RENEGADE INC.
It is incredibly rare for the BBC to admit that one of their Syrian reports failed to meet the corporation’s editorial standards for accuracy by reporting false claims.
The corporation, whose misreporting has dogged both journalism and peace in the Middle East for decades, finally conceded that their reporting of an alleged chemical weapons attack by President Assad’s government in the Syrian city of Douma on April 7, 2018 was seriously flawed.
Host, Ross Ashcroft met up with Political Scientist, Piers Robinson, and Journalist, Vanessa Beeley, to discuss the background to the BBC Radio 4 programme at the centre of the story, Mayday: The Canister on the Bed.
Staged
The Radio 4 programme, Mayday: The Canister on the Bed, broadcast on 20 November 2020, included an account of the role played by a former inspector with the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), known by the pseudonym Alex, who believed the chemical weapons attack at Douma, Syria, had been staged and had expressed concerns about the OPCW’s conclusions on the matter. The programme insinuated that the disclosures by Alex had been motivated by a reward of $100,000 offered by WikiLeaks.
The September 2, 2021 outcome of the BBCs Executive Complaints Unit (ECU) published on the BBCs website “found that, although they were limited to one aspect of an investigation into a complex and hotly contested subject, these points represented a failure to meet the standard of accuracy appropriate to a programme of this kind.”
Renegade Inc. had discussed with Piers Robinson the backdrop to the Douma incident on 4 June 2018, a full three years and three months prior to the acknowledgement by the BBC that their programme contained serious flaws. However, on 14 April, 2018, The Times had dubbed Robinson one of Assad’s useful idiots for simply questioning the official narrative.
This is an excerpt from The Times’ leader that hit people’s doormats that Saturday:
“Given all that’s known about President Assad’s willingness and capacity to inflict harm on a captive population, it would take an extraordinary degree of credulity, sophistry and ignorance to exculpate him of this atrocity. Exactly those characteristics are exemplified by a small group of academics, whom, we report today at respectable institutions that include universities of Sheffield and Edinburgh.”
The Times, in other words, had smeared Robinson and the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media even though over three years later the BBC effectively acknowledged that this group of academics had been right to question the official mainstream media narrative of the Douma incident.
Unsustainable
The BBCs apology, the testimony of OPCW investigator, Ian Henderson, together with the leaking of an internal engineering report and the fact that there was no evidence of any nerve agents detected at the site, clearly indicate that the claim the Syrian government carried out an attack is unsustainable.
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