Catte Black

The official narrative on the OPCW’s deception about the alleged ‘chlorine gas attack’ on Douma, Syria, in April 2018 is falling apart. The dam of media silence is cracking and straining. Trickles of truth are dribbling out. The Mail on Sunday has allowed Peter Hitchens to blog about it. Jonathan Steele and other mainstream journalists are suddenly noticing the whistleblowers they ignored for so long and salving their consciences by going public before the dam bursts.

No one is going to say this is a bad thing. However cynical it might appear, it can only be good if the wholesale corruption in the OPCW evidenced by leaked documents and whistleblower statements, is finally and officially acknowledged. It might at least make it less likely we’ll be dragged into WW3 by faked evidence of phony war crimes.

But let’s not forget in our excitement at getting some attention from the big table that when/if this story finally does burst into the mainstream consciousness it will also simultaneously be neutered of its most important reality – viz that the OPCW are just one tiny part of the massive war-manufacturing, war-justifying, war-sanitising lie-machine that is the entirety of western political society.

Of course they’re staffed with strategically placed yes-men. Of course they produced a report that was fudged into a gigantic if obfuscated deception. What do you expect when our institutions are totally subsumed by warmongers, for warmongers? When our financial and political system is built around the pursuit of wars that are not supposed to be won but merely to continue indefinitely?

If the mainstream finally deigns to recognise the malfeasance of the OPCW, it will treat the whole shady episode as a strange anomaly, a dreadful ‘misjudgment’ by a few misguided individuals. A teeny stain on an otherwise impeccable record. Some middle-ranking unfortunates in the OPCW may be sacked or ‘disciplined’. The media may run stories about how the ‘rebels’ (who will suddenly be bad guys) ‘misled’ the lovely innocent (white) investigators into accepting cunningly planted evidence. There may even be talk of how ‘tunnel vision’ about Syria had taken over at the State Department and FCO.

Someone, somewhere, somehow will, of course, inevitably blame the Russians.

If enough fuss is made there may even be a public inquiry of some type that takes ages to convene, is run by an elder statesman with an MI5/NSA dossier that ensures his compliance, and ends up finding that ‘grave mistakes were made’.

But there will be no questioning of the basic official western Syria narrative. No questioning of the need for ‘humanitarian’ war, or of NATO’s a priori moral superiority over all its adversaries.

In fact there’s a great example of this nascent fallback narrative in Robert Fisk’s recent article in the Independent.

While a decent overview of the facts in many ways (which by the way further indicates it’s about to go seriously mainstream), it includes this penultimate paragraph:

The deep concerns among some of the OPCW staff and the deletion of their evidence does not mean that gas has not been used in Syria by the government or even by the Russians or by Isis and its fellow Islamists. All stand guilty of war crimes in the Syrian conflict. The OPCW’s response to the evidence should not let war criminals off the hook. But it certainly helps them.

Those who have followed Fisk’s career to date may well wonder if he freely chose to add this xenophobic, jingoistic nonsense to his otherwise pretty honest piece. But regardless of how it got there, this para shows us, succinctly, how the true story of and lessons of the OPCW Douma scandal will be castrated and distorted when/if it goes mainstream.

If we want more than that we have to provide it ourselves. The corporate media is never – ever – going to tell the truth about the system that controls it.