If a "Sarin Bomb" Exploded Where WH Claims, Casualties Would Have Occurred Directly Across the Street

Accounting for wind direction at the time of the so-called "sarin bombing," the red oval indicates where large numbers of casualties would have been found — including immediately across the road from the site the White House intelligence report identifies as the bomb site. (See report below for more information. Click to enlarge all images.)

by Gaius Publius

Earlier we reported on Dr. Theodore Postol's work examining the alleged 2017 "sarin bombing" in Khan Sheikhoun, Syria — see "New Evidence that Syrian Gas Story Was Fabricated by the White House" and "Theodore Postol: Khan Sheikhoun Victim Videos Can’t Be from the Claimed "Sarin" Munitions Site" for more information.

We also wrote about the 2017 Khan Sheikhoun incident here, citing other sources: "Another Intelligence Group Makes the Case: Assad's Responsibility Is Not Proved." It's not just Dr. Postol who's raising questions.

The first of the two reports we reproduced from Dr. Postol (first link above, issued April 14) contained this conclusion (emphasis mine):

It is now clear from video evidence that the WHR report [White House Intelligence Report of April 11, justifying the U.S. Tomahawk strike after the fact] was fabricated without input from the professional intelligence community.

The press reported on April 4 that a nerve agent attack had occurred in Khan Shaykhun, Syria during the early morning hours locally on that day. On April 7, The United States carried out a cruise missile attack on Syria ordered by President Trump. It now appears that the president ordered this cruise missile attack without any valid intelligence to support it.

In order to cover up the lack of intelligence to supporting the president’s action, the National Security Council produced a fraudulent intelligence report on April 11 four days later. The individual responsible for this report was Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster, the National Security Advisor. The McMaster report is completely undermined by a significant body of video evidence taken after the alleged sarin attack and before the US cruise missile attack that unambiguously shows the claims in the WHR could not possibly be true. This cannot be explained as a simple error.

These charges are serious and two-fold. First, that it's not at all certain there was a "sarin bombing" to begin with. There's plenty of indication that evidence of sarin use, and evidence that it was from an aerial bombing, may well have been manufactured or tampered with by "health officials" in rebel-held (al-Qaeda-connected) Idlib province, where Khan Sheikhoun is located.

Second, that given the obvious video evidence of possible tampering — along with videos of health workers and others handling supposed "sarin" victims with bare hands — the White House report (WHR) must both be in error, and be knowingly in error. There's a phrase for a government issuing knowingly wrong reports that lead to war, and quite a history behind the practice, including in the U.S.

Keep both of Dr. Postol's conclusions in mind as you read what's below — that the case for an aerial sarin attack in Khan Sheikhoun at the site identified by the White House as "ground zero" is seriously undercut by available video evidence, and that the White House intelligence officials faked conclusions to the contrary in its official Tomahawk-justifying report.

Corrections to Dr. Postol's April 18 Report

On April 18, Dr. Postol issued a Correction to his April 14 report (the second link at the top of this piece; also here), that's even more damning than the original. The Correction document is printed in full below. To my knowledge, so far this is the only Web source for the entire text of this document.

The error Dr. Postol made, and corrects below, is a miscalculation in the direction of the wind at the time of the bombing. In the original report, Dr. Postol had mistakenly identified the wind as carrying the supposed sarin away from the White House-identified "bomb site" toward the southwest [CORR: southeast] and through a small open (unbuilt) area of the town.

