Inner City Press -- Investigative Reporting From the United Nations to Wall Street to the Inner City

By Matthew Russell Lee

UNITED NATIONS, September 11 -- On Syria, the scam is on, at least at the UN. On September 11 while reporters chased US Ambassador Samantha Power and her French and UK counterparts up to the Russian Mission, in-house scribes in suits pre-spun the UN's chemical weapons report.

The UN report, of course, is explicitly NOT supposed to assign responsibility for the use of chemical weapons. But a UN go-to pass-through breathlessly gushes that "UN Report Will Finger Assad Regime" -- on Monday.

  The sourcing? An unnamed Western official.

  So how does a Western -- presumably then not "UN" -- official know on Wednesday what Ban Ki-moon will tell the Security Council in five days time?

  Either this is an admission that Ban Ki-moon is a Western tool, either telling them in advance what he will say or being told what to say, or there is something wrong with this story. The fact that it cites Samantha Power's tweets is telling.

If the results are already known, why wait five days? Unless in this UN's Race for Relevance, that seems like the best timing, after tomorrow's Kerry and Lavrov meeting. But wasn't the UN process supposed to be scientific and not political?

  Responding to this outing, Ban Ki-moon should either release "his" report more quickly, or make sure it follows what he said his mandate was: simply to say if chemical weapons were used or not, not to say who used them.

  If he is changing the claimed mandate, he has a duty to do the work he was initially charged with, investigating Khan al Asal.

  But as noted, Ban this week blithely gave a speech honoring Samantha Power. He pre-empted noon briefings for two and five question press conferences, with all the questions leaning in one direction.

  The first question in every instance given to the "UN Correspondents Association," which held a faux "UN briefing" with Saudi sponsored Syria rebel boss Ahmad al Jarba, publicized only to those who paid money.

The officers of this same UNCA, along with the author of the "UN Report Will Finger Assad Regime" spin job, were thanked by the UK's outgoing Deputy Permanent Representative Parham for the gift of a tie. But the gifts (and spying) go both ways, as well as anonymous trolling against whoever dares question these scams. Watch this site.