Often it is the countries that need it most that have been robbed, such as Italy. Syria was pressed to join the Chemical Weapons Convention in September 2013 by its close ally Russia after a deadly chemical weapons attack that the West blamed on Damascus. “These types of weapons are banned by international law,” said Peter Salama, executive director of the WHO Health Emergencies Program, “because they represent intolerable barbarism.”, Three days after the chemical weapons attack, the U.S. military fired dozens of cruise missiles against a Syrian airbase 75 miles south of the village. In an April 5 statement, the World Health Organization estimated that at least 70 people had died with hundreds more affected. The global chemical weapons watchdog says that two investigations into alleged attacks in Syria in 2016 and 2018 couldn't establish that chemical … Republish. In Postol’s view, none of this justifies the journal’s decision. “I rather hope it was.”. Recommendations -- Methodology -- I. Legal framework: chemical weapons -- II. Helicopter-delivered munitions -- III. Casualties are reported, as well as civilians fleeing from their homes. In the Guardian report, the only evidence of a possible sarin-containing vessel was a small pipe, only a few feet long and less than 5 inches wide. Click + to receive email alerts for new stories written by Found insideIntelligence reports indicated Syria had launched a chemical weapons attack on Syrian rebels from the base, primarily directed at civilians, ... “I fear there is little one can do since the report is final… Higgins, on the other hand, notes that Postol has falsely accused Bellingcat of claiming that Postol’s colleagues were paid off by foreign governments — a claim Postol recanted when challenged about it. The nascent controversy seemed a natural challenge for Chen, who had extensive experience with mathematical modeling of high-speed collision and impact phenomena. Niles Niemuth @niles_niemuth. But other scientists and some investigative reporters familiar with the Khan Sheikhoun attack say that the criticisms of Postol’s analysis are well deserved. He has failed to show up for rallies, government events, and even the funeral of a close ally, the New York Times reports. In its final report, the Fact Finding Mission (FFM) of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) stated that there are reasonable grounds to believe that on April 7, 2018, chlorine gas was used in an attack on the Syrian city of Douma. Syria was pressed to join the Chemical Weapons Convention in September 2013 by its close ally Russia after a deadly chemical weapons attack that the West blamed on Damascus. Twitter: @ak_mack, NEW FOR SUBSCRIBERS: Found inside – Page iIn this report, potential deficiencies in operational areas based on the review of current supporting technologies for cleanup of CWM sites and develop options for targeted research and development efforts to mitigate potential problem ... The U.N. probe was criticized from the outset as being too narrow in scope, and the New York Times has reported that Russia sought to pressure U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres to limit the investigation and withhold its findings. New WikiLeaks documents expose doctoring of chemical weapons report to justify 2018 US attack on Syria. THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AFP) – The global chemical weapons watchdog on Wednesday for the first time explicitly blamed Syria for toxic attacks, saying President Bashar al-Assad’s air force used the nerve gas sarin and chlorine three times in 2017. A video grabbed still image shows Syrian people receiving treatment after an alleged chemical attack at a field hospital in Saraqib, Idlib province, Syria… The White Helmets have shot a new fake video of 'Assad's chemical attack' in Syria's Idlib, the Russian MoD has said. Russian representatives disassembled the theory about the alleged chemical attack in the Syrian city of Duma 2018 in front of the UN Security Council in New York. “Many of the premises and methodologies used by Postol are flawed,” said Zanders. The first edition of this book, Chemical Warfare Agents: Toxicity at Low Levels, was published just prior to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Introduction . Chen assembled his team of mathematicians and computer scientists and discussed the various scenarios being put forward for how the chemical attack might have taken place. Fifty-nine … That predilection has exposed him many times to accusations of being a crackpot, a conspiracy theorist, or more ominously, a willing supporter of dictators and autocrats, including Assad. Tweet . IIn early 2019, Science & Global Security had accepted the paper submitted by Chen, Postol, and their colleagues, who spent the following months revising and editing the manuscript. If history has taught us one thing, it’s that while we’re focused on one crisis, the next is just around the corner. Postol had already discussed his concerns with several other colleagues and contacts, including investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, who also questioned the official U.S. justification for its air strikes. Found insideSyria. One of the first overseas trips by Putin after his election in March 2018 was ... Another chemical attack, in Aleppo, a city held by the Syrian army, ... Share . There has been much written about the alleged chemical attacks of the 25th and 30th March 2017 at Lataminah, Syria. In December 2019, Chen sent a letter on behalf of himself and his co-authors to the journal’s editor. Public health professionals and policy-makers require this data to prioritize