OPCW Whistleblower Ian Henderson Gives New Details On Western Manipulation Over Syria.

Ian Henderson, Formerly of the OPCW, Gives New Details On How The West Manipulated The Organization To Justify The Dirty War In Syria.

The New York Times described the CIA’s regime change program in Syria, code-named Timber Sycamore, as “one of the costliest covert action programs in the history of the C.I.A” and “one of the most expensive efforts to arm and train rebels since the agency’s program arming the mujahedin in Afghanistan during the 1980s”.

From 2012-2017, the CIA armed and trained jihadist-aligned rebels in Syria, spending “a budget approaching $1 billion a year” or “$1 of every $15 in the CIA’s overall budget,” according to the Washington Post.

Following the covert CIA war, the United States placed crippling sanctions on Syria and occupied its oil and wheat-rich areas in the North East, hoping it would crush Syrian society and eventually lead to regime change.

In 2019, Defense Department official Dana Stroul bragged that “one-third of Syrian territory was owned via the US military,” which she described as “the resource-rich, economic powerhouse of Syria where the hydrocarbons are”.

She bragged that this, along with sanctions that block “reconstruction aid,” and kept Syria in “rubble,” were designed to lead to regime change in Syria.

Reporting on the sanctions in 2023 on the ground, journalist Charles Glass wrote, “Damascus reminded me of Baghdad on my many trips there between the war over Kuwait in 1991 and the American invasion in 2003. In those years, the US, the EU, and the UN were enforcing similar restrictions based on their conviction that economic hardship would destabilize Saddam Hussein’s regime or compel a hungry populace to depose him. In Iraq then, as in Syria now, the regime flourished and people starved.”

Writing about the sanctions in 2024, the Washington Post wrote :

American and European Union sanctions aimed at punishing the regime of President Bashar al-Assad have weakened the medical system that millions of Syrians rely on — preventing hospitals from maintaining or importing lifesaving diagnostic machines and making it more difficult to provide timely treatment to the wounded and the sick.

MRI and CT scanners have fallen out of service and are hard to replace. Laboratories lack equipment. The domestic pharmaceutical industry that once covered up to 90 percent of the local market has all but collapsed, leaving pharmacy shelves filled with imported, expensive, and sometimes poor-quality drugs.

In the days after Assad fled, Syrians finally learned how well the family had lived. Rooms were topped with crystal chandeliers, and basements were full of luxury cars. The powerful had found their way around the sanctions, it seemed; the public, meanwhile, had been left to suffer.

The regime change operations eventually worked in 2024, with former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad being overthrown and replaced by Ahmed al-Sharaa, the “former” leader of Syria’s Al Qaeda branch, who went on to oversee a number of sectarian massacres against Syria’s minority population.

Despite this, the U.S. and UK have completely normalized with him, with Donald Trump praising his “very strong past” and UK foreign secretary David Lammy saying he will “build a stable, more secure, and prosperous future for all Syrians”.

One of the main talking points to justify this regime change operation was the charge that Bashar al-Assad “gassed his own people,” normally a reference to three contentious chemical attacks that took place in Ghouta in 2013, Khan Shaykhoun in 2017, and Douma in 2018, and which rebel groups and Western governments blamed on the Assad government.

These accusations were bolstered by a series of reports from the OPCW (Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons), an ostensibly neutral chemical weapons watchdog.

But since 2018, a number of whistleblowers- most notably Ian Henderson, formerly one of the organization’s top inspectors- have alleged that the West co-opted the organization in order to bolster their narrative on Syria.

Henderson has just released a new article on journalist Aaron Mate’s Substack, where he gives new details on this U.S. manipulation, noting that, “The widely disseminated narrative that Bashar al-Assad ‘gassed his own people’ was essential for justifying the isolation and delegitimation of the former Syrian government, underpinning the United States and its allies’ ultimately successful policy of regime change.”

Henderson writes that the U.S., UK, and France manipulated the OPCW to put out reports bolstering their narrative, even noting that the leadership of the OPCW told the team, “we’ve been told by the first floor that we have to make it sound like we found something” in reference to the Douma attack.

