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.

Fake News and Censorship, A.K.A, Propaganda

Western corporate mainstream media is performing poorly these days. Examples are numerous. The week-long absurd effort to airbrush the coup in Bolivia as a resignation by a corrupt autocrat comes to mind. Then there is framing of Roger Stone's conviction Friday as a vindication of Russiagate, when, as Craig Murray explains, it was the exact opposite:

The headline “Roger Stone: Trump Adviser Found Guilty On All Charges in Trump Hacking Case” is deliberately designed to make you believe a court has found Stone was involved in “Wikileaks hacking”. In fact this is the precise opposite of the truth. Stone was found guilty of lying to the Senate Intelligence Committee by claiming to have links to Wikileaks when in fact he had none. And of threatening Randy Credico to make Credico say there were such links, when there were not.

Let's not forget Jonathan Steele's OPCW bombshell published Friday by CounterPunch, "The OPCW and Douma: Chemical Weapons Watchdog Accused of Evidence-Tampering by Its Own Inspectors." You won't find a hint of that story in NYT, WaPo, AP, Reuters, or the Guardian. The corporate mainstream media are actively censoring the story. OPCW leadership generated a fraudulent report in order to shield the United States, France and the United Kingdom from war crimes allegations.

What you will find are stories about Prince Andrew and his connection with the late sex trafficker and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Unfortunately you won't find anything about Amy Robach's revelation that ABC spiked a story three years ago about Epstein's pedophile ring unless you watch Fox News, which Katie Halper correctly identifies as feeding into the information tribalism that divides (and rules) the nation.

The Hong Kong uprising and the Buttigieg presidential campaign also need to be included as "events" animated by the corporate media. So much reporting is devoted to both that "facts on the ground" are being created in the Western mind. This is how propaganda works.

Crass Propaganda on Idlib

A noxious example of propaganda appeared yesterday in the national edition of The New York Times. Penned by Edward Wong, "U.S. Says Assad May Be Using Chemical Weapons in Syria Again" revives calls for the United States to bomb Syria on behave of jihadists, to act as "Al Qaeda's air force."

Two things jump out about this article:

1) Nowhere in 18 paragraphs does Wong mention that Idlib Province is principally controlled by Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS), which is a re-branded Al Nusra Front, the Syrian Al Qaeda affiliate. Last September in Sochi Syria, Russia and Turkey reached a a ceasefire agreement for Idlib, an agreement which excluded HTS/Nusra. Turkey was supposed to neutralize HTS/Nusra, but over the last year HTS/Nusra has gobbled up more territory in Idlib. There is not a hint of this in Wong's article. Instead the reader is presented with the old cartoon of a bloodthirsty tyrant whose main purpose in power is to bomb and gas helpless civilians.

2) Wong provides a recent history of chemical attacks in Syria; he refers to the Douma incident, saying 

In April 2018, Mr. Trump and European allies ordered limited airstrikes and missile attacks from warships after they concluded the Syrian military had carried out a chemical weapons attack near Damascus that killed at least 40 people.

No mention is made of the recently leaked OPCW engineering report which concluded that the Douma attacked was staged. (Even Bellingcat has been mum.)

It was frequently mentioned during the siege of Aleppo that the Western mainstream media had turned a corner from which there was no coming back, so extreme was the propaganda. I can see why.

Mackey vs. Beeley + North-South Peace on the Korean Peninsula

This morning Niqnaq posts an illuminating exchange of tweets between the odious Robert Mackey and the excellent Vanessa Beeley. Mackey attempts to undermine last Thursday's news conference at the OPCW by alleging that Russia rushed the testimony of the eyewitnesses to the public without allowing the OPCW to interview them first. Beeley refutes this, with an assist from the Russian embassy in the Netherlands, and then demands that Mackey produce the OPCW statement that he says "asked Russia to let them interview the witnesses first, and not hold their event until after the inspectors finish their work and file their report." Mackey does not, which probably means that he just made it up.

