Tag Archives: Douma

NATO-backed network of Syria dirty war propagandists identified

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Defaming journalism on the OPCW’s Syria cover-up scandal, The Guardian and its NATO-funded sources out themselves as the real “network of conspiracy theorists.”

By Aaron Maté

Source: Aaron Maté Substack

On June 10th, The Guardian’s Mark Townsend published an article headlined “Russia-backed network of Syria conspiracy theorists identified.” (“Russia-backed” has since been removed).

The article is based on what Townsend calls a “new analysis” that “reveals” a “network more than two dozen conspiracy theorists, frequently backed by a coordinated Russian campaign.” This network, Townsend claims, is “focused on the denial or distortion of facts about the Syrian regime’s use of chemical weapons and on attacking the findings of the world’s foremost chemical weapons watchdog,” the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). According to Townsend, I am named “as the most prolific spreader of disinformation” among the nefarious bunch.

In hawking this purported exposé of “disinformation”, Townsend violated every basic standard of journalism. He did not contact me before publishing his allegations; fails to offer a shred of evidence for them; and does not cite a single example of my alleged “prolific” disinformation. Instead, Townsend bases his claims entirely on a think-tank report  that also provides no evidence, nor even assert that I have said anything false. In the process, Townsend failed to disclose that the report’s authors — the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) and the Syria Campaign — are groups funded by the US government and other belligerents in the Syria proxy war. To top it off, Townsend fabricates additional allegations that his state-funded sources do not even make.

As a result, Townsend and the Guardian have engaged in the exact sort of conduct that they falsely impute to me and others: spreading Syria-related disinformation with coordinated support from state-funded actors. The aim of this propaganda network is transparent: defaming journalism that exposes the OPCW’s ongoing Syria cover-up scandal and the dirty war waged by Western powers on Syria.

The OPCW cover-up is arguably the most copiously documented pro-war deception since the US-led drive to invade Iraq. In Western media, as The Guardian’s behavior newly demonstrates, it is also without question the most suppressed.

At the center of the story are two veteran OPCW scientists, Dr. Brendan Whelan and Ian Henderson. The pair were among a team that deployed to Syria in April 2018 to investigate an alleged chemical attack in the town of Douma. They have since accused senior OPCW officials of manipulating the Douma probe to reach a conclusion that baselessly implicated the Syrian government in a chlorine gas attack. Their claims are backed up by a trove of leaked documents and emails that show extensive doctoring and censoring of the Douma team’s findings.

The Douma cover-up extends far beyond the OPCW’s executive suite. It also implicates NATO governments led by the US, which bombed Syria over the Douma chemical weapons allegation, and then, weeks later, privately pressured the OPCW to validate it. Since the OPCW scandal became public, the US and its allies have thwarted efforts to address it.

At the most criminal level, the scandal implicates sectarian death squads armed and funded by the US and allies during their decade-long campaign for regime change in Syria.

At the time of the incident, Douma was occupied by the Saudi-backed jihadi militia Jaysh-al-Islam and under bombardment from Syrian army forces attempting to retake control. Shortly before their surrender, local allies of Jaysh-al-Islam accused Syrian forces of using chemical weapons. They released gruesome footage of an apartment building filled with slain civilians. A gas cylinder was filmed positioned above a crater on the roof. Concurrently, the White Helmets, a NATO and Gulf state-funded, insurgent-adjacent organization, released footage of what it claimed were gas attack victims in a Douma field hospital. Several journalists, including Riam Dalati of the BBC, Robert Fisk of the Independent, and James Harkin of the Intercept, found evidence that the hospital scene was staged. (In February 2019, Dalati claimed that he can “prove without a doubt that the Douma Hospital scene was staged.” Oddly, more than three years later, he has not released his findings).

The White Helmets’ alleged fakery of a chemical attack aftermath, coupled with the censored OPCW findings showing no evidence that a chemical attack occurred, suggest the inescapable conclusion that insurgents in Douma carried out a deception to frame the Syrian government. And given the unexplained deaths of the more than 40 victims filmed in the Douma apartment building, that deception may have entailed a murderous war crime.

Unlike the Iraq WMD hoax, the very existence of the OPCW’s Douma scandal is unknown to much of the Western world. With few exceptions, establishment media outlets have refused to acknowledge the OPCW whistleblowers and the leaks that brought their story to light.

After largely ignoring the OPCW cover-up since it first surfaced in May 2019, the Guardian has now published defamatory claims about journalists, myself included, who have dared to report on the censored facts.

When I wrote The Guardian about the Townsend article’s journalistic lapses, I did not get a response. One week later, I phoned Townsend, who was now back in the office but had yet to reply. In our conservation, which I recorded and recently published, I repeatedly asked Townsend to substantiate his claims about me and identify even a single example of my alleged disinformation.

Townsend did not attempt to defend his article’s assertions, beyond claiming that they were based on what was “in a report.” When I pressed further, he claimed that he had to “dash for a meeting” and promised that I would soon hear from the paper’s reader’s editor. (Before I published our phone call, and this article, I emailed Townsend a detailed list of questions and invited him to offer any additional comment. He did not respond).

“Deadly Disinformation”

Townsend could not provide any evidence for his assertions because the report that he parroted offers none as well.

The report, titled “Deadly Disinformation” and authored by The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) and the Syria Campaign, contains bare references to my reporting and makes no effort to refute it. Nowhere does the report even claim that I have said anything false. It simply claims to have “identified 28 individuals, outlets and organisations who have spread disinformation about the Syrian conflict,” and that I am “the most prolific spreader of disinformation” among them.

When the report bothers to mention of anything that I have actually said, it engages in distortion. In its first mention, the report states that I wrote an article that “attacks Bellingcat for its contributions to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).” Here, they not only fail to assert that I said anything false, but offer a false portrayal of what happened.

As for “attacking” Bellingcat — a website that, like the report’s authors, is funded by NATO states that were belligerents in the Syria dirty war – what I really did was expose its disinformation.

In this case, Bellingcat fraudulently attacked Whelan (the key OPCW whistleblower), along with several journalists (myself included) by falsely accusing us of concealing an OPCW letter that, I quickly revealed, did not in fact exist. Bellingcat was forced to add a correction, delete embarrassing tweets, and apologize to one of the article’s targets, the journalist Peter Hitchens (who resides in the UK, home to strict libel laws). I later exposed that Bellingcat copied a hidden, external author for some of their false material.

In short, the ISD/Syria Campaign’s first purported example of my alleged “disinformation” is an easily verifiable case where I’ve exposed state-backed lies.

The report’s only other substantive example comes when it notes that I have argued that the OPCW probe’s Douma probe “was flawed.” This far understates my case: the OPCW’s Douma investigation wasn’t “flawed”; it’s a scandalous cover-up worthy of global attention. Regardless, yet again, the report does not even assert that my argument is false, let alone try to explain why.

In a July 13th email, I asked the ISD to substantiate their claim that I have spread disinformation, and provide even one example of it. On its website, the ISD claims to “take complaints seriously,” and promises a response “within ten working days.” As of this writing, after 13 working days, I have not heard back.

At The Guardian, OPCW leaks are “problematic”

When I emailed a complaint about Townsend’s reporting, The Guardian admitted fault only on failing to contact me before publishing his evidence-free allegations. This was the result, they claimed, of a “breakdown of communication internally.” I was then offered the chance to respond to the article in 200 words.

A key point in my reply (which can be read here) was that The Guardian and its state-funded source are unable to identify any falsehoods in anything I’ve written “because my reporting on the OPCW’s Douma cover-up scandal is based on damning OPCW leaks.” These leaks, I added, “reveal that veteran inspectors found no evidence of a chemical attack in Douma, and that expert toxicologists ruled out chlorine gas as the victims’ cause of death. But these findings were doctored and censored by senior OPCW officials.”

