By Peter Hitchens

January 23, 2020 "Information Clearing House" - What governments learned from the Iraq war was not that such wars are stupid and wrong, but that measures must be taken to prevent an independent media from questioning them in future.

Let me explain.

A month and more after I published my first exclusive story about the censoring of official reports into the alleged poison gas atrocity at Douma, Syria, most major news organisations have not followed it. Reuters, to their credit, did confirm that one of the documents on which I relied, an internal e-mail, was indeed authentic. But as far as I know, neither the BBC nor any other major British newspaper has ever said a word about this story, apart from The Independent, where Robert Fisk, in his usual courageous fashion, took it up. He also added a fascinating new detail, which you may read here: https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/syria-war-chemical-weapons-watchdog-opcw-assad-damascus-russia-a9262336.html

Tucker Carlson of Fox News has also covered it, a rare independent mind almost unique in mainstream US broadcasting.

This silence fell despite the fact that anybody who did follow the story faced no risk. Some exclusives are hard to follow because the facts are hard to confirm.  Those striving to follow them have neither sources nor documents on which to rely. Of course,  the fact that a major newspaper has published the story should provide some confidence.  British newspapers are often jeered at, but in fact, especially on matter such as this, we cannot afford to be careless or rash. We at The Mail on Sunday obviously took very serious steps to confirm, cross-check and validate our sources and material. But in the end we had to decide whether or not to publish, on our own.  Even the most persuasive stories can sometimes be wrong (ours wasn’t) and editors and lawyers have almost all experienced such things at some point in their lives. So they interrogate such stories, and their authors, very closely.  British national newspapers operate in a pretty stern legal and regulatory landscape. They also have rivals keen to pounce on any errors they make. So they are very careful about such things. Of course, we also had the advantage of direct contact with sources, which others could not easily obtain.

But a very short time after our story was published, printed and online, leaked copies of the authentic documents I had seen (and on which I largely based my stories) swiftly became generally available through Wikileaks. What is more, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) made no attempt to contest what I had said or to suggest that documents were not authentic. It could not. They are. The British, French and US governments, who now face accusations that their April 2018 attack on Syria was contrary to the UN Charter, also made no attempt to deny what I had said.

An important but neglected fact: The OPCW has previously come under pressure to behave in a similar way. This is an undisputed matter of record http://bit.ly/BoltonversusBustani

It merely blustered about standing by its published (and censored) reports, a course it was only able to follow because of the flaccid, shuffling response of the rest of the western media. The whole episode was deeply dispiriting. I have now concluded that, if the Iraq War crisis were re-run with the media of 2020, the failure to find WMD in Iraq would never have got out, or - if it had done -would have been widely ignored and dismissed, and the authors of the report marginalised as ‘Saddam apologists’ .

Hence my opening words, which I now repeat. What governments learned from the Iraq war was not that such wars are stupid and wrong, but that measures must be taken to prevent an independent media from questioning them in future.