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Media’s Deafening Silence On Latest
WikiLeaks Drops Is Its Own Scandal
By
Caitlin Johnstone
December 29, 2019 "Information
Clearing House"
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WikiLeaks has
published yet another set of leaked internal
documents from within the Organisation
for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW)
adding even more material to
the mountain of evidence that we’ve been
lied to about an alleged chemical weapons
attack in Douma, Syria last year
which resulted in airstrikes upon that
nation from the US, UK and France.
This
new WikiLeaks drop includes an email from
the OPCW Chief of Cabinet Sebastien Braha
(who is
reportedly so detested by organisation
inspectors that they code named him “Voldemort”)
throwing a fit over the
Ian Henderson Engineering Assessment
which found that the Douma incident was
likely a staged event. Braha is seen
ordering OPCW staff to “remove all traces,
if any, of its delivery/storage/whatever”
from the organisation’s secure registry.
The drop also includes the
minutes from an OPCW toxicology meeting
with “three Toxicologists/Clinical
pharmacologists, one bioanalytical and
toxicological chemist”, all four of whom are
specialists in chemical weapons analysis.
“With respect to the consistency of the
observed and reported symptoms of the
alleged victims with possible exposure to
chlorine gas or similar, the experts were
conclusive in their statements that there
was no correlation between symptoms and
chlorine exposure,” the document reads.
According to the leaked minutes from the
toxicology meeting, the chief expert
offered “the possibility of the event being
a propaganda exercise” as one potential
explanation for the Douma incident.
The other OPCW experts agreed that the key
“take-away message” from the meeting was
“that the symptoms observed were
inconsistent with exposure to chlorine and
no other obvious candidate chemical causing
the symptoms could be identified”.
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Like all the other
many,
many,
many,
many different leaks which have been
hemorrhaging from the OPCW about
the
Douma incident, none of the important
information contained in these publications
was included in any of the OPCW’s public
reports on the matter.
According to
the
OPCW’s Final Report published in March
2019, the investigative team found
“reasonable grounds that the use of a toxic
chemical as a weapon took place. This toxic
chemical contained reactive chlorine. The
toxic chemical was likely molecular
chlorine.”
We now know that these “reasonable
grounds” contain more holes than a spaghetti
strainer executed by firing squad. This is
extremely important information about an
unsolved war crime which resulted in dozens
of civilian deaths and led to an act of war
which
cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars
and had many far-reaching geopolitical
consequences.
Yet the mass media, freakishly,
has had absolutely nothing to say about this
extremely newsworthy story.
As of this writing, a Google News search
for this story brings up an article by RT,
Al-Masdar News, and some entries by
alternative outlets you’ve almost certainly
never heard of like UrduPoint News
and People’s Pundit Daily.
Make no mistake about it:
this is insane.
The fact
that an extremely important news story of
immense geopolitical consequence is not
getting any mainstream news media
coverage, at all,
is absolutely stark raving insane.
Up until the OPCW leaks, WikiLeaks drops
always made mainstream news headlines.
Everyone remembers how the 2016 news cycle
was largely dominated by leaked Democratic
Party emails emerging from the outlet. Even
the relatively minor ICE agents publication
by WikiLeaks last year, containing
information that
was already public, garnered headlines
from top US outlets like
The Washington Post ,
Newsweek, and
USA Today. Now, on this
exponentially more important story, zero
coverage.
The mass media’s stone-dead
silence on the OPCW scandal is becoming its
own scandal, of equal or perhaps even
greater significance than the OPCW scandal
itself. It opens up a whole litany
of questions which have tremendous
importance for every citizen of the western
world; questions like, how are people
supposed to participate in democracy if all
the outlets they normally turn to to make
informed voting decisions adamantly refuse
to tell them about the existence of massive
news stories like the OPCW scandal? How are
people meant to address such conspiracies of
silence when there is no mechanism in place
to hold the entire mass media to account for
its complicity in it? And by what mechanism
are all these outlets unifying in that
conspiracy of silence?
We can at least gain some insight into
that last question with the internal
Newsweek emails which were
published by journalist Tareq Haddad two
weeks ago. The emails feature multiple
Newsweek editors telling Haddad that
they would not publish a word about the OPCW
leaks
for two reasons: (1) because no other
outlets were reporting on them, and (2)
because the US government-funded narrative
management firm Bellingcat had
published a laughably bogus article
explaining why the leaks weren’t newsworthy.
Haddad has since resigned from Newsweek.
We may be certain that this story
is being killed in news rooms all around the
world in similar fashion, and possibly using
those very same excuses. As long as
no other “respectable” (i.e. establishment)
outlets are covering this story, it can be
treated as a non-story, using a deceitful US
government-funded narrative management
operation as justification as needed. If one
journalist threw his life into chaos and
uncertainty by resigning and blowing the
whistle on this conspiracy of silence, we
may be certain that the same is happening to
countless others who don’t have to courage
and/or ability to do the same.
