Children in Douma who are clearly not suffering from an kind of chemical poisoning but are, instead, being used as actors in a staged scene.
The global chemical weapons watchdog is facing renewed questions after fresh details emerged about how it suppressed the findings of its own inspectors who raised serious doubts about an alleged poison gas attack in Syria.
The Mail on Sunday can reveal that
a senior official at the Organisation for Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) demanded the 'removal of all traces' of a document which undermined claims that gas cylinders had been dropped from the air - a key element of the 'evidence' that the Syrian regime was responsible.
Unconfirmed reports and videos showing the bodies of adults and children foaming at the mouth in Douma, a rebel-held Damascus suburb, shocked the world in April 2018.
A week later, without waiting for proof that chemical weapons had been used, Britain, France and the US launched a retaliatory missile strike, the biggest Western military action of the eight-year war.
It was only after the blitz that a team of OPCW inspectors - non-political scientists - were able to visit Douma to investigate the attack, later detailing their conclusions in a report.
Last month,
The Mail on Sunday revealed details of a leaked email -
whose authenticity has since been verified by the OPCW - which protested that the scientists' original interim report had been censored to change its meaning.
Fernando Arias, Director-General of the OPCW, has insisted that he stands by 'the independent, professional conclusions' of the organisation's final report which was released in March.
Comment: WikiLeaks has released a new set of documents including the ones Hitchens references in the article above:
Aside from the
Daily Mail, the only other mainstream western publication which has covered the story is the Italian
la Repubblica:
The
Newsweek journalist whose piece was suppressed by his editors published the following:
Lies, Newsweek and Control of the Media Narrative: First-Hand Account.
Moon of Alabama provides some excerpts, including on Haddad's editor Dimi Reider:
I glanced at his resume and was honored to be working with such an accomplished foreign affairs journalist. I had genuinely hoped to build a closer relationship to him.
That was why I was so bewildered when he flatly refused to publish the OPCW revelations. Surely any editor worth their salt would see this as big? Of course, I understood that the implications of such a piece would be substantial and not easy to report — it was the strongest evidence of lies about Syria to date — but surely most educated people could see this coming? Other evidence was growing by the day.
But no. As the earlier messages showed, there was no desire to report these revelations, regardless of how strong the evidence appeared to be. Dimi was simply happy to defer to Bellingcat — a clearly dubious organization as others have taken the time to address, such as here and here — instead of allowing journalists who are more than capable of doing their own research to do their job.
It was this realization that made me start to question Dimi. When I looked a little deeper, he was the missing piece.
...
The U.S. government, in an ugly alliance with those the profit the most from war, has its tentacles in every part of the media — imposters, with ties to the U.S. State Department, sit in newsrooms all over the world. Editors, with no apparent connections to the member's club, have done nothing to resist. Together, they filter out what can or cannot be reported. Inconvenient stories are completely blocked. As a result, journalism is quickly dying. America is regressing because it lacks the truth.
Comment: See also:
US intention to announce withdrawal of 4K troops from Afghanistan next week