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A paucity of forensic evidence, George Monbiot, Khan Sheikhoun, Syria, the official narrative, Tim Hayward
I write this open letter, George, because you have been using your public platform to defend claims about Syria that I fear may be damaging for its people.
Most recently, you blogged a note about the 4th April chemical incident in Khan Sheikhoun, Syria, and you related this to the more general issue of competing narratives.
Professor Postol of MIT criticised the NATO/Gulf State account of the incident, and you say his claims ‘should be treated with great caution’. That’s fair enough. Shouldn’t we apply a similar standard of scrutiny to claims made on both sides?[1] You replied to the Media Lens article reporting Postol’s claims without acknowledging that it also mentioned that ‘former and current UN weapons inspectors Hans Blix, Scott Ritter and Jerry Smith, as well as former CIA counterterrorism official Philip Giraldi, had all questioned the official narrative of what happened on April…
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I like Tim, his own blog is always worth a visit and his comments are useful.
Postol is a drooling imbecile.
https://louisproyect.org/2017/04/29/baathists-caught-with-their-pants-down/
Care to elaborate, Louis?
Hi, Louis,
I waited for your reply. It never came. But I’ve an idea what you might have written, and so here is my preemptive reply to “that:”
Do you mean that Postol is an imbecile in the way that Dan Kaszeta couldn’t possibly be? You may have a point. Why, have a look at this:
A Brief Assessment of the Veracity of Published Statements in the Press and Elsewhere Made by Dan Kaszeta, A Self-Described Expert on the Science and Technology of Chemical Weapons
Although I’m sure you already read it. Perhaps, then, you can “disprove” by something other than mere ad hominem retorts the many claims in that document substantiated by the imbecile? Surely you have already had enough time?
But yeah, it does look as if Postol was having a bad day. It happens, doesn’t it? I mean to “everyone.” People misread things and because of these misreadings, end up looking a tad foolish, a bit less than super-human because, well, they aren’t super-human.
Luckily, however, Postol caught some of his misreadings and misinterpretations, and publicly acknowledged them, and then corrected them.
And wouldn’t you know it, the corrections once noted, rather than working to undermine his original conclusion, end up making it even less contestable than it had originally been.
But perhaps you can “demonstrate” otherwise? On the basis of some “logic” and “evidence?”
(Context for this comment can be found here, here, here, here and here)
DDTea
You write:
This is rather different than claiming that “ . . . hexamine is a decomposition product of RDX.” He never actually said “that,” did he. Nor did he imply either of the “only” two possible implications that you draw from his assertion.
The matter at hand is rather this: Prof. Postol is no chemist. He is relying for his assertion on the expertise of Dr. Åke Sellström, who is by all accounts an expert in arms, especially in chemical weapons, and Dr. Sellström has unambiguously stated on the record that hexamine may be DERIVED from EXPLOSIVES. See, for example, the quote I provided, which comes from one of the emails that Dr. Sellström wrote to Prof. Postol.
Consequently, when Prof. Postol asserts that the explosive that would have been used to rupture the container would certainly have left traces of hexamine behind, what he is repeating is an assumption based upon the expert authority of Dr. Sellström.
So your slander of Postol as being a charlatan IS equally a slander of Dr. Sellstöm, for he is the source of Dr. Postol’s confident assertion that hexamine IS a “byproduct” of exploded ordnance. But good effort on your part trying to weasel your way out of that one. And to suggest that he “probably didn’t have the time to dive into the literature of explosive residues,” is somewhat laughable, wouldn’t you agree, given his purported field of expertise?
As an additional point of emphasis, if you exonerate Dr. Sellstöm on account of his “over-abundance of caution in his conclusions,” you must all the more so exonerate Prof. Postol, for the former is the latter’s expert adviser in matters of hexamine residue, and that “over-abundance of caution” would logically carry over to Prof. Postol’s re-assertion of Dr. Sellstöm’s expert opinion.
Of course, as to whether or not there could ever be post-explosion residues of hexamine from explosives, you are just trying to be clever in limiting the possible origin of those residues at the location where munitions have been used to the chemical reactions involved in producing the “explosion as such.” You also fail to mention that traces of hexamine may be present in trace amounts as an impurity in the explosive mixture BEFORE detonation or that it may be used and often is used as a primer to set off a charge. Would every particle of that hexamine be consumed in the detonation or would possible traces of it remain?
At any rate, we have Dr. Sellström asserting one thing and you, an anonymous commenter three years deep into an alleged Ph.D. in organic chemistry, asserting another. As a layman, in whom do you think I should place my trust? A ghost who may be on a hired mission to obfuscate a matter of forensic evidence or someone whose credentials and alleged statements I can verify?
As for referencing Dan Kaszeta, you know as well as I do that he is a proven liar. People who are reading this comment might be interested in reading this document produced by Prof. Postol and judge for themselves the “reliability” of Mr. Kaszeta’s assertions in matters relating to “hexamine” and its “smoking gun” connection to “Syrian sarin:”
A Brief Assessment of the Veracity of Published Statements in the Press and Elsewhere Made by Dan Kaszeta, A Self-Described Expert on the Science and Technology of Chemical Weapons
DDTea, if it isn’t obvious to some, your inept little game is becoming quite transparent to others.
