson stressed that he was speaking out in line with his duties as a scientific expert.

Henderson said he does not even like the term whistleblower and would not use it to describe himself, because, “I’m a former OPCW specialist who has concerns in an area, and I consider this a legitimate and appropriate forum to explain again these concerns.”

Russia’s UN representative added that Moscow had also invited the OPCW director-general and representatives of the organization’s Technical Secretariat, but they chose not to participate in the session.

Video of the UN Security Council session on the OPCW’s Douma report

Ian Henderson’s testimony begins at 57:30 in this official UN video:

Transcript: Testimony by OPCW whistleblower Ian Henderson at the UN Security Council

“My name is Ian Henderson. I’m a former OPCW inspection team leader, having served for about 12 years. I heard about this meeting and I was invited by the minister, councilor of the Chinese mission to the UN. Unfortunately due to unforeseen circumstances around my ESTA visa waiver status, I was not able to travel. I thus submitted a written statement, to which I will now add a short introduction.

I need to point out at the outset that I’m not a whistleblower; I don’t like that term. I’m a former OPCW specialist who has concerns in an area, and I consider this a legitimate and appropriate forum to explain again these concerns.

Secondly, I must point out that I hold the OPCW in the highest regard, as well as the professionalism of the staff members who work there. The organization is not broken; I must stress that. However the concern I have does relate to some specific management practices in certain sensitive missions.

The concern of course relates to the FFM investigation into the alleged chemical attack on the 7th of April in Douma, in Syria. My concern, which was shared by a number of other inspectors, relates to the subsequent management lockdown and the practices in the later analysis and compilation of a final report.

There were two teams deployed; one team, which I joined shortly after the start of field deployments, was to Douma in Syria; the other team deployed to country X.

The main concern relates to the announcement in July 2018 of a new concept, the so-called FFM core team, which essentially resulted in the dismissal of all of the inspectors who had been on the team deployed to locations in Douma and had been following up with their findings and analysis.

The findings in the final FFM report were contradictory, were a complete turnaround with what the team had understood collectively during and after the Douma deployments. And by the time of release of the interim report in July 2018, our understanding was that we had serious misgivings that a chemical attack had occurred.

What the final FFM report does not make clear, and thus does not reflect the views of the team members who deployed to Douma — in which case I really can only speak for myself at this stage — the report did not make clear what new findings, facts, information, data, or analysis in the fields of witness testimony, toxicology studies, chemical analysis, and engineering, and/or ballistic studies had resulted in the complete turn-around in the situation from what was understood by the majority of the team, and the entire Douma team, in July 2018.

In my case, I had followed up with a further six months of engineering and ballistic studies into these cylinders, the result of which had provided further support for the view that there had not been a chemical attack.

This needs to be properly resolved, we believe through the rigors of science and engineering. In my situation, it’s not a political debate. I’m very aware that there is a political debate surrounding this.

Perhaps a closing comment from my side is that I was also the inspection team leader who developed and launched the inspections, the highly intrusive inspections, of the Barzah SSRC facility, just outside Damascus. And I did the inspections and wrote the reports for the two inspections prior to, and the inspection after the chemical facility, or the laboratory complex at Barzah SSRC, had been destroyed by the missile strike.

That, however, is another story altogether, and I shall now close. Thank you.”

thegrayzone.com

This is getting really, really, really weird.

WikiLeaks has published yet another set of leaked internal documents from within the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) adding even more material to the mountain of evidence that we’ve been lied to about an alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma, Syria last year which resulted in airstrikes upon that nation from the US, UK and France.

This new WikiLeaks drop includes an email from the OPCW Chief of Cabinet Sebastien Braha (who is reportedly so detested by organisation inspectors that they code named him “Voldemort”) throwing a fit over the Ian Henderson Engineering Assessment which found that the Douma incident was likely a staged event. Braha is seen ordering OPCW staff to “remove all traces, if any, of its delivery/storage/whatever” from the organisation’s secure registry.

Minutes from an OPCW meeting with toxicologists specialized in chemical weapons: “the experts were conclusive in their statements that there was
no correlation between symptoms and chlorine exposure”.https://t.co/j5Jgjiz8UY pic.twitter.com/vgPaTtsdQN

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) 27 декабря 2019 г.

The drop also includes the minutes from an OPCW toxicology meeting with “three Toxicologists/Clinical pharmacologists, one bioanalytical and toxicological chemist”, all four of whom are specialists in chemical weapons analysis.

