Rumble link Bitchute link
Piers Robinson chronicles the unraveling cover-up
The series of chemical weapons hoaxes—false flag incidents that helped NATO and Israel overthrow the Syrian government and install their current ISIS/Al-Qaeda puppets—are unraveling. Today Dr. Piers Robinson joins us to discuss this issue by way of his recent article “Dr. Brendan Whelan’s ILOAT Win Reveals Clear Evidence of OPCW Corruption.”
Kevin Barrett: Welcome to Truth Jihad Audio-Visual. I’m Kevin Barrett, doing this podcast since 2006. I try to bring on the most interesting writers and translate them into audiovisual. One of the best writers right now is Piers Robinson. He’s a fellow refugee from the controlled academy. We’re not so controlled now (that we’ve left).
Piers has done great work on a number of issues. We recently did a podcast on his work on the 9/11 planes. And now we’re going to revisit another of these big deceptions and scandals: the Syria chemical weapons thing. It’s hard to say whether it even was a thing. So let’s find out. Hey, welcome, Piers Robinson. How are you?
Piers Robinson: Good to see you, Kevin. I’m doing well, thanks.
Kevin Barrett: Good to have you back. So these chemical weapons accusations against Syria during the war that finally brought down the Syrian government a couple of years ago always had the stench of dubiousness about them, to say the least. But it was kind of hard to nail it down and prove exactly what was going on. It was complicated, right? Lots of alleged attacks going both ways.
Piers Robinson: You are correct. There was one in Homs in 2012 in December which was a staged event and they tried to spin it off as a sarin or a nerve agent attack. But very quickly the wheels came off that and I think even the US State Department backed away from the claims being made. But that was one of the very earliest incarnations of what I describe as essentially false flags, staged events.
Kevin Barrett: Bush had joked about Iraqi WMD and pretended to be looking for them under his desk. It turned out to be a complete hoax, and yet they rolled out the same thing for Syria. How do they get away with that?
Piers Robinson: Well, that’s the incredible thing about it. Syria was one of the 9/11 wars. It was planned. Wesley Clark famously blurted out the seven countries in five years, and Syria was one of them. So it was always one of the countries which they were going to use the 9/11 false flag in order to get a war going. And of course with Syria it didn’t really get going until 2011 when you had various covert operations and also multiple external actors fueling dissent within the country and then really pretty much almost immediately triggering unrest.
Well, of course, there were no weapons of mass destruction there. But in the UK you had Dr. David Kelly, Britain’s top biological weapons expert, who had a rather candid conversation with the BBC and said that the British government had sexed up the intelligence on Iraqi WMD.
At the same time, you had Ambassador Wilson in the US, who had been sent to Niger to investigate the yellowcake uranium claims, and he said pretty much the same thing. On both sides of the Atlantic you had very high, very significant officials basically saying that there was no WMD in Iraq because they were manipulating the intelligence.
A lot of people became aware of that in the fullness of time. Then came Syria. It’s quite remarkable that one of the decisions they made — and I suspect some of this was to do with Israeli involvement, but a lot of it was actually rooted in UK Foreign Office planning — was to build a narrative around demonizing the Syrian government and Assad using the same set of allegations, this idea that there are chemical and biological weapons.
Of course, in the case of Syria, the allegation was that Assad was using these weapons. In a way, it’s surprising that they embarked upon the same kind of deception again, but then perhaps not so surprising because it did work the first time.
Kevin Barrett: Right, but people woke up to it, supposedly.
Piers Robinson: People woke up to it, but they got the job done. But then that’s quite a long time to 2011. And I think you had the whole Arab Spring narrative building up around 2011. And I think it was easy for what was happening in Syria to get folded into that.
There was a build-up to this, because prior to this there was an interesting series of alleged chemical weapons attacks. It actually started in March 2013 when there was actually an attack on Syrian army soldiers using a nerve agent. And the Syrian government went straight to the United Nations and said, “We want an investigation. Some of our soldiers have been killed and we believe it’s a nerve agent.”
Almost as soon as the Syrian government had done that, you then had these counter accusations coming in from Britain, France, Qatar and the US alleging that the Syrian government was using chemical weapons.
