By Aaron MATÉ

In the early days of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons’ investigation of an alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria, expert toxicologists ruled out chlorine gas as the cause of death for the more than 40 civilians reported at the scene. Instead of publishing this finding, senior OPCW officials concealed it, and then launched an investigation of a veteran inspector who questioned the censorship.

The suppression of the toxicologists is among a series of deceptions by the OPCW leadership to corrupt the Douma probe’s scientific process, as detailed in this new multi-part investigation by The Grayzone. More than three years later, the high-level campaign of censorship and muzzling has mired the world’s top chemical weapons watchdog in scandal.

The manipulation began when the OPCW’s Fact-Finding Mission (FFM) produced a 115-page report in June 2018. The report found no evidence of a chemical weapons attack in Douma. This undermined the stated pretext for US-led air strikes on Syria two months prior, and raised the possibility that insurgents had staged the April 7, 2018 incident to frame the Syrian government.

But as leaked documents later revealed, this original report was kept from the public. Instead, senior OPCW officials tried to rush out a replacement, doctored version that falsely claimed evidence of chemical weapons use. The original report’s chief author, Dr. Brendan Whelan, thwarted the release of the bogus substitute only after discovering it at the last minute and sending an email of protest.

Whelan’s successful June 22nd intervention proved to be one of his last. In the following months, a tense standoff ensued between OPCW team members who wanted to follow the facts, and senior officials determined to reinforce the US-led narrative that a chlorine attack had occurred. A delegation of US representatives was brought in to lobby the inspectors. The original team that deployed to Douma was usurped by officials who never set foot there. And Whelan was effectively sidelined until his scheduled departure from the organization in September 2018.

When the OPCW released its final report on the Douma incident in March 2019, the science lost. Contradicting the original report, the final report now claimed that there were “reasonable grounds” to believe that a chemical attack occurred in Douma, and that “the toxic chemical was likely molecular chlorine.”

The US, which had bombed Syria in April 2018 along with the UK and France, claimed vindication. “The conclusions in the FFM report support what the United States determined in our assessment of the attack last April – that the regime is responsible for this heinous chemical weapons attack that killed and injured civilians,” a State Department spokesperson said.

Although the final report of March 2019 purported to be the OPCW’s verdict, a trove of leaked internal documents and emails has since surfaced, at Wikileaks and The Grayzone, that undermine the US-led narrative.

Drawing on these published documents, OPCW sources, and previously undisclosed leaks, this multi-part investigation by The Grayzone uncovers the OPCW leadership’s extensive and systematic effort to manipulate the science.

This installment details how senior OPCW officials censored the conclusions of expert toxicologists who ruled out chlorine gas as the cause of death in Douma. The OPCW not only suppressed the toxicologists’ findings but concealed the fact that they were ever consulted.

In a previously unreported incident, the OPCW also targeted Whelan for trying to raise alarm about this act of subterfuge. In August 2019, Whelan reached out to colleagues who were aware of the censored toxicologists’ conclusions. But instead of eliciting support to question the suppression, Whelan found himself the subject of an OPCW probe.

By erasing and blocking the findings of leading specialists — and investigating Whelan for voicing concern in response — the OPCW leadership ensured that an organization committed to “a world free of chemical weapons” would in fact become, in its high-stakes Douma probe, free of world-leading chemical weapons expertise.

How the OPCW concealed an inconvenient conclusion

 How the 40 plus victims died in Douma on April 7 2018, has been one of the most contested and controversial aspects of the OPCW’s investigation. It is also where the most blatant suppression of evidence and scientific deception took place.

In video footage supplied by insurgent-tied groups, the Douma victims were filmed in piles strewn across an apartment building referred to by the OPCW as “Location 2.” Many had profuse frothing from the nose and mouth, and numerous victims showed discoloration of the skin around their eyes. A gas cylinder could be seen above a crater on the roof.

In the immediate aftermath, two toxic chemicals were suspected: sarin, a deadly nerve agent; and chlorine gas, a much less, but still toxic chemical widely used in industry and water treatment plants.

Outside experts, however, quickly rejected the likelihood of chlorine. On April 10th, toxicologist and Professor Alastair Hay OBE, then-member of the OPCW’s Education and Outreach board and recipient of its Hague Award, dismissed the notion that victims could have been poisoned by chlorine gas. The victims’ symptoms, Hay told the Washington Post, were “much, much more consistent with nerve-agent-type exposure.”

“It’s just bodies piled up…There’s a young child with foam at the nose and a boy with foam on its [sic] mouth. Chlorine victims usually manage to get out to somewhere they can get treatment,” Hay observed. But in Douma, the victims “have pretty much died where they were when they inhaled the agent. They’ve just dropped dead.”

Other experts interviewed by the Post agreed with Hay’s analysis, concluding that “the speed with which the victims died suggested that a nerve agent was used,” as “chlorine usually takes longer to work.” To date, there are no recognized chemical weapons experts who have gone on record to state that the Douma victims’ rapid, and in some reported cases immediate onset, of profuse frothing is consistent with chlorine gas exposure.

On the ground in Douma, the OPCW team collected dozens of samples at the scene of the alleged attacks. If a nerve agent had indeed been used, then these samples would likely detect it. But on May 22nd, two weeks after their return to headquarters at the Hague, the inspectors received some puzzling results.

The OPCW’s Designated Labs that were contracted for analysis found no evidence of nerve agents in either environmental or biological samples. The labs only reported finding traces of innocuous chemicals known as chlorinated organic compounds (COCs). The COCs’ presence left open the possibility that the samples might have been in contact with something as deadly as chlorine gas, or as benign as household bleach. (Here, too, the science became highly contested, as this series will address in a follow-up article).

Regardless of whether there was evidence of chlorine gas or not, the finding that no nerve agents were present raised an obvious conflict.

Like Professor Hay, the OPCW inspectors knew that rapid or immediate onset of profuse frothing from the mouth and nose was a classic sign of nerve agent exposure. It was most certainly not consistent with chlorine poisoning — if indeed there had been any chlorine release at Location 2, which was still not a given.

The ramifications were huge. The disconnect between the victims’ signs of nerve agent poisoning on the one hand, and the absence of nerve agents in samples, on the other, immediately called into question the possibility that a chemical attack had occurred.

It was a call too large for the inspectors to make. Experts were needed to resolve the discrepancy and provide a definitive evaluation.

A mission to Germany

In early June 2018, four OPCW officials flew to Germany to meet with toxicologists/pharmacologists, all recognized world experts in chemical weapons poisoning. The trip was approved at the highest levels through a Mission Warning Order. The delegation consisted of Dr. Brendan Whelan and Dr. Sami Barrek, both senior members of the Douma investigation team; Dr. Marc Blum, the Head of OPCW Laboratory; and Dr. Soumik Paul, the Head OPCW Health and Safety Branch.

The German experts were shown numerous photos and videos of the victims, and were informed of what alleged witnesses had described to the inspectors. Some alleged witness had claimed rapid, even immediate onset of severe frothing from exposure to a toxic chemical (Original Report para 7.82). As the final report recounted, “Casualties began arriving [at the hospital known as Location 1] shortly after 19:00 with excess salivation or foaming from the mouth.” (para 8.56). The alleged attack took place at about 19:00 (para 8.58).

Within an hour, the toxicologists easily confirmed what the OPCW team and other experts had already suspected – that such a rapid onset of profuse frothing was incompatible with chlorine exposure. According to leaked minutes from that meeting, previously published by Wikileaks:

…the experts [toxicologists] were conclusive in their statements that there was no correlation between symptoms and chlorine exposure. In particular, they stated that the onset of excessive frothing, as a result of pulmonary edema, observed in photos and reported by witnesses would not occur in the short time period between the reported occurrence of the alleged incident and the time the videos were recorded (approx. 3-4 hours).

The experts were also of the opinion that it was highly unlikely that victims would have gathered in piles at the centre of the respective apartments at such a short distance from an escape from the toxic chlorine gas to cleaner air.

Immediately after their consultations with the toxicologists, the OPCW officials met and agreed that “the key ‘take-away message’ from the meeting was that the symptoms observed were inconsistent with exposure to chlorine.”

The evidence was now overwhelming that the more than 40 victims filmed at Location 2 had not been killed by either nerve agents or chlorine gas. But the Douma samples turned up no other toxic chemicals that could have caused the rapid frothing. Was it possible that the highly toxic offending chemical had not been picked up in the samples? The OPCW team and the German toxicologists discussed this possibility, but found it unlikely.

“The experts tried to consider what other known toxic chemical might be consistent with the symptoms observed and their rapid onset”, but “no other obvious candidate chemical could be identified,” the minutes of the meeting stated.

Upon returning to The Hague, the inspectors added the toxicologists’ input to their 115-page report. “The rapid, and in some reported cases, immediate onset of frothing described by victims is not considered consistent with exposure to chlorine-based choking or blood agents,” the original report said. “The opinion of a number of toxicologists, specialists in chemical-weapons-related intoxication supported this assessment.”

The toxicologist assessment left a disturbing unanswered question. If the profuse frothing from the victims’ mouths and noses was not a result of poisoning by nerve agents (because none were found in the samples); chlorine; or any other identifiable chemical — what then caused the heavy foam-like secretions?

The original team report tried to address this question by noting an integral element of epidemiological studies. To establish a possible connection between chemical weapons use and the deaths of the victims, the report said, “there must not be any likely alternative explanation for the symptoms.” (para 7.71) This same criterion was later included in the final report (para 8.70) but with no attempt to consider alternative scenarios. In the original report, however, the inspectors did follow proper scientific inquiry and considered what else could have killed the victims and caused the symptoms, if it were not nerve agents or chlorine.

When the original report was being finalized, there were still dozens of samples remaining to be analyzed. Accordingly, the inspectors left it open that further analysis could in theory turn up new evidence and hypothesized that:

 a. The victims were exposed to another highly toxic chemical agent that gave rise to the symptoms observed and has so far gone undetected.

Given that the inspectors had no explanation for the symptoms displayed by the victims, and failing to identify the elusive highly toxic chemical, it was now also reasonable to consider that the victims did not perish from chemical poisoning. So, the inspectors offered a second hypothesis:

 b. The fatalities resulted from a non-chemical-related incident.

The inspectors knew that such a hypothesis would be controversial, as it hinted at the possibility of a staged incident in Douma. They were circumspect in their claims, however, and stressed that the investigation would need to continue to gather evidence to support  one or the other hypothesis.

“The team has insufficient evidence at this time to be able to formulate an authoritative conclusion in either regard. To this end, the investigation remains on-going,” the report said.

This passage — with its mention of the toxicologists’ assessment and a hypothesis leaving open the possibility of a staged incident — was never published by the OPCW. And the team would never get the chance to continue this critical area of investigation.

Erasing the experts

By the time the final report was published in March 2019, Dr. Brendan Whelan had left the organization seven months prior. In that period, senior OPCW officials buried the original report’s key findings — including those of the toxicologists.

