MIT professor finds errors in US report on chemical attack in Syria

a reply to: BlueAjah

The White Helmets have been given millions of dollars by the US and UK. The can probably get ppe from the same place they get their shiny white helmets.

a reply to: paraphi

paraphi,

To put it bluntly, MIT does not hire regular folk. It hires the highest functioning genius minds on the face of this world. Such people can do more with their armchair time, than 90% of people could do with a Hollywood movie budget, an army of lackeys and security force resources on tap at any moment, and access to the NSAs entire intelligence infrastructure.

What is your point?

a reply to: watchitburn

Outstanding Wib.

But sadly, around here direct factual evidence as well as expert testimony has been ruled inadmissible.

Only unqualified personnel opinion, hearsay and conjecture are ruled as admissible.

Buck

originally posted by: TrueBrit
a reply to: paraphi

paraphi,

To put it bluntly, MIT does not hire regular folk. It hires the highest functioning genius minds on the face of this world. Such people can do more with their armchair time, than 90% of people could do with a Hollywood movie budget, an army of lackeys and security force resources on tap at any moment, and access to the NSAs entire intelligence infrastructure.

What is your point?

I suspect his entirely accurate point is that giving special weight to someone's opinion,whose research seems to be entirely based on YouTube videos, is foolish at best.

Regardless of the person's academic status. (And i suspect you might have a slightly over inflated view of how good MIT is).

originally posted by: hiddenNZ
Yeah he will be dead soon. Or it won't matter cause someone's gonna step up and drop a real bomb.... Maybe.

Again, Hillary did not win, this is Trump's Admin

I'm curious as to how long after the attack the pictures of the people collecting samples was taken.

Sarin gas breaks down fairly quickly once exposed to the environment.

"Sarin is very soluble in water whereas other nerve agents are more sparingly soluble. VX has the unexpected property of being soluble in cold water but sparingly soluble in warm water (>9.5 °C).

The most important chemical reactions of nerve agents take place directly at the phosphorus atom. The P-X bond is easily broken by nucleophilic reagents, such as water or hydroxyl ions (alkali). In aqueous solution at neutral pH the nerve agents decompose slowly, whereas the reaction is greatly accelerated following the addition of alkali. The result is a non-toxic phosphoric acid. The formation of the non-toxic phosphoric acid is also accelerated by rise in temperature or by a catalyst (e.g., hypochlorite ions from bleaching powder). This hydrolysis forms the basis of most decontamination procedures utilizing decomposition. In general, we may assume that an area exposed to G-agents decontaminates itself within a few days"

Cite

You would think an MIT professor would know this also.

a reply to: ScepticScot

This is not just an uniformed, armchair observers opinion. This is the opinion of a man who has been involved with the fields of science and technology which directly related to weapon system creation, deployment and assessment of the effectiveness of the same for most of his career, and who has a long history of critical deconstruction of false or misleading claims made about weapon systems.

This is not his first rodeo. He was one of the crucial voices in getting the truth about the Patriot missile defence system out, in that it is likely that the Patriot never actually successfully engaged a target, despite propaganda to the contrary.

The man is vastly experienced in this field.

a reply to: ColdWisdom
Sarin is volatile and with suspicion of nerve agent attack, it would have been prudent and easy to spray a solution of bleach.

Sodium Hypochlorite - Medical Countermeasures Database

a reply to: Cofactor

I very much doubt that doing that, would have made it possible or wise for virtually unprotected details of men to be deployed to the area to examine it. Even with that solution down on the ground, full hazardous material protective gear would have been required, in case of a missed spot.

He was one of the crucial voices in getting the truth about the Patriot missile defence system out, in that it is likely that the Patriot never actually successfully engaged a target, despite propaganda to the contrary

I was boots on the ground when the overhaul of the Patriot / Arrow systems were done. And I 'll debate those facts with anyone. When we received there first P1s, there confidence levels were a mere 47%, once the A1s initial conversions were completed, the confidence rose to 93% and a further 4% after refinements and project completion designs were installed to the Arrow 1 systems. There was so much potential that work on P2 / A2 were immediately started which again did not utilize all available capabilities, therefore P3/A3 prototypes were brought into production.

And as they say, the rest is history.



Buck

originally posted by: TrueBrit
a reply to: ScepticScot

This is not just an uniformed, armchair observers opinion. This is the opinion of a man who has been involved with the fields of science and technology which directly related to weapon system creation, deployment and assessment of the effectiveness of the same for most of his career, and who has a long history of critical deconstruction of false or misleading claims made about weapon systems.

This is not his first rodeo. He was one of the crucial voices in getting the truth about the Patriot missile defence system out, in that it is likely that the Patriot never actually successfully engaged a target, despite propaganda to the contrary.

The man is vastly experienced in this field.

My understanding is that his assessment of the effectiveness of the patriot system was again based on video evidence and is very much the outlier on judgement on the systems effectiveness.

Again watching YouTube videos is not research.

a reply to: ScepticScot

And none the less, his input was one of the primary drivers of the US government changing their guidance about use of them, and indeed the decision that was made to move to a different system for anti-missile tasks.

My guess is that the MSM will have tough time spinning that one in order to try to blame Assad or the Russians :

Iraqi unit with U.S., Australian advisers hit by ISIS mustard agent

All sources I have been able to find state that sarin gas breaks down rapidly due to it's volatile nature.

"Sarin is the most volatile of the nerve agents, which means that it can easily and quickly evaporate from a liquid into a vapor and spread into the environment."