Giving an Invitation for A False Flag.

The Western discussion around chemical weapons use in Syria began in 2012, when Obama was asked what would trigger U.S. military intervention in Syria, and he replied, “We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus”.

One former U.S. ambassador to the Middle East told journalist Charles Glass that this statement was taken by rebel groups in Syria as “an open invitation to a false-­flag operation”.

One of the earliest Chemical Weapons attacks that the United States blamed the Assad government for was the alleged Sarin attack in Khan al-Assal, which killed 16 Syrian government soldiers.

In an interview, Carla Del Ponte, who at the time was a member of the UN Independent Commission of Inquiry on Syria, said, “Our investigators have been in neighbouring countries interviewing victims, doctors and field hospitals and, according to their report of last week which I have seen, there are strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof of the use of sarin gas, from the way the victims were treated” and said, “this was used on the part of the opposition, the rebels, not by the government authorities”.

This strongly suggested that rebel groups in Syria had access to Sarin gas and were using it.

One year after the Khan al-Assal attack, a more brutal Sarin attack took place in the rebel-held town of Ghouta, which killed at least hundreds, if not over one thousand civilians, after rockets containing the nerve agent Sarin were launched into the territory.

The timing, however, brought questions as to who launched the rockets.

As Ian Henderson noted in his book, “The Syria Scam: An Insider Look into Chemical Weapons, Geopolitics and the Fog of War” the OPCW “arrived in Damascus on 18 August 2013” and “started work on the 19th and continued on the following day,” after a request “by the Syrian government, for the UN to establish an impartial, independent mission to investigate an alleged chemical attack against Syrian government soldiers and civilians in Khan Al-Asal”, which Carla Del Ponte alleged was done by Rebels groups.

Then, as Henderson notes, “very late that night (or, rather, early in the morning of the 21st) while they were asleep in their Damascus hotel,” the Ghouta attack happened.

Henderson asks the obvious question, “Why would the Syrian government, having asked the UN to send a team of investigators, wait five months until the UN finally arrives, and then the following day commit a massive chemical attack with sarin on the outskirts of Damascus, right under the noses of the UN investigators?”

These are not the only questions surrounding the Ghouta attack. Journalist Seymour Hersh reported at the time that “One high-level intelligence officer, in an email to a colleague, called the administration’s assurances of Assad’s responsibility a ‘ruse’. The attack ‘was not the result of the current regime’, he wrote”.

Jeffery Goldberg in the Atlantic also later reported that “Director of National Intelligence James Clapper interrupted the president’s daily briefing to tell him that the intelligence on Syria’s use of sarin gas was ‘not a slam dunk’” which was a “carefully chosen term” in reference to when “CIA Director George Tenet infamously told President George W. Bush that intelligence leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a ‘slam dunk’.”

Jordanian journalist Yahya Ababneh went to Ghouta shortly after the attack and reported that , “from numerous interviews with doctors, Ghouta residents, rebel fighters and their families”, “many believe that certain rebels received chemical weapons via the Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, and were responsible for carrying out the deadly gas attack”.

Finally, a study of the rockets used in Ghouta done by MIT’s Theodore A. Postol and an analyst at the military contractor Tesla Laboratories, Richard M. Lloyd, found that the Sarin rockets “had a range of about three kilometers.”

Postal and Lloyd argued at the time that this suggests the rockets were “launched from fields” that were controlled by rebel groups.

Cover Ups At The OPCW.

Later allegations of Syrian government chemical attacks were often bolstered by reports from the OPCW.

But as Ian Henderson notes in his recent article, “the FFM (Fact Finding Mission) never went into Syria to get to the site of an alleged chemical attack. After the social media postings that in each case triggered allegations of an attack, all the later ‘evidence’ was handed over to the FFM, usually in Turkey, by the same militant enemies of the Syrian government that had filmed and reported the allegation. Most cases were littered with mysterious contradictions or uncertainties that were ignored or glossed over in FFM and IIT (Investigation and Identification Team) reports.”