You had the emergence of what I understand now as essentially staged events. This is where you started to have the involvement of, for example, Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a former British military officer who’d set up a company called SecureBio. As we know now, he was part of an MI6 sample-gathering operation in 2013.
So you had this kind of interesting build-up to Ghouta 2013, all set around this invitation or request from the Syrian government: come in, send in the UN, send in the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and get this investigated.
Then all of these other allegations suddenly started being thrown out by the Americans and the Brits and these kinds of events occurring in Syria.
When the joint OPCW-UN team arrived in Damascus in August 2013 to begin their investigations, at exactly that point there was a mass rocket-launch sarin attack in the suburbs of Damascus in Ghouta.
So this is what we’re being asked to believe in terms of this narrative building: that the Syrian government legitimately requested the UN OPCW to come in, the inspectors get into the capital and then within a week or so you have this mass sarin rocket attack in Ghouta with a large casualty count.
The details of this are a little bit more complicated than that. I know some researchers argue that actually not that many people were killed by sarin and a lot of these people were probably massacred.
I think there are elements in the US who were part of this red-line creation. I think it was pushed by external actors in Israel as well. Obama famously backed away from it. He was given information from Clapper that this was not a slam dunk.
They backed away. Russia, of course, defused the situation by persuading Assad to hand over Syria’s strategic chemical weapons stocks, which Syria always had essentially as a deterrent against Israel’s nuclear capability.
But Assad said, “Okay, we’ll go along with this. We will sign up to the Chemical Weapons Convention and we will dispose of all of our weapons.” These were all put onto Cape Ray, an American warship, and then destroyed.
That was the point at which the red line didn’t quite work for those wanting the full-scale intervention, but it did, I think from Israel’s point of view, get to this point of the disarmament of Assad.
Kevin Barrett: For sure.
Piers Robinson: I think with hindsight, knowing what we know now, it was a mistake. And it was also clearly a mistake because this didn’t bring an end to it.
Within a year of Syria having acceded to the Chemical Weapons Convention and getting rid of its sarin stocks, you then had the sudden emergence of chlorine allegations.
Chlorine historically as a battlefield munition was used by the Germans in the First World War. You need huge quantities of the material. You’re talking with these alleged tactics of chlorine cylinders dropped, they burst and chlorine would pour out.
Kevin Barrett: Like somebody was getting in by the roof with a bottle of bleach from their laundry and kind of dropping the bleach bottle.
Piers Robinson: Yeah, but this worked and these alleged attacks started to occur. Then the allegations started to be delivered from the usual suspects: Assad has now started to use chlorine weapons against his own population.
The British government was very much involved in this. The Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence were involved in the sense that they had the White Helmets set up, as some of your listeners are probably aware. They had various other outsourced operations in Syria.
The important point is around 2014 where the OPCW got drawn back into investigation of these attacks. What happened was that they set up an ad hoc body called the Fact Finding Mission, the FFM missions. These were there to deploy into the country.
They were told that they had clearance to go in, so they went into opposition-held territory. But just as they crossed the line outside Syrian government-controlled territory where they had been safe, their convoy was ambushed.
Two of the OPCW teams were held hostage for about 24 hours. They hit an IED. There’s a picture of their UN car severely damaged.
At that point — and you can probably start to guess what might have been the rationale for opposition groups attacking the OPCW convoy — the OPCW decided they couldn’t safely send teams into those territories.
So you had this setup where you had the OPCW with this ad hoc Fact Finding Mission set up to go into Syria, but then not being able to get in on the ground and relying upon information being supplied by groups aligned with belligerents in the country.
In the case of the White Helmets, these were groups aligned with opposition forces.
This went on for several years. I’ve gone through a lot of these. I’m working on a book on it at the moment. I’ve done a series for UK Column.
Some of these allegations were transparently false, and yet they got reported on by the OPCW Fact Finding Mission and ultimately started to build this alleged body of evidence: here we’ve got another investigation, another chemical attack, not confirmed, but reasonable grounds to suspect this is going on.
There was this period between 2014 and 2016 where what you had were essentially fairly crudely staged false flags or staged events.
