Reply With QuoteRemember the alleged Russian/Syrian chemical attack in Douma ? There was a hysterical reaction to it in the West, almost kicking off another world war with air strikes on Syria. I was very dubious about it, so was BT, so was journalist Peter Hitchens. The OPCW has produced it's report on the alleged attack, our government and media, in line with it's peculiar, self defeating ante-Russian stance has ignored it, so it's left to Hitchens to report the truth.
Back in April I was treated with something very like contempt because I refused to be rushed into supporting a Western attack on Syria.
This illegal assault was supposedly justified because of alleged gas attacks by the Syrian government in Douma.
As I said at the time, there was no independent evidence that this had actually happened, and also no good reason to rush into action.
The area affected had at that time been under the control of a savage Islamist militia, and so Western journalists and diplomats could not safely go there.
But lurid and distressing reports on the supposed atrocity were prepared by media organisations hundreds or thousands of miles away on the basis of material provided by propaganda sources. They were given great prominence.
Now, almost unreported, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has produced its first report on Douma. The OPCW is not perfect, and has sometimes got carried away, but on this occasion it has been properly cautious.
In April, a major and rather self-important Left-wing national newspaper wrote that unidentified doctors ‘said the symptoms had been consistent with exposure to an organophosphorus substance’.
Now the OPCW says: ‘No organophosphorus nerve agents or their degradation products were detected, either in the environmental samples or in plasma samples from the alleged casualties.’
Seems like Putin and Assad were telling the truth after all, whoever would have thought it ?
Originally Posted by oldcolner
