September 3, 2021
I've been tempted to do a post like this before, but now is time, as it relates to the exposé What the Rocket Man Wants us to See in Ghouta (forthcoming), but needs its own post to breathe.
For a long time now I have imagined Bellingcat founder & CEO Eliot Higgins as a sort of nemesis. It's kind of silly, but I only mean "in part." We do both use much of the same couch potato analysis, largely from video and visual evidence, to bring new insight to contentious events of geopolitical significance. But of course we do it to opposite effect; Higgins and co. generally labor to support official narratives while I and those I collaborate with challenge them. Bellingcat get to "re-invent journalism" by "pioneering" Open Source Investigation, have international criminal investigations launched over their findings, and so on, They have real budgets to pay and constantly hire new staff, somehow made available by some Western governments but mainly a lot of private donors whose agendas (and finances) aren't at all clear to me (to anyone?). In the meantime, our work... has been tolerated so far.
Collaboration and Format (last 10 years):
During Libya's disastrous Arab Spring "revolution" in 2011, Higgins was posting comments at The Guardian as Brown Moses. He was famous for being the first commentator on topics of interest (Bosker, HuffPost). As I recall seeing (comments now all gone?), he would collect claims about African mercenaries and Gaddafi regime crimes, track feats of the multinational "freedom fighters," and put down pro-Gaddafi "conspiracy theories."
In the meantime from April, I started this blog and began some detailed open-source work exposing those lies (like the sniped tykes of Misrata's fake-x-ray matching) and the real massacres (starting with Al-Baida) by the foreign-backed terrorists. These would tear Libya apart, ruining the best living standards in Africa, provide new havens and new armaments to Jihadists across Africa and the Middle East, and bring open Human slavery back to Africa. They were called "freedom fighters," and Eliot Higgins among many others cheered for them. (Libya masterlist and collected posts tagged Libya - incomplete - at first the whole site was about Libya and it wasn't tagged)
In 2012-2013 after seeing a job well done or a good cause destroyed, we both turned our attention to Syria - as did the thrust of global Jihad. Higgins started his Brown Moses blog in March 2012. Among other topics, he tracked insurgent weapon supplies - largely from Libya - in videos of their deeds. He would achieve the most recognition, however, for adding OSINT weight to the gravest alleged crimes of the "Assad regime," like the Houla Massacre of over 100 by Alawite death squads, and later the Ghouta chemical massacre of over 1,000.
With Petri Krohn, I started CIWCL in February to formalize our Libya work, then swiftly turned to Syria in June. and later to Ukraine (and the "group" name became CIWCL-SUB for Syria, Ukraine, and beyond). Petri and especially "CE" (whom I knew from the JREF forum, now International Skeptics) helped start the wiki site A Closer Look On Syria (ACLOS), to formalize a collaborative process that emerged (others could add blog posts if they joined, as Petri and Felix did, but not add to or clean up mine - a wiki site opened all that up). With CE primarily managing the site, more great open source work followed - visual and otherwise - exposing Syria lies like the Houla Massacre and the Ghouta chemical attack. ACLOS was not highly praised. It was DDOS attacked so frequently we had to move sites early on to even keep it visible. Props to ShoutWiki. When people complained of attacks that seemed to appear when we did and suggested deleting ACLOS, they refused. The attackers eventually gave up and let the site be. (link f/c - it was way back, somewhere)
2014-forward: Higgins launches Bellingcat to formalize the collaborative process that emerged (Keefe: "concerned that he was getting too much of the credit for work that collaborators published on his blog") and does all kinds of other "visiting fellow" and receiving awards type stuff, as detailed at the Rocket Man post, besides hosting workshops, giving media interviews, etc.
In this time I did some at ACLOS, which expanded to many other areas - mainly surrounding Russia - that Bellingcat also covered, and I was less interested in. I wrote some articles, collaborated with the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media, etc. But mostly I came back to this blog and renamed it Monitor on Massacre Marketing, as I neglected ACLOS and let the CIWCL site expire (but it's still active on Facebook). I got kind of lame last year, wasted most of it researching and debating little besides COVID-19 massacre and it anti-marketing (a depressing experience).
