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.

Rocket Man: Copied Impact Site Mix-Up

What the "Rocket Man" Wants us to See in Ghouta: Copied Impact Site Mix-Up

August 9, 2021

rough, incomplete

While our currently controversial Ghouta report(s) co-author Chris Kabusk is quite gifted at at visual geolocation, he's not perfect at it. One error he made in or by Feb. 2014 finally became clear only in 2017, raising a new mystery with a fairly obvious answer, but one that helps to get agreement on. Only in Feb. 2020 did I help Chris confirm the UN-OPCW site 5 where the north-facing balcony of a vacant apartment was impacted by a rocket we don't see (except likely bent on the street below).

He had already accurately linked this spot to a Zamalka street scene of fully-protected OPCW inspectors. They're looking down on collected samples, so it's following a visit to some CW-relevant site nearby. At right is my color-coded update of his matching - photo taken from the apex of the blue angle of view. 

The opposition LCC and HRW had both mapped an impact just a little behind them here, suggesting it was that site the inspectors were just at. It's likely imprecise as all of those mapped spots,  so LCC2 might refer to any building in the block on the left (5 buildings seen here), or somewhere nearby. A red triangle marks the corner of the building decided by this graphic, as used in my June 2021 report. Do note original draft (to be updated) messed up the coordinates for this spot. The correct ones for the spot shown are 33.5216642° N, 36.351963° E.

There were TWO impacted buildings the OPCW visited in Eastern Ghouta, out of three impacts total: sites 3 and 5 as they called them - besides the field impact site 4. Site 5 is barely mentioned, maybe not even named in the official report (PDF), maybe since nothing but small pieces of the munition were found here. But they specify five impacts were looked at, note a visit to a final lone site with a balcony on August 29, and they were filmed there that day. Sites 3 and 4 were visited simultaneously the day before, on the 28th, both also filmed (not, I think, to the inspectors' liking, but usefully for us - thanks, Islamist morons).

There were also two street scenes with the inspectors that could be located, maybe correlating with sites 3 and 5. But they also visited a clinic, matching best with the other street scene (right) in which they are not geared up with gas masks. So just the one street scene (again, the one above) should relate to EITHER site 3 or 5. 

Reference: all LCC, HRW, and collective impact mappings compared:

Deciding on site 5 as we did involves deduction, and the exact building may be wrong even in the graphic above. I may have misread a brief view between buildings - not really clear which building then - perhaps the one just NE, with "impact" label resting on its edge - for future review. Here are the views of the spot I need to re-consider: left 3 frames from a video I've seen, right before the street scene in question (thus likely connected, but uncertain) - right: three crops from a video I haven't seen, via Bellingcat (see below) - colored marks clarify they all show the same spot moments apart - Time if site 5: about 1:50-2PM; last samples on 29 Aug. were taken 13:46 local time (report, p. 26). If site 3 (possible), similar time anyway.

So guesswork is still involved in that, but this area is much better narrowed as the home of impact site 5 now that the other building impact - site 3 - has been undeniably placed well to the south in Ain Tarma. Chris Kabusk did that using site photos, back in August, 2017, and we worked together confirming several totally matching features seen from the other view to the west. Update: Chris did NOT use coordinates in that 2017 search, as I wrote. Apparently I was confused between several questions and several answers. He says he used visuals alone for that, in the other photo from the same roof the photographer shared with him (photo and site match below). 

Impact site 3 coordinates: 33.519130°, 36.354841° - or as shown above, or similar will point to that same rooftop. Those last digits are very fine-tuned. Actual first impact (from the northwest) was roughly in the middle, over open roof on the west side, into a N-S wall of this partly-roofed 1/2 of a 6th floor.  

But before site 3 was set there, we had video & photos but no description for site 5, and for site 3 we had unplaced visuals, and the UN report describing it: a rocket "penetrated a cinderblock wall and a rebar containing concrete floor before coming to rest in a room below." That cinderblock wall was "on a roof of a 5-story building" that was visited August 28 by one team, while another team investigated impact site #4 in a "nearby open field," - so sites 3 and 4 are close by. 

Otherwise, it seems it might have been atop on of those other 5-6-story buildings a ways north, by the plotted LCC2/HRW2. In fact, it's been taken widely as fact that it was right here 

How it Was Done Wrong

In a bit of deduction that proved wrong, Chris had initially decided that street scene was just outside the roof impact site 3 (the only site described as at a 5-story building) and possible fit - and NOT what it eventually proved to be - the apartment balcony impact in one of those 5-6 story buildings. It had a small structure in the middle of the roof, as other buildings here have, perhaps enough to that one smashed into at impact site 3. 

