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.
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Okay, you guys, on the line, I've got Dave DeCamp.
He is the Assistant News Editor at antiwar.com, which means he writes at news.antiwar.com, but also at original.antiwar.com as well.
And that's where you'll find this piece, OPCW Tries to Discredit Whistleblowers in Response to Douma Leaks.
Welcome back to the show, Dave.
How are you doing?
Good, Scott.
Thanks for having me back.
Very happy to have you here.
So a little bit in the weeds of this discussion, but it's a very important one, and that is surrounding the alleged chemical weapons attack by the Syrian regime in Douma, east of Damascus in 2018, which was the occasion then for the second set of strikes that Trump launched.
That was in April of 2018, that is.
And the same thing had happened in 2017 in Khan Sheikhoun.
So this is the more recent there.
And then all the controversy surrounding what had really happened there and the OPCW report, which is the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.
And so then recently, I guess, just to set up a little bit further here, beginning last spring with one important leak, and then especially last fall with some follow-up leaks that were published by WikiLeaks, we got to hear from whistleblowers inside the OPCW.
I guess also they're talking with Peter Hitchens from, is it The Mail where he's writing in the UK?
Yeah, The Mail on Sunday.
And then, I'm sorry, who was it that wrote the piece for Counterpunch?
That was Jonathan Steele.
Jonathan Steele, right.
Okay.
Yeah.
Wrote this important piece for Counterpunch.
And this is essentially where, you know, the background of this story is people inside the OPCW disputing the official report.
And then, so now we're in the weeds even further because this is the OPCW responding and saying, well, you're not really a whistleblower because what do you really know anyway?
Which really gets to the characterization of the level of employment and access and authority that these different whistleblowers are invoking, essentially.
And so there are, at least on the face of it, it seems like from reading your piece, there are important clarifications.
I'm not certain how meaningful they are, but I'll let you go ahead and take it from here.
Yeah, so the OPCW released their report on the leaks this month on February 6th.
And like you said, since spring 2019, leaks started to come out right after the OPCW published their final report on the investigation.
And that final report concluded that there was reasonable grounds that a chemical attack occurred and the chemical was likely chlorine.
So the first leak came out in May 2019.
And then starting in the fall, October and November, Wikileaks started releasing internal emails.
So the report that the OPCW just released, they don't get into any of the whistleblowers' claims.
They really just try to discredit the whistleblowers.
And there's two whistleblowers that they discuss, Inspector A and Inspector B.
And Inspector A is a guy by the name of Ian Henderson, who was the leak in May 2019.
The first one that came out was an unreleased engineering assessment.
And Ian Henderson was the author of that assessment.
So that assessment concluded that the two cylinders that were found in Douma that were said to be full of gas, full of chlorine, the idea of the allegation that the Syrian government committed this attack rests on the idea of the cylinders being dropped from an aircraft.
And Henderson's unreleased engineering report concluded that it was more likely that the two cylinders were manually placed where they were found in Douma.
One was found on a rooftop balcony.
One was found in another building on a bed.
And so Henderson concluded that it was more likely that these cylinders were manually placed.
So now in this report, this recent report by the OPCW, they try to discredit him.
Since that report was leaked, they said that Henderson was not a member of the fact-finding mission that went to Douma, the OPCW team that was actually deployed to Douma, the FFM.
And they stick with that story.
So when the leak was first published by the Syrian group Propaganda Media, the OPCW released a statement and said Henderson was not a member of the FFM.
And then later leaks show that there's two groups that can be considered the FFM, one that was deployed to Douma and one that was only deployed to what they call Country X, which is what the OPCW calls Turkey.
So the OPCW, they stick to that story in their new report that Ian Henderson was not part of the FFM.
Now Ian Henderson's whole gripe with the way that this investigation went down was that the FFM that was deployed to Douma was ignored in the publishing of the final report, in the preparing of the final report, and that a whole other team that deployed to Turkey made the report and everybody that went to Douma was ignored.
So that's his main gripe with the OPCW.
And that's not addressed in the OPCW's report on the leaks.
They kind of actually confirm his suspicions.
They say that Ian Henderson was deployed to Douma in support of the FFM, but they say he wasn't part of the FFM.
But either way, it confirms that he was deployed to five different sites in Douma and took measurements of the cylinders and he bagged and tagged the cylinders.
So they confirmed that he was there.
Whether or not he was technically part of this FFM, maybe there's some OPCW documents of that and his name's not on it.