At The Guardian, this passage set off an apparent alarm. After disparaging my reporting on the OPCW leaks, The Guardian informed me that they would now prevent me from even mentioning them. In a July 8 email, a Guardian editor wrote that the “the part about the OPCW” in my reply “continues to be problematic.” My reference to the OPCW leaks, the editor claimed, “makes an assertion that has been rebutted by an independent inquiry.”

I responded by asking the editor to specify exactly which “assertion” of mine has been rebutted. I also proposed that, if they believe that I have said anything “problematic,” they publish their own rebuttal.

In multiple follow-up emails, the editor failed to identify any “rebutted” assertion of mine. Despite that, the Guardian proceeded to publish my reply without its reference to the OPCW leaks. But this raised a new problem: in censoring my statement, they misquoted me. When I pointed out that error, they updated my reply to finally allow a (minimal) mention of the OPCW leaks.

The Guardian also took me up on my proposal that they publish their own rebuttal:

Editor’s note: Both the ISD and the Syria Campaign list a diverse range of funders and describe themselves as “fiercely independent”. In 2020 the OPCW rebutted claims about its investigation into the Douma incident (Inquiry strikes blow to Russian denials of Syria chemical attack).

As for the “inquiry” that The Guardian claims “rebutted claims about its investigation into the Douma incident,” the inquiry was not independent, and did not rebut anything.

The “inquiry” was appointed by the OPCW’s Director General’s office, the very body that presided over the cover-up. It was also staffed by two “investigators” from the US and UK. These happen to be the two states that bombed Syria based on the Douma allegations that the OPCW fraudulently validated, and that have since tried to bury the scandal at every stage.

Accordingly, the OPCW “inquiry” avoided the allegations of censorship in the Douma probe and instead disingenuously minimized the whistleblowers’ role. The whistleblowers themselves have rebutted the inquiry’s claims about them, as have I in subsequent reporting.

A network of NATO disinformation

As for what the Guardian calls the ISD and Syria Campaign’s “diverse range of funders,” both groups indeed enjoy a diverse range of funders: everyone from NATO governments to NATO government-funded organizations. They also receive support from billionaire-funded foundations that often work in concert with these same NATO governments’ foreign policy objectives.

The Institute for Strategic Dialogue’s “diverse range of funders,” according to The Guardian.

The ISD’s “diverse” funders include the US State Department, the US Department of Homeland Security, three other US state-funded organizations, and more than two dozen other NATO government agencies. On the private side, the ISD’s funders include the foundations of three of the world’s richest oligarchs: Pierre Omidyar’s Omidyar Group, George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

In using the ISD as a source, The Guardian has a conflict of interest that its article did not disclose. The latter two ISD donors have also given sizeable grants to The Guardian: at least $625,000 from Open Society Foundations since 2019, and at least $12.9 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation since 2011.

Omidyar’s foundation has a direct role in the ISD/Syria Campaign report. The Omidyar Group’s Luminate Strategic Initiatives is listed alongside the German government-funded Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung foundation as the report’s fiscal sponsor.

Omidyar’s sponsorship of an attack on journalism about the OPCW scandal is highly fitting. The Intercept, the self-described “fearless and adversarial” outlet that Omidyar also funds with his vast fortune, has never once acknowledged the OPCW leaks or whistleblowers’ existence. While ignoring the OPCW scandal for more than three years, The Intercept has published multiple articles promoting the allegation that Syria committed a chemical attack in Douma.

Like the ISD, the Syria Campaign is also funded by governments and other belligerents in the Syria dirty war. As The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal reported in 2017, the Syria Campaign was founded by Ayman Asfari, a Syrian-British billionaire oil tycoon and leading financial supporter of the Syrian National Coalition, the largest government-in-exile group established after the Syria conflict erupted in 2011. The Syria Campaign has also done extensive P.R. and fundraising for the White Helmets, the insurgent-adjacent, NATO state-funded organization implicated in the Douma incident.

That these two state-funded groups “describe themselves as ‘fiercely independent'” is apparently enough for The Guardian. I trust that the Guardian would feel differently if they were dealing with self-described “fiercely independent” groups funded by the Russian and Syrian governments.

Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of sources quoted in the ISD/Syria Campaign report are funded or employed by the same NATO state and private sponsors. This includes the White Helmets; the Global Public Policy Institute; Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS); self-described journalist Chloe Hadjimatheou of the BBC, who produced a podcast series that disparaged the OPCW whistleblowers and whitewashed the Douma cover-up; and James Jeffrey, the former US Special Envoy for Syria.

For a report that claims to be concerned with protecting Syrians from “real-world harm,” Jeffrey is a particularly interesting interview subject. Few US officials have been as candid about their willingness to immiserate Syrian civilians in pursuit of hegemonic US goals in their country.

Jeffrey has declared that al-Qaeda is a US “asset” in Syria, and has admitted to misleading the Trump White House to undermine an effort to withdraw the US military, whose illegal occupation deliberately deprives Syria of its own wheat and fuel. Jeffrey has openly bragged about his “effective strategy” to ensure “no reconstruction assistance” in Syria — even though the war-ravaged country is “desperate for it.” And he has also taken credit for helping to impose crippling US sanctions on Syria that have “crushed the country’s economy.”

Jeffrey’s proudly self-acknowledged real-world harms on millions of Syrians don’t seem to bother the study’s authors, presumably because their Western state sponsors implement them.

The report is so invested in its state funders’ aims in Syria that it approvingly airs frustration that other governments are failing to toe the NATO line. A “former Western diplomat” complains that “disinformation” on Syria is helping states “avoid making the decisions that we want them to make, say in the Security Council or elsewhere.” (emphasis added). From the point of view of Western officials, the anonymous diplomat is employing an accurate operative definition of what constitutes “disinformation”: any information that causes those deemed subordinate to “avoid making the decisions that we want them to make.”

Fittingly, another anonymous “senior diplomat” laments that supposed Syria disinformation is intended “ultimately to cast doubt upon the legitimacy and integrity of the people doing this kind of [policy] work.” Daring to question the “legitimacy and integrity” of Western policymakers who oversaw a multi-billion dollar CIA-led dirty war on Syria that knowingly empowered al-Qaeda and other sectarian death squads while leaving hundreds of thousands dead — another intolerable act that can only result from “disinformation.”

A member of the US-funded, insurgent-adjacent White Helmets is also given space to lament that alleged “disinformation” is hurting its donations. “We hear about billions of dollars for aid at conferences on Syria but most of that funding goes to the UN,” a White Helmets manager complains. Unmentioned is that European governments have cut funding to the group after their late founder, the lavishly paid UK military veteran James le Mesurier, admitted to pocketing donor funds and financial fraud right before he took his own life.

Having promoted the hegemonic agenda of its state sponsors, the report closes with a thinly veiled call to censor the dissenting voices it targets.

The ISD and Syria Campaign urge policymakers to “adopt a whole-of-government approach in tackling disinformation” and “ensure that loopholes or special privileges are not created for ‘media’ which would only exacerbate the spread of disinformation.” These “privileges” presumably refer to free speech. The report also notes favorably that platforms have addressed “thematic harms such as public health disinformation or foreign interference in elections.” As a result, the report calls on these platforms to “commit to applying similar levels of resourcing… in the context of the ongoing Syrian conflict.” Perhaps they have in mind the censorship of journalism about Hunter Biden’s laptop before the 2020 election, on the fake grounds that the story was “Russian disinformation.”

The fact that this network of state-funded actors is devoting energy to disparaging journalism about the OPCW’s Syria cover-up — and even advocating that it be censored – reflects their powerful sponsors’ desperation to bury a damning scandal.