The final report made no mention of the German toxicologists’ clear and unequivocal conclusions ruling out chlorine as the cause of death in Douma. There could only be one reason: if the report was going to declare that there were “reasonable grounds” to believe chlorine was used as a chemical weapon, the inconvenient toxicology assessment from the Germans had to go — along with any mention of the meeting itself. In its detailed timeline of the OPCW mission, the final report omits the team’s visit to Germany in June 2018.

Instead, the report states: “The FFM consulted with four toxicologists and one toxicologist and medical doctor, all versed in chemical weapons or toxic industrial chemical exposure.” The timeline states that this happened in September and October 2018, clearly not referring to the German toxicologists.

As for what these replacement toxicologists concluded, the final report does not say. But we can surmise that they — just like the now-omitted German experts – did not find the deaths consistent with chlorine gas exposure. Otherwise, the report would have said so. It instead vaguely concedes that: “It is not currently possible to precisely link the cause of the signs and symptoms to a specific chemical.”

This crafty choice of words let the OPCW off the hook for having to issue a judgment on whether chlorine gas could have been a cause of the Douma victims’ symptoms – while simultaneously allowing it to later make the incoherent conclusion that chlorine gas was the weapon “likely” used. With this sleight of hand, the OPCW was hiding the inconvenient, now-deleted original toxicologists’ unequivocal conclusion that “symptoms observed were inconsistent with exposure to chlorine.”

When veteran inspector flagged censorship, OPCW investigated him

The final Douma report was an affront to scientific integrity and particularly to those OPCW scientists who had fought to defend it. For Dr. Whelan, it was not the end of the matter.

In an August 2019 email, detailed here for the first time, Whelan wrote to two OPCW officials who had accompanied him to Germany for the toxicology assessment. Whelan asked the pair if they would be willing to join him in raising concern about the suppression of the toxicologists’ critical findings with the Organization’s Director General, Fernando Arias.

“I would like to know your opinions on this potentially serious irregularity and, given the information all three of us are privy to, whether you are willing to jointly raise the issue with the DG,” Whelan wrote to his now former colleagues. (Whelan had left the OPCW at the scheduled end of his tenure in September 2018).

When the original toxicology assessment had been done in June 2018, Arias had not yet taken the helm. Neither was he there, later that month, for the suppression of the original report containing the inconvenient assessment. Whelan was concerned that the new Director General was either not aware of this key omission from the final report, or didn’t grasp its significance.

Months earlier, in an April 2019 letter previously published by The Grayzone, Whelan had raised his concerns with Arias. But the DG’s indifferent response, Whelan told his colleagues in the August email, left him worried that close aides were insulating Arias from the inconvenient facts.

I have written to the Director General informing him of my concerns. Though I received a response from him, it was an entirely unsatisfactory one. I get the impression, however, that the DG himself may be getting an unbalanced account from sources that would prefer such inconsistencies or irregularities not be highlighted.

In any case, Whelan sought a reasonable explanation for the omission of the toxicology assessment — even being open to the possibility that there might be one.

I believe it is our professional and moral obligation to ensure the DG appreciates the gravity of the matter. There may be a justified reason for the omission – though I can’t imagine what. At a minimum a satisfactory explanation has to be provided.

But the OPCW was not interested in explanations. Instead, Whelan’s correspondence soon got into the hands of two external investigators from the UK and US, two nations with a vested interest in preserving the chemical attack narrative around Douma. The investigators had been appointed to investigate the very first leak in the Douma scandal, an engineering assessment by another OPCW veteran, Ian Henderson.

Whelan’s email to his colleagues — intended to alert the Director General of possible fraud — was instead used as a pretext to instigate a formal “independent” OPCW inquiry against him as part of that probe into the leaked engineering report. The inquiry’s report ultimately characterized Whelan’s email of concern about scientific censorship as a cynical crusade against the OPCW.

“As late as August 2019, [Whelan] contacted members of the Organisation to attempt to convince them to join his campaign to challenge the final Douma report,” the report said.

Even the private letter Whelan sent to the Director General the previous April was also depicted as a sinister act of subversion. “This included a letter to the Director-General, challenging the findings in the final Douma report,” the investigators wrote.

The Grayzone sent detailed questions about the omission of the toxicologists’ assessment to one of the OPCW officials who attended the June 2018 meeting in Germany and received Whelan’s August 2019 email. The official, who is no longer with the OPCW, did not respond.

The outcome of the OPCW’s high-profile investigation against Whelan and Henderson was presented to Ambassadors from member states who were summoned to the OPCW for what the British journalist Peter Hitchens called “The Show Trial of A and B., Kafka comes to the Hague.”

The Director General condemned the inspectors as “individuals who could not accept that their views were not backed by evidence. When their view could not gain traction, they took matters into their own hands and committed a breach of their obligations to the Organisation.” Western media outlets like The Guardian  were quick to publish the Director’s derisive words and pitch the outcome as a “blow to Russian denials of Syria chemical attack.”

As a result of Whelan’s attempt to flag fraudulent conduct, Arias then formally banned him from ever working again with the OPCW, even as a consultant. In practice, this punishment was tantamount to a life ban from any UN body.

Arias was sending a clear message to any would-be dissenters. And in public appearances, he has continued to send a message that chemical weapons expertise, when it comes to Douma, is not welcome within his walls.

Speaking before the European Parliament in April, and at the United Nations Security Council in June, the Director General was asked about the exclusion of the toxicologists’ findings from the final report. In his remarks, Arias spent ample time offering false excuses about why he has refused to address the Douma probe’s alleged scientific fraud and attacking the dissenting inspectors, as The Grayzone has previously reported.

But when it came to the missing toxicologists, Arias avoided the issue entirely.

thegrayzone.com

By Kit KLARENBERG

A tight-knit cast of characters has sought to destabilize the Syrian government by convincing Syrians, Western citizens, foreign states, and international bodies that the CIA-backed Free Syrian Army is a legitimate, “moderate” alternative, while flooding news across the globe with opposition propaganda.

Its key actors have also played a central part in high-profile chemical weapon deceptions, participating in the attacks’ staging, generating media coverage, orchestrating official investigations and even legal actions, all with the clear goal of cultivating Western support for regime change.

Despite facing official investigation into corrupt practices and being exposed for serious credibility issues, these figures have been treated with adulation by a Western mainstream media that appears just as committed to destabilizing Syria as they have been.

One of the most prominent among this group of self-proclaimed experts is supposed chemical weapons specialist Hamish de Bretton-Gordon. Previously Commanding Officer of the UK CBRN Regiment and NATO’s Rapid Reaction CBRN Battalion, his past deployments have included spells in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Cyprus, Kosovo, and Iraq.

Once upon a time, de Bretton Gordon’s Twitter profile identified him as a member of 77th Brigade, the British Army’s shadowy psychological warfare division, which maintains a vast militia of real, fake and automated social media accounts that it deploys to disseminate propaganda in support of UK Foreign Office objectives, and discredit government critics.

Chillingly, official Army doctrine states the Brigade is “notably” key to the purported “grey zone between peace and war” that informs UK military thinking in the 21st century. The designation was removed from de Bretton-Gordon’s Twitter account after this journalist drew attention to it.

In British media, de Bretton-Gordon is portrayed as a gallant human rights hero who is responsible for “training local doctors how to treat gas attacks and risking his life on battlefields, to convincing world leaders to take threats seriously.”

A glowing Times of London profile features a photo of de Bretton- Gordon posing beside a hunting trophy and a well-stocked bar in his elegant country home, clad in a desert camo-colored smoking jacket. The article opens with the following passage: “Beneath the smoke-hazed starlight of the desert night, a young tank captain waited for his moment of war. He was a romantic man and it was his first conflict.”

From the September 05 2020 Times of London profile of Hamish de Bretton-Gordon

Behind the legendary aura spun out by UK media, questions linger about de Bretton-Gordon’s field work. He is often referred to as the founder or director of Doctors Under Fire, an NGO or humanitarian group. However, no operation of that name is registered as a commercial or charitable entity in the UK, or seemingly anywhere else in the world – clearly, no mainstream reporter has ever checked. He has also been lauded for his collection of soil samples in Syria, conducted through another suspicious organization he founded in Aleppo called CBRN Taskforce.

The vital question of how and why de Bretton-Gordon came to be involved in such a hazardous, sensitive activity has been left unexplored. This is an extraordinary failing on the part of the media, given that the work would necessarily require him to operate in areas occupied by Salafi-jihadist insurgents. He would also have potentially collaborated with or at least been in extremely close quarters with these elements, which have every reason to falsely accuse the Syrian government of chemical weapons use.

Further, there are strong indications that de Bretton Gordon’s activities were conducted in explicit support of regime change, and on behalf of at least one belligerent state participant in the Syrian conflict.

‘Signs of Heavy Editing’

In an April 2015 Guardian op-ed, de Bretton-Gordon disclosed that his sample-gathering activities began two years earlier. Contemporary media reports refer to UK foreign intelligence service MI6 conducting operations to covertly smuggle soil samples out of Syria for analysis at Porton Down at precisely this time, strongly suggesting his involvement in the scheme.

A 2016 article also characterizes him as a “former spy,” a unique designation that doesn’t appear in any online biographies of de Bretton Gordon or other news pieces mentioning him.

One report on the MI6 program quoted an anonymous “senior Western source,” who suggested that an objective of these operations was to encourage US intervention.

“MI6 played the leading role but the American military wants more evidence before it agrees Assad has crossed the line in the use of chemical weapons. The question is what is the West going to do now? If nobody reacts, there was not much point in conducting the tests,” they said.

Accordingly, some of these samples were delivered directly to Washington. In April 2015, evidence de Bretton-Gordon collected from an alleged chlorine attack in Sarmin, Syria was presented to the UN Security Council by Samantha Power, then-US Ambassador to the body and one of most notorious interventionists in government.

In September 2016, de Bretton-Gordon addressed the UK parliament’s now-defunct All-Party Friends of Syria Group. In his remarks, he boasted of how documentation relating to an alleged April 21st, 2014 barrel bomb attack in the Syrian town of Talmenes that CBRN Taskforce supplied to an OPCW/UN Joint Investigative Mechanism (JIM) probe resulted in the pair announcing they possessed “conclusive evidence” that government forces were behind the strike.

The JIM report on the Talmenes incident did indeed make that charge. However, it also indicated that the material submitted by CBRN Taskforce showed unambiguous signs of falsification. In all, a nameless witness connected to the organization provided testimony, 42 videos of supposed impact sites, and soil samples to the JIM. The results, the report noted, were published by the conservative Daily Telegraph in an article painting de Bretton Gordon as a valiant investigator.

While the JIM did not ultimately depend on the CBRN-supplied samples, the videos became a key source of evidence. However, clips related to the first site, “location #1”, failed to pass muster.

Two videos depicted an individual measuring a three-meter-wide and one-meter-deep crater in a backyard, with no remnants of the bomb visible. The JIM’s examination concluded they didn’t show the aftermath of a barrel bomb strike, finding instead that the pit featured was “probably” caused by a small explosive (“TNT equivalent”) buried in the ground.

