For Pacifica Radio, December 22nd, 2019.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all.
Welcome to the show.
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I'm the editorial director of antiwar.com, and I'm the author of the book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,000 interviews now, going back to 2003, at scotthorton.org.
All right, you guys, introducing Dave DeCamp.
He is our new assistant news editor at antiwar.com, news.antiwar.com.
But he also writes original opinion pieces for us as well.
Welcome back to the show, Dave.
How are you doing?
Good, Scott.
Thanks for having me back.
Very good.
Very happy to have you here.
All right.
So, important news story that you got here.
New leaks provide further evidence into OPCW Duma cover-up.
Might sound to people like a story that's a little bit deep in the weeds, but it really is important.
This is OPCW, that's the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, a UN agency specializing in chemical weapons, obviously.
And Duma is the site in Syria of the alleged sarin, and then later chlorine, alleged chlorine attack in April of 2018.
So, please do tell us all of the latest of the leaks, I guess, which began last spring about dissent inside the OPCW on their conclusions about what had happened in Duma.
Yeah.
So, just the background on the attack.
The allegation was that on April 7th, 2018, the Syrian government dropped chemical canisters on the city of Duma, and about, I think, 43 people were allegedly killed by it.
And then about a week later, the US, UK, and France launched an airstrike against the Syrian government, which was the largest Western attack on Assad's government since the war started in 2011.
And then the Duma, the OPCW fact-finding mission went to Duma after that.
So, the leaks started last May, after the final report came out in March 2019.
The first leak was from a guy named Ian Henderson.
He's an OPCW engineer, and he concluded that the two canisters that were allegedly dropped from a helicopter were more likely, he didn't just conclude that there wasn't sufficient evidence to prove that they were dropped from an aircraft, he concluded that they were more likely placed there.
He didn't go as far to say as it was staged by the opposition or whatever, but his conclusion was that it was more likely that these two canisters were placed where they're found.
One was found on a bed inside a building, and one was found on top of a roof.
And now, let me ask you, was this the same thing where they had computer modeled it about how it would have happened and all that?
Yeah, there is some computer models to it in the report.
So, I interviewed Ted Postal about that at the time, and he's the scientist from MIT, and Ted Postal had, I guess, been convinced by the OPCW report about this until he found out about this leak and the engineering assessment about these two cylinders.
And then he went, oh no, I was so wrong about that because this guy has got it right, the computer models show that to drop these cylinders from this height in a way that would punch through concrete like this would have caused completely different damage to the concrete and to the metal canisters themselves, both.
Yeah, yeah.
In the original interim report that the team prepared, they said that they couldn't understand why there was such little damage to the canisters and that they were going to, you know, consult experts and look into that further.
And that was what it looks like.
That was this guy, Ian Henderson, who leaked his report.
He was the so-called expert looking into the damage, you know, to the canisters and the area around it.
So, they brought him in and then he did his engineering assessment, but they did not include that in their report.
That's why we're talking about it was leaked last spring was because it wasn't published in their report at all.
Yeah, it wasn't published in the report.
So now, a way to like delegitimize the leak, even actually OPCW themselves in their statement to the working group on Syria, propaganda and media, they're the ones that published that leak and OPCW statement to them said this guy, Ian Henderson, was never a member of the fact-finding mission, kind of alluding to the idea that he was never in Douma.
Well, and saying that he was lying about his participation in the study in the first place, which is a pretty severe claim for them to make against him.
Yes.
So, in these new leaks that were just published by Wikileaks, the most recent ones, this, this, this month in December, it was five documents.
And one of them was an email from an anonymous sender to a higher up in the OPCW that took great offense to what they did to this Ian Henderson guy.
And, um, here I'll, I'll read a little, cause it is, it's pretty dramatic.
Um, it says a member of the FFM team has been suspended from his post and escorted from the OPCW building in a less than dignified matter.
After more than 12 years, I believe serving as serving the OPCW with dedication and professionalism, Ian Henderson's personal and professional integrity have taken a knock in the most public of fora, the internet, a falsehood issued by the OPCW that Ian did not form part of the Douma FFM team has been pivotal in discrediting him and his work.
So whoever this sender was to Veronica Strzomczykowa, she's the OPCW director of strategy and policy, was very offended by what they did to Ian Henderson.
And this is dated May 20th, 2019.
So just a few days after that leak.
And this was just released in December.
And now have they responded at all to the recent leak?
And I know this is just one part of it, but have they responded to, for example, this anonymous email writer's complaint that this guy sure was too a member of the fact finding mission and that it was a falsehood that they had spread about him?