In public, OPCW Director General Fernando Arias has provided misleading and outright false answers about the Douma probe, including why he refuses to meet with the dissenting inspectors and the rest of the original investigative team.

On top of the two known whistleblowers, Arias has ignored calls for accountability from his original predecessor, founding OPCW chief Jose Bustani, as well as four other former senior OPCW officials. Along with Bustani, former senior UN official Hans von Sponeck has spearheaded the Berlin Group 21, a global initiative to address the OPCW scandal. The US has responded to Bustani by blocking his testimony at the United Nations. Arias meanwhile refused to open a letter that he received from Sponeck’s group, returning it back to sender.

The response of Western media outlets like the Guardian to the stonewalling of these veteran diplomats and senior OPCW officials has simply been to ignore it.

In whitewashing the OPCW cover-up, the preponderance of state sources parroted by The Guardian reveals the ultimate irony in its allegations. While claiming to “identify” a fictional network of Russia-backed disinformation actors about Syria, The Guardian’s Townsend is himself spreading the disinformation of a NATO-funded network that defames voices who expose the dirty war on Syria.

In fact, one of Townsend’s central allegations goes well beyond his state-funded sources. Although Townsend’s article is premised on identifying a “network of conspiracy theorists,” Townsend’s sole source – the ISD/Syria Campaign report – never alleges that such a “network” exists. Nowhere in the report does the word “network” even appear.

Thus, Townsend has not only parroted state-funded sources, but concocted an additional allegation in the service of their narrative. This is not just an ordinary fabrication: in creating the fantasy of a “coordinated”, “Russia-backed”, “network of conspiracy theorists,” Townsend also reveals himself to be the very thing that he accuses his targets of being: a conspiracy theorist.

And given that Townsend not only parrots his state-backed sources but works for an outlet funded by some of the same sponsors, it is fair to say that The Guardian and these state-funded think tanks are a part of the same network. 

Consequently, reading the article’s headline — “Network of Syria conspiracy theorists identified”—as a description of The Guardian and the NATO-funded sources that it relied on, the claim is no longer inaccurate.

The Art of Doublespeak: Bellingcat and Mind Control

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By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

In the 1920s, the influential American intellectual Walter Lippman argued that the average person was incapable of seeing or understanding the world clearly and needed to be guided by experts behind the social curtain.  In a number of books he laid out the theoretical foundations for the practical work of Edward Bernays, who developed “public relations” (aka propaganda) to carry out this task for the ruling elites.  Bernays had honed his skills while working as a propagandist for the United States during World War I, and after the war he set himself up as a public relations counselor in New York City.

There is a fascinating exchange at the beginning of Adam Curtis’s documentary, The Century of Self, where Bernays, then nearly 100 years old but still very sharp, reveals his manipulative mindset and that of so many of those who have followed in his wake.  He says the reason he couldn’t call his new business “propaganda” was because the Germans had given propaganda a “bad name,” and so he came up with the euphemism “public relations.”  He then adds that “if you could use it [i.e. propaganda] for war, you certainly could use it for peace.”  Of course, he never used PR for peace but just to manipulate public opinion (he helped engineer the CIA coup against the democratically elected Arbenz government in Guatemala in 1954 with fake news broadcasts).  He says “the Germans gave propaganda a bad name,” not Bernays and the United States with their vast campaign of lies, mainly aimed at the American people to get their support for going to a war they opposed (think weapons of mass destruction).  He sounds proud of his war propaganda work that resounded to his credit since it led to support for the “war to end all wars” and subsequently to a hit movie about WWI, Yankee Doodle Dandy, made in 1942 to promote another war, since the first one somehow didn’t achieve its lofty goal.

As Bernays has said in his book Propaganda,

The American motion picture is the greatest unconscious carrier of propaganda in the world today.

He was a propagandist to the end.  I suspect most viewers of the film are taken in by these softly spoken words of an old man sipping a glass of wine at a dinner table with a woman who is asking him questions. I have shown this film to hundreds of students and none has noticed his legerdemain.  It is an example of the sort of hocus-pocus I will be getting to shortly, the sly insertion into seemingly liberal or matter-of-fact commentary of statements that imply a different story.  The placement of convincing or confusing disingenuous ingredients into a truth sandwich – for Bernays knew that the bread of truth is essential to conceal untruth.

In the following years, Bernays, Lippman, and their ilk were joined by social “scientists,” psychologists, and sundry others intent on making a sham out of the idea of democracy by developing strategies and techniques for the engineering of social consensus consonant with the wishes of the ruling classes.  Their techniques of propaganda developed exponentially with the development of technology, the creation of the CIA, its infiltration of all the major media, and that agency’s courting of what the CIA official Cord Meyer called in the 1950s “the compatible left,” having already had the right in its pocket. Today most people are, as is said, “wired,” and they get their information from the electronic media that is mostly controlled by giant corporations in cahoots with government propagandists.  Ask yourself: Has the power of the oligarchic, permanent warfare state with its propaganda and spy networks increased or decreased over your lifetime. The answer is obvious: the average people that Lippman and Bernays trashed are losing and the ruling elites are winning.

This is not just because powerful propagandists are good at controlling so-called “average” people’s thinking, but, perhaps more importantly, because they are also adept – probably more so – at confusing or directing the thinking of those who consider themselves above average, those who still might read a book or two or have the concentration to read multiple articles that offer different perspectives on a topic.  This is what some call the professional and intellectual classes, perhaps 15-20 % of the population, most of whom are not the ruling elites but their employees and sometimes their mouthpieces.  It is this segment of the population that considers itself “informed,” but the information they imbibe is often sprinkled with bits of misdirection, both intentional and not, that beclouds their understanding of important public matters but leaves them with the false impression that they are in the know.

Recently I have noticed a group of interconnected examples of how this group of the population that exerts influence incommensurate with their numbers has contributed to the blurring of lines between fact and fiction. Within this group there are opinion makers who are often journalists, writers, and cultural producers of some sort or other, and then the larger number of the intellectual or schooled class who follow their opinions.  This second group then passes on their received opinions to those who look up to them.

There is a notorious propaganda outfit called Bellingcat, started by an unemployed Englishman named Eliot Higgins, that has been funded by The Atlantic Council, a think-tank with deep ties to the U.S. government, NATO, war manufacturers, and their allies, and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), another infamous U.S. front organization heavily involved in so-called color revolution regime change operations all around the world, that has just won the International Emmy Award for best documentary. The film with the Orwellian title, Bellingcat: Truth in a Post-Truth World, received its Emmy at a recent ceremony in New York City.  Bellingcat is an alleged group of amateur on-line researchers who have spent years shilling for the U.S. instigated war against the Syrian government, blaming the Douma chemical attack and others on the Assad government, and for the anti-Russian propaganda connected to, among other things, the Skripal poisoning case in England, and the downing of flight MH17 plane in Ukraine. It has been lauded by the corporate mainstream media in the west.  Its support for the equally fraudulent White Helmets (also funded by the US and the UK) in Syria has also been praised by the western corporate media while being dissected as propaganda by many excellent independent journalists such as Eva Bartlett, Vanessa Beeley, Catte Black, among others.  It’s had its work skewered by the likes of Seymour Hersh and MIT professor Theodore Postol, and its US government connections pointed out by many others, including Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal at The Gray Zone. And now we have the mainstream media’s wall of silence on the leaks from the Organization for the Prohibition on Chemical Weapons (OPCW) concerning the Douma chemical attack and the doctoring of their report that led to the illegal U.S. bombing of Syria in the spring of 2018.  Bellingcat was at the forefront of providing justification for such bombing, and now the journalists Peter Hitchens, Tareq Harrad (who recently resigned from Newsweek after accusing the publication of suppressing his revelations about the OPCW scandal) and others are fighting an uphill battle to get the truth out.

