by: Chris Weber

Since the 1970s Syria has had a chemical weapons program. At the time, they had the third largest chemical weapons stockpile, behind the United States and Russia. Syria was until 2013, one of the only countries not to be a member of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC).

After international outrage over an alleged 2013 chemical attack against civilians, in the town of Ghouta, and repeated use of chemical weapons in the Syrian civil war, the Syrian government struck a deal with the Western nations to dismantle their chemical weapons program.

It was thought that by 2014, the Syrian government no longer possessed chemical weapons, although mainstream media still believed they hadn’t gotten rid of them all.

Since the dismantling of Syrian chemical weapons, there has been some very suspicious chemical attacks, that were blamed on the Syrian president.

April 2017 in Khan Shaykhun, Syria

April 2018 in Douma, Syria.

After the 2017 attack, there was much speculation as to who was responsible.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said “we do not have evidence” that the Syrian president was behind the attack. It was thought that possibly the rebels staged a chemical attack in order to keep the United States involved in the war.

A year later, there was the 2018 attack in Douma, this time, the United Nations sent the Organization of the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to conduct a fact-finding mission, to once and for all, find out if Syria was still using chemical weapons.

The alleged attack happened on April 7th, but the OPCW team didn’t have access to Douma until April 17th due to hostile conditions in Syria. The ten days between the alleged attack and the arrival of the OPCW complicated the investigation. The conclusion of the fact-finding mission was that the Syrian dictator, indeed, was behind the 2018 attack in Douma.

Now, there are some within the OPCW who are speaking out about the validity of that OPCW report.

The OPCW Came out with a Completely Biased Report

On November 23rd 2019 WikiLeaks published an email sent by a member of the team that investigated the Douma chemical attack. In the email the whistleblower questions the certainty that there was chlorine gas present, calling the OPCW report “misleading.” The report talked about there being chlorine in certain areas, but omitted to mention that it was “trace quantities” of chlorine.

The whistleblower says there are inconsistencies “between the victims’ symptoms as reported by witnesses, and the symptoms seen in video recordings.” What we know about the victims of the chemical attack in Douma comes from rebel witnesses and video recordings.

February 27th 2019 a dissenting report from the OPCW themselves was leaked. Dissenting members of the OPCW disagreed with the view that one of the chemical containers was dropped from a Syrian helicopter. The fifteen page report of engineers uses “very careful mathematics” to show how the container of chemicals would have fallen through the roof in every computer simulation.”

The container sitting on top of the roof proves that somebody manually placed the container, considering its impossible that it was dropped from above. If it was dropped from a helicopter, it would be likely that it came from the Syrian government. The fact that the container was manually placed makes it very likely the attack was staged.

We were so Close to Withdrawing

It seemed like the United States was going to withdraw from the war in Syria. President Trump held some anti-interventionist views during the campaign. The war in Syria was started by President Obama, so it was popular among republicans to oppose it. The evidence is clear that the rebel forces in Syria have staged chemical attacks to keep the U.S involved in the war. Its time to get out of this war in Syria, and its time to stick a finger to the military industrial complex. Don’t let these false flag attacks lure us back into Syria, please.

Sources

1. https://wikileaks.org/opcw-douma/

2. https://wikileaks.org/opcw-douma/document/Internal-OPCW-E-Mail/Internal-OPCW-E-Mail.pdf

3. https://thegrayzone.com/2019/05/25/opcw-syria-gas-attack-staged-theodore-postol/

4. https://www.opcw.org/media-centre/news/2018/04/opcw-fact-finding-mission-team-visits-douma-syria

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syria_chemical_weapons_program

6. https://apnews.com/bd533182b7f244a4b771c73a0b601ec5

syriapropagandamedia.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Engineering-assessment-of-two-cylinders-observed-at-the-Douma-incident-27-February-2019-1.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPCW_Fact-Finding_Mission_in_Syria