So another "chemical" attack in Syria?

[Will Wiley]

No matter how many times their government or press lies to them there are always a worrying number of Americans who continue to believe anything they are told, and who can't wait to start another war

Well at least you are finally criticizing Dear Leader.

No. I always criticised Trump. All I ever said was that when I looked at what he said, as an Australian, I preferred his foreign policy to that of Hillary Clinton. I also said I preferred Sanders over both of them.
As an Australian I don't want to get dragged into another war. Trumps isolationist rhetoric seemed preferable to Clintons crazy warmongering. But despite selling himself as a strong leader is too weak to stand up. He should have waited for the dust to settle have waited for the dust to settle, for some sort of investigation, for an intelligence assessment.
We know that US intelligence is doing an assessment, but if their assessment is that Turkey or ISIS or some rebel group was behind it, then it doubtful that will ever see the light of day.
https://consortiumnews.com/2017/04/05/another-dangerous-rush-to-judgment-in-syria/

While it’s hard to know at this early stage what’s true and what’s not, these alternative explanations, I’m told, are being seriously examined by U.S. intelligence. One source cited the possibility that Turkey had supplied the rebels with the poison gas (the exact type still not determined) for potential use against Kurdish forces operating in northern Syria near the Turkish border or for a terror attack in a government-controlled city like the capital of Damascus.

 

[Will Wiley]

Where Was CIA’s Pompeo on Syria?

Where Was CIA’s Pompeo on Syria?

By Robert Parry

There is a dark mystery behind the White House-released photo showing President Trump and more than a dozen advisers meeting at his estate in Mar-a-Lago after his decision to strike Syria with Tomahawk missiles: Where is CIA Director Mike Pompeo and other top intelligence officials?
Before the photo was released on Friday, a source told me that Pompeo had personally briefed Trump on April 6 about the CIA’s belief that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was likely not responsible for the lethal poison-gas incident in northern Syria two days earlier — and thus Pompeo was excluded from the larger meeting as Trump reached a contrary decision.

Thus, a serious question arises whether President Trump did receive that “high degree of confidence” assessment from the intelligence community or whether he shunted Pompeo aside to eliminate an obstacle to his desire to launch the April 6 rocket attack.

If so, such a dangerous deception more than anything else we’ve seen in the first two-plus months of the Trump administration would be grounds for impeachment – ignoring the opinion of the U.S. intelligence community so the President could carry out a politically popular (albeit illegal) missile strike that killed Syrians.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

I'm not so sure. Even a relatively small amount of Sarin can be VERY lethal to a wide area, so the Daesh wouldn't have needed a lot of it for it to have that kind of effect. On the other hand, NOT having a lot of it would adequately explain why they never used it before: if they only have enough of it to use it once or twice, they would have been saving it for a "last stand" if it looked like Assad/Russia was really about to deliver a killing blow. They might have enough of the stuff for one or two attacks that could, in a pinch, turn the tide of a losing battle, but not enough to start using it at random to win meaningless skirmishes in cities they don't really even control.

They certainly have less of it NOW though.

How much sarin is lethal over how much area for how long?

What I'm reading is that large amounts are required. Sarin is volatile; it evaporates quickly.

Yes it's volatile, but it's not light. The vapors will stay relatively close to the ground until they dissipate to concentrations too low to be lethal and even then the effects will still be very HARMFUL even if they are not lethal (being a nerve agent at all: it'll still fuck you up pretty bad even if your life isn't in immediate danger). I've been reading that that's one of the things that makes Sarin such a deadly chemical weapon: BECAUSE it's so volatile, it goes into a gas phase pretty easily and spreads over a wide area quickly. This, compared to other chemical agents, which tend to precipitate and settle to the ground more quickly once the gas cools, becoming either a solid or a droplet. You don't want chemical weapons to cool and solidify like that because then it's a lot easier for your victims to avoid exposure; in gas form, it seeps into everything and stays lethal (or at least dangerous) a lot longer.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Well, Sarin is one of the best poisons, that means small amounts are required.

How small? To kill a hundred and sicken 500 more in a village.

A lethal concentration of sarin gas is something like 100mg per cubic meter. Serious (and usually permanent) health effects begin to manifest between 20 and 60mg per cubic meter).

If you blow up a shed full of canisters of Saren -- say, 500 one-liter canisters -- that's 500kg of the stuff. A single kilogram would poison a volume of air about million cubic meters. So the total volume of lethal to semi lethal exposure is between 1 and 5 billion cubic meters.

