All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
We can also sign up for the podcast fee.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
Okay, guys, introducing Dave DeCamp.
He's Assistant News Editor at antiwar.com and this one you can find on the blog, author of leaked OPCW engineering report on Duma, speaks at UN Security Council.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Dave?
Good, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
Well, I can hardly believe that this happened, except that you have a link.
So remind us again, what's the OPCW, who's Duma, and what are they all doing at the Security Council?
So the OPCW, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, they're a UN group that they investigate possible chemical weapons attacks or they oversee the destruction of chemical weapons for certain countries, like they did with Syria.
We don't know for sure if Syria got rid of all their chemical weapons like they said they did, but OPCW did confirm it.
And so in April 2018, on April 7th in Duma, Syria, there was an alleged chemical attack on an apartment building.
Well, there's two locations where cylinders were dropped and the one where there were like mass casualties, it was an apartment building, about 40 people were allegedly killed.
There's pictures and videos of the people that were killed.
So, you know, there was dead people.
And about a week later, the U.S., the U.K. and France responded with an airstrike against the Syrian government.
It was the largest Western military action on Assad's government during the whole war.
So it was a pretty big deal.
And this was before any investigation team was able to go in from the OPCW or anywhere else.
A lot of video came out right after the attack of children at a hospital, they're having their faces washed and everything, which I'm sure a lot of you and your listeners remember when all this was going on.
So the OPCW went in at the end of April and they started investigating.
And in March 2019, the OPCW released their final report on their investigation into Duma.
And that report concluded that there's reasonable grounds to believe that a chemical attack occurred and that chemical was likely chlorine.
The main evidence to support the allegation that the Syrian government committed this attack was that the two cylinders found were dropped out of a aircraft, most likely a helicopter.
And in May 2019, an unreleased engineering report was leaked to the working group on Syria propaganda and media.
And this report was completely left out of the OPCW's final report.
And it concluded that it was more likely that the cylinders were manually placed at the location, which would point to the fact, to things that the Russian government and the Syrian government were, what they were claiming, that it was staged by Jaysh al-Islam and the White Helmets.
Jaysh al-Islam was the rebel group that was being driven out of Duma by the Syrian government.
And they would have an interest in staging this attack because it would bring Western intervention like it did.
Probably not as much as they would have liked, but it did result in a military attack.
So the engineer that prepared that report, the OPCW employee whose name was on it, is Ian Henderson.
And since then, really since November 2019, at the end of the year, WikiLeaks started releasing some more internal OPCW documents.
And a lot of it was leaked by Ian Henderson.
And so this was on Monday.
The UN Security Council met in New York in what they call an ARIA formula meeting, which is a little more informal than their other meetings.
But the Russian government, Syrian government, and I think the Chinese organized it to talk about this attack and these OPCW leaks that have gotten virtually no coverage by the mainstream media with the exception of Peter Hitchens in the Mail on Sunday.
There's an article in The Independent about it, Tucker Carlson did a segment, but it's like, I mean, it's just a media blackout on this.
Yeah, I was going to say, I haven't really double checked, but has there been no coverage of this in the Post of the Times whatsoever, Wall Street Journal at all?
Of this UN Security Council meeting or the whole thing in general?
Or yeah, the WikiLeaks and the recent revelations.
Yeah, I mean, there's been like, as far as I have seen, there's been nothing.
That's really something itself right there.
Yeah, it really is.
All right, so talk about, so Ian Henderson, he was the guy that they even had tried to say that he wasn't even on the team, when in fact he was one of the ones who actually went there, where the ones who wrote the report had stayed in Turkey and all this, if I understand that right.
And so correct me if I'm wrong, and then go ahead and tell us about what happened at the Security Council if you can.
Okay, so yeah, the leaks.
So since Ian Henderson released his report, the OPCW put out a statement that said he wasn't part of the fact-finding mission that was in charge of preparing their report.
And then internal documents.
So this is what Ian Henderson said.
It kind of just supported all the recent leaks, was that he was deployed to Douma in support of the FFM.
And that's where he did his study of the cylinders, and he was enlisted to do further investigation because the original interim report that was released in July 2018, the team said that they don't have enough evidence to explain the moderate damage to the cylinders that they found.
They weren't sure really what happened to these cylinders.
And according to Ian Henderson and other whistleblowers, he was the one that had the most expertise in the area.
Chemical engineering, I've been reading Peter Hitchens just put up a blog post.
He was a military guy, he was an artillery guy, so he has like ballistics expertise.