Another clip of the same crater, said to have been broadcast by “local” media, portrayed the damaged outer jacket of a barrel bomb lying next to the aforementioned crater, animal carcasses strewn nearby. Expert scrutiny of the clip reinforced the JIM’s ruling that no barrel bomb attack had occurred. Indeed, the bodies of the animals were said to be “clean and intact,” making it “highly unlikely” they were in close vicinity to whatever actually caused the crater when it exploded. Moreover, analysis of the video’s metadata found it was created one day before the alleged incident – and yet another clip depicting the same courtyard was disregarded due to “signs of heavy editing.”

As a result of these “inconsistencies”, location #1 was excluded entirely from the JIM’s investigation. Why all other CBRN Taskforce submissions were not automatically discounted remains unclear.

Further, how an individual or organization that supplied provably fraudulent material has been permitted to play any role whatsoever in multiple inquiries into alleged chemical weapon attacks in Syria by international bodies ever since remains a highly disquieting riddle.

Citizen journalism and civil rescuers, made by the UK Foreign Office

The report’s reference to “local” – or opposition – media having broadcast one of the bogus videos supplied by de Bretton Gordon’s Taskforce is also conspicuous when considering that British intelligence may well have created the outlet, in addition to helping mock up the clips.

Internal UK Foreign Office files released by a self-proclaimed hacktivist collective Anonymous in September 2020 reveal that ARK, a shadowy “conflict transformation and stabilization consultancy” headed by probable MI6 operative Alistair Harris, trained and equipped hundreds of citizen journalists in Syria over many years.

“Activists” were tutored in “camera handling, lighting, sound, interviewing, filming a story,” post-production techniques including “video and sound editing and software, voice-over, scriptwriting,” and “graphics and 2D and 3D animation design and software.”

ARK’s students were even instructed in practical propaganda theory – namely “target audience identification, qualitative and quantitative techniques, media and media narrative analysis and monitoring,” “behavioral identification/understanding,” “campaign planning,” “behavior, behavioral change, and how communications can influence it [emphasis added],” and more.

Content these “stringers” created was disseminated via “TV, FM radio, social media [platforms] and print material [including] posters, magazines and comics” established by ARK, in order to “promote the moderate opposition” within and without the country.

The company stated that it “frequently directs and connects international journalists” – working for the BBC, CNN, Guardian, New York Times and Reuters, among others – “to appropriate opposition figures.” In turn, ARK was “regularly approached” by the opposition Syrian National Council for “media handling advice,” including in the wake of the highly suspicious August 2013 chemical strike in Ghouta.

ARK’s most well-known creation was the supposed rescue group known as the White Helmets. The contractor spearheaded an “internationally-focused communications campaign designed to raise global awareness” of the supposed first responders and “keep Syria in the news” for several years.

This was before management of the endeavor was handed over to Mayday Rescue, the brainchild of the late British mercenary James Le Mesurier, a former ARK employee who apparently committed suicide in 2019 amidst a corruption investigation by state donors into the White Helmets’ bookkeeping.

Le Mesurier’s third wife, Emma Winberg, was also heavily involved in Whitehall’s information warfare operations in Syria through a company called Innovative Communications and Strategy (Incostrat). She founded the outfit in 2014 alongside military intelligence veteran Paul Tilley, the former UK Ministry of Defence strategic communications director for the Middle East and North Africa, who, like Le Mesurier, had attended the elite Sandhurst Military Academy.

In the same vein as ARK, the company produced slick propaganda promoting extremist groups as credible alternatives to the Syrian government, while whitewashing the barbarous deeds that became their calling card in areas they occupied. One such jihadist entity may have been the fundamentalist, Saudi-backed Jaysh Al-Islam (the Army of Islam), which worked closely with the White Helmets in the areas it occupied, including Douma at the time of the now-notorious April 2018 chemical weapons deception.

It is no coincidence that ARK, the White Helmets, Le Mesurier, Mayday Rescue, and de Bretton-Gordon would each play a fundamental role in the propaganda operation that sold the Douma incident to the world – and the subsequent sabotage of the OPCW probe into what happened.

An irreconcilable contradiction

In March 2019, the OPCW issued a final report on Douma, which concluded there were “reasonable grounds” to believe a chemical weapons attack had occurred, and “the toxic chemical was likely molecular chlorine.” Leaked files have revealed that these findings were explicitly contrary to the evidence collected by investigators who actually visited the city, which pointed strongly to a false flag incident.

A consortium of UK-based scholars called the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda, and Media has meticulously documented how the investigation was “nobbled.” According to the Working Group, the OPCW dispatched two teams; one to Syria, one to Turkey, with the latter collecting samples from and interviewing witnesses supplied by the White Helmets, all of which was suggestive of a chemical weapon attack. The final report relied almost exclusively on this fudged evidence.

There were also strong indications that Len Phillips, a former OPCW inspection team leader who turned freelance in April 2018, and is reported to have met frequently with Le Mesurier, was integral to influencing the probe.

Before leaving the OPCW, Phillips oversaw four other investigations into alleged chemical weapons attacks in Syria between 2015 and 2017, all heavily dependent on evidence provided by the White Helmets. The Working Group found at least three of the probes excluded or ignored unambiguous signs the events had been staged.

In April 2019, Phillips registered a company in the UK, PHBG Consultants Ltd. Though listed as the sole director and shareholder, the company’s name implies others are involved.

If the ‘PH’ is Phillips, is the BG de Bretton-Gordon?

The company’s stated “nature of business” is “risk and damage evaluation” relating to “engineering related scientific and technical consulting activities.”

The OPCW’s final report on Douma refers to “consultations with engineering experts”, which is surely how the problem of its on-site investigators finding there was a “higher probability” that cylinders alleged to have been dropped from Syrian Air Force helicopters were “manually placed…rather than being delivered from aircraft” was resolved.

The final report also depended on external consultations with toxicology experts to reach its finding that a chemical weapon was used. However, those specialists were unable to reconcile the problem of White Helmets-disseminated photos and videos of dead bodies, including children, lying in piles in a housing complex, foaming from the mouth – clear signs of exposure to a nerve agent, when none was found either in Syria or Turkey.

A suppressed draft interim report on the incident contained a lengthy section outlining in detail why it was inconceivable that the victims could have been afflicted by chlorine, and how no other alternative chemical culprit could be identified. This contradiction was considered so noteworthy, in fact, that it was referenced repeatedly in the 116-page document’s opening summary, described as an “inconsistency” that “cannot be rationalised.”

The appraisal reflected the views of four chemical weapons specialists expressed to OPCW investigators in June 2018. The final report makes no reference to these findings, or the meeting, limply concluding it was “not currently possible” to “precisely link” the symptoms with a “specific chemical”, while slyly conflating the highly divergent properties and indicators of sarin and chlorine.

Regime change enthusiasts have offered a panoply of peculiar explanations for the grave incongruity at the very heart of the Douma incident.

Yet mainstream media reports published in the immediate aftermath of the event and prior to the arrival of OPCW investigators in the city show chemical weapons specialists were at first unanimous in declaring the victims had been afflicted by a nerve agent.

‘They Could’ve Escaped’

On April 10th, long-time chemical weapons researcher Alastair Hay, then-member of the OPCW’s Education and Outreach board, and recipient of the organization’s Hague Award in 2015, forcefully dismissed the notion that corpses featured in the White Helmets-supplied footage could have been afflicted by chlorine, as their symptoms were “much, much more consistent with nerve-agent-type exposure.”

“It’s just bodies piled up…There’s a young child with foam at the nose and a boy with foam on its [sic] mouth. Chlorine victims usually manage to get out to somewhere they can get treatment,” he said. “Nerve agent kills pretty instantly…People have pretty much died where they were when they inhaled the agent. They’ve just dropped dead.”

A consequent Washington Post article reinforced Hay’s analysis, reporting that “outside experts” had concluded “the speed with which the victims died suggested that a nerve agent was used,” as “chlorine usually takes longer to work.” That same day though, de Bretton-Gordon appeared in the Financial Times peddling a novel theory.

“The big question is whether it was chlorine or sarin. I am favoring a mix of the two,” he hypothesized. De Bretton-Gordon then argued that if Washington subsequently launched airstrikes on Damascus – which happened three days later – it would be “an indication of irrefutable evidence” of Syrian government culpability for the attack.

On April 16th, he reiterated this view to the Daily Mail. The same article also quoted a White Helmet operative’s firm dismissal of chlorine as the agent responsible.

“Sarin you breathe and it kills you. There were many who died on the stairs. If it was chlorine, they could’ve escaped. But they died after just taking a few steps,” they said.

Chemically, a combination of chlorine and sarin makes no sense as a weapon, as chlorine compounds would simply decompose the nerve agent outright in the event they were successfully stored in the same container.

Of course, de Bretton-Gordon may have spoken out of pure ignorance. He has an extensive history of issuing headline-grabbing, unscientific claims, including warning of the potential threat of jihadists returning to the UK from Syria using components from household fridges to construct IEDs. There was also the time he claimed the Russian military could employ novichok hand grenades on battlefields.

Another interpretation may be that de Bretton-Gordon was attempting to explain away the looming, irresolvable disconnect between symptoms exhibited by victims of the alleged strike and the FFM’s actual chemical findings. Given the inevitable paradox created by that massive discrepancy, resolving this quandary was surely of supreme concern to all invested in the event’s staging.

Alternatively, there’s the question of whether de Bretton-Gordon himself had been concocting samples containing chlorine and sarin. The findings of an OPCW Investigation and Identification Team (IIT) probe into an alleged chemical attack in the Syrian city of Saraqib in February 2018 made clear someone was cooking up evidence in this manner.

The inquiry, which ruled the Syrian government had dropped “at least” one cylinder containing chlorine on the city, depended entirely on a May 2018 OPCW FFM investigation of the incident, which arrived at the same conclusion.

FFM staffers didn’t actually visit the site of the purported strike, and all samples reviewed were provided by the White Helmets. The IIT report claims that they contained both chlorine- and sarin-related chemicals.

Strikingly, the IIT recorded that it would be “difficult” to fill a cylinder with both chemicals, so it explored the question of whether “cross-contamination” may have occurred during the sampling process, “or at a later stage in the handling of the samples themselves.”

Its findings left open the possibility that “contamination occurred before sampling or after the samples were taken, but before they were secured by the OPCW in sealed packaging.” Still, “since the FFM did not make findings related to the use of sarin in Saraqib…the IIT refrained from pursuing this aspect of the incident further [emphasis added].”

By any objective measure, the IIT’s failure to explore that tantalizing lead was an absolutely staggering dereliction of its investigative duties, amounting to willful blindness in legal terms.

Other areas of the report similarly underline the inspectors’ determination to hear no evil, see no evil, and speak no evil. One of the cylinders reportedly involved in the strike was excluded from the IIT’s consideration, despite “consistent” witness accounts indicating both were dropped by a single Syrian Arab Army helicopter, due to a “lack of certainty” over whether it was moved to a location “further away” from the crater it supposedly created “with no clear explanation.”