Further, there was that mapped claim of an impact right about there. In contrast, the spot it wound up being ... was never mapped at all by LCC or HRW. So maybe expecting such a shortcut wound up limiting Chris' view. Indeed, as he said in 2017 "Yeah, I took a shortcut because of HRW's identified spots and also it was Eliot who told me that the rocket landed in Zamalka." (the identified spot is in Ain Tarma, like the "impact site 4" it was said to be near) 

Anyway, these are all fairly simple, reasonable mistakes to make. He had decide this early on, with one of his earlier tweets, Feb. 20, 2014 showing a roof very near eventual site 5 pinned for "rocket 3 Volcano" - it's in the middle image, sideways and distorted, but same as shown more clearly on 8/30/14 (and below) with 3D model - (modeled as 4-story - mislabeled UMLACA 5 not 3, mix-up noted - small labels: LCC4 (but it's #2 in the only numbered LCC map I have - see below. All these ref codes can get hopelessly confused. But otherwise...). This is the same spot looked at above - in fact the same square-ish building just NE of the current site 5 impact label - coincidentally, this might be the building with impact site 5. But site 3 was never here.

So this site was Chris' guess from at least Feb. 2014. However, the rooftop structure here probably isn't big enough. It's not very near to site 4 as described. The view to the west didn't match - buildings almost touching site 3's roof were clear enough even in 2013 views, while this has an open space to the west. Still, it seemed good enough to Chris than, and to most observers forever. He may have noticed any of these issues before, but at least when he saw the right spot emerge, he was capable of following those better clues - this time to a 100% certainty. But not everyone's mind is so capable, or willing to adapt to the 3D reality of events, whatever it winds up being. 

How that Error was Mindlessly Copied

Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins variously cited, copied, verified by, or otherwise did the same as Chris on several points from at at least Jan. 30, 2014 and up to at least September, but in a different overall spirit. He did give public credit for some of this (even "big thanks"), but not all. And while I'm not sure it was Chris' exact error about impact site 3 that caused it, this is the same exact site 3 vs. site 5 mix-up Higgins and/or his team used and is still stuck on, down to the exact building. 

-- to fill-in -- it seems Chris was on positive terms with Higgins early on, even being invited to a Storyful newsroom events for journalists to share findings, network, etc. on Ghouta and other subjects. (Chris also retweeted on a Higgins presentation 2/19/14). As linked above, this site was squished into a Feb. 20 image, so available from then, and it was shown more refined in late August. On the anniversary, 8/21, he tweeted  a mapping update including "UMLACA 5 [suspected videos] UN inspectors." (He meant UMLACA 3 or actually Volcano 3, not 5. And he thought it was impact site 3 at UMLACA 3 but it was impact site 5. Just to be clear, lol.) So this finding was around all year, and no one else had provided a location guess.

Bellingcat's "Locating the Rockets Used During the August 21st Sarin Attacks in Damascus", (August 10, 2014) somehow only relates 3 of the five impacts then mapped, skipping the pivotal impact site 4 (so they didn't have to go on the record with a visual reading to match or clash with the one reported by the UN-OPCW mission). The one involving dead livestock was also skipped. 

But this explains the re-dubbed "rocket 1" (field on my map above), "rocket 2" (wall 2), and it closes with "rocket 3" as it was then called. This includes a video of the site with inspectors inside, looking at rocket remains that fell down next to a coffee table, with the midday sun beaming down through the hole it made in the roof/floor above. This is impact site 3, beneath the pierced roof (below: video paused outside the stuck door).  

Higgins goes on to explain "the key" with rocket 3 was "establishing the location of the building the video was filmed in." Well, he never got that key then. 

He goes on there to note as I have here "Only one group of videos filmed outside buildings matched" ... with ONE of two building impacts, by deduction. It's the scene filmed - as Chris had found - next to LCC2/HRW2. Next, "we were able to make out the following three individuals present both at the inspection site and outside one building." (One is a leader of the armed militant minders Liwa al-Islam provided who guarded these useful infidels around to investigate - as it turns out - Liwa al-Islam's own crime). What he and Bellingcat apparently didn't consider: maybe they were seen outside a different building in those separate scenes. 

But "Based on having established the location" - of the street scene not clearly linked to any other exterior scene, really, nor to either interior scene ... "it appears the inspectors are coming out of the building to the north of the building marked by the VDC and LCC..." That's in a video not linked, but using the stills shown above. It appeared to ME like the building to the SW marked in red above, but now I'm not so sure (future review). He might just be right on the building they're leaving, but it shouldn't really appear like any particular one without good reason, which Higgins doesn't seem to have. I think his reason was Chris having chosen that building, and he might have had good reason.

And "so it seems likely this was the building hit by the attack." One of the 5-6-story buildings here was hit, yes, but not with THAT rocket. That coffee table has been clearly placed way to the south. 

