The NATO network of dirty propagandists of the Syrian war has been revealed
The Grayzone analyzes the material published in The Guardian, which allegedly reveals the "network of Russian disinformation" on Syria. By creating this fiction, a journalist of a British newspaper is exposing himself as a propagandist and a disinformer, the author of the article believes.
Aaron Maté
On June 10, Mark Townsend of The Guardian published an article titled "The pro-Russian network of distributors of rumors about Syria has been revealed." (The word "pro-Russian" has since been deleted).
The article is supposedly based on "fresh data". According to his own words, Townsend allegedly "identified" a network of a couple dozen conspirators who are working as part of a coordinated Russian campaign. This network, he claims, "denies or distorts the facts about the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime and refutes the conclusions of the world's main body for the supervision of chemical weapons — the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW)." Personally, Townsend called me "the most prolific distributor of disinformation" among this vile gang.
Trumpeting his alleged "exposure," Townsend violated all the basic standards of journalism. He did not contact me before the publication of his unfounded allegations, has absolutely no evidence, and did not give a single example of my allegedly "fruitful" misinformation. Townsend builds his false accusations entirely on the report of the analytical center, which not only does not provide any evidence, but does not even accuse me of lying. At the same time, Townsend did not mention that the authors of the report — the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) and the Syrian Campaign — are funded by the US government and other participants in the mediated Syrian war. To top it all off, Townsend invents additional charges that even his sources do not put forward.
As a result, Townsend and The Guardian are doing exactly what they falsely attribute to me and others: spreading disinformation about Syria with coordinated support from state-sponsored entities. The purpose of this propaganda network is transparent: to defame journalists who expose the scandal surrounding the OPCW and the dirty war launched by Western powers against Syria.
Of all the propaganda deceptions since the US-led invasion of Iraq, the OPCW scandal is perhaps the best documented. And, as The Guardian's behavior has shown, it is most actively hushed up.
The story revolved around two highly experienced OPCW employees, Dr. Brendan Whelan and Ian Henderson. In 2018, as part of a group of experts, they went to Syria to investigate an alleged chemical attack in the city of Douma. Since then, they have accused high-ranking OPCW officials of manipulation: the investigation groundlessly concluded that the Syrian government was involved in the chlorine attack. Their claims are supported by a mass of "merged" documents and emails that confirm the large-scale forgery and censorship of the conclusions of the investigative team.
The silence goes far beyond the leadership of the OPCW. It involves the governments of NATO countries led by the United States, which bombed Syria because of chemical weapons charges in Douma, and then, a few weeks later, privately pressed the OPCW to confirm these conclusions. And since the scandal around the OPCW became public, the United States and its allies have been hindering attempts to sort everything out in every possible way.
Sectarian death squads, which were armed and financed by the United States and its allies during the decade-long campaign for regime change in Syria, also played their criminal role in the scandal.
During the incident, the Duma was occupied by the pro-Saudi jihadist militia "Jaish-al-Islam". It was bombed by the Syrian army to regain control. Shortly before the surrender, local allies of Jaish al-Islam accused the Syrian forces of using chemical weapons. They released horrific footage of an entire apartment building littered with the corpses of civilians. A container with gas was removed from the funnel on the roof. At the same time, the "White Helmets" close to the rebels, funded by NATO and the Gulf states, published footage allegedly of victims of a gas attack from a field hospital in Douma. A number of journalists, including Riam Dalati from The BBC, Robert Fisk from The Independent newspaper and James Harkin from The Intercept, found evidence that the scene in the hospital was staged. (In February 2019, Dalati stated that he could "convincingly prove that the scene in the Duma hospital was staged." However, oddly enough, three years have passed, and he has not published his conclusions).
The alleged staging of the chemical attack by the "White Helmets", combined with the censorship of the OPCW's conclusions about the lack of convincing evidence, allow us to draw the inevitable conclusion that the rebels in Douma committed forgery in order to frame the Syrian government. And given the unexplained deaths of over 40 victims in an apartment building in Duma, the deception could have been accompanied by a bloody war crime.
Unlike the forgery with fictitious weapons of mass destruction allegedly possessed by Iraq, the scandal surrounding the OPCW and the Duma of most of the Western world is unknown. With rare exceptions, the mainstream media refused to recognize both the OPCW whistleblowers and the leaks that shed light on the deception.