The silver lining to the Douma false flag provocation is that it exposes intelligence agency assets like Robert Mackey who have burrowed into left-of-center outlets like The Intercept. Mackey will go on finding work, but his career will never be the same.

****

Having had an opportunity to digest some of the reporting of the Kim-Moon talks at Panmunjom, my sense is that there is little chance for success because the U.S. is insisting on complete, rapid denuclearization before any sanctions are lifted. Call it the Gaddafi option. North Korean leadership is not as gullible as the ousted and lynched colonel.

Everyone knows by now that the United States is a bad-faith agent, something that will be even more pronounced when the U.S. pulls out the Iran nuclear deal sometime in May. It will be an official marker for the end of the U.S. unipolar world.

The North Korean strategy is to move South Korea away from the U.S. and closer to China. I think they will be successful.

As Close as We'll Get to a "Smoking Gun" in the Skripal Poisoning

The long and short of it -- for an excellent compendium see Niqnaq's "skripal and BZ agent" -- is that the Skripals were poisoned by BZ, a toxic nerve agent which temporarily disables a person. The sample sent to the OPCW was spiked with A-234 (what has been referred to by the British as "Novichok") in "its virgin state."

Lavrov's question to the OPCW is why there was no mention of BZ in its final report:

Taking into account that Yulia Skripal and the policeman have already been released from hospital, whereas Sergei Skripal is still recovering, as the British claim without letting us see either Yulia or Sergei, the clinical pattern corresponds more to the use of a BZ agent. Nothing is said whatsoever about a BZ agent in the final report that the OPCW experts presented to its Executive Council. In this connection we address the OPCW a question about why the information that I have just read out loud, and which reflects the findings of the specialists from the city of Spiez, was withheld altogether in the final document. If the OPCW would reject and deny the very fact that the Spiez laboratory was engaged, it will be very interesting to listen to their explanations.

A-234 apparently degrades very quickly. To find it in its "virgin state" weeks after the event is highly suspicious; it would have killed the Skripals instantaneously. An obvious conclusion is that A-234 was added in haste to the BZ that poisoned the Skripals to fit the original story concocted by the British government.

Reuters ran a turgid version of the story. So far there is nothing in the "newspaper of record." It is too busy celebrating Trump's blowing up of fictitious chemical weapons labs in Syria.

House Holds Hearings Titled "Assad's Abhorrent Chemical Weapons Attacks"

The bane of a frontline wage-worker's life is repetition. Life is largely routinized Monday through Friday down to quarter-hour intervals. There is a tiny bit of freedom that the weekend affords, but Saturday and Sunday, for me at least, are largely routinized as well.

The silver lining to all this repetition is that it does yield a certain kind of deep knowledge. Doing the same thing over and over again gives one a type of understanding that is prized as "organic."

Reading the newspaper every morning for years one bit of organic wisdom that I have gleaned is that anything in the Gray Lady with a byline by Eric Schmitt or Rick Gladstone usually mirrors a U.S. governmental department perspective. These reporters' jobs are to act as a conduit -- most of the time, not 100% of the time -- for USG propaganda.

Another fruit of repetition (we seem to be on a lunar cycle here) is the Syrian chlorine gas barrel bomb delivered by "only Assad's military has helicopters" helicopters. There were hearings held yesterday by the House Foreign Affairs Committee neutrally titled "Assad's Abhorrent Chemical Weapons Attacks." Gladstone, in his story covering the hearings, "Claims of Syrian Chlorine Bombs Counter News of Progress on Chemical Arms," could not bear to refer to the hearings by their title, no doubt because he is a seasoned propagandist and "Assad's Abhorrent Chemical Weapons Attacks" is clearly of a class with Gaddafi's rape rooms, Saddam's soldiers throwing babies onto the floor from their incubators, etc.

