Higgins and Me

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. 

What is now called "Open Source Investigation" or "Open Source Intelligence" (OSINT) wasn't called anything I knew of at first. But it is specifically what we focused on. Rather than just wait for secrets from Wikileaks, we could learn a lot from reports and visuals that are publicly available, properly weight and with an eye to correlation. In 2012 I co-founded a "group" based on this idea, called "Citizen's Investigation into War Crimes in Libya" (CIWCL) with a website and everything, which has since expired. The logo has a magnifying glass over text of the phrase "available evidence suggests," split into 2 lines. The focus is both on the text (the evidence) and especially considering the sources, on reading between those lines. 

This is one aspect where Higgins and his team differs most from me and mine. Bellingcat's visual work is largely correct, but doesn't usually prove that much; they can geolocate a video to say the events allegedly occurred HERE, but they still rely on trust in terrorist-activist claims as to what HAPPENED there, taking little to no effort at verifying the claims BY the video. At our best anyway, we employ a much more rigorous comparison of all sources, weighed properly. If we find the visual and the verbal disagree, the visual evidence is preferred. Bellingcat will try to avoid finding such conflicts.

Other differences: Higgins had wondered early on how you get paid analyzing videos and stuff. He's found his solutions to that, whereas I decided to not even try. I still squeeze in what I can on my own time, and just kept not having much of a life outside work and this. The others I think do similar, maybe some with less work and more life, etc.

As for similarities ... I know I've been inspired by some of Higgins' and Bellingcat's methods, and the opposite might also be true, though I've always had a lower profile. As I had put it once in December, 2014 "We're not following him/them, or vice-versa (that I know of), just riding two sides of the same geopolitical waves." Who copied who isn't certain or crucial - what I mean to show here is that Higgins' type of work is not that amazing or unique. But on review, it still seems he might be copying me at times. Below I'll explore some parallels regarding collaboration and format, investigative methods, and two important early investigations.

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). 

Then a big new discovery this year led to the Ghouta sarin attack reports with Michael and Chris, making some small waves thanks to to Rootclaim founder Saar Wilf and to Aaron Maté (whom Higgins has also blocked as supposedly irrelevant), no thanks to an apparent boycott by some of the antivaxxers and virus apologists (who distrust Aaron and Max Blumenthal as much as they do 99+% of global health experts), and well-timed just ahead of the 8-year anniversary of the Ghouta event. (the big blurry face is mine, sorry) I cannot overstate how completely we own this subject now. And it's the biggest Syria story there is to own. Higgins denies it, but then he has a long history of denying Islamist atrocities just to score more points against - as it so happens - the West's latest geopolitical target (see below).

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. 

I had the impression I'd done this kind of work quite a bit by then. But on review all that clearly predates it is from July 17, with the small image at right to show one place protesters were being shot dead in Benghazi on Feb. 19 - near the area marked with a pale blue box. This is the entrance of a Tariq Bin Zeyad school as labeled, next to a park with distinct features. (BTW sunlight played no role here under clouds and smoke and/or it may be after sunset). Although I didn't show the video details that match, the video is still available and it seems worth showing it now, in a new image below (using a March, 2011 Google Earth view, as the February one is obscured by clouds). School entrance coordinates: 32°5'45.9"N, 20°5'1.58" E

At this spot: a man shot in the head is laid down, likely dead, as some climb the walls as if to unlock the school from inside and make it a clinic or base. Another wounded man bleeding heavily is carried by in the direction marked in red. There's a fire set a ways back, making a smokescreen, as protest-militants will do to avoid being shot. Further back that way is the "Katiba" military barracks the "protesters" attacked daily with molotov cocktails, grenades, guns, a bulldozer and even a stolen tank. They did this every day, with some killed in self-defense each day allowing the funeral march that would start the next day's battle, until  Feb. 20 (the day after this video). By then they had more weapons seized in other cities and a suicide bomber destroyed the gates, letting them in to massacre the soldiers, beheading some of them. This finalized the "liberation" of Benghazi the Libyan government was not allowed to correct. 

It was a month later "when [Higgins] had his idea" to similar effect. But he's the "most innovative" one anywhere.

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.

Investigation: Ghouta and Other CW Incidents

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.