Yet Bellingcat: Truth in a Post-Truth World won the Emmy, fulfilling Bernays’ point about films being the greatest unconscious carriers of propaganda in the world today.

Who presented the Emmy Award to the film makers, but none other than the rebel journalist Chris Hedges.  Why he did so, I don’t know.  But that he did so clearly sends a message to those who follow his work and trust him that it’s okay to give a major cultural award to a propaganda outfit.  But then, perhaps he doesn’t consider Bellingcat to be that.

Nor, one presumes, does The Intercept, the billionaire Pierre Omidyar owned publication associated with Glen Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill, and also read by many progressive-minded people. The Intercept that earlier this year disbanded the small team that was tasked with reviewing and releasing more of the massive trove of documents they received from Edward Snowden six years ago, a minute number of which have ever been released or probably ever will be. As Whitney Webb pointed out, last year The Intercept  hosted a workshop for Bellingcat.  She wrote:

The Intercept, along with its parent company First Look Media, recently hosted a workshop for pro-war, Google-funded organization Bellingcat in New York. The workshop, which cost $2,500 per person to attend and lasted five days, aimed to instruct participants in how to perform investigations using “open source” tools — with Bellingcat’s past, controversial investigations for use as case studies…Thus, while The Intercept has long publicly promoted itself as an anti-interventionist and progressive media outlet, it is becoming clearer that – largely thanks to its ties to Omidyar – it is increasingly an organization that has more in common with Bellingcat, a group that launders NATO and U.S. propaganda and disguises it as “independent” and “investigative journalism.”

Then we have Jefferson Morley, the editor of The Deep State, former Washington Post journalist, and JFK assassination researcher, who has written a praiseworthy review of the Bellingcat film and who supports Bellingcat.  “In my experience, Bellingcat is credible,” he writes in an Alternet article, “Bellingcat documentary has the pace and plot of a thriller.”

Morley has also just written an article for Counterpunch – “Why the Douma Chemical Attack Wasn’t a ‘Managed Massacre’” – in which he disputes the claim that the April 7, 2018 attack in the Damascus suburb was a false flag operation carried out by Assad’s opponents. “I do not see any evidence proving that Douma was a false flag incident,” he writes in this article that is written in a style that leaves one guessing as to what exactly he is saying.  It sounds convincing unless one concentrates, and then his double messages emerge.  Yet it is the kind of article that certain “sophisticated” left-wing readers might read and feel is insightful.  But then Morley, who has written considerably about the CIA, edits a website that advertises itself as “the thinking person’s portal to the world of secret government,” and recently had an exchange with former CIA Director John Brennan where “Brennan put a friendly finger on my chest,” said in February 2017, less than a month after Trump was sworn in as president, that:

With a docile Republican majority in Congress and a demoralized Democratic Party in opposition, the leaders of the Deep State are the most—perhaps the only—credible check in Washington on what Senator Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) calls Trump’s “wrecking ball presidency.”  

Is it any wonder that some people might be a bit confused?

“I know what you’re thinking about,” said Tweedledum; “but it isn’t so, nohow.”

“Contrariwise,” continued Tweedledee, “if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t.  That’s logic.”

As a final case in point, there is a recent book by Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb And The CIA Search For Mind Control, the story of the chemist known as Dr. Death who ran the CIA’s MK-ULTRA mind control project, using LSD, torture, electric shock therapy, hypnosis, etc.; developed sadistic methods of torture still used in black sites around the world; and invented various ingenious techniques for assassination, many of which were aimed at Fidel Castro.  Gottlieb was responsible for brutal prison and hospital experiments and untold death and suffering inflicted on all sorts of innocent people.  His work was depraved in the deepest sense; he worked with Nazis who experimented on Jews despite being Jewish himself.

Kinzer writes in depth about this man who considered himself a patriot and a spiritual person – a humane torturer and killer.  It is an eye-opening book for anyone who does not know about Gottlieb, who gave the CIA the essential tools they use in their “organized crime” activities around the world – in the words of Douglass Valentine, the author of The CIA as Organized Crime and The Phoenix Program. Kinzer’s book is good history on Gottlieb; however, he doesn’t venture into the present activities of the CIA and Gottlieb’s patriotic followers, who no doubt exist and go about their business in secret.

After recounting in detail the sordid history of Gottlieb’s secret work that is nauseating to read about, Kinzer leaves the reader with these strange words:

Gottlieb was not a sadist, but he might well have been…. Above all he was an instrument of history.  Understanding him is a deeply disturbing way of understanding ourselves.

What possibly could this mean?  Not a sadist?  An instrument of history?  Understanding ourselves?  These few sentences, dropped out of nowhere, pull the rug out from under what is generally an illuminating history and what seems like a moral indictment. This language is pure mystification.

Kinzer also concludes that because Gottlieb said so, the CIA failed in their efforts to develop methods of mind control and ended MK-ULTRA’s experiments long ago. Why would he believe the word of a man who personified the agency he worked for: a secret liar? He writes,

When Sydney Gottlieb brough MK-ULTRA to its end in the early 1960s, he told his CIA superiors that he had found no reliable way to wipe away memory, make people abandon their consciences, or commit crimes and then forget them.

As for those who might think otherwise, Kinzer suggests they have vivid imaginations and are caught up in conspiracy thinking: “This [convincing others that the CIA had developed methods of mind control when they hadn’t] is Sydney Gottlieb’s most unexpected legacy,” he asserts. He says this although Richard Helms, the CIA Director, destroyed all MK-Ultra records. He says that Allen Dulles, Gottlieb, and Helms themselves were caught up in a complete fantasy about mind control because they had seen too many movies and read too many books; mind control was impossible, a failure, a myth, he maintains. It is the stuff of popular culture, entertainment. In an interview with Chris Hedges, interestingly posted by Jefferson Morley at his website, The Deep State, Hedges agrees with Kinzer.  Gottlieb, Dulles, et al. were all deluded.  Mind control was impossible.  You couldn’t create a Manchurian Candidate; by implication, someone like Sirhan Sirhan could not have been programmed to be a fake Manchurian Candidate and to have no memory of what he did, as he claims.  He could not have been mind-controlled by the CIA to perform his part as the seeming assassin of Senator Robert Kennedy while the real killer shot RFK from behind. People who think like this should get real.

Furthermore, as is so common in books such as Kinzer’s, he repeats the canard that JFK and RFK knew about and pressured the CIA to assassinate Fidel Castro. This is demonstrably false, as shown by the Church Committee and the Assassinations Record Review Board, among many others. That Kinzer takes the word of notorious liars like Richard Helms and the top-level CIA operative Samuel Halpern is simple incredible, something that is hard to consider a mistake.  Slipped into a truth sandwich, it is devoured and passed on. But it is false. Bullshit meant to deceive.

But this is how these games are played. If you look carefully, you will see them widely.  Inform, enlighten, while throwing in doubletalk and untruths.  The small number of people who read such books and articles will come away knowing some history that has no current relevance and being misinformed on other history that does. They will then be in the know, ready to pass their “wisdom” on to those who care to listen. They will not think they are average.

But they will be mind controlled, and the killer cat will roam freely without a bell, ready to devour the unsuspecting mice.

As The OPCW Is Accused Of False Reporting U.S. Propaganda Jumps To Its Help

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Source: Moon of Alabama

An international organization published two false reports and got caught in the act. But as the false reports are in the U.S. interests a U.S. sponsored propaganda organization is send out to muddle the issue. As that effort comes under fire the New York Times jumps in to give the cover-up effort some extra help.

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) manufactured a pretext for war by suppressing its own scientists’ research:

OPCW emails and documents were leaked and whistleblowers came forward to speak with journalists and international lawyers. Veteran journalist Jonathan Steele, who has spoken with the whistleblowers, wrote an excellent piece on the issues. In the Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens picked up the issue and moved it forward.