So he was the most qualified for this job.
And he said that he was kind of stonewalled and ignored, and his findings were ignored and left out of the final report that was prepared by this, what they call the FFM core team that was only deployed to Turkey after the Douma team was deployed to talk to witnesses.
And yeah, so it's basically, you know, he confirmed the content of the leaks.
He was very respectful to OPCW.
He opened his statement with saying that he has respect for all the employees and he still believes in the organization and he's worried about its integrity.
And that's why he's doing this and he doesn't want to be referred to as a whistleblower.
So he's not some crazy, you know, crank that they're trying to make him out to be.
He's a professional that worked for the OPCW for 12 years.
And he's, you know, really just concerned about this international body that's supposedly neutral, that it might be, you know, ignoring and suppressing evidence to fit a narrative.
Yeah.
Well, and one that they kept trying over and over.
This is the third giant fake sarin attack in the Syria war.
So yeah, so far there haven't been, you know, a fourth or fifth major one anyway.
I guess there's some claims chlorine attacks here and there.
Yeah, there was a recent claim that there was a Mike in September of 2019, Pompeo said that there was another chlorine attack in like May of 2019 by the Syrian government.
So these, you know, these claims are still.
And then so now, did he really talk about all the different aspects that were in the WikiLeaks stories from last November?
Can you go through some of that?
About what all he addressed in his little talk there?
Yeah.
So he didn't go into the levels of chlorine, but I'll read this one quote for him, which is pretty revealing.
He said, in my case, I had followed up with a further six months of engineering and ballistics studies into the cylinders, the results of which had provided further support from the view that there had not been a chemical attack.
This needs to be properly resolved through the rigs of science and engineering.
And he went on to say, my situation is not a political debate, although he's aware that it is a big political debate, but not in his case.
And he also said that the entire team that went to Douma at the time that the interim report was released in July 2019, that they had serious misgivings that a chemical attack took place.
And then another, a new piece of information that he revealed was that he said he led a highly intrusive into the bars of the Syrian Scientific Research Center, that we'll call that the SSRC for now, and that was the target of the U.S. airstrike after this attack.
So there's, I'm going to look, I haven't completely dug into this yet, but there's a total of like three OPCW reports about that site.
And they did two inspections in 2017, what Ian Henderson refers to as highly intrusive, and they cleared it of, you know, being a location for chemical weapons productions.
And then there was another investigation after the missile attack that Henderson said he prepared reports for all these, and he was the team leader.
So he is a, I mean, he was let go after this leak, but he was a, you know, you know, inspection team leader in the OPCW.
He wasn't just a low level guy.
Yeah.
Well, it's really interesting the way that they try to trash him and smear him and minimize his role and all these kinds of things.
But yeah, you know, it's even more revealing, you know, again, about the media blackout here where every major, what about, and I know that there are a few companies involved, but think about all the newspaper editors who got to make a decision to keep this out and all of the different, you know, the Lair, whatever, it's not called Lair anymore.with former old CNN lady, what's her name, Judy Woodruff and all these, I mean, there's so many, you know, possible outlets.
You mentioned Tucker Carlson is the only one who talked about it on any channel and it's just a complete blackout.
Remember that giant thing that we crammed down your throat back a couple of years ago?
Yeah.
Turns out not so much new information came to light.
They can't even admit it at all.
They just completely bury it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And well, I mentioned Bellingcat in the piece and they just released like a three little three part series on these leaks.
And one of them was about Ian Henderson and they're still going, this was a few days before he spoke and they said, oh, he's still not made a public statement, blah, blah, blah.
But according to Peter Hitchens, who I think is in direct contact with him, he said before that he's only going to speak, you know, in official either UN or OPCW sanctioned meetings.
I think he came out like three days before he gave his video statement.
Oh, and they try to spin that as cowardice that he's saying, I'm sorry, for now I have to stay within the official channels because that's my job.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm sorry.
And then you were going to say what?
Yeah.
Something I left out is he had a, it was a video statement that at the security council meeting in New York because he couldn't get a visa waiver to get to come to New York for whatever reason, which is interesting.
He said he was invited by the Chinese representative to the security council and that due to unforeseen circumstances, he couldn't attend the meeting in person.
Well, I mean, obvious answer there.
We don't really know, but it sure seems like the Americans must've been trying to keep him out to keep him from testifying.
Isn't that, they were trying to pull this on the Iranian foreign minister and that's a special occasion, but now they decided they can do this to whoever they want.
I mean, isn't that's against the rules about having the UN in America in the first place.
