Top MIT Scientist Slams OPCW Leaders for Repressing Dissenting Report on Douma

MIT rocket scientist Theodore Postol has accused the OPCW leadership of overseeing “compromised reporting” and ignoring evidence that challenged claims that the Syrian government carried out a chemical attack in Douma.

By Aaron Maté, The Grayzone

Facing a growing controversy, the head of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has offered his most extensive comments to date on a leaked internal assessment that challenged allegations that the Syrian government carried out a chemical weapons attack in the city of Douma in April 2018.

But the remarks from OPCW chief Fernando Arias have done little to address concerns that his UN-backed watchdog suppressed the document and published a flawed report that ignored countervailing data.

In an exclusive interview with The Grayzone, the award-winning rocket scientist and MIT professor emeritus Theodore Postol accused Arias of badly mischaracterizing the document in order to paper over his organization’s errors.

According to Postol, the OPCW appeared so determined to attribute blame to the Syrian government that it overlooked clear evidence the incident was staged.

In the end, Postol said, the OPCW produced “a product of compromised reporting of the inspection and analysis process by upper level OPCW management.”

Serious questions surrounding the Douma gas attack

The unfolding scandal relates to an incident that took place in Douma, a suburb of Syrian capital Damascus that had been occupied for years by a Saudi-backed extremist militia called Jaysh al-Islam.

As Syrian forces moved in to retake the area in April 2018, opposition activists linked to Jaysh al-Islam accused the Syrian government of dropping gas cylinders on a shelter and killing at least 43 people.

This allegation prompted the United States, France, and Britain to bomb three sites in Syria one week later.

An OPCW investigation later concluded that the cylinders in Douma were likely dropped by from the air, a finding that effectively pinned blame on the Syrian military, the only warring party with aircraft.

But a leaked engineering assessment revealed that an expert with the OPCW Fact Finding Mission (FFM) had in fact challenged that conclusion.

The leaked document, authored by Ian Henderson, found that the “dimensions, characteristics and appearance of the cylinders and the surrounding scene of the incidents were inconsistent with what would have been expected in the case of either cylinder having been delivered from an aircraft.”

Accordingly, Henderson wrote, there is “a higher probability that both cylinders were manually placed at those two locations rather than being delivered from aircraft.” Henderson’s conclusion suggests that the attack was in fact staged on the ground. 

Henderson’s work was excluded from the OPCW’s final report to the UN Security Council on March 1, 2019. It remained unknown until it was leaked to a group of UK-based academics known as the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media (WGSPM) in May.

After initially attempting to downplay the document’s significance and refusing to address the issue publicly, the OPCW is now on the defensive.

There is much more to this very interesting report. Please go to The Grayzone for the rest.