Adam Larson aka Caustic Logic
April 20/21, 2021
(kind of rough - edits 4/23, adds 4/24)
This is largely simmered down from a previous post and is less complete, but includes new points and thoughts, and I hope added readability.
The Hexamine Shell-Game, Recap
So as luck would have it, in their response to peaceful protests in 2011, President Assad and his brainwashed minions walked into one self-made trap after another, vis-a-vis international human rights norms. They started with shooting protesters and castrating young boys, and quickly turned to sectarian massacres - Alawite Shabiha death cult hacking up Sunni families in their homes and leaving their bodies for the freedom fighters to document, like in Taldou, Al-Houla. By late 2012 Assad and his Shabiha were convincing people less and less that they were truly behind those crimes. People like Channel 4's Alex Thomson were starting to air doubts and to pass on competing claims that Jabhat al-Nusra and their ilk were behind these heinous crimes (See Aqrab, Haswiyeh, both in December, 2012).
So as luck would have it, Assad decided it was better to kill in ways only he could - barrel bombs, any thing from the air, chemical weapons, especially sarin. Enough with the swords and hatchets. Shocking, yes, but too ambiguous.
As luck would have it yet again Assad's forces used a very unusual and distinctive method of producing sarin, one extra-sure to be traced back to them. And so Assad freely used it over and over, even against his own troops several times. As far as we know (?) no other state uses hexamine (copy-pasting hexamethylenetetramine) in its production of Sarin, past or present. Yet Syria does, even now, long after claiming to surrender its program. And the Sarin that keeps turning up there has Hexamine, so it must be theirs, not any from any other state nor from any terrorist lab.
Or so we've heard. (Sarcasm mode off for the moment. )
As far as I can tell, here's how we came to hear that:
Nov 24, 2013: CW expert Jean Pascal Zanders lists the chemical precursors Syria had just declared to the OPCW: Under category heading "Sarin" are listed three compounds: hexamine, isopropanol and hydrogen fluoride. Explained, maybe: "[…] The EOI’s list of compounds consists mainly of chemicals that play a role in the startup of the development or production of chemical warfare agents or are intermediate-stage precursors. I have grouped them according to the type of warfare agent in a separate table. […]"
By what method those were grouped under sarin is unclear. Hexamine shouldn't normally belong (see Kaszeta, below). My guess: it had turned up in the sarin being used in Syria, and Zanders wanted that to be made by Syria's recipe, so he decided on this recipe and then listed the ingredients accordingly.
As declared to OPCW, per the actual REQUEST FOR EXPRESSION OF INTEREST (EOI) of 20 November 2013 (PDF), hexamine and isopropanol are listed under "organic chemicals" while hydrogen fluoride is listed separately under "inorganic chemicals." The "type of warfare agent" each was related to production of must be explained somewhere else. Until I see otherwise, I'm sticking with my guess that Zanders just wanted it that way.
Just a few weeks later, the same idea gained traction. Dan Kaszeta is a CW expert, or a former US Secret Service man who knows such experts, a lot about CRBN response, other relevant bits and pieces, and mainly - like Zanders - he knows the right thing to say, politically, so he gets to be a touted "expert" rather than "propagandist." He wrote via Higgins/Brown Moses Dec. 14, 2013: "I consider the presence of hexamine both in the field samples and in the official stockpile of the Syrian government to be very damning evidence of government culpability in the Ghouta attacks." He assumes it's being added to Syria's binary sarin. FWIW the volcano rockets used in Ghouta were not binary, and there was never any evidence they were.
"It would have been informative if the UN and OPCW had explained why they considered hexamethylenetetramine (‘hexamine’)" as relevant to declare and have destroyed. Again, they didn't clarify by listing it under "Sarin," as was just suggested. To his credit, Kaszeta doesn't cite Zanders' list as if it mattered, and instead replicates that inexplicable listing with his own brand of detective work.
"I do not think that hexamine’s normal uses ... do not [sic] merit its inclusion as a chemical of concern by the OPCW." He does not think it does not belong (other than by a manufactured mystery he'll solve). And indeed it probably does belong in a more normal way. As WhoGhouta would soon remind this supposed CW expert, heaxmine is the traditional stabilizer for sulfur mustard (mustard gas), which was a Syrian program of interest. That will corrode metal canisters badly, but it was found long ago a bit of hexamine added - maybe to scavenge the excess acids? - helped it have a longer shelf life. Thus "hexamine is not a smoking gun."
