Post

Stephen McIntyre

@ClimateAudit

May 13, 2019 • 38 tweets • 13 min read • Read on X

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1/ OPCW document entitled "Engineering Assessment of Two Cylinders Observed at the Douna Incident", Draft for Internal Review, Expanded Rev[ision] 1, dated 27 Feb 2019 syriapropagandamedia.org/working-papers… is astounding. Totally undermines US and UK government statements. Also OPCW report.

2/ chlorine cylinders were observed in two Douma locations. "An engineering assessment has been conducted, using all available information, to evaluate the possible means by which these two cylinders arrived at their respective locations as observed". Just what was required.

2/ at both locations, the engineers fairly stated the two competing hypotheses:
A) that cylinders dropped from aircraft (helicopters) creating crater in roof
B) that cylinders manually placed, craters pre-existing (false flag)

3/ at Location 2 (cylinder on balcony of building where bodies located), engineers found that observed impact event could not be reproduced even with drop heights as low as 500 m (much lower than actual helicopter operating heights).

4/ simulations showed that a cylinder puncturing a concrete roof with steel rebar (as observed) would be marked by steel rebar, but "no traces" of such interaction in the balcony cylinder

5/ engineers point out that "observed appearance of cylinder and rebar not consistent". Front of cylinder shows "no signs" of impact with concrete slab or cylinder, while observed rebar "does not indicate" that it slowed cylinder to stop.

6/ New York Times postulated a theory in which cylinder bounced off a corner of terrace wall. Engineers pointed out that observed deformation "not consistent" with this theory and that supposed "cushioning" effect of wire netting "negligible" relative to energy of cylinder

7/ Engineers reported that observed crater on balcony "more consistent" with that expected from mortar or rocket artillery round than falling cylinder, and that this explanation supported by similar craters on nearby buildings

8/ Engineers dismissed another element of New York Times theory in which criss-cross pattern on cylinder postulated to have occurred as scratches from cylinder penetrating mesh. They observed that pattern "inconsistent" with postulated near-vertical trajectory.

9/ Engineers also dismissed New York Times theory that "mangled remains" of "mild steel framework and fins" located on balcony had ever been fitted to cylinder or (somehow) stripped from cylinder during impact

10/ their assessment of Location 4 (the bedroom cylinder) was just as savage. They observed that it "was not possible to establish a set of circumstances" where post-deformation cylinder could fit through crater with valve intact and fins deformed as observed.

11/ they observed that corrosion of damaged areas shows that cylinder had "spent some post-damage time being exposed to the elements", dryly adding that it "would most likely not have degraded to such an extent ... inside the bedroom".

12/ they observed that observed deflection of the shower frame in the bedroom was "not consistent" with direction of required movement of cylinder from crater to the bed.

13/ the engineers resoundingly dismissed the facially implausible theory that the cylinder "bounced onto the bed" as being contradicted by observed features of the bedroom

14/ the FFM engineering sub-team said that the "dimensions, characteristics and appearance of the cylinders and the surrounding scene of the incidents were inconsistent with what would have been expected in the case of either cylinder having been delivered from an aircraft".

15/ FFM engineering sub-team stated that "alternative hypothesis", manually placing" of cylinders, produced "only plausible explanation for observations", rejecting theory that cylinders had been "delivered from aircraft"

16/ this document is absolutely devastating both to intel assessments by US and other governments and to the OPCW report published on March 1, 2019, raising serious questions about the integrity of each.