The corrected wind direction is to the northwest, directly into a densely populated section of housing — housing that starts immediately across the road, no more than ten or twenty meters away. (See the image at the top, taken from the report below.) The logical conclusion is obvious, since no victims were ever identified adjacent to the site — not by the White House nor anyone else. As Dr. Postol writes:

When the error in wind direction is corrected, the conclusion is that if there was a significant sarin release at the crater as alleged by the White House Intelligence Report issued on April 11, 2017 (WHR), the immediate result would have been significant casualties immediately adjacent to the dispersion crater. [emphasis in original]

The fact that there were numerous television journalists reporting from the alleged sarin release site and there was absolutely no mention of casualties that would have occurred within tens to hundreds of meters of the alleged release site indicates that the WHR was produced without even a cursory low-level review of commercial video data from the site by the US intelligence community. [emphasis mine]

The report below contains more information. Note that the location of the "dead goat," supposedly killed by sarin, is upwind of the location that the White House alleges the munition exploded.

Who Is Dr. Theodore Postol?

Dr. Theodore Postol is Professor Emeritus and former Chair of the Department of Science, Technology and National Security Policy at MIT. You can read a little more about Dr. Postol's background and bona fides at his MIT faculty page.

Note especially his work at Argonne National Laboratory; with the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment; and as a scientific adviser to the Chief of Naval Operations. One of his areas of expertise is missile defense systems. Dr. Postol was also called as an expert witness in a pre-Iraq War lawsuit brought against a prominent defense contractor, TRW, for fraud.

And now Dr. Postol's document in full.

GP

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April 21, 2017

IMPORTANT CORRECTION TO
The Nerve Agent Attack that Did Not Occur:

Analysis of the Times and Locations of Critical Events in the
Alleged Nerve Agent Attack
at 7 AM on April 4, 2017 in Khan Sheikhoun, Syria

Introduction

This report corrects an important error in the earlier report released on April 18, 2017 titled The Nerve Agent Attack that Did Not Occur: Analysis of the Times and Locations of Critical Events in the Alleged Nerve Agent Attack at 7 AM on April 4, 2017 in Khan Sheikhoun, Syria.

In my earlier report released on April 18, 2017 I quite stupidly misinterpreted the wind-direction convention resulting in my estimates of plume directions being exactly 180° off in direction. This document corrects that error and provides very important new analytic results that follow from that error [emphasis mine (GP)].

When the error in wind direction is corrected, the conclusion is that if there was a significant sarin release at the crater as alleged by the White House Intelligence Report issued on April 11, 2017 (WHR), the immediate result would have been significant casualties immediately adjacent to the dispersion crater.

The fact that there were numerous television journalists reporting from the alleged sarin release site and there was absolutely no mention of casualties that would have occurred within tens to hundreds of meters of the alleged release site indicates that the WHR was produced without even a cursory low-level review of commercial video data from the site by the US intelligence community. This overwhelmingly supports the conclusion that the WHR identification of the crater as a sarin release site should have been accompanied with an equally solid identification of the area where casualties were caused by the alleged aerosol dispersal. The details of the crater itself unambiguously show that it was not created by the alleged airdropped sarin dispersing munition. [emphasis mine (GP)]

These new details are even more problematic because the the WHR cited commercial video as providing information that it used to derive its conclusions that there was a sarin attack from an airdropped munition at this location.

As can be seen by the corrected wind patterns in the labeled photographs on the next page, the predicted direction of the sarin plume would take it immediately into a heavily populated area [emphasis mine (GP)]. The area immediately adjacent to the north northwest of the road is may not be populated, as there was likely heavy damage to those homes facing the road from a bombing attack that occurred earlier at a warehouse to the direct east of the crater (designated on map below). However, houses that were immediately behind those on the road would have been substantially shielded from shock waves that could have caused heavy damage to those structures.

Since the reported wind speeds were very low, and the area is densely packed with buildings, a sarin dispersal would certainly not have simply followed a postulated plume direction as shown with the blue lines in the map below. Sarin aerosol and gas would have been dispersed both laterally and downwind by building fronts and would also have been dispersed downward and upward as the gases and aerosols were gently carried by winds modified by the presence of walls, space ways and other structures. A purely notional speculation on how a sarin plume might be dispersed by the structures as prevailing winds push the aerosol and gas through the structures is shown in the figure at the bottom of page 4.