“With respect to the consistency of the observed and reported symptoms of the alleged victims with possible exposure to chlorine gas or similar, the experts were conclusive in their statements that there was no correlation between symptoms and chlorine exposure,” the document reads.

According to the leaked minutes from the toxicology meeting, the chief expert offered “the possibility of the event being a propaganda exercise” as one potential explanation for the Douma incident. The other OPCW experts agreed that the key “take-away message” from the meeting was “that the symptoms observed were inconsistent with exposure to chlorine and no other obvious candidate chemical causing the symptoms could be identified”.

Like all the other many, many, many, many different leaks which have been hemorrhaging from the OPCW about the Douma incident, none of the important information contained in these publications was included in any of the OPCW’s public reports on the matter. According to the OPCW’s Final Report published in March 2019, the investigative team found “reasonable grounds that the use of a toxic chemical as a weapon took place. This toxic chemical contained reactive chlorine. The toxic chemical was likely molecular chlorine.”

We now know that these “reasonable grounds” contain more holes than a spaghetti strainer executed by firing squad. This is extremely important information about an unsolved war crime which resulted in dozens of civilian deaths and led to an act of war which cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars and had many far-reaching geopolitical consequences.

Yet the mass media, freakishly, has had absolutely nothing to say about this extremely newsworthy story.

As of this writing, a Google News search for this story brings up an article by RT, another by Al-Masdar News, and some entries by alternative outlets you’ve almost certainly never heard of like UrduPoint News and People’s Pundit Daily.

Make no mistake about it: this is insane. The fact that an extremely important news story of immense geopolitical consequence is not getting any mainstream news media coverage, at all, is absolutely stark raving insane.

Up until the OPCW leaks, WikiLeaks drops always made mainstream news headlines. Everyone remembers how the 2016 news cycle was largely dominated by leaked Democratic Party emails emerging from the outlet. Even the relatively minor ICE agents publication by WikiLeaks last year, containing information that was already public, garnered headlines from top US outlets like The Washington Post , Newsweek, and USA Today. Now, on this exponentially more important story, zero coverage.

The mass media’s stone-dead silence on the OPCW scandal is becoming its own scandal, of equal or perhaps even greater significance than the OPCW scandal itself. It opens up a whole litany of questions which have tremendous importance for every citizen of the western world; questions like, how are people supposed to participate in democracy if all the outlets they normally turn to to make informed voting decisions adamantly refuse to tell them about the existence of massive news stories like the OPCW scandal? How are people meant to address such conspiracies of silence when there is no mechanism in place to hold the entire mass media to account for its complicity in it? And by what mechanism are all these outlets unifying in that conspiracy of silence?

We can at least gain some insight into that last question with the internal Newsweek emails which were published by journalist Tareq Haddad two weeks ago. The emails feature multiple Newsweek editors telling Haddad that they would not publish a word about the OPCW leaks for two reasons: (1) because no other outlets were reporting on them, and (2) because the US government-funded narrative management firm Bellingcat had published a laughably bogus article explaining why the leaks weren’t newsworthy. Haddad has since resigned from Newsweek.

We may be certain that this story is being killed in news rooms all around the world in similar fashion, and possibly using those very same excuses. As long as no other “respectable” (i.e. establishment) outlets are covering this story, it can be treated as a non-story, using a deceitful US government-funded narrative management operation as justification as needed. If one journalist threw his life into chaos and uncertainty by resigning and blowing the whistle on this conspiracy of silence, we may be certain that the same is happening to countless others who don’t have to courage and/or ability to do the same.

Our fearless media watchdogs still maintaining complete blackout on @OPCW whistleblower leaks debunking WMD attack in Douma. The leaks show that Trump—like Dubya— used fake WMDs to bomb Arab country—then strong-armed @OPCW to cover up the lies.https://t.co/bdbzf6py8p

— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) 27 декабря 2019 г.

Many alternative media commentators are highlighting this news media blackout on social media today.

“Our fearless media watchdogs still maintaining complete blackout on OPCW whistleblower leaks debunking WMD attack in Douma. The leaks show that Trump — like Dubya — used fake WMDs to bomb Arab country — then strong-armed OPCW to cover up the lies,” tweeted journalist Mark Ames.

“The US attacked Syria for a chemical attack by Assad last year. But official OPCW scientists who investigated the event didn’t find evidence the Syrian military used chemical weapons. The media has chosen to ignore this story and fire its own journalists who try to report on it,” tweeted author and analyst Max Abrahms.

