The British Government Engineered Fake OPCW Reports on Syrian Chemical Weapons Attacks
July 1, 2019 (EIRNS)—The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), created to implement the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1997, has been corrupted by the same British networks that created and financed the White Helmets in Syria, which have been accused of staging chemical weapons attacks in Syria then used as pretexts for a U.S. cruise missile strike on Shayrat, Syria in April 2017, and again, but with the British and French joining in, in April 2018. This is all documented in a June 26 report of the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media, an ad hoc organization convened by Prof. Piers Robinson, Chair in Politics, Society and Political Journalism at the University of Sheffield from 2016-2019, who is one of four co-authors of the report.
The June 26 report, “How the OPCW’s Investigation of the Douma Incident Was Nobbled” (i.e., illegally interfered with), is based on publicly available documentation of the false flag Douma chemical attack of April 7, 2018, which the authors cite with internet links, and communications with OPCW staff who were angry at the behavior of upper-level management in these investigations. The Working Group came to two groundbreaking conclusions (among others). They show, first, the deep connections between certain of the OPCW investigators and the Syrian White Helmets organization; and second, the role of British government information warfare operations in suppressing any evidence that tended to contradict the official narrative that the Syrian government was responsible for the two cited and other chemical incidents in the Syrian war.
The Working Group report follows up on the suppression of an OPCW engineering assessment leaked about one month ago, which showed that the gas cylinders that were allegedly the source of the gas used in the April 2018 incident in Douma, were placed on the ground manually rather than dropped from aircraft as was alleged by the Syrian opposition. The engineering assessment’s conclusion,however, was never cited in the Fact Finding Mission’s final report on the Douma attack, however. The authors of the engineering assessment also never saw the final report before it was completed. The Working Group’s investigators concluded that OPCW management stepped in to prevent any conclusions in either the interim or final reports except the official conclusion that the Syrian government was responsible.
The Working Group authors quoted an internal note shared among OPCW staff that stated:
“The OPCW report on the alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria on 7 April is currently under review by management. As it is currently drafted, the report indicates a high degree of probability that the alleged chemical attack was staged by an opposition group.”
The note concluded: “I predict that the OPCW simply will not be allowed to issue a report that raises any doubts on the pre-judged guilty party.”
The OPCW mission was split into two groups for the Douma investigation, an arrangement that was criticized by the Russians. One team, Team Bravo, went to Damascus to work with the Syrian government. The second team, Team Alpha, went to Turkey to deal with claims made by the Syrian armed opposition. That team was led by a Len Phillips who, it turns out, had close connections with the White Helmets organization, and who had excluded evidence of staged provocations from his reports on previous incidents. The Working Group authors report that they have been told that Phillips met regularly in Turkey with James Le Mesurier, founder of the White Helmets. There is also evidence that Phillips was in contact with at least one member of the White Helmets who was in Douma at the time of the incident. Phillips also follows two other groups on Twitter: Chemical Violations Documentation Center Syria, and the Syrian American Medical Society, both opposition-linked groups that have provided evidence of alleged attacks to the Phillips team.
In the Douma report and two other investigations that Phillips led, there are indications that evidence favoring staging, rather than a chemical attack, was ignored or distorted, the Working Group finds. “This strengthens the case for retracting all these reports, not just the Final Report on the Douma incident, and allowing independent reassessment of the material collected,” the authors write.
The second explosive element of the Working Group report is the explicit identification of the role of the British government in fomenting the chemical weapons fakery. “From combining all available information, it is now clear that several entities involved in reporting and documenting alleged chemical attacks have their origin in a covert program launched by the U.K. government in 2012,” the Working Group report states.
“In this program, like a low-budget theatrical production, the same actors reappear in different roles. For instance, Hamish de Bretton-Gordon (HdBG) appears successively as covert agent collecting samples for Porton Down, as independent chemical weapons expert quoted in the media, as the founder of a small business setting up an NGO to collect evidence for the OPCW, and from 2016, described as a ‘former spy,’ in the role of a humanitarian worker coordinating a network of hospitals. It is likely that this program would have attempted to co-opt OPCW staff, especially U.K. nationals.”