Assuming a cloud of sarin 100 meters high (the stuff is volatile but it doesn't float super high) then it looks like the cloud of sarin could disburse to lethal concentrations out to about fifty thousand square meters, which would cover an area about 220 meters in diameter. If, on the other hand, the vapor cloud settles closer to the ground after a while (which, being Sarin, it's generally supposed to do) and given wind conditions in the area, it could spread to twice or three times that area along the ground. Picture an area 300 meters wide and 700 long; in a typical American city, that would be an area about five blocks wide and eight or nine long. Just counting in my own neighborhood: that's 45 streets with 20 houses per street (some of which are apartment buildings, most are houses with families). So call it anywhere between 1,000 and 5,000 in the immediately affected area. If Syria's population density is one tenth of that (it isn't, but let's say it is) then you have 100 to 500 people in that affected area.

The people closest to the shed would be very, VERY dead. The people a little bit farther and downwind of it would start to feel the effects almost immediately and most of them would have permanent neurological damage.

And that for 500kg of Sarin, the equivalent of maybe a dozen nerve gas shells or four air-dropped bombs. That's not a lot; it's a small enough amount that it could have been dropped from an airplane in a bomb, but it's ALSO a small enough amount that it could have been the entire stash of a Daesh cell that was saving it for an emergency.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

It means authors of the theory understand that it makes no sense for Assad to use chemical weapons, hence the need for convoluted theory of theirs.

It acknowledges the sensibility of Assad leaving his Russian allies to twist in the wind: by isolating the superpowers, they can't force a settlement on him he doesn't want.

There are simpler answers to the milion dollar questions which don't involve Assad being responsible.

I haven't seen any. The ones I've seen are fantastic. Sarin is stored as separate ingredients, typically in separate locations. It's volatile, so it disappears quickly.

That's not what "volatile" means.

The liquid form of it BECOMES GASEOUS quickly. Sarin is a heavy gas, so it sinks down and fills low spaces almost immediately after it vaporizes. In that sense its behavior is very similar to, say, carbon dioxide. If you've ever seen dry ice sublimate, you have an idea of what Sarin does when it goes into its gaseous state:
[YOUTUBE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0362IqnMXY[/YOUTUBE]
Almost all of the gas will hug the surface of wherever its distributed. See above calculations: it's going to spread out along the ground and keep spreading out until it reaches a non-lethal distribution. That distribution point is so low that it could poison literally tens of thousands of people without actually killing them.

Bonus points: Sarin is solulable in water. So the most likely way for it to "disappear" is to end up in the local water supply, where the locals get to keep drinking it for the next twenty years or so. Wonderful shit that sarin gas!

A direct hit would mostly destroy the gas.

Unlikely. Weaponized sarin is a combination of the nerve agent plus an accelerant that react endothermically on contact. Basically, they heat it up so it gets super hot and SPEED UP its gaseous expansion. Hitting it with a bomb would accomplish the same thing, just less efficiently.

 

[barbos]

How small? To kill a hundred and sicken 500 more in a village.

A lethal concentration of sarin gas is something like 100mg per cubic meter. Serious (and usually permanent) health effects begin to manifest between 20 and 60mg per cubic meter).

If you blow up a shed full of canisters of Saren -- say, 500 one-liter canisters -- that's 500kg of the stuff. A single kilogram would poison a volume of air about million cubic meters.

10,000 cubic meters.
If we assume it stays low lets say within 1 meter then it's 10,000 square meters per 1 kg of gas.
that's about 20-30 households at least.

 

[barbos]

The liquid form of it BECOMES GASEOUS quickly. Sarin is a heavy gas, so it sinks down and fills low spaces almost immediately after it vaporizes. In that sense its behavior is very similar to, say, carbon dioxide. If you've ever seen dry ice sublimate, you have an idea of what Sarin does when it goes into its gaseous state:
[YOUTUBE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0362IqnMXY[/YOUTUBE]

That's not true. What you see is fog - aerosol of water droplets, not CO2.
Heavy gases are not that heavy to be that low. In open space they will mix with air and get high very quickly. But in aerosol form it will behave like that CO2 in the pool.

 

[TV and credit cards]

Well at least you are finally criticizing Dear Leader.

No. I always criticised Trump. All I ever said was that when I looked at what he said, as an Australian, I preferred his foreign policy to that of Hillary Clinton. I also said I preferred Sanders over both of them.
As an Australian I don't want to get dragged into another war. Trumps isolationist rhetoric seemed preferable to Clintons crazy warmongering. But despite selling himself as a strong leader is too weak to stand up. He should have waited for the dust to settle have waited for the dust to settle, for some sort of investigation, for an intelligence assessment.
We know that US intelligence is doing an assessment, but if their assessment is that Turkey or ISIS or some rebel group was behind it, then it doubtful that will ever see the light of day.
https://consortiumnews.com/2017/04/05/another-dangerous-rush-to-judgment-in-syria/

While it’s hard to know at this early stage what’s true and what’s not, these alternative explanations, I’m told, are being seriously examined by U.S. intelligence. One source cited the possibility that Turkey had supplied the rebels with the poison gas (the exact type still not determined) for potential use against Kurdish forces operating in northern Syria near the Turkish border or for a terror attack in a government-controlled city like the capital of Damascus.