Under U.S. pressure the OPCW management modified or suppressed the findings of its own scientists to make it look as if the Syrian government had been responsible for the alleged chemical incident in April 2018 in Douma.

The public attention to the OPCW’s fakery lead to the questioning of other assertions the OPCW had previously made. With the OPCW under fire someone had to come to its help.

To save the propaganda value of the OPCW reports the U.S. financed Bellingcat propaganda organization jumped in to save the OPCW’s bacon. Bellingcat founder “suck my balls” Elliot Higgins claimed that the OPCW reports satisfied the concerns the OPCW scientist had voiced.

That assertion is now further propagated by a New York Times piece which, under the pretense of reporting about open source analysis, boosts Bellingcat and its defense of the OPCW:

The blogger Eliot Higgins made waves early in the decade by covering the war in Syria from a laptop in his apartment in Leicester, England, while caring for his infant daughter. In 2014, he founded Bellingcat, an open-source news outlet that has grown to include roughly a dozen staff members, with an office in The Hague. Mr. Higgins attributed his skill not to any special knowledge of international conflicts or digital data, but to the hours he had spent playing video games, which, he said, gave him the idea that any mystery can be cracked.
…
Bellingcat journalists have spread the word about their techniques in seminars attended by journalists and law-enforcement officials. Along with grants from groups like the Open Society Foundations, founded by George Soros, the seminars are a significant source of revenue for Bellingcat, a nonprofit organization.

It seems that the New York Times forgot to mention an important monetary source for Bellingcat. Here is a current screenshot of Bellingcat’s About page:

Porticus, Adessium, Pax for Peace and the Postcode Lottery are all Dutch organizations. Then there is the notorious Soros organization the New York Times mentioned. But why did the NYT forgot to tell its readers that Bellingcat is financed by the National Endowment for Democracy which itself is to nearly 100% funded by the U.S. government?

Could that be because the NED, which spends U.S.government money on more than 1.600 U.S. government paid Non-Government Organizations, is a Trojan horse, a cover for the CIA?

Spurred by Watergate – the Church committee of the Senate, the Pike committee of the House, and the Rockefeller Commission, created by the president, were all busy investigating the CIA. Seemingly every other day there was a new headline about the discovery of some awful thing, even criminal conduct, the CIA had been mixed up in for years.
…
What was done was to shift many of these awful things to a new organization, with a nice sounding name – The National Endowment for Democracy. The idea was that the NED would do somewhat overtly what the CIA had been doing covertly for decades, and thus, hopefully, eliminate the stigma associated with CIA covert activities.
…
“We should not have to do this kind of work covertly,” said Carl Gershman in 1986, while he was president of the Endowment. “It would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the C.I.A. We saw that in the 60’s, and that’s why it has been discontinued. We have not had the capability of doing this, and that’s why the endowment was created.”And Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, declared in 1991: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

In effect, the CIA has been laundering money through NED.

The fact that the NED is doing the CIA’s work is likely the reason why the NYT puff piece about Bellingcat forgets to mention its payments and also why it jumps to Bellingcat’s and the OPCW’s help:

Some journalists and activists hostile to what they characterize as Bellingcat’s pro-Western narratives have criticized some of its coverage of the war in Syria.At issue is an April 7, 2018, attack on Douma, Syria. Bellingcat reported, based on an analysis of six open-source videos, that it was “highly likely” that Douma civilians had died because of chemical weapons. In March, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons reported that there were “reasonable grounds” to say that chemical weapons had been used in the attack.

Critics of Bellingcat have pointed to an email from an investigator with the organization, saying that it raised questions about the findings. WikiLeaks published the email on Nov. 23. In a response, Bellingcat defended its reporting, saying the final report on Douma from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons reflected the concerns of the investigator whose email was published by WikiLeaks.

By playing video games Elliot Higgins learned to identify chemical attacks in dubious video sequences published by terrorist affiliates. If true it is an admirable capability. Still his assertion that the OPCW report “reflected the concerns of the investigator” who criticized it is, as Caitlin Johnstone demonstrates, utterly false:

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 [Fact Finding Mission] team but strongly noted by three toxicologists with expertise in exposure to [Chemical Weapons] agents.”

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, …

In its defense of the OPCW report Bellingcat wrote:

[A] comparison of the points raised in the letter against the final Douma report makes it amply clear that the OPCW not only addressed these points, but even changed the conclusion of an earlier report to reflect the concerns of said employee.

Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens did not concur with that paragraph:

Apart from the words ‘a’, and ‘the’, everything in the above paragraph is, to put it politely, mistaken. Bellingcat have been so anxious to trash the leak from the OPCW that they have (as many did when the attack was first released) rushed to judgment without waiting for the facts. More is known by the whistleblowers of the OPCW than has yet been released …

Caitlin and Peter should play more video games. I have read in the NYT that they are the true path to learning and to the factual assessment of alleged chemical attacks.

On April 7 2018 terrorists of the Jaish al Islam group ruled in Douma. They killed 40 civilians. The bodies were shown in videos along with chlorine gas canisters to pretend that the Syrian government had killed those people. The OPCW’s fact finding team analyzed the evidence and found that the canisters had not been dropped from the air but were manually placed. The symptoms the victims showed were inconsistent with a chlorine attack and chlorinated substances were only found in extremely low concentrations. There were absolutely no “reasonable grounds” to say that chemical weapons had been used in the attack.

But the OPCW management, under U.S. pressure and despite the protests by its own scientists, put out a report that said the opposite. As the manipulation came to light the U.S. funded Bellingcat made a perfunctory attempt to muddle the issue. Thus another propaganda organization, the New York Times, had to jump in to save Bellingcat and the false OPCW claims.

It is not going to help. There will soon be more evidence that the OPCW management published two false reports on Douma, and likely even more on other issues. There will be a public recognition that the OPCW has failed.

New OPCW Leak Further Vindicates Skeptics Of Establishment Syria Narrative

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

On the sixth of July last year, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) released its interim report on its findings regarding an alleged poison gas attack in Douma, Syria in April 2018. The incident, which resulted in dozens of civilian casualties, was blamed on the Syrian government by the US, UK and France, who launched retaliatory airstrikes on multiple targets in that nation.

The interim report claimed that “various chlorinated organic chemicals were found” in different locations on the scene, but strangely said nothing about the levels at which those chemicals were found. The Moon of Alabama blog highlighted this suspicious exclusion on the day the report came out, noting that levels are absolutely essential in determining chemical weapons use when you’re talking about compounds which are found virtually everywhere at some level in any industrialized region.

“The preliminary OPCW report says nothing about the concentrations in which these substances were found,” MoA observed. “Without knowing the concentrations, which may be extremely low, one can not come to further conclusion.”

“The ‘various chlorinated organic chemicals’ are unsurprising,” MoA wrote. “Chlorine is widely used for water purification and cleaning and ‘chlorinated organic chemicals’ will be found in any household.”

A new addition to the body of leaks which have been hemorrhaging from the OPCW shows that such skepticism was indeed entirely warranted. A leaked email sent shortly before the interim report was published reveals that the chlorinated organic chemicals which OPCW investigators found on the scene were as low as one or two parts-per-billion, meaning, just as Moon of Alabama speculated last year, that they were found at trace quantities you’d expect to find in any industrialized area.

The leaked email, which has been published by WikiLeaks and several other outlets, was sent by an unnamed OPCW investigator to the OPCW’s then-cabinet chief Bob Fairweather, outright accusing OPCW leadership of misleading the public with the information it was omitting from the report it was drafting. Those who’ve been following this scandal closely may remember Fairweather as the man who journalist Jonathan Steele recently reported was responsible for calling investigators into his office to be intimidated by unknown officials from the United States government.