No, I haven't seen anything yet.
Not that I know of.
I know the people that are probably the journalists that have been on top of this, like Peter Hitchens, Jonathan Steele.
I'm sure that they they've all been inquiring, but I haven't seen anything.
So this was May, 2019 after the final report was released in March, 2019.
The leak that WikiLeaks released last month in November, it was a different email from another, a separate member of the fact finding mission.
So this is a second whistleblower, basically.
That took issue with a lot of things.
It was mostly what the team prepared in their interim report and what the OPCW published in their redacted version of that report.
So help me out with this, because it has been reported, as you know, that this group, Bellingcat, based in England, that they have debunked the debunking here and said, come on, these complaints are about an interim report and all of the concerns that were brought up in the complaints were corrected by the time of the final report, and so you're making a mountain out of a molehill here.
Yeah.
And, you know, I addressed that in my piece because this leak came out last month, this guy, this whistleblower, he came out in November, you know, after the final report was released and one of his issues was addressed and, um, and that was kind of the most like egregious thing that they did with these two reports.
So this is the original interim report.
This is what they conclude about the cylinders being the source of the gas.
They say, although the cylinders might have been the sources of the suspected chemical release, there is insufficient evidence to affirm this.
Now, this is the redacted report.
This is what OPCW changed within like a couple days or weeks of them getting that interim report.
They say the team has sufficient evidence at this time to determine that chlorine or another reactive chlorine-containing chemical was likely released from the cylinders, so they changed insufficient evidence to sufficient evidence, and that was something that, that was kind of the main gripe of this email.
And then in the final OPCW report, they did change that.
They said, it is possible that the cylinders were the source of the substances containing the reactive chlorine.
So that's what the Bellingcat people are saying.
Like, oh, it's a, they got to learn the difference between an interim report and a final report.
But you're saying the original story was a negative.
Then they changed that to positive and then they split the difference too.
Yeah, yeah, maybe.
So the most, and now what they did leave out of the final report was the, obviously Ian Henderson's leak, the cylinders that he concluded that they were most likely placed there and that the damage wasn't to the cylinders in the area, it wasn't consistent with what the allegation of being dropped out of an aircraft, because one of them was found on a bed, one of the cylinders and the fact finding team that their first report, they said, I don't, they, we don't get how this cylinder got on the bed.
It doesn't make any sense.
Somebody has to look into it.
And, uh, but in the final report, there's this whole thing about how the trajectory of the cylinder could have hit the, came through the ceiling, hit the floor and landed on the bed.
But yeah, so that the expert who was sent to Duma to research these cylinders, that's not what he concluded and he was ignored.
So in other words, these Bellingcat claims that the problems have already been resolved is just not true.
Yeah.
The complaints of the whistleblower still stand here across the board.
And this is another thing that was in the interim report taken out of the redacted report and kind of in the final report, but not, not really.
So this is straight from the interim report.
Some of the signs and symptoms described by witnesses and noted in photos and video recordings taken by witnesses of the alleged victims are not consistent with exposure to chlorine containing choking or blood agents, such as chlorine gas, sodium or cyanogen chloride.
And then this is from the interviews that they did with the medical staff in Syria.
Most of the medical staff present in the emergency department on the 7th of April who were interviewed emphasized that the symptoms of the casualties were not consistent with those expected from a chemical attack.
So that last part about the medical staff emphasizing that this is a pretty big claim emphasized that the symptoms of the casualties are not consistent with the gas attack was taken out of the redacted interim report and now it was put into the final report, but in the final report, right after they say that, they say some other witnesses say that there was a gas attack and it doesn't specify a lot of these witnesses interviewed were in Turk were in country X.
They call it, which WikiLeaks speculates is Turkey.
It's most likely Turkey because we know that the OPCW went there to interview alleged witnesses and then a certain amount of them they interviewed in Damascus, in Douma and a certain amount in country X.
And it's clear from the interim report that the ones that they interviewed in Damascus, it actually says, it says that those interviewed in Damascus under that section, it's the medical staff emphasizing that the symptoms were not consistent with a chemical attack.
Yeah, that's funny.
You might think that would be the headline of the whole thing.
The symptoms inconsistent with a chemical attack.
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I'm talking with Dave DeCamp from antiwar.com about the new wiki leaks from the OPCW Duma chemical weapons attack investigation.
Of course, at the time they said it was a Sarin attack and they ended up dropping that.
That was the excuse at the time.
