The Evidence vs. Bellingcat vs. Khan Sheikhoun False Flag Theories

Idlib CW Massacre 4-4-17

The Evidence vs. Bellingcat vs. Khan Sheikhoun False Flag Theories

Adam Larson (aka Caustic Logic)
August 6, 2017
(incomplete, rough)
last edits Aug. 7

Lately, open-source investigator Eliot Higgins and others at the Bellingcat site have been tackling persistent "conspiracy theories" about the alleged sarin attack on April 4 in Khan Sheikhoun, Syria. Back in July, Bellingcat used an array of tinfoil hats to illustrate Higgins' What a Khan Sheikhoun False Flag Conspiracy Would Actually Mean. As a trusted anti-Syria propagandist, working with Human Rights Watch and the Atlantic Council, and a visiting scholar at King's College in London, he can't be trusted to tell us what it would actually mean. This piece is not entirely bogus, but needs some corrections. Apologies it took me almost a month to notice the piece and decide that.

"Despite the wealth of witness statements, analysis of samples collected from the ground, reports by the OPCW, and other information," he writes, there have been several attempts "to dismiss what happened as being part of a conspiracy against the Syrian government." "Dismiss" is a rather dismissive word. Let's say there have seen multiple tries at supporting the fairly logical suspicion that terrorists are behind the atrocity, or at least that the Syrian government is not.

I agree with Higgins on many points about where these efforts have specifically failed to adhere to the evidence or, sometimes, to even make sense. For example, the extremely common claims based on sarin persistence and danger to people visiting a site hours and even days after the event have no basis in reality. Sorry, he's right there. What he and others at Bellingcat talk about (in this and other recent articles) often is not wrong. As we'll see, it's what they don't talk about that's the real problem.

While it's not pushed by the same undeniable voices, there's a version with much better questions raised. It's been brought to his and Bellingcat's attention, at least in part, and so far they have no remotely adequate answer. I put the top 4 best questions at the end of this piece, hoping to be sure now they have seen all 4, and there's some further explanation and possibly some  follow-up later on.  All told, this is and will be another large post. I had to linger over every point to try and own this discussion, but no one needs to read it all.

So, What Would it Mean?
But first, Higgins asks what a false-flag would mean, and frames the implications in various ways I'll now address.

Any conspiracy theory would, of course, need conspirators, and the scale of the Khan Sheikhoun attack would require a lot of them.

It would probably not require any implausible number. Do we think most local militants would reject helping in some deceptive or sectarian crime that gets Syria in trouble and perhaps bombed or overthrown?

Whole military formations from different groups participate in kidnapping Syrian civilians, mostly women and children, from Alawi villages and other places they overrun, on a routine basis. That's after they've killed all the men, age 13 and up. For one example, Islamist rebels led by Al-Name-Change Front (al-Nusra/Al-Qaeda) overran the villages of Khatab and Majdal, near Hama, in late March, 2017. A reported 250 hostages, including whole families, were said to be taken directly to Khan Sheikhoun, of all places, when the SAA reclaimed the towns on or by March 31 (map at right, some explanation here).

Higgins must be sure there was no such kidnapping, or it's a total coincidence. I suspect there was one and it might be just where the KS Islamists got their hundred or so victims seen five days later, dead and dying in trucks and morgues or gasping in the mud. Enough criminal, sectarian conspirators to seize 250 expendable heretics is a natural formula for a mass slaughter of same, and then a mass deception to shift the blame onto Syria.

Continuing:

Often the involvement of the White Helmets in the aftermath of attack is held up as the key piece of proof needed to show that the attack was a false flag, generally with the usual accusations of them being an imperialist funded Al Qaeda allied (if not just Al Qaeda) organisation that spends the majority of its time faking rescue videos, if not outright murdering and robbing people.

In my own opinion, White Helmets as proof of anything is overplayed by many. I and others may take it as a bad sign, but the general public shouldn't be expected to, so I don't see why it's used as such a leading point. As far as I know, 2/3 of what they do might actually be rescue or humanitarian work that doesn't get filmed. But still, the general picture of Islamist partisans and propagandists seems basically correct - they've been caught in many deceptions, seem to have helped launder many massacres, etc. There's something wrong with them, and at the very least, their presence should not be taken as adding much credibility to any allegations. 