Nonetheless, the IIT contended this glaring incongruity in no way implied the incident was staged, reasoning that if it had been orchestrated by opposition actors, it was “hard to comprehend” why the cylinder was placed and video-recorded so far away from its accompanying crater, “thus creating uncertainties as to its significance for this incident.”

In other words, if this was a false flag, those choreographing it would surely have done a better job. Inspectors’ reliance on ‘evidence’ gathered by the White Helmets is all the more questionable given longstanding OPCW protocol stating that a chain of custody for all physical evidence is “100% critical”.

“The OPCW would never get involved in testing samples that our own inspectors don’t gather in the field, because we need to maintain chain of custody of samples from the field to the lab to ensure their integrity,” an OPCW spokesperson said in April 2013.

‘Ready for Trial’: UK information warriors move from warfare to lawfare

The clear role of British intelligence in forging material has greatly influenced global media coverage. As a result, it has driven public support for regime change across the West, corrupted official investigations by international bodies, and helped trigger destructive military interventions.

The same bogus findings cooked up by the UK’s information warriors may be used in future kangaroo prosecutions of Syrian officials for war crimes, thus reinforcing the perception that the West’s long-running dirty war on Damascus was a righteous mission.

The shift in objective from warfare to lawfare was made clear by Emma Winberg in June 2018, at an event on the subject of “archiving atrocities” hosted by NATO’s unofficial think tank in Washington, The Atlantic Council.

“We’re in a phase of the conflict where we’re having to look ahead and plan for the next phase, where it’s less about advocacy to act on Syria, and instead how we best preserve what we do have, how we capture that in the most meaningful and effective way, that helps with future documentation and processes,” she said.

However, these efforts date back to the very beginning of the crisis. Leaked documents reveal that in 2011, the UK intelligence contractor, ARK, collaborated with a shadowy consultancy firm called Tsamota to “extract contemporaneous documentation from the conflict zone,” thus “[ensuring] that when the conflict ends, the raw material of a post-conflict war crimes process is ready for trial, in turn providing a key contribution to truth telling, reconciliation and the future of Syria.”

To this end, an endeavor created by Tsamota and called Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA) has collected thousands of kilos of documentation from abandoned government buildings in opposition-occupied areas of the country. As documented by Grayzone in 2019, these operations necessitated CIJA securing protection and assistance from numerous Islamist militias active in these areas, including the al-Qaeda affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra.

While the organization has received tens of millions in funding from the governments of Canada, Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, UK, and US for its efforts, few indictments have followed. A rare exception was the April 2020 Koblenz trial in Germany, in which two former Syrian security service officers who defected in 2012, were prosecuted for torture. One willingly provided their Western counterparts with sensitive information, while the other became a member of the opposition delegation.

A defendant has since been found guilty of aiding and abetting crimes against humanity, and received a somewhat paltry four-and-a-half years in prison. His conviction was heavily dependent on documents recording the meetings and directives of the “Central Crisis Management Cell,” established by the Syrian government in late March 2011 in response to the uprising.

Notably, the files record that lethal attacks on Syrian security forces began almost immediately after the allegedly peaceful protests began. However, soldiers were under clear orders from the inception to “counter with weapons” only those “who carry weapons against the state,” while guaranteeing “civilians are not harmed.”

“Ensure that no drop of blood is shed when confronting and dispersing peaceful demonstrations,” an August 2011 directive unequivocally stated.

The question of where the vast sums CIJA received ultimately ended up is a particularly urgent one given that the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) has formally accused it of fraud and “submission of false documents, irregular invoicing, and profiteering.”

OLAF made the allegation in relation to a project delivered by CIJA under the EU’s “Rule of Law” project in Syria, and recommended that authorities in the UK, Netherlands, and Belgium prosecute the group.

Seated on the board of CIJA is Toby Cadman, a lawyer who “[advises] clients how best to identify, approach and influence the key decision makers of Westminster, Washington DC, Brussels and further afield.” In 2016, he founded “international justice chambers” Guernica 37, which counts UK information warrior Emma Winberg among its staff.

That same year, Cadman authored an op-ed for the Huffington Post announcing that he had joined a “non-profit group that brings together doctors, military and humanitarian specialists and lawyers,” Medics Under Fire – the original name of de Bretton-Gordon’s fictional Doctors Under Fire.

Prosecutions in absentia for staged chemical weapons attacks could be in the offing in future.

In October 2020, The Grayzone’s Aaron Maté caught US and UK-government funded propaganda platform Bellingcat publishing a bogus draft letter to an OPCW whistleblower that was never sent.

In the aftermath of the debacle, Chris York, a former Huffington Post journalist with a history of fanatically smearing the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda, and Media, attempted to defend the letter’s authenticity in private communications with this journalist.

In the process, he made an intriguing disclosure.

“There’s a whole bunch of stuff about Douma that isn’t public yet because it would put any future investigations and possible criminal trials in jeopardy,” York claimed.

He may have been bluffing, attempting to legitimize an obvious con job he himself had fallen for good and proper months earlier, and been on the verge of publishing. But there’s also the chance York knows something the rest of us do not.

thegrayzone.com

In the two years since the censorship of a Syria chemical weapons investigation was exposed, the head of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), Fernando Arias, has vigorously resisted accountability.

Arias has refused to investigate or explain the extensive manipulation of the OPCW’s probe of an alleged April 2018 chlorine attack in Douma. Rather than answer calls to meet with the veteran inspectors who protested the deception, Arias has disparaged them. The OPCW Director General (DG) has even resorted to feigning ignorance about the scandal, recently claiming that “I don’t know why” the organization’s final report on Douma “was contested.”

Facing growing pressure to address the cover-up – most prominently in a “Statement of Concern” from 28 notable signatories, including five former senior OPCW officials – Arias came before the United Nations Security Council on June 3^rd to answer questions in open session for the first time.

In a nod to the public outcry, Arias backtracked from a previous statement that the Douma controversy could not be revisited. But while appearing to suggest that the investigation could be reopened, Arias offered more falsehoods about the scandal, and new disingenuous excuses to avoid addressing it.

This two-part report summarizes Arias’ latest evasions and distortions, which include the following:

• Rejecting proposals for resolving the Douma controvery, Arias invoked restrictions that do not appear to exist. Arias falsely claimed that the OPCW’s Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) has “no authority” to examine the suppressed Douma evidence. Arias also claimed that he personally has “no authority whatsoever to reopen this investigation,” even though the OPCW’s regulations contain no such limits.

• To discredit the vast quantity of work that was done for the investigation’s original report, which found no evidence of a chlorine attack, Arias falsely stated that the “bulk” of analysis was conducted after its chief author was no longer involved. To advance this falsehood, Arias cited a fabricated figure.

• Arias tacitly retracted a previous false claim that no state has challenged the Douma report’s conclusions. But instead of acknowledging that prior falsehood, he replaced it with a new one.

• Arias did not answer direct questions about the documented scientific fraud in the Douma probe, and how he plans to address it. The DG ignored a question from the Russian delegation about why the Final Report omitted the conclusions of NATO member state toxicologists who ruled out chlorine gas as the cause of death. And for the third time, Arias did not respond to a question asking whether he will agree to meet with the dissenting inspectors.

• A recent BBC podcast interviewed a purported OPCW source who discussed sensitive information and criticized the Douma whistleblowers, as well as the organization’s first Director General, José Bustani. Arias offered an absurd excuse to avoid launching an investigation, stating that he would only probe the breach of confidentiality if the BBC’s source “is identified.”

• Arias continued to deceptively minimize the role of the key dissenting inspector, Dr. Brendan Whelan. Arias downplayed the fact that Whelan was the scientific coordinator and chief author of the team’s original report, and falsely claimed that he was only involved “in a limited capacity.”

• Arias also continued to falsely downplay the role of the second known whistleblower, Ian Henderson. Arias’ latest distortions about Whelan and Henderson are addressed in the second part of this report.

Arias’ UN appearance was the latest chapter in a saga that has upended the world’s chemical weapons watchdog. In April 2018, the US, UK and France bombed Syria after accusing its government of committing a chemical attack in Douma. In March 2019, the OPCW released a final report that aligned with the US narrative that Syria was guilty of dropping chlorine gas cylinders on a pair of apartment buildings, including one where dozens of dead bodies were filmed. But an extraordinary trove of leaks soon exposed that the OPCW had published a whitewash.

Internal OPCW documents showed that the inspectors who investigated the Douma incident had found no evidence of a chemical weapons attack. The files also revealed gross inconsistencies in the prevailing narrative that chlorine was the cause of death. These findings, if released, would have reinforced strong indications that extremist insurgents who controlled Douma had staged the incident, just as Syrian forces were set to retake control. But the Douma evidence was concealed in a multi-stage cover-up.

Unknown senior OPCW officials were caught trying to doctor the team’s original report to falsely suggest evidence of a chemical attack. A delegation of US officials also visited the Hague and, in a highly irregular move, tried to convince the team that chlorine gas was used by the Syrian government. The bulk of the original team who deployed in Douma was sidelined, replaced by officials who, for the most part, had not even set foot in Syria. The result was a deceptive final report that erased the key findings of the censored original.

Although the OPCW leaks first surfaced in May 2019, Arias did not face direct questioning about the controversy until December of last year, when he came before the United Nations Security Council. However, Arias refused to answer in open session, and reportedly gave vague, non-substantive answers in private.

The Director General’s decision to return to the UN to answer questions in open session followed growing public pressure, led by former senior UN official Hans von Sponeck, as well as Bustani, the former OPCW chief. Arias’ reliance on falsehoods and hollow excuses offered the most stark display yet that his handling of the Douma cover-up cannot be defended in good faith.

OPCW chief falsely claims “no authority whatsoever” to address Douma cover-up

Just weeks before his UN appearance, Arias told the European Parliament on April 14^th that when it comes to the OPCW’s Douma scandal, “the matter is closed.”

But when he came before the UN Security Council on June 3rd, Arias changed his tune. Rather than personally closing the door on revisiting the probe, Arias now claimed that he does not have the authority to re-open it. Arias did so by citing OPCW rules and restrictions that do not appear to exist.

Arias’ fallacious excuse came in response to a new proposal to break the impasse. In April, the Berlin Group 21 – established by former UN assistant secretary general Hans von Sponeck, former OPCW chief Jose Bustani and Richard Falk, an eminent Princeton Law Professor – put forward a way to address the dispute over the Douma report. They urged Arias to allow the OPCW’s own Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) — a subsidiary body made up of 25 independent scientific and technical experts who serve in their personal capacities — to assess the claims of the dissenting inspectors.

“The SAB possesses the necessary scientific and technical expertise,” the Berlin Group 21 statement said.  “[We] believe that leaving the scientific debate to the scientists, who best understand the issues at hand, would provide a more objective and rational approach to begin resolving this unfortunate and highly damaging controversy that surrounds the OPCW and indirectly endangers global security by eroding confidence in future findings relevant to alleged uses of chemical weapons.”