Nevermind the hospital where the people were suffocating because just from the dust from a bomb shelter, um, and they went into the hospital and the white helmet started just hosing the kids down and giving them albuterol inhalers, you know, for asthma inhalers and, and, and just yelling gas, gas, uh, Robert Fisk from the independent went and talked to the doctors there and they said, oh yeah, that was ridiculous.
And explained exactly what had happened there.
Totally different thing.
Nevermind half of this was just a complete hoax in every way, like from the get go.
But then it turns out here we got all these different layers of hoax in, in the attack, um, down the block there at the apartment building where they said it was Sarah and they completely abandoned claims that it was Sarah in here.
Um, you have the remnants they said of, it's not chlorine, but it's the kind of byproducts that you would find in a place if chlorine had reacted with something.
But then there's a whole controversy about that.
In the Wiki leaks here, these new leaks from inside the OPCW on that question too, right?
Yeah.
On the presence of chlorine, like organic chemicals there is.
Um, but just back to the team in Duma that there was a team that went to do it and investigated it.
Um, this was another memo that was leaked.
It's a member of the, you know, the fact finding mission and the memo says that there are about 20 inspectors who have expressed their concern over the report.
This is dated two weeks after the final report was released.
And it says that the fact finding mission report does not reflect the views of all the team members that were deployed to Duma.
Only one FFM team member of the so-called fact finding core team was actually in Duma and that the FFM report was written by this core team, thus by people who have only operated in country X.
And like I said before, country X is most likely Turkey because we know the fact finding mission did also go to Turkey to interview witnesses.
So this is the biggest revelation of this new leak was that this member of the team saying that only one member of the team that actually went to Duma had anything to do with the report that was written.
So now to go into, there was another leak in this new, uh, 12 documents.
It was multiple emails to Sammy Barrick, who was the team leader of the Duma fact finding mission who's been accused of suppressing evidence.
And in this series of emails, this gets into the chlorine levels.
This is one of the emails it reads, isn't there, this is to Sammy Barrick.
Isn't there a danger that leaving out the references to concentration is going to allow some readers to arrive at a simplistic conclusion?
The presence of chlorine and chlorides, um, would mean that therefore there was an attack.
So, so this gets into the levels of the chlorine and the environment.
And this year, this is a series of emails.
It's about like 80 emails.
It's not clear if it's one person to this Sammy back, or if it's more, it looks like multiple people, if you read it.
So, and it sounds like they're saying they're not that well, geez, maybe we should have done a study to get a controlled level of chlorinated whatever's from a few miles away in any direction.
It sounds like they already know that we're talking about natural levels of chlorine, or at least typical levels of chlorine, not necessarily from nature, but from living in a city and, and having these kinds of particles around.
Uh, they already know that it's essentially, they're telling a half truth and saying, Ooh, we found the remnants of chlorinated, chlorinizers and whatever, and making it sound like something important when they already know that it's not.
Yeah.
And one of the shocking things in this email, uh, in this back and forth, this Sammy back responding, she says, I considered inputs from all team members.
I have the support of most team members, and I would like to remind you that I can take unilateral decisions, reminding them that, you know, what she says goes.
And then a response to that is, can we take it then that you are unilaterally deciding to remove this fact from the report against the recommendations of the team?
So this is a pretty serious argument about the chlorine levels.
And now this gives credence to a report by Jonathan Steele last month in November that was on counterpunch.
So Jonathan Steele spoke with a OPCW whistleblower going by the name of Alex.
Now, Alex is most likely the author of the email that we discussed earlier.
That was, this is where it gets confusing, keeping track of all these leaks, but this was a leak released last month in November by Wikileaks.
And this Alex is most likely the author of that email.
And this was him taking issue with them completely changing the interim report.
And this is where it gets into more of the chlorine levels.
And this is from what Steele said, that according to Alex, there was huge internal arguments at the OPCW before the interim report was released.
And this, and that email back and forth, I just read between the Sammy Barrack, the team leader, was dated July 5th, 2018.
And the report was released July 6th.
So it was literally like the day before.
And according to Alex, chlorinated organic chemicals are present in the natural environment.
So one crucial point in discovering what actually happened at Duma was to measure the amount in the locations where the two cylinders were found and in the other parts of the two buildings in the street outside.
And apparently, according to this Jonathan Steele article and this whistleblower, Alex, is that they took those tests and they were not sharing the results with the team, which is pretty revealing.
I see.
So yeah, they really did do the controlled study essentially.
And then they bury the results of that too.
Yeah.
