Seymour Hersh exposes Russian & Syrian lies about sarin attack

In Sincerely yours, Theodore A. Postol I was debunking another very different theory of how Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his Russian supporters weren't behind the sarin murders of close to a hundred people in Khan Sheikhoun on 4 April 2017.

Dr. Ted said that jihadist terrorists set off a sarin pipe bomb in the middle of the street. He said they staged it as a "false flag" attack while a Syrian war plane was overhead, however he did agree with just about every other investigation, including now the OPCW, on one important point - that there was a chemical attack. Hersh denies even this! Postol said in his initial report: 

The only indisputable facts stated in the White House report is the claim that a chemical attack using nerve agent occurred in Khan Shaykhun, Syria on that morning.

Now Hersh and his supporters dispute what even Ted Postol found indisputable! We've come a long way in two months. What's the saying?: "Like it never even happened!" 

While Postol agreed that there had been nerve agent murders that morning, he took the responsibility away from the Assad regime and put it on some unnamed actors. This was good enough for the Assad supporters, and for a while Postol's theory was all the rage. They couldn't stop talking about his impressive credentials, Professor Emeritus of Science, Technology, and National Security Policy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and they couldn't stop complaining about how the MSM was suppressing his exposure of the "truth."

At the time, it wasn't a problem that Postol's "who didn't dun it" completely contradicted Hersh's, but it was a big problem that it contradicted the official line from Moscow and Damascus. He tried to fix this in later revisions of his theory, but not before I pointed them out. This is what I wrote about Russian and Syrian explanation for the deaths in that critique of Postol:

Both the Russians and the Assad regime have had a consistent story about how civilians in Khan Sheikhoun died of chemical poisoning and they have been sticking to it. According to them, the Syrian air force bombed a jihadist chemical weapons storage facility in a civilian neighborhood and that is what caused the chemical deaths. It was the terrorist's sarin. Although they have never once used it in battle, we are told to believe they had it stockpiled in a warehouse waiting to be released by a Syrian air force bomb.

On the day of the attack, 4 April 2017, Russia Today reported:

The Syrian Air Force has destroyed a warehouse in Idlib province where chemical weapons were being produced and stockpiled before being shipped to Iraq, Russia’s Defense Ministry spokesman said.

The strike, which was launched midday Tuesday, targeted a major rebel ammunition depot east of the town of Khan Sheikhoun, Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Major-General Igor Konashenkov said in a statement.

The warehouse was used to both produce and store shells containing toxic gas, Konashenkov said. The shells were delivered to Iraq and repeatedly used there, he added, pointing out that both Iraq and international organizations have confirmed the use of such weapons by militants.

The next day Sputnik News repeated the same story:

MOSCOW (Sputnik) — Syrian aircraft have conducted an airstrike near the town of Khan Shaykhun in Syria’s Idlib province on the warehouse of terrorists’ ammunition and the mass of military equipment, where chemical weapons' ammunition had also been stored and delivered to Iraq, Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said Wednesday.

According to Konashenkov, on Tuesday "from 11.30 to 12.30, local time, [8.30 to 9.30 GMT] Syrian aircraft conducted an airstrike in the eastern outskirts of Khan Shaykhun on a large warehouse of ammunition of terrorists and the mass of military equipment".

Konashenkov said that from this warehouse, chemical weapons' ammunition was delivered to Iraq by militants.

Konashenkov added that there were workshops for manufacturing bombs, stuffed with poisonous substances, on the territory of this warehouse.

On the day after that, 6 April 2017, the Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem said in a press conference in Damascus @6:20:

"The first air raid conducted by the Syrian army was at 11:30 of that day and it attacked an army depot that belongs to al Nusra Front which contains chemical weapons. The evidence is that army depot is actually monitored by cctv and had that raid actually happened the damage would have reached a circle about with 1 km diameter. al Nusra Front and ISIS and other organizations continue to store chemical weapons in urban and residential areas."

And in case anybody thought they were changing their story, they repeated it again more than a week after the attack. Sputnik News stated 12 April 2017:

MOSCOW (Sputnik) — Russia stands by its assertion that the Syrian forces struck a militant chemical weapons production facility on April 4, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said Wednesday.

"According to our absolutely reliable information, the point at issue are Syrian Arab Republic air force's Su-22 airstrikes on a site controlled by terrorists where chemicals were produced," Ryabkov told reporters.

Now comes the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour M. Hersh with a story to tell about what really happened, based on a high level secret source that knows all, and in doing so he exposes the lies told above by the Russians and Syrians.  According Hersh's source:

The Syrian target at Khan Sheikhoun, as shared with the Americans at Doha, was depicted as a two-story cinder-block building in the northern part of town. Russian intelligence, which is shared when necessary with Syria and the U.S. as part of their joint fight against jihadist groups, had established that a high-level meeting of jihadist leaders was to take place in the building, including representatives of Ahrar al-Sham and the al-Qaida-affiliated group formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra. The two groups had recently joined forces, and controlled the town and surrounding area. Russian intelligence depicted the cinder-block building as a command and control center that housed a grocery and other commercial premises on its ground floor with other essential shops nearby, including a fabric shop and an electronics store.

Well, if that were true why didn't they just say that in the first place? Why make up stories about "a warehouse in Idlib province where chemical weapons were being produced and stockpiled?" Why did they leave out the part about a high-level meeting of jihadist leaders that needed to be dealt with, and why take responsibility for knowingly bombing chemical weapons stores, something the US took pains to avoid in its retaliatory strike against Shayrat airfield?

Even if it wasn't Assad regime sarin, if they knew it was being stored in a civilian area [which Shayrat airfield was not] and they bombed it anyway, most moral people would still hold them partly responsible for the civilian deaths that resulted, but if it was just insecticide and disinfectants in the basement, no blame, no foul.

Its like if Hersh is right, their cover story actually makes them more culpable than the truth. Why did they make up lies that make themselves look worst?

And why did they lie about the little things?

The Syrian FM said the bombing started at 11:30.  Thanks to Seymour's secret source we know different:

The target was struck at 6:55 a.m. on April 4, just before midnight in Washington. A Bomb Damage Assessment (BDA) by the U.S. military later determined that the heat and force of the 500-pound Syrian bomb triggered a series of secondary explosions that could have generated a huge toxic cloud that began to spread over the town, formed by the release of the fertilizers, disinfectants and other goods stored in the basement, its effect magnified by the dense morning air, which trapped the fumes close to the ground. According to intelligence estimates, the senior adviser said, the strike itself killed up to four jihadist leaders, and an unknown number of drivers and security aides.

There has also been a massive conspiracy to misidentify the attacking aircraft as a SU-22, and judging from the statement above, the Russians are a part of it! Thanks to Seymour's secret source we know the truth:

The intelligence made clear that a Syrian Air Force SU-24 fighter bomber had used a conventional weapon to hit its target: There had been no chemical warhead.

And no SU--22 according to Hersh; or could he be wrong both about the plane and what it dropped?

Since we can depend on an investigative reporter with a Pulitzer Prize to give us the facts, its hard to understand why the Syrians and the Russians led with a pack of lies, especially since those in the know, on both sides, already knew the real mission, according to Seymour Hersh's secret source:

Russian and Syrian intelligence officials, who coordinate operations closely with the American command posts, made it clear that the planned strike on Khan Sheikhoun was special because of the high-value target. “It was a red-hot change. The mission was out of the ordinary – scrub the sked,” the senior adviser told me. “Every operations officer in the region" – in the Army, Marine Corps, Air Force, CIA and NSA – “had to know there was something going on."