Methods: Visual Geolocation
Oliver Bullough at GQ recently explained "one of the specialties that Higgins developed was open-source geolocation—authenticating that posted footage did indeed capture the place that it purported to document," usually by matching scene details to satellite views. It sounds like he invented this "online wizardry," and perhaps so; many bright people have invented similar methods before and since, besides many who have copied it from others. The case is described:
"In August 2011, Libya’s revolution had become a civil war and insurgents were boasting about having seized the coastal town of Brega. Higgins posted a video selfie purportedly taken by a rebel fighter walking through the town, but another commenter snapped back – it could have been filmed anywhere; it proved nothing."
Higgins wanted to know, but it seemed impossible. "This is when he had his idea. He watched the video again," taking careful note of the scenery and the roads walked, looked up Brega on Google Maps, "and searched for roads that matched his sketch. It took a while, and he had to keep rotating his piece of paper" but he found the matching spot in the eastern residential district, and added other matching details to verify. Good work. Insurgents "had indeed entered Brega – or the eastern part of it anyway." Other evidence would prove that terrible fact of moderate short-term interest, but Higgins got to confirm it first, as he likes to do. Bullough comments on this: "If Higgins isn't the most innovative journalist anywhere, I don't know who is."
A later Bellingcat article explained this Brega geolocation, from a video posted on August 11. The video is not available now, but one still frame is shown with mid-afternoon sunlight. He could have done less map rotating if he knew how to read solar angles and set the basic directions.
With varying help (notably Petri, Peet 73, Felix, I forget), I did more of this in kind of mapping work, manly from late August on the hideous massacres in Tripoli and in Sirte and other incidents, and in review of earlier events in the "Arab Spring" phase. A few of the better examples: Al-Baida snipers Aug. 24 - another early video located on Nov. 5 - one of the Tripoli massacres explained Dec. 11, with some backstory - another with a pile of bodies actually visible in the satellite view - etc.
(A contemporaneous effort: On August 9 I started trying to sort a "Qala'a massacre" including location - a forest or tree farm with dirt roads, which I tried to map considering angle of sunlight, with help mainly from a Peet 73 getting better clues by the 11th and 12th text-based location on August 15 - nothing relevant or timely enough to have inspired Higgins' map-spinning work in Brega. A locations post stayed unclear until October with a specific guess based on a new photo from the site - not definitive but good, in the middle southern edge of the spot we had identified west of al-Gawalish.)
Higgins after that ... quite a few hits, but then see below his geolocation work on two important investigations in Syria.
Investigations: Houla Massacre
Higgins got wider attention past weapons buffs out of his coverage of the grisly massacre in Taldou, al-Houla on May 25, 2012. As Syria Deeply explained in April, 2013:
A turning point came when Higgins live-blogged the Houla massacre, which unfolded near Homs last summer. “There was a massive amount of info coming from Twitter and Facebook,” he says, “so I decided to live blog it. And that was reported on NPR, and then after that I got lots of followers on Twitter and people [began] reading the blog. I set targets to do stuff. I’m competitive, so I like to be able to build up an audience.”
He started at the Brown Moses blog with an impressive list of videos from the scene, of the supposed regime shelling that proved all to follow was by them, and the emotion-loaded scenes of hacked-up kids, all with little to no analysis. He didn't see the clue in how rebels so easily got the bodies - as they usually do. He geolocated nothing of relevance and correlated nothing. "Survivors" are cited blaming army shelling and "Shabiha" militants from the neighboring Alawite town. But it was never known these were genuine witnesses and speaking freely. In fact it can now be seen their stories clashes with the video evidence, and sometimes with themselves (consider star witness Ali in some of my open-source analysis of verbal nonsense).
Higgins covered that story in two blog posts of May 25 and 27 collecting videos and claims, and then nothing else until he popped back on June 28 to in part dismiss "Mother Agnes Mariam claims about the Houla massacre." Those were only part of the body of evidence for insurgent guilt, and were based on some of the other witnesses who described a terrorist massacre, as Syrian state media had reported. But some pro-opposition clergy members had spoken up with their own opinions that mother Agnes was just spreading pro-Assad lies. On this basis, Higgins said John Rosenthall owed an apology for citing her, and the Brown Moses blog had nothing more to say on the Houla Massacre after this.