At the UN Security Council, Arias rejected this proposal, claiming that his hands are tied by the OPCW’s own regulations:

 The goal of the Scientific Advisory Board is written, in the terms of reference, is to enable the Director-General to render specialized advice in connection with very sophisticated, very complicated matters and issues related to chemicals and chemical weapons.  Which means that the SAB has no role to assess the findings of the FFM.  The FFM is entrusted to investigate and activate an investigation to produce a report.  And this report—I sign the report, I don’t touch it—it goes directly to the policymaking organs, in this case the Executive Council.  Which means that the SAB has no authority to reassess the investigation of the FFM or to assess any opinion of the inspectors produced on a personal basis.

In claiming that the SAB “has no authority to reassess” the Douma FFM’s findings, Arias is invoking a restriction that does not exist.

In citing the SAB’s terms of reference (ToR), Arias failed to mention that it – along with the Chemical Weapons Convention — explicitly allows for the establishment of a temporary working group of scientific experts to provide recommendations on “specific issues” – exactly as the Berlin Group 21 proposed. Paragraph 9 of the SAB’s ToR states:

In consultation with members of the [Scientific Advisory] Board, the Director-General may establish temporary working groups of scientific experts to provide recommendations within a specific time-frame on specific issues, in accordance with Article VIII, paragraph 45 of the [Chemical Weapons] Convention.

 Contrary to Arias’ claim, there is nothing preventing him from convening a working group of scientific experts to review the particularly “specific issue” that is the Douma investigation – arguably the most internally contested specific issue in the OPCW’s history. Yet Arias is claiming that he is somehow hindered by regulations that, in reality, explicitly grant him the authority to do exactly what he now claims he cannot.

In stating this excuse, Arias also dismissed the work of the dissenting inspectors as having been “produced on a personal basis”, and therefore not subject to reevaluation. Yet there was nothing “personal” about the Brendan Whelan authored-original report, completed in June 2018 and reviewed and sanctioned by other inspectors, including the team leader. What remains unknown is who exactly were the senior OPCW officials who personally doctored its contents – a question that Arias has refused to investigate.

Arias also offered another hollow excuse. The OPCW chief claimed that he can no longer revisit the Douma investigation because it is no longer “in the hands” of his office, but instead the policy-making organizations of the OPCW. According to Arias, that power now lies in the hands of the Executive Council, (the rotating group of 41 member states who govern the OPCW), and the full Conference of State Parties (all OPCW member states):

 I have to say that the report of the FFM directed to Douma is in the hands of the Executive Council and the Conference.  The Director-General has no authority whatsoever to reopen this investigation that concluded and was reported to the Executive Council, and through the Executive Council to the Conference.  The matter is in the hands of the policymaking organs and not of the Director-General.  The Executive Council was already seized of the matter in March 2019.

 This is the first time that the Director General has claimed that the report is out of his control, and instead “in the hands” of a higher body. In introducing this escape-hatch, Arias is now giving the appearance that in principle he no longer objects to a reopening of the investigation. In reality, he is skirting responsibility for that decision by passing it to executive bodies that have blocked any efforts to discuss the cover-up right from the start. Upon the release of the Douma final report in March 2019, the Executive Council immediately voted down a proposal to hear from all of the experts who worked on the Douma case. The US delegation lobbied to block the vote by reportedly arguing that such a hearing would be akin to “Stalinist trials.”

Contrary to Arias’ assertions, the Chemical Weapons Convention does not support his claim that once a final report is issued, it becomes “in the hands of the Executive Council and Conference.” The relevant passage of the CWC simply states that the “Director General shall promptly transmit the preliminary and final reports to the Executive Council and to all States Parties.” (Part XI of the Verification Annex to the CWC, Investigations of Alleged Uses of Chemical Weapons, Section D [Reports], paragraph 23.)

There is nothing to suggest here that the Executive Council – or the State Parties — becomes the custodian of these reports, or that the Technical Secretariat (TS), which the Director General oversees, somehow loses control over them.

This is indeed borne out by past practice. It is common for the TS to make amendments to final reports and issue them without the Executive Council’s permission. Such amendments, which are issued as official TS “Addendums” to published reports, can be minor technical or typographic corrections, but also major substantive additions.

This practice includes a previous OPCW investigation in Syria. After publishing a final report on alleged chemical attacks by insurgents in Syria in December 2015 (S/1318/2015/Rev.1), Syrian authorities invited the OPCW to return in order to collect further evidence that the report claimed was lacking. The FFM team paid a second visit to Syria one month later and published an Addendum to the final report — with details of its additional deployment — in February 2016. (S/1318/2015/Rev.1/Add.1).

The Addendum contains no mention of the Executive Council, and there is no record of any EC vote to authorize it. The opening paragraph reads:

 This addendum provides information further to “The Report of the OPCW Fact-Finding Mission in Syria Regarding the Incidents Described in Communications from the Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs and Expatriates and Head of the National Authority of the Syrian Arab Republic” (S/1318/2015/Rev.1, dated 17 December 2015’).

 In the case of Douma, no one is even proposing that the OPCW return to Syria, as it did after issuing that final report of December 2015. The OPCW is simply being asked to hear from the Douma probe’s own inspectors, and address their complaints including the doctoring of the mission’s original report. Arias is passing the buck to a concocted higher authority in order to avoid exercising his own.

Disparaging whistleblowers, OPCW chief cites a fabricated figure

In one of his few attempts to make a substantive claim in defense of the Douma investigation, OPCW Director General Ferando Arias has repeatedly asserted that “most of the analytical work took place” in the last six or seven months, when the dissenting inspectors were no longer part of the Douma Fact-Finding Mission (FFM). Because of this, Arias has claimed that the dissenting inspectors “had manifestly incomplete information on the Douma investigation,” rendering their protests “egregious.”

At the UN Security Council, Arias doubled down on this argument by adducing, for the first time, a purported figure to substantiate it. According to Arias, 70 samples were analyzed by the OPCW in the last six months of the investigation, when the dissenting inspectors were no longer involved. Arias made this claim twice:

The FFM, after Inspector B departed, worked for more than six months, during which the bulk of the results of the investigation was got by the team.  For instance, out of the more than 100 samples, around more than 70 results were brought in those last six months of the investigation.

 …Of course, the bulk of the investigations related to Douma came after I arrived to the Organisation after July 2018.  Of the more than 100 samples, more than 70 good samples were analyzed after the summer of 2018.  The bulk of the investigation, the bulk of information, the bulk of analysis, of all the information that had been gathered came after the two inspectors left.” 

Arias’ claim that “more than 70” samples “were analyzed after the summer of 2018” in the “last six months of the investigation” is a demonstrable falsehood. Unless the OPCW somehow failed to report dozens of analyzed samples until now, the claim of 70 samples is a fabricated figure. In reality, the final report on Douma shows that just 44 samples were analyzed throughout the entire probe. And just 13 of those samples were analyzed after the issuing of the interim report — i.e., after the dissenting inspectors were out of the picture.

With just 44 samples analyzed for the entire probe, and just 13 new samples analyzed in the final six months, this means that 70% of the Douma investigation’s total sample analysis was in fact conducted in its first month.

Completely inverting that reality, Arias has now produced a phony figure that paints a false picture of the work conducted in the six months after the dissenting inspectors were sidelined.

By claiming that the “bulk of the investigation” was conducted after the whistleblowers were no longer involved, Arias is also erasing other critical areas of work conducted in the first two months, and detailed in the suppressed original report.

As I recently detailed in a UN presentation, a comparison between the interim report of July 2018 and the final report of March 2019 shows that the vast majority of the investigation  was already done in the first two months in multiple key areas: 100% of the research of the scientific literature was done; 87% of the total interviews had been conducted and analyzed; a meeting with four NATO toxicologists had been convened, and 98.5% of the metadata analysis of media files from Douma was undertaken. In addition, a complete epidemiological study was reported in the original report, much of which was expunged from the final report.

This means that, contrary to Arias’ claim, the bulk of the work was in fact carried out in the probe’s first two months.

Retracting one falsehood, Arias replaces it with another

At the European Parliament in April, Arias falsely claimed that no state party has challenged any of the Douma report’s conclusions, and that Russia even “agrees” with them:

The conclusions of the report, paradoxically, have never been disputed by a state party. Even the Russian delegation agrees with the conclusions.

Arias’ implausible contention was that, despite the heated two-year public dispute over the Douma investigation, no member state has challenged it. Yet Syria and Russia have vigorously challenged the report’s findings, within the OPCW itself and in a series of UN Security Council debates.

As The Grayzone has previously reported, this phony talking point was first put forward by the NATO-tied website Bellingcat last year. Bellingcat produced excerpts of a letter that it claimed was sent by Arias in June 2019 to Dr. Brendan Whelan, the key dissenting inspector. This letter, Bellingcat declared, “reveals that at a diplomatic level behind closed doors, the Russian and Syrian governments have both agreed with the conclusions of the OPCW report.”

But The Grayzone then revealed that not only was this claim ludicrous, but based on a “letter” that was never actually sent. The Grayzone obtained and published Arias’ actual letter to Whelan, which contained none of Bellingcat’s text.

In a sign that he has now recognized the fallacy of the Bellingcat-promoted talking point, Arias tacitly walked it back in his June 3^rd UN appearance. But instead of acknowledging his previous error, he replaced it with a new one. Arias now claimed:

None of the 193 Member States of the OPCW have challenged the findings of the FFM that chlorine was found on the scene of the attack, in Douma.

 To support his claim about chlorine found at the scene, Arias cited a note verbal (diplomatic correspondence) from Russia:

I have here in front of me a note verbal of the Russian Embassy, dated the 26th of April 2019, note #759 that includes an attachment.  It’s a Russian Federation paper, based on the conclusions of the report of the FFM in Douma.  And this note required me to disseminate this report. This note, or report attached to the note by the Russian Embassy in The Hague said, “Conclusion.  The Russian Federation does not challenge the findings contained in the FFM report regarding the possible presence of molecular chlorine in the cylinders, etc.”  This is on the web page from the Organisation.

 Arias’ own source undermines his claim. Whereas Arias told the UN that no state has “challenged the findings of the FFM that chlorine was found on the scene,” his evidence for that statement – a Russian note verbal – simply states that Russia “does not challenge” that there was a “possible presence of molecular chlorine in the cylinders.”

The Russian correspondence goes on to explain why it explicitly does challenge the final report’s conclusion that chlorine was likely used as a chemical weapon. Responding to Arias at the UN, Russian Ambassador Vasily Nebenzya read the relevant passage in full:

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.

Therefore, the only contention that Russia did not challenge is that of a “possible” presence of molecular chlorine in the cylinders found in Douma. That is for obvious reasons.

No one has argued that there was no possibility of a chlorine presence. There were, after all, two chlorine cylinders found at the scene, so traces of chlorine could be expected. In reality, the OPCW did not even report any finding of chlorine gas on the cylinder. They found chloride, a breakdown product of chlorine gas but also a very common substance in the environment, and in household products like table salt and other chloride salts. Chloride theoretically could have been dispersed around the cylinders.