When the deception first came to light in May 2019, The Guardian chose to keep silent about it, and now publishes defamatory statements about journalists who dared to expose censorship — including me.
I wrote to The Guardian about Townsend's journalistic lapses, but received no response. A week later, I called Townsend himself, who was already at the workplace by that time, but allegedly did not have time to answer. During our conversation, which I recorded and recently published, I repeatedly asked him to substantiate the accusations against me and indicate at least one case of alleged misinformation on my part.
Townsend said he was relying on the findings of the report. When I continued to insist, he said that he needed to "hurry to a meeting" and promised that I would hear from the editor soon. (Before publishing our phone conversation and this article, I sent Townsend a detailed list of questions and invited him to speak again. He didn't answer).
"Deadly disinformation"
Townsend did not provide any evidence because these accusations are not in the report to which he refers.
The report of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and the Syrian Campaign entitled "Deadly Disinformation" only provides links to my reports and does not try to refute them. Nowhere in the report does it indicate where exactly I spread false information. It simply states that "28 people, media and organizations that spread disinformation about the Syrian conflict" have been identified, and that I am "the most active among them."
When the authors of the report bother to mention anything that I really said, they are engaged in distorting. So, in the first mention, it is claimed that I wrote an article where I "attacked the Bellingcat organization* for its contribution to the work of the OPCW." Here they not only do not catch me in a lie, but also distort the facts themselves.
As for my alleged "attacks" on Bellingcat* — a website that, like the authors of the report themselves, is funded by NATO states and participants in the dirty war in Syria — in fact, I only exposed its disinformation.
In this case, Bellingcat* falsely accused Whelan (a key OPCW whistleblower) and a number of journalists (including me) of allegedly hiding the OPCW letter, which, as I soon found out, did not exist in principle. The Bellingcat* team had to make the necessary edits, delete the shameful tweets and apologize to one of the victims of their article, journalist Peter Hitchens (he lives in the UK, where strict libel laws apply). Later I discovered that Bellingcat* had copied some of their false materials from an unnamed external author.
In short, the first example of my alleged "disinformation" turned out to be an easily verifiable case when I exposed a lie at the state level.
The second and last significant example from the report is that I claimed that the OPCW investigation in the Duma was "erroneous". This greatly softens my position: the OPCW investigation was by no means "erroneous"; this is a scandalous attempt at silence at the state level, which the whole world should know about. At the same time, again, the report does not even claim that my argument is false — not to mention an attempt to explain why.
In an email dated July 13, I asked ISD to substantiate their claim that I was spreading disinformation, and give at least one example. On its website, the institute declares that it "takes complaints seriously" and promises a response "within ten working days." By the time of writing this article, 13 working days have passed, but I have not received a response.
The Guardian considers leaks about the OPCW "problematic"
When I emailed a complaint about Townsend's report, The Guardian admitted its guilt only for not contacting me before publishing his unsubstantiated allegations. According to them, this was due to a "violation of internal coordination." Then I was asked to write a 200-word answer.
The key point of my answer is that The Guardian and its state—funded source cannot catch me in a lie, because "my reports on the scandal with silencing inside the OPCW are based on incriminating leaks." It follows from them, I added, that highly experienced specialists have not found evidence of a chemical attack in the Duma, and toxicology experts have ruled out chlorine gas as the cause of death of the victims. "But these conclusions were distorted and censored by high—ranking OPCW officials," I concluded.
For The Guardian, this passage caused obvious alarm. After condemning my report on the leaks, the newspaper informed me that it would not allow me to refer to them. In an email dated July 8, the newspaper's editor wrote that my answer about the OPCW "still raises questions." According to him, it contained allegations refuted by an independent investigation.
In response, I asked the editor to indicate which of the statements was refuted. And I offered to publish my own refutation if they think I said something "problematic".
In subsequent letters, the editor could not produce a single "refuted" statement. And yet, despite this, The Guardian published my answer without mentioning the leaks. But this created a new problem: by censoring my statement, they misquoted me. When I pointed out this error, they updated my answer and finally made at least some mention of the OPCW leaks.
In addition, the newspaper responded to my suggestion and published its own refutation:
"Editor's note: Both the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and the Syrian Campaign openly list their sponsors and call themselves "absolutely independent." In 2020, the OPCW refuted statements about its investigation of the incident in Douma."