But regardless of that, he was in Douma and he took the measurements, and this report confirms that.
So getting back to his engineering assessment, in the OPCW they say that after the team came back from Douma, Ian Henderson took it upon himself to do this engineering assessment.
This is basically their accusation against Henderson is that he was like a rogue scientist who decided to do this report and it was totally outside of the OPCW mandate.
Yeah, it's interesting.
The competing narratives there, I'm not sure how clear either of them are, but yeah, they make it sound like he was some kind of stowaway on this mission or something, but he worked for them, right?
Yeah, he worked for them.
That's another thing that they say in the report that Ian Henderson, he worked there from 95 to 2004, I think, and then he was rehired at a lower level.
It said he was a team leader when he first worked there, rehired at a lower level, but a quick Google search, there's OPCW documents that call him a team leader from 2018.
So they're trying to downplay his importance, too.
And from February 2018, so just a couple of months before, two, three months before this whole thing took place.
But then they're saying, what, he just happened to be in Damascus and so came with them, but he never was actually assigned to that team, and so any assessment that he did was outside of their authority?
Is that what they're saying?
And is that credible?
It's not credible.
And so they're saying he was at the command post in Damascus, the OPCW command post.
So it's normal for that inspector to accompany fact-finding missions if they happen to be in the same city.
So now there is a new document that was released.
The last time we talked, we talked about Ian Henderson gave a statement to the UN Security Council by video.
And then right after this, my piece published a couple of days, The Gray Zone published, Aram Mate published a great story, and they obtained the written statement that Henderson gave to the UN.
In this written statement, according to Henderson, he was a member of the FFM.
He was assigned.
He was not at the command center in Damascus at the time.
He went there.
He was somewhere else, and he went there, and then wasn't posted to the command center until after the investigation was over.
So the Duma team, so the FFM arrived in Duma.
Ian Henderson might have arrived a little late.
He helped them.
They went back to the Netherlands, The Hague, where the OPCW is based, and Henderson stayed at the command post for another five weeks.
So he wasn't there while the team arrived.
He arrived after to specifically help the team.
If you follow that, I know it's a little confusing, but Henderson, this is what he's saying, and he seems more credible to me than the organization.
It sounds like they're sort of characterizing the same facts slightly differently, but he was there to help the team, or he was part of the team, seems to be the real crux of the question here.
Yeah.
Or what does that mean, he was there to help them, as opposed to he was not the team leader, but he was member three, or whatever, I don't know.
Yeah.
But he went there specifically to help them, according to his statement, and then he stayed in Damascus for a while.
That's not like he forgot how to do engineering in the meantime or anything.
But what they're saying is that, what, he just kind of took it upon himself to examine these cylinders when that wasn't his assignment?
He was just there, what, to help with the cleanup or some other thing?
Yeah, well, no, they say that he was there, and he took some measurements, and he bagged and tagged the cylinders.
So according to his statement, Henderson's statement, when he came back from Damascus- His prior statement, or he's responded to them now?
He hasn't responded to them yet.
Okay, so his prior statement, go ahead.
This is his prior statement to the UN that was released by the Gray Zone after this report came out.
So he said that upon his return from Damascus, he was assigned by the team leader to conduct a study on the cylinders.
The report basically makes it out like this assessment wasn't sanctioned at all, and Henderson, he noticed that he started being ignored after he was assigned to do this assessment.
And his statement, he says that he talked to the director, inspector general or whatever, and they said, yeah, we can't see why both assessments can't be done, because the other team that went to Country X, the other FFM, they were starting their work already.
So that's his side of the story that came from the Gray Zone.
His statement really undermines the whole OPCW report.
He says his assessment was peer reviewed.
He manually handed it to people, a printed out version that worked at the OPCW, and he was trying to hand it in and get it on the final report.
But the final report was released before he could give it to them.
But he made every effort to give it to the senior authorities at the OPCW, and they just stonewalled him.
And so.
And then, so now there's one other whistleblower, but do we know from, and I'd ask you to tell us all about him, but do we know from either of them how the other members of the team felt, especially the way it's described that you had this one team that went there, and then you had another team of all their bosses in Turkey who didn't, and they were the ones who decided what it all meant and wrote it their way.
And it seems like at least two objected.
I wonder about the rest of the people on the team and how they felt about it.
Yeah, well, some leaks show there's a memo that was leaked by WikiLeaks that Henderson wrote to the director general that said that the, you know, the whole team is, is upset about it.