Other possible evidence of chlorine gas use came from very low traces of various chlorine-containing organic compounds (CLOCs) found at the scene — most, if not all, of which can be present in the environment. Because the OPCW failed to test background samples – an oversight or deliberate omission that Whelan later described as scientifically indefensible – it could not determine if these trace quantities of CLOCs found at the scene pointed to chlorine gas use, or if they came from benign sources.

When challenged at the UN on his misrepresentation of the Russian note verbal, Arias did not offer a rebuttal. He instead tersely stated: “The Russian note verbale is published and that is what they have to say.”

Arias’ willingness to deceive the UN on the details of the Douma probe and the OPCW’s own capacity to address it also extends to his portrayal of the whistleblowers, as we will explain in detail in the second part of this report.

thegrayzone.com

The United States, Britain, and other NATO powers failed in their covert military efforts for regime change in Syria, thanks in large part to the principled intervention by Russia to defend its historic Arab ally. However, Peter Ford, the former British ambassador to Syria, contends that regime change is still very much a top priority for Western powers and their criminal agenda of reshaping the Middle East according to their imperial objectives. In the following interview, Ford explains how the Western tactic has now shifted to intensifying economic warfare in order to buckle the Syrian government led by President Assad. Nevertheless, the former British envoy envisages that the presidential election on May 26 will see Assad being resoundingly re-elected by a nation defiant towards Western aggression.

Peter Ford is a former British ambassador to Syria (2003-2006) who has publicly denounced Britain’s proxy-terror war for regime change in the Arab nation, along with other NATO accomplices. He is a seasoned diplomat having graduated in Arabic Studies from Oxford University and serving as an envoy in several Middle East countries. Ford has incurred the wrath of the British establishment for his outspoken truth-telling about their nefarious agenda in Syria. On the other hand, he has won the admiration of many people around the world for his courage and integrity. He is a recipient of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromising Integrity in Journalism.

Interview

Question: What do you make of the ruling last week by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to strip Syria of its member rights based on allegations that the Syrian government military forces have repeatedly used chemical weapons during the 10-year war? It seems that the OPCW has become extremely politicized by the United States and its Western allies. Do you see a lot of arm-twisting of member states by Western powers to produce OPCW sanctions against Syria?

Peter Ford: The Western powers are like dogs with an old bone on the subject of alleged use of chemical weapons in Syria. There is no meat on it but they continue to gnaw away. Why? Because the trope that “Assad gasses his own people” has become a cornerstone of the whole Western propaganda narrative on Syria. Without it, justifying the cruel economic war on Syria, largely through sanctions, would be harder to justify. And with military efforts at regime change having failed, economic warfare is now the last hope for the Western powers of destabilizing Syria enough to topple the government. For this strategy to work the Western powers are more than ready to undermine the credibility of the OPCW by abusing their ability to manipulate it in the Syrian context.

Question: The OPCW’s executive has been exposed in distorting its own reports for the objective of incriminating the Syrian government over alleged chemical weapons attacks. Do you think the OPCW has been turned into a lever to enable Western powers to harass Syria because these powers have been blocked by Russia and China from using the United Nations Security Council as a mechanism for aggression against Syria?

Peter Ford: The United States and the United Kingdom have not hesitated to ventriloquize the OPCW executive to get their way on Syria, stifling whistleblowing even where the cases of misreporting have been flagrant. As a former United Nations official myself, I can say that international organizations are nearly all controlled and used by the U.S./UK, with the Security Council thankfully the one arena where they are unable always to get their own way. This irks them considerably, leading them to go even further in exploiting and debasing agencies like the OPCW.

Question: Three months into a new administration in the United States under President Joe Biden, is there any discernible change in Washington’s policy towards Syria? You have stated publicly before that the whole war in Syria was a regime-change operation orchestrated by the U.S., Britain, France, and others. Is regime change in Syria still on the Western powers’ agenda?

Peter Ford: Regime change is very much still on the agenda. It cannot be openly avowed, of course, but how else to describe a policy of seeking a  “transition” under conditions that would guarantee removal of the present government? Those conditions include rigged elections and “justice” against “war criminals”. The economic warfare is as severe as anything that was waged against Iraq to bring Saddam down. It is blatant deceit to pretend this policy is not aimed at President Bashar al-Assad’s removal. Biden brings no change. If anything he is doubling down on the policy of his predecessor, without even the pretense of wanting out of Syria, holding on to sanctions, and deliberately hampering reconstruction.

Question: The United States still has troops illegally occupying parts of eastern Syria near the country’s oil fields, denying the Syrian state important resources for national reconstruction. You have described the American forces there as functioning like a “tripwire”. Could you expand on that concept?

Peter Ford: U.S. forces in occupied parts of Syria number around a thousand. The Syrian Arab Army could overrun these forces and their Kurdish allies in a matter of days. What stops them? The certain knowledge that any advance towards the American forces would trigger massive retaliation from the U.S. Air Force operating from its bases in the region. So the function of these U.S. forces is not to help “eradicate ISIS terror remnants” as implausibly claimed, but to serve as a tripwire and thereby deter Syrian forces from recovering territories that hold most of Syria’s oil and grain resources. Denial of these resources is key to bringing Syria to its knees via economic warfare.

Question: Could Biden step up the military intervention in Syria? Or is it more likely that the U.S. and its Western allies will pursue economic warfare through sanctions against Syria?

Peter Ford: It must be considered unlikely that the U.S. would put many more boots on the ground but many in the Pentagon are straining at the leash to bomb Syria at the slightest pretext. For the moment, the policy planners are counting on economic sanctions and are content to wait for the Syrian government to buckle.

Question: What are the strategic reasons for Western regime change in Syria?

Peter Ford: It’s a way of getting at Russia and Iran, essentially. A little thought experiment proves it. Imagine Assad suddenly said he was ready to get rid of the Russians and Iranians and complete America’s set of Arab powers in return for being left in power. Egypt’s Sadat did something similar in the late 1970s so it’s not unthinkable, and Assad was having tea with Britain’s Queen Elizabeth not so very long ago. Would the U.S. not then cast aside without a moment’s hesitation all the blather about democracy and human rights?

Question: How significant was Russia’s military intervention in the Syrian war in October 2015?

Peter Ford: It was a life-saver. Most people do not realize how close ISIS and other terrorist proxies were to grabbing control of Damascus. Naturally, the Western powers never like to acknowledge this awkward truth.

Question: France’s former Foreign Minister Roland Dumas remarked in a media interview back in 2013 how he was privately approached by British officials with a scheme for regime change in Syria two years before the war erupted in 2011. As a former British ambassador to Syria (2003-2006) can you recall noticing any such plot being considered?

Peter Ford: Planning for regime change in Syria only really began when the aftermath of the Iraq war went really sour and rather than blame themselves, the U.S./UK sought to deflect blame on to Syria. It accelerated after Britain’s Conservatives with their anti-Russian and anti-Iranian obsessions, and their support for Israel, came to power in 2010.

Question: Your principled and outspoken criticism of the British government’s involvement in the Syrian war has won you much respect around the world. Do you feel personally aggrieved by the malign conduct of Britain in Syria?

Peter Ford: I feel ashamed for my country’s actions. It really is quite shameful that we have been instrumental in causing suffering for millions of Syrians while hypocritically claiming we are doing it for their own good.

Question: Finally, Syria is holding presidential elections on May 26 in which incumbent Bashar al-Assad is running for re-election. The Western powers disparage Syria as an “undemocratic regime”. How do you view Syria’s polity? Is Assad likely to win re-election?

Peter Ford: Of course Assad will win and of course the Western powers will try to disparage his victory. But I can state with certainty that if you could offer the Conservative party in Britain a guarantee of achieving in the next general election anything anywhere near Assad’s genuine level of support, albeit some of it reluctant from a war-weary people, the Tories would bite your hand off for such an electoral gain. Much of the current Western propaganda effort against Syria is geared at trying to spoil Assad’s victory and deny it legitimacy. But inside Syria itself, the people will see the election as setting the seal on 10 years of struggle, and Assad will emerge strengthened as he faces the next phase in the Western war on Syria.

By Aaron MATÉ

The US-UK-France bombed Syria in April 2018 after accusing it of a chemical weapons attack in the city of Douma. Leaks later revealed that OPCW inspectors found no evidence of a Syrian government chemical weapons attack. But their findings were suppressed, their original report was censored, and the team was sidelined. Rather than having their concerns addressed, the inspectors have since faced a concerted smear campaign.

On April 15, OPCW Director-General Fernando Arias faced questions about the Douma cover-up from Mick Wallace and Clare Daley of the European Parliament. Both Wallace and Daley asked Arias why he has refused to address the Douma cover-up and meet with the dissenting inspectors. The meeting chair, former French cabinet minister Nathalie Loiseau, tried to cut-off the questions and even apologized to Arias for them being posed.  Arias then made a series of excuses and even false claims.

The following day, the Douma scandal was discussed at an Arria Formula Meeting of the United Nations Security Council. The ambassadors of the nations that bombed Syria in April 2018 — the US, UK, and France — tried to dismiss the Douma cover-up scandal as Russian propaganda and refused to offer any substantive comments on the issue.

The invited briefers at the meeting included Hans von Sponeck and Lawrence Wilkerson, two veteran diplomats who have signed a Statement of Concern about the Douma scandal, alongside other notable voices including five former OPCW officials. In his comments, von Sponeck revealed that Arias, the OPCW chief, refused to read the statement and returned it to sender.

Video: Aaron Maté recaps the European Parliament meeting on April 15 and UN Security Council Arria Formula meeting on April 16.

Featuring: Mick Wallace and Clare Daley, Members of the European Parliament; Fernando Arias, OPCW Director-General; Hans von Sponeck, former UN Assistant Secretary-General and UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq; Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Secretary State Colin Powell; Richard Mills, Deputy US Ambassador to the UN; Nicolas de Reviere, France’s Ambassador to the UN; Jonathan Allen, UK Ambassador to the UN; Jose Bustani, former OPCW Director-General; and Aaron Maté of The Grayzone.

thegrayzone.com

By Ben NORTON

ABritish academic who belongs to a prominent anti-war research group has been targeted in a deceptive sting operation run by a regime-change organization funded with UK and US taxpayer money. That contractor now stands accused of defrauding the European Union of millions of dollars.

The Working Group on Syria, Propaganda, and Media is a UK-based collective of professors who have published scholarly investigations exposing the disinformation and lies that have been at the heart of the decade-long Western dirty war on Damascus.

The working group’s success in debunking this propaganda, and in amplifying whistleblowers from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), has made it a target of pro-war elements in Western governments and intelligence agencies, along with their allies in major corporate media outlets.

This March, it was revealed that the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA), a regime-change organization that has been funded by numerous Western governments and is linked to UK intelligence agencies, had run an elaborate sting operation in a bid to discredit an academic member, and the working group as a whole.

A representative of CIJA posed as a Russian under a fake name and deceived a British researcher named Paul McKeigue into feeding it information with the goal of ensnaring him, vilifying his research group, and smearing its participants as tools of the Kremlin.