But this is a case that doesn't just draw on prior suspicions, but adds quite a bit to the picture. Consider here: they support the story and details that we now see clash badly with more objective evidence, like the video record and radar tracks (see 4 best questions below, if you don't know about this yet). They also got seen helping sickened children by spraying them with hoses, near-naked in near-freezing weather, but never do we see where they got poisoned. It's on these peoples' word that it was in their homes in a described area (southwest of the sarin crater) rather than in some school's basement rigged up as a gas chamber (for example). (this is question 3)

Several child victims seem to be hacked, perhaps fatally, in the head and/or neck (see here), at least two of them after they had gotten to the White Helmets, Al-Qaeda, and supposed safety. (see Two Smoking-Gun Head Wounds) They're seen unmarked but struggling to breathe (possibly dead, but with other kids who are alive), being saved by White Helmets. Later they're seen not saved, instead finished off with blades. How does that happen? Assad's sarin can't hack the victims when it kills too slowly. Is this analysis wrong? As far as I've seen, Higgins still doesn't know about this.(so it's best question #4)

It’s often claimed (erroneously) all samples from the site and victims were collected by White Helmets, and therefore the samples cannot be trusted.

This is true, but that truth may prove irrelevant in the end. That is, there was an opening for them to taint the samples, but it may not have been needed, if sarin were previously put into the environment, either with the weaponry used on April 4, or planted soon thereafter. This seems to be the case.

Let us assume, therefore, that samples have been tampered with, and the OPCW have tested doctored samples, what would this actually mean?

First, those doctoring the samples would have to have access to Sarin, as samples tested by the OPCW have found Sarin along with other related products from the production process and degradation of Sarin.

"...or a sarin-like substance." But either way, this is no problem for well-connected Islamists in Syria, as Eliot knows. Al-Name-Change Front has the nerve agent, and could taint a sample, spray a bombed area, or hit the area with a sarin-containing weapon in the first place.

They’d also make sure it included hexamine, which was detected in previous Sarin attacks, and claimed by some to link that Sarin to the Syrian governments manufacturing process, ...

Hexamine: This has questions around it that I'm hazy about. It might a residue from the opening charge for the device, or perhaps a key and telltale ingredient as claimed. It might have various meanings. Either way, it's said it turned up in "previous sarin attacks," not necessarily in Syria's known stocks.

Ghouta, Saraqeb, Khan al-Assal... that's the same dirty, kitchen-grade sarin that keeps fulfilling terrorist purposes and getting Syria in trouble, and it apparently NOT the stuff Syria was always known to have, as surrendered and taken away on the USS Cape May in 2013-2014. Samples were surely kept from that and could be compared, and if a match was found, that would probably be announced. Instead, we hear the KS sarin has hexamine, and so it's probably the same as in all the other attacks blamed on Syria. Implicitly, all these attacks use about the same stuff, and none of it matches with what Syria surrendered, and has apparently never used. These clues, circumstantial as they are, could mean this is either Assad's other, undeclared and dirty sarin, or it's the terrrorists' undeclared, dirty sarin.  (see here) This when, for years, experts assured us the agent being used seemed to match with Syria's known stocks of military-grade sarin.

...including French intelligence in their recent National Evaluation of the Khan Sheikhoun attack.

This claimed the Khan Sheikhoun sarin matched the kind used in the Saraqeb attack on April 29, 2013, said to poison several locals and to kill one woman (ACLOS). The government's sources told them terrorists made hostages inhale fumes from barrels of an unknown liquid, and made other locals breathe powder from plastic bags, before trucking the victims to Turkey for sarin testing. As everyone knows, sarin or a sarin-like substance turned up. 

As reported, locals were poisoned by nerve agent dropped from a regime helicopter. How it was dropped varied; a barrel bomb full of TNT and sarin (wherein the former would destroy the latter), or powdered sarin in plastic bags (still dropped from a helicopter, maybe weighted with cinderblocks, for example), or plastic hand grenades linked to Jabhat al-Nusra, dropped in a glowing and smoking "cinderblock" (as shown on video, at right). There was powder on the ground, said to be the remains of the block after impact. I contend this is an unrelated drop of white phosphorous, as screening smoke for some SAA military offensive. But the latter story with the air-dropped hand grenade is the most accepted version.