Many alternative media
commentators are highlighting this news
media blackout on social media today.
“Our fearless media watchdogs still
maintaining complete blackout on OPCW
whistleblower leaks debunking WMD attack
in Douma. The leaks show that Trump—like
Dubya— used fake WMDs to bomb Arab
country—then strong-armed OPCW to cover
up the lies,”
tweeted journalist Mark Ames.
“The US attacked Syria for a chemical
attack by Assad last year. But official
OPCW scientists who investigated the
event didn’t find evidence the Syrian
military used chemical weapons. The
media has chosen to ignore this story
and fire its own journalists who try to
report on it,”
tweeted author and analyst Max
Abrahms.
“This is the FOURTH leak showing how
the OPCW fabricated a report on a
supposed Syrian ‘chemical’ attack,”
tweeted journalist Ben Norton. “And
mainstream Western corporate media
outlets are still silent, showing how
authoritarian these ‘democracies’ are
and how tightly they control info.”
“Media silence on this
story is its own scandal,”
tweeted journalist Aaron Maté.
But this spin machine is twirling off its
axis trying to normalize this silence.
Bellingcat narrative jockeys such
as “senior investigator” Nick Waters are
already scrambling to perception manage
everyone into believing their own eyes are
lying to them. Waters
has a thread on Twitter that’s being
shared around by all the usual Syria
spinmeisters claiming, based on no evidence
whatsoever, that WikiLeaks is selectively
publishing the documents it has to create a
false impression of events in the OPCW.
Waters falsely claims that an email by
Sebastien “Voldemort” Braha — the guy at the
center of the scandal — proves that Ian
Henderson was not a part of the Fact-Finding
Mission (FFM) in Douma, in contradiction to
the claims made by the anonymous second OPCW
whistleblower who goes by the pseudonym of
“Alex”.
As Waters is one hundred percent aware,
Henderson absolutely was part of
the Douma Fact-Finding Mission, and one of
the FFM members who actually went to Douma
no less. I’ve put together a Twitter thread
refuting Waters’ ridiculous claims which
you can read by clicking here, but in
short an arbitrary distinction seems to have
been made between the FFM and the “FFM core
team”, or what is labeled the “FFM
Alpha team” in a newly leaked email
trying to marginalize Henderson’s
assessment. Henderson actually went to Douma
as part of the FFM, unlike almost all
members of the so-called “core team” who
except for one paramedic
operated solely in another nation
(probably Turkey).
Of course, the distinction of whether
Henderson was or was not “in the FFM” is
also itself irrelevant and arbitrary, since
we know for a fact that he is a longtime
OPCW inspector who went to Douma and
contributed an assessment which was hidden
from the public by the OPCW.
So this narrative being spun by
the US government-funded propagandists at
Bellingcat is bogus from top to bottom, but
what’s infuriating is that we already know
who editors in news rooms are going to
listen to.
It’s absolutely amazing how tightly
interlaced Bellingcat is with the upper
echelons of mainstream news media and the
public framing of what’s going on in Syria.
Mere hours after the latest WikiLeaks drop,
CNN pundit Brian Stelter
shared an article about Bellingcat
founder and former Atlantic Council Senior
Fellow Eliot Higgins, who warns of the
dangers posed by alternative media reporters
who cover underreported stories like the
OPCW scandal.
“We have this alternative
media ecosystem that is driving a lot of
disinformation. It is not understood by
journalists or anyone really beyond a very
small group of people who are really engaged
with it,” reads the ironic
Higgins quote in the excerpt shared by
Stelter.
We’ve been seeing a mad rush from mass
media pundits to give this US
government-funded narrative management
operation unearned and undeserved
legitimacy, churning out tweets like
Stelter’s and fawning puff pieces by
The New York Times,
The Guardian and
The New Yorker. This unearned and
undeserved legitimacy is then used by
editors to justify looking to Bellingcat for
instructions on how to think about important
information on Syria rather than doing their
own basic investigation and analysis. It’s a
self-validating feedback loop which just so
happens to work out very conveniently for
the government which funds Bellingcat.
It remains unknown exactly
what’s transpiring in news rooms around the
world to maintain the conspiracy of silence
on the OPCW scandal, but what is known is
that by itself this scandalous silence is
enough to fully discredit the mass media
forever. WikiLeaks has exposed
these outlets for the monolithic propaganda
engine that they really are, and they did it
just by publishing extremely newsworthy leak
after extremely newsworthy leak.
In order to perception manage us
any harder, these freaks are going to have
to go around literally confiscating our ears
and eyeballs.
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