You wouldn’t know it from today’s news headlines, but there’s a major scandal unfolding with potentially far-reaching consequences for the entire international community. The political/media class has been dead silent about the fact that there are now two whistleblowers whose revelations have cast serious doubts on a chemical weapons watchdog group that is widely regarded as authoritative, despite the fact that this same political/media class has been crowing all month about how important whistleblowers are and how they need to be protected ever since a CIA spook exposed some dirt on the Trump administration.
When the Courage Foundation and WikiLeaks published the findings of an interdisciplinary panel which received an extensive presentation from a whistleblower from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) investigation of an alleged 2018 chlorine gas attack in Douma, Syria, it was left unclear (perhaps intentionally) whether this was the same whistleblower who leaked a dissenting Engineering Assessment to the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media this past May or a different one. Subsequent comments from British journalist Jonathan Steele assert that there are indeed two separate whistleblowers from within the OPCW’s Douma investigation, both of whom claim that their investigative findings differed widely from the final OPCW Douma report and were suppressed from the public by the organization.
The official final report aligned with the mainstream narrative promulgated by America’s political/media class that the Syrian government killed dozens of civilians in Douma using cylinders of chlorine gas dropped from the air, while the two whistleblowers found that this is unlikely to have been the case. The official report did not explicitly assign blame to Assad, but it said its findings were in alignment with a chlorine gas attack and included a ballistics report which strongly implied an air strike (opposition fighters in Syria have no air force). The whistleblowers dispute both of these conclusions.
The drip-drip of revelations continues. Now a *second* whistleblower has come forward to say the OPCW concealed their findings clearing the Assad government of responsibility for an alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma last year https://t.co/HqnlvFYdBh
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) October 28, 2019
At the very least we can conclude from these revelations that the OPCW hid information from the public that an international watchdog organization has no business hiding about an event which led to an act of war in the form of an airstrike by the US, UK and France. We may also conclude that skepticism of their entire body of work around the world is perfectly legitimate until some very serious questions are answered. Right now no attempt is being made by the organization to bring about the kind of transparency which would help restore trust, with multiple journalists now reporting that the OPCW is refusing to answer their questions.
It is also not at all unreasonable to question whether the OPCW could have been influenced in some way by the United States behind the scenes, given how its now-dubious final report aligns so nicely with the narratives promoted by the CIA and US State Department, and given how we know for a fact that the US has aggressively manipulated the OPCW before in order to advance its regime change agendas.
In June of 2002, as the United States was preparing to invade Iraq, Mother Jones published an article titled “A Coup in The Hague” about the US government’s campaign to oust the OPCW’s very first Director General, José Bustani. If you’ve been following the recent OPCW revelations you will recall that Bustani was one of the panelists at the Courage Foundation whistleblower presentation in Brussels on October 15, after which he wrote the following: “The convincing evidence of irregular behavior in the OPCW investigation of the alleged Douma chemical attack confirms doubts and suspicions I already had. I could make no sense of what I was reading in the international press. Even official reports of investigations seemed incoherent at best. The picture is certainly clearer now, although very disturbing.”
Mother Jones (which used to be a decent outlet for the record) breaks down how the US government was able to successfully bully the OPCW into ousting the very popular Bustani from his position as Director General in April 2002 by threatening to withdraw funding from the organization. This was done because Bustani was having an uncomfortable amount of success bringing the Saddam Hussein government to the negotiating table, and his efforts were perceived as a threat to the war agenda.
Friendly reminder that we know the USA has threatened to kill OPCW funding as leverage to achieve strategic goals. During the Bush administration it was to remove OPCW Director General Jose Bustani because he was interfering with the Iraq war agenda.https://t.co/757YaCLBZG pic.twitter.com/9rt3wXkA4e
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) October 28, 2019
“Indeed, US officials have offered little reason for its opposition to Bustani, saying only that they questioned his ‘management style’ and differed with several of Bustani’s decisions,” Mother Jones reports. “Despite this, Washington waged an unusually public and vocal campaign to unseat Bustani, who had been unanimously reelected to lead the 145-nation body in May, 2000. Finally, at a ‘special session’ called after the US had threatened to cut off all funding for the organization, Bustani was sent packing.”
This happened despite broad international support for Bustani, including from then-Secretary of State Colin Powell who’d written to the renowned Brazilian diplomat praising his work in February 2001. According to the report’s author Hannah Wallace, the US was able to oust a unanimously re-elected Director General due to the disproportionate amount of financial influence America had over the OPCW.
