As mainstream journalists acknowledge Douma attacks were “staged,” the “humanitarian” Syria regime-change network tries to save a sinking ship
There
is increasing desperation on the part of the “humanitarian”
regime-change network to protect its influence and the power of its
narratives, not just in Syria but in future conflicts.
by
Whitney Webb and Vanessa Beeley
Part
1
Over the
past few days, notable journalists and other figures in mainstream
media have acknowledged that the alleged chemical weapons attack that
occurred last April in the Damascus suburb of Douma, Syria was likely
“staged” by “activist” groups such as the White
Helmets. Their comments and investigations have largely vindicated
the many journalists and academics who cast aspersions on the
precipitous Western media campaign to blame that alleged attack on
the Syrian government. Many of the dissenting voices were derided
as “conspiracy theorists” or ignored entirely by mainstream
sources.
Yet, now
that these revelations are being voiced by acceptable figures in
mainstream media, those who have built their careers on promoting the
White Helmets and regime change in Syria are working to discredit
these new dissenting voices. Among those on the counter-attack are
individuals connected to the oligarch-funded “humanitarian”
regime-change network that was the subject of a recent MintPress
exposé.
The
alleged Douma attack — notably used as the justification for a
military attack launched against Syria by the U.S., the U.K. and
France — returned to the news cycle earlier this month following a
report from James Harkin, a journalist who has written for The
Guardian, Harper’s and the Financial Times, and
is currently the director of the Center for Investigative
Journalism. Harkin’s report, which was published in The
Intercept, cast doubt on the prevailing mainstream narrative
surrounding the events that occurred in Douma last April.
Harkin,
in visiting Douma and the surrounding area, confirmed past reporting
by other independent journalists that no sarin gas had been used —
which was also confirmed by the OPCW (Organisation for the
Prohibition of Chemical Weapons) interim report — and claimed that
the scenes filmed at the Medical Point in Douma, which were widely
circulated by the mainstream media as evidence that a chemical
weapons attack had occurred, had likely been staged. Harkin lamented
the staging of the hospital scenes as a casualty of “Syria’s
propaganda war.”
Elements
of Harkin’s rather rambling report were rapidly corroborated by BBC
producer Riam Dalati, who revealed on Twitter that he had proof,
after a six-month investigation, that those same hospital scenes had
been staged.
Dalati
had previously been the cause of some consternation among the
pro-regime-change pundits when he had tweeted, immediately after the
alleged Douma chemical attack, that he was “sick and tired of
activists and rebels using the corpses of dead children to stage
emotive scenes for Western consumption.” Dalati was referring
to the image of two children wrapped in a “last hug” that
went viral on social media, eliciting sympathy for the “chemical
attack” narrative.
Dalati
pointed out that the two children had been photographed on separate
floors in the building before being artfully arranged into the “last
hug” position by the producers of this scene, which was picked
up by the majority of corporate media and used to give the impression
that the Syrian Arab Army had used chemical weapons against their own
civilians as they were concluding final amnesty negotiations with
Jaish Al Islam, the extremist group then occupying Douma.
Shortly
after deleting the aforementioned tweet, Dalati protected his Twitter
account before reiterating his observations in a less inflammatory
tweet, while explaining that his first tweet had been “correctly
deemed in breach of [BBC] editorial policy thru [sic] use of
‘sick/tired’ and by not providing context…”
Dalati
had notably been a member of the production team of the notorious
September 2013 BBC Panorama documentary “Saving Syria’s Children”
— a report that was forensically investigated by independent
researcher Robert Stuart, who concluded that “sequences filmed
by BBC personnel and others at Atareb Hospital, Aleppo on 26 August
2013 purporting to show the aftermath of an incendiary bomb attack on
a nearby school are largely, if not entirely, staged.”
So,
Dalati, no stranger to controversy, appears to have once more broken
with the ranks of mainstream media by admitting that the White Helmet
“chemical attack” scenes in Douma Medical Point were “without
a doubt” staged. One might ask why it took Dalati six months of
investigation to arrive at the same conclusion as acclaimed
journalist Robert Fisk and other on-the-ground journalists did just
days after the attack occurred. At the time, those journalists had
been labeled by Dalati and others as “conspiracy theorists.”
However,
the recent statements made by Dalati and Harkin’s recent report
have hardly created a consensus regarding the alleged chemical
weapons attack in Douma within the mainstream media. Instead, much
the opposite has happened, with journalists and “experts” who
have linked their professional reputations to the credibility of
groups like the US/UK incubated and financed White Helmets now going
on the offensive in an effort to trivialize the recent revelations
regarding the events of April 7, 2018.
Following
the renewed interest in the Douma incident as a result of Harkin’s
report and Dalati’s subsequent tweets, Tobias Schneider — a
research fellow at the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPI) —
accused people like Harkin and Dalati of “squabbling over the
intricacies” of the alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma,
later calling these independent investigations and statements
“madness.”
We must
presume that Schneider’s Twitter accusation would also be directed
at genuinely independent journalists and academics who presented
evidence to counter the dominant Douma narratives produced by the
usual suspects in corporate media and groups like the White Helmets
affiliated to Jaish Al Islam, the brutal armed group in control of
Douma. Among those are journalists who actually visited Douma
immediately after the attack — Vanessa Beeley, Eva Bartlett, Robert
Fisk of the Independent, Uli Gack from ZDF, Germany and Pearson Sharp
of OAN (One America News Network). Also, potentially in Schneider’s
crosshairs are the members of the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda
Media (WGSPM) established by Professor Piers Robinson who produced an
extensive briefing scrutinizing the media anomalies in the Douma
attack.
Unwilling
to stop there, Schneider also announced that the GPPI would be
publishing the first analytical study “on the logic underpinning
the Syrian regime’s systematic use of improvised chlorine bombs in
particular” that would use “the broadest dataset
compilable and break down tactical, operational, strategic patterns”
in order to claim that, despite a lack of evidence for chemical
weapons use in Douma last year, other separate incidents form a
pattern that would incriminate the Syrian government in the events
alleged to have taken place last April. The report has now been
published and has been picked up by the usual purveyors and promoters
of the “chemical attack” narratives that are designed to
criminalize the Syrian government.
A look
into Schneider’s background and the organization that employs him
hardly paints a picture of an objective observer of the evidence
surrounding this hot-button issue. Quite the contrary, Schneider
and the GPPI are directly connected to the “humanitarian”
regime-change network that was exposed in a recent MintPress
series for its efforts to exploit the death of the late MP Jo Cox in
order to manufacture consent for regime change in Syria and whitewash
both the U.K.-government connections to the White Helmets and the
White Helmets’ own troubling track record in facilitating and even
directly committing war crimes.
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