by Eric Zuesse for the Saker Blog
The formerly respected global authority on whether or not a chemical-weapons attack has occurred, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, or OPCW, has now so continuously ignored its own hired expert investigators, so that in an April 28th news-report, at “The Gray Zone” investigative-news site, anonymous “OPCW Insiders” have issued a public statement saying that:
A number of impartial and principled professionals no longer wish to be associated with the politically motivated reports being issued by the OPCW FFM [Fact-Finding Mission] and now the IIT [Investigation and Identification Team]. Many consider this work and these reports to be procedurally and scientifically flawed. Some of us believe they should not be seen as representing the work of OPCW inspectors at all.
The recent publication of the IIT report into alleged chemical attacks at Ltamenah [in Syria — a country whose non-sectarian Government the U.S. regime has been trying since 2009 to overthrow and replace by a fundamentalist-Sunni government that would be controlled by the Sauds] on March 24, 25 and 30 2017, has highlighted again the misuse of the OPCW by influential state parties to further their political and foreign affairs objectives.
The news-reports that are listed below provide the essential background to this, indicating that the “influential state parties” which are being referred-to are the U.S. and its allied regimes (such as UK).
If the quoted statement is, in fact, a leak by “OPCW Insiders,” as “The Gray Zone” alleges, then it’s yet another nail in the coffin of the OPCW’s international credibility. Coming after a lengthy string of such OPCW scandals as are documented in the below-listed articles, all international funding organizations will then cancel their commitments to OPCW, except for organizations that represent the U.S. regime; and, then, the only international organizations that will continue to publicize the ‘findings’ from the OPCW will be organizations that themselves are agencies of the U.S. regime.
In that case, of course, no national delegations to the United Nations, except ones that represent regimes which themselves likewise front for (are vassals of) the U.S. regime, will continue to cite OPCW ‘findings’, in any other way than to deny the credibility of OPCW reports.
The background on all of this, including an explanation of what the main objectives of the U.S. regime are in Syria — what the purposes of this OPCW propaganda against Syria’s Government are — is provided here.
And, now, following, are the news-reports that describe the events building up to the “OPCW Insiders” statement, that “Some of us believe they should not be seen as representing the work of OPCW inspectors at all” (these events will be listed starting with the latest, and working backwards in time, to the earliest):
“As an employee of the OPCW I was horrified” 12 March 2020
“Deluge Of New Leaks Further Shreds The Establishment Syria Narrative” 15 December 2019
“Fresh Evidence that UN Watchdog Suppressed Evidence Casting Doubt on Assad Gas Attack” 15 December 2019
“New WikiLeaks Bombshell: 20 Inspectors Dissent From Syria Chemical Attack Narrative” 14 December 2019
“Newsweek reporter resigns after accusing outlet of SUPPRESSING story about OPCW leak that undermines Syria ‘gas attack’ narrative” 8 December 2019
“Second whistleblower exposes cover-up at OPCW & Syria chemical weapons report (Video)” 16 November 2019
“SUPPRESSED OPCW FINDING: War-Crime Likely Perpetrated by U.S. Against Syria on 14 April 2018 (Update)” 19 May 2019
“A memo from a member of the OPCW’s Fact-Finding Mission (FFM) in Douma to the OPCW Director General Fernando Arais” 14 March 2019
“Douma Videos and Photos” 24 April 2018
“Did Al Qaeda Dupe Trump on Syrian Attack?” 9 November 2017
“The Trumped-Up Syria-Sarin Case” 4 November 2017
“UN On Khan Sheikhoun – Victims Hospitalized BEFORE Claimed Incident Happened” 29 October 2017
“The Red Line and the Rat Line: Seymour M. Hersh on Obama, Erdoğan and the Syrian rebels” 17 April 2014
“Possible Implications of Faulty US Technical Intelligence in the Damascus Nerve Agent Attack of August 21, 2013” 14 January 2014
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
Thank you for this article. It is indeed heartening to see people begin to resist these types of deciets and abuses of position and power. I hope that the corrupt officials in these agencies continue to be brought to light, and continue to lose their ability to wrongfully cause harm.
Joshua
The point is that President Assad never used chemical weapons. The facts are as follows:
First of all, when the Russian expeditionary force arrived in Syria, the tide turned and the Syrian Arab Army, with Russian help, started defeating ISIS and liberating ISIS held territory. The Syrians were later on joined by Iranian volunteers. Why would Assad incriminate himself by using chemical weapons, especially when he was winning ? It makes no sense.