So Kaszeta ignored or was unaware of the most logical reason hexamine would be included, then decide on a useful alternate reason that let him blame the government for these sarin attacks. He found it quite a unique thing they did there in Syria: "7 weeks of research on this subject reveal no public domain evidence of hexamine being used in this way in other Sarin programs." Just the one. IF the one, and he was pretty sure.
And the New York Times couldn't miss the chance for a big story on December 18: Experts say hexamine may be the smoking gun, citing Kaszeta's faux deduction that let Higgins have a promotional scoop along the way, probably a couple of "oh yeah, sure" experts with intel backgrounds agreeing. I don't have a subscription.
June 2014: UN mission head Ake Sellstrom is said to agree Hexamine was used in Syria's sarin program: "It is in their formula, it is their acid scavenger." Audio is said to prove he said that, without any contradictory qualifiers, and so case closed. Dan Kaszeta says so.
Back to Zanders, August, 2014: "Analysis of their contents by the OPCW confirmed sarin as their payload. Moreover, the filling displayed all the characteristics of sarin as produced by the Syrian government, the principal telltale sign being the presence of hexamine.” The cylinders in question: tested in June, 2014, after they were "allegedly" used against SAA troops in Jobar on 8/24/13, almost a year earlier. That happened, as we now realize, about 400 meters from the probable - and opposition-controlled - firing spot for the sarin rockets that hit East Ghouta on 8/21/13.
It seems hexamine turned up in all that stuff; the sarin in E. Ghouta would show hexamine, just like the stuff used against troops and civilians in Khan al-Assal in March, and just as would the stuff released on these SAA conscripts in Jobar. Zanders explained in a comment at the same post "The hexamine presence was confirmed in several discussions I have had over the past two months with people closely following the Syria dossier, including government officials, diplomats and scientists." Assad must have gassed his own troops, or faked all of that, or whatever. Trusted officials and the type of "scientists" tipping off this Zanders character say so. Or so says Zanders.
In 2017 the UN-OPCW Joint Investigative Mechanism would add a wrinkle - besides hexamine, two specific impurities they say were found in the actual DF Syria had declared and also in the Khan Sheikhoun attack, at least.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-syria-crisis-chemicalweapons-exclusiv-idUSKBN1FJ0MG
https://libyancivilwar.blogspot.com/2020/03/a-sarin-blame-shell-game-hexamine-to.html
It's likely that too is a non-specific a clue, because those impurities are very common, or because the terrorists were given Syria's DF, or a reverse-engineered version of it, based on samples stolen years ago and handed to a foreign intelligence agency. For example, as Joby Warrick recently informed us - sometime before 2001, CIA double-agent "Ayman" handed over what sounds like completed liquid sarin produced by the Syrian CW program he worked for. Interesting details:
"His laboratories would make a form of binary sarin: two stable liquids that could be stored separately and blended only at the last minute. One of the two liquids was ordinary isopropyl alcohol. The other, a toxic brew called DF, contained all the other ingredients, including an exclusive additive — which Ayman helped discover — that helped ensure that the sarin lost none of its potency during the short interval between the mixing and the arrival at the target."
Someone will say that additive was hexamine, but I doubt that - unless the additive part was added by his handlers years after Ayman's death by firing squad for treason.
2018's information offensive didn't expand much apparently expanded on the chemical matches. The previous findings for Hexamine and the two DF impurities were repeated as valid, but no clearer reason to implicate Syria's military alone was given. Importantly, it seems (?) the whole impurities package was expanded laterally - the usual "attack a had the same sarin as attack b" - existing appearances of blame tapped into to cover for any shortage of relevant evidence. redone in the light of matching "signatures" (plural - not just hexamine, but still including it)
Anthony Deutsch, Reuters, 1/29/18: “We compared Khan Sheikhoun, Khan al-Assal, Ghouta,” said one source who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the findings. “There were signatures in all three of them that matched.” Eliot Higgins echoed the sentiment in June 2018: "The presence of hexamine at every confirmed Sarin attack shows the hexamine is part of the Syrian government’s manufacturing process" The fact that it's being used is all the proof we need. Well, that plus the seemingly knee-jerk and often absurd findings of government guilt in case after case.
What if Hexamine Meant Something Else?
As I've said before, even if hexamine really was part of Damascus' sarin formula, that’s more like a recipe than a fingerprint. Fingers can even be cut off, but it's easier yet for others to copy the recipe, or have their own that’s just similar.