The email was sent to Fairweather on June 22nd, laden with pointed words and phrases like “misrepresents the facts”, “selectively omitting”, “highly misleading”, “disingenuous”, “inaccurate”, and “a major deviation from the original report.” Less than two weeks later, on July the fourth, the investigators were reportedly called into Fairweather’s office for a disturbing meeting with US officials which deeply rattled them.

“On July 4 there was another intervention,” Steele’s report reads. “Fairweather, the chef de cabinet, invited several members of the drafting team to his office. There they found three US officials who were cursorily introduced without making clear which US agencies they represented. The Americans told them emphatically that the Syrian regime had conducted a gas attack, and that the two cylinders found on the roof and upper floor of the building contained 170 kilograms of chlorine. The inspectors left Fairweather’s office, feeling that the invitation to the Americans to address them was unacceptable pressure and a violation of the OPCW’s declared principles of independence and impartiality.”

It’s worth noting at this time that the US government already has a known and established history of leveraging the ostensibly neutral and international OPCW to conform to its preexisting military agendas.

Fairweather’s intimidation ploy appears to have been a response to comments made in the email, and probably other similar internal objections made by other investigators at that time. The email reads as follows (transcript and parenthetical annotations made by Daily Mail):

Dear Bob,

I wish to express, as a member of the FFM (Fact Finding Mission) team that conducted the investigation into the alleged chemical attack in Douma on 7 April, my gravest concern at the redacted version of the FFM report, which I understand was at the behest of the ODG. (Office of the Director General). 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. Many of the facts and observations outlined in the full version are inextricably interconnected and, by selectively omitting certain ones, an unintended bias has been introduced into the report, undermining its credibility. In other cases, some crucial facts that have remained in the redacted version have morphed into something quite different to what was initially drafted. If I may, I will outline some specific aspects to the redacted report that are particularly worrisome.

The statement in paragraph 8.3 of the final conclusions ‘The team has sufficient evidence at this time to determine that chlorine, or another reactive chlorine-containing chemical, was likely released from cylinders’, is highly misleading and not supported by the facts. The only evidence available at this moment is that some samples collected at Locations 2 and 4 were in contact with one or more chemicals that contain a reactive chlorine atom. Such chemicals could include molecular chlorine, phosgene, cyanogen chloride, hydrochloric acid, hydrogen chloride or sodium hypochlorite (the major ingredient of household chlorine-based bleach). Purposely singling out chlorine gas as one of the possibilities is disingenuous. It is also worth noting that the term ‘reactive chlorine-containing chemical’ used in the redacted report is, in fact, inaccurate. It actually describes a reactive chemical that contains chlorine which itself (the chlorine) is not necessarily reactive e.g. chlorophenol. The original report uses the more accurate term ‘a chemical containing reactive chlorine’.

The redacted report states that the gas was likely released from the cylinders (in Locations 2 and 4). The original report purposely emphasised the fact that, although the cylinders might have been the source of the suspected chemical release, there was insufficient evidence to affirm this. It is possible the error was simply a typo. This is a major deviation from the original report.

Paragraph 8.2 states that ‘based on the high levels of various chlorinated organic derivatives, […] detected in environmental samples’. Describing the levels as ‘high’ likely overstates the extent of levels of chlorinated organic derivatives detected. They were, in most cases, present only in parts per billion range, as low as 1-2 ppb, which is essentially trace quantities.

The original report discusses in detail the inconsistency between the victims’ symptoms, as reported by witnesses and seen in video recordings. Omitting this section of the report (including the Epidemiology which has been removed in its entirety) has a serious negative impact on the report as this section is inextricably linked to the chemical agent identified. It either supports or detracts from the confidence in the identity of any possible chemical. 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 inconsistency was not only noted by the FFM team but strongly noted by three toxicologists with expertise in exposure to CW (Chemical Weapons) agents.

The original report has extensive sections regarding the placement of the cylinders at both locations as well as the relative damage caused to the impact points, compared to that caused to the cylinders suspected of being the sources of the toxic chemical. These sections are essentially absent from the redacted report. This information was important in assessing the likelihood of the ‘presence’ of toxic chemicals versus the ‘use’ of toxic chemicals.

A feature of this investigation and report was the robust and extensive scientific basis for sampling plans and analysing the data collected. A comprehensive bibliography of peer-reviewed scientific literature was attached to support and enhance the credibility of the work of the mission. This has unfortunately been omitted from the redacted report.

By singling out chlorine above other equally plausible substances containing reactive chlorine and presenting it as a fact in isolation creates, I believe, a level of partiality that would negatively impact on the perceived credibility of the report, and by extension that of the Organisation. I am requesting that the fact-finding report be released in its entirety as I fear that this redacted version no longer reflects the work of the team. The original report contains facts and observations that are all equally valid. The fact that inconsistencies are highlighted or observations not fully understood does not justify their omission. The inconsistencies and observations are based on the evidence and data collected. Further information in the future may help resolve them but the facts as they stand at present will not alter and need to be reported.

If the redacted version is to be released, I respectfully request to attach my differing observations, in accordance with the spirit of paragraph 62 of part II of the Verification Annex of the CWC.

Yours sincerely

The OPCW’s final report published March of this year continued the pattern of crucial omissions even more egregiously than the interim report.

“Regarding the alleged use of toxic chemicals as a weapon in Douma, the evaluation and analysis of all the above-referenced information gathered by the FFM provide reasonable grounds that the use of a toxic chemical as a weapon has taken place on 7 April 2018,” the final report claims. “This toxic chemical contained reactive chlorine. The toxic chemical was likely molecular chlorine.”

Again, the information complained about in the leaked email remained omitted.

The unfolding scandal about the US and its allies once again deceiving the world about yet another military intervention in yet another Middle Eastern nation is a major story, and hardly anyone’s been on top of it.

Back when I published an article about the first OPCW whistleblower this past May it was shared by actress Susan Sarandon on Twitter, who captioned it with the question, “This is really important. Why aren’t we talking about it?” Click on the tweet and read through the comments if you want to see the platoon of blue-checkmarked narrative managers who converged on her post telling her I’m a crazed conspiracy theorist who mustn’t be listened to. I got this story right, and everyone who’s been ignoring it or dismissing it has made an ass of themselves.

So congratulations to me. Congratulations to Moon of Alabama for getting this story right from day one. Congratulations to Piers Robinson, Tim Hayward, and the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media who published the first OPCW leak back in May of this year in the face of numerous obnoxious smear pieces from the mainstream media. Congratulations to Jimmy Dore, Aaron Maté and the handful of other alternative media figures who’ve been keeping this story alive while all the “reputable” mainstream news outlets tried to let it die.

We were right, they were wrong. Maybe going forward people should listen to us a bit more and listen to them a bit less.

Buried In Broad Daylight – The ‘Free Press’ And The Leaked OPCW Report On Douma

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By David Cromwell and David Edwards

Source: Media Lens

A defining feature of the propaganda system is that facts supporting the agenda of Western power are pushed to the forefront of the ‘mainstream’ media, while inconvenient facts are buried. A prime example is the shameful media silence in response to a devastating document leaked from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), discussed in a recent media alert. The document, an engineering assessment of two chlorine cylinders found at two separate locations after an attack on the Damascus suburb of Douma on April 7, 2018, casts serious doubt on the official narrative that Syrian government forces had dropped them from helicopters. The claim that Assad had used chemical weapons ‘against his own civilians’ was used by the US, UK and France to ‘justify’ missile strikes on ‘chemical weapons facilities’ on April 14, 2018.