Russian and Syrian intelligence officials, the Army, Marine Corps, Air Force, CIA and NSA all knew "that there was no chemical attack," according to Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist Seymour M. Hersh. What must they all have been thinking when both the Russians and the Syrians came out with a pack of lies that makes them look worst than the truth according to Hersh?

See also:
Sy Hersh's incredible secret source
Syria, Seymour Hersh and the Sarin denialists

Syria is the Paris Commune of the 21st Century!

Click here for my posts on the 2016 US Election Click here for a list of my other blogs on Syria Click here for a list of my other blogs on Libya

Syria, Seymour Hersh and the Sarin denialists

An important post by Brian Whitaker, Former Middle East editor of The Guardian, 1 July 2017. Republished from his website www.al-bab.com.

Syria, Seymour Hersh and the Sarin denialists

Seymour Hersh: his anonymous source claimed no chemical attack had taken place. Photo: Institute for Policy Studies

Do news organisations have a duty to publish stories from anonymous sources when there is reason to believe they are untrue? Apparently some people think so.

Yesterday, following scientific tests, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons confirmed that inhabitants of Khan Sheikoun, in the Syrian province of Idlib, had been “exposed to Sarin, a chemical weapon”, during an attack last April. Reports at the time said at least 74 died and hundreds were injured.

The news that Sarin had definitely been involved caused a buzz on Twitter from people refusing to believe it. Many pointed instead to an article in a German newspaper last weekend which quoted an unnamed “senior adviser to the American intelligence community” as saying no chemical attack had taken place.

The article, by veteran American journalist Seymour Hersh, suggested that Syrian forces using a conventional explosive bomb had accidentally hit a store of “fertilisers, disinfectants and other goods” causing “effects similar to those of sarin”.

Hersh’s version contradicted evidence from a range of sources and, in the light of yesterday’s announcement from the OPCW, is clearly untrue. As far as some people were concerned, though, it said what they wanted to hear and, even after the OPCW reported its findings, they were still complaining that mainstream media had failed to take Hersh’s ridiculous story seriously.

An article on The Canary Website began:

“An acclaimed investigative journalist [Hersh] has now blown a giant hole in the official narrative of one of 2017’s most explosive world events: the Syrian ‘chemical attack’ and Donald Trump’s fierce response. But the BBC and other media outlets seem to be completely ignoring his exposé.”

Media Lens, an organisation dedicated to “correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media” grumbled that searching a database of newspapers had revealed no mentions of Hersh’s article.

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Meanwhile Jonathan Cook, a journalist who mainly reports on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, wrote in a blog post:

“If you wish to understand the degree to which a supposedly free western media are constructing a world of half-truths and deceptions to manipulate their audiences, keeping us uninformed and docile, then there could hardly be a better case study than their treatment of Pulitzer prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh.

“All of these highly competitive, for-profit, scoop-seeking media outlets separately took identical decisions: first to reject Hersh’s latest investigative report, and then to studiously ignore it once it was published in Germany last Sunday. They have continued to maintain an absolute radio silence on his revelations …”

But why should anyone pay attention to Hersh when an anonymous source tells him something that flies in the face of evidence? The reason, apparently, is that he won a Pulitzer prize for journalism 47 years ago. His supporters constantly mention the Pulitzer as if that’s a good reason for unquestioning faith in whatever he writes.

Winning a Pulitzer obviously means a reporter’s work has impressed the judges but it’s not necessarily a guarantee of factual accuracy. In 1981, one of the winners was a Washington Post journalist whose story about an eight-year-old heroin addict later turned out to be fabricated.

Hersh has certainly done valuable reporting in the past. He exposed the Mai Lai massacre in Vietnam back in 1969 and, more recently, the horrors of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Some of his other exposés have misfired, though, and he has often been criticised for his use of shadowy sources. In the words of one Pentagon spokesman, Brian Whitman, he has “a solid and well-earned reputation for making dramatic assertions based on thinly sourced, unverifiable anonymous sources”.

Another complaint about his more recent work is that he spends too much time listening to his unidentified sources and not enough looking at open-source evidence which points in a different direction. In an earlier article where Hersh suggested the Assad regime had not been responsible for Sarin attacks near Damascus in 2013, he either overlooked or disregarded evidence which didn’t fit his argument and posed a number of questions which other writers had already answered.

His 2013 article about chemical weapons in Syria was rejected by the New Yorker magazine and eventually published in Britain by the London Review of Books. However, the London Review of Books rejected his latest article — which is why it ended up being published in Germany.

Inevitably, Hersh’s loyal supporters discount the most likely reason for these rejections — that his editors found the articles flaky — in favour of a media conspiracy. Jonathan Cook (this time writing for Counterpunch) says:

“Paradoxically, over the past decade, as social media has created a more democratic platform for information dissemination, the corporate media has grown ever more fearful of a truly independent figure like Hersh. The potential reach of his stories could now be enormously magnified by social media. As a result, he has been increasingly marginalised and his work denigrated. By denying him the credibility of a ‘respectable’ mainstream platform, he can be dismissed for the first time in his career as a crank and charlatan. A purveyor of fake news.”

This may explain why Media Lens, which specialises in critiquing the mainstream media, has such a high opinion of Hersh.

Media Lens has previously taken a dim view of journalists who use anonymous sources. A few years ago it bombarded the Guardian with complaints over a news story about Iraq which extensively quoted unnamed American officials. These sources, Media Lens said, were used “with no scrutiny, no balance, no counter-evidence — nothing”.

Exactly the same charges can be levelled against Hersh but Media Lens not only seems unperturbed but is urging other media to regurgitate his anonymously-sourced story.

To some extent, scepticism about chemical weapons in Syria is a knee-jerk reaction to misleading reports about Iraq’s imaginary weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the 2003 invasion: if we were deceived over Iraq, how do we know we are not being deceived over Syria?

The best protection against that — then, as now — is evidence. Regardless of who is claiming what, check for evidence that might support their claims.

In Syria there is abundant evidence that Sarin has been used as a weapon during the conflict. The Assad regime, by its own admission, had stockpiles of Sarin — and possibly still has some. It also denies that any has been lost, stolen or captured. Furthermore, there is no evidence that rebel groups fighting in Syria have ever possessed or had access to Sarin. Draw your own conclusions.

In Iraq, on the other hand, suspicions about Saddam Hussein’s weapons were not supported by evidence. During the long build-up to war, constantly repeated claims from politicians and others led many prominent journalists to abandon their critical faculties. But, as with Hersh’s Syria articles, warning signs were there if only people looked for them.

The Washington Post, for example, devoted an extraordinary 1,800 words to an extremely flimsy (but scary) story suggesting Iraq had supplied nerve gas to al-Qaida.

At the New York Times, star reporter Judith Miller was churning out more alarmist stuff. One story concerned US attempts to stop Iraq importing atropine, a drug used for treating heart patients which is also an antidote against pesticide poisoning … and nerve gas. This tale, as presented by Miller (with assistance from anonymous official sources) was that Iraq not only possessed nerve gas but intended to use it and wanted to protect its own troops from the harmful effects.

