The 2018 chemical attack in Douma, Syria

[Philomath]

I recently made note of the following source on Wikipedia's page about the 2018 Douma chemical attack: https://berlingroup21.org/wp-content/up ... ressed.pdf

For those not in the weeds here: the official story is that the Syrian military, upon orders from president Bashar Al-Assad, attacked civilians in Syria with chemical weapons. Whatever happened that day, we know that about 40 people died. This event took place in an area that was controlled by a Syrian rebel group at the time. The Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) investigated the scene some time later, and reached an official conclusion: Assad had gassed his own people, by deploying military attack helicopters, which dropped canisters of poison gas onto civilian targets.

This was repeated by NATO and used to argue for further US/NATO intervention into Syrian domestic affairs. Some observers, including a whistleblower from the OPCW, alleged that this was not the case, and that the OPCW had done a "cover-up", fabricating evidence suggestive of a military chemical attack, and suppressing evidence that contradicted the preferred narrative. We don't know what happened, these observers & whistleblowers say, but we know that the US/NATO narrative "confirmed" by the OPCW is a sham, and that the real truth should be found. Note that the OPCW received enormous pressure from the USA in the early 2000s, during the "Iraq has WMDs" psyop. This pressure led the first ever OPCW director, Jose Bustani, to step down in protest of the US's attempts to get him to lie. 20 years later, he is one of the authors of the report linked above.

Needless to say, any acknowledgement of the whistleblowers, or of any narrative other than "Assad gassed his own people", is ignored by the propaganda-by-omission of the US media. If it is acknowledged at all, it is as a "pro-Assad" or "pro-authoritarian conspiracy theory". Thus, the Wikipedia article makes no mention of it, and, predictably, there are a lot of NPC drones who are dedicated to preventing "pro-Assad authoritarian conspiracy theories" (i.e. narratives other than the preferred narrative of NATO and the military industrial complex) from seeing the light of day on Wikipedia.

That's the context for my latest attempt to poke the bear at Wikipedia:

A new source is available. And it's a big one.

"A Review of the OPCW fact finding mission report into the alleged use of chemical weapons in Douma: evidence of manipulation, bias, and censorship." 162 pages, 192 endnotes. Written by four esteemed western authors, including the first director of the OPCW, A professor Emeritus of international law at Princeton, a professor of propaganda studies, and a former assistant secretary general of the UN.

This is a very serious challenge to the established narrative on Douma. Made by serious people. No Assad or Putin puppets for you to strawman here, NPC drones.

Now the games begin - what arguments will the Wikilawyers bring to the table for why this source absolute cannot, and must not, be given any weight? How urgent and strident will they be in their tone? I think the chances of the source being widely acknowledged as valuable are approximately...zero.

One opinion so far, and it's a doozy, albeit predicable: it's "intentional disinformation". No explanation, no evidence, no reference to a word of the text. Just a random editor with a 10-day old account, no talk page, and some very hot takes.

I think some people overstate the CIA/government presence on Wikipedia. In fact, I think the US government is getting a fantastic deal. Think about it: there are people on Wikipedia that are so stupid, clueless, and arrogant, they'll do the State's bidding for free, with enthusiasm, without even knowing it.

I'll post an update if the NPCs give me any more spicy takes on this source.

[Bbb23sucks]

Kind of off-topic, but I find it funny how they always bring up these "massacres", but they never bring up MOVE, Sainte-Soline, and other real massacres. Omission by intention as you said.

[ericbarbour]

"Malibu Sapphire" has "shared sockpuppet' written all over it. Likes Mormon subjects and soda pop. Someone's using this "shared account" to fight you off.

An old, commonplace, and very stupid trick. But it keeps working--because most Wikipedians are idiots. The sock parrots something and a major combatant will use the parroting as "evidence".

The interest in beating the Douma story into a froth is also classic Wikipedia. According to their own Syrian civil war article (which is also the subject of brutal multi-year WP editwarring), 306,000 civilians and at least 170,000 combatants have died directly due to military actions. Several megabytes of squabbling in the talkpage archives.

The Douma attack is a miserable little side item by comparison. But a few WP nitwits will fight you to a standstill over it.