“This is the FOURTH leak showing how the OPCW fabricated a report on a supposed Syrian ‘chemical’ attack,” tweeted journalist Ben Norton. “And mainstream Western corporate media outlets are still silent, showing how authoritarian these ‘democracies’ are and how tightly they control info.”

“Media silence on this story is its own scandal,” tweeted journalist Aaron Maté.

But this spin machine is twirling off its axis trying to normalize this silence.

Surprise, surprise, Wikileaks didn’t leak the next email in this chain from the OPCW questioning why Ian Henderson was creating rogue reports.

This email also quite clearly contradicts “Alex’s” claim that Henderson was in the FFM. pic.twitter.com/qcJkAyXe9W

— Nick Waters (@N_Waters89) 27 декабря 2019 г.

Bellingcat narrative jockeys such as “senior investigator” Nick Waters are already scrambling to perception manage everyone into believing their own eyes are lying to them. Waters has a thread on Twitter that’s being shared around by all the usual Syria spinmeisters claiming, based on no evidence whatsoever, that WikiLeaks is selectively publishing the documents it has to create a false impression of events in the OPCW. Waters falsely claims that an email by Sebastien “Voldemort” Braha — the guy at the center of the scandal — proves that Ian Henderson was not a part of the Fact-Finding Mission (FFM) in Douma, in contradiction to the claims made by the anonymous second OPCW whistleblower who goes by the pseudonym of “Alex”.

As Waters is one hundred percent aware, Henderson absolutely was part of the Douma Fact-Finding Mission, and one of the FFM members who actually went to Douma no less. I’ve put together a Twitter thread refuting Waters’ ridiculous claims which you can read by clicking here, but in short an arbitrary distinction seems to have been made between the FFM and the “FFM core team”, or what is labeled the “FFM Alpha team” in a newly leaked email trying to marginalize Henderson’s assessment. Henderson actually went to Douma as part of the FFM, unlike almost all members of the so-called “core team” who except for one paramedic operated solely in another nation (probably Turkey).

Of course, the distinction of whether Henderson was or was not “in the FFM” is also itself irrelevant and arbitrary, since we know for a fact that he is a longtime OPCW inspector who went to Douma and contributed an assessment which was hidden from the public by the OPCW.

So this narrative being spun by the US government-funded propagandists at Bellingcat is bogus from top to bottom, but what’s infuriating is that we already know who editors in news rooms are going to listen to.

“We have this alternative media ecosystem that is driving a lot of disinformation. It is not understood by journalists or anyone really beyond a very small group of people who are really engaged with it,” @EliotHiggins says https://t.co/RWi2Mqy8jV

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) 27 декабря 2019 г.

It’s absolutely amazing how tightly interlaced Bellingcat is with the upper echelons of mainstream news media and the public framing of what’s going on in Syria. Mere hours after the latest WikiLeaks drop, CNN pundit Brian Stelter shared an article about Bellingcat founder and former Atlantic Council Senior Fellow Eliot Higgins, who warns of the dangers posed by alternative media reporters who cover underreported stories like the OPCW scandal.

“We have this alternative media ecosystem that is driving a lot of disinformation. It is not understood by journalists or anyone really beyond a very small group of people who are really engaged with it,” reads the ironic Higgins quote in the excerpt shared by Stelter.

We’ve been seeing a mad rush from mass media pundits to give this US government-funded narrative management operation unearned and undeserved legitimacy, churning out tweets like Stelter’s and fawning puff pieces by The New York Times, The Guardian and The New Yorker. This unearned and undeserved legitimacy is then used by editors to justify looking to Bellingcat for instructions on how to think about important information on Syria rather than doing their own basic investigation and analysis. It’s a self-validating feedback loop which just so happens to work out very conveniently for the government which funds Bellingcat.

It remains unknown exactly what’s transpiring in news rooms around the world to maintain the conspiracy of silence on the OPCW scandal, but what is known is that by itself this scandalous silence is enough to fully discredit the mass media forever. WikiLeaks has exposed these outlets for the monolithic propaganda engine that they really are, and they did it just by publishing extremely newsworthy leak after extremely newsworthy leak.

In order to perception manage us any harder, these freaks are going to have to go around literally confiscating our ears and eyeballs.

medium.com

Is the media suppressing evidence that the 2018 chemical ‘attack’ in Syria didn’t happen the way officials said it did?

Scott RITTER