Thread by @MichaKobs

Last straw, @EliotHiggins, to save a fake investigation?

Your Country X witnesses opened and closed the valve and distributed the effect via video on YouTube before they became "witnesses".

Why could the medical workers not move? 11yr old Hassan Diab moved. He was called to the hospital. He moved like allegedly up to 500 people according to some sources. The White Helmet in your deleted balcony video was on the road with a stretcher. He moved too.

The collapsing small rebel group was called Jaish al Islam. The were brutal, @EliotHiggins. Here is what this little pocket was: vimeo.com/257350289

If you say so, @EliotHiggins. But most of these victims were wet. We observed scenes of mass-wetting several times.
On the other hand, Jaish al Islam used 5000 hostages to make their bus-deal out. 200 came home. 4800 disappeared. Makes 4800 bodies to choose from, @EliotHiggins.

Btw. if these White Helmets in the streets found indeed one basement full of starved people either due to fire or dust and a building collapse then you might have plenty of bodies without injuries.
Berlin stories of WWII are full of those basements that became deadly traps.

So, why is there no video showing the unloading of 40 bodies?
1) almost excusively activists equipped by the West had such technical stuff
2) the rest would indeed risk their life taking videos
3) you claimed no one could move at that time
You cannot have it both ways.

And here, @EliotHiggins, you completely lost it.
Indeed, claims of a chmical attack are exclusively originated from ex-Jaish al Islam activists interviewed in Country X. The medical workers in Damascus, to put it frankly, didn't discuss the 7yrs of war as a whole.

They discribed their observations regarding April 7, 2018 in Douma. The rest is your propaganda. btw. what do you think about the depth of the crater in Hendersons drawing? Did you realize your failure (while accusing Henderson)?

Dear Eliot, you not even read the witness accounts of the medics in Damascus. Of course, I'm not sure if these accounts made it in the final report since pages and pages were deleted. Here is what they said according to the original Interim Report:

This is a valid point but there is no valid identification. An article of M. Mansour from April 8 gave us some names allegedly released by the head of the White Helmets. Later we got completely different names. Which are the right ones? Any? Were they citizens or hostages?

btw the same article gave us completely different times. It stated that the helicopters took off at 8:30 and dropped sarin at 9:00. The same was reported by noumerous sources - locals, alleged witnesses, SAMS with contacts to people on the ground. Which times are rigth? Yours?

And when it comes to yellow clouds observed in the dawn or darkness against the wind and around the corner then...
Well, on 9/11 people observed all kind of things like a blue plane or no plane or laser beams.
HRW can sing a song about rising orange clouds in dawn or darkness.

AFAIK the "yellow to green cloud or smoke" testimonies first appeared in the final FFM report. Did the follow-up FFM team do any new interviews in country X? How reliable is the expression "cloud or smoke". Chlorine looks like a cloud or smoke as long as it is a fluid vapor.

This is how a "cloud or smoke" of 24000kg chlorine (versus 180kg max) looks like. I would estimate the same "cloud or smoke" size as described by the Country X witnesses (if authentic).
However, once Cl2 consumed enough heat from the atmosphere the "smoke" appearance disappears.

Again we have (only) one witness who allegedly watched somthing falling. His timing (19:00) coincides not even with @EliotHiggins' take off at the airport. It also contradicts the local reporters.
The only one person who also mentioned 19:00 is the alleged only surviver.

This man told CBS how they ran up the stairs, how his alleged brother washed his face in the kittchen at the 2nd floor... but not how he could leave the building after he watched his brother washing his face.
His story completely contradicts even the final FFM report.

Furthermore, the activists in Country X told the FFM that some sought immediate assistence at point One, the hospital. Nevertheless, @EliotHiggins says that no one could move. How is it possible, Eliot?
And why did the SCD needed 2:10 hours to reach that point? Unloading?

In a way, however, the statements of the Country X activists and the alleged brother confirm the timing of the medical staff in Damascus. ...just not the alleged times for a chemical attack given by @EliotHiggins.

