UN Inspectors Confirm Syria Chemical Attack

[geek tragedy]

12. None of that is true re: Ghouta. The rockets found at the scene were not in the rebels arsenal.

Nor were the rebels capable of producing sarin in those quantities.

The flight paths triangulated to the headquarters of the Republican Guard's artillery brigade.

The UN team was able to access the area and test for sarin.

Photos posted on social media--from both rebels and the government--confirm what happened.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/12/09/sy_hershs_chemical_misfire

But Hersh is apparently unaware that there's a growing body of evidence that answers these questions. Much of that evidence comes from the Syrian military itself -- and it very strongly suggests that it was Assad's cronies, not the rebels, who carried out the Aug. 21 attack.

Since the attack, myself and others have been studying the vast amount of open-source information posted online on sites like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, which has provided many more pieces of evidence about what happened in the Damascus suburbs that day. This information not only answers many of the questions Hersh's article raises, but has also provided a much greater understanding of other events in the Syrian conflict. ...

What this tells us is the Syrian government has been using the explosive type of Volcano rocket in Damascus for at least a year, and there's evidence that the chemical type was used before the Aug. 21 sarin attack. There is no evidence of Syrian rebel forces ever using this type of munition -- and only Syrian government forces have ever been shown using them.

...

"The 1994 to 1996 Japanese experience tells us that even a very large and sophisticated effort comprising many millions of dollars, a dedicated large facility, and a lot of skilled labor results only in liters of sarin, not tons," Kaszeta said. "Even if the Aug. 21 attack is limited to the eight Volcano rockets that we seem to be talking about, we're looking at an industrial effort two orders of magnitude larger than the Aum Shinrikyo effort. This is a nontrivial and very costly undertaking, and I highly doubt whether any of the possible nonstate actors involved here have the factory to have produced it. Where is this factory? Where is the waste stream? Where are the dozens of skilled people -- not just one al Qaeda member -- needed to produce this amount of material?"

He went on to add: "We have to apply a simple logic test here. Who is more likely to have done the deed? The regime, which has confessed to CW [chemical weapon] production facilities and has declared a stockpile of precursors that match the Aug. 21 chemistry very well?… Or persons unknown, with their alleged mystery factory, with no actual location, no trace of either supply chain or waste stream, no known employees, and far better things to do with the required amount of money?"

While Hersh rightly expresses concern about the way in which the U.S. government's narrative of the Aug. 21 was built, significant information can be gathered from open sources about this conflict -- information that he appears to be lacking. In the future, open-source information may become even more important for understanding hard-to-access conflict zones, and learning how to use it effectively should become a key skill for any investigative journalist.

The evidence that exists points overwhelmingly at the government. Hersh's gossipy piece doesn't bother looking into any of the relevant facts.