And this could all be like by the bell and cat people.
Oh, this is just an anonymous whistleblower, blah, blah, blah.
That's why these leaks, these new leaks are really important because it's just making them harder to argue against their points when there's evidence of the internal disagreements.
It's not just two whistleblowers.
It might even be 20 people that disagreed with this report.
So it's just, it's not, the story's not going away.
And that's the big takeaway is the amount of dissent within the OPCW over this final report, because the chlorine levels could be explained away.
There's some like reports from Bellingcat about in their report, there's a whole spreadsheet about different chemicals and blah, blah, blah.
But the fact is that the people that were in Duma, the scientists, the inspectors, the experts are saying, you're, you didn't listen to us and you presented people with a false allegation that there was a chemical attack.
And that's not the conclusion that we came to.
Now, is there anything in these leaks about the bodies that were shown on the stairwell in the apartment building?
I think there were some that were found down in the basement.
I mean, were there autopsies done or did the OPCW people have access to those bodies at all?
No, they didn't.
There was no autopsies done.
There was hair and blood samples taken from witnesses in Turkey, and they all came back, no evidence of nerve agents or chlorine, or that's according to the whistleblower, to Jonathan Steele.
And then there is stuff in the reports.
But then they just buried that?
Or did they contradict that in the report?
I think that's just buried.
There's a section of the interim report, and I think it was in the, yeah, just the interim report.
It says that the bodies, because it was a certain amount of days after the attack, will most likely not come back with any chlorine or any evidence.
So therefore, it's not worth taking the samples because we're not going to find anything of the bodies.
Even though it would seem like they would have some kind of circumstantial evidence from the bodies if they really had been chlorinated to death and died of that, whether scarring in the lungs or whatever it is, you know what I mean?
They would have, if not the exact compounds, I mean, well, they're looking for the compounds elsewhere.
Yeah.
You know, the results of the chlorine elsewhere.
But even still, they would have other circumstantial signs on the bodies, you would think.
But, you know, it's also worth bringing up that there were a lot of people who never believed these lies at the time.
We had two major false flag, you know, chemical attacks in the Syria war before this.
There had been some minor ones as well.
Yeah, but of course, in Ghouta in 2013, Al Qaeda did a false flag sarin attack there, which Bellingcat and others blamed on the Assad government.
And ridiculously, so just moving the alleged launch point time after time after time to try to make it fit their preconceived conclusion there.
And Seymour Hersh, of course, completely blew the lid off of that one.
And then there was Khan Sheikhoun where something happened.
And it looks like they kind of tried to make a chemical attack out of it after the fact, rather than in a premeditated way.
Although there's actually a contradiction to that, too, which is that people are showing up to the hospital before the attack even happened.
But there was also evidence that the Russians had bombed a target there with the permission of the Americans and cooperation of the Americans that had led to some kind of gas cloud from whatever was in the basement of fertilizers and whatever else was in the basement of this and maybe weapons of the building that they attacked that then they built up into a kind of after the fact false flag attack.
And then you had this one, and that was in Khan Sheikhoun in 2017, which led to Trump strikes.
And then a year later, you have this one in Douma.
And in all three of these cases, the Assad government has no motive whatsoever to do this.
And the al-Qaeda guys, a.k.a.
Obama and John Brennan's moderate rebels, the al-Nusra Front, they had every motivation in the world to try to frame the Damascus government for doing this, while the Damascus government had everything to lose when this was the supposed red line that would provoke overt intervention in the war by NATO.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, it was really the one way that Assad could invite foreign interference against his fight to retake his cities from these these rebels.
And then at the time of this alleged chemical attack in Douma, when Assad was retaking Douma, Jaysh al-Islam was people who were in charge of doing that.
And they're, you know, an extremist Islamist group.
So, yeah, they had every reason to say, hey, look, a chemical attack, you know.
Well, and they were on their last legs there.
They were about to have to flee off to the Idlib province, which is what they did soon after anyway.
And it certainly wasn't one attack on one apartment building with or without gas that made that choice for them.
Their back was all the way up against the wall.
So does it make sense for Assad to use chemical weapons and provoke the red line strikes when he's got Jaysh al-Islam beat and they're about to get on a bus to Idlib anyway?
So.
Yeah.
Well, and the way that they go after people like that question, this stuff is is kind of unbelievable, like the amount of anger and hate these people have towards, you know, I was rereading like Eva Bartlett's reports from Douma.
She went there in April 2018 and watching her interviews.