They, that they, you know, they went to do it, they did this, a lot of scientific work and it was ignored.
And then that gets into the other whistleblower, Inspector B, because his, his main problem was with the interim report, which was published in July of 2018, you know, just a few months after the attack.
So Inspector B, who we'll call Alex, because that's a suetonym he used when he spoke with Jonathan Steele for Counterpunch, he, according to the OPCW in the report that they just released, he left the organization in August 2019, which is, you know, just a few months after the interim report was released.
And their whole claim is that these two guys were not involved in the work that went into the final report.
But just keep in mind that that's, their whole problem is that they weren't involved.
And so Alex's account, they say he was part of the FFM, but he never left Damascus.
But they say he, he prepared the interim report and WikiLeaks released the interim report that Alex and the other inspectors that went to Douma, the one that they made.
And then it was changed.
It was taken by OPCW management and completely changed.
And then they settled on one that was published.
So the one that Alex and the other inspectors made, it had, it came to two possible conclusions.
That a chemical attack happened, it wasn't chlorine, and they don't know what it is, or a chemical attack never occurred.
That's what it said in the document.
And according to Alex, from the Jonathan Steele story, he felt like he was walking on eggshells.
He knew writing that in the report was going to be a big deal because it was so politicized at this point.
You know, because the U.S. and the U.K. and France bombed Syria because of this attack.
So they handed their final report in, not their final report, I'm sorry, their interim report in, and they completely changed it.
They changed it to conclude that there was an attack.
They just got rid of all their signs.
Their interim report is over 100 pages.
The new one was like 26 pages.
And it said that there's sufficient evidence to prove that chlorine came from those two cylinders.
And it was just, I mean, it's pretty unbelievable how different these two reports are.
And then the final, I'm sorry, it's confusing to keep track of these reports.
The interim report that was published on July 6, 2018 that they supposedly agreed on, it took out all the signs.
It wasn't as definitively stating that there was an attack or there wasn't an attack, but it said that there were chlorinated organic chemicals found.
And Alex's issue, so they took samples of the areas where the cylinders were found and chlorinated organic chemicals were found, the COCs.
So according to Alex, COCs are found in every environment naturally.
And they were waiting for the samples to come back to compare the levels.
And after they got back from Douma, they just never got them.
The team that went there never got the results.
So they prepared the interim report without that.
And then one of the inspectors got a hold of these results and it found that the levels of COCs was less than you would expect to find in an environment.
Meaning if the COCs, the levels were an indication that there was a chemical attack, the levels would indicate that there was none.
And by lower than normal, that doesn't necessarily imply artificially lower somehow, it just means within the margin of error.
But in fact, the other way this time.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So.
Yeah.
Well, that would seem to be, I don't know what a scientist would say if that really disproves it, but sure is a startling lack of evidence where there ought to be at least something.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that was, so according to the OPCW's investigation into these leaks that they just, they say that Alex agreed to the interim report in writing.
They say he raised some concerns, but he agreed to it and then he left and then he was bothering all these OPCW employees and talking to people he shouldn't have been.
But so in Jonathan Steele's story, it says that the team agreed to an interim report after the, they prepared theirs, the OPCW gutted it and changed it.
And then there was a third one that they agreed on that included the levels.
WikiLeaks released a series of emails on July, from July 5th, the day before that the interim report was published, that the team leader, the person in charge of the report just sent an email and said, I, after some thought, I decided that we're not going to include the part about the levels, the section about the levels.
And then you see the, it's an email chain and you see it, I don't know, it could be multiple people.
It could be one person, but they're just, they're upset.
They're like, why are you, you know, you're making a unilateral decision against the rest of the team, blah, blah, blah.
The next day, the next day that report's released and the media grabs that one line about the COCs being found and uses that as proof.
I think I linked to an Al Jazeera story in my piece and the headline something like, oh, OPCW finds proof of chemical attack in Douma.
And that upset Alex, the whistleblower, you know, and I think that was enough to, uh, you know, maybe he wasn't, he wasn't involved in the rest of the investigation.
I think it's, it's pretty disturbing.
Um, you know, I'm sure he was pretty disturbed by, by what went down.
And another thing he told Jonathan Steele was that, um, three U.S. officials came into the OPCW and, and told them that a chlorine attack happened and that they wanted the report to reflect that.
And Ian Henderson, um, confirmed that in his written statement to the UN.
He said on July 5th, three U.S. officials presented quote unquote, he put in quotes evidence that a, that an attack happened.