Gladstone even includes the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) announcement of the successful disposal of Syria's chemical weapons stockpiles as a way to balance the House Foreign Affairs Committee dog & pony show:

The monitoring group overseeing the destruction of Syria’s chemical arms stockpile said Wednesday that almost all effluent from the neutralized weapons had been eliminated, portraying the progress as a great success in the nearly two years since Syria agreed to give up its arsenal. 

But the news from the group, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, was partly overshadowed by outrage over what critics of the Syrian government call its increasingly brazen use of chlorine in makeshift poison gas bombs dumped on civilians and suspected rebels in the civil war. 

Witnesses at a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing in Washington, including a Syrian doctor and a civil defense coordinator from areas said to have been attacked, described the chlorine bombs as horrific weapons that had asphyxiated young children.

One witness, Dr. Annie Sparrow, a pediatrician and human rights activist who has helped train doctors working in rebel-held areas of Syria, accused the Syrian government not only of using chlorine in bombs, but also of withholding chlorine for water purification and other critical sanitation needs in areas it does not control. 

Dr. Sparrow, an outspoken critic of the Syrian government, said it had “transformed a principal element of public health into a tool of disease and terror.” 

President Bashar al-Assad of Syria denies that his forces have dropped chlorine bombs, which would be a war crime. Such attacks would also violate the Chemical Weapons Convention, which the Syrian government, under heavy pressure from Russia, signed in 2013 to avert an attack threatened by the United States.

Gladstone doesn't mention that Dr. Annie Sparrow is married to Human Rights Watch (HRW) executive director Kenneth Roth. HRW authored a report, now discredited, blaming the Syrian government for the Ghouta sarin attack in August of 2013. Sparrow and Roth are partisans in the campaign to topple the Syrian government.

To get a more in depth look at these hearings one should consult a story (Alice Ross and Shiv Malik, "Syrian doctors to show the US evidence of Assad’s use of chemical weapons") that appeared in The Guardian a few days ago:

A network of Syrian doctors is due to tell the US Congress that Bashar al-Assad’s regime is systematically weaponising chlorine to spread fear among civilian populations, in defiance of a recent UN security council resolution.

The testimony on Wednesday will be accompanied by a dossier of evidence compiled by the Syrian American Medical Society (Sams), a charity that runs 95 medical facilities inside the country. It documents 31 separate chlorine attacks between 16 March and 9 June. The charity says all the attacks were conducted by launching barrel bombs from helicopters and many targeted civilian areas, leaving 10 dead and at least 530 people seeking medical treatment.

The dossier, which has been seen by the Guardian, provides US lawmakers with data, photos and videos that Sams says were taken in the aftermath of chlorine bombings in a province of Syria recently overrun by militants, including the al-Qaida-affiliated al-Nusra Front.

The Guardian has been unable to verify the material, which includes videos and photos of adults and children struggling to breathe, often wearing oxygen masks. Some are retching, while others are being stripped and hosed down to remove chemical residue.

Sams also provided the Guardian with a redacted list of basic patient information for 221 people treated for chlorine exposure. According to that list, 57 were under 18.

The lead medical coordinator for Sams in Idlib province, Dr Mohamed Tennari, has flown to Washington DC and has been invited to testify in front of the House foreign affairs committee on Wednesday morning. Tennari will say that although chlorine is less likely to kill than conventional weapons, it has created a “new type of psychological torture” for the Syrian people. He told the Guardian: “We would like to see a no-fly zone and increasing help being provided to refugees.”

The Sams data only reflects attacks that have been confirmed by the charity’s own facilities, and only those taking place in Idlib province. Other activists, including the White Helmets, a volunteer rescue service who will also testify at the hearing, have reported further incidents in the adjoining Hama province.

Recent reports suggest that militant forces in Syria, including Isis, are developing a chemical weapons capability of their own. Isis are understood to have used chlorine in Iraq. However, Sams said that all the attacks in their data were launched from helicopters, which are only operated by the Assad regime. [!]

The Syrian president has denied that his forces have deployed chlorine. Although the chemical is widely available, its weaponisation is strictly banned under international law. In an interview with France 2 on 20 April, Assad said there was no proof of chlorine use in attacks on Idlib city. 