Another of Miller’s “scoops” was an unverified claim that a Russian scientist, who once had access to the Soviet Union’s entire collection of 120 strains of smallpox, might have visited Iraq in 1990 and might have provided the Iraqis with a version of the virus that could be resistant to vaccines and could be more easily transmitted as a biological weapon.

Unfortunately, there were plenty who took her word for it at the time. She was, after all, a Pulitzer prize-winning investigative journalist.

Originally published at al-bab.com.

See also: Sy Hersh's incredible secret source

Syria is the Paris Commune of the 21st Century!

Click here for my posts on the 2016 US Election Click here for a list of my other blogs on Syria Click here for a list of my other blogs on Libya

Sy Hersh's incredible secret source

The legendary journalist Seymour M. Hersh has recently published an appreciation of the deadly attack on Khan Sheikhoun, Syria that took place on the morning of 4 April 2017 and of United States President Donald Trump's response several days latter. While the Syrian opposition, the United States, France, Germany, Human Rights Watch and the OPCW all have come to the conclusion that 92+ Syrian civilians were murdered that morning by a sarin bomb delivered by a Syrian warplane, the claim that Hersh makes is "that there was no chemical attack." This is a bold claim in the face of so many deaths and a mountain of evidence that they were caused by sarin.

The OPCW report on the attack on Khan Sheikhoun, dated 29 June 2017 and released today, begs to differ:

The [OPCW Fact-Finding Mission] team concluded that a large number of people, some of whom died, were exposed to sarin. The release that caused exposure was likely to have been initiated in the crater in the road, located close to the silos in the northern part of the town. The team concluded that, based on such a release, the only determination that could be made was that sarin had been used as a weapon.

This would be the same crater that another Assad defender, Dr. Theodore Postol claimed was the site in which terrorists set off a sarin pipe-bomb so they could blame the Assad regime. Ted Postol's Assad defense relies on alternative facts from Hersh. Hersh has little use for the crater in the street since it contradicts his story about the bombing of a building. I have also extensively criticized the various Postol defenses of Assad:

05/12/2017 Dr. Ted Postol misreads the HRW Report on Khan Sheikhoun
05/10/2017 Are Scott Horton & Ted Postol holocaust enablers?
05/03/2017 Reading Comprehension 101 for MIT Professor Dr. Ted Postol
05/01/2017 Postol's Apostles & the normalization of chemical weapons use
04/30/2017 Dr. Postol's "correction" shows he still needs Reading Comprehension 101
04/28/2017 Please Re-Tweet as Ted Postol beats a hasty retreat
04/26/2017 Sincerely yours, Theodore A. Postol

Ray McGovern, another long time Putin pundit and Assad supporter, seemed not to notice this contradiction between his earlier support of Postol's theory of how Assad didn't do it, and Hersh's in his Counterpunch defense of Hersh. He begins by repeating verbatim Hersh's story about what happened:

Russia and Syrian Air Force officers gave details of the flight path to and from Khan Sheikhoun in English, Hersh reported. The target was a two-story cinderblock building in which senior leaders – “high-value targets” – of the two jihadist groups controlling the town were about to hold a meeting. 

Then a few paragraphs later he remembers a memo put out by his group in support of Ted Postol's thesis:

For instance, the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity produced a memo on April 11 questioning Trump’s rush to judgment. Former MIT professor Ted Postol, a specialist in applying science to national security incidents, also poked major holes in the narrative of a government sarin attack. But the MSM silence was deafening.

But Hersh contradicts Ted Postol's thesis as much as he contradicts the OPCW findings. Both agree that there was a sarin attack. Both agreed that the crater in the street was the release site. The divergence that McGovern supports is Postol's conclusion that the source of the CW attack was a terrorist sarin pipe bomb. Hersh says there was no sarin, only a conventional bomb in a cinderblock building. How can McGovern promote both theories at once? Perhaps the answer is that a con artist is someone who can promote two opposing theories and still remain convincing.

The question of whether there really was a chemical attack is especially important now because Russian President Vladimir Putin has predicted there would be more CW attacks in Syria, and US has claimed that the Assad regime is preparing them. It is also important because after having been effectively banned in 1925, CW weapons are starting to make a comeback as an accepted weapons for the suppression of mass rebellion, and not just in Syria anymore. A critical component of this new normalization of chemical weapons use has been efforts by the perpetrators and their supporters to create doubt and confusion over who is responsible for these chemical deaths. That way nobody is prosecuted. In this case Hersh supports the Russian-Syrian flat out denial that a chemical attack has even occurred, in spite of the fact that labs in Turkey, France, and for the OPCW have all tested samples from Khan Sheikhoun and found that sarin was used.

Seymour M. Hersh has not been reporting on the day to day, week to week, or month to month slaughter that has been called the Syrian conflict, and has so far taken more than a half-million lives over the past six years, but he has felt the need to weigh in strongly when Bashar Assad has been accused of killing with chemicals. In the case of the sarin murder of more than 1400 civilians in suburban Damascus on 21 August 2013, Sy Hersh mobilized an army of anonymous experts and intel officers to exonerate Assad. I roundly critiqued his positions in these six posts:

04/23/2014 How Seymour Hersh confuses Syria with Libya
04/13/2014 After Hersh lays smoke screen, Assad lobes gas bombs
04/12/2014 Mỹ Lai and Sy Hersh, a Reappraisal
04/10/2014 Seymour Hersh's chemical weapons fetish
04/08/2014 Seymour Hersh's Believe It or Don't
12/09/2013 Whose Seymour Hersh?

Sy Hersh's latest defense of Assad, Trump's Red Line, published by Welt, 25 June 2017, makes the bold claim that we are the victims of fake news and there really were no victims of a sarin attack in Khan Sheikhoun in April. His claim has been lauded and repeated by a number of commenters, including Scott Ritter and Ray McGovern, who like Hersh himself, are people I use to admire.

Just What a Khan Sheikhoun False Flag Conspiracy Would Actually Mean, has been well covered today by Eliot Higgins on Bellingcat, so I don't have go into how ridiculous it is to think there is a big secret studio somewhere cranking out opposition YouTube videos.

Since there can be no question that we are seeing murder on a mass scale in Syria, getting to the truth of these claims and counterclaims is not a parlor game. It is most serious. If Hersh and his supporters are right, then both the public and the Assad regime have been the victim of a tight, well organized conspiracy involving hundreds of people in Syria, Turkey, France, and the United States. If they are wrong, them the lot of them should be looked upon as holocaust enablers.

Who is Hersh's secret source?

Scott Ritter, Ray McGovern,  Jonathan Cook, Alex Jones and many others are basing their claims on Sy Hersh, and Sy Hersh bases his claims on information from "a senior adviser to the American intelligence community, who has served in senior positions in the Defense Department and Central Intelligence Agency." Hersh doesn't say who this anonymous individual is, but since he or she is the source of the narrative being fed to us by Hersh, knowing his or her identity is important. What can we discern about Hersh's source from what he tells us?

Since Hersh only says that he has served in the intelligence community, it is probably safe to assume he is a former intelligence officer, rather than one actively employed, and yet he seems to know all about everything on all sides! He knows about communications between the US and Syrian forces at levels few would expect. For example, as part of "deconfliction":

the Russians speak on behalf of the Syrian military

except apparently when Syrian Air Force officers communicate directly with USAF officers aboard AWACS planes:

Russian and Syrian Air Force officers gave details of the carefully planned flight path to and from Khan Shiekhoun on April 4 directly, in English, to the deconfliction monitors aboard the AWACS plane, which was on patrol near the Turkish border, 60 miles or more to the north.