Secondly, when the first chemical attack occurred in Syria, both the Western governments and media were quick to accuse President Assad. However, neither bothered to quote ISIS commanders, who openly admitted that they were responsible, as they did not know how to use gas canisters, killing a dozen of their own men in the process.
And yes, the OPCW has been turned into Washington’s propaganda machine. The reason the United Nations (conveniently situated close to Wall Street) have not fully become Washington’s propaganda machine and political pawn is due entirely to Russia and China.
I am well aware of the facts. Thank You.
The point that I would like to illustrate, however, is that this is far from the first time that these organizations have been misused against targeted lands, and peoples. Through the corruptions of money, and behind the scenes influence, these organizations have been used to falsely justify naked aggression against literally millions of living people. This practice is, of course, one of the many things which must be brought to light so that it can be corrected, in order for any genuine peace to be established and kept.
Important article. Thanks Eric!
Some recent articles from non-western sources on opcw corruption and war crimes:
OPCW insiders dispute SECOND chemical weapons probe on Syria, blast watchdog for ‘glaring technical weaknesses’
https://www.rt.com/news/487145-opcw-insiders-ltamenah-report/
“Writing at the Grayzone, the insiders denounced the “compromised” investigation into chemical incidents in the town of Ltamenah in March 2017. ( https://thegrayzone.com/2020/04/28/opcw-insiders-ltamenah-chemical-weapons-report/ )
The Russian Foreign Ministry noted that the alleged evidence gathered by the team ( not the Grayzone whistle-blowers, an opcw group of propagandists ) came mostly from anti-government groups eager to see a regime change and could only be described as “misinformation.”
The IIT report on Ltamenah was instantly amplified by Western media as fact, despite claims by high-level OPCW whistleblowers that the organization’s leadership had suppressed evidence during a previous probe into an alleged chemical attack in Douma in 2018. The suppressed evidence, in that instance, had strongly suggested the incident may have been staged by jihadist rebel groups in order to frame the Syrian government and trigger a Western intervention. The OPCW, however, publicly offered a narrative which backed up Western claims of Syrian guilt, legitimizing US, British and French air strikes conducted in the immediate aftermath of the incident.
The fact that insiders are now also disputing the credibility of the Ltamenah report proves that “dissension within the OPCW ranks extends well beyond the Douma investigation,” the Grayzone said in its editor’s note.
The reports are so flawed and “politically motivated” that many OPCW professionals “no longer wish to be associated” with them, the group wrote, and many feel they should not be seen as representing the work of OPCW inspectors at all.
The Ltamenah report highlights the fact that “influential state parties” are misusing the OPCW to further their foreign policy objectives, and that the IIT was formed not to investigate the incidents but “simply to find the Syrian government guilty,” they said.”
It’s a decent report with a lot more info than the quoted material I posted here.
Russia Blames OPCW for Sacrificing Reputation for West’s Ambition in Syria
https://sputniknews.com/middleeast/202004221079058639-russia-blames-opcw-for-sacrificing-reputation-for-wests-ambition-in-syria/
“The OPCW reputation as an authoritative expert body in the field of chemical disarmament has actually been sacrificed to the Middle East geopolitical ambitions of a small group of countries”, the Russian ministry said in a statement.
It argued that the investigative body had been set up in violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention. Only the UN Security Council has the right to apportion blame for chemical attacks.
“[The] activity of this quasi-prosecutor structure, which is dominated by representatives of Western countries, encroaches on the exclusive powers of the UN Security Council and is aimed at the solution of odious political tasks to discredit legally elected authorities of Syria”, it said.
Russia sees the decisions to create the investigative team and fund it with money from the OPCW’s regular budget as illegitimate, the ministry said. It refuses to cooperate with the investigators or finance their activities.”
Syrian chemical dossier: Russia slams misinformation in OPCW team’s report on alleged Ltamenah incidents in 2017
https://www.rt.com/newsline/485461-syria-opcw-chemical-russia/
“The Russian Foreign Ministry said it was difficult to expect anything else from the body, set up by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), after the report said that “there are reasonable grounds to believe” that in all three instances, chemical weapons were used by the Syrian Air Force.
The relevant Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) requires the mandatory dispatch of experts directly to the sites of alleged incidents, the ministry said on Thursday. However, the information gathered by the IIT “mostly came from anti-government armed groups and pseudo-humanitarian NGOs affiliated with them, including the notorious White Helmets.”