Some of the claims being made are laughable. In one instance, one of the early instances where the Fact Finding Mission gathered evidence from information supplied to them, there was a crater on the ground surrounded by dead animals. This is where one chlorine cylinder was supposed to have impacted and created the huge crater.
Ninety metres away there was another yellow cylinder on a kitchen, which was claimed to have occurred at the same time.
It was reported at the time by the White Helmets and the usual suspects promoting it over social media.
So you had almost comical but ultimately effective operations because the OPCW Fact Finding Missions were very much, I would argue, co-opted by the intelligence services, certainly of Britain and other Western powers.
They were basically serving up what the US wanted, what the British government wanted, what the French wanted and what the Israelis wanted.
Even when you had these implausible scenarios being presented, more occurred throughout 2015 and 2016.
There was a bizarre idea that chlorine was being generated in tiny quantities through improvised devices.
As some people pointed out at the time, this was absurd. One person I know connected to the OPCW said, “Well, that will create enough chlorine to kill maybe a field mouse. Why not just drop a cylinder of chlorine?”
But it helped create this impression of dastardly weapons being created by the Syrian government. That ended up in an OPCW report.
Again, the same setup. By this point the White Helmets were very much in the driving seat of these chemical attacks. They turn up, they feed the information back, and they became key sources of information going back to the Fact Finding Missions.
This was facilitated by James Le Mesurier, the former British military guy who was having direct contact with the OPCW inspectors. So you can see the dangers of the corruption of the process there.
That rumbled on until 2017. In a way this helped maintain the backdrop narrative of the Syrian government systematically using chemical weapons.
But it wasn’t necessarily having the splash they wanted. So this is where they moved to: okay, we need to bring sarin back into play here, even though the Syrian government has given up its sarin stocks.
We were trying to hold this line that Assad was just using chlorine gas cylinders. Now that doesn’t really kill a large number of people. It’s not a particularly dangerous weapon to be using in that way.
So then you had the Khan Shaykhun sarin attack, which the Trump administration bombed Syria over a week later.
The White Helmets were heavily involved in that. Ted Postol, the American MIT ballistics and weapons expert, argued that this was a staged or false-flag event in order to try and get the Trump administration to carry out a bombing.
Khan Shaykhun killed a significant number of people. I think about 40 people were killed in this sarin attack.
I know people who’ve looked at it closely and said this is clearly a staged event. People are killed, but it’s a false-flag event which has occurred.
This was around the point where I started, as an academic, to look at this issue.
Then came Douma in 2018. About 43 civilians were killed. Again America, Britain and France bombed in retaliation, so it was very big news.
It was initially presented as a sarin attack. These people were filmed in an apartment block with foam in their mouth and so on. It was argued at least initially by the US that this was a nerve-agent attack.
The OPCW FFM team got into Syria. Just as the Douma alleged attack occurred, the area fell to Syrian and Russian forces. So for the first time the OPCW were actually able to get in on the ground and investigate themselves.
All of those previous alleged attacks had relied upon the White Helmets. Now suddenly, because the Syrian government had secured the area almost immediately after the alleged attack, the OPCW Fact Finding Team were able to get in on the ground.
America, Britain and France bombed anyway before they even got to work.
This is where the wheels came off the Fact Finding Missions and the investigation of these attacks.
The OPCW inspectors who were in charge of writing the original report ended up arranging to visit NATO weapons experts and chemical weapons experts, who gave unequivocal feedback that these people could not have been killed by chlorine.
There’s no sarin present, but the actual features you see on the civilians and the numbers don’t make sense if chlorine gas had been used. It would make sense if a nerve agent had been used, but not chlorine.
So immediately there was a problem.
At the point at which the interim report was supposed to be published, Brendan Whelan and the others produced a report saying, “Okay, we need to do more work, but we have toxicology findings that don’t support chlorine.”
They also raised concerns about the cylinders supposedly pouring chlorine down into the house and killing the 43 people in the building.
They set this out in a very objective interim report which essentially raised the possibility that this could well be a false flag.
That report was signed off by the Douma team. But at the point at which it went to publication, Brendan suddenly discovered that the report had been completely changed.