funding, training, chemical weapons preparedness, disaster response, and recovery. Though not directly involved in the decision concerning the article, S&GS cofounder and editorial board member Frank von Hippel called the controversy over the paper “a total cockup on both sides,” saying that “at the journal, the reviews were handled too informally because Ted is an admired colleague,” and the noisy public debate over the article and the larger debate over who used nerve gas in Syria irreparably compromised the review process before it could be fairly completed. The Syrian government surrendered its stockpiles of chemical weapons in 2014 to a joint mission led by the UN and the OPCW, which oversaw the destruction of the weaponry. Found inside – Page 463... of military strikes against Syria.131 The three governments argued that these strikes were in response to chemical attacks against civilians in Douma, ... Days afterward, more than 80 … Such a pipe could not have held much sarin, Postol argued. Welcome to While You Weren’t Looking, Foreign Policy’s new pop-up newsletter focused on non-coronavirus news. Found insideThe volume provides a review of the arguments concerning appropriate international responses to events in Syria and how they were framed in leading newspapers in the United States, Great Britain, and Canada during the crucial early years of ... Video and a transcript of former OPCW engineer and dissenter Ian Henderson’s UN testimony appears at the end of this report. Syria was pressed to join the Chemical Weapons Convention in September 2013 by its close ally Russia after a deadly chemical weapons attack that the West blamed on Damascus. The Suspicious Douma Chemical Attack The Douma chlorine attack allegedly took place in the Suburb of Douma, Damascus on April 7th, 2018. One was the detection of a chemical warfare agent – found in samples collected in late 2020 from several large volume containers – whose production had not been previously declared. Since the Syrian Revolution erupted in 2011, the regime has confronted it with various armed responses to suppress its demands for freedom, justice and equality.The regime has launched 222 attacks using internationally prohibited chemical weapons, killing over 1600 people in these atrocities. The OPCW Executive Council responded by demanding that Syria provide details. The world’s newest security partnership is a window into how the world works—and the unpredictable places it’s heading. Top: Children get treatment at a hospital after a chemical weapons attack on the village of Khan Sheikhoun, Syria, on April 4, 2017. Who was responsible for the attack remains a subject of heated debate. Fri 7 Feb 2020 08.07 EST. Thank you, Ambassador. It is the first time since 2016 that Riyadh has agreed to a cessation in hostilities in the conflict, which has raged for over five years. Found insideI am so grateful that this story has been told.” —Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Big Magic and Eat, Pray, Love “Absolutely fascinating and brilliantly written, The Daughters of Kobani is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand ... “And if people think that I’m going to walk away from that,” he added, “they’re wrong.”, Mark Wolverton is a science writer, author, and playwright whose articles have appeared in Undark, Wired, Scientific American, Popular Science, and American Heritage, among other publications. Men, members of Syrian civil defense organization, White Helmets let a white pigeon to fly for people who lost his life in chemical attack that in the Eastern Ghouta region of Damascus, Syria … In March, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons confirmed that a chemical weapon had been used in Douma in Damascus Countryside governorate in April 2018. Even if the move is only temporary, it could reinvigorate U.N. efforts to broker a political solution to the war, which has killed over 100,000 people, Elana DeLozier writes in FP. “The Syrian government has a long history of chemical weapons use, and the OPCW’s conclusions concur with a wealth of witness testimony,” wrote George Monbiot, a Guardian columnist, in support of the U.N. agency’s investigation in November 2017. The global chemical weapons watchdog issued a report Wednesday blaming the Syrian air force for a series of chemical attacks using sarin and chlorine … "The Islamic Republic of Iran, as the biggest victim of chemical weapons in the contemporary period, condemns the use of chemical weapons by anyone at any place and time and under any circumstances," Mousavi said. The article “had the appearance of not being reliable,” he said. Found insideThe best country-by-country assessment of human rights. The human rights records of more than ninety countries and territories are put into perspective in Human Rights Watch's signature yearly report. But Chen and Postol say they were stunned to see S&GS first accept their paper, and then reverse that decision without citing any of these standard reasons. Cynthia Arnson, the director of the Latin America program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, told CBS news that she feared a spike in domestic and gender-based violence as people are encouraged to stay at home. A leaked phone call reveals that outside pressure caused Amnesty to pull its promotion of a webinar featuring Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters – a vocal skeptic of the Douma ‘chemical attack’ that prompted Western powers to bomb Syria. Postol’s response to such charges is always that he simply follows the science wherever it leads, even if sometimes it leads to dark places and unsavory conclusions — and even if some people don’t like it. In “A Missionary on Trial,” the New Yorker’s Ariel Levy takes a deep dive into this cautionary tale, asking: Who is to blame for the dozens of deaths at Bach’s facility? For his part, Postol contends that the forensic evidence in the OPCW report not only contradicts its own findings, it also raises strong suspicions that some of the evidence — such as a dead goat near the crater supposedly killed by sarin — may have been planted by one or more of the rebel factions controlling the area, in order to direct blame toward the Assad regime. Found insideAt the same time, Baker tells the stories of the heroic journalists and lawyers who have devoted their energies to wresting documentary evidence from government repositories, and he shares anecdotes from his daily life in Maine feeding his ... Found inside – Page 149... (last accessed January 2, 2020). 67. Joby Warrick, “More than 1500 Killed in Syrian Chemical Attack,” The Washington Post, August 30, 2013, ... Facing accusations that it issued a doctored report alleging a chemical attack in Syria, the OPCW has released an inquiry attacking two whistleblowers as rogue actors. In 2018, the organization established a team to identify the perpetrators of the attacks, analyzing lab reports, satellite imagery, medical records, videos, and witness interviews. Friday, November 20, 2020. “Society gives me all kinds of privileges because, supposedly, I’m an honest, independent, capable analyst. In the end, the journal did not agree to publish the paper, nor to issue an apology, nor to arrange an open forum on the events of Khan Sheikhoun. AS DELIVERED. Assad denied responsibility, and in the days following the U.S. airstrike, he suggested that child actors had staged death scenes as part of a plot to justify American military action. On 7 April 2018, a chemical warfare attack was carried out in the Syrian city of Douma. In Colombia, Guatemala, and Honduras, homicide rates fell by half last month, Axios reports. Investigations by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons… Media silence, and even outright hostility, has marked ongoing attempts by the OPCW to cover-up evidence from the chemical weapons attack in Douma, Syria. As reported recently by the news agency Reuters: “The Syrian war has split the OPCW, once largely a technical organization, along political lines, with Russia and its ally Syria on one side and the United States, France, and Britain on the other.”. The Syrian and Russian … The complaint was filed under the principle of universal jurisdiction. Homicide rate drops in Latin America. “All we’re saying is, look, [Assad is] a criminal, but he didn’t do this criminal act,” Postol said. (This is what happened unfortunately)). Three astronauts took off for the International Space Station on Thursday after spending a month in prelaunch quarantine. He wrote a critique of nuclear winter research “with the risk of this being taken up by supporters of maintaining nuclear weapons,” he said. The Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman added that the OPCW's report on Syria and the type of reasoning and conclusion it provides indicated that the report was prepared and compiled under external pressure, and the sources used in the report had, to some extent, been provided by some terrorist groups and so-called humanitarian organizations, such as the White Helmets. While acknowledging reports of dozens of chemical attacks in Syria, the report focused on three, in the rebel-held village of Ltamenah in northern Syria during the last week of March 2017. ... November 06th, 2020. Chad’s President Idriss Déby Itno declared two parts of the Lake Chad region war zones in the wake of the assault, giving local and military officials more power to respond to the militant group. U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders announced that he would end his presidential campaign on Wednesday, making Vice President Joe Biden the presumptive Democratic nominee to face off against Donald Trump in the November election. Send your tips, comments, questions, or corrections to newsletters@foreignpolicy.com. Securing the necessary parliamentary support has proved to be an uphill task for previous nominees. “In about a week we received their reply,” said Chen. “We had accumulated some good amount of high-speed impact experience,” Chen said, “but dealing with explosives, with munitions, that was a new experience.” The team spent a couple of months just trying to figure out what kind of software to use. The Khan Shaykhun chemical attack took place on 4 April 2017 on the town of Khan Shaykhun in the Idlib Governorate of Syria. With numerous illustrations and texts by the artists and members of the jury, this book presents the award-winning works of the 2020 competition. By its own admission the regime had stockpiles of chemical weapons, and almost all the reported attacks struck rebel-held areas. The global chemical weapons watchdog on Wednesday for the first time explicitly blamed Syria for toxic attacks, saying President Bashar al-Assad’s air force used the nerve gas sarin and chlorine three times in 2017.. It Depends. People stand in front of damaged buildings, in the town of Douma, the site of a suspected chemical weapons attack, near Damascus, Syria, April 16, 2018. “You must be rejected on technical and scientific grounds”, Science magazine kept the matter in the public eye with a follow-up article attributing the S&GS decision to a “backlash from scientists,” many of whom accuse Postol of pushing conspiracy theories. 