We fixed this error, but Bellingcat never did, and they're the main ones everyone else mindlessly follows. For example, in 2020 the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression (SCM), Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI), and Syrian Archive brought lawsuits against Syria in Germany, France, and later Sweden so hopefully "Syrian officials can be arrested” or until then, new economic sanctions can be imposed, etc.. OSJI lawyer Steve Kostas heralded "the most detailed investigations to date into these attacks," which they had assembled to bolster these acts of hostility. Their factual basis was spelled out, in varying detail, in a public summary of the evidence released by SCM/OSJI/Syrian Archive. 

https://www.justiceinitiative.org/uploads/4bc2c0f7-81ad-48c5-8166-281ab35301ab/sarin-complaint_ghouta-public-summary_10062020.pdf

Regarding the rocket impact analysis, as my report had recently summarized:

"The public summary’s analysis to “verify the locations” of Volcano rocket impacts seems to just copy others’ open-source work, including a widespread mix-up between UN-OPCW sites 3 and 5. As such they they “verified” just four correct but pre-verified locations, “verified” one to the  wrong spot, and just “identified” one impact (it belongs at that wrongly taken spot, and was left unplaced). The report by three well-funded groups, with three staffs, explained that to achieve so little required reference to “hundreds of videos” and “working with the Human Rights Center Investigations Lab at UC Berkeley School of Law” as well. 

(By those definitions, the present report “identifies” one impact, “verifies” eight to their correct locations, and adds serious trajectory analysis. ..."

The public summary gives coordinates for the five impacts they considered, along with a description of each. One entry says: "Impact site C: a rocket pierced through the roof of a five-story building and landed in the room below, visited by the UN Mission on 28 August 2013,31 at coordinates 33.521641, 36.352425." They describe impact site 3, but give the coordinates for impact site 5, absent rocket penetrated the north-facing wall of a vacant apartment. Citation 32: "Coordinates by Bellingcat and Human Rights Center Investigations Lab at UC Berkeley School of Law. Rocket described by Bellingcat as “Rocket 3” in Bellingcat Rocket Analysis." 

This Human Rights Center Investigations Lab at UC Berkeley School of Law that helped with the location work - along with Bellingcat and doing it just the same as they did - might appear like added, independent confirmation. They show 5 placed impacts with no explanation how it was done past "By comparing videos and images of the attack with satellite imagery of Eastern Ghouta, the team confirmed the location of four previously identified impact sites and located an additional impact site. Each can be seen here." it's done just like Bellingact, including their mix-up of UN-OPCW sites 3 and 5. - that's their site C - they mean that's the rooftop impact, based on a bad guess they re-made or just copied. The public summary was wiser to leave that one just "identified." 

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

But really it seems more like the Berkeley team just copy-launded Bellingcat's prior findings. Being a 2020-era view, it is interesting to see if it was improved since 2014. Nope. As named here and in that public summary, it's "impact site C" that's set quite a bit north of where it actually was. It's wrong just like Bellingcat was, just like Chris was at first, but without the subsequent learning he and 'his new team' had added - THREE YEAR BEFORE this blunder here. 

In Conclusion

Ironically, if Chris Kabusk's work led anyone astray with this error, it's the same people (loosely speaking) who now attack his credibility as likely distorting or disqualifying our work. Rather an unrelated imperfection in his early analysis - plus their own laziness caused Bellingcat to leave this error intact. They never formed the doubts Chris did about that site match. They never followed up on the 2017 photo clues. They never even copied our work along those lines between 2017 and 2020. 

And so the same easily-refuted mistake was passed on lazily to the kids at Berkeley, the SCM, OSJI, Syrian Archive and that pompous lawsuit. It's not some stray error either - the public summary admits the rockets could only fly ~2km, but also admits to including witnesses for them being launched from Mt. Qasioun, 10km distant. They have false claims, impossible claims, and maybe even a few true ones, all agreeing the "Assad regime" must be blamed and punished yet again.

Higgins for Bellingcat had boasted, in that 2014 article, of their careful correlation work on the clincher rocket 3, which was "more of a challenge" than the others. Of course he loves a challenge, like a complex video game. He and/or "we" met it as shown, and says "this demonstrates how a variety of information can be used to establish important facts that might otherwise be impossible to establish." 

No. It shows how a decent try can also establish non-facts like this. We can all run into this. This very blog, hard to believe (lol) is still full of wrong calls I know of and only have time to update sporadically or in the next version. The better minds notice it and correct - ideally more uniformly than I do. But other minds just stick to their beliefs, rational or not. And Eliot Higgins seems to really believe in Chris Kabusk's work, like to a fault. But overall, that's for good reason. 

As he continued on how this all pays off (same 2014 article): "As I demonstrate in “Identifying Government Positions During The August 21st Sarin Attacks” this information then becomes part of a broader understanding of the attacks, giving us a clearer understanding of where the attacks could have originated from." As he finds over and over with various faulty readings, that can include a number of government-controlled areas. Next post.