He claims that they also give exact targeting information, including descriptions of buildings being struck to the US command in Doha:

The Syrian target at Khan Sheikhoun, as shared with the Americans at Doha, was depicted as a two-story cinder-block building in the northern part of town...Russian intelligence depicted the cinder-block building as a command and control center that housed a grocery and other commercial premises on its ground floor with other essential shops nearby, including a fabric shop and an electronics store.

He then goes on to say how the basement is being used. This sounds like they share with the US the type of intelligence that can only be gathered by spies on the ground. How nice of them! According to Hersh's secret source, the Russians give the US this type of detailed advance notice is so that CIA assets can have time to escape.

One reason for the Russian message to Washington about the intended target was to ensure that any CIA asset or informant who had managed to work his way into the jihadist leadership was forewarned not to attend the meeting. 

This seems at odds with stories heard in other quarters of Syrian warplanes threatening CIA assets around Raqqi, but it is particularly considerate of the Russians. Since, if the target is suppose to be a meeting of jihadists, both the attempt by the CIA to communicate the attack plans to their supposed assets on the ground, and the attempt by those assets to flee, would involve a considerable chance they would blow the whole operation, after so much careful planning, with drone observations and special bomb and all, according to Hersh. Gee, they must really love us. Can't we treat them better?

According to Hersh's secret source, the Russians talk directly to the CIA about their bombing missions and detailed intelligence about the insurgents.

I was told that the Russians passed the warning directly to the CIA. “They were playing the game right,” the senior adviser said. The Russian guidance noted that the jihadist meeting was coming at a time of acute pressure for the insurgents: Presumably Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham were desperately seeking a path forward in the new political climate. 

These two groups could have easily met more safely in the physical climate of Turkey, but the senior adviser didn't explain why they were risking this meeting in Khan Sheikhoun. He does portray a level of cooperation by US forces with the Russians and Syrians that they have been lobbying for. He says that Russian and Syrian spies work closely with multiple American command posts. Who knew?

Russian and Syrian intelligence officials, who coordinate operations closely with the American command posts, made it clear that the planned strike on Khan Sheikhoun was special because of the high-value target. “It was a red-hot change. The mission was out of the ordinary – scrub the sked,” the senior adviser told me. “Every operations officer in the region" – in the Army, Marine Corps, Air Force, CIA and NSA – “had to know there was something going on. 

If knowledge of the "real" nature of the attack was so widely known, it is all the more surprising that Hersh had to go with his one unnamed source. In this era of leaks it's not uncommon for a major story in the New York Times or Washington Post to claim a dozen sources for a story. This is probably why the London Review of Books rejected it, even after having paid for it. Instead, Hersh had to shop Europe to find a publication with, shall we say?, less rigorous standards on sourcing.

Apparently, some US allies have been kept out of this loop, and didn't receive all this juicy information. They had to stoop to intercepting Syrian communications that they said proved Assad's forces delivered the sarin bomb. Hersh is at pains to explain to us that they are confused but US intelligence sources different from Hersh's secret source also claim to have overheard these communications, as did Syrian opposition plane spotters for which the disposition of Syrian military aircraft is a life or death question. Hersh doesn't give Syrian sources the time of day because it's easier to treat the Trump administration as the source of the facts he wishes to deny, but  an opposition news site had already identified the pilot of the bomber Hersh mis-identified as a Su-24 the day after the attack:

Orient Net contacted a number of field, independent and even Syrian Civil Defense observatories in the countryside of Idlib and Hama, and all testimonies indicated that the Assad terrorist who dropped toxic gas-filled barrels on Khan Sheikhoun was colonel pilot, Muhammad Yousef Hasouri.

Colonel Hasouri is the commander of the Sukhoi 22 Squadron at al-Sha’yrat airport. His warplane carries Quds 1 banner. He hails from the villages of Talkalakh town from Homs countryside and currently resides with his family in the Assad-controlled al-Sakan al-Shababy neighborhood in Homs city.

At approximately 06:30 am on Tuesday (April 4), Colonel Hasouri took off with his Sukhoi 22 and dropped barrels filled with toxic chemicals on the town of Khan Sheikoun in Idlib countryside, killing more than 100 civilians as they slept and injuring more than 400.

The majority of those who fell victim to the toxic gas were children.
...
It is worthy to mention that the walky-talkies and wireless connections have become an essential part of the lives of Syrians living in the liberated areas because of their effective role in reporting any sudden assault by Assad or Russian warplanes.

While the Hersh narrative ignores the crater in the street that Ted Postol made such a fuss over and everyone else claims was the place the sarin bomb exploded, it has a lot to say about an explosion no one on the ground reported. This former intelligence officer of Hersh's apparently still has access to pentagon Bomb Damage Assessments (BDA) which he said confirmed that what happened was pretty much what the Russians and Syrians said had happened:

U.S. military later determined that the heat and force of the 500-pound Syrian bomb triggered a series of secondary explosions that could have generated a huge toxic cloud that began to spread over the town, formed by the release of the fertilizers, disinfectants and other goods stored in the basement, its effect magnified by the dense morning air, which trapped the fumes close to the ground. According to intelligence estimates, the senior adviser said, the strike itself killed up to four jihadist leaders, and an unknown number of drivers and security aides. There is no confirmed count of the number of civilians killed by the poisonous gases that were released by the secondary explosions, although opposition activists reported that there were more than 80 dead, and outlets such as CNN have put the figure as high as 92. 

I guess Hersh somehow thinks a decision to drop a bomb in a busy shopping district ("with other essential shops nearby, including a fabric shop and an electronics store") that kills a hundred civilians in order to take out four "high value targets" can be morally justified so long as chemical weapons aren't involved. This is his CW fetish I wrote about earlier. What is missing from anybody's account of the aftermath of the attack are reports of fighters or civilians being killed or injured by the blast of a 500 pound bomb. The reported deaths were from chemical exposure.

Hersh's senior advisor seems to think he knows all about Putin's relationship with Assad as well:

"What doesn't occur to most Americans" the adviser said, "is if there had been a Syrian nerve gas attack authorized by Bashar, the Russians would be 10 times as upset as anyone in the West. Russia’s strategy against ISIS, which involves getting American cooperation, would have been destroyed and Bashar would be responsible for pissing off Russia, with unknown consequences for him. Bashar would do that?"

There is ample evidence, including some published on this blog, that Russia's strategy in Syria isn't against ISIS so much as it is about propping up the Assad regime, so while this retired intel officer may think he knows what Putin is trying to do in Syria, he is probably wrong. Like everything else that he tells Hersh, it is what Putin wants us to hear.

He is probably right that Assad wouldn't do anything to piss off Putin. The one true tone that underlines the whole Hersh narrative is that it is Putin that is running the show in Syria. That merely means that Putin was behind the sarin attack and those who ask why would Assad do it are asking the wrong question. They should be asking why would Putin do it? Most likely the answer has little to do with Syria, and much more to do with the overall international situation, and particularly the acute need at that juncture, two days after Republican Congressional Intel Committee chief Nunes was forced to recuse himself from the Russia investigation, to create a distraction and an open break between Trump and Putin.

But wait there's more! Hersh's secret source doesn't just know all about events in Syria, and in the US military, he knows details about goings on in the White House, including what the CIA told the White House.

