USA strikes Syria again

armedoldhippy said:

did Joe West have anything to do with it?

Click to expand...

knucklehead bob said:

Did you find this post helpful? No

I don't know who Joe West is ?

Click to expand...

St. Phatty said:

A Gun-slinger from Outlaw Josie Wales ?

Click to expand...

armedoldhippy said:

one of the worst baseball umpires ever - "ball four"...sorry.

Click to expand...

gaiusmarius said:

so the American military has based its self in the two biggest oil fields in Syria, they now patrol in a line between the two oil fields. so US soldiers are being used as mercs to implement colonial era resource theft from the sovereign nation of Syria, who would have ever imagined it? no more hiding behind humanitarian bombs and war, now its out in the open the US is an empire with ambitions to rule the whole world without regard to international law.

Click to expand...

gaiusmarius said:

Syria scandal: New whistleblower claims UN chemical weapons watchdog buried Douma evidence


[YOUTUBEIF]qqK8KgxuCPI[/YOUTUBEIF]


BTW.
they killed off the British ex army guy who founded the white helmets as they know the whole fake regime change operation is blown and the evidence has to be got rid of before it can be secured by the Russians or Syrian government.

Click to expand...

November 19, 2019 "Information Clearing House" -Claims that President Bashar al-Assad’s forces have used chemical weapons are almost as old as the Syrian civil war itself. They have produced strong reactions, and none more so than in the case of the alleged attack in April last year on the opposition-controlled area of Douma near Damascus in which 43 people are said to have been killed by chlorine gas. The United States, Britain and France responded by launching airstrikes on targets in the Syrian capital.

Were the strikes justified? An inspector from the eight-member team sent to Douma has just come forward with disturbing allegations about the international watchdog, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which was tasked with obtaining and examining evidence.

Involved in collecting samples as well as drafting the OPCW’s interim report, he claims his evidence was suppressed and a new report was written by senior managers with assertions that contradicted his findings.

The inspector went public with his allegations at a recent all-day briefing in Brussels for people from several countries working in disarmament, international law, military operations, medicine and intelligence. They included Richard Falk, former UN special rapporteur on Palestine and Major-General John Holmes, a distinguished former commander of Britain’s special forces. The session was organised by the Courage Foundation, a New York-based fund which supports whistle-blowers. I attended as an independent reporter.

The whistle-blower gave us his name but prefers to go under the pseudonym Alex out of concern, he says, for his safety.

He is the second member of the Douma Fact-Finding Mission to have alleged that scientific evidence was suppressed. In May this year an unpublished report by Ian Henderson, a South African ballistics expert who was in charge of the mission’s engineering sub-team was leaked. The team examined two suspicious cylinders which rebels said were filled with chlorine gas. One cylinder was found on the roof of a damaged building where over two dozen bodies were photographed. The other lay on a bed on the upper floor of a nearby house below a hole in the roof. The inspectors were able to check the scene because Syrian troops drove rebel fighters out of the area a few days after the alleged gas attack.

Assessing the damage to the cylinder casings and to the roofs, the inspectors considered the hypothesis that the cylinders had been dropped from Syrian government helicopters, as the rebels claimed. All but one member of the team concurred with Henderson in concluding that there was a higher probability that the cylinders had been placed manually. Henderson did not go so far as to suggest that opposition activists on the ground had staged the incident, but this inference could be drawn. Nevertheless Henderson’s findings were not mentioned in the published OPCW report.

The staging scenario has long been promoted by the Syrian government and its Russian protectors, though without producing evidence. By contrast Henderson and the new whistleblower appear to be completely non-political scientists who worked for the OPCW for many years and would not have been sent to Douma if they had strong political views. They feel dismayed that professional conclusions have been set aside so as to favour the agenda of certain states.

Alex, the new whistleblower, said his aim in going public was not to undermine the OPCW, most of whose investigators are objective scientists, but to persuade the organisation’s leadership to allow the Douma team to put forward their findings and answer questions at the week-long annual conference of member states which starts on November 25. “Most of the Douma team felt the two reports on the incident, the Interim Report and the Final Report, were scientifically impoverished, procedurally irregular and possibly fraudulent”, he said. Behind his call for the Douma inspectors to address the next OPCW conference was the hope that thereby the watchdog would “demonstrate transparency, impartiality and independence”.

He told me “Ian and I wanted to have this issue investigated and hopefully resolved internally, rather than exposing the failings of the Organisation in public, so we exhausted every internal avenue possible including submission of all the evidence of irregular behaviour to the Office of Internal Oversight. The request for an internal investigation was refused and every other attempt to raise our concerns was stone walled. Our failed efforts to get management to listen went on over a period of nearly nine months. It was only after we realised the internal route was impossible that we decided to go public”.

Within days of rebel-supplied videos of dead children and adults in the aftermath of the alleged attack in Douma Francois DeLattre, France’s representative at the UN Security Council, said the videos and photos showed victims with “symptoms of a potent nerve agent combined with chlorine gas”.