They have to let people in to participate in it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's funny.
I was just, last night I was watching some Nikki Haley, April 9th, two days after this alleged attack.
She, you know, this 10 minute sanctimonious her speech in the UN about how only a monster can do this.
And she's like, oh, I could hold up pictures of dead children, children getting their chemicals washed off their face and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Only a monster would do this.
And this was a few days before we launched the attack.
And then when it was time for the Syrian representative to talk, Haley and her team, they stand up and they will walk out, which is just kind of shows, um, just the attitude about this whole.
Well, and the shamelessness too.
I mean, how ridiculous was that footage of those kids getting hosed down, you know, by these white helmet Al-Qaeda public relations flax.
And you know, here's an asthma inhaler.
You've been attacked with sarin.
Here's some albuterol, little kid that'll save you.
And Oh, and here's a hose.
Take that sarin nerve gas.
And then they put that on TV and Nikki Haley, this is her thing that, you know, at least with the pictures of the dead people on the stairwell, you don't know what really killed them or how they got there, but they sure look pretty dead.
Something happened to them.
There's at least a crisis there.
Some poor kid getting hosed down might as well be in the front yard in the summertime as far as how attacked with Sarah and he's been in that footage.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I think, and that's pretty much accepted that that hospital scene was staged.
There was like a BBC reporter who said, uh, yeah, Robert, even people that, yeah, you know, yeah.
They think, uh, it's pretty much confirmed that, that, that was all staged.
The White Helms just ran into chemicals and started spraying people with water.
What a great hose.
So, I mean, yeah, it's an example, yeah, but the, the belly cat stuff is really cause when it comes to the chlorine levels, I mean, they have a whole story of that and that's something, I mean, to me, you can, uh, I could, you could explain to me how there's different types of chlorine chemicals and I, and you know, I'll, if you know what you're talking about, I'll, I'll listen to you and I'll, I'll trust you.
But the fact is that this other OPCW, uh, employee that goes by Alex, he's a chemist and he's saying that there's an issue with traces.
I don't really care what these guys at Bellingcat are saying.
They're not scientists, man.
They're PR flacks at Bellingcat, they don't know.
Yeah, and, and through their, their thing on Ian Henderson, they're like, oh, we're not engineers, but, but you know, it should kind of end right there.
Um, and, and you're not, we're not asking for much.
I'm not, you know, this doesn't exonerate Assad of any other possible war crimes.
It's, it's about the OPCW.
It's about this organization, um, possibly being corrupt and it like needs to be investigated.
Yeah.
Well, and it's also about America and its allies, you know, willingly having their chain jerked by Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda creating false flag attacks for pretext for war and America going along with, well, if this is what Al Qaeda wants us to do, what harm could come from it?
Let's go.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Um, but yeah, cause I'm, I mean, me, you know, I'm writing about this, I'm, I'm reporting on this, you know, I put my opinion in a little bit just because of the media blackout is so ridiculous, but, um, I'm perfectly willing to accept the conclusion that Assad did this.
Um, but the people at Bellingcat that they cannot even consider that it's, which is kind of revealing.
It's like, there's clearly an agenda there.
Um, well they, what I mean is they cannot consider the other conclusion that it was possibly staged in, um, so, cause that's not their job.
And you know, it's not a coincidence that they also happen to be one of the major forces behind pushing the Gouda hoax and the Khashoggi hoax too.
I mean, when it came to, to Gouda, they must've moved where the rocket must've been launched from 10 times to try to make their story stick and the whole thing's completely ridiculous.
It's not even confirmation bias.
It's just bull.
Yeah.
You know, they're lying.
That's their job is making you believe things that aren't true.
That's the ticket.
See?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And they, they're pretty good at it apparently.
Um, cause it, there's a market for it.
No question.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The Newsweek journalist that resigned after his lease came out, uh, Tariq Haddad in his, you know, he released some internal Newsweek emails and they were like, well, Bellingcat says it was not a big deal.
So that's that.
And that could be how it's being killed in newsrooms and, um, people aren't willing to risk their jobs over it.
Right.
Yeah.
They all cite each other's inaction as their excuse to not do anything.
Well, I don't know.
Bellingcat says it's fine and nobody else is challenging them.
So why would we?
Yeah.
So it's, but it's just good to see, I mean, you get to watch the video of Ian Henderson.
He's not, he's a professional man.
Yeah.
You know, I think I'm just going to go ahead and let that play and tack that audio onto the end of this interview so people can hear that.