And then there's the Country X story of a doctor who was afraid of secondary contamination and sent the first bodies back.
What bodies could they have been, Eliot? We saw them at 10:00 and again and again. We know which bodies changed position and why. The babies, for example.

btw. the guy with the baby... is it the same guy who sent you the cylinder video? The one you deleted until he savely left to Country X? Just a rethorical question. No need to answer.

These country X guys told the FFM that the strong smell prevented anyone without respiratory protection from approaching the cylinder. In fact, the only one with a gas mask was the only one they allowed to be seen in the video.

Listen to the sound! No one else had a gas mask!

Here it is:

One of them was a photographer for Douma City, who obviously had no problem to run into the suspected sarin scene without any protection. He was also in the hospital shooting pictures of Hasan Diab being hosed.
What did he know 2 hrs prior to the release of the sarin story?

In the next paragraph @EliotHiggins suggests that the cylinder should have been installed "shortly before". However, he does not explain what leads him to this assumption.

1) The crater could be old
Its twin in size and shape found in the neighbouring roof was already visible on satellite images one year before. In 2017, nothing could be seen from the sun roof and even the roof corner could already be damaged.

Unfortunately, the balcony crater is in the shadow during the whole day and therefore not visible on public satellite images. But there is also nothing to suggest that the FFM has compared satellite images that are not publicly available. The corner damage should be visible.

2) The cylinder shows clearly that the underside is discolored black. However, this is not "discoloration" by chlorine, as the NYT tried to claim. It is soot that has been partially washed away by the water flowing down the cylinder.

If the fire had been started after the alleged poison gas attack, no soot would have been able to reach the surface of the cylinder. At the time of the 22:06 video the crater was already black, but the surface of the cylinder was apparently protected by a layer of ice.

The fire must therefore have occurred before the ice formation. So was it spontaneous combustion from the chlorine? But the witnesses claim to have seen a green cloud. They don't report seeing a black plume of smoke. Nevertheless, this fire must have produced a lot of smoke.

3) The kitchen with the rolled up carpet on the second floor seems uninhabited. The same can be said of the apartment on the ground floor. There are hardly any objects of daily use there that were not packed. Even the bicycle was wrapped in paper.

The easiest and most plausible explanation for all these observations is an abandoned house with a crater in the roof. In anticipation of the coming bombing and the resulting casualties, it would be obvious to prepare this house for a perfidious move to set a trap for Assad.

This simplest and most plausible explanation would explain the soot, the missing dust on curtains and clothes under the crater, the abandoned kitchen, the broken doors, the stretcher in the street... everything. It would even explain why Hassan Diab was sent to the hospital.

The best explanation from @EliotHiggins is a rocket that stopped after 2km trajectory on a 10m long and 2m wide roof without significant damage and without bouncing off this small roof. This cylinder would have had its place in the Bellingcat article on exceptional corrosion.

...or in an upcoming Bellingcat article about extraordinary traces of inertia, apparently caused by an earlier impact of the same rocket motor.

His 2nd example shows impressively how such a cylinder can be placed under a Mortar crater. And while @EliotHiggins insists on a non-explosive impact at location2 because of allegedly missing fragmentation traces, he overlooks the overly obvious fragmentation traces here.

Similarities:
- abandoned apartment with a crater in the roof
-cylinder hit apparently with the heavier fin-side (low low helicopter)
-harness rusted immediately (not only after 2 weeks)
And strangely enough these fins point in the direction of the fire traces above the window.

btw. it's not like a framentation pattern is missing at the balcony. It's more like too high or something. The point is, it was not examined for relevance at all, at least not by the FFM exchange team.

But if the crater was caused by the cylinder and a cylinder do not cause a fragmentation pattern then what caused the fragmentation pattern? A mortar shell or something similar? But for a mortar shell it it to high? What caused it and not the crater? ...if true.

Let us note that some form of explosive impact must have taken place on the balcony. Under this premise, it is an extra mental effort not to associate it with the crater and/or damage to the roof corner. A slanted cone on the crater would at least describe the pattern quite well.

