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| Russia & Syria are bombing hospitals in Idlib now |
The Syrian government was accused of dropping gas cylinders that killed dozens in the city of Douma in April 2018. But a newly leaked engineering assessment from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) challenges that claim and says there is a higher probability that the cylinders were “manually placed.” That is the first time this judgment has been made public. It was excluded from the OPCW’s final report on the Douma incident, which was used to pin the blame on the Syrian government.As I have explained in my first post on this subject, there is nothing about this document that says it ever was accepted as an OPCW document. There is nothing officially OPCW about it. The confidentially classification is not a real OPCW classification. There is no basis for claiming this 27 February note was excluded from the OPCW report that was months in production and published on 1 March. The note was dated only two days earlier, and we don't know when it was received by the OPCW or even if they received it before 1 March. You can't arrive too late to be checked-in, and then complain about being excluded. And, while the public only got a look at this 15-page note after it was published this April, the “judgement” that this gas attack was “staged” is one the Russian and Syrian governments have been making since the attack was first reported. Consider these statements:
This is the Russian Federation's judgement:
The existing facts more likely indicate that there is a high probability that both cylinders were placed at Locations 2 and 4 manually rather than dropped from an aircraft.This is Ian Henderson's judgement in his “leaked” note:
In summary, observations at the scene of the two locations, together with subsequent analysis, suggest that there is a higher probability that both cylinders were manually placed at those two locations rather than being delivered from aircraft.
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| Neo-Nazi Poster | Daily Stormer supports Dr. Ted Postol |
Dr. Ted first entered this controversial landscape after Assad massacred over 1400 with sarin in East Ghouta on the morning of 21 August 2013. He claimed Assad's army was too far away to have fired those rockets, and he had a bunch of fancy math to prove it. Later, it came out that he got assistance in developing his theories from Maram Susli, a pro-Assad troll and Infowars contributor that goes by the handles “Syrian Girl”, “Partisangirl” and “Syrian Sister.”
The people of East Ghouta knew where the rockets were coming from because ones with conventional warheads had been raining down on them for months. That's why the children were all sleeping in the basements where gas could get them first. For them, there was never any mystery about that where the rockets came from. But these sounded different when they landed. Almost like duds; Almost.
Dr. Ted set out to exonerate Assad of the sarin murders even though it was clear he had murdered ten-of-thousands by conventional means. Robert Barsocchini gave us this example of how Dr. Ted arrived at his conclusions:
Postol located the crater via satellite and examined it himself, concluding it reveals “absolutely no evidence that the crater was created by a munition designed to disperse sarin after it is dropped from an aircraft.”Assad had to turn over most of his sarin in a subsequent deal to avoid military attack. With that in hand, the UN would report, 5 March 2014, that:
128. In Al-Ghouta, significant quantities of sarin were used in a well-planned indiscriminate attack targeting civilian-inhabited areas, causing mass casualties. The evidence available concerning the nature, quality and quantity of the agents used on 21 August indicated that the perpetrators likely had access to the chemical weapons stockpile of the Syrian military, as well as the expertise and equipment necessary to manipulate safely large amount of chemical agents. Concerning the incident in Khan Al-Assal on 19 March, the chemical agents used in that attack bore the same unique hallmarks as those used in Al-Ghouta.
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| Levant |
For example, he clearly doesn't understand that sarin evaporates like water on a dry day because after noting:Within a four day period in April of 2017, Dr. Ted publish three different versions of what “really” happened at Khan Sheikhoun, as he was forced to follow the shifts in the Russian/Syrian story.
The video evidence shows workers at the site roughly 30 hours after the alleged attack.He then goes on to conclude that because they aren't using what he would consider adequate protection, the whole scene must be a fabrication:
The honeycomb facemasks would provide absolutely no protection against either sarin vapors or sarin aerosols. The masks are only designed to filter small particles from the air. If sarin vapor was present, it would be inhaled without attenuation by these individuals. If sarin was present in an aerosol form, the aerosol would have condensed into the pores in the masks and evaporated into a highly lethal gas as the individuals inhaled through the masks. It is difficult to believe that health workers, if they were health workers, would be so ignorant of these basic facts.What utter nonsense! I asked chemical weapons expert Dan Kaszeta to name a common substance with evaporation characteristic similar to sarin and he responded “Water. On a very dry day, next to zero humidity.” The reason why he stated that last part twice is because how rapidly water evaporates does vary greatly with the amount of water already in the air, but it is always a very dry day for sarin, at least for parts of the world not under Assad's air force. For that reason alone, if sarin vapor was present in dangerous quantities, after 30 hours, in sunlight, outdoors, in a dry climate, it would be a physics miracle, and if sarin was present in an aerosol form, still floating over the road after 30 hours, it would be a good candidate for an investigation of the supernatural. That is what it would be. To use “ignorance of these basic facts,” to condemn health workers who are necessarily putting themselves at great risk without adequate equipment because they have been given no other choice is disgraceful.
Then the French came out with an independent report that also laid the blame at Assad's feet, and Dr. Ted had to take that one on too. When he did, he confused two separate attacks discussed in the report and blended them into one in such a way the we suggested he needed Reading Comprehension 101. It really was embarrassing.