Absolute proof that opposition forces had sarin still seems lacking, but it's quite likely they did. And among all those who'd acknowledge the possibility, none of them could tell you how it was made, what it did and didn’t have in it, or how it compares to the stuff being used. It's still quite possible they did have sarin, and it used hexamine and DF with those same impurities, because it's the exact stuff used, in every single case.
In his Brown Moses piece, Dan Kaszeta acknowledged that it was possible for terrorists to have come up with a formula for sarin involving hexamine. However, "the likelihood of both a Syrian government research and development program AND a non-state actor both coming up with the same innovation seems negligible to me." Since he had just faux deduced the former, he had no choice but to caps-lock AND and then reject the latter. Obviously we're not repeating that stunt here.
I don't always believe what Seymour Hersh's intelligence sources say, but when I do ... for his LRB article "Whose Sarin?" this one sounds quite credible in telling him:
"An intelligence document issued in mid-summer dealt extensively with Ziyaad Tariq Ahmed, a chemical weapons expert formerly of the Iraqi military, who was said to have moved into Syria and to be operating in Eastern Ghouta. The consultant told me that Tariq had been identified ‘as an al-Nusra guy with a track record of making mustard gas in Iraq and someone who is implicated in making and using sarin’. He is regarded as a high-profile target by the American military."
From his record making mustard gas, Ahmed would know about hexamine’s stabilizing properties, and might make an unusual choice to use it in his sarin. An odd new sarin appears – not exclusively but mainly in E. Ghouta – by Mid-March 2013 at latest, and it uses hexamine. US intel heard the terrorist Ahmaf was making it right there in E. Ghouta by summer at the latest. They heard he was doing it for Al-Nusra Front, who could distribute it nationwide and further if they wanted. No one knows what it would look like, and someone’s sarin kept turning up and getting Damascus in deeper and deeper trouble. The link to Syria's stocks remains far from proven, and still the only clear thing hexamine links to is to many, most, or all of the disputed sarin incidents over the years.
Ahmed was a "high-profile target" for the U.S. in Iraq, but didn't get killed there, was operating in Syria, and like every foreign-backed militant there, was off-limits for Syrian government forces, as far as Washington had a say. And he might have been the one person central to getting that "red line" crossed.
Why use hexamine? Just knowing about it from prior use is no great reason to reach for it in a sarin recipe. It's impossible to say, but from what I know, here's one possibility: As I gather, hexamine is an amine, one of the kind of impurities that lend the unusual characteristics to the sarin used in Syria: a yellowish color, corrosive properties (burns the eyes and airways), and an odor most often described as "foul" and "strange" - like rotting corpses but different, hard to place. I imagine it's a bit synaesthetic - a smell that's almost a different sensation. Soldiers in the August 24 attack described, per the UN report, "a foul and strange odour" and "a badly smelling gas."
The smell aspect always struck me as interesting from a psychological standpoint. I've read somewhere survivors describing the paralysis, loss of sight, and suffocation of severe sarin exposure as feeling like the angel of death is crushing you. If one's goal is to terrorize with the stuff, making it burn and smell like disgusting death might just be a desirable effect. This Ziyaad Tariq Ahmed - or whoever makes this stuff - might even be proud of his innovation and give it a cool nickname like "stench of death."
A Brief History of DUUHHHH (and strange, foul smells)
Sarcasm back on for a recap of what all "Assad" has done with this unique hexamine sarin.
* The same hexamine sarin first appears, that we know of, at Khan al-Assal, Aleppo 3/19/13 – 1 soldier and 19 civilians killed - gov reports terrorist sarin attack, demands a probe. (smell: some say chlorine-like, others said sulfur-like)
* Same 3/19/13: Oppo. reports sarin attack in Ateibah, killing 5 men, a baby (a foul smell) - abortively reports a CW attack in Homs as well, and oppo. says regime hit themselves in Khan al-Assal, with a fighter jet or a scud missile (reliable accounts differ), missing the nearest rebel target by over 1km, maybe on purpose. Alleged: coordinated regime CW attacks in Damascus, Aleppo, and Homs.
* April-May-June, Syria's request: Western powers tack on opposition allegations incl. Ateibah that need investigated just as badly, slow the process digging for as many as possible - dismiss sarin claims re: Khan al-Assal (eg SSG's clear findings a sarin simulant was used), play them up in other cases
* 4/29/19 sarin grenade attack, Saraqeb (“It was a horrible, suffocating smell.") One woman dies in the ambulance en route to Turkey, with a super-fatal dose that should have killed in minutes - no one else comes close to dying.