And the people were saying the same exact things that were in the OPCW with that witnesses told the OPCW investigators.
And she's a person who's been, you know, everybody calls her an Assadist, the Russian propagandist.
Well, you know, but her reporting is aging pretty well with all these leaks coming out.
Yeah, yeah.
I'll tell you, the best the best person to read on like Bellingcat and all that stuff is Caitlin Johnstone.
I know we run her stuff, like link to her stuff at antiwar dot com.
But people want to look more into Bellingcat.
And what she calls like the Syria regime change narrators that she she does really good stuff on that.
Yeah.
And Bernard Moon of Alabama as well.
He really is the best.
And the OPCW, for a good history of that, Scott Ritter, he just wrote some on Truthdig about.
The history of the OPCW in the early days lead up to the Iraq war, the U.S. did like like kicked out the director general of the OPCW because he was getting Saddam to comply with him.
So it's pretty interesting.
And then that goes back to another thing from that Jonathan Steele article that this whistleblower, Alex, said was that two days before it was published, a few unnamed, unknown U.S. officials, not sure from which U.S. agency, were brought in and told these people, these OPCW inspectors and investigators, that there was a chlorine attack done by the Assad government.
And that's that.
And then they walked out and they started changing their reports more.
And again, these Bellingcat people can call this conspiracy and now it's just one disgruntled.
Oh, now it's just two disgruntled employees.
But with all these leaks coming out there.
Well, as Ted Postal always emphasized, the guys from Bellingcat aren't scientists.
Elliott Higgins isn't a scientist.
He's a MI6 guy.
He's a PR man for the American and British governments, which finance his operation is all he is.
He's not an expert, you know, but he makes a great excuse for journalists who refuse to want to pick up this story.
And if you could, you mentioned this in your piece.
Could you tell us really quickly about this journalist who tried to write a story about this at Newsweek?
But his editor just cited Bellingcat and in general, not in specific, in order to refuse to run it.
Yeah.
Tariq Haddad.
Yeah.
He was trying to publish this story about the leaks, about the ones that came out last month in November.
And he got just stonewalled and and he published like a really cool, detailed story about it.
And you could see the internal emails.
So he decided to resign and tell a story, which is pretty brave, I think.
It's good to see that from a mainstream journalist.
People are interviewing him, I think.
Mint Press News did a story on him.
Aaron Maté, I think, interviewed him for a show just recently.
I haven't seen it yet, but yes.
So and then, you know, you got to really wonder now with like what our endgame is in Syria now, because it's clear that Assad's not going to be taken out of power.
I mean, and but we're still like Kyle Anzalone.
He wrote about the NDAA, about that Caesar Act that was included.
And that's more sanctions against Assad.
And and that's sanctions that's just going to hurt the Syrian people that are trying to rebuild their country after this disastrous war.
And, you know, you don't have to be an Assadist or like Assad to just want us to just stop messing with this country and get our troops out.
And that's not our oil fields that we're occupying.
And we just, that is what Jack Keane and Lindsey Graham told Trump in their visit in the White House, was that he went in there with a map and pointed at the oil fields and said, you see all this and, you know, who's going to take this if we leave?
I mean, I interviewed Ron Enzweiler on the show and he went through the mathematics of how much money we're spending compared to how much oil that is.
And that's not what it's about, stealing the oil.
It's just about keeping Assad from having it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I heard that that was a good piece, like the money, just how much more it costs to keep troops there than the oil is worth.
But yes, I guess, you know, their goal is as long as Trump's in office, just to keep him in Syria, keep this war going for as long as they can, because then it'll be a lot easier.
Not trying to give Trump any credit here.
He could have very easily sent Jack Keane and Lindsey Graham out of his office and gone through with his withdrawal.
But it seems like maybe damage control right now.
Hey, let's just keep him in because then the next guy that comes in will most likely be able to control a little more.
All right.
Well, thanks again for your time, man.
Great to talk to you, Dave, and great work at Antiwar.com.
I'm really glad we got you on board.
Hey, thanks.
I'm happy to be there.
Thanks for having me on.
All right, you guys, that is Dave DeCamp.
He is our assistant news editor working with Jason Ditz there at News.
Antiwar.com and he writes regular columns for us, too, at Original.
Antiwar.com.
Dave DeCamp.
All right, y'all, and that has been Antiwar Radio for this morning.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm editorial director of Antiwar.com and author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
You'll find my full interview archive, more than 5,000 interviews for you now going back to 2003 at ScottHorton.org and sign up for the podcast feed there as well.
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See you next week.
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