Once more through the looking glass. In a flurry of press releases, Fifa again attempted to bolt the stable door on its botched investigation into World Cup bidding long after a herd of horses had galloped over the horizon.

Ahead of a pivotal two-day meeting of the Fifa executive committee in Marrakech, its tactic of trying to drown out criticism in bureaucratic gobbledygook appeared unlikely to succeed.

With Fifa’s executives touching down ahead of a meeting that will again be dominated by discussion of Michael Garcia’s report, after the German Fifa executive, Theo Zwanziger, forced a vote over whether to publish it in full, a familiar process cranked into gear.

First, its appeals committee rejected a claim from Garcia, the head of the investigative arm of its ethics committee, that Hans-Joachim Eckert, the head of the adjudicatory arm, had fundamentally misrepresented his 430-page report.

Eckert’s 42-page summary was published last month and effectively cleared 2018 host Russia and 2022 host Qatar of serious wrongdoing despite admitting the former had refused to co-operate, having insisted all their emails had been lost, and a long list of question marks over the latter.

In a move that was a surprise even by Fifa’s standards, hours after the summary was published Garcia reported his colleague to the appeals committee claiming his summary contained “numerous materially incomplete and erroneous representations”.

Yet in a triumph of which Big Brother’s Ministry of Truth would be proud, the appeals committee found Garcia had nothing to appeal against. Eckert’s summary only represented an opinion, it ruled, therefore Garcia had no case. Minutes earlier, Fifa’s disciplinary committee had ruled that complaints from two whistleblowers that their confidentiality had been breached also had no merit.

Of all the distasteful aspects of the fallout from the cash-soaked scramble to host the world’s biggest sporting event, the treatment of Bonita Mersiades and Phaedra Almajid is among the worst.

Mersiades was an executive on the Australia 2022 bid and Almajid had a senior communications role on the Qatar 2022 bid. Both had already spoken out about their experiences but agreed to co-operate with Garcia on the agreement that their evidence would remain confidential. Yet when Eckert published his summary – which may or may not be an accurate reflection of Garcia’s tone – he dismissed their evidence and turned on both. Almajid was, to some extent, compromised by the fact she retracted some of her claims in 2011, later insisting she had only done so under pressure. However, whatever the quality of her evidence, nothing can justify the way she was hung out to dry.

While neither was named, both were easily identifiable. Eckert not only dismissed their evidence but did so despite the need to maintain the confidentiality of witnesses being the main argument employed in favour of publishing a summary rather than the entire report.

Fifa said that the pair had effectively waived their right to anonymity by going public with their “own media activities long before the publication” of the report summary.

Almajid, who claimed her safety and that of her family had been compromised by the Garcia process, said that was an “obvious dodge”, insisting she had remained silent throughout the period of the investigation. There also appears to be a discrepancy between the reasons Fifa gave for dismissing her complaint in its media release and those in a letter to Almajid, seen by the Guardian, in which it effectively states she is not entitled to complain because she is no longer working in football.

As for the wider drama, the ball is back in Garcia’s court. He could now choose to leak his entire report or take the case to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. He might prefer to wait until the outcome of Friday’s board meeting, during which the head of the audit committee, Domenico Scala, will update members on how much of the report he is prepared to share with them and they will vote on whether to release it in full.

Even if we ever get to see it, Garcia’s report will not provide all the answers. He was compromised from the start by the fact that he had no power to seize phone records or email traffic and those corrupt former Fifa officials who are no longer involved in the game could not be compelled to talk.

He also has his own questions to answer, having agreed to take on the case under the existing Ethics Code – which states baldly that “the ethics committee may decide not to communicate the grounds of a decision and instead communicate only the terms of the decision” – only to change his tune when it became clear his reputation was at risk. Garcia’s appeal loss does not affect his ongoing prosecutions of five men, including the German World Cup winner Franz Beckenbauer, for wrongdoing in the bid campaign.

Among that five are three current Fifa board members – vice president Ángel María Villar of Spain, Michel D’Hooghe of Belgium and Worawi Makudi of Thailand. That all three will now vote on whether his report should be released is just another bizarre feature of the process.

The fifth official charged is the former Chile football leader Harold Mayne-Nicholls, who Fifa chose to lead an inspection team evaluating the nine candidates in 2010. With crushing inevitability, the investigation intensified when he revealed he may stand against Sepp Blatter for the presidency next year.

There was a reminder of another of the intractable problems facing the Qatar 2022 tournament when the European Clubs Association and the European professional leagues published a detailed proposal to shift the tournament to May in order to minimise the disruption a move to January or November would cause. It appears unlikely to hold sway, with Blatter’s favoured option of November remaining favourite.

Meanwhile, the best hope for getting to the truth about what really went on during that much scrutinised bid race – although much of the evidence now lies in plain sight thanks to the efforts of the media – is not Garcia’s full report but an ongoing FBI investigation.

The president’s strategy appears to be to box and cox his way through to May 2015, obfuscating and obscuring as he goes, when he plans to stand for another term despite previously promising this would be his last. But when you’re as practiced in Orwellian doublethink as Blatter, what’s one more broken promise?