Before we begin I should
highlight that Bellingcat is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy,
which according to its own cofounder was set up to do
overtly what the CIA had previously been doing covertly, namely orchestrating
narrative management geared toward the elimination of governments which refuse
to comply with US interests. NED is funded
directly by the US government, which means that Bellingcat is funded by the
US government via an organization set up to promote imperialist regime change
agendas. Bellingcat is also funded by Open Society Foundations, another imperialist narrative management operation.Imperialist
propaganda firm Bellingcat has published a response to the ever-expanding OPCW
scandal, and it's got to be seen to be believed.
Syria has been the target of
what may be the most sophisticated propaganda campaign in history, and
Bellingcat has been consistently rallying behind even the most transparently
ridiculous tools of this campaign. This includes the notorious Bana Alabed psyop which at its height saw CNN staging a fake, scripted interview featuring a
seven year-old girl assigning blame to Bashar al-Assad for an alleged sarin gas
attack in Khan Shaykhun. Bellingcat's stellar investigative work (which has been praised
in fawning puff pieces by mainstream outlets like The Guardian and The New Yorker) concluded that this obvious propaganda
construct was in fact nothing other than a little girl and her mother
independently composing viral tweets, giving interviews and authoring books
about how the Syrian government must be toppled via western interventionism.
Bellingcat's latest phenomenal
report on how you're supposed to think about important geopolitical disputes,
titled "Emails And Reading Comprehension: OPCW Douma Coverage Misses
Crucial Facts", addresses the leaked OPCW email which was
recently published by WikiLeaks and various other outlets
revealing that the OPCW omitted crucial information from its Douma report which
indicated that a chemical weapons attack was unlikely to have occurred. I
encourage you to go and check out Bellincat's new masterpiece for yourself; don't
worry about giving them clicks, that's not where they get their money.
The first thing you'll notice
about Bellingcat's article is that at no point does it even attempt to address
the actual inflammatory comments within it, such as the OPCW whistleblower's
assertion that the samples tested where a chlorine gas attack is alleged to
have occurred in April 2018 contained levels of chlorinated organic compounds
which were so low that it would be unreasonable to claim with any confidence
that a chlorine gas attack had occurred at all. The whistleblower writes in the
leaked email to the OPCW cabinet chief that the levels "were, in most
cases, present only in parts per billion range, as low as 1-2 ppb, which is
essentially trace quantities."
As we discussed previously, early skeptics of the establishment
Douma narrative highlighted
the bizarre fact that when the OPCW published its Interim Report in July of last year its report
contained no information about the levels at which the chlorinated
organic chemicals occurred. Chlorinated organic chemicals occur at trace levels
in any industrialized area, so they are only indicative of a chlorine gas
attack when samples test at high levels. The email said they didn't. The OPCW
omitted this in both its Interim and Final Reports.
The whistleblower told journalist Jonathan Steele that the levels found
"were comparable to and even lower than those given in the World Health
Organisation’s guidelines on recommended permitted levels of trichlorophenol
and other COCs in drinking water."
“Had they been included, the
public would have seen that the levels of COCs found were no higher than you
would expect in any household environment”, the whistleblower said.
In a new Fox News interview
with Tucker Carlson, Steele explained the significance of this revelation.
"The main point is that
Chlorine gas degrades rapidly in the air," Steele said. "So coming in two weeks later, you
wouldn't find anything. What you would find is that the gas contaminates or
affects other chemicals in the natural environment. So-called 'chlorinated
organic chemicals.' The difficulty is they exist anyway in the natural
environment and water. So the crucial thing is the levels, were there higher
levels of chlorinated organic chemicals found after the alleged gas attack than
there would have been in the normal environment?"
"When they got back to
the Netherlands, to The Hague where the OPCW has its headquarters, samples were
sent off to designated laboratories, then there was a weird silence
developed," Steele continued. "Nobody told the inspectors what the
results of the analysis was. It was only by chance that the inspector found out
through accident earlier the results would come in and there were no
differences at all. There were no higher levels of Chlorinated organic
chemicals in the areas where the alleged attack had happened where there is
some suspicious cylinders had been found by opposition activists. So it didn't
seem possible that there could have been a gas attack because the levels were
just the same as in the natural environment."
Bellingcat simply ignores this
absolutely central aspect of the email, as well as the whistleblower's point
about the symptoms of victims not matching chlorine gas poisoning.
"In this case the
confidence in the identity of chlorine or any choking agent is drawn into
question precisely because of the inconsistency with the reported and observed
symptoms," the whistleblower writes in the email. "The inconsistency
was not only noted by the FFM team but strongly noted by three toxicologists
with expertise in exposure to CW [Chemical Weapons] agents."
Bellingcat narrative
management reaches bargaining stage on road to acceptance, now emphasising that
OPCW final report downgraded its conclusion to suggest merely “possible” use of
chlorine.
— Tim Hayward
(@Tim_Hayward_) November 25, 2019
Bellingcat says nothing about
these revelations in the email, and says nothing about the fact that the OPCW
excluded them from both its Interim Report in July 2018 and its Final Report in
March 2019, the latter of which actually asserted the exact opposite saying there was "reasonable grounds that the use
of a toxic chemical as a weapon took place. This toxic chemical contained
reactive chlorine. The toxic chemical was likely molecular chlorine.”