I brought these problems to Higgins' attention at his Brown Moses blog back in 2013 (see here), and he responded:

To me it seems like two gas grenades were placed inside a cinderblock... and ignited as they were dropped from the helicopter, so you can see them producing light and smoke as they fall. When it hit the ground, the cinderblock was smashed to dust and small fragments (visible both at Sheikh Magshoud and Saraqeb). [referring to an April 13 attack in Aleppo]

Problem is, this doesn't seem to really match with a Sarin attack for a number of reasons, and the victims in Saraqeb are directly linked to one of the two containers dropped, so it's not like there were other munitions linked to those injuries. It's all very confusing, in away made even more confusing by the fact the same sort of attack happened twice.

Also, why go to all the trouble of flying a helicopter over Saraqeb to just drop those two packages? Is that all that helicopter was doing on that day? The more I think about it, the weirder it gets.

They lit their plastic gas grenades on fire? To help release sarin, or what? Just so the video can be related after all? Maybe the plastic bags story is better. Both sides have agreed at times that plastic bags full of powder were involved. ...

It's an evidently problematic story behind that sarin release. And they say this is the same exact stuff we're seeing now. It might well be. Besides hexamine, it has similar hallmarks, like bizarre or impossible dispersal methods ...

They’d also have individuals collecting samples for the Syrian government also doctor those samples with Sarin and hexamine,so tests by the Syrian governments labs and OPCW would show the presence in those samples as well.

This is a fair point and worth heeding; it seems everyone, including Syria's government, has trusted samples from the site in question, the crater by the grain silos and the central bakery, and concludes sarin or similar was present. So sample tampering seems unlikely; it was apparently in the environment. Issue: how did it get there? Delivered by regime dropped bomb? By regime missile? By terrorist false-flag rocket? By later planting (like a sprayed mist)? Is it sarin, or a sarin-like substance? How sarin-like? These points are not fully clear.

Then they’d even have volunteers or unwilling victims expose themselves to Sarin and cross the border with Turkey,...

They wouldn't "have unwilling victims expose themselves." This is too passive in tone. The terrorists would themselves expose the unwilling victims. They would mercilessly gas them to death (or, if they aimed too low in some cases, they would finish them off some other way).

Voluntary exposure would be the case for the talkers who help spin the conspiracy theory that runs against so much evidence. They would be allies, volunteering for exposure. You wouldn't want to make enemies of your sources by dosing them without approval.

Consider Abdelhamid Al-Yousef: for a few days as he made so many video appearances and met sultan Erdogan in Turkey, he was notably weak, sweaty, prone to tears and drippy nose - possibly late effects of a single April 4 sarin exposure, but more consistent with a slower and later exposure to spaced-out token doses. At right, he's sweating, sobbing, and leaking from the nose as he tells implausible stories. (He thought his wife and kids were ok, even though they started feeling ill, as he left them with paramedics and/or had them hide in a basement. Learning there was a deadly chemical about, he ran to his father's house and carried dead people with no protection, then ran to his uncle's house and did the same, before... he passed out for a while, and hence failed to rescue his own family. This narrative is pretty absurd, really. Apparently the key to survival is to visit every attack site and handle as many bodies as possible.)

"... where some would die from Sarin exposure, and where the OPCW would run tests on the living and dead which resulted tests results consistent with exposure to Sarin..."

...or a "sarin-like substance". I would guess this: those killed with chemicals will have caustic lung damage and other unpleasant effects, while the surviving talkers (mostly men who claim no politics but spout rebel propaganda points) will have suffered little in the line of painful damage, and there will be no explanation offered for the difference.

"Then they would ensure that all witnesses told the same version of events, even those exposed to Sarin..."

It would all be by prior agreement, we should presume. So if this were a false-flag event, no one broke script that we noticed. That's not hard to believe at all.

...which indicated the origin of the Sarin was one crater in Khan Sheikhoun.