[Philomath]

T+36: Obviously, this source (the Berlin Report) cannot and must not appear anywhere on the Wikipedia page, or it will disrupt the narrative that NPCs have been curating for the better part of a decade. Someone needed to step up and do everything possible to exclude the source. Fortunately for Wikipedia and for the US military industrial complex, Andrevan is up to the challenge.

His basic premise is to cite US and British intelligence to discredit the source. It's pretty amazing that someone could, with a straight face, do such a thing. It does not even occur to him that a US government-funded source should be treated with skepticism when it's "discrediting" people who allege US government corruption. It's akin to citing Russian state-controlled media to show that an allegation of corruption in the Russian government is "unreliable". Leave it to Andrevan to say something so stupid that it's almost unbelievable. Out of all the NPCs I've interacted with, he consistently has the dumbest, lowest-IQ takes.

Bellingcat is the specific source he cites. Bellingcat reported, essentially, that one time, a guy who knows some of the guys who wrote the Berlin Report sent some emails to a US government agent who was pretending to be Russian. This, to Andrevan, is evidence that the Berlin Report is unreliable (lol)

Not all of Bellingcat's work is necessarily fraudulent - I look at it and sometimes find value in it. But it's worth noting that they are funded by multiple western governments, and 100% of their "investigations" are targeted at adversaries of the US and Great Britain. 100% is not an exaggeration. To date, I'm aware of zero Bellingcat investigations that have investigated anything that the US government wouldn't want investigated. They're not state-owned, but they're state-funded and clearly have an allegiance to western governments that far exceeds their allegiance to the truth.

Normally, I'd assume that someone who cites US intelligence to debunk critics of US intelligence is doing so in bad faith. With Andrevan, I'm willing to be kinder and give him the benefit of the doubt: I think he's just that dumb.

This is a guy who was an admin and a bureaucrat for over a decade, before he resigned from both positions while Arbcom was closing in on him. His absolute inability or unwillingness to separate factual analysis from his own personal opinions is so egregious and absurd that even other Wiki-cultists got tired of it.

See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... e/Andrevan
See what WPO has to say about him: https://wikipediocracy.com/forum/search ... s=andrevan


Shoutout to Burrobert, who's the only halfway serious Wikipedian who didn't express a desire to throw the source down the memory hole as quickly as possible. I think Burrobert and I would agree on almost everything re:Wikipedia if we had the chance to talk off-Wiki. But his actions on-Wiki are very cautious. The only mention of him on WPO was when Hemiauchenia, another useful idiot for western intelligence agencies, accused him of being a pro-Assad propagandist who "legitimizes Russian disinformation".

My new pet theory - and I'm only half joking - is that the US intelligence agencies hardly edit Wikipedia at all. Why would they have an agent edit Wikipedia on the timeclock when NPCs like Hemiauchenia and Andrevan will make the same edits they would have made, but for free?

Anyway, the results so far are unsurprising: Wiki-cultists are trying to find any possible reason to make sure this Berlin Report is never even given a passing mention on Wikipedia.

[ericbarbour]

My new pet theory - and I'm only half joking - is that the US intelligence agencies hardly edit Wikipedia at all. Why would they have an agent edit Wikipedia on the timeclock when NPCs like Hemiauchenia and Andrevan will make the same edits they would have made, but for free?

This is EXACTLY what SlimVirgin did for many years. She once admitted on her "secret" mailing list that MI5 was paying her to do "something". At least two Israeli government employees were being allowed to edit content and add their own bias for a few years. And remember Wiki-Bilim.

But yeah, it doesn't necessarily have to be paid. One can always find an idiot man-baby who will bias material for you, in return for trivial favors. Or possibly just because he finds it "lulzy".

[ScotFinnRadish]

P.S. Philo, I have more info about Dronebogus. In addition, I have also been thinking about how we can stop him. PM me for more information.

[Ognistysztorm]

P.S. Philo, I have more info about Dronebogus. In addition, I have also been thinking about how we can stop him. PM me for more information.

This is a surprising, but welcoming turn of events. I still believe that Dronebogus is the symptom of a systemic problem though.

Edit: Can you please explain this one?

[Philomath]

This is almost certainly the same troll that's behind a lot of this. It's not ScottishFinnishRadish.

[Bbb23sucks]

This is almost certainly the same troll that's behind a lot of this. It's not ScottishFinnishRadish.

Banned him.