In posting that June 28 commentary, Higgins seems to be indirectly replying to the previous day's UN Human Rights Council report. Otherwise, he simply ignored it. That "oral update" was unable to decide the blame, noting a same-day rebel offensive that overran at least two army checkpoints. "With the available evidence, the CoI could not rule out ... [that] the perpetrators were anti-Government forces seeking to escalate the conflict while punishing those that failed to support – or who actively opposed - the rebellion." Even with some apparent effort to blame the government, several points kept suggesting the other view. A later report issued in August tried harder and ignored more, managing a fairly decisive indictment of the Syrian army and "Shabiha" militias (see here). But Higgins could rule out the alternative, somehow, even when the UN couldn't, and had already called it case closed.
For me this massacre, with dozens of children murdered in such a shocking manner, was a turning point to finally start studying Syria. Early analysis at ACLOS went on for months, analyzing reports, videos, and accounts from "alleged witnesses/survivors" for the two main narratives, with an eye to correlation and consistency. By year's end we established that an insurgent force of several hundred descended on Taldou that day and almost certainly overran 2, 3, or even 4 of the five security posts there, while attacking the fifth. In this way it seems they gained control over the southern half of the town, where someone then engaged in a massacre targeting - per the most credible reports - an extended Abdulrazaq family of the Shia faith and 2 Sunni families seen as loyal to the government (both named Al-Sayed but supposedly unrelated). 112 civilians were killed, 63 of them children, all shown, some with horrified faces hacked open as if with hatchets. Among that 112, some Abdulrazaqs and some al-Sayeds were also killed in the rebel-controlled north of town, and some other intermarried with the Abdulrazaqs were even killed in the fractious village of Aqrab a ways to the north (noting all between Taldou and Aqrab was rebel-held Al-Houla, connecting to other rebel-held towns like Rastan, and with territory running to the Turkish border).
Two reports and some addenda explaining all this are offline until I find them a new home, but the "Battle for the Houla Massacre" evidence in the 2014 2nd report is important (see the decent 2017 review here). I got an idea to re-up that after Bellingcat was started, with and a new blog Taldou. Truth. It could never go far, and didn't even go all the way, but close - it's a great resource on the subject. I issued a challenge there: Brown Moses on the Hook to show if anything was wrong in our visual work, or to maybe admit he couldn't. Issued in December 2014, he of course never responded to the challenge. He meant case closed.
Bellingcat were not the ones to map several videos to spots in town relative to overrun and circumvented security posts and massacre sites, as we did here. Because of laziness and lack of concern, Eliot Higgins never saw the smoke rising from the National Hospital after sunset, in line with the rebel attack witnesses he dismissed as Assadist liars. It was the ACLOS crew who correctly pinned one "regime shelling attack" on a rebel dude firing an RPG over and over just south of the central security post, around 6:15 PM (B.1 below) as activists tried awkwardly to ignore him. Higgins had found that shelling video extra-convincing, maybe because the explosions were just so loud.
I realize this is pretty hardcore pro-Assad propaganda here and will set a lot of people off. That blood was clearly set on his hands, and those of the insane genocidal Alawites next door, and it was case closed based on who-cares-what details long ago. "Everybody" knows that. But sorry, I don't calculate my position based on how far it strays from the approved version, and I wouldn't keep it tighter just because the crime was so hideous. If it's completely f%$#ing upside-down, absolving the killers and blaming the victims, someone who is still FREE to say so should say so. It's depressing, but the implication here is we have a sick system. Higgins didn't invent this inversion of truth, but he did his part maintaining it.
Furthermore, I and we (varyingly) have found the same basic MO again and again in these early massacres of - mainly - late 2011 to late 2012. But Jabhat Al-Nusra kept getting implicated in these (Houla, Tremseh, Daraya) and especially at the end (Aqrab, Ma'an, Haswiyeh). And they did have access to things like rifles and hatchets. Seeing his "Shabiha massacres" advantage falter, "Assad" then turned - as of December 2012 - to attacks by SCUD missiles, aircraft only he could fly, and chemical attacks with sarin from his own unique recipe. He would try to blame the "terrorists" for these crimes, but Eliot Higgins would be on hand to help foil those plans.