Also of note: Higgins was apparently informed in May, 2013 that Jabhat al-Nusra had seized some of Syria's chemical weapons in the Aleppo area some time before, and although the type(s) weren't clear, they may have used them at Khan al-Assal (which, again, used sarin). He was asked to keep that off the record, and has accordingly deferred to Syrian claims that none of their CWs have been stolen. As it so happens, that's probably the right call; as I may explain in another post, this story from Matthew Van Dyke is rather dubious anyway. (they probably did have sarin, just not by the route he was told about.)

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) 

But he only now blocked me, on July 26, within hours of our Push Back appearance. That's just as I reason I/we might be too big to ignore. I'm not to see any of the attacks he might be launching, or I'm on hard mute like I don't exist until hopefully I don't. Turns out this intelligence unit isn't so open after all. But he is getting paid and praised. 

What the "Rocket Man" Wants us to See in Ghouta

Posted Aug. 16, 2021

filled-in ...

For anyone who didn't know or forgot, on August 2013, the Syrian government allegedly killed at least 4-500 people - perhaps over 1,400 as reported - in chemical attack on Eastern and Western Ghouta. It was by far the deadliest chemical weapons attack since Halabja in 1988. As the 8-year anniversary of this massive event draws near, we're finally getting the picture to undeniable clarity with a breakthrough visual analysis publicized this June and still gaining in awareness. The sarin rockets were fired by opposition forces from a certain opposition-controlled field - and they did it on video we have and can match by all visual details to the site with consistent scorching just a few meters from where our 7+ trajectory estimates converge. See 2021 Ghouta Reports overview post.  

In the process, we have again exposed Eliot Higgins and his Bellingcat group as frauds of the first order. Higgins' rise to fame allowing the Bellingcat project was greased first and foremost by his analysis of this incident. He was dubbed "the rocket man" - the master of Volcano rocket analysis, mainly to demonstrate they were government-made, government-used weapons, Because it was always possible opposition forces could steal some, or possibly make their own replicas. and also with less success, tried to bolster that w/fired from gov-held areas. 

As I will show in this post, that work was largely based on lazy absorption of others' analysis, including flawed guesses he never corrected, and was clearly driven by politically bias to bolster the regime-change campaign against Syria, regardless of the truth.

The main content is forthcoming, but will cover his/their criticism of our findings / report(s) AND their own heralded take of 2013/14. For now I have this post up to collect the 3 sub-posts needed to explain some tedious details... (these will later appear in the course of relating the Higgins-Bellingcat investigation)

Copied Impact Site Mix-Up 

Some Government-Held Firing Spot or Other

What the "Rocket Man" Wants us to See in Ghouta: Nothing, Just Blindly Trust the "UN Azimuth"

Some previous posts that will come up:

Higgins replicates UN, original article

Whose Hexamine?

> a sarin blame shell-game

Related - other Syria CW attacks covered poorly by Bellingcat:

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

Postol-Higgins Debate Winner: Confusion

On OPCW-Bellingcat "Collaboration"

On the Limits of Tariq Bhatti's Chemistry Analysis

Rocket Man: Just Blindly Trust the "UN Azimuth"

What the "Rocket Man" Wants us to See in Ghouta: 

Nothing, Just Blindly Trust the "UN Azimuth"

August 14, 2021

(rough, incomplete as usual)

North? West? Northwest?

Just five days after the Ghouta sarin attack blamed for over 1,400 deaths, Eliot Higgins posted a first visual estimate as to where the rockets were fired. From the geolocated impact of rocket #197 in a field ("field" in the image below), he estimated it came from 6-8km NORTH (yellow line), where he found bases and roads of the Syrian Arab Army's 155th Brigade. (Brown Moses blog, 26/08/13) No exact compass heading was given, but the sites in question are almost due north, though an angle as small as 335° could reach an edge of this area. 

For what it's worth, most observers made a similar call, but the magenta Kobs 2020 reflects a better analysis (see 2021 reports); it came from the northwest after all, and the tube buckled both forward and a bit to the right.

Then a report on the findings of UN-OPCW joint mission was released a few weeks later, on 16 September (PDF). This provided a single trajectory reading for a nearby rocket at "impact, site 4," also in a field but right at a wall or concrete fence. Both sites were visually located early on, as shown at right. 

The UN-OPCW mission had this unbent rocket tube pointing "precisely in a bearing of 285 degrees" so it came in at an opposite trajectory of 105° or from the WEST. This is 50-75 degrees different from what Higgins had just estimated (inset: white line vs. yellow line shows a full 75°). These angles are almost halfway to opposite of each other.

To be clear, as it has been to many observers from the start, this "precisely" measured 105/285° is grossly wrong. In facts it's some 30 DEGREES off from the visual reality we've now established. Before that, the white line had appeared even further off from reality, as shown in non-magenta colors. 

