Former OPCW Director Slams Media for 'Wall of Silence' on Douma False Flag Operation

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Former OPCW director defends Douma whistleblowers as ‘extremely competent’,

slams media for creating ‘wall of silence’

19 Oct, 2020 18:38 

Bustani at a hearing amid US efforts to remove him from his post as director-general of OPCW

© Reuters / Jamil Bittar

The former head of the OPCW has defended the whistleblowers who alleged that it engaged in a cover-up of exonerating evidence in Douma, arguing efforts to silence him prove the dissenters right.

Jose Bustani, the OPCW’s founding director general, has fiercely defended the inspectors who braved political pressure from their own organization along with the US and its allies to expose the apparent cover-up of evidence countering Washington’s hole-filled narrative that Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government used chemical weapons in Douma in April 2018. 

In an interview with the Grayzone, Bustani lamented the political co-option of the body he helped establish by the US, which – together with its allies, including Britain and France – barred him from testifying before the UN Security Council earlier this month, using the bizarre excuse that he lacked the expertise to speak about the operations of the organization he once led. 

Not only are the Douma whistleblowers “extremely competent…extremely professional and extremely reliable” – trusted colleagues from his early days at the OPCW – but the group’s very reluctance to hear them out signaled it lacked confidence in its own revised conclusions of Syrian guilt in the Douma attack, Bustani told the outlet. The body’s insistence Assad had used chemical weapons was held up after the fact to justify US airstrikes on Damascus.

“If the OPCW is confident in the robustness of its scientific work on Douma,” Bustani explained, referring to the official report alleging the use of chlorine gas on civilians by the Assad government, “it should have little to fear in hearing out its inspectors.” 

If, however, the claims of evidence suppression, selective use of data, and exclusion of key investigators, among other allegations, are not unfounded, then it’s even more imperative that it should be dealt with openly and urgently.

Otherwise, the OPCW is just a political tool in the hands of NATO, Deep State, etc.

Bustani explained he had volunteered to testify before the UN Security Council because he felt it was his “duty” to help the whistleblower inspectors get the fair hearing they had been denied and bring their concerns to a wider audience. The inspectors, who only resorted to leaking their version of the report last year after complete institutional stonewalling, “are an asset to the OPCW” and giving them an opportunity to “set the record straight” would repair the organization’s greatly damaged credibility, Bustani said.

US Influence on Douma probe

He expressed horror that a delegation of US officials had reportedly met with OPCW inspectors early on in the investigation to “convince them a chlorine attack had occurred” after the body’s initial report questioning whether there had been a chemical attack at all had been allegedly doctored to be more favorable to the US narrative. Bustani speculated that perhaps the inspectors had been intimidated into meeting with the Americans, stating emphatically that “If I were [still] Director General, this would never have happened.”

Threats from John Bolton

The veteran diplomat is certainly no stranger to US intimidation, having infamously been bullied out of his position in the run-up to the Iraq War by the Bush administration, specifically cabinet official John Bolton. Bustani was allegedly given “24 hours to leave the organization” in 2002 after his efforts to bring Iraq into the OPCW threatened to scuttle the administration’s flimsy “weapons of mass destruction” narrative. Making a personal visit to the OPCW’s The Hague headquarters in March 2002 to inform Bustani that the war-hungry Bush administration didn’t like the diplomat’s “management style,” Bolton supposedly told him “we have ways to retaliate against you,” making a pointed mention of his “two sons in New York.” 

After an initial effort to pressure member states into voting him out failed, the US threatened to withhold funds from the OPCW and even began surveilling his office.

Disappearing security personnel

Bustani shared more details about the US-led efforts to get him to “resign” in 2002, including that the wall behind his desk was “full of listening equipment” and that it took an investigator two days to remove all the devices. When he tried to bring the surveillance to the head of security for the organization, the official and all the equipment in his “huge office” simply “disappeared” – a bizarre event Bustani said was never explained.

MSM toes US narrative

Bustani was also highly critical of the mainstream media’s sweeping failure to cover the scandal with the exception of the occasional critical piece slandering the whistleblowers, noting that in his experience even nominal coverage from the New York Times or Le Monde would have “really helped” to convince the OPCW to take action in hearing out the dissenters’ concerns. Even commentators who had supported him against the Bush administration's warmongers in 2002 had willingly participated in the creation of an “impenetrable wall of silence” that prevented the investigators from being heard, he complained, noting that the apparent embargo persists more than a year after the “real” report on the events in Douma in April 2018 was leaked.

Everything but science

Three members of the OPCW’s Douma Fact-Finding Mission have come forward to challenge the body’s official conclusion that the Assad government used chlorine gas on Syrian civilians in the attack that was immediately – before any sort of investigation could be conducted – met with retaliatory US airstrikes. One of the whistleblowers stated when he came forward in November at a Brussels briefing organized by the Courage Foundation that “most of the Douma team felt the two reports on the incident…were scientifically impoverished, procedurally irregular and possibly fraudulent,” and that evidence had been tampered with.

The organization has refused to consider the whistleblowers’ claims, instead denouncing the investigators as not credible and recommending tighter security measures to prevent further leaks.

It's curious that American media outlets, most of which are rabidly anti-Trump, would miss this chance to blame Trump, Bolton, and Bush for corrupting the OPCW. There must be a more important reason for them to toe the official narrative, rather than bash conservatives over this. That would be the case if Deep State owned the media. The media would reflect Deep State's interests above their political interests. Does that make sense to anyone but me?

