“Working Group” Can you find Henderson or “leak” his full OPCW report?

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In the middle of April, a group of British academic supporters of war criminals that call themselves the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media release a 15-page PDF that claimed to be the “Executive Summary” signed by a Ian Henderson of an “Engineering Assessment of two cylinders observed at the Douma incident.” Now more than two months have gone by and nobody has seen neither hide nor hair of Mr. Henderson, and nobody has claimed to even have seen the “Engineering Assessment of two cylinders observed at the Douma incident,” that Ian Henderson's Executive Summary claims to summarize.

United States Attorney General William Barr has recently shown us how much we should trust an “Executive Summary” while we are being denied the full report.

      “shouldn't give it
      the time of day.”

No one should continue to give this so-called "Executive Summary" a minutes attention as long as the document being summarized is missing and the author is unavailable to validate his work.


The “Working Group” is obviously affected with  the chemical weapons fetish. As many as 1700 civilians were murdered by Assad's big sarin attack on East Ghouta, 21 August 2013, but the body count on other CW attacks comes nowhere close to that. While over 300 chemical attacks have been reported on Syria since 2012, only a handful have caused a hundred or more deaths. For most CW attacks, the death toll was much smaller, and many caused no deaths at all.

The point is that in a civil war in which more than a half-million civilians have been slaughtered, chemical weapons have played a small part in the killing. The Russian and Syrian air forces have done far more damage, and taken far more lives, than these chemical attacks. It is their wanton attacks on civilian targets that brand Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin as war criminals, even if they never used chemical weapons.

And yet the “Working Group” is focused almost entirely on defending the Syrian and Russian governments against charges that they have used chemical weapons, and they have yet to find even one CW attack either of these two regimes are responsible for, even though they both have documented histories of war crimes by non-chemical means. That history of conventional war crimes, and police state torture, is not of interest to the “Working Group.” They are the chemical warfare barristers for war criminals.

In their latest post promoting the Henderson “leaked” Executive Summary, they claim to have contacts inside the Organization for Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) that are feeding them secrets. 

 “Our sources have provided information that fills in some details of how the investigation was nobbled.”

Have your sources been able to come up with anything backing Henderson's claims beyond his “Executive Summary”?

"Our sources report that even before he took up his post as an employee of the OPCW, he was frequently in the building ...”

Well, wasn't he the French Deputy permanent representative to OPCW even before he changed jobs and became an employee of the OPCW?

Have your sources told you when Ian Henderson was last in the building, and why he has no comment, after two months, about the report that bears his name?

“We have confirmed from other sources that the Team Leader who left Damascus was Sami Barrek and that he was subsequently seen in Turkey with the White Helmets.”

Scandalous! He associates with people who save lives.

Have any of your sources spotted the illusive Mr. Henderson, or found even a few pages of the  “Engineering Assessment of two cylinders observed at the Douma incident.” beyond the 15-page summary?

“We have learned from multiple sources that the second stage of the investigation involved consultation with Len Phillips...”

Thank you for providing the Linkedin link for Phillips. Now, could you please provide one for Henderson? Linkedin finds 1,394 Ian Hendersons, won't any of your multiple sources tell you which is your man Henderson?

Finally, you thank your sources inside the OPCW:

“We thank the OPCW staff members who continue to communicate with us, some of whom have provided detailed comments on earlier drafts of this briefing note.”

A pity one of the OPCW staff members who continue to communicate with you isn't Ian Henderson. Have they been able to give you any clue as to his whereabouts or the reason for his prolonged silence?

You say:

“A first step towards restoring belief in the integrity of the OPCW’s investigations would be to make the reports from all three external engineering consultancies publicly available.”

We also need to see more than Henderson's Executive Summary. When can we see the report he is summarizing?

You say:

“To resolve the discrepancy between the conclusions of the internal Engineering Assessment and those of the Final Report, a first step would be to make public the assessments of the external engineering experts on whom the Final Report relied." 

Actually, to resolve any discrepancy between the conclusions of the internal Engineering Assessment and those of the Final Report, we would need to see the Engineering Assessment, and not just the mysterious Mr. Henderson's “Executive Summary” of the Engineering Assessment. So, we are all awaiting the leaking of the “Engineering Assessment of two cylinders observed at the Douma incident.” - so far we have only seen the “Executive Summary”

When will we see “Engineering Assessment of two cylinders observed at the Douma incident”?

Where is Ian Henderson?

Recent posts on this beat:

Russian's War on the OPCW— Putting the Henderson "leak" in contex
Lies, damned lies, and engineering sub-team reports
Where in the world is Ian Henderson?
More on the silent Ian Henderson and his "leaked" OPCW paper
Dr. Ted Postol rides again - right into the OPCW "leak" controversy
OPCW Word Games - Exposing the Politics of the Henderson "leak"
Henderson's "leaked" OPCW Executive Summary: a searchable version

Syria is the Paris Commune of the 21st Century!

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