One of the cylinders was found on top of a four-storey building with its front end lodged in a hole in the roof. The other cylinder was found lying on a bed in the top-floor room of an apartment with a crater-like opening in the roof. Engineering analysis – based on measurements, photographs and computer modelling – were conducted on the two cylinders and the scenes where they were found. The aim was to ‘evaluate the possible means by which these two cylinders arrived at their respective locations as observed.’ The leaked report, signed by Ian Henderson, a senior OPCW engineer with many years’ experience, concluded:

‘In summary, observations at the scene of the two locations, together with subsequent analysis, suggest that there is a higher probability that both cylinders were manually placed at those two locations rather than being delivered from aircraft.‘ [Our emphasis.]

But this dissenting engineering analysis was excluded from the final OPCW Fact-Finding Mission report presented to the UN Security Council on March 1, 2019.

Theodore Postol, professor of science, technology, and international security at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose main expertise is in ballistic missiles, gave an initial assessment of the leaked OPCW report on May 21, and agreed with its conclusion. He summarised:

‘For now, it suffices to say that the UN OPCW engineering report is completely different from the UN OPCW report on Khan Sheikhoun, which is distinguished by numerous claims about explosive effects that could only have been made by technically illiterate individuals. In very sharp contrast, the voices that come through the engineering report are those of highly knowledgeable and sophisticated experts.’

On June 4, Postol released a more in-depth assessment which completely rejected the propaganda claim that the cylinders could only have been dropped from Syrian government helicopters. This strengthens the conclusion that the April 2018 Douma attacks were indeed staged, presumably by Syrian rebels attempting to provoke a Western military response against Assad (and perhaps even with Western connivance).

Postol noted the glaring discrepancies between the OPWC report that was submitted to the UN (minus the dissenting analysis of the leaked document) and the facts on the ground:

‘The calculations produced as proof for the conclusions bear no relationship to what was observed at the scene and both the observed data from the scene and the calculations bear no relationship to the reported findings.’

Postol expanded:

‘An important characteristic of concrete is that it is brittle. By definition, such a material is not flexible but will develop cracks and fail catastrophically when subjected to stresses that are sufficiently large. Concrete can be substantially strengthened [as in this case] by embedding reinforcing steel rebar or other strong but flexible materials within it. The rebar performs the function of maintaining the strength of the material when it is flexed rather than failing catastrophically as is the case with the surrounding brittle material.’

He added:

‘A very important additional phenomenon associated with the impact of an object can be the creation of a hole due to a process that is generally referred to as “tunneling.” Because the breach created by the penetrating object results in the crushing and pushing of brittle concrete as the object moves forward, the diameter of the hole produced by the impact of the object will be very close to that of the penetrating object. This means that a hole created by a 40 cm diameter chlorine cylinder should be close to 40 cm in diameter…’

But this was not the case:

‘The diameter of the hole is nearly twice that of the cylinder and the steel rebar that was supposed to stop the cylinder from penetrating through the roof is instead completely shattered and bent away from the forward direction by more than 60°… This photograph shows that the crater was produced by an explosion on the roof which had nothing to do with the impact of a chlorine cylinder. These discrepancies simply mean that the cylinder was placed on the roof after the hole was produced by the explosion of a mortar shell or artillery rocket.’

Postol provided much more detail, but this was his summary:

‘There is absolutely no doubt that the OPCW finding that the chlorine cylinder found at what it identifies as Location 2 did not produce the hole in the roof that allegedly led to the killing of more than 30 people that the OPCW claims were trapped and poisoned in the building. The OPCW’s own science-based technical analysis does not come close to matching what was observed at Location 2.’

The only possible conclusion is that ‘chemical weapons attacks’ at the two sites where the cylinders were found must have been staged.

Postol praised the high-quality analysis presented in the leaked OPCW document. But he was damning about senior OPCW management who had disregarded the dissenting engineering assessment and instead presented a deeply biased and misleading final report to the UN:

‘The OPCW has been compromised in terms of the content they are providing. The deception of the OPCW is quite blatant. Perhaps they are not used to people who are knowledgeable on these issues scrutinizing their material.’

On June 3, Labour MP Chris Williamson submitted a parliamentary question:

‘To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, with reference to investigations suggesting that reports of the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian Government in Douma in April 2018 were staged and with reference to reports that OPCW expert advice was redacted from its final report, whether he has made a reassessment of the decision to bomb targets in Syria in 2018.’

In an interview with Afshin Rattansi on RT’s Going Underground, Williamson rightly pointed to the insidious part played by the ‘mainstream’ media:

‘The hysterical mainstream media at the time a year ago who seemed to be clamouring for military airstrikes have been incredibly silent about this [leaked OPCW report]. I remember having a very rough interview on Channel 4 about the whole issue. And yet they seem to, as far as I’m aware, have failed to follow up now with this quite damning revelation which has been brought to light by a whistle-blower.’

He added:

‘What is very regrettable today is the tradition that we used to take for granted, that investigative journalists – serious journalists like John Pilger – seem to be sadly lacking these days.’

Williamson also cited Robert Fisk – ‘a very unusual animal these days’ – who reported from Douma last April, after interviewing civilians in the vicinity of the alleged chemical weapon attacks. A senior Syrian doctor, Dr Assim Rahaibani, told him that the ‘gas’ video that had so horrified the world showed patients who had been overcome, not by gas, but by oxygen starvation:

‘I was with my family in the basement of my home three hundred metres from here on the night but all the doctors know what happened. There was a lot of shelling [by government forces] and aircraft were always over Douma at night – but on this night, there was wind and huge dust clouds began to come into the basements and cellars where people lived. People began to arrive here suffering from hypoxia, oxygen loss. Then someone at the door, a “White Helmet”, shouted “Gas!”, and a panic began. People started throwing water over each other. Yes, the video was filmed here, it is genuine, but what you see are people suffering from hypoxia – not gas poisoning.’

BBC Syria producer Riam Dalati said earlier this year via Twitter that:

‘After almost six months of investigation, I can prove without a doubt that the Douma hospital scene was staged’.

He subsequently set his Twitter status to ‘private’. Moreover, in a now deleted tweet, he stated two days after the Douma attack:

‘Sick and tired of activists and rebels using corpses of dead children to stage emotive scenes for Western consumption. Then they wonder why some serious journos are questioning part of the narrative.’

As far as we know, BBC News has never given proper coverage to the serious doubts surrounding the alleged ‘chemical weapons’ attack on Douma, other than to ascribe such doubts to Syrian and Russian government claims of ‘fabrication’. As we saw with Iraq and Saddam’s ‘denials of WMD’, a powerful propaganda technique to dismiss facts, evidence and truth is to make them come out the mouths of Official Enemies.

 

The BBC Goes Quiet

That the OPCW may be so compromised as to present a misleading report to the UN Security Council that could be used as post-facto ‘justification’ for a Western military attack is, to say the least, an extremely grave matter. Indeed, it casts doubt on the whole integrity of an important international organisation. Ted Postol said in an interview with Sharmini Piries of The Real News Network that he believes the official OPCW report into an alleged chemical weapons attack in Khan Shaykhun on April 4, 2017 – almost exactly one year before the Douma attack – may also have been ‘severely compromised’.

As Tim Hayward, a member of the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media (WGSPM), the group of independent scholars and researchers that originally published the leaked OPWC document, noted:

‘While Western politicians and news media echo tropes about obstructive Russia & outlaw Syria, States of Non-Aligned Movement and China share their concerns about politicisation and polarising of OPCW.’

Hayward added:

‘Suppressed OPCW document undermines the claimed justification for Western missile strikes on Syria in April 2018, and it reveals an organisation in need of radical reform.’

Regardless of the findings of the official and leaked OPCW reports, the leaders of the US, UK and France, including Prime Minister Theresa May, were guilty of launching an unprovoked military attack on another country in violation of the UN Charter; the ‘supreme international crime’, in the words of the post-WW2 Nuremberg judgement. These are issues that would, in a sane media system, be extensively reported and debated.

