© AFP / Nicholas Kamm
Blind trust in controversial 'citizen investigation' outlet Bellingcat prompted
Newsweek editors to drop a report on the latest OPCW leaks, the author of the piece who resigned from the magazine after the incident told RT.
Tareq Haddad announced his resignation from
Newsweek last week, accusing the magazine of "suppressing" his attempt to report on a leaked email casting doubts on the results of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) investigation into an April 2018 chemical attack in Douma, Syria, which allegedly killed dozens of civilians. The OPCW sent a fact-finding mission to the site, which pinned the blame for the attack on Damascus. While witnesses who later spoke in the Hague said the White Helmets' video of the attack was staged.
Haddad also issued a scathing rebuke to the
Newsweek - and Western journalism in general - by accusing it of siding with the American warmongers to promote the US wars and obscure the truth. Now he also revealed to RT that it was the editorial board's quite peculiar pick of trustworthy sources that gave a rise to the whole issue in the first place.
Haddad first approached his editors with an OPCW leaks story pitch, citing an opinion piece by Peter Hitchens in
The Mail on Sunday."The fact that another British journalist has published it in a reputable publication, I thought, was more than enough for
Newsweek to be able to do that," he told RT.
The editors simply discarded this idea by calling Hitchens - a man Haddad describes as an "accomplished journalist [working] for more than 12 years" - not trustworthy enough. Instead, they referred him to a Bellingcat article supposedly debunking the whole leak story.
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