* "rebels" re-take Khan al-Assal in June, precluding investigation there (agreement on which was nearly achieved at the time), massacre captive soldiers, possibly witnesses, steal the sarin samples there (? SyGov later unable to produce samples to OPCW)
* US intel has sarin samples from an attack somewhere sent in, supposed match w/government stocks/hexamine/etc. found (?). Chain of custody, whatever, UN investigations eventually decided the Khan al-Assal attack used sarin with the same impurities as in other attacks. Reasonable cause to believe the Syrian government attacked their own troops and civilians - in a mostly Shi'ite village just being re-populated after a brief occupation by sectarian "rebels"
* 8/18/13: UN-OPCW inspectors finally arrive - again, originally on Syrian invitation - to investigate Khan al-Assal, plus Ateibah, and a Dec. 23, 2012 incident in Homs city thought to involve sarin - 1st reports differed 180 on miosis & atropine, pointing to sarin OR incapacitant BZ - some reported it was "pungent-smelling" - rockets and bombs are cited, but so are "canisters" or "grenades" maybe lobbed from a regime car that drove by the "street battles" - 1 "FSA" fighter and 6 civilian men rep. killed by the gas - the day after 7 SAA troops re. killed by a yellow gas (no smell rep) down in Daraya.)
http://libyancivilwar.blogspot.com/2017/02/what-happened-in-homs-december-23-2012.html
http://libyancivilwar.blogspot.com/2017/11/what-happened-december-6-and-22-2012-in.html
* Assad allegedly distracts them using the same sarin to kill hundreds right next door (smell: "something like vinegar and rotten eggs" or "like cooking gas" (if propane is meant, then that will be Ethyl Mercaptan: "Most people describe the smell as either rotten eggs or rotten cabbage")) – eventually helping prove he did Khan al-Assal too, hitting his own troops
* Obviously on Aug. 24, gas his own troops again and hand the proof over again
* and adding he did this again on Aug. 25 in Daraya, soldiers and sarin handed over just to be ignored in the rush to attack Syria (smell: "foul," "bizarre"). Another CW attack on SAA troops in E. Ghouta, on August 22, didn't seem as likely to be sarin-related.
* Then Assad paused in sarin use after the red line threat failed to materialize; after trying so hard to get bombed out of power with these brazen attacks and false-flag failures, he suddenly wanted to appear as if he’d handed it all over?
* 2014-2017: Assad resorts to killing - implausibly - with small air-dropped cylinders of chlorine gas that had bizarre and mutable properties
* He quietly sarin-attacks his own soldiers again at least in Daraya, Feb. 2015, OPCW confirmed – just out of old habit – no one cared. (smell: "like burning nylon")
* Likely did the same back on 8/29/2014 in Jobar - twice in a day, incapacitating soldiers in both cases, leading to capture and execution for many in the 4PM incident - reportedly just 2 of the 15 soldiers involved escaped back to base. At least as I read it. Anyone else? The UN-OPCW heard from the two survivors of the 4PM incident, and 20 survivors of the later 6PM incident, but sadly had to dismiss the reports of the day's singular "incident" based on the 2 "discrepant" stories they heard (one or both must be made up) and so so "The FFM was not able to identify a cohesive narrative" - let alone a credible or true one.
And as the Fact-Finding Mission knew from its facts in Syria "the smell of sarin is most frequently described as a sweet smell of apple or pear" - just like reported over and over by both sides in all these sarin incident. WHEREAS the soldiers described something way different: "a particular odour which some compared to the smell of dead animals or corpses and others reported as similar to rotten eggs. Still others reported that they had never experienced anything similar before and couldn’t compare the smell to anything."
Some others who maybe couldn't compare it to anything tried anyway, and came up with "chlorine," as some did at Khan al-Assal. Another sign it's all made up! Except at Khan al-Assal it turned out to be sarin. Still, fresh and fruity was the correct answer! At least on that occasion.
The FFM did allow that soldiers in whichever version might be true MIGHT have been exposed, briefly, a little bit, to "some type of non-persistent, airborne irritant secondary to the surface impact of two launched objects." If they blacked out and got captured and killed just because of some basic irritant, that's their problem. No one's getting "held to account" over pansy stuff like that. And besides, it was probably all made up. Right? No realistic detail or anything.