And most important: they indicated it came from a regime airstrike. That's the core falsehood. Because they have false claims about where poisoning happened, IF the crater is indeed the sole release point as they also claim. Or they have a false release point, if the affected area is correct. (see question 2 below). Anticipating possible story shifts to some spread that makes sense, they still lack a supported link to those distant jets.

This includes insuring that the locations victims were reportedly found were all consistent with a spread of Sarin from the crater in the same direction.

Indeed, but it seems they really bungled that part. He suggests if it's false-flag, they would plan it out right, and I would presume the same - they would at least try to get it right. But here it is, just about 180 degrees opposite from correct (see question 2 below). And it happens that's just the kind of mistake - blowing from read as blowing to - that people can make when interpreting a wind direction. Therefore, I still suspect they "pulled a Postol" and read their wind backwards when they decided where to say people had died. It's not what I'd expect, but it either happened, or some other error to the same effect was coincidentally made. It's a lucky break for investigators faced with ferreting out truth from the fog of war, but Higgins has so far ignored it.(At least one other Bellingcat member has addressed the problem, but poorly. Again, see question 2 below)

This consistency of witnesses telling the same version of events would also be required if the sample tampering scenario was abandoned and instead some version of a device being denoted by some opposition faction, or an attack with a rocket of some sort by an opposition faction was proposed,...

If it was terrorists who dispersed the sarin (or planted it at the site prior to sampling), the witnesses would have to either not know or not say that, because none of them says that. Again, sticking to the script is nothing unexpected for the scenario we're considering (and some are considering it better than others).

... which just happened to be filled with Sarin that contained hexamine to make it look like Syrian government Sarin.

Here again "Syrian government sarin" means the kind used in the 100% dubious CW attacks from 2013 forward. It could be this way: the terrorist plotters had to have the same kind of sarin the plotters of those terrorist incidents had. I'm not calling it "terrorist sarin" as a known fact, but Higgins is calling it "Syrian government sarin."

"Now after all these shenanigans, which the OPCW falls for completely (unless they’re also complicit)..."

Yes, apparently. Do we realize the OPCW is headed by a Turk, Ahmet Uzumcu? He's not known (by me) to be a total puppet of Sultan Erdogan, nor to be a free man of science. He has been Turkey's ambassador to NATO and to Israel. He may also have Syrian opposition contacts from his days as a sort of ambassador in Aleppo. And his OPCW managed to get their Assad-blaming narrative with some impropriety: 

1) Ignoring the radar track of the alleged attack jets: that's been released, and should support their case. But it happens to disprove the common air-dropped bomb theory, and somehow they decided to ignore it. Also, OPCW dropped the bomb claim, never specifying what kind of munition, so it could be a missile. This suggests they were aware of the problem, and managed to downplay and ignore it at the same time.

2) They chose to ignore the best wind evidence (multiple view video record of the events), confused themselves with different unreliable reading and predictions, and wound up deciding there was "no discernible wind." As it so happens, this lets a lucky slope to the west (for the terrorist narrative) be what killed everyone. Open-source and conclusive evidence proves that guess wrong, but they ignored that and put their credibility behind this convenient guess anyways.

3) Most of their information comes from activists and screened alleged witnesses delivering verbal accounts that contradict the evidence they ignored.

4) They accepted environmental samples they couldn't really vouch for, having refused invitations to have their own teams visit the site. Even if it's irrelevant to the outcome (as it seems - they would have found the same thing), it's still improper, or so says former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, and common sense. But having a sample that tested right helped them to clarify it was definitely sarin (or a sarin-like substance) rolling against the wind after coming out of that unknown but clearly jet-delivered munition... they also cannot vouch for how the sarin or "sarin-like substance" was gotten into the human cases. Their surviving patients - the talkers, likely exposed only to token amounts - will have claimed it was from a passing regime jet. But of course the best and ignored evidence suggests that's not true.

So I don't propose a gullible OPCW "fell for it" here. They're too professional to accept such blatant falsehoods unless they wanted to be fooled. And unless all these improprieties are coincidental oversights, that all suggests complicity in sowing the opposition's lies while obscuring their massacre. So there's no reason to dismiss the option as an aside and insist we eithe think of the OPCW as simple dupes or accept their biased and deeply flawed report.