"Because it evaporates so quickly, sarin presents an immediate, but short-lived, threat."

cite

Now on to the addendum:

All bold text is my emphasis.

"Figure 1 shows a man standing in the alleged sarin-release crater. He is wearing a honeycomb facemask that is designed to filter small particles from the air. Other apparel on him is an open necked cloth shirt and what appear to be medical exam gloves.
Two other men are standing in front of him (on the left in the photograph) also wearing honeycomb facemask’s and medical exam gloves.
If there were any sarin present at this location when this photograph was taken everybody in the photograph would have received a lethal or debilitating dose of sarin."



His own report alludes to the possibility that the sarin gas may have already dispersed.

"Figure 4 shows the crater, probably shortly after the tampering occurred that is documented in Figure 1."

"Tampering"??? Not 'sample collection' or 'investigation' or other wording that's not quite so volatile, but I'm sure this MIT professor just made a mistake in his choice of words... he didn't choose that word to possibly garner an emotional response.

"The camera bore site is downward into the crater and its azimuth is roughly East Northeast. Note that the surgical gloves that can be seen on the ground behind the man in the crater in Figure 1 can be seen almost unmoved in the photograph shown in Figure 4. This strongly suggests that the photograph was taken a relatively short time after the tampering occurred.
Figure 5 shows the crater at a time that may have been before the tampering occurred. The bottom of the crater looks rather different and the piece of pipe, which is clearly lying on top of the bottom of the crater in Figure 4, now appears to be partially buried. The photograph in Figure 5 is taken with the bore site of the camera looking roughly west."

Maybe he just likes the word tampering...

"Summary and Conclusions from the Data
We repeat here a quote from the WHR:
An open source video also shows where we believe the chemical munition landed—not on a facility filled with weapons, but in the middle of a street in the northern section of Khan Shaykhun [Emphasis Added]. Commercial satellite imagery of that site from April 6, after the allegation, shows a crater in the road that corresponds to the open source video.

It's odd that in his summary and conclusions that he left out this part of the WHR"

"We have confidence in our assessment because we have signals intelligence and geospatial intelligence, laboratory analysis of physiological samples collected from multiple victims, as well as a significant body of credible open source reporting, that tells a clear and consistent story."

I wonder why he left out that the WH used other sources of information, not just the open source video.

"The data provided in these photographs make it clear that the WHR made no serious attempt to collect data that would support its “confident assessment” that there was data to unambiguously support a conclusion that the Syrian government executed a sarin attack as indicated by the location and characteristics of the crater."

So he is saying that based on the six photos in his report, the WH and any intelligence agencies that supplied information to the WH did not make any "serious attempt to collect data that would support its “confident assessment”".

How can he jump to those conclusions, he has no idea the information supplied by intelligence agencies?

His own report states that the guys collecting evidence in the first picture may not have been exposed to sarin (due to it dissipating rapidly) "If there were any sarin present", then he uses volatile wording by stating that the site was "tampered" with.

Bottom line, this whole addendum is politically generated and full of logical fallacies.

“If there were any sarin present at this location when this photograph was taken, everybody in the photograph would have received a lethal or debilitating dose of sarin..."

I agree it certainly seems like something fishy was going on.

But he's basing his conclusion on the assumption that the ground team was present while sarin was still concentrated in the area.

I mean, if they're there 10 minutes after drop, then I can see that being a concern. What about 30min, an hour, a day?

Not a compelling argument without at least providing some time info, and maybe not then.

a reply to: swedy13

Best I can figure/find is that the picture of the guys at the bomb crater was taken a day or two after the attack.

I couldn't not find any definitive information on how long it takes sarin to break down, but it 'appears' to be fairly quick.

a reply to: LockNLoad

Yeah, I'm not a sarin expert, but this seems like a pretty silly proposition from an armchair enthusiast. The gloves and mask are probably to prevent skin abrasion as a precautionary measure, not to protect again gas molecules.

a reply to: LockNLoad

I couldn't not find any definitive information on how long it takes sarin to break down, but it 'appears' to be fairly quick.

Agent GB (Sarin) is so volatile that it is largely a vapor hazard rather than a contact hazard. The evaporation rate is the same as that of water. The deployment method (ordnance) used is assumed to produce complete pulverisation (no big droplet).

Here is a review on the fate of this agent: The sources, fate, and toxicity of chemical warfare agent degradation products.

An interesting quote:
"Decontamination. Because of its rapid evaporation, large-scale decontamination for GB is unnecessary (234). Decontamination of GB with aqueous acidic or alkaline solutions results in hydrolysis to the same products discussed previously, but at a much more rapid rate (13,346). For example, at a temperature of 24.5°C and a pH of 6, the half-life of GB (2 x 10-4 M), in the presence of hypochlorite from sodium hypochlorite or Ca(OCl), (2.8 x 103 M), was approximately 11 min (347). In hypochlorite solutions, which are fairly alkaline, GB would be hydrolyzed with a half-life of < 1 sec (13)."

a reply to: Cofactor

Yep that's along the lines of what I found, so the only real question that would be nice to have an answer for is how long after the attack was the picture (the guys inspecting the blast crater) taken.

a reply to: LockNLoad

Khan Shaykhun chemical attack took place around 6:30 a.m. local time on 4 April, 2017. Source provided by OP state:

A Syrian man collects samples from the site of a suspected toxic gas attack in Khan Shaykhun, in Syria’s northwestern Idlib province, on April 5, 2017.

Precise timing for the picture may be obtained by enquiring AFP but if we look at the man's shadow it is probably around noon.