In addition, according to Prof Theodor Postol, a 90° deflection of the steel struts means an explosion, which sounds plausible.
(With all the talk about Ted Postol, who neither does OSINT nor is a chemist, one should not forget that he is 100% an expert on this exactly matter.)

In the following paragraph @EliotHiggins asks the right question, but links it to wrong prerequisites. 1) It was not "several hundred meters". If anything, it was one hundred meters. 2) The deformation is consistent with a collision no matter where and when this occurred.

These one hundred meters also refer only to the concrete. At first, the 50m/s cylinder was slowed down with the roof corner, then it was allowed to hit the ground with only 30m/s, so that it came to a standstill just on the last reinforcement steel beam.

Note the 100% vertical undeformed cylinder. So the braked state was simulated separately (concrete only). If you had simulated it in connection with the roof, the cylinder would have rotated and flown anywhere maybe
Furthermore, the reinforcing steel is by no means angled at 90°.

So what's the trick?
The deformation is a result of the loss of kinetic energy while the cylinder is slowed down by 20m/s.
But while the kinetic energy increases with the square of speed (blue, orange), the loss / damage increases linearly and much more slowly (red).

In other words, it makes little difference whether you brake the cylinder from 20 to 0 m/s or from 100 to 80 m/s. The damage is about the same.
The final FFM report shows us the damage caused by braking from 50 to 30 m/s but no image shows the final state of this deformation.

And funny enough, @EliotHiggins comes along and explains that this deformation is absolutely consistent with what we actually see on the cylinder.
So the question is, what caused the crater?
Another question is whether @EliotHiggins is really smarter than Ian Henderson.

Let's use the excellent Omni-Calculator (omnicalculator.com/physics/free-f…) to find out from what height a cylinder would have to fall to get the simulated damage when braking by 20m/s.

It seems, about 20m are enough.
...or any approaching wall at 20m/s = 72km/h = 45mph.

This is what the final FFM report and Bellingcat sold to the public as the damage caused by a low helicopter drop about 30min after 19:30 without any hint for a helicopter at that particular time but people arriving at the hospital at 19:00 and locals reporting sarin at 21:00.

Also regarding location 4 @EliotHiggins tries to stress the word "consistent". No, Eliot, this cylinder hasn't fooled anyone. They (the OPCW) just switched the team. You did a failed fake-analysis in part 1 of your smear trilogy too as explained here:

https://twitter.com/MichaKobs/status/1218647971329388544

Your buddies at Forensic Architecture did the same nonsens because they cannot or want not handle their point cloud as explained here: docdro.id/mfXh78B
Their model is truncated, the crater is wrong. It's misleading b***s*** and they know it.

Sorry, I forgot to add the quote I'm referring to. Here it is and no, no one was fooled and I suspect not even you, @EliotHiggins.

If these images had fooled you, @EliotHiggins, then you would have been the first to notice that the armour must have slipped strangely before impact, which is highly unusual, isn't it? How else could the harness have bent around the flattened side of the cylinder?

You would have pointed out that the front ring is not flattened, but the cylinder below is. How is that possible?
Besides, how could the unprotected valve have survived this horizontal impact? The hole does not form until it is created with force.

How could all these cylinders, contrary to the laws of aerodynamics, touch down in horizontal position?
...with or without harness, with or without valve, some in two towns at the same time?

Yout corrosion argument is new your similarities argument is old.
Do you mean corroded like your example? ...the one with two frontrings and different lugs from below the mortar crater? The corrosion argument only works in conjunction with the design argument, right?

So, let's talk about design. This argument is based on the assumption that no one can copy such a harness. Not even with a helpful website that provides drawings and photos?
We had an era of fake Chinese cylinders while the producer never never sold cylinders to Syria. Remember?

We had one front wheel, two front wheels, wide front ring, two front rings, tube-like lugs, rebar-lugs... all sorts of variations obviously based on the available material. We had the use of detcord or no explosives, totally blown up cylinders or the virtually undamaged in Douma.

Then we had the design in Saraqib with this eye-catching floral pattern, which was pressed perfectly vertically into the cylinder dome. These cylinders had no valve. One even had a broken valve hidden under a pink plastic mass, which was uncovered by the man with the measure.