17/ here is link to blog post by Paul McKeigue, David Miller and Piers Robinson breaking this story: syriapropagandamedia.org/working-papers…

https://twitter.com/ScottLucas_EA/status/1127916482845765632

18/ Bellingcat and UK propaganda IntegrityInitiative have laughable response. Higgins linked to Scott Lucas tweet

https://twitter.com/ScottLucas_EA/status/1127916482845765632

which (falsely) claims to "dissect" "new engineering document"

19/ Lucas (part of "Integrity" Initiative) wrote Facebook post facebook.com/EAWorldView/ph…

20/ Bellingcat ally Lucas confirmed "investigation undertaken by engineering sub-team of FFM, beginning with on-site inspections in April-May 2018, followed by a detailed engineering analysis" and that "report of this investigation was excluded from the published Final Report"

21/ remarkably, the chronology of events in OPCW report did NOT cite this original work by engineering sub-team of FFM, instead citing only the much later (Oct-Dec) work commissioned from "unidentified 'engineering experts'"

22/ Bellingcat ally Lucas observed that Ian Henderson, a named assessor in report, is identified as "OPCW Inspection Team Leader" in Feb 2018 OPCW Scientific Advisory Board report opcw.org/sites/default/…

23/ to give an idea of Lucas' sloppiness, he says that Henderson stated that "'the alternative hypothesis' provides the only explanation for both cylinders", but that Henderson did "not delineate that hypothesis"

24/ however, a few pages earlier in relatively short document, Henderson clearly set out "alternative hypothesis" L2-2 for Location 2 (balcony) and L4-3 for Location 4 (bedroom) - that persons placed the cylinders manually.

25/ against many inconsistencies in Henderson report, Lucas offered single "explanation": that, per OPCW report, balcony cylinder first hit roof decreasing speed, so that it "hit concrete floor of balcony causing a hole in it, but without sufficient energy to fall through it".

26/ more on this after dinner

27/ Lucas falsely reduced the many FFM engineering sub-team issues to a single Location 2 issue: that "deformation of part of cylinder but not of rest is not consistent with an “intermediate impact”", also falsely claiming that sub-team failed to "refer" to roof damage.

28/ Lucas claims that "apparently", this argument was "rejected by the OPCW Fact Finding Mission before Henderson submitted his assessment, or in the 48 hours before publication of the final report."

29/ in reply to Lucas' skimpy argument, first an obvious point. Engineering Sub-team presented contradictions at two locations: Location 2 (balcony) and Location 4 (bedroom). Lucas totally ignored the Sub-Team's devastating critique of implausible bedroom scene. Zero discussion

30/ before turning to Lucas' single point, take note of huge contrast between Engineering Sub-Team (Feb 27) and OPCW Report (Mar 1) on whether balcony crater could be due to incoming mortar fire (explosive).

31/ Sub-Team stated that appearance of balcony crater "more consistent" with "mortar or rocket artillery round" (explosive) than "impact from falling object". They gave multiple reasons: deformed rebar splayed out and concrete spalling underside of crater (no photo in report);

32/ Sub-Team observed that mortar explanation supported by "more than one crater of very similar appearance in concrete slabs on top of nearby buildings". An example of such "very similar" crater is shown in OPCW Report Figure A.6.3; balcony crater also shown to compare.

33/ Sub-Team: also supporting mortar/rocket artillery attribution was "fragmentation pattern on upper walls" (while noting unusually elevated), concrete spalling and "black scorching" (also noting fire in corner of room)

34/ despite Engineering Sub-Team finding that crater "more consistent" with mortar/artillery, OPCW report stated that FFM "analysed the damage" and found that "this hypothesis is unlikely" "given the absence of primary and secondary fragmentation characteristic of an explosion"

35/ so, on Feb 27, OPCW Engineering Sub-Team said "fragmentation pattern on upper walls" supported likely attribution of crater to mortar/artillery. On Mar 1, OPCW Report stated opposite: that attribution to mortar unlikely because of "absence of fragmentation". Who to believe?

36/ Engineering Sub-Team cited "black scorching" underside of crater as support for attribution to mortar/artillry, while also noting post-crater fire in room. Skeptics earlier cited fire as evidence that crater long preceded Apr 7. OPCW weakly said that fire to "detoxify".

37/ seems odd that White Helmets would set a fire in this upstairs room on April 8 when so many dead bodies being removed from house. On April 9 afternoon, Russians inspected.

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Stephen McIntyre

@ClimateAudit

Aug 12

Here's a listing of Minority HPSCI Staff in early 2017. Most of the redactions in yesterday's release can be identified here.