The report they’d written had been rewritten to basically imply that this was definitely a chlorine attack. “We’ve got a bit more research to do, but that’s pretty much what happened.”
That was the start of internal dissent within the OPCW, with Brendan Whelan challenging his superiors and saying, “What on earth is going on? Somebody has literally come in and rewritten our report.”
Everything from there, for about six, seven or eight months before the final report came out, involved internal battles going on within the OPCW.
Then when the final OPCW report came out in 2019 basically saying there were reasonable grounds to suspect that the Syrian government carried out a chlorine attack, the whistleblowers realised they had witnessed a manipulated and corrupted investigation.
They tried to speak out internally.
Other things started to happen. I was part of the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media, and we were leaked an engineering study commissioned by Ian Henderson, one of the OPCW inspectors.
The engineering assessment basically said that these yellow cylinders were more likely to have been placed by hand. It’s very unlikely they fell from helicopters.
The cylinders didn’t punch holes in ceilings. These cylinders were placed there.
We published that document in the Working Group and then all hell broke loose within the OPCW.
We’ll talk about Brendan’s win at the International Labour Organization in a few minutes. But the issue remains unaddressed by the OPCW.
The OPCW have continually refused to even meet with the scientists who were blowing the whistle.
As I say, everyone has been to varying degrees smeared.
Now we are in this kind of holding pattern on the issue where obviously the Syrian government fell in 2024.
The OPCW has created a new special missions office to try and seal up the Syria file. We’re all waiting for them to pull out some evidence, haul in some people they’re going to accuse, and so on.
But we don’t know what their play is going to be. They obviously have a huge amount of their credibility invested in this.
That was a long introduction, but that kind of covers everything, I think.
Kevin Barrett: Yeah, it’s kind of a different approach to false flags than 9-11. 9-11 was one huge thing all happening on the same morning and hijacking headlines reverberating out from there.
Piers Robinson: As I said before, the basic setup with the OPCW Fact Finding Missions is they’re relying upon information supplied by the White Helmets.
Another thing which came out of the Douma scandal was that the Office of the Director General in the OPCW and the Chief of Cabinet — which is considered the key power position — had oversight.
You had a British career diplomat in charge during Douma, later replaced by a French career diplomat.
The political and bureaucratic office had oversight of the investigation, while the verification and scientific divisions of the OPCW were kept away.
So you actually had the political office taking control of the process.
We know at Douma that the 43 civilians who were found dead in the building were almost definitely killed somewhere else.
They were probably killed by Jaysh al-Islam, probably under the watch of British intelligence.
So you’ve got some pretty dirty dealings going on as part of this narrative building.
James Le Mesurier, as you probably know, fell to his death from his apartment building in Turkey two weeks after an OPCW official had given testimony at the Brussels panel.
There are a lot of question marks over how he came to fall off the roof of his building in the middle of the night.
But he was closely involved in this operation. We know that. We know he was this kind of channel between the White Helmets and the OPCW process.
Our involvement in this was pretty horrifying.
This is why when I was with a group of academics and we started looking at the Syria chemical weapons issue back in 2017 and early 2018 — this was before Douma — within weeks of setting up that Working Group we were on the front page of The Times of London being described as Assad apologists.
These were pretty unknown professors in Russell Group universities.
Kevin Barrett: Yeah, I remember that.
Piers Robinson: We realised, boy, we’re right over the target. They really, really wanted to shut us up.
Kevin Barrett: It didn’t take them long. With 9-11, the 9-11 Truth Movement had been building up slowly for several years before they finally pushed back in the summer of 2006.
That was also when a group of academics had gotten involved. Scholars for 9-11 Truth had suddenly gotten about 100 people on record, with the possibility of a lot more. That was when they pushed back.
Apparently you guys were doing a better job, or at least doing it quicker.
Piers Robinson: Tim’s still in position. I’ve worked hard to keep publishing in mainstream academic outlets and still managed to do that. I count that as a major victory given the amount of mud thrown at us.
But this is how the system works. You can shut people up by reputational attacks.
As I say, I’ve managed to get stuff published in the last few years.