Bellingcat completely ignores
all of these points, which are literally the only reason any of this is in the
news at all, instead opting to make silly, pedantic arguments that the text of
the email and the Interim and Final Reports indicate that some of the
whistleblower's concerns appear to have been partially addressed by
OPCW leadership in its publications. To make this argument, Bellingcat
highlights how some of the wording in the reports was changed to appear a bit
less conclusive, such as changing "likely" to "possible"
and changing "reactive chlorine containing chemical” to "chemical
containing reactive chlorine”.
By highlighting these
barely-significant changes Bellingcat attempts to spin the narrative that there
was no internal OPCW coverup of its investigators' findings at all, which is of
course invalidated by the fact that its Final Report concluded that a chlorine
gas attack had taken place despite the whistleblower clearly stating that there
is no basis upon which to conclude this. It's also obviously invalidated by the
fact that not one but two whistleblowers have come forward, meaning they
plainly do not feel as though their concerns were met.
"Ian and I wanted to have
this issue investigated and hopefully resolved internally, rather than exposing
the failings of the Organisation in public, so we exhausted every internal
avenue possible including submission of all the evidence of irregular behaviour
to the Office of Internal Oversight," the whistleblower told
Steele. "The request for an internal investigation was refused and
every other attempt to raise our concerns was stone walled. Our failed efforts
to get management to listen went on over a period of nearly nine months. It was
only after we realised the internal route was impossible that we decided to go
public”.
"Ian" is Ian
Henderson, the OPCW ballistics expert whose Engineering Assessment which was leaked this past May.
Henderson concluded that, contrary to what the OPCW's Final Report strongly
implies, the cylinders found at the scene in Douma were more likely to have
been manually placed there, i.e. staged. The anonymous whistleblower informed
Steele that all but one of the OPCW's investigative team agreed
with Henderson's assessment. This too was left out of all OPCW reports, and
Bellingcat's piece completely ignores it, instead writing only that "Three
independent analyses by experts in three different countries were carried out,
and all reached complimentary conclusions: the damage at the impact sites is consistent
with the cylinders having fallen from height."
Just so all my followers are
clear, Tucker Carlson and the merry band of alt left grifter idiots trying to
convince you that 1 of the 257 chemical attacks in Syria was a false flag are
wrong, again, and never even bothered to read the report they say is
wrong https://t.co/IRJQzC0VaL
— Danny Gold
(@DGisSERIOUS) November 26, 2019
With the temerity only an NED
paycheck can get you, Bellingcat argues that this vapid pedantry which has no
bearing on the actual story whatsoever completely invalidates all reporting on
the OPCW scandal.
"Although this letter
appears to be at least superficially damaging to the OPCW, after reading the
actual reports published by the OPCW it is clear that this letter is outdated
and inapplicable to the final Douma report," Bellingcat concludes.
"If the people covering this story had actually taken the time to read the
letter and the FFM reports, they may well have chosen to publicize it in a very
different manner."
Empire apologists have taken
this ridiculous, nonsensical line of argumentation as gospel and run with it on
social media, sharing Bellingcat's embarrassing faceplant with triumphant,
chest-thumping captions.
"Just so all my followers
are clear, Tucker Carlson and the merry band of alt left grifter idiots trying
to convince you that 1 of the 257 chemical attacks in Syria was a false flag
are wrong, again, and never even bothered to read the report they say is
wrong," tweeted Newshour's Danny Gold.
"So the letter written by
the dissenting OPCW employee on Douma investigation was sent two weeks before
the interim report was released and nine months before the final one. In the
final one, the employee's concerns were addressed. Where's the cover
up?" tweeted Telegraph's
Josie Ensor.
"WikiLeaks et al are
lying to you in defence of the Assad regime," tweeted odious Syria narrative manager Oz Katerji.
Tucker Carlson spreads
disinformation about a deadly chemical attack in Syria https://t.co/aFtPwpUtE8
— Eliot Higgins
(@EliotHiggins) November 26, 2019
Media Matters For America,
another narrative management firm founded by troll army commander David Brock, has also picked up
Bellingcat's ridiculous arguments and run with them in an even dumber article
titled "Tucker Carlson spreads disinformation about a deadly chemical
attack in Syria".
"Despite the seemingly
scandalous accusation in the leak, Carlson is misrepresenting the nature of the
WikiLeaks documents and their significance," MMFA claims.
"Investigative journalists at Bellingcat found that the leaked
letter was in fact referring to an 'interim report' issued in July of 2018,
before the OPCW released its final conclusions. A side-by-side comparison shows
that the concerns addressed in the letter 'are present, or else are in modified
form, in the final report.'”
Which is of course false, as
explained above.
MMFA's other claims are
nothing other than simple regurgitation of the very reports that are now being
invalidated by the leaks that Tucker Carlson highlighted on his show. Their
entire argument boils down to "This old information is in contradiction to
that new information," which is of course the entire bloody point.
"These claims contradict
and misrepresent the available evidence regarding the attack, the
conclusions of multiple governments, and they are based on a Syrian and
Russian misinformation campaign seeking to discredit investigators
and absolve Assad of responsibility for the atrocity," MMFA argues,
linking to a 2018 BBC article saying Assad was responsible for the Douma
incident, a 2018 Guardian article about the US government's
unsubstantiated claim to have secret proof of Assad's guilt, and a 2018
Guardian article claiming that Russia is wrong about its skepticism of the
western Douma narrative, respectfully.
Which is the same as saying
"You're wrong because we disagree with you. Here is evidence of our
disagreeing with you last year."
This is the best the spin
masters can do, and the OPCW scandal is only going to unfold more. Should be
fun.
Caitlin Johnstone |
November 27, 2019
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