In two of the 302s, WHISTLEB described the HPSCI Democrat system for exfiltrating secret information from a secure room in a three letter agency: presumably FBI, from which copies and notes were prohibited.

As a work-around, three HPSCI Democrat staffers would attend the Secure Room and, after each visit, "would immediately compose summaries" on a standalone computer set up in a back room by "committee's network administrator" for exclusive use by "Russian team" members. After the three Russian team members had completed their visit summaries, they briefed certain other staffers.

All of the names underneath the redactions can be plausibly identified from contemporary HPSCI Democrat staff rosters as shown below.

Here is a transcription of each of the two descriptions of the Russian team and secondary briefees, showing character counts.

The Russian Team had two 16s (at least one with LN8) and an 11. (number denotes character count of full name.)

The secondary briefees were a 6+5 (12), two 13s (one a 5+7), an 11, and the communications director (a 14). One of the 13s was a new hire.

Read 9 tweets

Stephen McIntyre

@ClimateAudit

Jul 31

Durham Classified Appendix is almost entirely about "Clinton Plan". Unsurprisingly, nothing about the post-election events during which Russiagate collusion hoax actually metastasized under FBI and CIA into a national flesh-eating disease.
Emails from Lenny Benardo of Soros' Open Society Foundation feature prominently. Note that Benardo was mentioned in a Washington Post article by Demirjan and Devlin Barrett on May 24, 2017 (a few days after Mueller appointment) - archive archive.is/w43O2 reporting that the email had been dismissed by FBI as "unreliable". DWS, Benardo and Renteria said at the time that they had never been interviewed by FBI.

https://x.com/FOOL_NELSON/status/1658525717183725569

Fool_Nelson proposed Julie Smith as Foreign Policy Advisor-2 in Durham report at the time:

https://x.com/FOOL_NELSON/status/1658525717183725569

Here's a July 27, 2016 email (attributed to Benardo) which contains a detail relevant to the argument against @DNIGabbard's first drop, claiming that Russian interference concern was NEVER about election infrastructure, but always about DNC hack and Buff Bernie memes. Here Benardo talks about how to make Russia "a domestic issue" by raising the spectre of a "critical infrastructure threat for the election". Brennan subsequently did just that: raised concern about "infrastructure threat". ODNI played down that threat in their briefings and ultimately in the proposed post-election PDB of December 8, 2016 which was cancelled by Obama intervention.

Read 4 tweets

Stephen McIntyre

@ClimateAudit

Jul 22

the ICA version in the recent DNI documents is a different version (dated January 5, 2017) than the released version (dated January 6, 2017). There were many changes overnight - some substantive.

Before editorializing, I'll laboriously go through comparisons - final version on left, previous day version on right. (I apologize for not marking this on each of the following slides.)

The Jan 6, 2017 version contained a preface entitled "Background... The Analytic Process and Cyber Incident Attribution", not present in the Jan 5 version (as shown). It has two sections.

The first section entitled "The Analytic Process" stated that these assessments "adhere to tradecraft standards".

"On these issues of great importance to US national security, the goal of intelligence analysis is to provide assessments to decisionmakers that are intellectually rigorous, objective, timely, and useful, and that adhere to tradecraft standards."

Now recall the dispute over inclusion of Steele dossier information in the ICA as an appendix and, as we recently learned, as a bullet supporting the assessment that Putin "aspired" to help Trump. Some IC professionals objected to the inclusion of Steele dossier information on the grounds that it did not meet tradecraft standards for inclusion in an ICA. Comey, McCabe and FBI insisted on its inclusion on the grounds that Obama had said to include "everything" - which they interpreted as mandating inclusion of Steele dossier information even though it didn't meet tradecraft standards.

Reasonable people can perhaps disagree on whether this was justified or not. What was not justified was the claim that the inclusion decision complied with "tradecraft standards". It was bad enough to include non-compliant material, but the claim that the included material "adhered to tradecraft standards" was miserably false. The recent Tradecraft Review should have addressed this fault.

