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Dear
Colleagues:
I am both pleasantly
surprised and totally baffled by the strong acceptance of the information just
published regarding the inaccuracy of official and media reports that nerve
agent was used in Douma on April 7, 2018.
In what follows, I will show
you that inaccurate information was also provided by official and media sources
about a nerve agent attack on April 4, 2017 in
Khan Sheikhoun, Syria. This
particular misreporting is more consequential than the misreporting of Douma
because the events at Khan Sheikhoun resulted in the first of two cruise missile
attacks against the Syrian government for war crimes that did not occur as
claimed.
Also of relevance, the
second US cruise missile attack on Damascus that followed the Douma attack was
in part justified by President Trump because the Syrian government had,
according to him, not “learned its lesson” from the first US cruise missile
attack that was supposed to have punished the Syrian government for its alleged
war crime at Khan Sheikhoun.
The Khan Sheikhoun incident
is also more serious because the UN has published, under very considerable
pressure from the United States, a totally false technical finding that there
was evidence that the Syrian government was responsible for that attack. Subsequently the United States and
Russia exchanged vetoes in the UN
Security Council over the veracity of the UN report and the Russians vetoed the extension of the Joint Investigative Mission (JIM) because
they concluded the investigation had been rigged for political reasons. These events have in turn had an adverse
effect on the credibility of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) and the UN as
instruments for the enforcement of international law. As such, I believe the staging of false
evidence at Khan Sheikhoun is a considerably more serious event in terms of its
consequences then the events at Douma – which by themselves are quite
serious.
The PDF file attached to
this email contains text and images from a talk I gave in London on October 14,
2018 at a conference held by the Center
for Investigative Journalism (CIJ) at Goldsmiths, University of London. For those of you who would like to see
the actual presentation on YouTube it can be found at:
What I find somewhat amazing at this time is that the egregious misreporting of the evidence and events at Khan Sheikhoun
was far more unmistakable than the case of the misreporting at
Douma.
If you simply look at the
image below (slide 47 from the PDF file ) you can see drag marks in the dirt
behind the carcass of a dead goat that the press and the UN investigators
claimed was poisoned by sarin released from a nearby crater.
In fact, my scientist
colleagues and I have shown using supercomputer calculations and detailed
observations of the crater itself that the crater was formed by a improvised
rocket with an improvised explosive warhead carrying roughly 6 kg of
explosives. We determined this from
supercomputer calculations which produce exactly what is observed in
numerous photographs of the crater (see PDF for additional images and
discussion).
Of special significance is
that the crater contained a metal pipe that we identified for certain was the
empty rocket motor casing of an improvised rocket. This spent rocket motor casing was
misidentifiede by the UN investigation as a vessel that contained sarin. Our conclusion indicates that no sarin
was released from the crater. This
is elaborated in the PDF file, which also contains a short video showing the
supercomputer results that elucidate how the arriving and exploding rocket both
creates the crater and bends the rocket motor casing on impact. The calculation not only shows that the
shape of the crater is from the exploding rocket warhead, but also that the
bending of the pipe in the crater was due to torques on the empty rocket motor
casing created as it hit the ground and bent forward. Thus, every detail of what was observed
in and around the crater is replicated by our calculations.
Since there is no evidence
of a sarin release at that crater, and there are drag marks behind the goat
carcass, the most straightforward explanation is that the goat was poisoned with
sarin somewhere else and its carcass was dragged to the location near the crater
where it was then videoed.
Since the goat could have
been poisoned with a drop of sarin while it was confined confined in a small
room, the amount of sarin needed for killing the goat could have easily been
produced by a moderately talented chemistry student. My guess is that the sarin was actually
produced from Methyelphosphonyl difluoride, which is a critical precursor for
making sarin when mixed with isopropyl alcohol. The Methyelphosphonyl difluoride is
known to be available to rebels, who have used sarin in the past and who have
been captured with Methyelphosphonyl difluoride in their possession.
The goat hairs were then
given to the UN and found to have sarin on them. UN inspectors were never on the scene
and no chain of custody of any kind was enforced. Thus, this was the equivalent of the
police and courts accepting DNA evidence from a third potentially criminal party
to a crime without regard to chain of custody.
The UN investigators claimed
that they had examined the extensive record of videos that were posted on the
Internet after the events at Khan Sheikhoun, but they did not find the evidence
of the goat being dragged to the location in spite of the fact it was
immediately found by me and others who had much fewer resources than the
UN. The four slides shown below labeled 46, 47,
48, and 49 from the attached PDF give a very brief explanation of the
situation.
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The UN also found the Syrian
government culpable for dropping high explosive gravity bombs on three
additional sites during the April 4, 2017 alleged nerve agent
drop.
Slide number 35 below shows
before and after high resolution satellite photographs of one of the three
bombed sites. The yellow circles
show the locations where the New York
Times and the UN investigators allege that a 500 pound bomb exploded on the
ground. As explained in the
attached PDF file, the building where the 500 pound bomb was supposed to have
exploded would simply be rubble and would be easily seen as such from the
satellite photographs. There is in
fact no evidence of bomb
damage in the before and after photographs of all three sites – that is “the
emperor has no clothes.”
Stated yet another way, the
buildings would simply not be present in the after photographs if they had been
hit with 500 pound bombs at the locations marked by the New York Times.
In summary, the alleged
nerve agent attack at Khan Sheikhoun did not occur as claimed by the UN and
reported by mainstream papers like the New York Times and the Guardian. The evidence is clear and overwhelming
and is in the process of being prepared for publication in a science-based
refereed Journal that has now passed successfully through the refereeing process
and is in the final stages of revisions.
Nonetheless, all of the
evidence has already been discussed in articles that I have circulated on the
web and are available to anybody who sends me an email and asks for them. Nothing in these articles was found to
be in error during the refereeing process.
Best regards, Ted
Postol
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