From my POV it is impossible to pressurize such a cylinder. It is impossible that an impact in the open field could cause such a pattern. And it is impossible that this nonsense is carrying chlorine and sarin at the same time.
That's what you told your readers, @EliotHiggins.

From your POV, @EliotHiggins, is there any reason to believe that these rebels are not able to simply replicate the simple design of a chlorine cylinder harness?
Strip steel, sheet metal, ball bearings, thin tube, thick tube (or twice strip steel if no thick tube is available)

Or, to put it another way, how much does the design have to differ from its predecessor variations for you to feel it is a break in style?
Why did your alarm bells not ring in Saraquib, @EliotHiggins? You're not stupid, am I wrong? Where did the sarin come from?

Yes, even the initial FFM-team with the leading engineer Ian Henderson didn't exclude the possibility that the cylinder passed through the roof. But they had serious questions and did 6 month additional analysis to answer these. The result was the leaked Henderson report.

You said that Henderson's cylinder is too big and you rescaled it to the outer dimensions of the crater 1.66 x 1.05m.
I say Henderson's drawing is correct and shows the inner dimensions of the crater 1.59 x 0.90m. Who is right?

Didn't you wonder that according to your outer dimensions thesis Henderson's crater is much too narrow? Then why didn't you protest loudly and write that Henderson's drawing is totally different from the 166:105 shape?
I'm saying you knew your mistake or made it intentionally.

Are you a liar, @EliotHiggins?

Why can't I get rid of the feeling that @EliotHiggins with independent investigation means his article of April 29, 2018?
Nevertheless, the corner was probably less a matter of prophetic farsightedness than of after-use. Whoever placed the cylinder did not even think about it.

So, I assume that the other two "independent investigations" are Forensic Architecture and New York Times. In other words, we have three alleged investigations which are all ultimately based on a hunch from @EliotHiggins.

The idea itself is not that bad. Something could have damaged the corner first and then caused the crater. But if it was the cylinder, then where did the slightly too high fragmentation marks come from? Was it a grenade that exploded in midair and disappeared?

Was it perhaps not a standard grenade at all, but a self-made one with an unpredictable fragmentation pattern? What makes you so sure it was the cylinder, @EliotHiggins?
And do you know that the 45° taper of the crater edge still indicates an explosion? (see photo)

I know, Prof Postol is a personal trauma of @EliotHiggins since he shortened the range of the Ghouta IRAMs from the barracks of the Syrian National Guard (9.6km) to only 2km. Now, that's what he wrote about this crater and it fits well with the photo above, doesn't it?

There are other indications that it wasn't the yellow cylinder that hit the corner.
Such an impact would inevitably have damaged the front edge of the front ring of the harness. However, the front edge is undamaged. Instead the ring is flattened laterally. How is that possible?

How could the front ring be deformed sideways while this cylinder was stuck inside, @EliotHiggins? How could something (e.g. the corner) forcibly wipe off the armour without leaving a long scratch on the yellow paint along the cylinder?

Instead of thinking about it, two of your "independent investigations" began to ponder impossible imprints from the sunroof. What do you think, @EliotHiggins? Could the vertical moving & impacting cylinder somehow experience lateral imprints? Underneath the harness?

Strangely enough, I still believe that my first impression was correct, because the harness looks as if this cylinder had never been in it.

I am not a chemist and this argumentation is really subtle. But I am afraid we have to exclude location 4 completely from this assessment.

According to Forensic Architecture this cylinder is hissing and therefore it is leaking chlorine gas.

We found out that the video was filmed on April 9 and according to the lightning conditions in the evening. The outlet cap appears to be still in place but...

...how is it possible that there is no hissing in the earlier videos, not even in a close up of the valve? Do you think the sound was added for effect? Do you think the cylinder just started hissing after 48hrs?

We could discuss the strange color change of the blanket between Bilal's video and Al-Doumanis video, but it seems to be certain that chlorine has leaked. The question is whether this leak is the result of a helicopter dropping or whether, as it seems, the valve was opened.