The preface also included the following assertion:
"The tradecraft standards for analytic products have been refined over the past ten years. These standards include describing sources (including their reliability and access to the information they provide), clearly expressing uncertainty, distinguishing between underlying information and analysts’ judgments and assumptions, exploring alternatives, demonstrating relevance to the customer, using strong and transparent logic, and explaining change or consistency in judgments over time."

The "past ten years" here refers to the period of time since the savage tradecraft review by the WMD Commission, an excellent repot on a previous intelligence failure of similar scale to the Russia collusion hoax as an //intelligence failure// - which it was (even if non-criminal).

They state that "standards include describing sources (including their reliability and access to the information they provide)". Now apply that to the description of the Steele network in the classified appendix (declassified and released in 2020) shown below and transcribed as follows:
"the source is an executive of a private business intelligence firm and a former employee of a friendly foreign intelligence service who has been compensated for previous reporting over the past three years. The source maintains and collects information from a layered network of identified and unidentified subsources, some of which has been corroborated in the past. The source collected this information on behalf of private clients and was not compensated for it by the FBI".

This description does not remotely comply with the warranty in the Preface. We know that Steele (the "source") had told the FBI that his information was funneled through a "Russian-based sub-source" who Steele refused to identify. Steele did however tell the FBI that Sergei Millian was one of the sub-subsources to the "Russian-based sub-source". By mid-December 2016, the FBI had figured out that Steele's "Russian-based sub-source" was Igor Danchenko, an alumnus of U of Louisville, Georgetown and Brookings Institute, who lived in northern Virginia and had an American-born daughter. A fulsome description of sources IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE WARRANTY IN THE PREFACE would have included these details and more.

It would have also stated that the FBI planned to interview the Primary Sub-Source as soon as possible. Given the importance of the document, the obvious question from any sane reviewer of the draft ICA would be: "uh, why don't you interview Steele's Primary Sub-Source right now? Today? " "And, by the way, why are you saying that he is 'Russian-based' when he lives in northern Virginia?"

If the reviewers had known that Steele's Primary Sub-Source had lived in northern Virginia and was available for interview, maybe they would have said: "uh, maybe we should hold off this ICA until we talk to Danchenko. This is a big document, maybe we should do some due diligence". But they weren't given that option, because Danchenko's location in northern Virginia was concealed from them. The warranty in the prefatory Background was false.

Subsequently, a few weeks later, when the FBI interviewed Danchenko and he revealed that there wasn't any "layered network" and that the key allegations were based (at best) on an anonymous phone call and that many of the sourcing claims in the dossier were untrue, the intelligence community had an obligation to fess up. To retract their claims about the Steele dossier, which, by the end of January, had emerged in public consciousness as the driving predicate of the Russia collusion investigation. Once the FBI knew that the sourcing claims were fraudulent, they had an obligation to disclose that to the rest of the IC and to publicly disown the Steele dossier, which had become important to the public precisely because of its endorsement in the ICA.

Read 9 tweets

Stephen McIntyre

@ClimateAudit

Jul 14

Trump's latest tariff venture is a 50% tariff on copper, ostensibly for national security reasons. Copper markets are something that I analysed in the 1970s; so I know the structure of the markets and statistics. I was even been involved as a junior analyst in a trade case about US copper tariffs.

Under the US Defense Production Act, Canada is considered "domestic production" for the purposes of national security, but neither Trump nor the Canadian government seem to have had any interest in this legislation.

I remember the difficulties of trying to make long-term forecasts of copper supply and demand. Copper is also a market with voluminous statistics maintained consistently for a very long period. US Geological Survey for US consumption and primary production of refined copper for 1950-2024 are shown below. As someone who, in the 1970s, actually thought about what this chart would look like, it was interesting to re-visit.

In the 1920s and 1930s, US copper company were industrial behemoths: Anaconda, Kennecott, Phelps Dodge and Asarco, all now forgotten, were among the top 20 or top 50 US stocks back in the day. In the 1970s, they were still major companies. US accounted for about 25% of world production and consumption.