From link:

Since Assad’s forces have gained a decisive upper-hand over the rebels, why would he risk stirring up international outrage at this juncture?

 

[whichphilosophy]

Where Was CIA’s Pompeo on Syria?

Thus, a serious question arises whether President Trump did receive that “high degree of confidence” assessment from the intelligence community or whether he shunted Pompeo aside to eliminate an obstacle to his desire to launch the April 6 rocket attack.

If so, such a dangerous deception more than anything else we’ve seen in the first two-plus months of the Trump administration would be grounds for impeachment – ignoring the opinion of the U.S. intelligence community so the President could carry out a politically popular (albeit illegal) missile strike that killed Syrians.

The problem is we hear intelligence operatives quoting high degree of confidence, certainty but no actual evidence. Yet cannot even provide a source. Such wording is irrelevant in the absence of proof.

 

[repoman]

Oy Vey!



Good thing false flags involving war have never happened once in the history of the world.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

The liquid form of it BECOMES GASEOUS quickly. Sarin is a heavy gas, so it sinks down and fills low spaces almost immediately after it vaporizes. In that sense its behavior is very similar to, say, carbon dioxide. If you've ever seen dry ice sublimate, you have an idea of what Sarin does when it goes into its gaseous state:
[YOUTUBE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0362IqnMXY[/YOUTUBE]

That's not true. What you see is fog - aerosol of water droplets, not CO2.

What you SEE is not completely different from what HAPPENS, and that is that carbon dioxide, like most heavy gases, sinks to the bottom of any column of air. Convection and turbulence can mix things up a little bit, but not enough to completely offset the net effect. The same thing happens with helium released into the atmosphere: it tends to rise very quickly, because the heavier gases (e.g. oxygen and nitrogen) sink beneath it.

And all that's just basic physics of buoyancy. Heavier things will sink within a volume of lighter things.

Heavy gases are not that heavy to be that low.

Yes, they really are. This is one of the things about Carbon Monoxide poisoning: the gas fills the bottom spaces first, so a standing person might not notice any ill effects, but then experience a sudden onset of debilitating symptoms just by the act of sitting down.

More importantly, the fact that Sarin gas settles into low spaces is one of the better known properties OF that substance and is, in fact, one of the reasons it was developed in the first place (as an insecticide).

 

[barbos]

That's not true. What you see is fog - aerosol of water droplets, not CO2.

What you SEE is not completely different from what HAPPENS, and that is that carbon dioxide, like most heavy gases, sinks to the bottom of any column of air. Convection and turbulence can mix things up a little bit, but not enough to completely offset the net effect. The same thing happens with helium released into the atmosphere: it tends to rise very quickly, because the heavier gases (e.g. oxygen and nitrogen) sink beneath it.

Nope, and I have PhD in physics. White stuff is water fog, if it had any significant amount of CO2 you would not like breathing it at all, probably would have died from spasms or something.

And all that's just basic physics of buoyancy. Heavier things will sink within a volume of lighter things.

Heavy gases are not that heavy to be that low.

Yes, they really are. This is one of the things about Carbon Monoxide poisoning: the gas fills the bottom spaces first, so a standing person might not notice any ill effects, but then experience a sudden onset of debilitating symptoms just by the act of sitting down.


More importantly, the fact that Sarin gas settles into low spaces is one of the better known properties OF that substance and is, in fact, one of the reasons it was developed in the first place (as an insecticide).

Carbon monoxide is actually slightly lighter than air, but for all intents and purposes it has the same density as air.

Heavy gases will not stay at the bottom, depending on how open the place is, they will mix rather quickly and occupy couple of kilometers of height. Basically height is inversely proportional to molecular weight. So if your gas is 5 times heavier than air (Sarin) then it will get to 2 km roughly. You need aerosol which is effectively superheavy gas.

 

[repoman]

PIPELINE

 

[barbos]

PIPELINE

What?

 

[repoman]

Proposed oil pipeline through Syria.

 

[barbos]

Proposed oil pipeline through Syria.

Who what and how is that relevant?

 

[repoman]

here is Bana with terrorists



Tapper deleted the following tweet:

 

[Loren Pechtel]

This. Trump actually did something right.

Trump committed a war crime. There has been no investigation into where the chemicals came from. The only ones who benefit are the terrorists, including the rebels.

Putin, not Trump.

We warned the Russians because they were operating from the airbase where the attack came from. Pretty hard to not note the chemical weapon safety precautions.

 

[Jayjay]

The "who benefits" analysis seems to be a staple of conspiracy theories everywhere. It hinges on the fact that if one side gets blamed for the attack, then the other side "benefits", but ignores the actual benefit that comes from killing your enemies and deteriorating the morale. Besides, if we blamed the rebels for faking the strike, then Assad would be the one to benefit... so it is evidence that Assad must have done it?

In short, "who benefits" is next to worthless in figuring out who did it.

 

[repoman]

oh goody