When a single intelligence asset claims information from multiple agencies and varied sources, it is a red-flag that that asset is getting information from multiple agencies, and that you are being played:

Within hours of viewing the photos, the adviser said, Trump instructed the national defense apparatus to plan for retaliation against Syria. “He did this before he talked to anybody about it. The planners then asked the CIA and DIA if there was any evidence that Syria had sarin stored at a nearby airport or somewhere in the area. Their military had to have it somewhere in the area in order to bomb with it.” “The answer was, ‘We have no evidence that Syria had sarin or used it,’” the adviser said.

According to Hersh's adviser, the CIA thinks they know exactly what has been going on at Shayrat airfield, even if he, Hersh and the CIA, can't keep the type of plane straight:

“The CIA also told them that there was no residual delivery for sarin at Sheyrat [the airfield from which the Syrian SU-24 bombers had taken off on April 4] and Assad had no motive to commit political suicide.”

The "political suicide" bit sounds more like an argument for acquittal than an intelligence assessment, particular since the much larger East Ghouta sarin attack in 2013 didn't kill him. anyway, every other description of the attack says that a SU-22 did the bombing.

But aside from a few issues like that, Hersh's whole story relies on this one senior advisor as its source, but he is such an unbelievable source! Not only does he know what al Qaeda is up to in the basement of a two-story brick building in Khan Sheikhoun, he also has intimate knowledge from inside the Trump White House. He can quote the president's private comments:

The intelligence made clear that a Syrian Air Force SU-24 fighter bomber had used a conventional weapon to hit its target: There had been no chemical warhead. And yet it was impossible for the experts to persuade the president of this once he had made up his mind. “The president saw the photographs of poisoned little girls and said it was an Assad atrocity,” the senior adviser said. “It’s typical of human nature.

This senior adviser was like a fly on the wall of Trump's Syria attack discussions:

“Trump ruled out option one off the bat,” the senior adviser said, and the assassination of Assad was never considered. “But he said, in essence: ‘You’re the military and I want military action.’” The president was also initially opposed to the idea of giving the Russians advance warning before the strike, but reluctantly accepted it. “We gave him the Goldilocks option – not too hot, not too cold, but just right.” The discussion had its bizarre moments.

This same senior adviser knew what the primary target at Shayrat Airbase was.

The airfield’s gasoline storage tanks, a primary target, were pulverized, the senior adviser said, triggering a huge fire and clouds of smoke that interfered with the guidance system of following missiles. As many as 24 missiles missed their targets...

The Tomahawk missiles use GPS as well as terrain tracking technologies. Fire and smoke at the target site would not interfere with their guidance systems. They would be pretty useless in combat if they did. Who does this senior advisor think he is trying to fool?

One curious coincidence is that while Hersh's secret source may disagree with everything Assad's opposition has to say about what happened that morning in Khan Sheikhoun, and what the Trump administration and the US Intelligence agencies have had to say about about that and the retaliatory raid on Shakyat airfield, he lays out a narrative that is consistent at most points with the one put forward  by the Russians and the Syrians. For example, while Hersh's senior adviser claims 24 missiles missed their target, the Russians said the Syrian Ministry of defense claims 23 Tomahawks hit the airbase. Both claims are wrong. A comparison of commercial satellite photos of the airbase both before and after the attack show at least 44 distinct hits, and while it doesn't prove the Pentagon's claim that 58 of the 59 TLAMS hit their targets, it doesn't disprove it either, considering the possibility of double taps on some targets.

After the strike: These satellite images show the damage to al-Shayrat military airfield which was hit by US cruise missiles on Thursday night

For some, faith in the Pulitzer prize winning reporter and his legendary secret sources has reached almost mythic proportions, as exampled by Jonathan Cook in his latest Counterpunch defense of Hersh:

So what did Hersh’s investigation reveal? His sources in the US intelligence establishment – people who have helped him break some of the most important stories of the past few decades, from the Mai[sic] Lai massacre by American soldiers during the Vietnam war to US abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib in 2004 – told him the official narrative that Syria’s Bashar Assad had dropped deadly sarin gas on the town of Khan Sheikhoun on April 4 was incorrect.

In the first place, Sy Hersh didn't exactly "break" the story of My Lai, okay? A friend at the Village Voice alerted him to a press release the Army had issued on the upcoming Calley trial. The real heroes were those that wouldn't let the story die. People like SP5 Ron Ridenhour, a former door runner who wrote 30 letters to members of congress demanding an investigation, or Sgt Michael Bernhardt who Hersh would cite 28 times on his way to the Pulitzer. They and others hounded the army until they put someone on trial for the atrocities. Only then did Hersh pick up the story.

Beyond that Cook talks as if Hersh has had the same solid sources in the Pentagon and CIA for almost fifty years so anything he tells us is gold. We can take it to the bank!

But this latest story comes from a single source and in spite of being a single source, has been able to give Hersh the inside scoop in every arena relevant to his story. Generally, a reporter would have to piece together a story like this from multiple sources. I mean how lucky is it to find one source that can tell you what the jihadist had in an Idlib basement, and what the president was told in his most private discussions? It sounds too good to be true, and that is my reading of Hersh, his secret source, and his story.

What makes it very, very bad is that he ended it with a note designed to prepare us to view stepped up chemical slaughter by the Assad regime and its Russian partners as fake attacks we would do well to ignore:

 And do not think these guys are not planning the next faked attack. 

 Seymour M. Hersh may have made his reputation as a journalist, but he is spending that capital as a holocaust enabler.

By Clay Claiborne    republish freely

Syria is the Paris Commune of the 21st Century!

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Dr. Ted Postol misreads the HRW Report on Khan Sheikhoun

On the heels of the French Report on the sarin massacre at Khan Sheikhoun on 4 April 2016, Human Rights Watch came out with their own report on May Day, Death by Chemicals: The Syrian Government’s Widespread and Systematic Use of Chemical Weapons. While the HRW report agrees with the basic findings of the White House Report, the French Report, and Syrians on the ground at Khan Sheikhoun, that in the early morning hours of 4 April 2016, a single Syrian air force Su-22 bomber dropped a chemical bomb in a civilian area and a lot of people died, it went further because it documented a pattern of chemical weapons use by the regime that involved at least four chemical attacks in the last six months.

The HRW Report does go into detail about the Khan Sheikhoun attack, and provides some important new information. In summary it says:

Human Rights Watch interviewed 60 people with first-hand knowledge of the chemical attacks and their immediate aftermath, and reviewed dozens of photos and videos of impact sites and victims that were posted online and provided directly by local residents, but was unable to conduct ground investigations of the attack sites.

Information from local residents in Khan Sheikhoun indicates that a warplane flew over the town twice around 6:45 a.m. on April 4, 2017. One resident said he saw the plane drop a bomb near the town’s central bakery in the northern neighborhood during the first fly-over. Several people, including the person who saw the bomb falling, said they heard no explosion but saw smoke and dust rising from the area, consistent with the relatively small explosive charge in a chemical bomb. Several people also confirmed that they saw people injured or heard reports of injuries immediately after the first fly-over. A few minutes later, they said, a warplane dropped three or four high-explosive bombs on the town.

Human Rights Watch identified 92 people, including 30 children, whom local residents and activists said died due to chemical exposure from this attack. Medical personnel said the attack injured hundreds more.