This can be made visually clear comparing the tube with the east-west wall it impacted. The engine points straight as an arrow in a reverse azimuth back to its launcher, and they say that runs 285°. The wall can be measured from satellite images over the years as running to 277° west on the compass. IS THIS a near-parallel eight degree angle? I've asked around and nobody wants to say "yes that is 8 degrees." But they defer to the inspectors who were there and measured it, and doubt our qualifications to measure such a thing. so ... that's what they wind up accepting. It's what Higgins would want to defer to as well, but he's supposedly held to higher standards than usual. And from the start, he was clashing badly.  (see also: how the UN-OPCW falsely fingered Syria)

Also note that was the only trajectory estimate the UN or OPCW offered for any Eastern Ghouta rocket impact. Any mention of a UN angle, azimuth, measurement or trajectory will refer to this grossly incorrect number.

In the compared estimates image, site 4 had a wide range of readings. These were largely pulled north relative to the magenta best (again Kobs 2020), maybe because it looked closer to perpendicular in most views (the shadow was tricky), and maybe to assist in converging with "field" off to the north (and it looked unlikely even then). Kobs got around such illusions with a view straight down the tube (bottom center image in the plate above), or right along the flight path, correlated to distance features that were then measured from the impact spot. That yielded 316° NW. My own take argues for a tiny bit lower, like 315 due NW. So we get a very good reading and it's 30-31° clockwise from what was measured "precisely." (For all other details, see as needed 2021 report(s) - the well-known "Rootclaim" report explains with 3D models, and my own mapping report with fuller explanation and slight revisions). 

In contrast, Eliot Higgins ... well, he's had a few ways of looking at it. 

He had that white line he should defer to, but couldn't possibly support. That line takes 9-10km to really implicate government forces at Mt. Qasioun, like it once seemed to. The yellow line takes 6-8km to find its blame nest. By late 2013, however, it had become clear these Volcano rockets could only fly 2-2.5 or maybe 3km at most. Run only that far out, both north and UN-west point to opposition territory. This would make north an unfavorable angle for Higgins, albeit one with some visual reason, and west would lose its appeal besides being unsupportable. As such, he would come to focus on a wide arc of northwest angles pointing towards a newly-won strip of government control perhaps close enough to have hosted the rocket launches (explained at this post). 

He also noted at points there may have been multiple angles fire from two or more locations, though he usually seems to think of a singular direction, and mainly just remained confused what direction it would be. 

Getting an Idea  

Brown Moses blog 30 November, 2013: while we already "had an idea of the direction the rockets came from" via the UN report, Higgins still couldn't show that idea and instead tested 2 new angles from an Al-Jazeera on-site investigation. He swapped in the closest match - 290° - run from the same impact site 4, that would be just 5 degrees different. But then he used a 299 degree line instead. I repair this here with a new green line, adding everything but the drawn red lines and provided distances:

That's the closest he could get to replicating the "UN" angle, but he knew these new al-Jazeera measures related to different impacts. The other one correlates with the geolocated "pool" impact at a spot mapped by HRW and LCC, where 307° runs almost exactly to the firing spot seen in the infamous Liwa Islam Volcano videos, at a range of 1.99km. This 290° angle, run from unverified mapped impact "HRW 9" does about the same, and the area there looks consistent with the video footage. 

In other words, those Al-Jazeera angles wound up confirming our 2021 findings once they were properly arranged, not the finding Eliot most needed help with at the time. 

He did struggle with it some. A month later, on 31 December, Higgins asked Chris Kabusk about his just-updated 3D model of this site 4: "For the wall one could you get a view directly above the munition?" He specified "directly above it, facing down, so we can see the angle of the munition" Getting n early start on a New Year's resolution? Chris soon showed that - an orthogonal elevated view as shown here, and a ground-level one to compare with photos. 

This kind of modeling is user-defined to approximate a visual match. As such, it doesn't necessarily prove the true angle, although this looks fairly close. As modeled, the rocket is at something like a 45-degree angle relative to the wall. In fact I quickly measured a 50 degree difference here (see right, rotated to true north), so the tube points to an origin 328° to the NW - some 43° off from what was reported and about 12° different from our later readings.

This model was also used in collaboration with Tesla Labs' Richard Lloyd, and used to show a range of 55-65 degrees from parallel (per labels on this other view at right). In retrospect, how Chris first modeled it seems better than this spread. This 55-65 is the Lloyd-Kabusk wedge of angles in the top image. Again, everyone was estimating too far north at first, for both of these sites. 

