The Organisation for the
Prohibition of Chemical Weapons is now hemorrhaging evidence that the US and
its allies deceived the world once again about yet another military
intervention, which should be a front-page story all over the world. Yet if you
looked at American news media headlines you’d think the only thing that matters
right now is indulging the childish fantasy that Donald Trump might somehow
magically be removed from office via supermajority consensus in a
majority-Republican Senate.
CounterPunch has
published an
actual bombshell of a report by journalist Jonathan Steele containing
many revelations about the OPCW scandal which were previously unknown to the
public. Steele is an award-winning reporter who
worked as a senior foreign correspondent for The Guardian back before
that outlet was purged
of all critical thinkers on western imperialism; he first
waded into the OPCW controversy last month with a statement made on the
BBC revealing the existence of a second whistleblower on the organisation’s
investigation into an alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma, Syria.
If you haven’t been following
this story you can click
here for a timeline of events to fully appreciate the significance of
these new revelations about the Douma incident, but just to quickly recap, in
April of last year reports surfaced that dozens of civilians had been killed in
that city by chemical weapons used by the Syrian government under President
Bashar al-Assad. This immediately drew skepticism from people who’ve been
paying attention to the narrative manipulation campaign against Syria, since
Assad had already won the battle for Douma and had no strategic reason to
employ banned weapons there knowing that there would be a military strike in
retaliation from western powers. True to form, a few days later the US, France
and the UK launched airstrikes on the Syrian government.
The OPCW released its final
report on Douma in March of this year, but that report has been contradicted by
two separate whistleblowers from the Douma investigation. The first surfaced
in May of this year with a leaked Engineering Assessment claiming the
chlorine cylinders found at the crime scene were unlikely to have been dropped
from the air, and that it was far more likely that they were manually placed
there, i.e. staged, by the occupying opposition forces in Douma. The second
whistleblower came forward last month with a day-long presentation in Brussels
before a panel of experts assembled by the whistleblowing defense group Courage
Foundation, the findings of which were published by WikiLeaks.
Chemical weapons watchdog
accused by its own inspectors: see https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/11/15/the-opcw-and-douma-chemical-weapons-watchdog-accused-of-evidence-tampering-by-its-own-inspectors/ …
This new report by Steele
focuses on information provided to him by the second whistleblower, who is
going by the pseudonym “Alex” out of fear for his safety. The information
provided by Alex has turned out to be far more incendiary even than the leaked Engineering
Assessment. Here are seven major highlights (hyperlinks go to the relevant
article text they reference):
1- US government
officials attempted
to pressure OPCW investigators into believing that the Assad
government was responsible for the Douma incident. The officials were placed in
the same room as the investigators by the OPCW’s then-cabinet chief Bob
Fairweather, which the investigators of course felt was a grossly inappropriate
breach of the OPCW’s commitment to impartiality. For the record the US
government already
has a known history of bullying the OPCW, an ostensibly independent
and international body, to force it to allow the advancement of pre-existing
regime change agendas.
2- Alex reports that internal
dissent on the OPCW’s official publications on the Douma incident was far more
ubiquitous than previously known, saying “Most
of the Douma team felt the two reports on the incident, the Interim Report and
the Final Report, were scientifically impoverished, procedurally irregular and
possibly fraudulent.”
3- All but one member of
the team agreed with the Engineering Assessment that it was far more likely
that the chlorine cylinders were manually placed on the scene by people on the
ground.
4- Ian Henderson, the South
African ballistics expert whose name was signed on the leaked Engineering
Assessment, seems to have been responsible for leaking
it. The identity of the leaker was not previously known to the public.
5- Investigators experienced
pressures against saying anything about their mounting findings that no
chemical attack occurred, with Alex calling it “the
elephant in the room which no-one dared mention explicitly”.
6- The OPCW’s Final Report on
the Douma incident explicitly
claimed the investigation found “reasonable grounds that the use of a
toxic chemical as a weapon took place. This toxic chemical contained reactive
chlorine. The toxic chemical was likely molecular chlorine.” Yet according to
Alex the levels of chlorinated organic chemicals found on the scene “were no
higher than you would expect in any household environment” and were in fact
“much lower than what would be expected in environmental samples”, comparable to or even
lower than the World Health Organisation’s recommended chlorine levels
for drinking water. This extremely crucial fact was actively and
repeatedly omitted from the OPCW’s public reporting in a way
Alex describes as
“deliberate and irregular”.
7- Steele mentioned last month that
he’d unsuccessfully reached out to the OPCW for comment on the second OPCW
whistleblower’s revelations, and in his new article he confirms that the
organisation is still dodging him, with both Fairweather and the OPCW’s media
office refusing to respond. La Repubblica‘s Stefania
Maurizi has also
been reporting that the OPCW is dodging the press on this important
matter. The OPCW did
respond to press inquiries after the first whistleblower surfaced in
May, but it appears that someone has given the order to cease doing so with the
claims of this second whistleblower.
This story -- 2 whistleblowers
accusing OPCW of suppressing evidence, under US pressure, to reach a conclusion
that justified US strikes on Syria --
should be a global scandal. Instead it's widely ignored, except for a principled few like @caitoz who've called it from the start: https://twitter.com/caitoz/status/1195679221546270720 …
should be a global scandal. Instead it's widely ignored, except for a principled few like @caitoz who've called it from the start: https://twitter.com/caitoz/status/1195679221546270720 …
If there were any correlation
between newsworthiness and actual news coverage, the OPCW scandal would be
making front-page international headlines today. Instead, the mounting evidence
that the US and its allies committed a war crime based on false information and
that a supposedly independent watchdog organisation helped them cover it up
barely registers. Why is that?
If you ask Syria narrative
managers like The
Guardian‘s George Monbiot or The
Intercept‘s Mehdi Hasan, this isn’t a big story because even if Assad wasn’t responsible
for the Douma incident, it doesn’t matter because he’s still a very bad man.
But this is an extremely intellectually dishonest obfuscation on their part,
because this has nothing to do with whether or not Bashar al-Assad is a nice
person. The OPCW covering up its findings exculpating the Syrian government on
Douma wouldn’t be significant because it would mean that Assad is a good
person, it would be significant because it would mean the US deceived the world
about yet another military intervention. And it would make it much harder for
the US to manufacture public support for other military interventions in the
future.
Which is of course the real
reason the political/media class is ignoring the OPCW scandal. Military
violence is
the glue that holds the US-centralized empire together, which means it is
of utmost strategic importance that that empire retain the ability to
manufacture consent for military violence going forward. Because
plutocrat-controlled news media outlets are
set up in such a way that their employees know their careers depend on
protecting the empire upon which the plutocratic class is built, the OPCW
scandal is an obvious no-go for anyone who wishes to remain in the business.
The only way this story will
get mainstream coverage is if it goes viral without the assistance of the
mainstream media, at which point the propagandists will be forced to report on
it to save face and begin the near-impossible task of trying to regain control
of the narrative. This will only happen if enough of us work together to shove
the OPCW scandal into mainstream attention. I think this would end up being a
very good thing for the world.
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