If you read the reporting from Grayzone, you’d have seen that the study done by MIT
Oh hey, good news: I did! And it’s bullshit. It funnily links to a NYT article covering it (I guess they’re credible if and only if they’re supporting your side). It also leaves out that credible organizations like HRW (which I’ll say, preemptively, I know you’re going to dismiss, but you’re going to dismiss anyone against your war crime denial in bad faith, so I don’t give a shit and neither should anyone else) pointed out at the time rebels didn’t have the means to do this.
Moreover, it conspicuously fails to mention a later debunking of the notion that the Lloyd and Postol’s conclusion is some kind of slam dunk:
When questioned about this in a recent interview with the Turkish website Diken Hersh dismissed the Volcano rockets, seemingly because he believes a range of “a mile” somehow means they should be discounted as important to his narrative. Hersh refers to the work of Ted Postol and Richard Lloyd who believe the range of the rockets is about 2km. But this range issue isn’t the problem Hersh appears to think.
Video footage from both sides of the conflict has allowed researchers to accurately find the positions of government controlled areas on 21 August. The Russian-language news site ANNA News posted two dozen videos showing “Operation al-Qaboun”, a Syrian government military operation running from June to August 2013. Embedded with Syrian forces, they were able to film the progress of the operation to clear positions between Jobar and Qaboun, a strip of land about 2km away from the 21 August impact sites.
Videos from opposition groups show the other side of the fighting, including attacks on checkpoints and government movements. Based on this information it appears that the front lines were about 2km away from the furthest impact sites of rockets used on 21 August. Only two rockets landed at the 2km maximum range described by Lloyd and Postol, with the reported impact sites of the remaining rockets being between 1.5km-1.8km away. It has been possible to confirm the precise impact locations of some of the rockets by a combination of GPS information, satellite map imagery, photographs and videos, and around a dozen impact sites were reported by local groups in eastern Ghouta. Hersh’s belief that the 2km rocket range is enough to dismiss them from his narrative is clearly misguided.
Despite Hersh’s claims we can clearly see that the rockets were used by the Syrian government, and within range of government controlled territory.
Your funeral if you want to keep denying well-established war crimes only still denied by e.g. the Russian government, fringe, tankie propagandist outlets, and said outlets’ moron readership. Whereas outlets like MintPress and The Grayzone may precede their reputations here with readers who aren’t well-informed about propaganda outlets, they surely do know that someone coming in here with apologia for al-Assad is batshit insane.
I wasn’t sure you’d let yourself get baited this hard into revealing who you really are, but here we are, I guess.
We could debate this for hours or longer (as people in that Guardian article’s comments section were) and never convince each other. The fact that it is so disputed and the details are not fully known, and the fact that Obama literally said the use of chemical weapons by Syria would cross a red line a year before the attack, and knowing the history of the US empire and its relentless greed and hunger for power and control, I am inclined to believe it was a false flag, just as you are inclined to believe the CIA propaganda/Western mainstream media line that every leader of a sovereign state that stands strong against US hegemony is a baby murdering dictator (even though all of the presidents of USrael are themselves baby murdering dictators). But I’m just a fringe tankie moron so don’t listen to me.
The fact that it is so disputed and the details are not fully known
Oh, you’re trying to end this in a draw because you know your position is unspeakably awful and indefensible to sane people, so backing down from “the rebels did it and it’s effectively impossible the regime did it because muh 2 km”, you’re now pivoting to it just being oh so murky and will we ever truly know?
No. Bashar al-Assad perpetrated it. Serious organizations don’t equivocate about this. Goddamn spineless that you’re pulling this “uwu it’s just too hard for anyone to say” bullshit. I could at least half-respect (as stupid and awful as it is) that you had an outspoken belief, but now it’s clear you’ll just say whatever muddies the waters the best because you value propagandizing over the truth. And here I thought the opposite might be true when you came out with unequivocal “al-Assad did nothing wrong” rhetoric (albeit with an objectively fucked version of “truth”). But no, you’re just really bad at it.
Oh hey, good news: I did! And it’s bullshit. It funnily links to a NYT article covering it (I guess they’re credible if and only if they’re supporting your side). It also leaves out that credible organizations like HRW (which I’ll say, preemptively, I know you’re going to dismiss, but you’re going to dismiss anyone against your war crime denial in bad faith, so I don’t give a shit and neither should anyone else) pointed out at the time rebels didn’t have the means to do this.
Moreover, it conspicuously fails to mention a later debunking of the notion that the Lloyd and Postol’s conclusion is some kind of slam dunk:
Your funeral if you want to keep denying well-established war crimes only still denied by e.g. the Russian government, fringe, tankie propagandist outlets, and said outlets’ moron readership. Whereas outlets like MintPress and The Grayzone may precede their reputations here with readers who aren’t well-informed about propaganda outlets, they surely do know that someone coming in here with apologia for al-Assad is batshit insane.
I wasn’t sure you’d let yourself get baited this hard into revealing who you really are, but here we are, I guess.
We could debate this for hours or longer (as people in that Guardian article’s comments section were) and never convince each other. The fact that it is so disputed and the details are not fully known, and the fact that Obama literally said the use of chemical weapons by Syria would cross a red line a year before the attack, and knowing the history of the US empire and its relentless greed and hunger for power and control, I am inclined to believe it was a false flag, just as you are inclined to believe the CIA propaganda/Western mainstream media line that every leader of a sovereign state that stands strong against US hegemony is a baby murdering dictator (even though all of the presidents of USrael are themselves baby murdering dictators). But I’m just a fringe tankie moron so don’t listen to me.
Oh, you’re trying to end this in a draw because you know your position is unspeakably awful and indefensible to sane people, so backing down from “the rebels did it and it’s effectively impossible the regime did it because muh 2 km”, you’re now pivoting to it just being oh so murky and will we ever truly know?
No. Bashar al-Assad perpetrated it. Serious organizations don’t equivocate about this. Goddamn spineless that you’re pulling this “uwu it’s just too hard for anyone to say” bullshit. I could at least half-respect (as stupid and awful as it is) that you had an outspoken belief, but now it’s clear you’ll just say whatever muddies the waters the best because you value propagandizing over the truth. And here I thought the opposite might be true when you came out with unequivocal “al-Assad did nothing wrong” rhetoric (albeit with an objectively fucked version of “truth”). But no, you’re just really bad at it.
Jesus Christ where do you get the time