Higgins has been noted for following Syria chemical attacks early on, even before a reported 1,429 were killed in Ghouta on August 21, 2013. But I've probably been following longer - since days before a single attack was even reported. The first attack report was noted at ACLOS on day 3 of my watch, following Obama repeating his tempting "red line" offer on Dec. 3. Early coverage into 2013 was pretty flawed but still valuable - eg I gave too much credit to chlorine claims in the Khan al-Assal attack of March 19 in one early article on Syria CW attacks run at the Center for Research on Globalization in early May: "Was the Syria Chemical Weapons Probe “Torpedoed” by the West?" - or better yet see an improved draft that just missed the deadline, posted here with later comments.
At the Brown Moses blog, Higgins showed some respect for this article. Despite the CRG website being "far to conspiratorial for my liking" my contribution was "a good round up of reports of chemical weapon use in Syria" and that's "not something I say lightly." He used it mainly as a start point to address the numerous claimed incidents up to then, and he was right about the chlorine claims in Khan al-Assal; chlorine is not that deadly, and eventually everyone seems to agree - sarin was used against Syrian troops and mostly-Shi'ite civilians at Khan al-Assal, described as "cottage industry" and also judging by impurities, it's said to be the same kind used in Ghouta. Also that launch spot cited - 47km away! - was some other error in Alex Thomson's early dispatch, with official claims being about 5km to the north, in Kafr Dael, and a small but powerful locally-made rocket called Bashair-3 used (see below).
We didn't interact much, but some. In an Oct 2013 grenade discussion in comments at his blog, he acknowledged the helicopter-dropped 'cinderblock containing the sarin grenades' is smoking AND glowing just like white phosphorous does. That might be last time he responded to me. These grenades have been linked to Jabhat al-Nusra, thanks partly to Higgins (my post on them), and in at least one attack contained the same kind of sarin used in Khan al-Assal and Ghouta. The same also appeared in the weapons used for a sarin attack on SAA troops in Jobar, that occurred just 3 days after Ghouta and in the same area from which the sarin-filled Volcano rockets were fired.
As for Higgins' investigation of the August 21 incident ... see What the Rocket Man Wants us to See in Ghouta for more detail, but in summary: He identified the government-improvised Volcano rockets from at least June and so recognized them right off in videos following the sarin attack. That's a plus. He also had linked them by videos to government use only, as if insurgents didn't have any Volcanos or managed to never show them off. He supposedly mapped their impacts and found the government-held firing spot; Oliver Bullough at GQ recently enthused at Higgins' work and a well-deserved "surge of interest that culminated in a profile in the New Yorker, headlined “Rocket Man”, after he proved the Syrian regime fired makeshift rockets packed with sarin at rebel-held parts of Ghouta, killing hundreds of people." Bianca Bosker at Huffington Post called Higgins a "one-man intelligence unit" whose "work unraveling the mystery of the rocket strikes of Aug. 21 played a key role in bringing much of the world" to blame Syria's government for the chemical attack.
And this fame would be crucial to launching Bellingcat. But really he did a pretty crap job on that aspect. None of Higgins' Ghouta geolocations are his own work; he just verified them, and in one case didn't even do that. Two locations were visually identified by followers, two others were set by coordinates, and Bellingcat claimed a fifth location based absorbing an error by then-collaborator Chris Kabusk (who now works with Michael and I). While Chris corrected this error in 2017 based on new photos, Bellingcat retains the flawed deduction and passes it on to influential parties worldwide.
For reference here: all impacts mapped by LCC & HRW (red and blue) vs. all correctly geolocated (green dots, 8 in total) and the ones among those that were first set by Higgins & co. boxed in yellow, or yellow-green for Higgins/Kabusk. We're not claiming to have placed all these green dots with out own work - just the ones that aren't wrapped in yellow.
In other spots Higgins can be seen consciously twisting the evidence to the official conclusions, urging us to just blindly trust the "UN azimuth" from the west - which he knows is grossly erred (the reality being up to "50 degrees off to the north"). Then ignoring that anyway, he looked northwest at max. range or a bit past it (2.1 to 2.6km), and decided some government-held firing spot or other probably fits. In 2021 he decides the maximum range no longer applies, claims his early reading from the north way past range, lets it be read as pointing west way past range - confirming the key finding of the UN-OPCW probe: the government did it, from whatever invented angle at whatever impossible distance.
Finally he had added a backup shortcut early on, in case that all failed. With Dan Kaszeta and other allies, he would use various unfounded tricks to "prove" the field samples of used sarin were from Syria's stockpiles, and so only they could have used it, even if that flies in the face of all the other evidence. After this, it was "case closed" and faith in that closure demanded.