Anyway, that clearly is NOT the near-parallel 8-degree angle required by the UN-OPCW reported trajectory. And it seems that Higgins saw this and absorbed the lesson. 

A few days later - 3 January - he would tweet "PT Interesting to note the UN azimuth for one of the rockets doesn't match the 3D model on those maps, seems 50 degrees off to the north." That must be the only impact WITH a measure to compare, and presumably to the same 3D model he'd just seen. I get +42°, or 50 from the wall itself, but yes, it's an issue ... with the model? or with the actual evidence? or with the reported trajectory? 

Surprisingly, he seemed to have had the right idea at the time. Two weeks later, 17 January, he would tweet at now-defunct propaganda compilers @geopoliticalhome @Lopforum "Based off the geolocated munitions the point of origin is from the north (even the UN one they said was from the NW)" In other words, they said NW (better put as west), but nonetheless, the facts said it came (more) from the north.  

Keeping it Quiet

Here's Eliot Higgins publicly noting the "UN" reading was wrong. How would he resolve that? Quietly, it seems for a while. 

Between launching Bellingcat in June, unwrapping endless present for their inaugural MH-17 investigation over the summer, and other activities, mid-2014 was a very busy time for Higgins. When he had time for Ghouta forensics - and it wasn't often - he looked for government-controlled areas with range, and kept the range quite flexible. There arguably were some of workable spots, but none on a bearing remotely close to 285. 

In March he proposed launches from a checkpoint well to the NNW. Then the glorious Bellingcat came to be, and his first article there likely to address the issue: "Locating the Rockets Used During the August 21st Sarin Attacks in Damascus" (August 10, 2014) didn't focus on trajectories, and ignored impact site 4 entirely. As I explained here, just two correctly located impacts were actually included in this article. The plural form was barely even accurate.

Then at the end of August, Chris Kabusk shared a new trajectory estimate for another impact a ways to the northeast ("wall 2" = LCC10, HRW12), proposing it was launched from the northwest. Higgins noted "the other rocket east of that points roughly nw too" and "based on that," Higgins traced a red arc of likely firing areas 2-2.5km out to the northwest. This started roughly where he had pointed in March, but expanded a ways to the southwest. None of it is remotely similar to the 285° official azimuth.

They seemed to be in basic agreement until Chris noted this new estimate added to his emerging picture of NW origins, in fact near the site of an August 24 sarin attack on SAA troops. This had to be sitting poorly with Higgins et al. The overall angle, as Chris put it, is "like UN's presumed flight path but off a bit and 1.5-2.5km ranges." Higgins replied incredulously: "You still think the wall Volcano was measured wrong by the UN?" 

He's perplexed, if not appalled, to hear the real angles described as "off a bit" from what the trusted "UN" had reported. It's as if it had been shown correct somewhere, but that can hardly be. No reply. What can you say to that? 

They had just been agreeing on quite different angles, but as soon as Chris even mildly points out the obvious - these remain inconsistent with the "UN's presumed flight path" - Eliot shames Chris doing what he had been doing himself, briefly, in January. And when he said it, it wasn't just "a bit off," but by 50 degrees!

In the 2014 interim, for no reason likely to be wholesome, Higgins had switched to disagreeing with the official measure quietly. He would speak up only to insist, with no provided reason, that others in his team should be quiet about it too. It seems he at least held to this approach from then on, always dancing around that impact. He's pointed different ways in general, but never explicitly using this clearest impact. In fact see my plotting for site 4, broad and most-likely estimates layered. Of EIGHT located impacts, this was the best indicator of the field we now identify, straight across the frontline from the bus station ...

...compared with the areas Eliot has implicated (red areas) and the video field (green star), right across from the long, white bus station he never indicated. As it happens, he's looked just to the left and to the right just to the right of this field, besides a little behind it. But he never along that clear, best measured line for any distance. Maybe its capacity for precision frightened him.

I didn't find any sign of him or Bellingcat referencing this Ghouta rocket analysis at all between mid-2014 and 2020. For some six years it seems there was nothing more to say. But when Bellingcat advised researchers at UC Berkeley's Human Rights Center in or before October, 2020, they should have given a pretty current or comprehensive view. The Human Rights Center's presentation via Storymaps included the UN west AND Higgins' original full north plus all angles in between for likely attack origin, in a wide arc covering some 1/4 of the compass (roughly mapped in above: green arc). Impact site 4 is mapped with others, but no specific rocket trajectories were cited. 