Human Rights Watch reviewed dozens of photos and videos provided by residents of a crater from the impact of the first bomb. Local residents believed this site was the source of the chemical exposure because those who died lived nearby and people who came near it, including first responders, exhibited the strongest symptoms of chemical exposure. One of the first photos of the crater, taken by first responders, shows what appears to be liquid on the asphalt. That would be consistent with the use of a bomb containing sarin, which is in liquid form at room temperature.

Doctor Theodore A. Postol, Professor Emeritus of Science, Technology, and National Security Policy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology believes these local residents don't know what they are talking about, or worst, they are part of a deep state conspiracy that involves obviously the White House, as usual, the French, a couple of guys in England, and now apparently also Human Rights Watch.  In spite of those odds, his Syrian Sister can rest assured that Dr. Ted is as yet undaunted in his defense of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. He maintains staunchly that Assad wouldn't hurt a fly, at least not with chemicals, so fresh on the heels of his attack on the French Report, which I critiqued here, he has penned a new attack on the HRW report dated 8 May 2017 and titled The HRW Evidence Disaffirms Its Own Conclusions in Its Report of May 1, 2017

In the best journalistic and humanistic traditions, HRW takes upon itself the task of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. Now, Dr. Ted can't say that, because when he writes about human rights atrocities it is to comfort the afflicter. He earlier made a name for himself for his pseudo-scientific defense of Assad in the case of the 21 August 2013 sarin murders. In the present case, he is attempting to get Assad off the hook for the sarin murders of 4 April 2017. I believe this is his sixth attempt. There were those first three attacks on the easiest target, the White House Report, the first pdf, the addendum, and the Truthdig article, all that claimed the evidence pointed to terrorists setting off a sarin pipe bomb in the street, and not an air strike. Then there was the second Truthdig article that said the Russians might be right about bombing a terrorists arms depot that stored chemical weapons. Then there was the attack on the French Report, and now this attack on the HRW Report. That makes six. If we were to include the Scott Horton show in which Postol attacks Bellingcat, Elliot Higgins, and Dan Kaszeta, that would make seven.

In examining Dr. Postol's critique in some of these earlier works, I noted that they seem to come from issues the good doctor has with reading comprehension. As we shall see, that is also at the heart of his problem with the HRW report. His reading error with the HRW Report is similar to the one he made with the French Report. In that case he read "a sign of" as meaning "a unique indicator," and then he used his confusion to "prove" the French Report didn't prove what he thought it said. With the HRW Report he misreads it as saying a certain model of Soviet era weapon was definitely used, and then bases his critique on that, whereas it only referenced it as an example, and not the weapon that was definitely used to the exclusion of all others, that is Postol's mis-reading.

In his critique, Dr. Ted speaks as though the HRW Report had identified the specific weapon used [my emphasis]:

The KhAB-250 and KhAB-500 airdropped munitions identified by HRW are designed to dispense sarin by bursting at low altitude in the air, creating an aerosol cloud of nerve agent-droplets that are carried downwind as they fall from the point of the airburst (see diagrams and photos on page 5 of 13 pages). A properly functioning “250” or “500” munition would not create the crater that is the focus of the HRW analytical conclusion that there is evidence that this munition was used

.@hrw Here we have Postol incorrectly identifying OFAB 250-270s as FAB-250s, which is like Baby's First Weapon ID 2/? pic.twitter.com/SE1XgVHjtj

— Eliot Higgins (@EliotHiggins) May 9, 2017

.@hrw Postol also appears to think FAB-250s and FAB-500s are cluster bombs, which they are most certainly not 3/? pic.twitter.com/qAVzgO89IZ

— Eliot Higgins (@EliotHiggins) May 9, 2017

.@hrw I suspect Postol got RBKs and OFABs mixed up, and thought OFABs are called FABs. Real amateur hour stuff 4/4

— Eliot Higgins (@EliotHiggins) May 9, 2017

In addition his misreading of the weapons type, his whole critique discounts any of the eye-witness reports or sarin tests done by multiple agencies. It is almost entirely based on his view that the HRW report is talking about this weapon. But does the HRW Report say that? [again my emphasis]:

The photos and videos of the crater show two remnants from the chemical weapon used: a twisted thin metal fragment with green paint and a smaller circular metal object. Green coloring is widely used on factory-produced weapons to signify that they are chemical weapons. The KhAB-250, for example, one of two Soviet-produced bombs specifically designed to deploy sarin from a warplane, has two green bands. The circular object seen in photos of the crater appears similar to the cap covering the filling hole on the KhAB-250.

These remnants, combined with witness observations, the victims’ symptoms, and the identification of sarin as the chemical used in the attack by the French[1] and Turkish[2] governments and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons,[3] suggest that the Syrian warplane dropped a factory-made sarin bomb. According to open source material, the only Soviet-produced bombs designed specifically to deliver sarin are the KhAB-250 bomb, and its bigger version, the KhAB-500.

You will notice that HRW never says that a KhAB-250 or KhAB-500 was dropped on Khan Sheikhoun. They did use those for purpose of comparison, "similar" - their word, because both have the green markings for chemical weapons, but not the same, because the green markings are different. They definitely say that the available evidence "suggest that the Syrian warplane dropped a factory-made sarin bomb," and they do point to KhAB-250 and KhAB-500 as publicly known examples of such weapons from this very secret world. Of course we have no way of knowing what variants of these old designs, or even completely new designs for "a factory-made sarin bomb," the Assad regime may have come up with. The North Vietnamese became famous for re-engineering the Soviet and Chinese anti-aircraft rockets to get more range out of them than anyone thought possible. That is something else Postol should consider when he is promoting his 2km limit as the reason Assad couldn't possibly have done the people in Ghouta with sarin in 2013. 

Reading comprehension is thus the core problem with Postol's critique of the HRW report. He says:

The HRW claim that their analysis shows that this “standard” Russian munition was the source of the sarin release is therefore unsupported by the observed evidence they put forward. Put in other words, the HRW report does not contain any basic forensic evidence to support its claim that a standard Russian munition was the source of a sarin release at the crater.

But the HRW Report does not claim that "a standard Russian munition" was used. It only cites those as examples. The HRW report did conclude "a factory-made sarin bomb," was used. Since the focus of Postol's critique is that HRW never proved claims it never made, all his charts and diagrams miss the point. He could have better spent his time improving his reading skills.

There is one place where he tries to clean up a bent position that I must address, however. In a number of his previous defense briefs on the Khan Sheikhoun sarin massacre, Dr. Postol referenced a video that show workers taking samples from the crater some 30 hrs. after the attack, and said that if it was really sarin, they would be dead. A number of his critics, including me, pointed out that sarin was a low persistence nerve agent. It would be gone in 60 minutes or less. His obvious ignorance on this point must have been an embarrassment to him, so in this latest piece he tries to clean that up a bit. In this new piece he says:

Since the evaporation rate from the saturated soil would be slow relative to sarin deposited on the flat surrounding road surface, the area in and around the crater could have easily been highly toxic for 5 to 10 or more hours after the impact. During this period it would have not been possible for “White Hats” without hazmat protective equipment to dig inside the crater or linger in the immediate area around the crater, as observed in videos.

Since he had previously identified the videos as being taken 30 hrs. after the attack, there is little point in arguing his thesis that soil under the road surface could have "easily been highly toxic for 5 or 10 or more hours" to people that "linger in the immediate area." Although he had previously correctly identified the sample collectors in the video as being from the Idlib Health Directorate, now he calls them "White Hats." This smells like an attempt to get extra strokes out of the tar brush that has been used against a different group, the White Helmets. Denigrating anyone who comes to the aid of the victims is central to the work of the holocaust enabler.