1 Infographic About. The White House then released a declassified report detailing the military intelligence that sparked its retaliatory strike on the Syrian regime. Conclusions in the OPCW report would […] “The only reason for not publishing the article is if the editors had concrete concerns about the accuracy of the science,” he said, “or if they thought that the science failed to address a technical issue that was important to international security policy.” Instead, he noted, “the editors have repeatedly acknowledged they have no problem with the science in the article, and they have in effect acknowledged that the article raises important questions.” The episode led Postol to resign his longtime position as a member of the S&GS editorial board last fall. Fifty-two Chadian troops were killed in the offensive. Will Syria Be Held to Account for Chemical Attacks? War on terrorism in Syria. United Nations, They are not doing it.” Postol noted that the controversy that has flared up in the scientific community over the paper effectively rules out the option of publishing it elsewhere: “This is such a controversial paper now. The Syrian civil war has driven over half of Syria’s prewar population of approximately 20 million people from their homes, killed more than half a million men, women, and children, and witnessed repeated use of horrific chemical weapons—despite Syria’s obligations under Security Council resolution 2118 and the Chemical Weapons Convention. He recalls being immediately alarmed by an early article in The Guardian identifying the chemical as the nerve agent sarin, and attributing the attack to an aerial bomb delivered by the Syrian air force. Abstracts: Vaccine Mandates, SpaceX, and More, Book Review: Inside an ER During the Covid Crisis, Opinion: Advanced Placement Thwarts Test Takers, Turning to Sports to Boost Black Men in Medicine, Opinion: The Fallout from 9/11 Toxic Dust Exposure, Abstracts: Covid in Kids, Mars Rover, and More, Book Review: A Wartime Link to Cancer Research. In April 2020, OPCW investigators blamed three chemical attacks in 2017 on the Syrian government. The Russian government — a Syrian ally with a track record of disinformation campaigns — blamed the chemical release on opposition fighters in Syria’s ongoing civil war. Kabul’s swift collapse leaves New Delhi with significant security concerns. Such criticisms are nothing new for Postol, who has made something of a career questioning official narratives and conventional wisdom. Over the next few days, international news coverage chronicled the human devastation: children struggling to breathe, bodies lying in the streets, families being pulled, lifeless, from their homes. Found inside – Page 41Chris Ford, 'The Use of Force in Response to Syrian Chemical Attacks: Emergence ... 2020; United Nations, 'Following Air Strikes against Suspected Chemical ... The movie, co-produced by the notorious White Helmets, is expected to be released shortly on social media. In August 2018, Chen, Postol, and the rest of their team completed their computer simulations and analysis, which suggested that the crater had been made not by an aerial bomb or an IED, but by a vehicle-launched 122-millimeter rocket — a type of weapon whose components are readily available for purchase around the world. Israel’s military said the missile, which set off air raid sirens near the country’s top-secret nuclear reactor, was the result of a misfire and not a deliberate attack. Syria election: Bashar Assad votes in former rebel town Douma, site of chemical attack ‘Today we prove from Douma that the Syrian people are one’ he said as he cast his ballot. When scientific papers are rejected by journals, it is generally for reasons of scholarship: inadequate data, poorly constructed arguments, or questions of plagiarism or overt bias. Media silence, and even outright hostility, has marked ongoing attempts by the OPCW to cover-up evidence from the chemical weapons attack in Douma, Syria. Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi resigned in November 2019 amid anti-government protests, but his cabinet has stayed on in a caretaker capacity as the struggle to find a replacement continues. In late April, Syria attributed an attack near Damascus to Israel, and that same night an anti-aircraft missile launched by Syria toward an Israeli jet exploded near Dimona in southern Israel. Bye-bye, Bernie. Chemical weapons have been used dozens of times during the Syrian civil war, but Wednesday’s report focused on just three attacks in Ltamenah. The Iranian Foreign Ministry has denounced as "one-sided" a recent report by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) about a series of suspected gas attacks in Syria's western region of Hama in 2017. It’s also especially difficult to criticize a scientific consensus in line with one’s own sympathies, and thus risk supporting a position that’s personally repellent, Martin added. Brian Martin, professor emeritus at the University of Wollongong in Australia and a social scientist who has spent his career studying controversies, whistleblowing, and dissent in science, suggests that the friction between Postol and his critics is understandable. While Western Governments seized on it and blamed the Syrian government immediately, there is some controversy about the attack. In this particular case, however, the editors expressed doubts that such an outcome was possible. Click + to receive email alerts for new stories written by, Want to read more on this topic or region? Along the way, Postol and his colleagues have found themselves condemned as unwitting apologists, or even willing propagandists on the side of the villains, when their analyses contested the official narrative of the U.S. and British governments, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) of the United Nations, and investigations by The New York Times and Human Rights Watch. Found inside – Page 1971reached an agreement with Syria requiring the Assad government to relinquish chemical weapons. The last known covered chemical weapons were believed to have ... Found inside... 