“This is another fake narrative by the western governments … The regular armaments that we have are more influential than chlorine, so we don’t need it anyway,” he said. “We didn’t use it. We don’t need to use it. We have our regular armaments, and we could achieve our goals without it. So, we don’t use it. No, there’s no proof.”

These chlorine gas stories crop up every month to keep alive the issue of a no-fly zone in northern Syria. Obama's realpolitik brain trust has been wary of overt moves to get rid of Assad, but his administration has supported CIA front groups like SAMS and White Helmets. Once a neocon, whether Hillary or the Republican (whomever that may be), recaptures the presidency, the issue of chlorine gas will be part of the public record and used to launch the no-fly zone.

What is incredible to me is that even in a superior story like the one that appeared on Tuesday in The Guardian the absolutely bald lie that only Assad's regime operates helicopters used to deliver the chlorine barrel bombs in the Idlib and Hama is waved through without comment or disclaimer.

"Need That Poison Gas" Redux

For the states -- Turkey, Saudi Arabia, as well as other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council -- that came tantalizingly close to pulling off the Ghouta sarin gas scam in August 2013 the temptation to pluck the note again and again until the desired result is finally achieved -- the exit of the Baathists from power in Syria -- never ends.

Not long after Syria started dismantling its arsenal of chemical weapons in a deal brokered by Russia, reports started to emerge of chlorine bombs being dropped from helicopters. These reports usually originated with "activists" aligned with the "opposition" to the Syrian state, and they were summarily dismissed as crude propaganda by representatives of the Assad government. But the stories have remained a regular feature as the months roll along.

Today's offering is a fine example. In "Syria Is Using Chemical Weapons Again, Rescue Workers Say" Anne Barnard and Somini Sengupta earn their pay as propagandists for the USG by filing another fallacious story about Syria's use of chemical weapons; fallacious because it is sourced to a "civilian defense" NGO called White Helmets. An inspection of the group's web site -- Barrel Bombs! -- linked to in the Barnard-Sengupta article, leaves one with the distinct impression that it is a CIA front. The allegations of White Helmets are then amplified by USG officials. This is the old familiar propaganda pattern. You have an "Astro-Turf" organization, an ersatz citizen group of some sort that has been mocked up by a foreign intelligence agency, make a specious charge, and then that charge is taken up by the United States in the United Nations Security Council:

Two years after President Bashar al-Assad agreed to dismantle Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile, there is mounting evidence that his government is flouting international law to drop jerry-built chlorine bombs on insurgent-held areas. Lately, the pace of the bombardments in contested areas like Idlib Province has picked up, rescue workers say, as government forces have faced new threats from insurgents. The Assad government has so far evaded more formal scrutiny because of political, legal and technical obstacles to assigning blame for the attacks — a situation that feels surreal to many Syrians under the bombs, who say it is patently clear the government drops them.

“People are so used to it, they know from the sound,” said Hatem Abu Marwan, 29, a rescue worker with the White Helmets civil defense organization, a note of exasperation creeping into his voice when asked to explain. “We know the sound of a helicopter that goes to a low height and drops a barrel. Nobody has aircraft except the regime.”

Prodded by the United States, the United Nations Security Council is discussing a draft resolution that would create a panel, reporting to the secretary general, to determine which of the warring parties is responsible for using chlorine as a weapon, according to Council diplomats.

“The Security Council must address the need to determine who is responsible for using chlorine as weapons in Syria,” said an American official, who declined to offer specifics and requested anonymity to discuss continuing negotiations. “Doing so is critical to getting justice for the Syrian people and accountability for those who have repeatedly used chemical weapons in Syria.”