"Replicating" a Fabrication

This Berkeley-Bellincat analysis was used for a SCM/OSJI lawsuit against Syria, including admittedly impossible claims of rockets fired from Mt. Qasioun alongside Bellingcat-oriented possible NW firing spots. (mapping report, p.64)

Then a final, bizarre, double twist - as explained here - upon Higgins' Feb. 2021 book We Are Bellingcat. This boasted of tracing ONE rocket trajectory to a Syrian army base using shadows, no further details. The footnote 96 links to the 26/08/2013 blog post explaining that was 6-8km to the north from the field impact. That's still 50-75 deg. off from what the UN-OPCW reported, but to logic-impaired ally  Mohammed Idrees Ahmad at "Newlines Magazine", that was Higgins "confirming the trajectory of the rockets." By identifying an army base, he had "replicated the U.N. mission’s most significant finding" of an attack from "the Republican Guard base on Mount Qasioun" 10km to the west. 

Maybe that leap was because Ahmad was also reviewing the brand new (same day, 23 Feb.) book Red Line, by Washington Post national security writer Joby Warrick. This says (per a Newsweek excerpt) the sarin rockets were fired "a few miles to the east" from hills northwest of Damascus, as proven by impact site 4's "azimuth of 105 degrees, in an East/Southeast trajectory." Ahmad took the passages of Warrick and Higgins together as 100% proving that impossible story was true after all, and Samantha Power's touted plans to bomb Syria immediately were fully justified. 

From then on, Ahmad presented his ridiculous article as the only thing anyone needs to see about the Ghouta attack. All that stuff about NW angles and 2km range is "recycled disinformation." In this article, Ahmad takes years of Eliot's quiet disagreement with the UN azimuth and tosses it under a poorly-driven bus. Higgins seems to quietly approve of  this, and the chance to be on the same page with a rising star of pro-war propaganda like Joby Warrick. 

Conclusion: Not Seeing is Believing

Open-Source Intelligence - OSNT - is what Higgins likes to call what we do, seemingly proud of the CIA-MI6 connotations. Whatever, it's the "open" part that's supposed to set it apart; anyone can see and show if you're wrong, so Bellingcat must be right. Like this impact site 4 the UN measured just fine. Back in March I issued an "OSINT challenge" they just didn't acknowledge: https://twitter.com/CL4Syr/status/1402719252629524480

@EliotHiggins ,brains  @bellingcat or allies: knowing HRW's 9.6km 285 is impossible, Sellstrom said this, 285 was a typed number w/no exp., can you back it up, using visual OSINT as all these colored lines did? Starting at NO.

Ghouta 2013 OSINT challenge @EliotHiggins ,brains @bellingcat or allies: knowing HRW's 9.6km 285 is impossible, Sellstrom said this, 285 was a typed number w/no exp., can you back it up, using visual OSINT as all these colored lines did? Starting at NO. pic.twitter.com/wFLNpKOUSl

— Adam Larson #EndtheOPCWCoverup #FreeAssange (@CL4Syr) March 24, 2021

https://twitter.com/CL4Syr/status/1374691627789209608

Bumped 9 June: "They've left it at no so far. Maybe they've all put me on mute? I'd like to know they saw this AND had nothing to say. Can someone help w/retweets  @EliotHiggins @bellingcat" There never was a response to that challenge until the day we appeared on Push Back, or became too big to ignore, when Higgins too felt the sudden need to block me.

In the 3D visual world he can only disagree with this important fake finding. Yet he defers to a fake 2D version wherein north replicates west and all that. His ability to exist in multiple dimensions at once is ... maybe not admirable, but interesting. It's also been useful in lending some veneer to the dirty war and regime change campaign against Syria.

In that light, let's reconsider how this guy was once heralded by Bianca Bosker for Huffington Post,  Inside The One-Man Intelligence Unit That Exposed The Secrets And Atrocities Of Syria’s War (18 November, 2013 - Updated somehow Dec 06, 2017):

Higgins ... says he has little patience for political leaders and their tendency to offer vague assurances that they have proof of weapons of mass destruction — in Iraq, in Syria, wherever — while refusing to make the goods public. “The U.S., U.K. and France produce a one-page report saying, ‘We have this evidence, we can’t show you it,’ ... People don’t just want reassurances that the evidence is there. They want to see it." Higgins sees his one-man intelligence unit as a vital source of information for the general public — more in depth than any newspaper article, but more open than any think tank or government agency. 