RELATED (09 May 2017)
Another reply to ‘Team DDTea,’ that I submitted this time below the headline of this related post by Prof. Tim Hayward: Rejoinder to George Monbiot on Syria
The comment can be found “here.”
Everything that follows is the comment(with minor edits):
Dear sick-and-tired-and-infuriated Team DDTea,
You write:
Ah, the cheek of him. I can’t imagine how slighted you must feel.
On the other hand, I don’t know — I’m only speculating, here — but could it be that your so-called criticisms are simply beneath his contempt?
You know, once someone has shown him- or her-self to be either insufficiently informed to debate, or incapable of sustained logical thinking, or is less than honest in making attributions – well, that kind of works as a disincentive to engage him or her. Just sayin’.
Of course, I’m not suggesting for a moment that you are that sort of person, although I do believe I myself have already caught you out on a wee tad of bullshit together with some rather endearing incoherence in your thinking, of the kind that harkens back to when my sons were but children, and that you wittingly or unwittingly committed to the comment section of this blog and that for a while will certainly be here memorialized, perhaps even by the Waybak Machine of fame. (I myself may make that submission.)
Oh, do protest as much as your heart desires, Team DDTea, but a fact is a fact until it changes, eh, and only then is it time to change one’s mind.
All I’m saying, based on my personal experience of only a few brief exchanges with you, is that Dr. Denis O’Brien might have a well-founded disinclination to engage you in debate. Not everyone is really worth the time and trouble, eh. For example, I know that I’m now less and less inclined to debate with you, to believe that you are worth any of my time, and I’m no Dr. Denis O’Brien. But enough with the small talk and friendly banter.
You write:
See, there you go again. You want me to take you seriously, but you insist on writing something as stupid as “hyperaemia” being the underlying cause of the “cherry red color” he’s referring to.
Are you claiming that someone who has died or is dying from sarin toxicity will present a “cherry red color?” Sounds like you are. But then you’d simply be wrong, eh.
Let me help you sort this out: sarin poisoning, among other nasty things, suffocates you by making it impossible for you to breath; if you can’t draw breath, you can’t oxygenate your blood; and if you can’t oxygenate your blood, you might come down with a tad of cyanosis, eh.
Here is a link to an example of a cyanotic appearance:
https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQBsJ_1f5lZY_DtrVa31JmAIUgZSL2ijBPN6fvpGQaIsw5VkWk9
And it doesn’t matter how dilated your blood vessels may be, that is to say, how hyperaemic you may be, a blue appearance is a blue appearance, with or without hyperaemia.
Now in the absence of cyanosis, that doesn’t mean that presenting a bright “cheery red color” can’t be an indication of having been poisoned by something. You at least got that right. Here are a couple of images of what cannot possibly be of cases presenting sarin poisoning, but which are definitely indicative of poisoning:
So, if in the catalogue of “images” that are being presented to the world to prove that sarin poisoning has occurred in Khan Shaykhun, there are dying and dead people presenting with a skin color that is a birght pink or high cherry red, then they most definitively have not been poisoned by sarin. Okay.
But cyanide poisoning or carbon monoxide poisoning would be highly consistent with that sort of thing. Maybe Assad poisoned the people of Khan Shaykhun with cyanide; maybe he gassed them with carbon monoxide. Who knows. (And that is the point, isn’t it? Who knows?!) But to suggest that corpses or people in the final throes of sarin poisoning will present with a skin color that is pink or bright cherry red is to be either uninformed or stupid or obfuscatory.
Do you begin to understand why maybe Dr. O’Brien might have felt it a waste of his time dealing with your ‘criticisms?’
Here is a challenge for you: go and find us actual pictures of people who have died of sarin poisoning, that is to say, confirmed case[s], and who present a skin color like in the immediately two preceding photographs. Take your time. You will need it. If you manage it, do let me know. And I don’t need to remind you about references and all that because you are already pretty keen on that, aren’t you? Splendid.
You write:
No. Didn’t you read the title of the brief? The core of it is “Dan Kaszeta as bullshit artist,” as when he claims that “someone” said something, and it turns out the “someone” denies ever having said that; or he makes a reference to something to prove a point, and what he references is kind of, well, entirely beside the point.
I myself recently came across something similar, something about someone having said something, but as it turned out, that wasn’t “exactly” what had been said. Seems as though a bit of Dan Kaszeta had possibly rubbed off in that instance. Collaboration will sometimes do that. Or maybe Team DDTea is Dan Kaszeta? How would I know?
But ‘nuff said, because the document has been linked to and people can go and read it and make up their own minds, eh. They don’t need Team DDTea to interpret the document for them. Oh, I know, I know, DDTea: infuriating sophistry!
CLOSING THOUGHTS:
You write:
Yes and no, Team DDTea. You can trust people who have a proven track record of honesty and accuracy in what they write and say. You verify their claims. You follow up their references. You examine their reasoning. If it all passes muster over a reasonable period of probationary time, you most certainly can “trust” certain experts without having to check their every statements. This doesn’t mean that they will never be in error. But it does mean that they will not willfully deceive, that they possess an admirable level of intellectual integrity.
You, on the other hand, are proving yourself less than reliable, and a person would indeed be remiss to trust anything you say or write.
This doesn’t mean that you will always be wrong or untruthful in what you write and say, but you’ve already shown yourself to me to be an unreliable source of both information and analysis.
It is unlikely, then, that I will ever again attend to any claim made by you, Team DDTea.