So, um, at the time, July, there was a few stories right after the attack happened.
Like there were all these 3D, uh, they created like a, they recreated it in 3D, um, like a 3D model, like almost looked like a video game in a New York Times story that said the attack said this means that the Syrian government dropped gas on, on Douma.
And so, you know, that could have been the evidence, a 3D model that was made a few months after by people that never went there.
Yeah.
Might as well be a drawing of a mobile biological weapons lab.
We don't have any pictures of them, but we, we got a drawing of what one might look like if it actually existed in space time, but hey.
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And another thing that's interesting that this revealed is that Ian Henderson, a lot of us assume that he was the source of the leaked engineering assessment to the working group on Syria, but he denies that he was.
And he says, and it's interesting because he says he was shocked to see it because it was his name was on it and his handwritten notes were on it.
So that could mean that it was a third person at the OPCW that actually leaked that report.
That's speculating.
But Peter Hitchens, who's been talking to these two guys, wrote on his blog that it's still there.
It's still not confirmed who was the source of that leak and he's in contact with both of them.
So, but that wasn't, as you say, at the end here, there's a chance we'll get some more leaks since it's pretty obvious what's going on here.
Everybody was right on their side as being stifled.
So yeah.
And I mean, I wrote that piece and I think it was a day later, 24 hours later, the gray zone published the Henderson's written statement to the UN.
And like Peter Hitchens, he said in his latest blog entry, we linked to it at antiwar.com, that he's working on a 20,000 word dossier about this.
So that's going to, I'm pretty, I'm looking forward to reading that and I'll write up a summary for our readers.
You know, there might be more leaks.
It's going to be from their account and it's a 20,000 word dossier compared to this report that the OPCW just released, it's like 2,500 words or so.
You know, these guys are determined now because Henderson was fired for that assessment being leaked.
He's getting smeared.
It was enough for him to start leaking stuff and talk to the UN and, you know, and then the other whistleblower, Alex, he, same thing.
And judging by Henderson's, you know, video deposition to the UN there, he's playing this straight and professional as can be.
All he needs is the truth on his side.
So yeah.
And he said, he's been saying the whole time that he's only going to talk to the, in official forms to the UN or OPCW.
But it looks like he might be, after this story came out, you know, he's trying to give his side of the story now.
So that might be what Peter Hitchens is, is writing about.
That might've been what he released to the gray zone.
Not sure if it was him or they got it through the UN, but it's yeah, it's not going away.
Well, and you can see it's one of those fun sort of social experiments about the media in this country too, where they all went with this story.
The government said so.
And plus Israel agreed and whatever else they needed for this to be a good enough narrative to them.
And then the opposite narrative isn't just that, oh, it turns out that that didn't happen.
It's that they got it that wrong and justified the launch of the missiles and all of this based on it.
And so you can see why, but I like it because, you know, you're talking about officials from this important organization testifying before the UN and all that.
And then, so the importance of all that in ratio to the silence is entertaining in itself, but it also goes to show that there remains a real potential for this story to finally break through at some point where they kind of can't keep a lid on it anymore.
And because it's such a good one, I think, you know, maybe it could be a little clearer for the narrative, but, you know, I don't know, investigators find truth, bosses cover it up and lie.
That's a pretty simple narrative.
You can do that.
Yeah.
And the first time the whistleblower Alex spoke out, it was in October at a panel hosted by the Courage Foundation in Europe, I think in Brussels, I'm not sure exactly, but one of the members, one of the people that attended that panel was Jose Bustani, who was the first director general of the OPCW, the group that started, the organization started in 97.
Jose Bustani was a Brazilian diplomat and he was thrown, he was ousted from the organization in 2002 by the U.S., by the Bush administration, because he was trying to get Saddam to cooperate, trying to get chemical weapons inspectors into Iraq.
And John Bolton threatened to kill his children.
Yeah.
Oh, that's another thing that the Grey Zone got, an email from a former OPCW official.
Neither of these two guys that said he would speak out, but he fears for his life.
And it might seem dramatic, but you think of that story of John Bolton, like, I think the guy, Bustani had a kid that lived in New York at the time, and there's a story on The Intercept about it, Bolton like threatened, he said, I know where your son lives, or something like that to him.
Yeah.
And he was speaking, you know, with the authority of the vice president Dick Cheney behind him.
I mean, that's not an idle threat.
I mean, John Bolton in real life, just him?
Come on.
He'd push him down with a feather, probably.
