DISINFO: OPCW smears whistleblowers to defend sanitised Douma report
SUMMARY
In response to a series of leaks concerning the OPCW’s report on the alleged chemical attack in Douma, the organisation carried out an internal review in which it smeared two whistleblowers who had given evidence that the OPCW had doctored its own findings on the incident. One of the inspectors, reffered to as “Inspector A” and “Inspector B”, was former OPCW specialist Ian Henderson, who visited Douma as part of the agency’s fact-finding mission and has publicly blasted the “sanitised” report on the alleged Douma attack. The other ‘Inspector’ was presumably a reference to ‘Alex’, an elusive whistleblower whose identity has not been revealed, and who has provided materials to WikiLeaks similarly casting major doubt on the OPCW’s integrity in its investigation of the alleged Douma attack.
RESPONSE
Recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narratives attacking the independence and integrity of the OPCW; lending credence to the claim that the 2018 Douma attack was staged; and absolving the Syrian regime of responsibility for chemical attacks in general. The story is peppered with falsehoods and out-of-context citations lifted from the OPCW website. It conveniently omits the fact that the quoted remarks were not ad-hoc verbal attacks on the "whistleblowers," but were made on the heels of an independent OPCW probe (not an internal review) which took six months to carry out and was overseen by external investigators. The probe does not name the leakers but provides just enough information to disprove the claim that Henderson "visited Douma as part of the agency’s fact-finding mission." Inspector A "was not a member of the FFM" and "played a minor supporting role in the investigation of the Douma incident" (para. 13). Inspector B, on the other hand, "never left the command post in Damascus because he had not completed the training required to deploy to the field" (para. 23). It follows that neither inspector could have visited the site with a fact-finding mandate. See here for a comprehensive debunking of Henderson's claims. Additionally, Sputnik never mentions that Inspector B "departed [from the agency] at the end of August 2018" (para. 25) and could not have possibly participated in the last seven months of the Douma investigation, during which "the majority of the [FFM's] investigative work was conducted" (para. 29). This fits the timing of Alex's leaked e-mail, which is dated 22 June 2018 and could not have possibly addressed the final version of the Douma report. In fact, the concerns raised in the e-mail were addressed in the final report, published in March 2019. See here for additional debunking by Bellingcat.