"They want to see" what? The truth, or the WMD lies in fancy visual form? Well, let's test that by  Higgins' approach to this official disinformation. The trusted agencies seemingly controlled by said governments had assured us the rockets pointed west - this one 8° from that wall's orientation. But again they didn't explain that carefully and people might wonder if it's true. And rightly so, of course! It should be an easy enough issue to settle, but Higgins finds he can only refute this using his vaunted open-source methods, and that's apparently not what he wanted. 

Eliot Higgins doesn't really want you to see 8° here, because that wouldn't work. He realizes that faith in this reading can only be BLIND faith, and he pretty much insists on blind faith. He tries to leave his followers seeing nothing here, and trusting this "UN" measurement at a safe distance from the evidence. 

Postscript: my use of "UN-OPCW" and scare-quoting of "UN" might be annoying or wrong. But those were the two agencies - along with the WHO - making of the mission investigating in Ghouta, and the OPCW part did the chemical weapons analysis, including the chemistry and ballistics. It's presumably them who gave us this fake trajectory. 

We would learn in 2019 how corrupt the OPCW had become by the time of their 2018 Douma probe. The time up to then and including Ghouta 2013, the organization was headed by Ahmet Uzumcu of Turkey, Ankara's former ambassador to Israel and to NATO. As always the Chief of Cabinet was from  Western nation hostile to Syria (Fairweather: UK. Braha: France.). We know of pro-war pressures in 2002, when the OPCW's first director-general was ousted under US pressure, and again in mid-2018, with a US team advising the investigators what to find, and those who followed the facts were frozen out of the process.

It is therefore interesting how Higgins et al. insist on downplaying the OPCW's role and calling this a "UN" mission filing a "UN" report, with a "UN" azimuth. It's as if it was all vetted by myriad voices and proven to be clear science, something credible enough to override lingering skepticism about WMD wars and related hostility against Ba'ath party governments in the Middle East.

Rocket Man: Some Government-Held Firing Spot or Other

What the "Rocket Man" Wants us to See in Ghouta: Some Government-Held Firing Spot or Other

August 11, 2021

(rough, incomplete)

here a fuller overview of the different ways Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins is well-known for linking the 2013 Ghouta sarin attack to the Syrian government, as related again in his recent book We Are Bellingcat. Citing this, supporter Idrees Ahmad praise how Higgins "replicated the U.N. mission’s most significant finding" that the Volcano rockets used were fired from "the Republican Guard base on Mount Qasioun," about 10km west of the stricken area. (NewLines, 23/02/21) This never was their finding exactly, but the given heading 285° points from the measured impact to about there (as shown, with Wikimapia labels) 

This never was Higgins' strong point in blaming Damascus for the attack, but he did try to use rocket trajectories. He has generally deferred to this reported angle, even as his own visual, open-source efforts simply had to disagree, always pointing further north. Here I will compile every area he has suggested based on actual evidence over the years, and show how none of them remotely matches this. We could call Mt. Qasioun spot 0 and count from there.

Spot 1) 6-8km north, 155 Brigade: 26/08/2013: Brown Moses Blog: 5 days after the attack, based on the first visually located rocket #197, "field" bent forward at an angle, that angle going unnoticed forever, it seemed the rocket was flying almost due south. So it seemed - to everyone, "the munition was fired from the north" as he explains with no more specific measure, but finds "6-8km away you'll find a number of military installations, connected by a 2km road to the 155th Brigade missile base. In one version of events, the Syrian National Coalition has claimed the rockets were launched from bases housing the 155th brigade." At right: my own quick tracing from about the field impact to 7.4km. Various bases, roads, a quarry fill the area - anywhere in there could suffice to launch rockets capable of flying 6-8km to land where they did. But note that everything south of there - from at least 5km and down - was all opposition-held.

https://brown-moses.blogspot.com/2013/08/finding-exact-location-of-alleged.html

Interlude: Limits set, directions disputed: Then "Who Attacked Ghouta," the Lloyd and Postol team, and others established a revised range - not the 9-10km or 6-8km needed for the above, but a mere 2km to maybe 2.5km max range. Higgins had accepted this by late November, 2013, and pretty much everyone did by early 2014. 2-3km to the north was all opposition turf. Higgins became less interested in looking north for a long time.