However, as we wrote over three weeks ago in our earlier media alert, other than the small-circulation, left-wing Morning Star, the damning leaked document has been mentioned in just two articles in the national press: one by Peter Hitchens in the Mail on Sunday and one in the Independent by Robert Fisk. Remarkably, but unsurprisingly, this remains the case at the time of writing. Nor is there a single mention of it anywhere on the BBC News website. Hitchens has also submitted questions direct to the OPCW which appear to have been ignored by the body.

Our repeated challenges to senior BBC journalists, including Kamal Ahmed, the BBC’s head of news, have met with a stony silence, with one exception. Lyse Doucet, the BBC’s chief international correspondent, replied via Twitter on May 24:

‘thanks for your message. I am in Geneva today, in Sarajevo and Riga last week, and heading to Gulf next week. It’s an important story. Will make sure programmes know about it. As you know, UK outlets focused on May & Brexit last few days.’ [Our emphasis.]

Let us set aside the implausible argument that ‘UK outlets focused on May & Brexit’ should preclude any coverage of a vital reappraisal of the West’s ‘justification’ of an attack on Syria; or the notion that senior editors at the BBC, with its vast monitoring resources, would have to be informed by Doucet of the leaked document. But, if we were to take Doucet’s words at face value, she would surely be happy to respond to our follow-up query, asking for an update. Seemingly not. She has now retreated behind the wider, blanketing BBC silence.

And yet, last week, evidence emerged that the BBC is well aware of the leaked document. In a live-streamed panel debate at the annual meeting of GLOBSEC, a global security thinktank, on June 6, the BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner asked OPCW director-general Fernando Arias about the Independent report ‘by someone called Robert Fisk’. Was this an example of fake news? In his evasive reply, Arias stated that:

‘all the information given by any inspectors is considered but sometimes it is not fit to the conclusion.’ [Our emphasis.]

This remarkable admission that serious evidence and analysis were disregarded because it does ‘not fit the conclusion’ went unchallenged by the BBC’s Gardner and everyone else in the room. It echoed the infamous statement in the 2002 Downing Street memo on plans to invade Iraq that ‘the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.’ The focus of Arias’s concern was to defend the OPCW and to identify the whistle-blower, stating that:

‘”actions had to be taken” following the leak…”I stand by the impartial and professional conclusions” of the full OPCW report.’

On June 12, Peter Hitchens, mentioned earlier for his excellent reporting on Syria, challenged Gardner on whether he had reported his exchange with the OPCW director-general. Later that day, Hitchens tweeted:

‘BBC this afternoon stated that @FrankRGardner has *not* reported on the exchange, indeed BBC as a whole, despite vast resources paid for by licence holders, has yet to report at all on this major development.’

The only response to the leaked OPCW report by a Guardian journalist so far appears to have been this remarkable outburst from George Monbiot on Twitter:

‘The Assad apologists are out in force again, and baying for blood. It’s chilling to see how they latch onto one person’s contentious account of a single atrocity, while ignoring the vast weight of evidence for chemical weapons use and conventional massacres by the govt. #Syria’

Monbiot added:

‘They seek to exonerate one of the bloodiest mass murderers on the planet, denying his crimes and whitewashing his record. In doing so, they share some of the blame for his ongoing mass killing of Syrian people.’

As we, and many other people, pointed out, this was an inexplicably irrational response to an obviously important, indisputably authentic, highly credible, leaked document that was not at all ‘one person’s… account’. The leaked material simply has to be taken seriously and investigated, not dismissed out of hand. We are, after all, talking about possible war crimes under Trump, the famously dangerous, fascist US President every liberal journalist is supposed to be determined to excoriate at every possible turn. Why should we not, then, describe Monbiot as a ‘Trump apologist’?

Last year, during an exchange about Syria, Hitchens told Monbiot what we had already concluded about him:

‘This is important. I have until now regarded you as a fundamentally decent and honest person (and defended you against those who have argued otherwise). But your behaviour in this matter is causing me to reconsider this opinion. Please argue honestly.’

The near-total ‘mainstream’ media blanking of the leaked OPCW document is a genuinely disturbing sign of growing corporate media conformity and totalitarian-style mendacity. In the age of social media – with netizens repeatedly challenging the likes of the BBC’s Lyse Doucet and the Guardian‘s George Monbiot – the stonewalling, and the denial of newsworthiness, is happening in plain sight. Corporate journalists know that it is important, they know that we know that it is important, they know that we are asking why they are ignoring it, and they are ignoring us anyway, with the whole act of censorship swathed in silence. As the Soviet dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko once said:

‘When truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie.’

How false flag operations are carried out today

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By Philip M. Giraldi

Source: Intrepid Report

False Flag is a concept that goes back centuries. It was considered to be a legitimate ploy by the Greeks and Romans, where a military force would pretend to be friendly to get close to an enemy before dropping the pretense and raising its banners to reveal its own affiliation just before launching an attack. In the sea battles of the eighteenth century among Spain, France and Britain hoisting an enemy flag instead of one’s own to confuse the opponent was considered to be a legitimate ruse de guerre, but it was only “honorable” if one reverted to one’s own flag before engaging in combat.

Today’s false flag operations are generally carried out by intelligence agencies and non-government actors including terrorist groups, but they are only considered successful if the true attribution of an action remains secret. There is nothing honorable about them as their intention is to blame an innocent party for something that it did not do. There has been a lot of such activity lately and it was interesting to learn by way of a leak that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has developed a capability to mimic the Internet fingerprints of other foreign intelligence services. That means that when the media is trumpeting news reports that the Russians or Chinese hacked into U.S. government websites or the sites of major corporations, it could actually have been the CIA carrying out the intrusion and making it look like it originated in Moscow or Beijing. Given that capability, there has been considerable speculation in the alternative media that it was actually the CIA that interfered in the 2016 national elections in the United States.

False flags can be involved in other sorts of activity as well. The past year’s two major alleged chemical attacks carried out against Syrian civilians that resulted in President Donald Trump and associates launching 160 cruise missiles are pretty clearly false flag operations carried out by the rebels and terrorist groups that controlled the affected areas at the time. The most recent reported attack on April 7 might not have occurred at all, according to doctors and other witnesses who were actually in Douma. Because the rebels succeeded in convincing much of the world that the Syrian government had carried out the attacks, one might consider their false flag efforts to have been extremely successful.

The remedy against false flag operations such as the recent one in Syria is, of course, to avoid taking the bait and instead waiting until a thorough and objective inspection of the evidence has taken place. The United States, Britain and France did not do that, preferring instead to respond to hysterical press reports by “doing something.” If the U.N. investigation of the alleged attack turns up nothing, a distinct possibility, it is unlikely that they will apologize for having committed a war crime.

The other major false flag that has recently surfaced is the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, England, on March 4. Russia had no credible motive to carry out the attack and had, in fact, good reasons not to do so. The allegations made by British Prime Minister Theresa May about the claimed nerve agent being “very likely” Russian in origin have been debunked, in part through examination by the U.K.’s own chemical weapons lab. May, under attack even within her own party, needed a good story and a powerful enemy to solidify her own hold on power so false flagging something to Russia probably appeared to be just the ticket as Moscow would hardly be able to deny the “facts” being invented in London. Unfortunately, May proved wrong and the debate ignited over her actions, which included the expulsion of twenty-three Russian diplomats, has done her severe damage. Few now believe that Russia actually carried out the poisoning and there is a growing body of opinion suggesting that it was actually a false flag executed by the British government or even by the CIA.

The lesson that should be learned from Syria and Skripal is that if “an incident” looks like it has no obvious motive behind it, there is a high probability that it is a false flag. A bit of caution in assigning blame is appropriate given that the alternative would be a precipitate and likely disproportionate response that could easily escalate into a shooting war.