The Douma fact-finding team quickly discovered this was wrong. Blood and other biological samples taken from alleged victims examined in Turkey (where some had fled after government forces regained control of Douma in mid-April) showed no evidence of nerve agents. Nor was there any in the surrounding buildings or vegetation in Douma. As the Interim Report, published on July 6 2018, put it: “No organophosphorus nerve agents or their degradation products were detected, either in the environmental samples or in plasma samples from the alleged casualties”.

The next sentence said “Various chlorinated organic chemicals were found”. The indirect reference to chlorine was reported in many media as proof of the use of lethal gas. According to Alex there were huge internal arguments at the OPCW before the Interim report was released. Chlorinated organic chemicals (COCs) are present in the natural environment so one crucial point in discovering what actually happened at Douma was to measure the amount in the locations where the two cylinders were found and in the other parts of the two buildings and the street outside.

As Alex put it, “if the finding of these chemicals at the alleged site is to be used as an indicator that chlorine gas was present in the atmosphere, they should at least be shown to be present at levels significantly higher than what is present in the environment already”.

But when the analysis of these key levels came back from the laboratories the results were kept with Sami Barrek, a Tunisian who was the Duma fact-finding mission’s leader. Against normal expectations they were not passed on to the inspector who was drafting the OPCW’s interim report on Douma.

The inspector did, however, have the analysis from the samples of blood, hair, and other biological data from eleven alleged victims who had gone from Douma to Turkey. In no case did the samples reveal any relevant chemicals. On this basis he wrote in his report that the signs and symptoms of victims were not consistent with poisoning from chlorine. Instead of an attack producing multiple fatalities there had been “a non chemical-related event”, it said.

The language was low-key, in part, as Alex put it, because of the tension and anxiety involved when evidence doesn’t match what it is thought that management wants to hear. But the implications of implying a non-chemical event were dramatic. Like the engineering report, it hinted that the Douma incident may have been staged by opposition activists. Alex described it as “the elephant in the room which no-one dared mention explicitly”.

When the inspector’s report was submitted to senior management, silence ensued. A few weeks later on the eve of the expected publication the inspector who had drafted the report discovered that management was going to issue a redacted version on June 22 2018 without the knowledge of most of the Douma Fact-Finding Mission. Its conclusions contradicted the inspector’s version. By then the inspector had learnt that the results of the quantitative analysis of the samples from the allegedly attacked buildings had been delivered to management from the test laboratories but not passed on to the inspectors. He got sight of the results which indicated that the levels of COCs were much lower than what would be expected in environmental samples. They were comparable to and even lower than those given in the World Health Organisation’s guidelines on recommended permitted levels of trichlorophenol and other COCs in drinking water. The redacted version of the report made no mention of the findings.

Alex described this omission as “deliberate and irregular”. “Had they been included, the public would have seen that the levels of COCs found were no higher than you would expect in any household environment”, he said.

The inspector who drafted the original report was furious when he realised it was to be replaced by a doctored management version. He wrote an email of complaint to the OPCW’s director general. The DG was Ahmet Uzumcu, a Turkish diplomat but his chef de cabinet, the man considered to have the most power in the OPCW on day-to-day issues was Bob Fairweather, a British career diplomat. (He has since been succeeded by Sebastien Braha, a diplomat from another anti-Assad government, France). In his email the inspector complained that it was wrong for the new report to describe the levels of COCs as high. He insisted that his original 105-page report be published.

This request was rejected but Sami Barrek, the team leader, was put in charge of replacing the doctored version with what turned out to be a toned-down but still misleading report. During the editing four of the Douma inspectors, including Ian Henderson, the engineering expert, had managed to get Barrek to agree that the low levels of COCs should be mentioned. On the day before the new publication date, July 6, they found that the levels were again being omitted.

On July 4 there was another intervention. Fairweather, the chef de cabinet, invited several members of the drafting team to his office. There they found three US officials who were cursorily introduced without making clear which US agencies they represented. The Americans told them emphatically that the Syrian regime had conducted a gas attack, and that the two cylinders found on the roof and upper floor of the building contained 170 kilograms of chlorine. The inspectors left Fairweather’s office, feeling that the invitation to the Americans to address them was unacceptable pressure and a violation of the OPCW’s declared principles of independence and impartiality.

Two days later the interim report was released. That morning, Alex recalled, “a senior colleague told us: ‘First floor [management] says that for the OPCW’s credibility we have to have a smoking gun”. Meanwhile, Fairweather asked the inspectors if he could get back the emails of complaint, including any which had been put into the trash folder. They complied.

After Alex’s briefing I emailed Fairweather with a request that he explain why he had facilitated the US officials’ meeting with the inspectors as well as why he had recalled emails. He did not reply.