The report contains “references to certain secret services data – apparently from the same states obsessed with a change of power in Damascus,” the ministry said, adding that “there is no other word for it but misinformation.” Russian experts will study the IIT’s report, it added, saying that “we have no doubt that numerous international independent experts will do the same.”
The statement also recalled “the scandalous story with the OPCW Technical Secretariat falsifying an investigation report of a high-profile incident in the Syrian city of Douma on April 7, 2018, which turned out to be a staged provocation by the White Helmets.”
This one:
Syria: Fake Attack, Real Deaths
https://sputniknews.com/columnists/202004151078963948-syria-fake-attack-real-deaths/
“While the patients were being brought in, there was a member of the White Helmets calling out “gas!” – which caused people to throw water over each other in panic.
Other witnesses, who told their story in The Hague on April 28th 2018, at a press conference organised by the Russian delegation to OPCW, roughly confirmed the statement of the doctor interviewed by Fisk. None of them, including several people who were seen in the video, said they hadn’t noticed anything of a poison gas attack.
In May 2019 a revealing document was leaked from OPCW about the two cylinders. The author, Ian Henderson, who in April 2018 had been sent to Douma to investigate the cylinders on behalf of the chemical watchdog, concluded that there was a “higher probability that both cylinders were manually placed at those two locations rather than being delivered from aircraft”. This seemed to be an understatement since the hole in the roof turned out to be smaller than the cylinder on the bed below.
Also “no organophosphorus nerve agents or their degradation products were detected, either in the environmental samples or in plasma samples from the alleged casualties”, the OPCW interim report on the Douma incident reads. The OPCW inspectors furthermore noted that the dead people in the photos and videos didn’t look like victims from “chlorine-containing choking or blood agents such as chlorine gas, phosgene or cyanogen chloride”.
Again, much additional info in the article.
You could write similar reports now about the WHO, as they are now funded to far too great a degree by big pharma and Bill Gates. They should be seen as propaganda channels to further the business interests of the increasingly private funders. All the Covid19 lockdown propaganda from WHO is to drive the business interests of Bill Gates et al.
The IPCC has been the long-term bellwether for propaganda above facts.
I am afraid to say that the US has consciously sought to completely delegitimise all international vehicles of principled evaluation and reporting. What is so shocking is that that is not a trigger for total global ostracism. It is after all high time that US genocidalists were put in docks equivalent to Nuremberg….
No not like Nuremberg, that was a complete sham….a mockery and a sneering contempt for justice. America and Britain were as guilty then as they are now. Their war crimes in Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki etc etc still cry out for justice. We need a complete reboot. America, Britain, Israel and their “Five Eyes” cohorts need to neutered completely, emasculated so that they can never ,ever again, be a demonic threat to the human race. You cannot contemplate reforming any of the statutory “alphabet” supervisory bodies as their cancerous corruption is endemic and terminal
I have to say that what you are saying is a distinct possibility, even a probability. Considering any corporate enterprise that operates on fiat currency is structured so that it must have some actual thing of real value to consume (or it will collapse). Pharmaceuticals, certainly fall into such a category. So does labor. Resource extraction. That’s probably why the first thing out of the corporate vultures’ mouths was ‘economy’, even before the expansive scope of the most recent pandemic was revealed. When I say vulture, I am referring to Ross (and probably mr glasses) and his little friends. I say ‘most recent pandemic’ because they have been selling fresh and creative pandemics every six months or so for years, so they can sell more drugs and vaccines (sales of which are guaranteed by insurance corporations and governments, which also operate on fiat currency).
What does the Empire do to pull the wool over the eyes of sovereign bodies? The old trick of introducing an alphabet agency to subvert decisions which can only legally be reached by the UN body.
This way the Empire look like they have legitimacy and the support of the international community whereas the reality is that they are moving the goal posts to have decisions rigged in it’s favor.
It’s not deception. It’s as simple as calling you up one rainy night and telling you your family will no longer be safe if you don’t play the game they way the Empire wants the game to be played …
https://theintercept.com/2018/03/29/john-bolton-trump-bush-bustani-kids-opcw/
What happens when the shoe is on the different foot, that if the empire doesnt play by its own rules that it will no longer be safe?
Well :-) That has happened before and will happen again.
It’s the theme that plays out when empires fall – when they can’t play by their own rules anymore.
Nice. Thank you for this report .
