Just reading now that Fisk has visited the site before the OPCW - WTF?
And his version of events coincides with the alleged perpetrator - who have actually been blocking the OPCW from attending. Jesus. I find this genuinely shocking. WTF is he doing, reporting from there, when when the international body supposed to determine the truth here are denied access? That's fucking scandalous.
Robert Fisk is guilty of enabling war crimes. It is an absolute disgrace he has agreed to this visit before the OPCW, and with the people inviting him having both vetoed the UN mechanism to investigate the identity of the perpetrator, and are currently blocking access to the site for the OPCW.
This is like attending a crime scene:
i) where access to the site is controlled by the chief suspect in the crime.
ii) where that suspect is blocking the police from accessing the site to collect evidence.
iii) And then dutifully insinuating the chief suspect's version of events
Fisk should be sacked by the Independent. He is no different from those who shilled for Stalin.
Russia and Assad are intent on bringing the entire mechanism of international law and cooperation into even greater disrepute and dysfunction.
They are enemies of all that is worth preserving about our current system, which is little but the only thing between us and complete polarization.
Russia and Fisk weaponise ignorance. They weaponise the gap between the complexity / nuance of a situation and the public understanding of it. They know this Fisk article will get shared by the fake news ecosystem, and spread around the world in hours. They know that just the headline implying a 'false flag', in a paper as mainstream as The Independent, will do much of the work (as it did with Newsweek) They also know the rebuttals will require paying attention and parsing the complexity and that the most likely result will be: 'it all seems so complicated and exhausting, don't know which media to trust these days'.