2020, www.trineday.com/blogs/trineday-podcast Gas attacks in Syria, ... www.yournewswire.com/un-inspector-assad-not-responsible-chemical-attack. Initial reports suggest the attack used sarin gas, a nerve agent. Mathematical modeling of the site, headed by Chen and Postol, led the team to believe that the impact was not created by an aerial bomb. Chen and his team had previously analyzed aircraft crashes such as the 2015 Germanwings incident, where a troubled pilot deliberately crashed the plane in the French Alps, as well as the 2014 disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370. They not only pointed out all the contradictions and their own investigation results but also backed them up with graphics and pictures. By RFE/RL April 09, 2020. Whatever the case, Postol and his colleagues are hardly the first to raise concerns about the response of the OPCW to the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime. At the time, the town served as a logistics hub for opposition groups fighting president Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Found inside – Page 1-101Zarocostas, J. Syria Chemical Attacks: Preparing for the Unconscionable. ... In Handbook of Toxicology of Chemical Warfare Agents; Elsevier, 2020; ... : 9.12 Medics and witnesses reported that it caused the deaths of between 40 and 50 people: 9.5: 971 and injuries to possibly well over 100. According to its website, Bellingcat specializes in “open source and social media investigation to probe a variety of subjects — from Mexican drug lords and crimes against humanity, to tracking the use of chemical weapons and conflicts worldwide.” Most recently, Bellingcat was instrumental in debunking the Iranian government’s narrative about the Ukraine Airlines flight that crashed outside Tehran in January. Postol responded to Koblentz’s criticisms by filing a complaint against him with George Mason University. In October 2017, the OPCW issued the final report of its investigation, concluding that the crater in Khan Sheikhoun was most likely “caused by a heavy object travelling at high velocity, such as an aerial bomb with a small explosive charge.” According to the report, the OPCW had examined the contention — put forth early on by Postol and others — that the bomb crater had been caused by an improvised explosive device, not an aerial bomb. The attack was the deadliest use of chemical weapons since the … All decided that the Khan Sheikhoun incident offered a unique problem well-suited to analysis by Chen’s techniques. Postol and Bellingcat had previously clashed over his analysis of the 2013 sarin nerve gas attack in Damascus, and in an interview with Undark, Higgins described Postol as “incredibly popular among the online community that was heavily into denying chemical weapon attacks in Syria.” After the attack in Khan Sheikhoun, Higgins said, that community “leapt on the various documents” that Postol sent out. What Russia is saying : 9.12 Medics and witnesses reported that it caused the deaths of between 40 and 50 people: 9.5 : 971 and injuries to possibly well over 100. On 5 October 2020, Open Society Justice Initiative, Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression, and Syrian Archive filed a criminal complaint in Germany on behalf of victims of the chemical weapons attacks on Eastern Ghouta on 21 August 2013. According to the report, the team had based its investigation on a range of evidence, including witness testimonies, videos, forensic reports on recovered munitions scraps, medical records and satellite imagery. The report attributed responsibility for a series of sarin and chlorine attacks to the Syrian Air Force after finding that sarin dropped over the town of Ltamenah, Syria, in March 2017 shared a unique chemical signature with samples of the nerve agent retained in OPCW labs after the destruction of Syria’s declared stockpile. ... inside Syrian town after chemical attack. In an email interview with Undark, Zanders added that “many of the premises and methodologies used by Postol are flawed. Do Masks Hurt Speech Development? The arc of the moral universe is long, but Wednesday’s report is seen as a significant step in bending it toward justice. While the UN asks countries like the UK or the US to keep patents in the public domain. The Western countries rushed to blame the incident on Damascus – an allegation rejected by the Syrian government – with the United States launching several dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles at a Syrian air base, taking the lives of about 20 people including both Syrian soldiers and civilians. Found insideA NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • A gripping, behind-the-scenes portrait of the rise of Saudi Arabia’s secretive and mercurial new ruler “Revelatory . . . a vivid portrait of how MBS has altered the kingdom during his half-decade ... By FRANK JORDANS October 6, 2020 GMT. Syria was pressed to join the Chemical Weapons Convention in September 2013 by its close ally Russia after a deadly chemical weapons attack that the West blamed on Damascus. Family members were not allowed at the launch site in Kazakhstan, and the Orthodox priest sent to bless the crew stood several feet away.
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