More fresh off the Mint Press? Love your sources. This woman you are quoting describes herself as, "Rogue journalist. Bogan socialist. Anarcho-psychonaut. Guerrilla poet. Utopia prepper.'
She also has a clear personal obsession with Bellingcat, but the purpose of her Op-Ed, apart from playing out this feud, was to post the report by this "Working Group on Syria, Media, and Propaganda." It's a think tank project dreamed up and made up by British professors analyzing from their desks. You've quoted them before. The former British MP she cites is someone who has already robustly been in the "Syria Chemical Weapons attacks are staged!" camp before the report came out. So was the Scotland Yard investigator quoted. So this reporter is taking care to quote the choir fastidiously:
https://al-bab.com/blog/2018/02/syrian-conflicts-anti-propaganda-propagandists
Professor Robinson raises some reasonable points, but his peer, a mathematician who insists his weird equation is "overwhelming evidence" that the rebels orchestrated and executed an elaborate ploy to mass murder their own while brilliantly framing Assad for it is obviously not someone approaching the problem from the point of neutrality.
The purpose of this latest report was to reveal that the OPCW had an engineering sub-team who favored the hypothetical the canisters had been placed there, rather than dropped from an aircraft. Just because this was their immediate assumption based on the testing doesn't preclude later research, study, and potential explanation. There were a lot of teams working on this investigation using a lot of disciplines. Alternative hypotheses don't necessarily exculpate Assad, anyway, so there's little stake to the method of delivery. Furthermore, if you entertain the OPCW engineering analysis as valid, then you accept it as valid for all other chemical attacks investigated in Syria, and those have all implicated Assad, too, including from engineering points of view. That report also confirmed the use of Chlorine used in Douma, which was something Russia and CTers previously denied, and goes out of its way to observe that tampering took place in some of the sites it visited (as it confirmed by open-source video that existed before they got there). The were aware of this.
Here is the OPCW Final Report on Douma:
https://www.opcw.org/sites/default/files/documents/2019/03/s-1731-2019(e).pdf
Here is the Bellingcat piece on Douma from April of last year:
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/men...-syrias-chlorine-bombs-douma-chemical-attack/
Otherwise, you're walking around in the same echo chamber clinging to the same scraps of Russian propaganda you always have. Let's rewind a year:
Syria conflict: Russia says no evidence of Douma chemical attack
Yeah. Russia literally tried denying any attack took place whatsoever despite the bodies, the doctors, and the collection of chemical residue congruent with the attacks. They continue to sabotage any U.N. measure to do more to locate chemical weapons and identify who carries out chemical weapon attacks. They've already been caught trying to hack the OPCW. Wouldn't be surprise if they were the source of the "leak" to the UK professors:
Russia Charged With OPCW Hacking Attempt
