U.S. bomber prepares to launch a strike mission from Al Udeid AIr Base, Qatar, April 2018, in support of the multinational response to reports of Syria’s recent use of chemical weapons. (U.S. Air Force/Phil Speck)
But the German military toxicologists, who were consulted by the OPCW in June 2018, were more definite.
The Germans told the OPCW that the circumstances of the fatalities — apparent immediate death and collapse in piles at the center of two rooms, a failure to escape and rapid profuse foaming at the mouth and nose — were inconsistent with chlorine poisoning.
According to the then-head of the OPCW Laboratory, the experts even raised “the possibility of a staged attack” in Douma because “the circumstances of death for the victims do not match chlorine.”
While the Doom victims’ signs of rapid foaming are not consistent with exposure to chlorine gas, they are consistent with nerve agent exposure. But by that point, the OPCW’s chemical analysis had ruled out a sarin or any other nerve agent bomb as the killer because none of these chemicals, or any toxic chemicals for that matter, were found at the scene or in biomedical samples.
If the rapid and profuse frothing was not the result of a nerve agent or chlorine gas attack, the possibility existed that there was no chemical attack at all — and that insurgents staged the incident to frame the Syrian government. In this case, the OPCW would be dealing with a faked chemical attack that triggered U.S.-led airstrikes on Syria, and the unexplained deaths of more than 40 men, women, and children.
The Germans’ assessment was included in the Douma team’s initial report, which Whalen authored with the help of fellow experts and, after peer approval including the team leader, prepared for publication in June 2018. But senior OPCW officials subverted that document and tried to rush out a replacement, doctored version that falsely claimed evidence of chemical weapons use.
Whelan thwarted the release of the bogus substitute only after discovering it at the last minute and sending an email of protest. But when the final report was released in March 2019, after Whelan had departed the organization, the OPCW again excluded any mention of the Germans’ expert opinions, or even that they had been consulted.
Instead, the report claimed that there were “reasonable grounds that the use of a toxic chemical as a weapon took place. The toxic chemical was likely molecular chlorine [chlorine gas].”
Had the Germans’ findings been published, they would have explicitly contradicted this conclusion.
(Via The Grayzone)
In an August 2019 email, Whelan asked two OPCW officials who had accompanied him to Germany if they would join him in raising concerns about the suppression of the toxicologists’ findings.
“At a minimum a satisfactory explanation has to be provided,” Whelan wrote.
But the OPCW has never offered a rebuttal to the initial toxicology assessment, nor an explanation for why it was concealed.
Another OPCW report on the Douma incident, released in January 2023 by the organization’s Investigation and Identification Team (IIT), claimed to have consulted with a different, unidentified toxicologist and asserted that the “symptoms of the victims are, overall, consistent with exposure to chlorine gas in very high concentrations.”
But as I reported at the time, and discussed in a presentation to the United Nations, the IIT report limited the toxicologist’s scope of assessment to just the “accounts” of a cherry-picked selection of alleged witnesses. Moreover, the IIT’s toxicologist failed to address the frothing seen on dead victims in the videos in Douma, as well as the Germans’ assessment that this was inconsistent with exposure to chlorine gas.
To date, no recognized toxicologist has gone on record to state that the Douma victims’ visible symptoms and reported rapid deaths are consistent with chlorine gas exposure.
In the halls of power, the IIT’s report was treated as a vindication of the chemical attack allegation in Douma, which was integral to the broader U.S.-led regime change campaign that toppled the government of Bashar al-Assad in December 2024.
The State Department and its British, French, and German counterparts hailed the IIT’s findings and touted what they called “the independent, unbiased, and expert work of the OPCW staff.”
Establishment media followed suit. Major outlets — including the BBC, Reuters, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post — approvingly covered the IIT report while omitting any mention of the OPCW’s Douma cover-up controversy.
In an illustrative act of denialism, the Post ignored the dissenting inspectors and reduced skepticism of the official narrative to “a disinformation campaign by the Russian state and a number of high-profile online activists.” These voices, the Post falsely added, even claimed that “children seen foaming at the mouth were faking their symptoms.”
In reality, the fakery came with the censorship of expert German toxicologists who ruled out chlorine gas as the cause of those symptoms and casualties. As a direct consequence of Whelan taking legal action, the OPCW has finally admitted that it suppressed this critical information in the still-unresolved probe into how dozens of people in Douma lost their lives.
Aaron Maté is a journalist and producer. He hosts Pushback with Aaron Maté on The Grayzone. In 2019, Maté was awarded the Izzy Award (named after I.F. Stone) for outstanding achievement in independent media for his coverage of Russiagate in The Nation magazine. Previously, he was a host/producer for The Real News and Democracy Now!
This article is from The Grayzone.
