(04-14-2017, 11:47 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: I hadn't read the Hersh article. His claims are interesting, but disputed in a reply below the article.
For me the key is the MIT report that said the chemical munition-carrying rockets only had a range of 2 km, which meant it could not possibly have hit the known targets from regime-held territory, that is, the story told by American intelligence could not possibly be true.
That American intelligence has published patent nonsense as "evidence" justifying American aggression was demonstrated to me during the Iraqi war incident when we were shown a bombed-out trailer that the administration claimed was a portable bioweapons lab used for making anthrax. The trailer was small and contained only one large tank, and a small amount of ancillary equipment that was all smashed up.
I’m a chemical engineer who had worked in fermentation and fermentation recovery operations for 15 years at that time. I knew what major pieces of equipment you would need to make weaponized anthrax: a fermentor, a decanting centrifuge and a spray drier. There should be two large tanks-like things in the trailer, the fermentor and the spray-drying chamber, as well as the centrifuge (another large piece of equipment) plus a lot of ancillary equipment for inoculum prep, fuel storage, the heating element for the spray dryer, (if they used steam like we do, then they would need a boiler and another large pressure vessel, which the trailer clearly did not have) and so on. The trailer was small, there was not nearly enough busted-up stuff in it to be the equipment required to make anthrax. The idea that that trailer was supposedly used for this purpose was laughable.
The Iraqis said it was a portable hydrogen-generating unit for filling balloons. Such a unit would contain one large pressure vessel and a small tank, and a bit of piping between them. The smashed up trailer contained just the equipment you would need for that purpose. It was plain as a pikestaff to me that what Americans were saying was BS whereas what Iraqis were saying was consistent with what was in the trailer.
I assume this missile story was just as fishy to physicists and engineers familiar with aerodynamics as that trailer story was to me. Once the MIT guys established that the administration was lying about the missiles, the mere possibility that the al Nusra front could have gotten some sarin from the Turks which the Hersh article relates makes it even less likely that the regime was behind the attacks. I am not saying there is solid proof that al Nusra was involved. I am saying that is no reason to believe that the regime was more likely involved than someone else.
For me the crowning point was this NYT article:
New York Times Wrote:In the latest attack on civilians, more than 100 people, including children, were believed to have been killed by chemical weapons in a rebel-held town in Idlib Province on Tuesday. A doctor there said the victims' pupils were reduced to pinhole-size dots, a characteristic of nerve agents and other banned toxic substances.Now the 1100 dead is just the sum of the 1000 killed in the 2013 sarin attack and the 100 killed in the 2017 incident. But the article makes no mention of the 2013 attack. This is because several months after the 2013 attack, the NYT times backed off their initial reporting of regime involvement in that attack.
The United States put the blame for the attack on the Syrian government and its patrons, Russia and Iran, and suggested that the salvo was a war crime. While the attack was among the deadliest uses of chemical weapons in Syria in years, it was far from an isolated case.
During the war, the Assad government has been accused of regularly using chlorine gas, which is less deadly than the agent used on Tuesday and is legal in its commercial form. According to the Violations Documentation Center, an antigovernment watchdog, more than 1,100 Syrians have been killed in chemical weapons and gas attacks.