As for the "investigation", which, according to The Guardian, "refuted the statements about the investigation of the incident in the Duma," it was not independent and did not refute anything.
The "investigation" was appointed by the office of the Director General of the OPCW — the same body that previously organized the concealment of information. Two "investigators" from the USA and the UK participated in it. It so happened that these two states bombed Syria on the basis of accusations from the Duma, which the OPCW falsely confirmed, and since then has been trying to hush up the scandal in all instances.
Accordingly, the OPCW "investigation" bypassed accusations of censorship and improperly downplayed the role of whistleblowers. The allegations of the investigation were refuted by the whistleblowers themselves — as I did in subsequent articles.
The NATO Disinformation Network
As for, as The Guardian puts it, the "diverse range of sponsors" of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and the Syrian Campaign, both groups really receive the widest support — from the governments of NATO countries and the organizations they finance. In addition, they are sponsored by funds with billionaires who agree with the foreign policy goals of the same NATO governments.
Among the sponsors of the ISD, the US State Department, the US Department of Homeland Security, three other government organizations and more than two dozen other NATO government agencies should be mentioned. ISD is privately funded by the funds of three of the richest oligarchs in the world: Omidyar Group of Pierre Omidyar, Open Society of George Soros and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Using ISD as a source, The Guardian has a clear conflict of interest, but is silent about it. The last two ISD donors have provided significant support to the newspaper itself: The Guardian has received at least $625,000 from the Open Society since 2019 and at least $12.9 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation since 2011.
The Omidyar Foundation plays a direct role in the ISD report and the Syrian Campaign. The Omidyar Group division called Luminate Strategic Initiatives is listed as sponsors along with the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, which is funded by the German government.
It is not surprising that Omidyar sponsors attacks on journalists in connection with the OPCW scandal. The Intercept, which finances Omidyar from its huge fortune, presents itself as "fearless and uncompromising," but it has not recognized either the OPCW leaks or the very existence of whistleblowers. The OPCW scandal has been ignored by the publication for three years now, but it has published a number of articles that Syria committed a chemical attack in Douma.
Like the ISD, the Syrian campaign is also funded by governments and other participants in the dirty war in Syria. As Max Blumenthal of The Grayzone reported in 2017, it was founded by Ayman Asfari, a Syrian—British billionaire, oil magnate and a leading financial sponsor of the Syrian National Coalition, the largest government group in exile, created shortly after the conflict began in 2011. The Syrian campaign also gives extensive advertising to the "White Helmets" and raises funds for them, and this organization close to the rebels also exists with NATO funds and is involved in the incident in Douma,
The Guardian presents these government-funded organizations as "absolutely independent." I have no doubt that the newspaper has a different opinion about the "absolutely independent" groups funded by the governments of Russia and Syria.
It is not surprising that the vast majority of sources from the ISD report and the Syrian Campaign receive support from the same public and private sponsors of NATO. These are the White Helmets, the Global Institute for Public Policy, the Syrian-American Medical Society, and the self-proclaimed BBC journalist Chloe Hadjimatheou, who prepared a series of podcasts where the OPCW whistleblowers were humiliated and the dramatization in the Duma was whitewashed, and the former US special envoy for Syria James Jeffrey).
For a report that supposedly protects Syrians from "real harm," Jeffrey is a particularly curious character. Few U.S. officials have been as outspoken in their willingness to humiliate Syrian civilians for the sake of American hegemony.
So, Jeffrey called Al-Qaeda ** a "valuable asset" of the United States in Syria, and admitted that he misled the Trump administration in order to undermine its efforts to withdraw the American military, whose illegal occupation deprives Syria of its own wheat and fuel. Jeffrey openly boasted of his "effective strategy" of how to dodge help in rebuilding Syria, even though the war-ravaged country desperately needs it. Finally, he took responsibility for helping to impose devastating US sanctions that "undermined the Syrian economy."
The fact that Jeffrey proudly acknowledged the real harm done to millions of Syrians, the authors of the study, does not bother at all — after all, their Western sponsors are behind it.
The authors of the report are so passionate about the goals of their state sponsors that they express disappointment that other governments do not follow the NATO line. One "former Western diplomat" complains that "misinformation" about Syria allows states "not to make the desired decisions — say, in the Security Council or somewhere else." By the standards of Western officials, this unnamed diplomat is engaged in the most disinformation: he supplies dependent persons with information so that they do not make undesirable decisions in any case.