But as far as could he get you, could he like order hitmen to murder you on the eve of trying to get us into Iraq War II?
I mean, that was meant to be taken as a serious threat when it was mentioned.
Believe that.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, absolutely.
And Bolton was in the Trump administration while this all went down with the Thuman investigation.
Do we know about any intervention by him in this story?
No, no.
No.
Just the three U.S. officials from an unknown agency.
So oh, in the media response to this, like we've talked about before, I've written about it's really just been radio silence from the mainstream media.
You know, Boustany really should have broken Bolton's nose right then.
And then that way he would have had to explain himself.
And then that way he would have been able to say publicly at the time about the threat that Bolton had made in a way that would have really got the attention.
Because I don't know when that story came out, because that was how it came out.
It was so quiet.
I don't know if anyone even took note of when it was or I didn't.
I don't even remember.
But I don't think it was a big deal at the time.
I think it only kind of surfaced later as a little piece of trivia about the war, you know, rather than being the biggest deal in the world at the time.
But you know what?
I mean, if it had been like that, where, you know, chemical weapons organization guy breaks State Department officials nose in confrontation at United Nations, and then says, yeah, but it's only because he threatened to murder my son.
I think, I don't know, man, that that story might have had a few legs.
They might have even had to put that on the front page of The Times.
But I don't know.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Anyway, I like fantasizing about alternative pasts where Iraq War II never happened.
I'm sorry.
It's kind of a thing of mine.
Yeah.
And John Bolton gets punched in the face.
It sounds like a pretty good.
Yeah.
That's a good one too.
Yeah.
That's where this narrative, this dimension breaks off from your timeline.
But you know what?
I got it.
So you hear that story.
You see this email from this guy who says his he feels he's scared of speaking out.
Yeah.
These two guys spoke out.
And maybe Henderson, they didn't initiate it.
Maybe Henderson was kind of forced to because he got fired.
But they did it.
Now, I hope they carry revolvers where they go.
Yeah.
The real shameful part of this is that, you know who Brian Whitaker is?
Someone should have given David Kelly a knife when he went on his walk that night.
No, Whitaker.
Sorry.
Go ahead.
No.
So Brian Whitaker, he is a former Guardian journalist.
He writes for this website called Al Bab.
But Elliot Higgins and like the Bellingcat people that have been doing a lot to discredit these whistleblowers by writing their own crap on it.
They retweet him a lot.
They promote his work.
This Whitaker guy doxed the other whistleblower known as Alex.
He yeah, he wrote a whole story about who is who it probably is.
I'm not like it's not confirmed.
I'm not going to use his name out of respect.
But and then Bellingcat, they wrote a story on this report and they use that guy's name.
So they're doxing whistleblowers.
Well, tell me this.
According to their doxing, if it's true, is this guy's position what he portrayed it as?
According to their doxing, if it's true, I don't get the question.
I'm sorry.
I'm saying, does it reveal that he is who he says he is in terms of his position in the organization?
Or they're saying, oh, we doxed him and it proves that he just parks cars and doesn't know nothing?
Well, from what I haven't looked too much into it, but it proves that he was in the organization and, you know.
Yeah.
OK.
I mean, that's what I'm asking is whether they say that the doxing disproves anything about his arguments, including how he portrayed his own position inside the organization or anything like that.
Yeah.
You know, or they're just trying to embarrass him by bringing his name up and get him in trouble.
Yeah, that's what it looks like they're doing.
And I hate to bring up like Twitter, Twitter fights because Twitter is just horrible.
But I saw Elliott Higgins had that story as his pinned tweet and I like quote tweeted him like, this guy doxes a whistleblower and Elliott Higgins has it as his tweet.
And then Higgins responded.
He's like, oh, is that the whistleblower?
I didn't know.
And and then because it was a different story.
And then I shared another story by Whitaker that he followed up with that he said he was the whistleblower.
And Higgins says to me, maybe you should ask WikiLeaks.
So I did such a job protecting the whistleblower's identity, which is just crazy for for this.
I don't know if he's a journalist or whatever the hell he is.
He's an investigator.
But just to have that attitude is just he's an MI6 PR man is what he is.
Yeah, that's yeah.
I mean, and who says that this guy got his information from anything at WikiLeaks?
You know?
Yeah.
Who knows what his source is?
Yeah.
There's no reason to presume that WikiLeaks compromised him.
They have no record of compromising anybody.
That would be the intercept.
That's different.
Yeah, exactly.