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Syrian state media dismiss the allegations as propaganda, and the Council remains divided and hamstrung. That leaves people like Mr. Abu Marwan, who has responded to nine suspected chlorine attacks, feeling abandoned. “There is no law to defend us as human beings, this is what we understand from the Security Council,” said Mr. Abu Marwan, a law school graduate, weeping as he recalled holding a dying child in Sarmeen. “I didn’t see in humanitarian law anything that says ‘except for Syrians.’ ”

You have the propaganda all there in a nutshell: the nefarious Assad; the hamstrung UNSC; the devoted, virtuous law-school graduate weeping with a dead gassed baby cradled in his arms. It is crass, and, at this point, tapped so often as it has been, it is ineffective. But the propaganda machine must extrude its product regardless of quality.

The "smoking gun" in the Barnard-Sengupta story is the helicopter. The chlorine gas is dropped in barrels by low-flying helicopters. We are supposed to baldly accept that only the Syrian government possesses helicopters. What the propagandists are attempting to capitalize on is the "barrel bombs" meme that the Western mainstream media has invested so robustly in. The reader has been conditioned to accept that the Syrian government and only the Syrian government bombs its people from the air by rolling barrels packed with explosives out of helicopters.

Hence, the conclusion to the Barnard-Sengupta piece:

A video taken Sunday in the town of Khansafra shows a barrel dropping from a helicopter and rescue workers holding up a portion of a canister labeled in English. The camera shakes, blurring all but a few words: “hazard,” “may cause irritation,” “caution,” “breathing.”

The obvious question is, Whose helicopter is it? Are there any markings? If it is a black helicopter, is there evidence that the Syrian government uses such helicopters?

An obvious question is, Why couldn't one of the Islamist jihadi groups, which have captured much Iraqi and Syrian military equipment, have piloted the helicopter?

The fact that Barnard and Sengupta give hardly a hint of the Iraqi Kurd reports from March that Islamic State used chlorine gas in attacks against its peshmerga is a strong tell that the two Gray Lady reporters are singing for their supper. Any open-minded reporter would explore the possibility that Nusra or ISIS could stage chlorine attacks. There is only this pro forma mention:

Frustrated with the Security Council’s impasse over the issue, rescue workers and doctors are now working to bring evidence of chlorine gas attacks directly to the French, British and American governments for testing. The aim is to give states a solid basis for action against the attacks, in the Security Council or through quieter diplomatic pressure, said James Le Mesurier, the British director of a nonprofit group, Mayday Rescue, that trains and equips the White Helmets, Syrian volunteers supported by the British, Danish and Dutch governments. 

Going directly to governments that have pushed for Mr. Assad’s ouster creates its own challenges. His allies may dismiss their evidence as politically tainted and can point to recent chlorine attacks in Iraq for which the government there blamed insurgents, not to mention the discredited American claims of an Iraqi chemical weapons program that were used to justify invading Iraq.

All we need to know about the recent spate of chlorine bomb attacks is that the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which set up a special mission last spring to look into the use of chlorine gas in Syria, won't endorse the claims that the Syrian government is to blame:

But investigators face difficulties. Chlorine dissipates quickly in the atmosphere and does not last in blood or urine, and residue stays in soil for just 48 hours, leaving little time to transport samples across borders. Also, Mr. Le Mesurier said, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons differentiates evidence it collects itself from evidence collected by rescue workers, categorizing the latter as circumstantial.

Emergency workers said they met recently with investigators from the organization, but Dr. Tennari called the body’s response “poor and slow.” Mr. Le Mesurier remarked, “No one showed up on a white steed.”

Three other Syrian doctors said the organization’s rules resulted in valuable evidence they collected going unexamined. 

One, who protects his identity with the nickname “Chemical Hazem” for his safety, said he reached one of the April 2014 attack sites, Tal Minnes, within hours, smelling bleach in the air. He smuggled samples from two victims to Turkey without waiting for border clearances. But he said the O.P.C.W. refused to accept an unexploded canister, which remains in Syria. 

“The ultimate evidence of the regime’s use of chemical weapons is gone,” he said, adding that no one seemed interested in getting samples out of Syria. “We can’t blame anyone who wants to follow the legal channels — but do any exist?”