While Postol demands exacting evidence that meets his high standards from those he is criticizing, he offers wild statements without anything like a shred of evidence as the premise for his conclusions. For example he says:

Given that there is substantial evidence that groups other than the Syrian government possess sarin precursors, indications of sarin poisoning do not alone indicate that the Syrian government was the source of the sarin, assuming the observed medical effects were from sarin.

Yes, assuming the French, the Turkish and the OPCW, weren't all conspiring together to "independently" find that samples tested positively for sarin, what proof is there that groups other than the Syrian government has sarin precursors beyond rubbing alcohol, or that even if in possession of all the necessary precursors, could formulate sarin? None is offered. Afterall, I can get plenty of coal but I can't make diamonds.

Postol offers this assertion about the widespread possession of sarin precursors, again without proof in this "Summary and Conclusions," and it is there that we find out what he really thinks. He starts out by acknowledging that whatever happened was a crime against humanity, and then immediately jumps into what I would call the "who didn't do it mode," in which you work to exonerate the most obvious killer. This is another thing that shows Postol and others of his ilk act like defense council for Assad rather than prosecutors for the people. If they were representing the people, and believed Assad didn't do it, they still should have pursued the "case of 2013" until the "real killer" was convicted or at least identified. That is how prosecutors prevent crimes from recurring. Defense counsels don't worry about that. After their guy gets off, they go home. Recurring crime is only their problem if their guy is being charged again.

This is why we are again hearing Postol et al speak out in Assad's defense. Bear in mind that Assad is most certainly a mass murderer many times over even if he can be acquitted in this particular case: 

There can be no doubt that using any form of murderous weapon, chemicals or otherwise, against innocent civilians and children constitute crimes against humanity.

It is also clear that there are multiple groups in Syria who have, or who have had access to the precursor chemicals needed to produce sarin. There is substantial evidence that the nerve agent attack of August 21, 2017 in Damascus might not have been executed by the Syrian government.

The future date of "August 21, 2017" is obviously a mistake, but it is Postol's mistake. Maybe Dr. Ted has problems with proofreading comprehension as well? He means 2013. Even after the United Nations said the sarin used in Damascus on 21 August 2013 came from "the chemical weapons stockpile of the Syrian military," he is still arguing Assad's innocent. His thesis would mean that opposition groups possess sarin and have used it twice against their own civilians, in 2013 and now in 2017, but never once used it in battle against Assad's forces.

In the case of the 2013 attack, Assad and most of his supporters, including Postol, argued that the opposition had a motive for gassing its own people. They said that because Obama had made this "red-line" pledge to intervene militarily if CW was used; they faked this attack so that he would intervene. It wasn't a very good "motive" then. Now it is a terrible one, but that doesn't stop Dr. Ted from raising it:

Human Rights Watch should have considered the possibility that at least some of these attacks could be perpetrated by groups who are interested in manipulating the United States into taking military actions that would support their political and military objectives against the Syrian government.

Really? Most of those attacks were done by aircrafts and those groups don't have them. Does HRW have a duty to entertain Dr. Ted's fantasies? Because if that was a thin thread in 2013, it is a gossamer one in 2017. Why would anyone stage a false flag attack that killed less than a hundred in the hopes of getting Trump to intervene against Assad right after he has announced a new more pro-Assad US policy, when the sarin deaths of over a thousand didn't prompt Obama to enforce his own red-line four years ago?

The French Report actually had a section on "the presence of armed groups in Hama and of their capabilities," but Dr. Ted chose to ignore it. He said the French Report didn't have any "details" like this:

Neither do the French services assess that the theory of a staged attack or manipulation by the opposition is credible, particularly because of the massive influx in a very limited time towards hospitals in Syria and Turkey, and the simultaneous, massive uploading of videos showing symptoms of the use of neurotoxic agents. 

Postol accuses HRW of encouraging groups to continue murdering innocent civilians and children in pursuit of US military intervention:

If this is the case, Human Rights Watch could be inadvertently encouraging these groups to continue murdering innocent civilians and children in pursuit of this objective.

I appreciate his logic, because even if Assad were somehow innocent of one or more chemical attacks, he clearly is guilty of the majority of the carnage in Syria. So what should we call those who come out to defend Assad whenever his mass murders get media attention, but holocaust enablers?

The next paragraph gives us his bottom line on the Syrian conflict. There is no just and moral side. There is no people's side in Syria. They are all bad people committing atrocities. No reason to single out the Assad Regime:

It is not foreseeable that when multiple groups are all engaged in routine wartime atrocities that one of the groups will suddenly transform itself into a moral and just winner while all the others would surely continue their monstrous behavior.

Clearly, he knows nothing of the history of Syria, its people, or this revolution. One of the groups is still the millions of Syrians that started this upheaval in 2011 by demanding an end to the fascist 40+ year old Assad dictatorship, and refusing to take "no" for an answer. They are still refusing to take "no" for an answer. That is the reason Assad is dropping sarin bombs on them. Those that still argue, as they did in 2013, that "Assad has almost won," don't understand the fight, because after all this carnage, Assad has still not forced them to accept his "no" for an answer. They didn't have to suddenly transform themselves into a moral and just cause, they have been that all along. Dr. Postol just can't see that from his perch on the other side. He probably can't read these banners either, so let me simplify them for him:

The People Demand an End to the Regime!

Bonus Feature...
Scott Lucas on sarin gas attack disinformation

Syria is the Paris Commune of the 21st Century!

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Please Re-Tweet as Ted Postol beats a hasty retreat

Although I prefer to think of the Syrian Revolution as the Paris Commune of the 21st Century, I have also called the Syrian tragedy the first holocaust of the 21st century. I continue to hope that latter characterization remains a warning and an exaggeration, but in the spirit of that sad metaphor, I would like to say that Doctor Theodore A. Postol, Professor Emeritus of Science, Technology, and National Security Policy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology is becoming one of the leading holocaust deniers of the 21 Century.

Many will say this label is unfairly awarded because what has so far happened in Syria has yet to reach holocaust proportions. That may be true. It may be more accurate to call Postol a holocaust enabler, because he is defending the mass murderers while they are committing the crime, and by doing this, he is helping them turn a string of atrocities into a holocaust.

As long as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was allowed to do his grisly work without much attention on the world stage Dr. Postol kept quiet. There were over a hundred thousand murdered before Assad used sarin in a big way in August of 2013. Then Ted Postol remerged as one of the chief investigators to argue that the Syrian regime wasn't responsible for the sarin murders of over 1400, including more than 300 children in Ghouta. He made a seemingly scientific argument that the regime could not have done it, and because of his MIT credentials, he quickly became the darling of the Assad didn't do it crowd.

Fast forward to 2017 and Assad is at it again with the sarin attack on Khan Sheikhoun, 4 April, so Postol is at it again too. Actually, Assad has been at it all along. He'd killed roughly another three hundred thousand since Postol first came to his defense, and he has never stopped killing, including with chemical. But this is the first time since 2013 that Assad has killed big time with sarin, and gotten the world's attention for it. Now Assad needs Postol's special talents again, and he's there for him.

And Postol is a rather slippery fellow. He's hard to pin down.