And that and I'm sure that when he, you know, gave WikiLeaks these emails and stuff that he leaked, he knew that the OPCW was going to know who it was, who he was.
But he probably didn't think a so-called journalist would reveal his identity to the rest of the world.
Yeah, so it's just.
It's just shameful that the type of coverage that this has gotten when this story, when this report came out, the Guardian did a story on it and their headline was inquiry strikes blow to Russian denials of Syria chemical attack.
But the.
Well, this all came from not from Russia, this is internal, this is OPCW employees that that's where these leaks came from, it's not from Russia.
Yeah, well, the problem is people don't believe in the devil anymore, so now it's Russia.
Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia.
I want to just check my notes real quick, make sure I didn't miss anything big because there's a lot.
Yeah, which, by the way, I mean, did anybody ever seriously allege that Russia had anything to do with this whatsoever, these whistleblowers and leaks and so forth?
I mean, anybody ever even claim that other than the Guardian in passing?
No.
Yeah.
No, there's like because that would they call people that write about this or or are concerned with this conspiracy theorists.
But the idea that Ian Henderson or this other guy, Alex, is on the Russian payroll, it that's pretty conspiratorial.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, you're a conspiracy theorist just for believing that they're wrong or dishonest.
That itself makes you a kook.
You know, I like that.
You don't have to have an idea of what happened instead.
You don't even have to put one forward.
You're still a kook just for saying that they're wrong.
Yeah.
Yeah, I like it.
I think that's fun.
And they both the report says they Henderson, I think he had 12 years at the OPCW.
Alex had 17.
That's a long time.
And they were both rehired, which Peter Hitchens says is apparently rare.
They usually don't rehire people, but they're both like experts.
They're both kind of well-respected in the and in the OPCW says that they consulted three independent experts to do to study the cylinders and that Henderson didn't have any access to those reports.
But I mean, that just raises the simple question.
Why didn't you use your expert that went there, took the measurements and saw it for himself?
Like.
That's revealing in itself that they they just ignored him, and that goes into his accusation that.
That team was ignored.
It doesn't make any sense on the face of it, and now it's an organization that I don't know the inner workings of as a guy who's just writing on this, but Ian Anderson and Alex know the inner workings of it.
And this this isn't right.
So there's a story that no matter how these guys try to downplay it or this is a story and it's just it's going to at some point these leaks are going to burst and it's going to be a full blown.
Yeah, it reminds me of when Georgia attacked South Osetia in August of 2008 and then like in late November, the New York Times ran a story where they're like, OK, yeah, we lied.
So it was Georgia.
We're going to get one of those at some point here.
They're going to be like, OK, yeah, for the record, all that was anyway, let's go on to the next set of lies, though.
But we I think we're still owed one.
Yeah, I get David Sanger to write it.
Oh, and the director general's statements, he released a statement when this report was released.
Fernando Arias is his name, and he said that these two inspectors are not whistleblowers.
They're just he said that they're just they're mad that their work, their.
Their, you know.
Work was not taken into account for the final report that just just made him seem like disgruntled people, and I don't think the OPCW has any whistleblower protection, but.
You know, it looks like that they're trying to deny them of whatever whistleblower protection they might have under international law or whatnot.
Well, or at least in terms of the PR fight.
But, yeah, you know, they were just mad that we didn't include their contrary conclusions does not preclude their whistleblower status.
It doesn't sound like to me that just sounds like, yeah, well, who was right if you were lying and they were telling the truth and that makes them the whistleblowers.
And since it's pretty obvious that that's the case, then, yeah.
So I can see why that's the best they can do, because what else are they supposed to say, but.
Not very convincing argument.
Yeah.
All right, well, listen, man, I appreciate you keeping your eyeballs on this story.
And at some point, I don't know, I guess when I get to this part of the book, I'm going to have to really buckle down and go back over it all and finally learn it all for myself.
But I've been putting it off.
I do have a chapter called Three Fake Sarin Attacks that are it's already kind of outlined, but yeah, three chemical.
Anyway, so that'll be fun when I get to it.
But I do appreciate very much.
You keep in tabs on this story as it develops and especially in writing for us at antiwar.com as well.
The article is OPCW tries to discredit whistleblowers in response to Duma leaks.
Thanks again, Dave.
Yes, Scott.
Thanks for having me back.
The Scott Horton Show and Antiwar Radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
APS radio dot com antiwar dot com Scott Horton dot org and Libertarian Institute dot org.