But, as you can see, since 2000, both US primary production and US refined consumption have declined precipitously. US refined consumption is now at lower levels than in the 1970s and US primary production is less than the early 1950s.

What will be the impact of a 50% tariff on copper imports? In the next post, I'll show how the changes in US market compare to world production.

although US copper production has declined since the 1970s, world copper production has almost quadrupled. US share of world copper refined production (here primary plus secondary scrap) has decreased from about 25% to 3%.

US copper production and consumption no longer dominate world markets - despite what the Beltway may imagine. An approximate 3% share doesn't get to dictate prices.

That means that the 50% copper tariff will be borne entirely by US copper consumers (i.e. manufacturers using copper). US producers will almost certainly increase their price to match the price of imports. So the tariff will be a bonanza for US domestic producers (e.g. Freeport McMoran) and a burden for US manufacturers.

the copper data also shows a vignette into the remarkable change in world economic geography since 9/11. In 2001, US still produced more copper than China. In 2024, China produced more than 13(!) times as much copper as USA. This isn't just production, but also consumption. Chinese manufacturers consume most of their copper production; their copper consumption is accordingly an order of magnitude greater than US copper consumption.

So when Trump puffs about the importance of USA as a market, this is simply not true of a basic commodity like copper. And I'm skeptical that it is true for other basic commodities.

Read 4 tweets

Stephen McIntyre

@ClimateAudit

Jul 9

on first page: Brennan's lawyer, Robert Litt, was General Counsel at ODNI in 2016 and involved in some key events. Litt published an article in October 2017 lawfaremedia.org/article/irrele… which claimed that "The dossier itself played absolutely no role in the coordinated intelligence assessment that Russia interfered in our election." The recent Tradecraft Review, abysmal as it was, admitted that the dossier was cited in the classified ICA as a bullet support for the claim that Putin "aspired" to help Trump get elected.

@15poundstogo very Clintonian here

Brennan refers here to two press releases issued by William Evanina in July and August 2020. The Evanina statements were prompted in large part by the release of Biden-Poroshenko tapes by Ukrainian parliamentarian Andrii Derkach (who had previously in October 2016 published receipts showing that Hunter Biden was getting paid $1 million per year by Burisma). Shortly after Evanina's statements, "Trump" administration sanctioned Derkach. As a result of these sanctions, Derkach was de-platformed and the Biden-Poroshenko tapes were deleted from nearly all locations. One of the tapes showed that Poroshenko and Biden gloated in August 2016 about the removal of Manafort as Trump campaign chair as a result of Ukrainian interference (Black Ledger announcement.)

Read 11 tweets

Stephen McIntyre

@ClimateAudit

Apr 13

New thread on new information from redactions.

I just noticed that the information in Binder on Trump briefing in Aug 2016 was previously published by Grassley in July 2020, a few days after identification of Steele Primary Sub-source (and thus we, in this corner, were otherwise preoccupied).
grassley.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/…

The new version sheds light on a previous redaction. Katrina, Norm, Ted, John and Amir were mentioned. Just noting this for future reference.

something else that I'm noticing in the less redacted documents: Kevin Clinesmith was much more prominent in Crossfire Hurricane operation than we previously realized.

In real time, Hans, myself and others had vehemently and savagely criticized Durham's useless plea agreement with Clinesmith that had failed to use their leverage over Clinesmith to obtain a road map of the Russiagate hoax operation. Compare for example Mueller's use of leverage over Rick Gates to interview him about 20 times, If anything, there was more leverage over Clinesmith.

Durham's failure to lever Clinesmith looks worse and worse as we now see Clinesmith's name in multiple Crossfire documents that had previously been redacted.

For example, here is Clinesmith on August 30, 2016 - early days of Russiagate hoax - approving the reporting of FBI surveillance of Trump and Flynn while they were supposedly providing a counterintelligence briefing.

In this briefing, they failed to give Trump and Flynn the same warning about Turkey that they had previously given Clinton's lawyers.

here's an example where the "declassified" Binder contains a redaction not made in the version published by Grassley almost five years ago. the name of Edward (Ted) Gistaro of ODNI

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