Postol issues a correction to his earlier misreading of the French intelligence report on Syria https://t.co/DHv5rBhUcb pic.twitter.com/nnAhy0PxWH— Media Lens (@medialens) April 29, 2017
But now the OPCW FFM report on the Douma incident is pointing the finger at Assad again, so Dr. Ted is back on his Levant again. As the controversy around the so-called leaked OPCW report grows, it seems more forces are being thrown into the struggle. Dr. Ted showed up on Grayzone, 25 May 2019, and threw his expertise behind Ian Henderson's 15-page note. I will just comment on a few of the things he said to give you a feel. This is how he begins:
This document is a highly professional document that was obviously produced by a team of experts. It's written in an extremely careful way.
He goes on to vouch for the precision of the “engineering sub-teams” math calculations:
[T]he reason the evidence is overwhelming is they did, first of all, very careful mathematical calculations to determine what the scene should look like if it occurred as it appeared.This is nuts! Has he seen something no one else has seen? There are no mathematical calculations in the Executive Summary and no links or footnotes to any. He continues:
And this is critical because what the calculation indicates is that the cylinder would have had so much momentum that it would have gone through the roof — it would not have been on the roof, just sticking into in through this hole that had appeared to be the situation when inspected.
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| SAF Helo carrying bombs at low level |
BTW, the basic “assumption” that the Syrian helicopter would have had to be flying so high that any chlorine cylinder it dropped would go straight through the roof, as well as the Russian claims that Syrian helicopters never fly below 2000 meters is disproved by this picture of a Syria Airforce helicopter carrying barrel bombs over Aleppo in 2013.
How can the Syrians, Russians, Henderson, Postol, and all their supporters be so sure that if the helicopter in that picture was carrying chlorine cylinders, instead of barrel-bombs, and dropped one from that height onto the concrete and rebar roof we can see the corner of, that it absolutely, positively, “would have gone through the roof — it would not have been on the roof, just sticking into in through this hole”? If your math tells you that, get a new calculator. This is junk science in the service of war criminals. Postol also wrote:
They then took their observations — they had experts on the scene, and these are real experts; I want to underscore real experts versus a phony expert, I’ll have more to say about that shortly — and these real experts observed that the hole in the roof had all the characteristics of a hole created by either an artillery rocket, or a mortar shell. And holes of this kind have certain characteristics that an expert — a true expert, a real expert — would understand. And they describe those details so that someone like me can understand why their conclusion is that it was an explosive charge that created the hole.That just flat out contradicts what the OPCW FFM team said in its report:
The FFM analysed the damage on the rooftop terrace and below the crater in order to determine if it had been created by an explosive device. However, this hypothesis is unlikely given the absence of primary and secondary fragmentation characteristic of an explosion that may have created the crater and the damage surrounding it.BTW, this is what a professional document looks like:
In the early part of the report they describe how they collected data. And they describe collecting data by their own observations; by interviewing various people; and by having discussions with what they describe as “supposed experts.”Here is the section he must be talking about because it is the only place Henderson uses the phrase “supposed experts”:
6. To derive the inputs for an engineering assessment, it was necessary to develop hypotheses for what was thought (i.e. alleged) to have occurred. This needed to be done in a way that did not pre-judge the situation or lead prematurely to a mistaken interpretation of the facts. The situation was also complicated by the many sources of information and opinion about what was alleged to have occurred, including impressions and views of alleged witnesses, spokespersons, the media, representatives of States Parties, as well as the views of supposed experts in subsequent exchangesI cited this same section in my first post on Henderson's “leaked” note, and wrote: “The method at work here makes a travesty of any concept of scientific investigation. How do you mix “information and opinion” like that?” Dr. Ted confirms that in this section they are describing how they collect data. So, it seems that what they consider data isn't just information; like their own observations; interviews with witnesses, and data gained from “supposed experts,” but also the sources Dr. Ted left out, the “data” gathered from “spokespersons, the media, representatives of States Parties.” This sounds very much like a scientific method heavily polluted by political concerns. From a Marxist perspective the equating of “information and opinion” is a fantasy construction in which mental processes (opinion) about reality can be put on a par with reality. It's the same “method” that leads Henderson to develop two completing hypotheses for what happened-one based on information from witnesses, and the other based on the opinion of the representatives of State Parties.
He goes on, about what he sees as the “smoking gun,” the fact that one of the gas cylinders didn't fall completely through the roof:
Now, you’re dealing with a brittle material in the case of the roof. And what you would expect is that if you hit the brittle material in the orientation of a vertical, falling cylinder, it would look like a bullet hole going through glass. In other words, you wouldn’t have a cylinder lying on its side. If the roof were so thick that you didn’t get a crater, then you could have a canister sitting on its side. But there would be no hole in the roof, for which the canister could then inject the chlorine.It is quite a “thought experiment,” indeed! To see a “very serious computational, mathematical approach” in Henderson's 15-page note. There is no math, and no data, and no references to any, only Henderson's assurance about the results. No wonder they need a Professor Emeritus of Science, Technology, and National Security Policy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology to co-sign for it.
And so, this is kind of a thought experiment that dovetails with the very serious computational, mathematical approach that was used in this analysis.
In Conclusion
Dr. Ted thinks he can press science into the service of acquitting Assad of his crimes, but his application is always corrupt. His habit of riding to Assad's defense has made him one of the more notable atrocity deniers and holocaust enablers of the twenty-first century.
Here are my previous posts on Dr. Ted Postol:
On the “leaked” Henderson report, see also:
Lies, damned lies, and engineering sub-team reports
Where in the world is Ian Henderson?
More on the silent Ian Henderson and his "leaked" OPCW paper
Clay Claiborne, Linux Systems Administrator, L2
Syria is the Paris Commune of the 21st Century!
May God forgive you for carrying water for American/UK warmongering.
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