“[I]n March of 2002, Bustani survived a US-led motion calling for a vote of no confidence in his leadership,” Wallace writes. “Having failed in that effort, Washington increased the pressure, threatening to cut off funding for the organization — a significant threat given that the US underwrites 22 percent of the total budget. A little more than a month later, Bustani was out.”
“Bustani suggests US officials were particularly displeased with his attempts to persuade Iraq to sign the chemical weapons treaty, which would have provided for routine and unannounced inspections of Iraqi weapons plants,” Wallace reported. “Of course, the Bush White House has recently cited Iraq’s refusal to allow such inspections as one justification for a new attack on Saddam Hussein’s regime.”
“Of course, had Iraq [joined the OPCW], a door would be opened towards the return of inspectors to Bagdad and consequently a viable, peaceful solution to the impasse,” Bustani told Mother Jones. “Is that what Washington wants these days?”
Panel Finds Gaping Holes in OPCW Report on Alleged Syrian Chemical Attack https://t.co/BIMiz4J3eH
— Consortium News (@Consortiumnews) October 29, 2019
Bustani told Mother Jones that he was already seeing a shift in the OPCW into alignment with US interests. Again, this was back in 2002.
“The new OPCW, after my ousting, is already undergoing radical structural changes, along the lines of the US recipe, which will strike a definitive blow to the post of the Director General, making it once and for all a mere figurehead of a sham international regime,” he said.
“Bustani traces the shift to the influence of several hawkish officials in the Bush State Department, particularly Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, John Bolton,” Wallace wrote.
Indeed, we’ve learned since that Bolton took it much further than that. Bustani reported to The Intercept last year that Bolton literally threatened to harm his children if he didn’t resign from his position as Director General.
“You have 24 hours to leave the organization, and if you don’t comply with this decision by Washington, we have ways to retaliate against you,” Bolton reportedly told him, adding after a pause, “We know where your kids live. You have two sons in New York.”
The Intercept reports that Bolton’s office did not deny Bustani’s claim when asked for comment.
It is worth noting here that John Bolton was serving in the Trump administration as National Security Advisor throughout the entire time of the OPCW’s Douma investigation. Bolton held that position from April 9, 2018 to September 10, 2019. The OPCW’s Fact-Finding mission didn’t arrive in Syria until April 14 2018 and didn’t begin its investigation in Douma until several days after that, with its final report being released in March of 2019.
“We Know Where Your Kids Live” John Bolton threatened head of chemical weapons commission as part of effort launch war against Iraq https://t.co/p8uluxbWGH
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) April 2, 2018
It is perfectly reasonable, given all this, to suspect that the US government may have exerted some influence over the OPCW’s Douma investigation. If they were depraved enough to not only threaten to withdraw funding from a chemical weapons watchdog in order to attain their warmongering agendas but actually threaten a diplomat’s family, they’re certainly depraved enough to manipulate an investigation into an alleged chemical weapons attack. This would explain the highly suspicious omissions and discrepancies in its report.
It is a well-established fact that the US government has long sought regime change in Syria, not just in 2012 with Timber Sycamore and the official position of “Assad must go”, but even before the violence began in 2011. I’ve compiled multiple primary source pieces of evidence in an article you can read by clicking here that the US government and its allies have been planning to orchestrate an uprising in Syria exactly as it occurred with the goal of toppling Assad, and a former Qatari Prime Minister revealed on television in 2017 that the US and its allies were involved in that conflict from the very moment it first started.
So to recap, we know that the US government has manipulated the OPCW in order to advance regime change agendas in the past, and we know that the US government has long had a regime change agenda against Syria. Many questions will need to be answered before we can rule out the possibility that these two facts converged in an ugly way upon the OPCW’s Douma investigation.
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28 responses to “The USA’s History Of Controlling The OPCW To Promote Regime Change”
There are times when my blood boils; yes it is wrong to have evil thoughts, no matter how brief they are. All injustice is bad; this kind of treatment is a war crime:
“A Mockery of Justice”
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/10/30/mockery-justice-outrage-over-one-month-community-service-sentence-israeli-soldier
Invading a country and stealing its resources are not things a good government should be doing. The United States is, and has been for years, doing that inside Syria. Where is the outrage? Are we a nation of Pirates?
