What is Bellingcat Going to Say Now?

Out of curiosity I entered "James Le Mesurier" as a search term on the Bellingcat website. "No results found."

I went to Bellingcat this morning because I wanted to see what sort of spookery, legerdemain and obfuscation would be on display to rebut the latest WikiLeaks documents release undermining the OPCW report which was used to conclude that the Syrian government was to blame for a chemical weapons attack in Douma in April 2018.

The latest WikiLeaks document release along with reporting by the Daily Mail's Peter Hitchens establishes that the investigators of the OPCW's Douma Fact Finding Mission (FFM) did not believe the official version of events. From the pristine condition of the pressurized metal canister supposedly dropped from great height which smashed through a reinforced concrete roof to the merely trace elements of normal chemicals -- not to mention the inconsistency of chlorine poisoning with victims foaming at the mouth -- the FFM investigators repeatedly voiced objections and raised concerns, which were then summarily suppressed by OPCW leadership.

In addition to WikiLeaks' OPCW document release on Saturday, Tareq Haddad, the Newsweek reporter who resigned after his story of the OPCW scandal was spiked, published his account, "Lies, Newsweek and Control of the Media Narrative: a First-Hand Account." Editors at Newsweek explained to Haddad that there was nothing to the OPCW scandal because Belingcat said so.

According to Caitlin Johnstone,

Newsweek’s foreign affairs editor Dimi Reider (who Haddad notes has Council on Foreign Relations ties) shot down Haddad’s pitch for a story about the OPCW scandal last month by falsely claiming that Bellingcat had “published a thorough refutation” of the story Haddad wanted to report on. In fact, as I documented at the time, Bellingcat had published an unbelievably pathetic spin job in which it tried to paint the whole OPCW scandal as a big misunderstanding.

Bellingcat argued that the concerns voiced in the leaked email published by WikiLeaks last month about the developing Interim Report in July 2018 had been fully addressed by the time the Final Report was published in March 2019, citing as evidence the fact that some slight adjustments had been made in the wording, like changing “likely” to “possible” and changing “reactive chlorine containing chemical” to “chemical containing reactive chlorine.” In focusing on this ridiculous, pedantic nonsense, Bellingcat tries to weave the narrative that because the whistleblower’s concerns were addressed with this pedantry, there was therefore no OPCW coverup. Never mind the fact that the multiple OPCW whistleblowers were still plainly so incensed by the organisation’s publishing that they felt the need to leak internal documents. Never mind that Bellingcat made no attempt whatsoever to address the aforementioned actual grievances by the OPCW whistleblowers like the low levels of chlorinated organic chemicals on the scene, the inconsistencies in symptoms and testimony with chlorine poisoning, or the Ian Henderson report. 

But that’s what happens when mass media outlets like The New York Times and The Guardian publish swooning puff piece after swooning puff piece about Bellingcat; they grant a US government-funded narrative management firm so much unearned legitimacy that even a transparently bogus argument like the one they made about the OPCW scandal gets passed around newsrooms by credulous editors assuring each other that it’s a “thorough refutation” of facts and reality. Mass media outlets help puff up Bellingcat’s legitimacy, and in turn Bellingcat rewards them with an excuse to not have to ever challenge establishment narratives. 

Reider also argued that Haddad’s report on the OPCW couldn’t be published because “not a single respected media outlet – many of whom boast far greater regional expertise, resources on the ground and in newsroom than Newsweek does – have taken the leak remotely seriously.”

That’s a great self-reinforcing system, isn’t it? MSM outlets validate US government-funded narrative managers like Bellingcat so they can tell them with authority why an unauthorised story shouldn’t be published, and each outlet sees the absence of other outlets reporting on it as evidence that it shouldn’t be reported on. And we wonder why no one’s reporting on the OPCW scandal. 

Given that Bellingcat specializes in open-source investigations of suspicious events, the fact that "James Le Mesurier," the co-founder of White Helmets who purportedly killed himself in Istanbul last month by jumping out of his apartment, cannot be found on its website is itself highly suspicious.