I would like to support your report, and also comment on Bellingcat whose role is discussed in your link here:
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/deluge-new-leaks-further-shreds-establishment-syria-narrative
and the larger implication within a corrupt world government system and its control.
Bellingcat serve the role as “investigative reporters” in corporate media (fake news) , beginning its service along the planned US coup d’etat in Ukraine and quickly earning a “SCOOP” price (Norway) for investigative report after publishing the CIA/NATO hit operation against MH-17 as done by Russia. They must be designated somewhat military/Atlantic/NATO cyber warfare through NATO false flag events and general propaganda operations.
Diving into the background of a corrupt world government control behind such operations, which also included Bellingcat and established them as a trustworthy source in the corrupt media around the planned coup d’etat in Ukraine, the earliest planning of the coup d’etat in Ukraine, came from the WEF (world economic forum) in 2011. Borge Brende, a norwegain director at WEF (Rockefeller Foundation) was publically stating that “they” (for the norwegian government?) were working to alter the government in Ukraine to make the country more suitable for their investments. Wikipedia: ” He re-joined the World Economic Forum in 2011 as managing director with responsibility for policy initiatives and engagement of the Forum’s non-business constituents.[4] ”
As a fact that coincided with the discovery of large oil and gas reserves in Ukraine by Chevron (Rockefeller). Chevron today control the entire Ukraine energy grid. Burisma was created as corrupt offshore accounts ( registered Cyprus) for the shale gas output which Chevron previously controlled and Royal Dutch Shell pulled out as well. (Rothschild Syndicate).
https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-federal-reserve-cartel-the-eight-families/25080
Diving further into the oil and gas industry of the Rothschild syndicate there is a large world control reaching all fields of government and its press/media control.
The Rockefeller Standard Oil was financed by Rothschild and as is evident today from the above article, Royal Dutch Shell and Chevron are Rothschild Syndicate meaning Rockefeller and Rothshild are one and the same. They likewise therefor run all the organisations together as the Rothschild syndicate, like World Economic Forum, Club of Rome, RIIA (Chatham House), UN, EU, CFR, ECFR, Trilateral Commision, Bilderberg, the politicians of Political Parties and the Parliamentarian system. And OPCW. ICC. By establish practical control over international bodies and poltical bodies the idea of justice, freedom, equality, and democracy have all disappeared in reality. The next threat is of course the disappearing freedom of expression, freedom of ideas, and basically any freedom since the world is run on propaganda and lies related to the fake narratives, and arrest of any deviation from the false narratives.
An interesting interview with Blumenthal on the philosophy of the Grayzone media house and their work exposing propaganda. Not much on the subject of chem weapons falseflag generation and propagandizing, but it shows where they are coming from.
Grayzone Founder: Unpacking Lies That Aim to Deceive US Into War With China
https://sputniknews.com/interviews/202004301079145703-grayzone-founder-unpacking-lies-that-aim-to-deceive-us-into-war-with-china/
“The Grayzone, a US-based independent news outlet, recently published a story busting the conspiracy theory of COVID-19 escaping from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, adding that it is “the Trump administration’s Iraqi WMD.”
Apart from digging into stories behind the conspiracy theories, the Grayzone also released many reports related to Northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in recent months. For example, it released a report in March that stated “forced labour” stories hyped by some Western and US media and US-based nongovernmental organisations are orchestrated by the “US government, NATO, arms industry to drive Cold War PR blitz”.
To learn more about The Grayzone and its work, the Global Times reporter Liu Xin(GT) spoke to Max Blumenthal(B), an award-winning journalist and founder of the Grayzone.”
At the bottom of the article are links to the Global Times where the other parts are published.
You are impressing me lately hr Zuesse, thank you for the links in this article and “The Victory America Won for Fascism and Nazism After WWII” is going to ruffle a few exeptionalist feathers i hope.
In my opinion quisling OPCW chief Fernando Arias should be publicly flogged then jailed indefinitely.
Even if it were true that Bashar al-Assad resorts to chemical warfare (like Saddam Hussein in Halabja), the obvious corollary question that should be asked is:
Since when is poisoning innocent people a crime in the eyes of Western imperialism? The West hardly views Syrians as an exceptional and indispensable people.
Also, somewhat ironically, the ’Syrian regime’ seems to have a groundswell of support at home. Not bad for a government relying on chemical warfare domestically.
OPCW = Occidental Propaganda on Chemical Weapons.