By Niles Niemuth
28 December 2019
28 December 2019
A fourth round of leaked
internal documents from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical
Weapons (OPCW) was published by WikiLeaks Friday, further exposing the official
report on an alleged 2018 chemical weapons attack in Douma—a suburb of Damascus
then held by CIA-backed Islamist forces—as having been doctored to justify an
attack by the United States, Britain and France against the Syrian government.
The documents point to a
systematic effort to suppress evidence uncovered by investigators that cast
significant doubt on the official line pushed by Washington and its imperialist
allies that the government of Bashar al-Assad had conclusively carried out a
chemical weapons attack which killed as many as 49 people.
Without presenting any
evidence to prove that Assad’s military had indeed carried out the alleged
attack, purported video of children suffering in its aftermath pushed by the
mainstream media was seized on by the US, UK and France to launch an assault on
Syrian government targets just one week later. The official OPCW report was
published this March, nearly one year after President Donald Trump ordered the
series of airstrikes which threatened to spark a wider war with Iran and
Russia, Assad’s main allies.
The series of leaks published by
the media outlet founded by journalist Julian Assange, currently imprisoned by
the British government while awaiting extradition to the US for exposing
imperialist war crimes in the Middle East, have exposed the fact that key
evidence along with dissent by investigators who were on the ground in Douma
was omitted from the final report in order to give the impression that the OPCW
had concluded that Assad had carried out a chlorine gas attack on April 7,
2018. The initial round of emails was verified as
authentic by Reuters at the end of November.
Just as extraordinary as the
leaks themselves is the fact that they have been completely blacked out by the
mainstream media in the United States and Europe. Despite the explosive
character of the documents that have been published so far, exposing the
ostensibly objective and neutral OPCW as a tool of the US and its imperialist
allies, there has been no significant coverage in the mainstream media nor any
effort by the New York Times, Washington Post or any other major
outlet to debunk the documents or their contents.
Last month, Newsweek reporter
Tareq Haddad resigned in protest after his editors forcefully rebuffed his
efforts to report on the leaks. Given the apparently enforced silence about
these now publicly available documents, the question must be asked if the
equivalent of a British-style D-notice has been sent by the CIA and the State
Department to editorial boards in the US, Europe and elsewhere in an effort to
bury any exposure of the lies whipped up in the years-long effort to overthrow
Assad.
The latest round of documents
includes an email from
the head of the OPCW, Sebastien Braha, sent on February 28, 2019, just ahead of
the release of the final report on the investigation of the Douma incident,
demanding the removal of any trace of the report produced by veteran OPCW
inspector and ballistics expert Ian Henderson from the organization’s internal
registry. Henderson’s investigation had concluded it was more likely that the
cylinders which had been identified as the source of chlorine gas had been
placed where they were found, rather than being dropped from the air.
“Please get this document out
of DRA [Documents Registry Archive]... And please remove all traces, if any, of
its delivery/storage/whatever in DRA,” Braha wrote, referring to Henderson’s
report.
The final report omitted any
reference to Henderson’s findings, which were not made public until they were
leaked to the press, and did not include any other dissenting opinions from
investigators who had examined evidence in Douma. An investigator from the Fact
Finding Mission (FFM) in Syria noted in an email from a previous tranche
released by WikiLeaks that the final report had been so changed that it “no
longer reflects the work of the team.”
Other critical details
uncovered by investigators, including that only trace amounts of
chlorinated organic chemicals had been found by investigators, were omitted
from the report, giving the impression that conclusive evidence was uncovered
of a chlorine gas attack.
Another email published
by WikiLeaks was sent by Sami Barrek, the team leader of the FFM, to Henderson
and several others at the end of July 2018. It noted that all but one of the
eight investigators who had been on the ground in Douma would be excluded from
further discussion on the final report. Jonathan Steele, former senior foreign
correspondent for the Guardian, reported in Counterpunch last
month that an OPCW whistleblower known as “Alex” relayed an incident that same
month in which three unidentified American officials met with dissenting
investigators to declare that there was no question that Assad was responsible
for the alleged chlorine gas attack in Douma.
The latest leak also includes
the minutes from
a meeting on June 6, 2018 between a team of OPCW investigators and three
toxicologists/clinical pharmacologists and one bioanalytical/toxicological
chemist, who were all experts in medical chemical weapons protection. The
purpose of the meeting with the four experts was to ask for their advice on the
efficacy of exhuming purported victims of the attack to seek evidence of
exposure to chlorine gas and to analyze video and photos of alleged victims to
determine if their symptoms aligned with exposure to chlorine or other reactive
chlorine gas.
On the first point, the
experts agreed that, given the conditions of burial of the alleged victims, the
likelihood of finding evidence of chlorine exposure was low, and exhumation
would not prove useful. More significantly, on the second point, according to
the minutes, “the experts were conclusive in their statements that there was no
correlation between symptoms and chlorine exposure,” based on the video and
photos they were shown by the investigators.
The chief expert laid out two
possibilities for the OPCW team—that there was, in fact, a real chemical
weapons attack, or that the event had been a propaganda exercise. The experts
were insistent that victims of a chlorine gas attack would not have gathered in
piles in the middle of their apartments, as they had been found. Instead, they
would have rushed to close-by exits in search of clean air.
The OPCW team concluded after
their meeting with the four experts “that the symptoms observed were
inconsistent with exposure to chlorine and no other obvious candidate chemical
causing the symptoms could be identified.”
Marc-Machael Blum, then head
of the OPCW laboratory, noted in an email sent
on August 28, 2018 after reviewing the minutes that speculation by the chief
expert during the meeting that the Douma incident was staged “was mainly fueled
by the fact that the circumstances of death for the victims do not match
chlorine rather than corpses arranged for propaganda purposes.”
These observations from the
investigators and experts, countering the official narrative, were likewise
excluded from the final OPCW report.
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