And then it's also linked in your, in your great article at antiwar.com too.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I keep bringing up Peter Hitchens, but he just wrote, uh, I saw it last night, a rebuttal to Bellingcats and I'll send you that link so you can put it in your, I don't know if you've seen that, but you can put it in the show notes because, uh, he, he says sources close to Ian Henderson requested that he did this.
And these sources could be more OPCW investigators because, um, he, he just, he knows more details and you know, around the investigation, um, and yeah, it's just a good read.
You should check it out.
I just read this one.
Yeah.
Um, but yeah, so it's just something that should be in the, in the new cycle and we got to keep talking about it.
And, uh, I think Ian Henderson's gonna, he said that just the Basra, the SSRC, he said that's going to be a story for another time.
So maybe he'll, he might keep speaking out about that, um, about how he cleared that place of chemical weapons and you know, it's just going to keep, keep coming.
Cool.
All right.
Well listen, keep writing about it.
It's great to have you focused on this for us at antiwar.com, man.
I really appreciate it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right, you guys, that's Dave DeCamp.
He's assistant news editor and you can find him.
He's got, he writes the opinion columns.
He's on the blog.
He's at news.antiwar.com and uh, such like that.
This one is on the blog.
It's called author of leaked OPCW engineering report on Duma speaks at UN security council and has the link there for you too.
Thanks again, Dave.
Yeah, Scott.
Okay.
Gentlemen, my name is Ian Henderson.
I am a former OPCW inspection team leader having served for about 12 years.
I heard about this meeting and I was invited by the minister, counselor of the Chinese mission to the UN, uh, unfortunately due to unforeseen circumstances around my, uh, Esther visa waiver, uh, status, I was not able to travel.
I thus submitted a written statement, uh, to which I will now add a short, uh, introduction.
I need to point out at the outset that I'm not a whistleblower.
I don't like that term.
I'm a former OPCW, uh, specialist who has concerns in an area and, uh, I consider this a legitimate and appropriate forum to, uh, explain again these, uh, concerns.
Secondly, I must point out that I hold the OPCW in the highest regard as well as the professionalism of the staff members who, who work there.
The organization is, is not broken.
I must stress that, um, however, the concern I have does relate to some specific management practices in certain, uh, sensitive, uh, missions.
The concern of course relates to the, uh, FFM investigation into the alleged chemical attack on the 7th of April in Douma in, uh, Syria.
Um, my concern, uh, which was shared by a number of other inspectors relates to the subsequent management lockdown and the practices in the, um, later analysis and compilation of a final report.
There were two teams deployed, uh, one team, um, which I joined shortly after the start of field deployments was to Douma in, uh, Syria.
The other team deployed to, uh, country X.
The main concern relates to the announcement in July 2018 of a new concept, the, uh, so-called, uh, FFM core team, which, uh, essentially resulted in the dismissal of all of the, um, inspectors who'd been, uh, on the team deployed to locations in Douma and had, uh, been following up with, um, uh, their findings and analysis.
The findings in the final FFM report were contradictory, were a complete turnaround with what the team had understood, uh, collectively, uh, during and after the Douma deployments.
And, um, by the time of, uh, uh, release of the interim report, uh, in July, 2018, our understanding was that we had serious misgivings that a chemical attack had occurred.
What the final FFM report does not make clear, uh, and thus does not reflect the views of the team members who deployed to, uh, Douma, uh, in which case I really can only speak for myself, uh, at this stage.
The report did not make clear what new findings, facts, information, data, or analysis in the fields of, uh, witness testimony, toxicology studies, uh, chemical analysis, and engineering and or ballistic studies had resulted in a complete turnaround in the situation from what was understood, uh, by the majority of the team and the entire Douma team in July, 2018.
In my case, um, I had followed up with a further six months of, uh, engineering and ballistic studies into the cylinders, the result of which had, uh, provided further, uh, support for the view that there had not been a chemical attack.
This needs to be properly resolved, we believe, um, through, uh, the rigors of science and engineering.
Um, in my situation, it's not a political debate.
I'm very aware that there is a political debate surrounding this.
Uh, perhaps a closing comment from my side is that I was also the inspection team leader who developed and launched the, uh, inspections, the highly intrusive inspections of the Barza SSRC facility, um, just outside Damascus.
And I did the inspections and wrote the reports for the two inspections prior to and the inspection after the, um, chemical, uh, facility or the laboratory complex at Barza SSRC had been destroyed by the, uh, missile strike.
That's however, it's another story altogether and, uh, um, I shall now close.
Thank you.
The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.