It is also a fact that the cylinder could not jump on the bed, as proven by the FFM. (

https://twitter.com/MichaKobs/status/1219680469178036225

) It also seems impossible that Bilal lifted 260kg on the bed alone. And it seems impossible that 6 strong men lifted it without disturbing the fine dust on top of it.

In short, either A) the cylinder landed on the bed or, if it could not, B) it was placed there before the dust. If B) then the leakage of chlorine is not causally related to a helicopter.
And thus the samples unfortunately prove at best the undoubted sibilant emission of gas.

Do you think it landed on the bed, @EliotHiggins?
I say, it could not since there is no impact velocity that enables the cylinder to jump any further than 40cm. And that means that all the chemistry in this place is for nothing.
True "Nobody bleaches their chandelier" but...

... if a cylinder at a speed of 2m/s max and 45° does not jump further than 40cm and 10cm high, then the only question at this place is, what actually destroyed the shower cabin?

This of course raises the question whether someone might have let chlorine gas out of the cylinder in Location 2. The frost suggests that.
The only question is how much, by whom or what and if this chlorine killed the people. The toxicologists said it probably did not.

Do you think, @EliotHiggins, that the toxicologists of the first FFM were under pressure from Assad? Or is it more likely that the FFM exchange team were under pressure from USUKFR?
I suspect, the toxicologists were from Germany and Assad's long arm doesn't quite reach that far.

Isn't it weird? The toxicologists say that "white or light-cream colour of froth is not in keeping with a choking agent" and Bellingcat shows blood and light-cream fluids claiming "it's pinkish."
It's not. The girl was obviously injured.

However. In location 2, your example is a piece of wood from the basement, where it was used as support of a rainwater tank.
You want Cl+/Cl- from a single source? ...because it's more convincing than different household products over years?
Try water purification befor drinking!

I like the paragraph about auto-refrigeration. Only one important detail is missing. It's the liquid chlorine that extracts heat from the cylinder. I.e. the ice forms on the underside up to the level of the liquid inside.

Does this mean that Bellingcat finally has realized what nonsense the other two "independent investigations" have told the public? And these are the reference why we shouldn't believe Henderson, but the result of the "three independent investigations", @EliotHiggins? That's bold.

They watched the dust gradually melting and concluded "Timing is consistent".
Do you smell it, @EliotHiggins. It's the smell af BS.
The dust not even show the slightest sign of condensation. I really wonder what the yellow-greenish lake on Bilal's bed might be.

I wonder how that bed was able to change color over night without moving the little polysterene flakes on the blanket. Do you think, @EliotHiggins, the bed is frozen? Auto-refrigeration due to released vapor?
Maybe I'm wrong but that's the only explanation I can come up with.

However, vapor release is very fast and would hissing loudly, wouldn't it? So, how was Bilal able to present such a convincing greenish whitish bed without a sweating or frozen cylinder? ...not frozen or sweating at any time!

With the knowledge of the connection between the level of liquid inside and ice formation on the outer wall, we can also take a closer look at this thing without a valve while it is lying there on its little roof in the sun. What do you think, @EliotHiggins?

Will it melt someday?
Why is it not visibly leaking?
Why they had to wash it but not the other ones?
What about the rapid corrosion?
What are the two fuses for? ...explosive chlorine maybe?
And what are the scratches on the motor tell us?

This is Douma.

And now we have this one apparently still filled up to the level of the broken valve but according to different sources 1-3 hours after the alleged attack. (no visible gas flow but maybe due to poor video quality.)

Note, that all fluid content above the broken valve level will be released in less than 6 minutes (probably in 3min). How much fo the remaining fluid below the leak boiled away during these 1-3 hours, Eliot? ...yet some people without gas mask stood right below of it filming?

One final question, Eliot. The White Helmets reported heavy shelling. That's why they allegedly couldn't move, right? Do you think this is the right time for a low low Mi-8 helicopter to fly right into all of it?

Hint: A rocket that reaches 2000m far will also fly 500m high.

It seems the Henderson team knew that.

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