In our reports this year, Michael, Chris and I use the ignored trajectory (read better as 30 deg. north from what the UN reported, not 50) as the clearest among 7 or 8 or 9 estimates (dep. on definition) from 7 or 8 geolocated impacts that converge almost exactly at a spot that matches the videos he had also dismissed. This footage shows Islamist insurgents in an area they would control, firing at least 3 of their own Volcano rockets, on what they say is the night of the attack, at the right angles to be some of those found 2km away the next day, full of that unique type of sarin.
This pretty well disproves Higgins' exclusive ownership shortcuts and sloppy ballistic analysis, besides implicating the foreign-backed terrorists for this attack and the several hundreds of civilian deaths blamed on that sarin. Below: based on alt. analysis in my 2nd report. I think it's generally an improvement, but full team review will be part of any NEXT ROUND of Ghouta analysis. Who's open here, and who's so eager to keep cases CLOSED based on authority decisions?
Open Sources, Open Debate?
One obvious appeal of Open Source investigation is how anyone can see and check the conclusions. As a rule of thumb a strictly visual geolocation from anyone credible is probably right; it's so easy to show wrong that someone likely will have already. But then maybe no one has - always worth verifying. In that sense at least, Bellingcat does produce findings that are largely correct, just very incomplete and not the proof they pretend it to be. This too is open enough to see - at least to the well-informed eye - as explained in part above.
As Higgins told Bianca Bosker “If you want someone to really question your work, just post it on the Internet. ... There are plenty of people who’ll want to tell you you’re an idiot and you’re wrong.” Implicitly, they'll fail when challenging his work because, as she wrote, "Higgins tries to imagine every disagreement from some ticked-off stranger online, and preemptively strengthen his argument’s weaknesses." In that case, they won't be able to SHOW anything truly wrong - they can raise confused questions and doubts, and even pretend they've proven you wrong, but otherwise ... they might resort to blocking you, etc. But that better describes our findings, strengthened so Eliot cannot cope with them directly.
Considering the points above, I long suspected Higgins never muted me, having too much intelligence to flat ignore my often insightful work, But he has ignored me or failed to respond since early-mid-2014 at latest - maybe in October 2013 - the entire time he's been this "OSINT" hot-shot thrust upon the world stage. He's smart enough to recognize a potential threat. Best defense would be to hope I remain obscure enough to barely matter, and definitely to avoid giving me any attention of his own. All-time twitter replies to my several questions: zero. IIRC all replies to a few comments at Bellingcat.com were fielded by others like "Servus" (here refusing to learn Syrian soldiers have been attacked with sarin until I was cut off from even trying). Bellingcat's Twitter account likewise has never replied (and just recently has blocked me, along with a lot of people - see replies here and check if you're blocked too - it was news to many).
The other two current Bellingcat contributors I have ever encountered - Aric Toler and Nick Waters - have blocked me in the last year or two. I don't think that was for any rude behavior, and likely on a Bellingcat ignore policy. But Higgins, who would originate this policy, did not. Recently as I review better, it strikes me Eliot is more lazy and lame than I had realized, and most likely did mute me long ago, but let me see what he was up to, for what it's worth (generally it wasn't worth much to me).
He blocked Ghouta reports co-author Michael Kobs back in 2014, as he was quite active against Bellingcat on the MH-17 issue all along. I disagreed with their direction, but the narrow visual work they had done seemed valid to me and I said so. It seemed a complex case where no one else got the complexity, and maybe that lonely road aspect led me to sort of drop out of that scene, and Ukraine/Donbass in general (I find I do better with picking my battles, and that was big one). That may be related.
As the Rocket Man articles explains (forthcoming), Higgins was aware of our new Ghouta findings since March, and casually engaged in efforts to minimize and discredit them. In time he got specific enough to offer a weak rebuttal of his own and commented in support of another, and falsely claimed we ignored key evidence about rocket and sarin ownership. Alongside this failure, he has been taking a harder line to skeptics and increasingly appeals to authority. He suggested in June that Twitter should ban statements that Syrian CW attacks were "false flags", pursuant to a policy against "denial" of "violent events" (the Holocaust, etc., with the etc. being really problematic)
.jpg)