To him and others, trajectory clues remained confused with the north indication and increasingly NW,  but not quite  the UN-OPCW's "northwest" or basically west.  North was seen as implicating the rebels, and it seems like any kind of NW was ambiguous or likely to blame government forces. There was an Air Force intelligence headquarters  known of that way only 3km or so, and a besieged Tohme checkpoint only half that distance out. (Chris Kabusk asked about the significance of a pretty northerly spot: "I meant that suspected launcher sites are most likely to be spotted in the north, not NW, we got them mapped wrong..." (idea: north = rebels, NW = gov and/or what the UN said). As Higgins hastened to add "It's still possible there's multiple launch sites" - though he usually seems to think of a singular direction from a singular area, and mainly just remained confused what direction it would be. 

A simultaneous development adding to this was a newly-captured "strip" of army control, sized-up from tons of video evidence and some reports, with Higgin and more credible participants all in general agreement. Higgins put forth this green-shaded area of army control on the night of August 20/21. Charles Wood always contested the corner west of that southern bit of highway as only taken later. He's probably right, but otherwise it's pretty well agreed. This flanks the stricken area to the northwest, about where the rockets seemed to originate, but maybe past that new maximum range. I'll be tracing in this frontline in white in images below. 

Naturally, Higgins took that part loosely, usually as if 2km was the minimum distance the rockets could be fired from and ~2.5km a max, Really it's more like 2-2.3km is the maximum, and the minimum range for normal use is maybe 1.3-1.5km. But he usually looks between the maxes, or even fudges these to 2.1km and 2.6km, looking almost totally out of range. Maybe related: this winds up giving the best fit with that SAA strip. 

Spot 2) 298° NW: 30/11/13: New trajectory estimates from Al-Jazeera published - two seemingly good measures, but from no given location, and said to point to a second firing spot besides Mt. Qasioun - SSRC Barzeh, some 5km to the northwest. (this is the site later destroyed by US-led bombing in 2018). Higgins tried swapping these angle (290° , 307°) in to the two known location for a basic idea. Together with range it should give a basic idea, although we already "had an idea of the direction" from the UN report and this one was different. (if far better than "north")

Below: his image with many additions. He traced these angles in red to ~2.1 and then 2.6km, after setting them to diverge - not because they would, but because that widens the search area so a tiny bit of government territory might be indicated. This is a spot where tanks were based ("tank park" on some maps), but his 2.1km line is more like the OUTER range to find a spot than the inner edge he uses it as.

Even then, the area he indicates - centered 2.3km bearing 298 - is 3/4 opposition held (front lines not as clear then, but drawn in now).  Nearby areas more within range are 100% off-limits to the Syrian military.

http://brown-moses.blogspot.com/2013/11/new-key-evidence-in-understanding.html

Update 14 Aug.: he did that wrong enough I'll need to update this: first, what he posted - note his area of interest, likely firing area, is between the dots well over 2km and 2,5km out - and area maybe 1/5 of this is part of the tank park, the rest rebel turf.

I finally checked his red lines and they are too parallel. 307 is good, but 290 is plotted like 299 or 300. Here for a third time with more notes - range to ~2.2km is more likely - in to 1.5 or less - full angle width = 99% rebel-held. Re-doing the right lines from the right spots, in lighter shades, and the right way (convergent on a spot, not expansive to include as many "choices" as possible)... and it comes out just a few meters north of where we think they came from. Likely explanation: wind drift, app. being to the northeast in the attack videos.

/end update.

He would suggest more data would point even better to right part of this island of regime control. But no. See here testing the same 2 angles (as he drew them, not verified) in blue from "our spot" - meaning the field explained in our 2021 reports, where the "Liwa al-Islam" Volcano launches seemingly occurred. It's not shown here but that roughly indicates two OTHER reported impacts. And it is OTHER ones they measured. One of them ("pool") was clearly located about at the end of one of these lines. The other can't be exactly placed, but probably does the same, coming out near an unseen but reported impact per HRW.

Spot 3) checkpoint near AF Intel: 17/03/14: Eliot Higgins tweeted "the area marked on this map was being attacked by the opposition before and after August 21st. ... It's the position of a check point, one of a number along that road." "It's not the "contested" territory some people would like to make out." AF Intel Harasta is here, just north off-frame, and all this interchange would be controlled, including the dug in position at the underpass. 

This spot features in a July 15 Bellingcat piece on government positions. An "electricity station checkpoint" was totally lacking visual evidence but was reported as active, just off the lower left corner here. This piece shows the green area of SAA control, and intersecting arcs 2-2.5km from known and mapped impacts, largely over that. 