OPCW Put Lid on Key Evidence in Douma Chemical Incident – Watchdog Whistleblower

Did John Bolton corrupt the OPCW in order to demonize Syria

and create an excuse for more war?

A scene at a Douma hospital that was used to push a claim of a chemical weapon attack by the Syrian government. Screengrab via Reuters.

The international chemical weapons watchdog likely skewed its own investigation of the 2018 chemical weapons incident in Douma, Syria to come to a predetermined decision, a damning conclusion based on whistleblower testimony said.

The April 2018 incident in the Damascus suburb was quickly blamed on the Syrian government by the West. Within days, the US, the UK and France launched barrages of cruise missiles in retaliation. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the international chemical weapons watchdog, later backed the justification, all but pointing the finger at Syria in its final report, which was released in March.

Now a panel of experts says the report was based on a flawed conclusion and likely deliberately steered toward the West-favored outcome. The accusation is based on evidence and testimony of an OPCW investigator, who came forward with damning evidence that his own organization had breached its mission.

After talking to the whistleblower and examining internal reports, text exchanges and other evidence, the panel was convinced that “key information about chemical analyses, toxicology consultations, ballistics studies, and witness testimonies was suppressed, ostensibly to favor a preordained conclusion,” it said in a statement.

The statement said the OPCW took effort to exclude dissenting investigators and silence their attempts to raise concerns about the report, which is “a right explicitly conferred on inspectors in the Chemical Weapons Convention.” The experts called on the organization to revisit its investigation and allow those not agreeing with the conclusion put in the final report to voice their concerns without fear of reprisal.

The panel convened by the Courage Foundation, which accepts donations for the legal defense of whistleblowers and journalists that report on leaks, includes several prominent specialists and public figures, including José Bustani, a Brazilian diplomat who served as the OPCW’s first Director General before being strong-armed from the office by US superhawk John Bolton.

Bustani said the whistleblower confirmed his doubts about the report, which “seemed incoherent at best” right from the start.

“My hope is that the concerns expressed publicly by the Panel, in its joint consensus statement, will catalyze a process by which the Organization can be resurrected to become the independent and non-discriminatory body it used to be.”

The panel did not make public the name of the whistleblower or any previously unpublished evidence of the OPCW’s alleged misconduct. WikiLeaks, whose editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson was a member of the panel, re-printed a draft engineering assessment penned by an OPCW investigator, which was leaked in May. The document rejects the claim that chlorine cylinders, which were used for delivery of the toxic gas in Douma, had been dropped from the air, which was used as a key argument in accusing the Syrian army for the attack.

Actually they attacked even before the OPCW had time to investigate. It was all about moving the military inventory and ramping up the excuse to continue the war they should never have been in in the first place.

UK Reporter Astounded By What He Found in Douma

BBC Producer Says Hospital Scenes After 2018 Douma ‘Chemical Attack’ Were Staged

German Reporter Says Douma was Completely Staged - MSM Won't Report It

Neither Nerve Agents, Nor Any Banned Chemicals Found in Samples From Syria's Douma - OPCW

The World: What is Really Happening - Craig Murray

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

War with Iran would be ‘like Christmas’ for John Bolton – Tucker Carlson

(left) © AFP / Yuri Kadobnov; (top right) © Reuters/Adam Ploessl; (bottom right) © Reuters / US Navy / Grant G. Grady

Fox News host Tucker Carlson blasted National Security Advisor John Bolton for his apparent love of violent global conflict, saying that for him war with Iran would be like “Christmas, Thanksgiving and his birthday” in one.

“Mercifully John Bolton doesn’t command the military,” Carlson said bitingly – however, the question of how strong his influence on President Donald Trump’s foreign policy remains.

video 4:37

Bolton has been consistent in his drive to push the US into a violent conflict with the Islamic Republic, even penning a rather blunt op-ed in the New York Times entitled ‘To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran’ in 2015. Although President Trump was elected in part based on his turn-away from the traditional neo-con interventionist (read: Deep State) outlook, his national security advisor pick has been as hawkish (read: Deep Stateish) as ever since assuming office last year.

“How is a war with Iran in America’s interests in any way?” Carlson asked, a pertinent question given a NYT report recently claimed Bolton ordered a plan to send 120,000 troops to the Middle East in order to “check” Iran’s influence. While Trump has since refuted the report, calling it “fake news,” he added that if it came to such a plan, “we’d send a hell of a lot more troops than that.” He did say that, “hopefully,” this will not be needed.

How is any war in America's interests? Because America's economy is largely dependent on the research, manufacturing, and sale of weapons of war. After WWI, global merchants realized they got filthy rich during the war and decided that war was very good for their financial interests. 

That thousands of young people die or are severely injured, or that millions of women and children are raped and murdered in wars, seems to not have occurred to them, or were dismissed from their apparent lack of conscience. War is good for the American economy! Especially wars you cannot win - it really keeps the inventory moving. This is Deep State!

Tucker on Tuesday was joined by retired army colonel Douglas Macgregor, who called the situation a “manufactured crisis,” noting that Iran actually serves as an ally in the main regional conflict against Islamic State.

Despite both sides having managed to avoid any direct confrontation for years, Macgregor asserts that Iran almost certainly wants to avoid conflict with the US “under any and all circumstances.”