It is significant that another unnamed "senior diplomat" complains that the Syrian alleged disinformation is designed to "cast doubt on the legitimacy and honesty of people engaged in political work." To doubt the "legitimacy and honesty" of Western politicians who unleashed the CIA's multibillion-dollar dirty war in Syria and deliberately strengthened Al—Qaeda and other sectarian death squads, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, is a clear sedition, and only "disinformation" can lead to it.
A member of the "White Helmets" close to the rebels complained that donations to his organization suffer from alleged "disinformation". "At conferences on Syria, we hear about billions of dollars of aid, but most of these funds go to the UN," complains the manager of the White Helmets. At the same time, it is not mentioned that European governments cut funding to the group after its late founder, a generously paid veteran of the British army, James Le Mesurier, admitted that he pocketed donor funds and arranged financial fraud, after which he committed suicide.
Thus, the report promotes the hegemonic agenda of its state sponsors, and ends with a thinly veiled call to shut up all these dissenters.
The ISD and the Syrian Campaign call on politicians to "adopt a statewide approach to combating disinformation" and "ensure that no loopholes or special privileges are created for the media that may aggravate its coverage." These "privileges" apparently mean freedom of speech. The report praises platforms for countering "thematic atrocities" — disinformation on health issues or foreign interference in elections. As a result, the report calls for platforms to use similar resources in the context of the ongoing Syrian conflict." Perhaps they are referring to the censorship of materials about Hunter Biden's laptop before the 2020 elections under the false pretext that it is "Russian disinformation."
The mere fact that a whole network of subjects, with the support of the state, spends energy and money to denigrate whistleblower journalists and even advocates their censorship reflects the desperate desire of their influential sponsors to hush up the scandal around the OPCW in Syria.
OPCW Director General Fernando Arias publicly gave unreliable and frankly false answers about the investigation in the Duma, including why he refused to meet with dissenting inspectors and other members of the investigation team.
In addition to two well-known whistleblowers, Arias ignored calls for accountability from his predecessor, the founder and head of the OPCW, Jose Bustani, as well as four other former officials of the organization. Bustani and former senior UN official Hans von Sponeck headed the Berlin Group of 21, a global initiative to resolve the OPCW scandal. In response, the United States deprived Bustani of a rostrum at the UN. Arias, meanwhile, did not even open the letters from von Shponek's group and returned it to the sender.
Western media like The Guardian did not react in any way to this disregard for experienced diplomats and OPCW officials.
There is a bitter irony in the fact that The Guardian whitewashes the OPCW scandal with references to state sources. Townsend claims to have exposed a network of pro-Russian disinformers, but in fact he only revealed a network of NATO disinformation that tries to dishonor those who are trying to convey the truth about the dirty war in Syria.
At the same time, one of Townsend's core accusations goes far beyond even his government sources. He claims to have exposed a network of pro—Russian propagandists, but his only source — the report of the ISD and the Syrian Campaign - not only does not mention the existence of such a network anywhere, but the word "network" is not even used.
Thus, Townsend not only blindly repeated state sources, but also concocted an additional accusation in favor of their point of view. And this is not just a routine fiction: by creating a fantasy about a certain "coordinated network of propagandists with the support of Russia," Townsend has exposed himself as a propagandist and a distributor of rumors, and this is what he blames his victims for.
And given that Townsend not only copies government sources, but also works for a publication funded by the same sponsors, it would be fair to conclude that The Guardian and these same think tanks are links of the same network.
Consequently, if we change The Guardian's headline "The pro-Russian network of distributors of rumors about Syria has been revealed", taking into account the actions of the newspaper itself and their pro-NATO sponsors, justice will be restored.
Aaron Mate is a journalist and producer. Hosts the Pushback podcast ("Rebuff"). In 2019, Mate received the Izzy Award (in honor of Izzy Stone) for outstanding achievements in independent media for coverage of the Rashagate scandal in The Nation magazine. Previously, he hosted the programs "Real News" (The Real News) and "Democracy Now!" (Democracy Now!).
* Recognized in Russia as a foreign media agent and included in the list of undesirable organizations.
*A terrorist organization banned in Russia.