In other words, the anti-war British scholar was entrapped by an organization supported by his own government, and that happens to have been accused of large-scale fraud by the EU’s own fraud regulator.

The European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) has formally accused CIJA of fraud, “submission of false documents, irregular invoicing, and profiteering,” and recommended that authorities in the UK, the Netherlands, and Belgium prosecute the EU-funded organization.

Faced with potential consequences over these serious EU allegations of corruption, CIJA appears desperate to discredit anyone that reports on its unsavory activities. So the regime-change group contrived a months-long confidence trick of questionable legality and morality. And Western media outlets have eagerly spread its narrative in a closely coordinated cover-up operation aimed at burying the well-substantiated charges of fraud.

CIJA: Lawfare based on money from Western governments and documents from Al-Qaeda

The group behind the sting operation, the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, has a history of unethical behavior. The Grayzone previously published an investigation documenting CIJA’s suspicious tactics, extensive links to Western governments, and direct collaboration with Syria’s al-Qaeda affiliate.

CIJA’s executive director and founder, William Wiley, also directs a company called Tsamota, and the two firms share the same legal address. Wiley has used Tsamota to cash in on conflicts that advance Western foreign policy interests, raking in millions in government contracts, while advising Canadian mining companies on how to avoid prosecution for their activities in Africa.

Leaked documents show that Wiley’s Tsamota is closely linked to other Western intelligence cut-outs and government contractors such as ARK, which was at the center of an enormous global disinformation campaign aimed at orchestrating regime change in Syria. In fact Tsamota and ARK collaborated in jointly launching the Syrian Commission for Justice and Accountability, which in 2014 changed its name to CIJA.

Having since 2013 received an estimated €42 million (nearly $50 million USD) in funding from the EU, Britain, United States, Germany, Canada, Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway – states that have waged war on Syria and supported the country’s Islamist opposition – CIJA has become the key instrument of legal warfare, or lawfare, targeting Damascus and the government of Bashar al-Assad.

The United States and its European allies spent billions arming and training militants, many from extremist Salafi-jihadist groups, to try to overthrow the Syrian government and Assad, as NATO did in Libya in 2011. But in their ruthless crusade to bring about regime change in Syria, these Western nations supplemented their military efforts with other forms of unconventional and hybrid warfare, including suffocating economic sanctions and lawfare.

CIJA was created in 2012, at the beginning of the dirty war, as a weapon of what these Western governments call “transitional justice,” or regime-change-by-court. (The doctrine has also been dubbed the “Responsibility to Prosecute,” based on the “Responsibility to Protect” concept that was employed by liberal interventionists to justify the NATO wars that destroyed the states of Libya and Yugoslavia.)

The commission’s investigators have collaborated with al-Qaeda and other Salafi-jihadist armed opposition groups in order to steal documents from Syria and use them in Western lawsuits against Assad and his government.

CIJA’s collaboration with al-Qaeda was acknowledged in passing in an otherwise fawning publicity piece in The Guardian before it was quickly flushed down the memory hole, never to be mentioned again by the very same mainstream corporate media outlets that have printed puff piece after puff piece heroizing the organization.

A €1.5 million EU grant for CIJA between 2016 and 2020

EU fraud regulator accuses its own grantee CIJA of corruption

The European Union awarded the Commission for International Justice and Accountability a massive €1.5 million (approximately $1.77 million USD) grant in 2016 in order to gather “evidential material of potential war crimes and crimes against humanity” and prepare “new criminal case files” against the Syrian government and ISIS. The funding was meant to be used between 2016 and 2020.

But Brussels has clearly not been happy with the work that CIJA did, or rather did not do, because the EU’s own fraud regulator announced when the project ended that the organization had been under investigation for fraud.

The European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) published a press release in March 2020 stating that it had conducted a “long and complicated investigation” that “revealed that while the partnership claimed to be supporting the rule of law, the partners [CIJA] were actually committing widespread violations themselves, including submission of false documents, irregular invoicing, and profiteering.”

OLAF recommended “that the national authorities in the UK, the Netherlands and Belgium consider prosecuting the involved project partners [CIJA] for possible offences of fraud and forgery.”

CIJA was not publicly named in the press release, but OLAF’s statement made it clear that the fraud charges concerned its “partners in Rule of Law project in Syria,” specifically an organization that “had entered into a contract with the EU to support possible prosecutions for violations of International Criminal and Humanitarian Law in Syria” — an obvious reference to CIJA.

The European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) accused the EU-funded group CIJA of fraud in 2020

The OLAF statement added that CIJA had been given €1,999,830 (roughly $2.36 million USD) as part of its Syria contract, even higher than the amount disclosed in 2016. (The figures and timeline on other EU disclosures also slightly vary, and the BBC later reported that the fraud allegations concerned a €3 million contract that the EU awarded CIJA in 2013.) OLAF suggested that the European Commission should recover €1,896,734 (nearly $2.24 million USD), or 95 percent, of that amount.

While the European Anti-Fraud Office did not explicitly name CIJA, a Dutch-language investigation by journalist Arjen van der Ziel, published in the major Dutch newspaper Trouw, later made it clear that CIJA was the organization being accused of fraud.

The UAE’s newspaper The National followed up with an article on OLAF’s investigation of CIJA’s corruption, titled “Fraud allegations taint efforts to prosecute war crimes in Syria.”

Back in 2014, the US State Department, which had given $1 million to CIJA over two years, announced that it was cancelling its annual funding for the group. Washington did not given a reason for the cut, so it is not clear if fears of corruption had also motivated this decision.

Millions in funding leads to just one, highly dubious case

Despite the millions of dollars the Commission for International Justice and Accountability received from Western governments, it has very little to show for itself.

Over a period of years, al-Qaeda and other Salafi-jihadist militias have helped CIJA steal huge sums of documents from Syria in a massive operation aimed at prosecuting the government of Bashar al-Assad. But that effort has culminated in just a single high-profile case, which is full of gaping legal holes.

In 2020, the German government used materials obtained by CIJA to arrest two former Syrian government officials whom it accused of war crimes. Both had voluntarily left Syria years before and were living in Germany.

In fact one of the men being charged in Germany, a 58-year-old former prison intelligence officer accused of torture named Anwar Raslan, had worked closely with the Syrian opposition when he defected from the government back in 2013. Raslan later established himself as a prominent member of the Western-backed opposition to Assad.

A 2020 profile in Foreign Policy, titled “If a Torturer Switches Sides, Does He Deserve Mercy?,” noted: “Raslan ingratiated himself with several opposition leaders and in 2014 even got a ticket to represent the rebellion in Geneva at U.N.-organized peace talks. The about-face paid off when he flew to Germany in the summer that year and sought asylum.”

Members of the Syrian opposition are split over how to prosecute leading Syrian government torturer and defector Anwar Raslan, Anchal Vohra writes. https://t.co/Z5v5BeyeDa

— Foreign Policy (@ForeignPolicy) April 22, 2020

That is to say, after being given several years, nearly $50 million of dollars in Western government contracts, and help from extremist Salafi-jihadist insurgents, this is apparently the best CIJA could come up with: a Syrian living in Germany who had supported the anti-Assad opposition.

As the commission comes under increasing scrutiny, and with the EU’s fraud regulator breathing down its neck, it enacted a desperate con-job to discredit its critics.

How CIJA resorted to lies to entrap a British anti-war scholar and distract from fraud charges

The Commission for International Justice and Accountability has enjoyed obsequious praise from across the Western press. One of the only organizations that has criticized the Western government-funded group and its dubious methodology was the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda, and Media.

So in 2020, CIJA took its characteristically deceitful tactics to the next level, in a quest to discredit the working group and smear its academic constituents.

In February, the working group sent CIJA a list of questions for its executive director, William H. Wiley, notifying him and his organization that their shady business dealings were being investigated. (The working group has since made these questions public, and has also published its lengthy investigation into CIJA.)

As the working group dug for information on Wiley, it was surprised to find that the CIJA leader had been listed as the head of nine different companies in four jurisdictions.

They even discovered that Wiley and his firm Tsamota – a contractor for the European Union and US and UK governments that has done work in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Congo – had suspiciously been named in the Panama Papers, a database of offshore entities.

Moreover, the researchers uncovered that CIJA and Tsamota had the same legal address listed, along with overlap in key personnel. The address that Wiley’s CIJA and Tsamota had registered in Brussels, Belgium was apparently just an apartment in a residential area. (In late 2015, Wiley moved the CIJA/Tsamota address to Lisbon, Portugal.)

CIJA Executive Director William Harry Wiley and his firm Tsamota, a Western government contractor, are named in the Panama Papers

When CIJA and Wiley saw the questions from the working group, they were apparently frightened to see that their alleged financial improprieties might come to light. (The European Anti-Fraud Office’s press release revealing its corruption investigation into CIJA was not released until March, a month later.)

So CIJA embarked on an attempt to entrap the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda, and Media, in a bid to discredit its research.

An unidentified CIJA staffer created a false account on the encrypted email platform ProtonMail and, in December 2020, contacted Paul McKeigue, a professor of genetic epidemiology and statistical genetics at the University of Edinburgh, and a member of the working group.

McKeigue told The Grayzone that when the fake account first emailed him, it did not identify itself. The user, a CIJA employee in disguise, tried to entice McKeigue by promising useful information on Syria that he could use for his research.

McKeigue said he was skeptical at first, but the account ultimately provided him with factual intelligence that only an insider could have had. McKeigue independently verified the information and saw that it was indeed correct.

“They are professionals at information warfare,” McKeigue recalled. “They know how to trick you into believing them and gaining their trust.”

The Grayzone has reviewed some of the emails sent between McKeigue and the CIJA staffer. The messages show how over several months of communication, CIJA deceived McKeigue into feeding it private information about his colleagues in the working group and about other public figures who have exposed lies and disinformation used to justify the Western dirty war on Syria.

McKeigue stressed however that not all of the information he provided in the sting operation was accurate. “Some of this was embellished to give the impression of a coordinated network that in reality does not exist,” McKeigue said in a public statement, noting that the working group “does not exist as an entity other than a loose group of people who occasionally co-author articles or comment on each other’s drafts.”

Professor Paul McKeigue, the British anti-war scholar who was entrapped by CIJA’s deceptive sting operation

It was not until weeks into their correspondence, McKeigue recounted, that the account began hinting that it was supposedly run by a Russian intelligence officer. McKeigue stressed that the user had at first remained anonymous for weeks, and did not falsely claim a Russian identity until well into their private communications.

Eventually, the account turned to a fake name: Ivan. The CIJA staffer behind it blatantly lied to McKeigue, creating an entirely new, fictitious persona.

“Ivan” tricked McKeigue into believing that he had a source on the inside, maybe even a whistleblower, who wanted to expose CIJA for apparent connections to Western intelligence agencies.

“When I first started looking at CIJA, I thought it was all an intelligence front and was doing its work to lay the basis for a US occupation and sanctions on Syria,” McKeigue told The Grayzone. “But as I dug further, I realized that, for all of the millions in funding that Western governments had provided it, CIJA had actually delivered very little.”