When both the Russians and the Syrians were coming out with a story about how they bombed a terrorist weapons depot that stored chemical weapons, Postol concocted his own story about how he could prove the terrorist exploded a chemical weapons pipe bomb in the street. Between 11 April and 14 April, he published no less than three versions of this story. The last one in Truthdig. Now that so many holes have been punched in that theory that it can't even hold our attention, he has come back to Truthdig with a "new" theory, Russian Explanation of the Mass Poisoning in Syria Could Be True, 26 April 2017. What I find incredible is that he doesn't address the earlier theory, because the sub-title of this piece should be "My Previous Truth Could Be False." He begins:

I have been examining the possibility that the April 4 attack in which a number of Syrian civilians and animals were killed, apparently by some kind of poison, hit an ammunition dump as claimed by the Russians. Videos taken on the morning of the attack show explosive debris clouds from four targets that were hit and provide strong circumstantial evidence that this Russian explanation could be true.

So far we have heard only of civilians (and animals) being killed, and assuming that is true, we have to wonder why no armed militants were killed, if this was an arms depot or chemical weapons store. Wouldn't they have been guarding it? Postol doesn't address that, instead he shows us this panorama stitched together from an opposition video of the Khan Sheikhoun attack that shows the three explosions and one puff of smoke seen in the video in one shot.

Then he tells us:

One of the clouds is quite distinctly different from all the others. The stem of this debris cloud has a base area that is five or more times larger than the cloud-stem bases of the other bomb debris clouds.

So now he is interpreting smoke signals for us. This image is actually from the video I used in my blog post criticising Postol.



There are a couple of problems with his use of these images to defend Assad. The first is that most observers of the chemical attack on Khan Sheikhoun reported that the Su-22 dropped four ordinances, 3 conventional rockets and one chemical. So the more likely interpretation of the three plumes of smoke is that they represent the conventional bombs. You wouldn't expect to see a plume like that from the chemical weapon. Why one plume is larger than the others may well have to do with what it hit, but it certainly doesn't prove it hit an arms depot. Besides, the only two large buildings in the area have been inspected both by reporters, and before and after satellite photos, and it has been determined that they were not bombed. That much smaller puff of smoke you see in the lower right hand corner on the video above in its starting position, it doesn't make a plume, it doesn't even go as high as the minaret, and is whiter. You can see it in Postol's picture too. Maybe that is where he should be looking for the chemical attack.

The second problem is that this video was uploaded to YouTube at 7:59am local time, just after the attack really happened, but both the Russians and the Assad regime insist the Syrian jet didn't attack Khan Sheikhoun until much later, close to noon. So by accepting this video as a valid record of the strike, he is acknowledging both the Russians and Assad regime are, shall we say "mistaken," even when he is arguing that they may be telling the truth!

Poor Postol. He wants so badly to please his Syrian Sister, but no matter how hard he tries, he can't seen to get it right. First he rushes to press with his own theory of how Assad didn't do it, only to discover his theory blows their alibi. So he ditches his theory to back their alibi, and in his zeal to find new proofs for them, ends up calling them out for lying again.

Then he goes off the deep end to imply it was some sort of industrial accident. Maybe they died from burning plastic!

I also have looked up data on poisonous gases that could be generated by the combustion of plastics, and have inspected photographs of the dead and dying from the Bhopal, India, chemical accident of Dec. 2-3, 1984.

How pathetic. Truthdig should publish a retraction of his earlier article, and this one.

Also on Wednesday, France issued a report on the sarin attack in Syria that is extremely detailed and claims to prove, among other things, that the sarin used on Khan Sheikhoun has been used by Assad before. The Chemical Attack in Syria - National Evaluation presented by Jean-Marc Ayrault following the Defense Council Meeting (26 April 2017) is a must read for anyone who wants to know what happened. This report is based exclusively on French intelligence, and they have been spying on Syria longer than most:

In view of the horrific attack and Syria’s repeated violations of its commitments to stop using weapons banned by the international community, France has decided to share the information at its disposal with its partners – who were informed overnight – and the general public.

The conclusions published in the national assessment – which we will be making public today – are based on painstaking investigations and analyses by French intelligence.

Naturally this became the new enemy Ted Postol had to take on and he did this on Thursday, 27 April 2017 in a piece he posted on Sic Semper Tyrannis (A Committee of Correspondence). He writes:

Attached below are data derived from the French Intelligence Report published yesterday on April 26, 2017. A reading of the report instantaneously indicates that the French Intelligence Report of April 26, 2017 directly contradicts the White House Intelligence Report of April 11, 2017. The discrepancies between these two reports essentially result in two completely different narratives alleging nerve agent attacks in Syria on April 11, 2017. The fact that these two intelligence reports allege totally different circumstances associated with the same alleged event raises very serious questions that need to be investigated and reported to the American public.

He is so confused in his haste to respond. He probably didn't take the time to read it twice before he added, with his empathise:

The French Report instead claims that there were at least three munitions dropped from helicopters in the town of Saraqib, more than 30 miles north of the alleged sarin release crater identified by the WHR.

The WHR claims that a fixed wing aircraft was the originator of the airdropped munition at the alleged dispersal site. The French Intelligence Report alleges that a helicopter was used to drop sarin loaded grenades at three different locations in Saraqib.

Both reports cannot simultaneously be true.

Actually they can. The French were talking about an attack on Saraqib that took place 29 April 2013. In that attack, the Assad regime dropped sarin grenades from a helicopter. One of the grenades failed to explode and was recovered. The French were able to compare that sarin with the sarin used on Khan Sheikhoun on 4 April 2017, almost 4 years later. This is how the French intelligence report referenced the attack on Saraqib:

c) According to the intelligence obtained by the French services, the process of synthesizing sarin, developed by the scientific Studies and Research Centre (SSRC) and employed by the Syrian armed forces and security services, involves the use of hexamine as a stabilizer. DIMP is also known as a by-product generated by this process.

d) This intelligence on the process used by the regime, which is a sign of its responsibility in the attack on 4 April, is based notably on the analysis of the content of an unexploded grenade which was used with certainty by the Syrian regime during the Saraqib attack on 29 April 2013. That mid-afternoon, a helicopter arriving from the north-east flew over the city of Saraqib at high altitude. Three unidentified objects, emitting white smoke, were dropped on neighbourhoods to the west of the city, on a north-south trajectory.

That was a small sarin attack. It never made the news, so Assad's defense was never called, and Postol paid no attention to it, otherwise he never would have fallen victim to his confusion now.

The French are also in complete agreement with Syrian witnesses and the White House Report as to the type of aircraft that attacked Khan Sheikhoun on 4 April, 2017:

b) The French services are aware in particular of a Sukhoi Su-22 bomber which took off from the Shayrat Airbase on the morning of 4 April and launched up to six strikes around Khan Sheikhoun.

This isn't rocket science, it's reading comprehension 101. If logic were a person, or even a corporation, it could probably bring a case in federal court against Postol for violating the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. At some point this has got to be embarrassing for MIT, even if it isn't for Dr. Postol.

Also related:
Noam Chomsky on Democracy Now says Assad now best for Syria
Sincerely yours, Theodore A. Postol
A valuable admission: Russia controls Syria & Putin runs the war
Why is Russia Today attacking Rep. Maxine Waters?

Syria is the Paris Commune of the 21st Century!

Click here for my posts on the 2016 US Election Click here for a list of my other blogs on Syria Click here for a list of my other blogs on Libya