"...we have the Russians and Syrians presenting a totally different version of events where a chemical weapons warehouse in the East of Khan Sheikhoun was bombed. Although it happened hours after the attack was first reported and documented,let’s imagine you’re still clinging to this scenario."

That exact scenario is indeed not any kind of answer. Somehow, it was suggested the admitted noon airstrike on terrorist facilities had caused the chemical incident, but of course that happened some five hours earlier, when Syria is clear they launched no airstrikes. This false lead has been frozen and used repeatedly by the opposition's shills and conspiracy theorists as a stand-in for all alternate theories. It may be worth debunking again, for the record, but it affects none of the points in the best questions version.

"The question is then why does the Syrian and Russian government not publish any evidence to support their claim?"

That's a fair question. I would suggest this: they may have some good reason, and there may still be little they really know. Better question: why does the opposition publish so much untrue information in support of their own claim? As perps or as victims, they should know quite a bit about this, and have access to truthful information. Yet they lie. Why?

Even something as simple as publishing the co-ordinates of this chemical weapons warehouse would allow anyone to check April 6th 2017 satellite imagery available on Terraserver to see if there’s a destroyed building.

And I would check it. But without any help, I found a spot they may have bombed at noon, and not earlier. Just southwest of town, there's an apparent farmhouse next to a sizeable water reservoir that seems to have been destroyed at least between Feb. 22 and April 29, that I identified just through video analysis (explained here).  I finally checked the April 6 images (added later), and the damage is there, so it was between 2/22 and 4/6. My guess as to when: around noon on April 4.

Earlier in the day? The video shows no plumes or emerging vapor in the first minute or so after attack (although it as at some distance, about 4 km from the camera). But some 20 minutes later, we can see it's one of two or maybe three sources for a massive outpouring of mystery vapor that got reported as sarin fog, like a faintly yellow winter fog but caustic, foul-smelling, and deadly, spread two meters deep across the town. Here, that now-bombed spot would be at the end of the green area, from which fog rolls east and north, covering square kilometers of the town's southern half. How much sarin do we think these bombs were capable of releasing? And why didn't anyone mention one dropped there?

That's possible evidence for some CW presence on-site, which fits the description. However, it's not a large warehouse, nor on the eastern outskirts (as Russia describes it) nor in the north of town (as Seymour Hersh's source claims). It does seem to have been scoped out by the Syrians, as if it were suspicious - the apparent surveillance flight seen on radar passes almost directly over the site (but again, there's no sign of bombing at the time of the attack)

Likely there were two or more targets hit in the noon strike. This may be one, and another was the White Helmets base and cave hospital complex; an external building was heavily damaged in an apparent airstrike right around noon. Did it have chemicals on site? We saw lots of poisoned people there hours earlier, with no poof they were poisoned elsewhere (they were placed in pickup trucks, but...). But this is all speculative, and a side-issue.

Every piece of open source evidence and the OPCW reports run counter to this claim,...

The exact claim, indeed, so far. But the most credible pieces of open-source information, if not the OPCW report intent on ignoring those, contradicts the opposition's story as well. And I mean it contradicts their best consensus version, not someone's flawed telling.

"...so if it really was a conspiracy against Syria, then revealing this information would expose a massive conspiracy that resulted in the US wrongly bombing Syria, and threatening Syria with further attacks."

Yes and no. It would show what it does, but that would be poorly and dismissively reported, supposedly debunked by the likes of Mr. Higgins, using often-bogus methods, and either blamed on Syria anyway or quickly forgotten.

Then perhaps that stunt would be answered with a new alleged CW attack that gets Syria blamed yet again, to prove how they will always fail to convince the empire and may as well just keep quiet. This is not made-up, but just about what happened with the Khan al-Assal sarin attack and investigation, as anyone who followed it will recall. (a refresher on how Syria's requested probe into the opposition sarin attack was derailed in a few ways, by the West and by the Ghouta attack)

Yet Russia and Syria stays quiet, so what does that mean?

Anything they say can and will be used against them? They're showing their info to investigators behind the scenes instead of to us on the internet? They don't want to spark any more incidents? And, of course, they've wasted some credibility with bogus claims or guesses, and are waiting for better information than they have. I'm not waiting on Russia and Syria to provide an answer, and never have been.

