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by Guest Wed May 29, 2019 11:10 pmA dissenting group of scientists and others recently published online what they say is a report prepared by an employee of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW)
You can access the report here. http://syriapropagandamedia.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Engineering-assessment-of-two-cylinders-observed-at-the-Douma-incident-27-February-2019-1.pdf
It strongly suggests that supposed gas cylinders found in bombed buildings in Douma, Syria, were *not* dropped by helicopters on those buildings. May I stress that I offer no alternative explanation as to how they got there. I have no information on this. The condition of these cylinders was simply not consistent with the idea that they had been dropped from helicopters and had then pierced the roof of the building where they were found.
But its findings do not seem to have been taken into account in the OPCW’s final report on the event, discussed here in my March 9th article.
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https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2019/05/strange-news-from-the-opcw-in-the-hague-.html
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Institutional – and journalistic – memory is such that we should perhaps take a trip down memory lane to remind ourselves of the importance of the 2018 Douma attack. As Syrian government troops closed in on Islamist-held Douma in the early spring of last year – besieging several square miles of apartment blocks, slums and narrow streets on the eastern edge of Damascus – videos transmitted from the scene showed harrowing footage of civilians foaming at the mouth and apparently choking to death after inhaling gas.
The Damascus government denied the claim. So did the Russians. But on the basis that sufficient evidence of a gas attack had been provided, the US, Britain and France launched bombing raids into Syria. At a press conference in London, Theresa May conducted a blistering condemnation of the Assad dictatorship for using gas against women and children.
There had been many reports of chemical attacks by the regime in Syria before the Douma episode, but the world’s response to the video evidence from the ward of a makeshift hospital there turned the event into a major international crisis. Among the American cruise missile targets was a scientific centre in Damascus which the OPCW had itself cleared of any involvement in chemical warfare in the autumn of 2018. But within two weeks – after delays imposed by the Syrians for “security” reasons – international scientists from the OPCW, who had already interviewed doctors from the Douma hospital, arrived in the streets where the chemical attack allegedly took place.
In their final official report in March this year, the OPCW say that although no “organophosphorous nerve agents” – sarin gas, to you and me – were found in Douma and that those recorded as dying in the attack had already been buried, their team, which it says included “mechanical engineering” experts, concluded that the canisters found in two specific locations had passed through concrete and a ceiling to impact on the floor of buildings.
It is possible, the OPCW said, “that the cylinders were the sources of the substances containing reactive chlorine”. Testimony, environmental and biomedical samples and toxicological and ballistic analyses, “provide reasonable grounds that the use of toxic chemical as a weapon took place.” In other words, the canisters had fallen from the sky.
The then-unrevealed document titled “Unclassified – OPCW Sensitive, Do Not Circulate – Engineering Assessment of the Two Cylinders Observed at the Douma Incident – Executive Summary” and dated 27 February this year, is authored by an engineer whose name is all over the internet but which we shall not repeat here. It draws diametrically opposite conclusions to the published report, stating that the “engineering sub-team cannot be certain that the cylinders at either location arrived there as a result of being dropped from an aircraft”.
And why not? “The dimensions, characteristics and appearance of the cylinders and the surrounding scene of the incidents were inconsistent with what would have been expected in the case of either cylinder having been delivered from an aircraft ... In summary, observations at the scene of the two locations together with subsequent analysis suggest that there is a higher probability that both cylinders were manually placed at those two locations rather than being delivered by aircraft.”
Put bluntly, the paper is suggesting that the location of the cylinders was a set-up, that someone inside Douma immediately after the bombings of 7 April 2018 – and no one, not even the Syrians or Russians, deny there was conventional bombing and shelling that night – placed the cylinders in the locations in which they were subsequently examined by the OPCW. Since the first images of the cylinders in these locations were shown on footage before the Syrians and Russians entered Douma, the obvious corollary is that forces opposed to the Assad regime may have put them there.
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What if we are now told that yet once more Syria is using gas against its enemies?
Strangely, amid the revelations of the OPCW’s hidden report, the US State Department – just two days ago – announced that “we continue to see signs that the Assad regime may be renewing its use of chemical weapons, including an alleged chlorine attack in northwest Syria on the morning of 19 May 2019…”
So here we go again.
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/douma-syria-opcw-chemical-weapons-chlorine-gas-video-conspiracy-theory-russia-a8927116.html
disident