* 2017: then Assad breaks out more of the same sarin in April, 2017, alongside chlorine in confusing combinations but with a uniquely Russian or uniquely Syrian binary sarin bomb, to kill some 80-100 civilians in Khan Sheikhoun, and a few in some preceding test incidents mostly in Al-Lataminah, maybe just to see if Trump had a more relevant "red line" kind of deal - he did. The miles-long plume of sarin fog coating town from at least two points quite far from the one identified sarin crater ... reportedly "it smelled like rotten food" "a foul smell ... a strange smell. I can’t put my finger on it." a "really disgusting odor," a "stench." Others reported a chlorine smell, and many say chlorine, or chlorine and sarin were used. One Lataminah sarin incident on 3-30 had clear reports of no smell, and another one went completely unmentioned, until after it was noticed that bizarre contradictions in another one almost required such an event - then it was oh yeah, the 3/24/17 sarin attack, we forgot about that. (and as Andrew alerts me, 3/24 even has an even-more forgotten 2nd CW attaack later in the day to explain other oddities)
- Actually everyone forgets because ISIS, but Assad also killed something like 100+ in an ISIS place (Uqrabiyat, Hama) with sarin in December 2016. Seriously, it seems no one remembers that. I barely do. Smell: "Some also said that there was a strong odor, although they could not describe it, while others said that they could not detect any." Statements were made. No one wanted to come bail out ISIS. I don't think OPCW ever did an investigation. HRW did include it in a report, in some detail.
* Last confirmed sarin: 4/4/17. No more in the following entries:
* Pause, then Nov. 2017 Harasta, next to Douma: in grenades or artillery shells, used Against: Ahrar al-Sham fighters, civilians - no deaths - symptoms: miosis, spasms, weakness, loss of consciousness, "excessive salivation," breathing problems, red eyes, "restlessness" - secondary contamination - reported as organophosphate, not sarin, because there was "a stench that does not exist in Sarin gas." This seems to be what US SecDef Mattis referred to in Feb. 2018, saying he didn't see good evidence for sarin use recently (since Khan Sheikhoun, 4/4/17).
http://libyancivilwar.blogspot.com/2018/03/alleged-cw-attack-in-harasta-nov-18-2017.html
* Saraqeb, 2/4/18 just after Mattis clarified that, Assad attacks with chlorine-sarin cylinders, later corrected by the IIT to just-chlorine with new, sarin-like symptoms reported and/or experienced, and some random background sarin complicating tests - (activists initially reporting a sarin-chlorine attack must be confused, IIT decided in correcting them, as that makes no sense) - it effected (as IIT confirmed) just 12 confirmed people: 8 people (militants pretending to be civilians, IIT doesn't specify) in a shelter, 3 "SCD" White Helmets sent to help them, one other person in the whole town, likely one of three we've heard from affirming the attack - all seemingly close relatives of the affected militants.
https://libyancivilwar.blogspot.com/2019/11/the-nonsense-gassing-of-militants-in.html
* Assad was smart enough to wait a year plus three days after Khan Sheikhoun before before he did that kind of big sarin massacre again in a non-ISIS rebel place: in Douma, the last and lost "rebel" bastion threatening Damascus, sarin and chlorine cylinders killed some 180+ civilians, leading to swift US-led military strikes - then when sarin couldn't appear for whatever reason, the chlorine alone just killed 42+, which itself is astounding. How the other 140 actually died: never explained. I guess they just didn't? Some insiders who should know say 187 were in fact killed, and they still seem to think it was sarin.
https://libyancivilwar.blogspot.com/2019/04/douma-chemical-massacre-187-killed.html
* And Assad's brilliant sarin strategy is laid bare. Right?
Add 4/24: thanks to "Gumby JD" (tweet) another twist in that strategy:
To believe a defected CW program expert Abdel Salam Abdul Razaq*, Syria's program made sarin that was pure, colorless, odorless - no hexamine, clearly. It evaporates quickly, he says. And so they used it regularly, by December 2012 (Times of Israel - and it's not clear who error it was to call mustard gas a nreve agent). But (news to me) the fingerprint hexamine evaporate much slower, so in mixture, it makes the sarin more likely to be found and verified (Kane via BBC). That's the stuff Assad allegedly used in 2013, to cross Obama's red line, with inspectors right there. He allegedly delayed them, and bombed the area to "erase the evidence." But he couldn't just stick with his old formula?
* (who would later join the US-backed moderate Noureddine AL-Zenki group, Al-Qaeda allies, child beheaders and app. users of CW with Abdulrazaq their designated denier of that)
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