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/10/30/how-us-regime-justifies-theft-syrias-oil/
“there’s a major scandal unfolding with potentially far-reaching consequences for the entire international community”… yes, this OPCW stuff is bad, and the material above significant but:
the true scandal, already unfolded, and with far more reaching consequences is that US have now explicitly arrogated themselves and normalized, in the whole international community, not just their NATO minions or their economic lackeys, stunning silence, the right to imprison and\or kill whoever they don’t like, regardless their nationality and the location of the perceived crimes, no due process or legal strings attached, in a “new standard” of globalized law. And in doing that, even wish to maintain the high moral standpoint (see the reactions to Kashogghi murdering, and to the Skripal and Litvinenko affairs)… what a hypocrisy, make me puke!!!!
Iran often called the United States “The Great Satan”. At the time, I thought it was a crazy exaggeration. Now I know it was spot-on.
In the end, I am hoping Donald Trumps malignant legacy is recognized across the land as so rotten it will be like rich compost out of which good things can grow and thrive.
Donald Trump and the New, New World Order by John Grant
https://thiscantbehappening.net/donald-trump-and-the-new-new-world-order/
… Trump didn’t corrupt the OPCW. That was underway before his watch.
At least Trump openly rejected the conclusions of the intel elite when they concluded Russia meddled in U.S. elections; a huge splash of political capital to try and keep the peace with Russia.
The OPCW doesn’t rate the same effort to defy as their conclusions don’t matter anymore.
Obama was worse. He did start the illegal invasion of Syria, and the only reason he didn’t instigate an even larger war on Syria is that the public was adamantly opposed to it.
Hi Caitlin,
I believe the Syria ISIS, White Helmet seed has germinated and is growing roots as to who actually funded, trained and supported the real terrorists in Syria. Time to move on and let the folks know about who we were actually supporting in the Ukraine, any surviving WWII veteran would go crazy. We were actually funding, training and supporting REAL flippin NAZI’s in the Ukraine. Not made up pretend NAZI’s like here in the US, real hardcore NAZI’s.
Time to let some folks know the truth about who our allies were in the Ukraine.
The allies in Ukraine are the (US)CIA, (US)Noodleman Kagan, (US)Pratt, (US)Volker, (US)Biden and ukrainian hardcore real NAZIS and members of US Deep State.
Actually it is all about stealing moneys from USA Taxpayers.
They seemed to have been doing OK stealing from the IMF as well.
re the possibility of President Pence — does it make anyone else nervous to think that the nuclear button will be in the hands of someone who thinks he will be “raptured” up to heaven when the world ends???
The ” neocons ” are the ones that are nervous. They are convinced that World War III is inevitable. They are also convinced that the longer they wait to start it; the worse it will be for our side because while we are getting weaker the Russians and the Chinese are getting stronger with better weapons than ours. These yahoos are hellbent on war.
In the latest from Jimmy Dore, posted yesterday, he goes over an interview with a Reagan administration guy on Fox News. He said something about a well established hoax just after 2 minutes in – was he talking about Douma?
We who had been following the sanctions on Iraq knew at the time that Bustani was force out of the OPSW because he was on the verge of getting Saddam Hussein to sign the convention and subject Iraq to regular and deep inspections, thus removing the excuse for US attack. There is no possibility that Colin Powell was not aware of this fact even as he made his speech in front of the UN. And Bush. None of these people are that stupid, even W.
whatever is already known to the world is 100 times more than what constitutes war crimes and warrants death sentences to all the war crimminals, from top to bottom.
“Many questions will need to be answered before we can rule out the possibility that these two facts converged in an ugly way upon the OPCW’s Douma investigation.”
Could read,
We can confirm that these two facts converged in an ugly way upon the OPCW’s Douma investigation.”
https://youtu.be/QruiMO4LR8I
“Many questions will need to be answered before we can rule out the possibility that these two facts converged in an ugly way upon the OPCW’s Douma investigation.”
Huhhh, the facts are not enough??
https://youtu.be/QruiMO4LR8I
From Thomas Babington Macaulay, Letter to Henry Stephens Randall [1857]
Either some Caesar or Napoleon will seize the reins of government with a strong hand, or your republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste by barbarians in the twentieth century as the Roman Empire was in the fifth, with this difference, that the Huns and Vandals who ravaged the Roman Empire came from without, and that your Huns and Vandals will have been engendered within your own country by your own institutions.
In much the same way that the Empire employs the ‘carrot and stick’, i.e., money and intimidation/brute force to control watchdog organizations like the OPCW, it has both muted and perverted the journalistic standards of several formerly independent ‘alternative’ media outlets, leaving free-thinking truth seekers an increasingly endangered species. At its core, this represents nothing less than a concerted assault, unprecedented in human history, on our most basic cognitive processes: attention, perception, memory, language, learning, and reasoning. For lack of a pre-existing term, we can call it “cogicide”.