Some of the early OPCW reports, especially those from the Investigation and Identification Team, which a number of OPCW inspectors have accused of putting out “politically motivated reports,” have blatantly contradictory statements.

For example, as Dr Piers Robinson, a former Chair/Professor in Politics at the University of Sheffield, has noted, one report on an alleged attack in Talmenes claims that one scene of the alleged attack was caused by “an explosive charge of 5 to 10kg TNT-equivalent buried in the ground” while the other was “sufficiently plausible to enable a conclusion that an actual chlorine attack had occurred”.

But as Robinson noted, this implies that “as one real attack was occurring, another one less than 100 metres away was being staged, complete with explosives buried in the ground,” which he noted is “quite literally, preposterous”.

After the Sarin attack in Khan Sheikhoun in 2017, which resulted in airstrikes from the UK, US, and France before an investigation, Ian Henderson notes in his book that, “I can state with confidence that, around 11 October 2017, after weeks of investigation, when the JIM team was on their way back to The Hague, having visited Damascus and the Shayrat airbase, they were certain about their findings. They were convinced that the release of sarin had not been a result of a bomb dropped from a Syrian Su-22 jet.”

However, as he noted, the final report from the JIM (Joint Investigative Mechanism, later renamed the IIT) reversed this conclusion.

Henderson notes, “Then, over the next week and a half, as described to me, ‘something changed’. I don’t know exactly what, but I wonder whether it included political pressure and the receipt of new ‘expert assessments’, and they had to make a call. The call was described by a key person as ‘the most difficult decision of my life’, suggesting that the conclusions were far from clear. Perhaps it could have gone either way.”

The Douma Cover-Up

The most extensively documented instance of a cover-up at the OPCW was the Douma case in 2018, where the U.S., UK, and France bombed Syria over allegations of a chlorine attack.

This time, as Henderson notes, “was the first and only time that the FFM got the scene of an alleged chemical attack in Syria that was attributed to government forces,” which “represents a test case where the most direct information was collected at the scenes”.

The original report found many things that called the official narrative into question, most notably comments from toxicology experts who looked at the symptoms of victims at the scene and argued that “there was no correlation between the symptoms and chlorine exposure”.

Furthermore, an engineering study commissioned by Henderson found that the chlorine cylinders found at the scene were “manually placed at the two locations rather than delivered from aircraft”.

Using an FEA simulation, experts found that the damage to the cylinder in one of the locations was not consistent with the damage to the roof.

Pictured Above: What the cylinder looked like at the scene (top) vs what it should have looked like if it was dropped by helicopter and caused the crater on the roof below it, according to the FEA simulation (bottom).

As Henderson notes in his book, “No FEA simulations, either from the FFM report or engineering studies, replicated the characteristics of the observed crater underside. Engineers and ballistics experts I consulted (the latter from both within the Secretariat and outside) were unanimous in identifying the crater as more likely having been formed by an explosive mechanism, thought to be probably a mortar bomb, artillery shell or rocket artillery round”.

Despite the investigation raising huge questions around the massacre in Douma, Henderson notes that “during a meeting, an instruction (was) relayed to me, that ‘we’ve been told by the first floor that we have to make it sound like we found something’”.

In his book, Henderson recounts that an American inspector told him, “DG (Director General) says we need something positive to imply it was a CW (Chemical Weapons) attack to maintain credibility”.

He noted that after this, there was a “secret rewriting of the Douma Interim Report without the team’s knowledge or consent, after it had been submitted for release.”

He noted that “the altered report, fortuitously intercepted, had been aimed at already locking in government forces’ accountability for the alleged attack”.

Also around this time, an American delegation visited the OPCW Douma team in an attempt to convince them of the U.S. narrative on Douma.

U.S. manipulation at the OPCW in Syria is just one of the many instances of the West manipulating and co-opting international organizations in an attempt to use them to bolster a pro-war narrative.

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