The final Douma report which was published in March this year also failed to give any quantitative analysis of the COC samples. But its thrust went much further than the interim report. It stated that the OPCW concluded that the evidence from the Douma investigation provides “reasonable grounds that the use of a toxic chemical as a weapon took place”.

Alex argued that the concept of “reasonable grounds” was undefined. What should have been done in the report, he said, was to set out alternative hypotheses for what had occurred in Douma and then assess the balance of probabilities of the various options and conclude which was the most likely.

This is what was done in Henderson’s report on the provenance of the two cylinders.

I asked the OPCW’s media office to explain why the COC levels were excluded from the interim and final reports but they did not respond. Asked whether the inspectors would be permitted to address the conference of member states, they also did not respond.

An open letter to every delegate at the forthcoming OPCW conference calling for the inspectors to be heard has been signed by

Jose Bustani, first Director General of the OPCW
Hans von Sponeck, former UN Humanitarian Coordinator (Iraq)
George Carey, former Archbishop of Canterbury
Scott Ritter, UNSCOM Weapons Inspector 1991-1998.
Noam Chomsky, Emeritus Professor, MIT.
John Pilger, Journalist and documentary film maker
Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst and co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
Oliver Stone, Film Director, Producer and Writer.

Jonathan Steele is the former chief foreign correspondent for the Guardian.
This article was originally published by "Counterpunch" - -

[YOUTUBEIF]SMSyLg1E49M[/YOUTUBEIF]

Click to expand...

Gry said:

Referred to as 'the great game', in an earlier era.

Click to expand...

Newsweek Journo Quits After Editors Kills Report On Syria Chemical Attack Scandal

“I have collected evidence of how they [Newsweek] suppressed the story in addition to evidence from another case where info inconvenient to US government was removed, though it was factually correct.”


by Alan Macleod


A top journalist has resigned from his post after management killed his report on the bombshell news that the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) suppressed a mountain of evidence suggesting that the 2018 Douma Chemical Weapons Attack in Syria was staged.


Newsweek’s Tareq Haddad announced on Twitter that, rather than accepting top-down censorship on an important issue, he was publicly walking away from his job at the New York-based magazine.



“I have collected evidence of how they suppressed the story in addition to evidence from another case where info inconvenient to US government was removed, though it was factually correct,” Haddad said, adding that he will publish full details about the event shortly but that “I was threatened with legal action” from his employers, who had inserted a confidentiality clause into his contract for just such an occasion as this.



He also stated that he is seeking legal advice from specialists in whistleblowing and that, “At the very least, I will publish evidence I have without divulging the confidential information.”

Silence on Syria

The shocking news that the OPCW fixed its own report in order to frame the Syrian government for a chemical weapons attack that likely did not even happen, according to its own expert investigators, has been roundly ignored by corporate media, but not by MintPress News, who has covered the news in depth.
Members of the OPCW team have come forward, expressing their “gravest concern” about the “selective representation of the facts” and the “intentional bias” “undermining the credibility of the report.” Even former OPCW Director-General Dr. Jose Bustani stated that the whistleblowers’ testimonies have “confirmed the doubts and suspicions” he already had about the organization and Syria.


The alleged chemical weapons attack was immediately used as a justification for foreign intervention in the conflict. Within days, the U.S., France and the United Kingdom launched bombings campaigns on the country, risking a potential nuclear conflict with Russia to the great approval of corporate media. Not one of the top 100 American newspapers by circulation opposed the extremely hasty actions.

Tareq Haddad: Not your average mainstream journalist

Haddad is a rare reporter in today’s corporate media landscape; one who insists on covering important issues such as the OPCW report, police killings of citizens, and the treatment of Julian Assange. He was also literally the only journalist across the entire mainstream spectrum to cover the astonishing news that a senior Twitter executive was unmasked as a British army psychological operations officer from their propaganda and online warfare battalion, something that MintPress News covered, but the New York Times, CNN, Fox News, CNBC nor any other national outlet did not.

I Interviewed Haddad in October about the Twitter scandal for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting and The Canary, asking him why this story was not front-page news given the concern over foreign interference online that has dominated the corporate news cycle for years now. He downplayed the possibility of malevolence, suggesting, perhaps naively, that the entirety of the U.S. press missed the story because it was revealed by a small British publication.



Haddad came across as somebody who was not overtly political but was simply a rare true believer in the clichéd myths of journalism about speaking truth to power and scrutinizing those with it, claiming that editors would always support journalists opposing the government as long as they had their facts straight, an ironic statement given the recent news.


He revealed that the coverage of the weapons of mass destruction saga, where the media refused to be skeptical of the Bush administration’s claims, was the spark that made him want to become a reporter. Since then he has maintained an admirable skepticism of the powerful.


Whether Haddad knew exactly the risks he was taking or whether he was blithely skipping over all the untouchable third rails of modern journalism (like Assange, the Twitter story or the OPCW report), unaware of the danger he was in, is something of a moot point. But it is rare that the world gets to see so publicly the myth of a free and independent press busted.

Click to expand...