Worst lie since fake claim sparked Iraq war?
A former inspector with the OPCW has accused the chemical weapons watchdog of issuing a sanitized report on the alleged 2018 attack in Douma, Syria, arguing it ignored serious reservations of its own fact-finding team.
The OPCW’s final report on the Douma incident, released last March, omitted key findings of its own inspection team which would have cast serious doubt on whether a chemical attack took place at all, a now former OPCW specialist, Ian Henderson, told members of the United Nations Security Council in a recorded video address – after his visa application to attend the meeting in person was rejected.
“The findings in the final [Fact Finding Mission] report were contradictory, were a complete turnaround with what the team had understood collectively during and after the Douma deployments,” Henderson said.
Max Blumenthal✔
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Ian Henderson, member of OPCW team on Douma, spoke today at the UN.
He re-stated his belief that no chemical attack occurred & called the final OPCW report a "complete turnaround in the situation from what was understood by the majority of the team and the entire Douma team." https://twitter.com/LennyZuber/status/1219372375764021249 …
Even though several members of the fact finding team “had serious misgivings that a chemical attack had occurred” as early as July 2018, the organization’s final report – compiled by another group that never even visited the incident site – nonetheless concluded there were “reasonable grounds” to all but pin the blame for the attack on Damascus.
Sanitized of any dissenting opinion, the report ignored “findings, facts, information, data or analysis” gathered by the team in the areas of witness testimony, toxicology studies, chemical analysis, as well as ballistics, the retired inspector said.
Ian Henderson, OPCW whistle-blower
Washington and its allies blamed the Syrian government for the Douma incident, with the US, France, and the UK launching joint strikes against Syria a week later, well before any official investigation could even start, and even delaying it. Western politicians and media claimed at the time – based purely on visual materials and witness accounts provided by the notorious White Helmets and other militant-linked sources – that the Syrian government forces had ‘highly likely’ dropped two poisonous gas cylinders, killing scores of civilians.
Henderson carried out a closer analysis of that pair of cylinders mysteriously found in a residential area of Douma. His ‘Engineering Assessment’ was initially leaked last May, laying out a number of hypotheses for how the cylinders wound up at the site in Douma. Most significantly, it noted a “higher probability” that they were “manually placed” instead of being “delivered from aircraft,” suggesting a party other than the Syrian government may have planted them there.
In my case, I had followed up with a further six months of engineering and ballistics studies into the cylinders, the result of which had provided further support for the view that there had not been a chemical attack.
Subsequent WikiLeaks publications would reveal that a senior OPCW official ordered “all traces” of Henderson’s assessment to be scrubbed from its archives. But despite the internal battle undermining the OPCW’s credibility, Henderson insisted the dispute should not be a matter of “political debate,” urging for any discrepancies to be “properly resolved… through the rigors of science and engineering.”
On 27 December 2019, Wikileaks released a new batch of internal documents from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). [1] An email among them reveals that Inspector Ian Henderson’s report was pulled by order of the OPCW’s chief of cabinet Sébastien Braha. [2]
The French diplomat is an "officer of the Orient" (high ranking official of the French Foreign Affairs Ministry) who was seconded to the OPCW three months after the alleged chemical attack on Douma in order to oversee the organization’s investigation.
In the email, Sébastien Braha (photo) demands: “Please get this document out of DRA [Documents Registry Archive]... And please remove all traces, if any, of its delivery/storage/whatever in DRA”. - Voltaire Network
The informal UNSC meeting to assess the situation and inconsistencies around the FMM’s report was convened at the request of Moscow on Monday. The US and its allies accused Russia of trying to “discredit the well-respected OPCW and its staff,” even though Moscow insists that the goal, on the contrary, was to restore trust in the organization.
“The chemical incident in Syrian Douma. Why is it so important? Because it was a justification of missile strikes by the US, France and the UK in April 2018, who immediately named the Syrian Government guilty,” said Vassily Nebenzia, Russia’s permanent representative to the UN, who accused the US and allies of “crying wolf.”
Since not so long... ago, some of our colleagues invented a new paradigm, the world of 'highly likely'.
Besides listening to Henderson’s testimony, the UNSC was addressed by Russia’s OPCW representative, Alexander Shulgin, and the chief of a NGO (Foundation for the Study of Democracy) that had previously interviewed over 300 residents of Douma, shattering the official Western narrative.
Remarks by Mr. Maxim Grigoriev, Head of the Foundation for the Study of Democracy, at an Arria-formula meeting of UNSC member states "Implementation of UNSCR 2118: OPCW FFM Report on Douma
Individual responses by people living in the apartment building allegedly affected by the chlorine canisters can be found at the link immediately above.
NGO “The Foundation for the Study of Democracy” conducted an independent evaluation of the Douma incident on 7 April, 2018.
We have interviewed:
• Fifteen witnesses in the Douma Hospital;
• 10 residents of a house in Douma where human bodies were found;
• 300 residents of houses, situated within one kilometer from the building where the bodies were found.
The testimony of witnesses is an undisputable proof that the chemical attack in Douma was falsified.
Those witnesses to the falsification tell how exactly it all happened:
• The fighters who came with the White Helmets, brought dead bodies, intimidated locals, shot at windows, forcing some people to leave their homes and isolating the rest in their apartments. Then, they brought the bodies outside and filmed the footage.
• One body the fighters left outside was identified by a witness. It was his brother who had earlier been killed in an artillery shelling and taken by fighters from hospital. The remaining bodies, as the witnesses supposed, were brought from the Al Thoba prison where fighters kept the people they captured, including women and children.
• Taking into account that other bodies had no injuries, the witnesses are confident that the people featured in the video recordings were killed just to organize the falsification.
The testimony presented above unequivocally proves that the chemical attack on 7 April, 2018, was falsified.
When preparing the report:
OPCW abstained from inquiring the above-mentioned witnesses who were permanently residing at the place of incident and were ready to testify. By all means, this is the first thing to be done to investigate the accident. The fact that OPCW Mission did not do this proves their low level of competence or lack of willingness to reveal the truth;
OPCW used data provided by people who may not have been present at the scene of incident, and who were inquired in Idlib Governorate and in other countries;
OPCW deliberately used falsified materials provided by the “White Helmets” as the main basis for their conclusions.
On 11 March 2019, a briefing was held at OPCW. I presented our report ”White Helmets: fact checking by eyewitnesses and former volunteers”. It contains numerous proofs that falsification of chemical attacks was an essential part of the work of White Helmets and they can not be considered as a credible source of information.
Officials of OPCW concealed conclusions made by its experts, deleted a number of vital facts from the report, and falsified the report itself.
For the first time over 23 years of its existence, Officials of the OPCW take part in falsification of a report. This is an unprecedented blow to the reputation of the OPCW.
Secretary-General of the United Nations is depositary of the Chemical Weapons Convention. OPCW works based on this CWC.
NGO “The Foundation for the Study of Democracy” prepared a letter addressed to the Secretary-General (показать) that contains testimonies of above mentioned witnesses. I kindly request to circulate it among Security Council members in order to reveal the truth about the falsification of chemical attack in Douma on 7 April, 2018.
Search this blog for Douma, for many more posts on the appalling story.
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