But again, 2km is closer to a top end than a minimum. If we rounded down to 2km max from all mapped impacts, we would have a firing spot inside the black lines here. With the one corner disputed (see above, Wood), and the controlled highway that comes with it not included, that would leave ZERO SAA areas indicated. We don't round down like that, but the evidence points to a real firing spot just a bit further out than this, about 2.09km from the furthest impact, just 1.44km from the nearest one, and about 1.9km for most. (Mapping to Accountability, p. 53) Compare: furthest impact ~2.1km vs. Higgins usually starts looking only at 2.1km. Searches like that are almost guaranteed to be fruitless.

Spot 4) an arc near AF Intel, 2-2.5km out: 01/09/14: Chris Kabusk asked Higgins "For the north one, Volcano 5, we're interested in your works on trajectories on them." and "Just wondering if you did your works after you asked me to create those 3d models?" Eliot replied "the other rocket east of that points roughly nw too" and Based on that I think potential launch sites are in this area" - a smart-looking arc about 2-2.5km out, including the above-mentioned checkpoint and almost half of the happy strip of accessible spots to the south and west, just up to the bus station. Below with added labels. At the far end, this angles to include a little rebel turf - not so far from including our proposed firing spot, "Liwa al-Islam field".

Spot 5) Mid-2020: Somewhere W-NW-N 2-2.5k out: After a long span with no updates I'm aware of, Bellingcat offered their help sometime in 2020 to the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley, who were helping the SCM and OSJI compile a fancy new lawsuit against Syria, in part over the Ghouta attack. In October this all went public, including their plotting the five impact sites Bellingcat had - including the wrong guess they never double-checked - and set their own huge arc shaded green (a different shade Bellingcat used, but green says go), covering almost 1/3 of the compass from nest to north, as if to cover all Higgins' readings AND/OR the UN angle or multiple lines. They acknowledge not having any clear location suggested, but "the area shaded in green represents this northwest area between 2.0 and 2.5 km from each impact site" - or an area that will be largely out of range. This, with nothing further in, gives "an approximate location from which the rockets may have been launched." As it happens, a bit past 2km seems to work, and the area we identified is within their "approximate location."

https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/56c19f1dbcbb4054b524cacc5f6a9fa5

Spot 6) 2021: again 6-8km north?: Higgins' self-authored book We Are Bellingcat was released in early February. It includes a brief retelling of his/their Ghouta investigation, mainly the rockets and sarin recipe being linked 100% he felt to the government, to the complete exclusion of opposition actors - regardless what the forensics might say. And he never did settle that aspect very well, but here brags of locating a rocket using shadows tracing its single trajectory to "a Syrian military installation, largely surrounded by rebel-held territory." The footnotes for citation 96 take us to Brown Moses 26/8/13, or spot 1) above: his first take in 2013 for 6-8km from the north. 

A misread angle plus ignorance of range issues did underpin this one time he could identify a known army facility. Does he really now reject the 2-2.6-ish km range, when he had been so clear about that in 2014 and up to that Berkeley collaboration in 2020? Or was this like Higgins' OPCW-partnership "copy paste error"? Like the wrong citation to pick in haste, and then write a description of, never remembering how wrong it proved? Coincidentally allowing for the clearest 2D idea mapping to match what another 2021 book said: Joby Warrick's Red Line - 10km from Mt. Qasioun, seen and measured by OPCW inspectors - is now printed in this "non-fiction" book. Warrick's and Higgins' books came out almost at once (Warrick's later, 23 Feb.), allowing side-by-side readings - like Ahmad's at NewLines, writing ON Feb. 23 that Higgins "replicated the U.N. mission’s most significant finding" even with a trajectory differeny by ~75 deg. (see ny review). Gullible masses could thus be easily convinced we were back to clarity about those flashes seen on Mt. Qasioun, Higgins' careful visual work confirmed that, and all that Lloyd & Postol stuff was over. 

All proposed spots in review: where blue crosses green might have come up if best work on range and the "UN angle" was accurate. Higgins never did find reason to look there. Places he did marked roughly in red, and Bellingcat via UC Berkeley in green. The decent ones (mid-green and corresponding reds) come pretty close to the green star marking our perfect fit for trajectories narrowed down to an exact spot by site-matching to video of the rockets being launched. It doesn't get much better than that. While the early bad reading to the north was understandable then, his bizarre 2021 reversion to this is a real mystery.