Thank you, Caitlin, for diligently and scrupulously walking us through these functions, reinforcing and encouraging the use of the most valuable tools that we possess to ‘Be Here Now”; to both feel and process the experience of being a human member of Earth’s interdependent Family of Life today. And most importantly, thank you for empowering and encouraging us to act “response-ably” in the media of our own human interactions, by our sheer numbers, to defend all that we love from those who seek to destroy it for all that they vainly desire.
Let’s make that “cognicide” – a much better term, I think, for the imperialist goal of absolute power by controlling not only what happens, but what we think about what happens. Thanks also for that insight, Caitlin. As you’ve noted, it’s a difficult program for the EM (Empire Maintenance) people to manage, given all the new information we have access to that punches large holes in the Masters’ Narrative. However, as I have discovered on a personal level and much to my chagrin, many people cling to The American Dream and MAGA as part of their automatic psychological response to cognitive dissonance, the feeling of discomfort and stress that arises when one’s deeply held beliefs are brought into question or contradicted by new evidence. Because of our innate tendency to avoid stress (or change of any kind), we tend to follow the path of least resistance in response to this stress by discounting the new information: US war crimes, political corruption, predatory pedophilia, whatever. But the accompanying response, going one step further, is often to regard the new information as a personal attack on our blissful ignorance, and “shoot the messenger” in a variety of ways, all of which are either encouraged, supported, contracted out, or directly implemented by one or more branches of the EM.
Compounding the problem, once again as you’ve noted, is the glaring truth that people who would commit mass murder and destroy the planet to feed their insatiable greed and lust for power are bat-shit crazy, psychopathic, to use the proper clinical term. And psychopaths, because they live only in the reality they’ve created, do not experience cognitive dissonance, unfazed even when confronted by clear evidence of the counter-productive, destructive, ultimately suicidal consequences of their own actions. Their confidence is infectious, even to their victims, who may even come to idolize them while suffering under their abuse – equally applicable to battered spouses and citizens of a once-democratic fascist state.
Oh, it turns out that the term “cognicide” is already out there. Ironically, it’s the title of the first album put out by the group Western Addiction. Really. I Googled it.
The name John Bolton should never again be written or uttered without adding
John “I know where your kids live” Bolton
I have to admit that I am waiting to hear if Mr. Bolton is the one that puts the deep knife into the back of Donald Trump to effect ” a regime change ” to President Pence so that the war with Iran can begin.
I read Ms Johnstone’s article today after reading this earlier:
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/10/29/wikileaks-reveals-opcw-falsified-reports-to-blame-syrian-government-instead-of-western-backed-jihadis/
This article below is very sad, but it reflects just how dysfunctional our species is:
But where did the child end up?
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/10/29/no-hope-for-kurds-40-million-people-without-country/
I had a nightmare that Bloody vaGina Haspel hopped a tail numberless rendition flight to HMP Belmarsh, where she made Julian Assange look in a mirror while she extracted his teeth with her fingers (silver lining: he no longer needs root canals). Mike Pompouseo was wearing a gimp mask and masturbating in the corner. When I awoke, I was devastated by the realization that reality is even worse. “Lady” Arbuthsnot and Vanessa Beratesher make Roger Waters’ “The Wall” look like Schoolhouse Rock’s “I’m Just A Bill”.
i’m afraid you’re still more optimistic than i am…
Forgive me, I just remembered a few more details from my nightmare. It was CIA/Clinton/Dershowitz/Epstein/Mossad/Trump’s “Lolita Express”, repurposed under the guise of civil asset forfeiture. Modifications were minimal: a waterboard in the lavatory, naso-gastric tubes and Ensure in the galley, an insect-filled overhead bin, and flight manifest ink pens were upgraded to pencils with erasers. The hidden recording equipment and fuselage-mounted stress position eyebolts were untouched.
CIA 5412 Commission, formed in 1954, allowed extrajudicial assassinations with just approval of the “Majestic Twelve and the vice president, creating plausible deniability for the president. Tricky Dick assassinated dozens, LBJ quite a few and would have approved JFK snuff, as well as later MLK and RFK hits. The Mockingbird media was prepared to promote the lone gunman hoax in each case. The ruse continues….
“Did Zionists & Kurds Schlong PDJT” by Robert David Steele at phibetaiota(.)net
And let’s not forget the OPCW’s involvement with the “Skripal affair” last year. God only knows what the real truth is behind that story.