“Ivan” tried to convince McKeigue not to focus on investigating the corruption angle, but rather to focus on links to Western intelligence. The account even told McKeigue that the executive director of CIJA, William Wiley, was a CIA agent who had a long history working with the US government.

This led McKeigue to investigate Wiley’s extensive links to Washington and other Western governments, and his role in the trial against Iraq’s former leader Saddam Hussein and international tribunal for former Yugoslavia.

McKeigue, who said that he now believes that Wiley was the one running the false “Ivan” account, found a book by journalist John Nixon, “Debriefing the President: The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein,” which referred to a CIA analyst in Iraq named Bill, whom McKeigue suspected was William Wiley.

CIJA executive director William Wiley

But “Ivan” had distracted McKeigue from the main scandal: The EU regulator’s serious charges that Wiley had presided over a massive case of fraud.

“I realized that the case was mostly about corruption,” McKeigue told The Grayzone.

“I was stupid, but I was extremely busy at the time,” he added. “If I hadn’t been so busy, I would have been more careful.”

This scandal came to light on March 26, with a series of articles in the British media.

The BBC’s avowedly pro-war reporter Chloe Hadjimatheou – who was exposed for her own unethical, propagandistic work on Syria by The Grayzone’s Aaron Maté – promoted CIJA’s sting operation in an article titled “The UK professor and the fake Russian agent.” Hadjimatheou uncritically echoed CIJA’s talking points, demonizing Paul McKeigue as a Kremlin shill and even defending the organization against the EU fraud regulator’s corruption charges.

Leaked documents reviewed by The Grayzone exposed how the BBC has infiltrated Russian language media to advance NATO interests in a covert program funded and overseen by the UK Foreign Office.

The Times, a British outlet known for amplifying the narratives of the UK’s intelligence services, ran a carefully coordinated piece attacking McKeigue. Just a few hours later, the same newspaper printed another smear accusing McKeigue and his colleagues at the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda, and Media of “peddling Syria war ‘conspiracies.’”  The article uncritically regurgitated the claims of Charles Lister, a DC regime-change lobbyist employed by militaristic think tanks funded by the Gulf monarchies waging war on Damascus.

These media attacks were followed by a nearly identical smear piece in the right-wing tabloid the Daily Mail, which conveniently failed to mention OLAF’s fraud investigation into CIJA.

Amid the coordinated media assault, CIJA released a statement maligning the working group and defending its own dishonest tactics, insisting that its sting operation was “undertaken by lawful means.”

For his part, Paul McKeigue published a personal statement on the working group website. “As a citizen investigator, I cultivate contacts with all sorts of people who have relevant information, including anonymous sources and some identified sources whose activities I do not endorse,” he wrote. “I kept an open mind about who I was talking to.”

The working group has since released its investigation into CIJA and Wiley’s suspicious business dealings.

McKeigue emphasized that he is deeply troubled by “the subversion of British parliamentary government by what I now recognize to be a ‘deep state’ operating partly through private cutouts.”

Indeed, a UK government contractor with close proximity to intelligence services engaging in a spy-like sting operation against a British anti-war academic in an attempt to discredit his research, stain the reputation of his colleagues, and cover up well-substantiated charges of corruption should be a major scandal.

The desperation of the tactics shows CIJA and William Wiley have a lot to hide. A truly independent media would shine light on this controversy. But so far, the mainstream press has functioned as the public relations arm for the corruption-stained CIJA, papering over the ethical rot and corruption of a taxpayer-funded organization in a bid to further the dirty war on Syria.

thegrayzone.com

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

By Aaron MATÉ

Five former officials from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons have joined a group of prominent signatories to urge the OPCW to address the controversy surrounding its investigation of an alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma, Syria in April 2018.

Leaks from inside the OPCW show that key scientific findings that cast doubt on claims of Syrian government guilt were censored, and that the original investigators were removed from the probe. Since the cover-up became public, the OPCW has shunned accountability and publicly attacked the two whistleblowers who challenged it from inside.

The “Statement of Concern” is signed by five former OPCW officials, including the organization’s founding leader, José Bustani, and others including Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Tulsi Gabbard, John Pilger, Lord West of Spithead, as well two former senior UN officials, Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck.

“The issue at hand threatens to severely damage the reputation and credibility of the OPCW and undermine its vital role in the pursuit of international peace and security,” the statement says. “It is simply not tenable for a scientific organization such as the OPCW to refuse to respond openly to the criticisms and concerns of its own scientists whilst being associated with attempts to discredit and smear those scientists.”

Pushback host Aaron Maté details the letter and airs clips of his and Tulsi Gabbard’s recent “Tucker Carlson Tonight” appearance discussing the OPCW controversy.

Statement of Concern: The OPCW investigation of alleged chemical weapons use in Douma, Syria
March 11, 2021

We wish to express our deep concern over the protracted controversy and political fall-out surrounding the OPCW and its investigation of the alleged chemical weapon attacks in Douma, Syria, on 7 April 2018.

Since the publication by the OPCW of its final report in March 2019, a series of worrying developments has raised serious and substantial concerns with respect to the conduct of that investigation. These developments include instances in which OPCW inspectors involved with the investigation have identified major procedural and scientific irregularities, the leaking of a significant quantity of corroborating documents, and damning statements provided to UN Security Council meetings. It is now well established that some senior inspectors involved with the investigation, one of whom played a central role, reject how the investigation derived its conclusions, and OPCW management now stands accused of accepting unsubstantiated or possibly manipulated findings with the most serious geo-political and security implications. Calls by some members of the Executive Council of the OPCW to allow all inspectors to be heard were blocked.

The inspectors’ concerns are shared by the first Director General of the OPCW, José Bustani, and a significant number of eminent individuals have called for transparency and accountability at the OPCW. Bustani himself was recently prevented by key members of the Security Council from participating in a hearing on the Syrian dossier. As Ambassador Bustani stated in a personal appeal to the Director General, if the Organization is confident in the conduct of its Douma investigation then it should have no difficulty addressing the inspectors’ concerns.

To date, unfortunately, the OPCW senior management has failed to adequately respond to the allegations against it and, despite making statements to the contrary, we understand has never properly allowed the views or concerns of the members of the investigation team to be heard or even met with most of them. It has, instead, side-stepped the issue by launching an investigation into a leaked document related to the Douma case and by publicly condemning its most experienced inspectors for speaking out.

In a worrying recent development, a draft letter falsely alleged to have been sent by the Director General to one of the dissenting inspectors was leaked to an ‘open source’ investigation website in an apparent attempt to smear the former senior OPCW scientist. The ‘open source’ website then published the draft letter together with the identity of the inspector in question. Even more alarmingly, in a BBC4 radio series aired recently, an anonymous source, reportedly connected with the OPCW Douma investigation, gave an interview with the BBC in which he contributes to an attempt to discredit not only the two dissenting inspectors, but even Ambassador Bustani himself. Importantly, recent leaks in December 2020 have evidenced that a number of senior OPCW officials were supportive of one OPCW inspector who had spoken out with respect to malpractice.

The issue at hand threatens to severely damage the reputation and credibility of the OPCW and undermine its vital role in the pursuit of international peace and security. It is simply not tenable for a scientific organization such as the OPCW to refuse to respond openly to the criticisms and concerns of its own scientists whilst being associated with attempts to discredit and smear those scientists. Moreover, the on-going controversy regarding the Douma report also raises concerns with respect to the reliability of previous FFM reports, including the investigation of the alleged attack at Khan Shaykhun in 2017.

We believe that the interests of the OPCW are best served by the Director General providing a transparent and neutral forum in which the concerns of all the investigators can be heard as well as ensuring that a fully objective and scientific investigation is completed.

To that end, we call on the Director General of the OPCW to find the courage to address the problems within his organization relating to this investigation and ensure States Parties and the United Nations are informed accordingly. In this way we hope and believe that the credibility and integrity of the OPCW can be restored.

Signatories in Support of the Statement of Concern:

José Bustani, Ambassador of Brazil, first Director General of the OPCW and former Ambassador to the United Kingdom and France.

Professor Noam Chomsky, Laureate Professor U. of Arizona and Institute Professor (em), MIT.

Andrew Cockburn, Washington editor, Harper’s Magazine.

Daniel Ellsberg, PERI Distinguished Research Fellow, UMass Amherst. Former Defense and State Department official. Former official of Defense Department (GS-18) and State Department (FSR-1).

Professor Richard Falk, Professor of International Law Emeritus, Princeton University.

Tulsi Gabbard, former Presidential candidate and Member of the US House of Representatives (2013-2021).

Professor Dr. Ulrich Gottstein, on behalf of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW-Germany).

Katharine Gun, former GCHQ (UKGOV), whistleblower.

Denis J. Halliday, UN Assistant Secretary-General (1994-98).

Professor Pervez Houdbhoy, Quaid-e-Azam University and ex Pugwash.

Kristinn Hrafnnson, Editor in Chief, Wikileaks.

Dr. Sabine Krüger, Analytical Chemist, Former OPCW Inspector 1997-2009.

Ray McGovern, ex-CIA Presidential Briefer; co-founder, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

Elizabeth Murray, former Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East, National Intelligence Council (rtd); member, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity and Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence.

Professor Götz Neuneck, Pugwash Council and German Pugwash Chair.

Dirk van Niekerk, former OPCW Inspection Team Leader, Head of OPCW Special Mission to Iraq

John Pilger, Emmy and Bafta winning journalist and film maker.

Professor Theodore A. Postol, Professor Emeritus of Science, Technology, and National Security Policy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Dr. Antonius Roof, former OPCW Inspection Team Leader and Head Industry Inspections.

Professor John Avery Scales, Professor, Pugwash Council and Danish Pugwash Chair.

Hans von Sponeck, former UN Assistant Secretary General and UN Humanitarian Co-ordinator (Iraq).

Alan Steadman, Chemical Weapons Munitions Specialist, Former OPCW Inspection Team Leader and UNSCOM Inspector.

Jonathan Steele, journalist and author.

Roger Waters, Musician and Activist.

Lord West of Spithead, First Sea Lord and Chief of Naval Staff 2002-06.

Oliver Stone, Film Director, Producer and Writer.

Colonel (ret.) Lawrence B. Wilkerson, U.S. Army, Visiting Professor at William and Mary College and former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell.

thegrayzone.com

By Aaron MATÉ

For the first time, OPCW chief Fernando Arias was asked a series of direct questions at the United Nations about the cover-up of a Syria chemical weapons probe. He answered none of them.

Russia’s UN ambassador asked Arias about several damning leaks, some revealed by The Grayzone, as well as ongoing deceptive attacks on the veteran scientists who challenged the censorship of their investigation. Arias refused to answer in public session, and gave vague, non-substantive answers in private.

Aaron Maté recaps the unanswered questions to Arias, as well as recent attacks on the OPCW whistleblowers via Western state-funded outlets Bellingcat and the BBC.

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