We did this big report for Mick Wallace and Clare Daly when they were MEPs.
I’m writing a book and I had a meeting with a mainstream academic publisher and said, “This is the book I’m going to do on the whole Syria OPCW chemical weapons issue.”
There’s a chance I’ll get it out with a mainstream publisher.
But it’s difficult. As you know, there’s a lot of gatekeeping in academia.
But I’ve still managed to work with people in mainstream academia. I still publish and write and present and give talks.
It hasn’t been total exclusion. That was certainly my sense in 2019 and 2020. I thought, “Well, this is going to be the end of me having any involvement in mainstream academia.” But it hasn’t worked out that way.
Still, I’m a naive optimist about these things.
Kevin Barrett: Isn’t it bizarre how suddenly the fact that Syria is now controlled by ISIS and Al-Qaeda people — one would think it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to think those people might actually have been committing atrocities.
We know they were.
Yet the media, which demonizes radical Islam and built the whole War on Terror on demonizing Al-Qaeda, is totally happy with having the president of Syria being Al-Qaeda because he represents the West.
Piers Robinson: It is amazing. That whole narrative flip or inversion of what we see is extraordinary.
Of course, this is picked up on by Massie and other American politicians.
The whole Islamic fundamentalist narrative was constructed. Essentially it’s false. This is a product of the intelligence agencies of the West, with Israel absolutely at the center of it, spinning a massive deception on audiences in the West.
Do you think we’re at the point — as we were saying in our last talk with Iran — is this a point of failure in the West? I’m not quite sure where it’s all going at the moment.
Kevin Barrett: I’m still hoping my predictions from 20 years ago hold true. I’ve always thought that a combination of a really grave military defeat plus an economic implosion could lead to the kind of situation that got the Argentine generals thrown out after the Falklands.
It seems like the global economy is heading for the cliff right now.
So it looks like that combination of a catastrophic military defeat followed by an economic implosion. Maybe when the pieces get swept up, that’s the time when the angry voices saying, “How did we get to this point?” start to be heard.
Piers Robinson: I probably feel the same as you. I’m hopeful and optimistic that there’s a context now where these things can properly unravel and there can be awareness, maybe even accountability.
But is there going to be another card played in terms of trying to distract populations? It’s difficult.
Clearly the international system is changing significantly. The distribution of power, whether economic, ideational or military, is clearly changing.
There’s clearly an awareness-raising going on in the US.
It’s realistic now to talk about whether it’s feasible for Israel to continue to exist in its current form given what has just happened.
That would have been unthinkable for polite liberals. People like me were considered jihadist crazies for saying things like that 20 years ago.
Kevin Barrett: Yeah.
Piers Robinson: But they’ve used up their support. Certainly globally it’s at rock bottom.
Even in the West, with what we see in Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Charlie Kirk — that part of the American right clearly shifting away from this kind of blind support.
So something good might come out of that.
Kevin Barrett: Right, it’s kind of strange how they’re breaking out the UFO thing right now.
Piers Robinson: I think that’s just a sign of weakness. “Oh blimey, you can’t start any wars, you can only do false flags — what can we do now to distract the masses? Okay, we’ll have to go for the little green men.”
I don’t believe any of it. I think it’s PSYOP.
Kevin Barrett: I’m confused about what the reality is. But I agree with you about the propaganda value or propaganda purpose of what they’re doing right now.
We ended False Flag Weekly News this week with the flying saucer video landing on the White House lawn and burning into the lawn: “Release the Epstein files.”
I actually did dive into that topic because my PhD work was on Moroccan medieval Sufi saint legends, and those legends are built around miracle stories.
So that ties into my longstanding interest in questions of extraordinary phenomena.
It does seem that if the whole thing is a big propaganda operation built on nothing, they’ve put an awful lot of effort into it and gotten an awful lot of people involved in counterintuitive ways.
So I actually think there is something going on.
But whether we’re going to hear the truth from a government commission, especially Trump’s, I wouldn’t bet on that.
Piers Robinson: Yeah, they’re going to spin it.
I like to keep open-minded about all these things. There’s more things in heaven and earth and so on.
