At UN, Aaron Maté debunks OPCW's Syria lies and confronts US, UK on cover-up

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Pushback with Aaron Maté

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4.7 • 594 Ratings

🗓️ 18 April 2021

⏱️ 28 minutes

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Summary

Support Pushback at Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/aaronmate [Note to listeners: this is audio of a visual presentation to the UN. To watch the video, go to: https://bit.ly/2Q6chHs] Speaking to the United Nations Security Council, Aaron Maté of The Grayzone takes apart the OPCW's excuses for refusing to address the organization's Syria cover-up scandal. OPCW inspectors found no evidence to support allegations of a Syrian government chemical weapons attack in the city of Douma in April 2018. But their findings were suppressed, and the team was sidelined. The OPCW leadership now claims that "most of the analytical work took place" in the "last six months" of the Douma investigation, when the original team was out of the picture. Comparing the OPCW's own published reports, Maté shows why that is demonstrably false. The bulk of the work was in fact carried out by the original team in the first weeks of the probe, and the “analytical work” conducted after their censorship is minor in scale and riddled with deceptions and unsupported conclusions. Maté also addresses a new claim by OPCW Director General Fernando Arias that "I don't know why" the OPCW's final Douma report "was contested." This is another demonstrably false claim, as Arias' own prior statements show. Maté also asks the US and UK ambassadors if they will support a new proposal from distinguished signatories -- including five former OPCW officials — to let the OPCW's own Scientific Advisory Board assess the claims of the dissenting inspectors. The US and UK Ambassadors left the meeting -- it is unclear when -- and so did not respond. Video: Aaron Maté's presentation to an Arria-Formula Meeting of the United Nations Security Council, April 16 2021. https://bit.ly/2Q6chHs Berlin Group21 proposal to OPCW: https://www.berlingroup21.org/background

Transcript

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0:00.0	And now I'd like to give the floor to Mr. Aramate.
0:08.7	Thank you. I'm very honored to be here once again. I really appreciate the opportunity.
0:16.2	So it has been three years since the alleged chemical attack in Duma and nearly two years since the cover-up of the OPCW investigation into Duma was exposed.
0:28.6	But yet all this time later, nothing has been done to address the serious flaws in this investigation.
0:35.1	So what I want to do today is go through some of the few arguments that
0:38.8	have been made by the OPCW and other state parties in trying to justify why they refuse to
0:44.7	meet with the inspectors, the original inspectors who challenged the cover-up of their probe,
0:49.6	and why they refuse to investigate any of the scientific fraud that was alleged.
0:56.0	So again, what are the basic details of this incident?
0:59.0	April 7, 2018, something horrible happens in Duma.
1:03.0	Dead bodies are filmed inside of a building.
1:06.0	The US, Britain and France, a few days later, bombed Syria accusing it of committing a chemical attack
1:11.8	in Duma. Shortly after that, the OPCW gets a team on the ground for the first time actually
1:18.0	having a fact-finding mission reaching the site of an alleged chemical attack in Syria. They investigate.
1:25.1	About a year later in March 2019, a Funa report comes out, and that report claims that
1:31.3	there are reasonable grounds to believe that a chlorine attack occurred in Duma.
1:36.7	And the inference of the report is that Syria was guilty.
1:39.8	So it aligns with the narrative put out by the countries that bombed Syria.
1:45.0	But then we get a pretty extraordinary series of leaks that exposes a major deception.
1:50.0	And these leaks show that the actual inspectors who went to Duma did not reach the conclusion that was put out by the OPCW.
1:58.0	And they actually found that there was no evidence of a chemical attack in Duma.
2:03.9	They did not speculate as to what actually happened, but what they said is that there was no
	...

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