Well it can only mean one thing, that Syria and Russia themselves are complicit in the conspiracy to fake a Syrianchemical attack, resulting in Syria being falsely accused of using chemical weapons by the US, and being bombed as a result.

Or Russia and Syria are simply lying, and Syria really did use Sarin in Khan Sheikhoun.

Well, after failing to narrow it down, that's 2 things it could be, and several others ignored. But it's true, Moscow and Damascus are fairly little help in solving this crime. I'm not waiting for their tips, even if Eliot wants to. There's open source intelligence to gather and analyze. While Eliot and Bellingcat have offered some good analysis of parts of it, it seems they want to ignore other data. I and others have plowed ahead on those points, and now I give the King's College crowd this shortcut to four best questions they could try to answer, or to avoid.

Khan Sheikhoun: 4 Best Questions

Some of these have only been ironed out after the July 4 article in question, so Eliot's missing them at the time might mean nothing. But after this and the proper alerts, they'll have no reason to claim ignorance of these important findings. Here's how we can see a Khan Sheikhoun false-flag attack would mean ... the best evidence and logic are correct. The video isn't lying to us, the terrorists are. Denying that puts one at odds with the evidence, and runs a grave risk of helping absolve terrorists for a hideous crime against humanity. I don't know how to embed tweets like others do, but these questions are/will be posed on Twitter, as linked.

1) Wrong radar track:

Tweet (before I decided on 4-question format): Khan Sheikhoun: "Can @EliotHiggins venture an answer to the problem of the US radar track?" (citing earlier explanatory tweet that culminates with the image at right - the radar track seems accurate, and shows the jets arcing around the town at a distance, never passing directly above the sarin crater to drop a sarin bomb as alleged.) Follow-up: "I predict he could, but it would have to be pretty lame, so he'll leave us with the crickets, and proof of what a stumper this is." He's done just that so far.

But others in the Bellingcat network have tried; Christian Triebert maps it about the same on Twitter; crater well north of flight path, with no comment, and he answers Bubslug in comments about the issue here:

Yes, I agree with you; we noticed. It is indeed interesting, but be aware that the 3D flight path visualisation of the Pentagon consists of what I think are radar blips (and thus does not show the full trajectory),...

I see no "3D visualization," just plotted radar returns (presumably) on a 2D map. And there's no room between returns to fit the needed flight path(s). Maybe it's like this? No, This is a fevered fantasy.

"... and is now projected on Google Earth, so there may be some distortion."

None that I can see. It starts right, lines up all the way, and shows a logical arc around the town, as Triebert should know, having mapped it out.

"For that reason I included a line that the reading the graph may be problematic."

Might be? It's definitely problematic, to the tune of disproving witness accounts of a bomb dropped from right above the bakery crater. Bellingcat will have to amend the story and decide those witnesses were just confused; the regime must have used distance-covering sarin missiles instead (and the very existence of such a thing isn't clear to me).

2) Wrong wind:

Tweet: "Khan Sheikhoun best Qs, 2/4: Can @EliotHiggins or anyone at @Bellingcat disprove this wind reading? See fog drift NE" Citing: wind direction explainer, and  see right, and the image used above for the fog spread. Member Timmi Allen already offered a poor explanation, claiming a roughly opposite wind at ground level affecting the fog movement, as addressed in that post. This is possible, but there's just one very dubious clue for it, and several points against it, like the actual spread of that fog as seen on video.

3) No rescue videos: 
Tweet: "Khan Sheikhoun best Qs, 3/4: @EliotHiggins @Bellingcat Can anyone show a single rescued-from-home scene for the 500+ affected? No. Why not?"Citing: nothing. There are no such videos. I could have cited this at ACLOS to explain.

4) Executed (child) victims
Tweet: "Khan Sheikhoun best Qs, 3/4: @EliotHiggins @Bellingcat  kids seen rescued, later seen dead w/head wounds. Answer?" That's 4/4. Citing: http://libyancivilwar.blogspot.com/2017/07/two-smoking-gun-head-wounds.html

Overall tweet that links here:
Adam Larson‏ @CL4Syr  Aug 6: @bellingcat @EliotHiggins Khan Sheikhoun evidence vs. Bellingcat and 4 best questions. Anyone?