[Peace-discuss] Followup on the ongoing OPCW scandal: Aaron Maté interviews Theodore Postol on "Pushback"

[J.B. Nicholson]

I wrote:
> Goodman also echoes a corporate-compatible line on the recent alleged gas attack in Douma, Syria. 
> Evidence at the time suggested that attack never happened, and the leaked reports from OPCW 
> (Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons) engineers say that the official OPCW report 
> was untrue -- the gas canisters found on the scene were most likely "manually placed" and not 
> dropped from the air. WikiLeaks has helped convey this OPCW information to us, and RT has been far 
> more forthcoming with this story as it unfolds than Democracy Now.
> 
> The mishandling of both the alleged Douma gas attack and Russiagate were cause for Aaron Mate to 
> quit his job at DN. Mate would also leave The Real News and The Intercept for comparable reasons. 
> Today he publishes with The Grayzone Project (with Ben Norton, Anya Parampil, and Max Blumenthal) on 
> his own YouTube show "Pushback with Aaron Mate" and has won an Izzy award for his Russiagate debunking.
> 
> None of this is mentioned in Scahill & Goodman's interview.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IML3FpuLH_Q (31m02s) -- Aaron Maté's interview of Theodore Postol, a 
great summary and update on this ongoing scandal which threatens the legitimacy of the OPCW. This 
scandal is also reaffirms the importance of WikiLeaks as one of the most important publishers of our 
time.

I still maintain that Amy Goodman's dismissive review of Pres. Trump's media chastisement is 
problematic. The issue of what to make of the modern media is more complicated and includes failures 
of Goodman's own news outlet Democracy Now, which I believe Maté chastised without naming when he 
introduced the above interview thusly:

> One of the biggest stories of 2019 was undoubtedly the OPCW's Syria scandal -- a coverup inside
> the world's top chemical watchdog that was used to justify US-led military strikes on Syria.
> [...K]ey findings [...] were kept from the public when the OPCW published its final report.
> Ignoring its own data and experts, the OPCW concluded that there were "reasonable grounds that
> the use of a toxic chemical as a weapon took place... This toxic chemical contained reactive
> chlorine.". But even now as the suppressed findings come out via brave whistleblowers and
> WikiLeaks, they are still being kept from the public. That is because the Western media,
> including top progressive adversarial outlets, have ignored or whitewashed the story. And that
> media self-censorship has become a scandal in itself.
-J