The complicated wind pattern inside the densely populated living area would have resulted in sarin accumulating in basements and rooms that are roughly facing into the wind. There would also have been areas in spaces between buildings where sarin densities were much higher or much lower as the gentle prevailing winds moved around corners and created pockets of high and low density sarin concentrations.

In addition, the crater-area where the alleged sarin release was supposed to have occurred was close enough to the densely populated downwind area that significant amounts of sarin that would have fallen near the crater during the initial aerosol release would have resulted in a persistent plume of toxic sarin being carried into this populated area as the liquid on the ground near the crater evaporated during the day [emphasis mine (GP)].

The close proximity to the crater would have certainly led to high casualties within the populated area.

The images on page 4 are taken from two different videos published on YouTube by the same crew of journalists who reported in detail on the site of the alleged sarin attack. Additional video frames from these two videos are shown on pages five and six.

In one of the video reports the journalist takes the observer on a short walk to the location of a dead goat. A close-up of the dead goat suggests that the animal was foaming at its mouth and nose as it died.

Video taken from a drone at high-altitude operated by the television crew shows the location of the dead goat, which is clearly well up wind of the sarin release point. Under all but implausible conditions, the wind would have carried sarin away from the goat and it would not have been subjected to a significant dose of sarin had largely been within the area where it was found [emphasis mine (GP)].

If one instead guesses that the goat might have been wandering around and had wandered into the path of the newly dispersed sarin, the goat should have been found on the ground near the release point as the sarin dose within the plume would have killed it very quickly.

Other images from the video report are of two examples of dead birds. Neither of these video images can be connected to the crater scene as there was no continuity of evidence from the movement of the cameras.

This assessment with corrected wind directions leads to a powerful new set of questions – why were the multiple sets of journalists who were filming at the crater where the alleged sarin release occurred not showing the numerous victims of the alleged release who would have been immediately next to the area?

It is now clear that the publicly available evidence shows exactly where the mass nerve agent poisoning would have occurred if in fact there was an event where significant numbers of people were poisoned by a nerve agent release. This does not rule out the possibility of a nerve agent release somewhere else in the city. However, this completely discredits the WHR’s claims that they knew where the nerve agent release occurred and that they knew the nerve agent release was the result of a airdropped munition [emphasis mine (GP)].

There is a second issue that I have refrained from commenting on in the hope that such a discussion would not be necessary.

The mainstream media is the engine of democracy. Without an independent media providing accurate and unbiased information to citizens, a government can do pretty much what it chooses without interference from the citizens who elected it. The critical function of the mainstream media in the current situation should be to report the facts that clearly and unambiguously contradict government claims.

This has so far not occurred and this is perhaps the biggest indicator of how incapacitated the mechanisms for democratic governance of the United States have become.

The facts are now very clear – there is very substantial evidence that the President and his staff took decisions without any intelligence, or far more likely ignored intelligence from the professional community that they were given, to execute an attack in the Middle East that had the danger of creating an inadvertent military confrontation with Russia. The attack has already created a very serious further downward spiral in Russian-US relations, and has had the effect of seriously undermining US efforts to defeat the Islamic State – a common enemy of the United States, Russia, and the Western European powers.

As such, it is a sacred duty of the mainstream media to our democracy and its people to investigate and report on this matter properly.

Theodore A. Postol

Professor Emeritus of Science,
Technology, and National Security Policy
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Email: postol@mit.edu

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Video Images of the Area where the Alleged Sarin-Releasing Crater Was Extensively Photographed and Reported on by Local Journalists in Khan Sheikhoun

Video Images from the First of Two Videos of the Area where the Alleged Sarin-Releasing Crater Was Extensively Photographed and Reported on by Local Journalists in Khan Sheikhoun

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLEjpNCSfHs

Video Images from the Second of Two Videos of the Area where the Alleged Sarin-Releasing Crater Was Extensively Photographed and Reported

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