Pro-Assad blogger writes nonsense about OPCW e-mail sent to disgruntled employee

Aaron Maté is an American blogger who writes about Syria. In his pieces published at The Greyzone he defends the Syrian/Russian Federation narrative about the usage of chemical warfare. In his December 2020 piece  Maté wants his audience to believe the OPCW deleted an email message which expressed critism on report about the investigation on the usage of chemicals in Douma, Syria. However Maté writes nonsense. 

The piece titled ‘OPCW executives praised whistleblower and criticized Syria cover-up, leaks reveal’ describes an email sent by Dr. Brendan Whelan, who was a member of the OPCW Fact-Finding Mission (FFM),  to  Robert Fairweather, the then-OPCW chief of cabinet. Whelan expressed his concerns about the interim report written by OPCW on the alleged chemical attack in Douma.

At June 22, 2018 at 08:27 Brendan Whelan sent this message to Robert Fairweather. He copied a couple of other OPCW-staff in the cc: . At the same day, at 8:32 AM, so only 5 minutes later, Fairweather responded by replying to the message.

Then Aaron Maté start to write complete nonsense in his piece. He states Fairweather sent an email to Whelan requesting Whelan to delete his message which was sent to Fairweather. The reason according Maté is a cover-up and censorship.

“Fairweather was, however, proactive in one respect — he initiated another act of censorship.

Shortly after Whelan sent his letter of protest, Fairweather wrote back to him and the rest of the recipients a one-sentence email: “Robert Fairweather would like to recall the message Grave concern about the ‘redacted’ Douma report.”

Such a request — a rare course of action among OPCW officials — would amount to the OPCW deleting Whelan’s email of complaint from its server and the inboxes of each recipient. This recall request, previously unpublished, suggests that senior OPCW officials were not only reluctant to take Whelan’s concerns seriously: they were intent on erasing them from the documentary record.”

The message, which Aaron Maté believes is a request by Fairweather for Whelan to delete the message he sent to Fairweather, looked like this. Maté writes under the screenshot of the email:

“Fairweather requests the deletion , or “recall” of an email from Dr. Bredan Whelan …”.

Utter nonsense!

Lets have a closer look at the text of the email. It does not have a greeting like the other message Fairweather sent to Whelan. No “Dear Bredan”. Also there is no signature like in the other message at the ending. So no “Regards Bob”. That is a bit strange.

The text “Robert Fairweather would like to recall the message, “Grave concern about the ‘redacted’ Douma report ” matches exactly the message received by Whelan when Fairweather wanted to recall, or delete HIS email sent to Whelan using the recall feature of Microsoft Outlook. The image below is an example of that text produced by Outlook and the mailserver Microsoft Exchange. How it works is explained here.

OPCW is using Outlook as the application to send and receive e-mails. This can be concluded from this job description published at the website of OPCW.

 

 

 

So we are now sure Fairweather did not request Whelan to delete his own message but somehow wanted to have the email system delete the email message Fairweather sent to Whelan at June 22 at 8:32 AM. So there is no ‘erasing them from the documentary record’ as blogger Maté wants his audience to believe.

Besides the text of the message 100% matches the text of a recall sent by the mail system, it would make no sense for Fairweather to write such strange text. If he wanted Whelan to delete his message he would use words like ‘could you please delete the message you sent me’.  But even that would be totally not logical. If Fairweather wanted to delete all traces of the email sent by Whelan he likely would not request Whelan to do so but instead sent a request strictly confidential to the system administrator of the email system.

It does not take an degree in IT to understand that what Maté writes in his piece is nonsense. But even after being informed about his error Maté on Twitter continues to spread his disinformation. In no less than four Tweets the Greyzone blogger still states Fairweather wanted to have to email of Whelan to be deleted. When questioned to provide any proof the blogger remained silent.