Thread by @EliotHiggins

Thread - Yesterday I wrote a response to @TusliGabbard's Reports on Chemical Attacks in Syria, posted on her campaign website at the start of this month. Her supporters have reacted poorly, so here's a thread on it bellingcat.com/news/mena/2019…

Gabbard's Reports on Chemical Attacks in Syria relies heavily on the work of Ted Postol, who is notorious among those who follow chemical weapons in Syria. He confirmed in June he had met Gabbard to share his ideas. therealnews.com/stories/new-ev…

Based on Postol's work, Gabbard highlights various "inconsistencies" in OPCW reporting on the Khan Sheikhoun and Douma chemical attacks, start with this one.

This comes from Postol's "A Quick Turnaround Assessment of the White House Intelligence Report Issued on April 11, 2017 About the Nerve Agent Attack in Khan Shaykhun, Syria", but there's a problem.

Postol actually retracted that claim last year, following further investigation which was published in the report "Computational Forensic Analysis for the Chemical Weapons Attack at Khan Sheikhun on April 4, 2017 ", so Gabbard's own source has debunked her d3ba7j4nna908t.cloudfront.net/attachments/At…

Now maybe you're thinking Gabbard is unaware of this new report, but in fact both the old report she's citing, and the new report that debunks that earlier work are included in the links on Gabbard's page.

There's many more errors and bad faith arguments on the page. Another example is claiming the OPCW ignored a weapons lab found in Douma. It's unclear if this is Postol's claim or her own.

This is simply untrue, the OPCW report on Douma has an entire Annex (8) dedicated to this site, and even has a photo they took of a chlorine cylinder in the site.

Gabbard's site also makes some fundamental errors just describing the attacks, even before she gets to detailing the "inconsistencies". Here she describes the scene at one of the attack sites. After the first full stop it's nearly completely wrong.

Here is the gas cylinder in the hole at the site she describes. As you can clearly see, the hole is not "several times wider than the diameter of the gas cylinder." like she claims.

She says "There are also photographs of similar hole in the roof of an adjacent building, where another yellow gas cylinder was found lying on a bed on the top floor." and here's the photo she's talking about, but it's not the site of the second cylinder.

Here's the actual site of the second impact, a totally different roof top 400m away. This isn't some debate over whether or not the US should fight wars in the Middle East, this is just basic fact-checking, and her site is full of errors, and errors that build on those errors.

There's a lot more wrong with her piece, and you can read all about it here. Hopefully she'll have the decency to issue corrections and perhaps reconsider the sources she's using that have led her down this path. bellingcat.com/news/mena/2019…

Also interesting to see Russia Today claiming we're meddling in the 2020 presidential campaign by doing some basic fact-checking.