But for sure the stuff they’re pumping out is for the purpose of trying to distract from economic crisis.
Here in Europe there’s a lot of chatter about war with Russia.
Kevin Barrett: Right, and the elites are open about it. Maybe that’s the thing they’re going to do.
I don’t understand it. My whole life the assumption has been that Europeans are somewhat more rational than the crazy gung-ho Americans, much less the completely crazy gung-ho Israelis.
Piers Robinson: This is an unelected individual in charge of the European Union. This is what they say. It’s not what you hear on the street.
We’re in this kind of post-COVID era where there’s already widespread skepticism toward authorities.
But getting people ready to go to war really focuses the mind amongst the population.
I think there is this historical memory in Europe.
What German is going to want his son or daughter to go and die in trenches in Ukraine against Russia?
Even a lot of Ukrainians have been reluctant to go along with the press gangs grabbing them and throwing them into vans to take them off to the front-line trenches, almost like World War I except with drones.
Kevin Barrett: I don’t know what the attraction would be to that kind of war or to nuclear war, for that matter.
And I don’t understand the geostrategic purpose.
Honestly, with Europe, I had always thought it would be good if Europe had more power and maybe rearmed a little bit and was more independent and acted as a counterweight to the United States because I always thought the Europeans were more sensible.
But now I don’t know.
Piers Robinson: I think there might be some economic arguments in there in terms of remilitarization, like kickstarting the economy in a Keynesian kind of way.
But I suspect most of the rationale is probably elites keeping control of the population by constructing an external enemy.
There’s no strategic interest. Obviously it’s in Europe’s interest to have good relations with Russia. Russia is just over there with lots of cheap energy.
So I think there’s no core interest in going toward conflict with Russia.
This is elites. We have economic crisis. We have a financial system which is a house of cards. Everyone keeps asking when it’s going to collapse.
We have economies which clearly need to be recalibrated given the shifts in the distribution of power globally.
The world’s changing and I’m confident we will change because necessity forces change.
But as we go through that change you’ve got elites at the top who are trying to hold on to the existing order and their power.
This is one of the cards they’re playing: war against Russia.
There were big demonstrations in town. There were always local demos every week.
So there was pushback there. I think if we get pushed closer to war with Russia, you’ll see the same.
I remember that a year and a half ago Sahra Wagenknecht called a demo at Brandenburg Gate. Jeffrey Sachs was piped in by livestream. They pulled 50,000 people at a week’s notice over the Ukraine war.
Kevin Barrett: They arrest people for holding placards.
Piers Robinson: That was going down in Britain. All of that stuff is very much out of control.
But there’s a limit to what they can do with censorship as well.
They’re trying to control social media, but you can clamp down there and people will communicate in other ways.
I’ve always thought about internet-based communications and their desire to control discourse through technology.
Most people also go down the pub and talk to their friends. There is a social world outside the internet and governments can’t control that in the way they want to.
Kevin Barrett: This Iran war is the least popular war in US history right off the bat, and yet we’re not seeing huge crowds opposing it. We just see polls showing that nobody agrees with it.
Piers Robinson: That’s an interesting question. Support for European leaders is also rock bottom.
You have crazy leaders carrying out crazy policies which none of the people support.
Is this simply the death throes of the Western Empire? That’s always the backdrop I hope we’re seeing here — a painful process that big powerful blocs and empires go through as they accommodate to a new reality.
Kevin Barrett: It’s the emperor’s-clothes thing.
But is Trump not already there? Half of his base now pretty much rejects the consensus.
Piers Robinson: That consensus group is fragmenting.
I’m guessing Charlie Kirk was killed for reasons that are not too difficult to fathom.
The people who ran public opinion through the methods you’ve studied for so long are maybe having a harder time now and getting desperate as their empire crumbles.
Kevin Barrett: Well, let’s come back and talk about it as the crumbling continues.
Piers Robinson: Keep our fingers crossed and hope for the best.
Kevin Barrett: Thank you. Keep up the great work.
Piers Robinson: Okay, Kevin. Good to talk.
Kevin Barrett: Take care.
Piers Robinson: Take care.
