Syria Sarin Attack a Hoax?

Update: A few readers have pointed out that the linked article herein actually refers to last year's sarin attack, not last week's. I regret my error. I plan to post a follow-up soon.

Is Trump being played by anti-Assad elements who staged the recent sarin attack in the hope that Trump would go his usual bananas at being defied?

Well, that would depend on the attack being a staged or hoaxed attack to begin with. And an MIT expert claims that the chemical weapons attack in Syria was staged.

A leading weapons academic has claimed that the Khan Sheikhoun nerve agent attack in Syria was staged, raising questions about who was responsible. ...

Theodore Postol, a professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology [said] ... "I have reviewed the [White House's] document carefully, and I believe it can be shown, without doubt, that the document does not provide any evidence whatsoever that the US government has concrete knowledge that the government of Syria was the source of the chemical attack in Khan Sheikhoun, Syria at roughly 6am to 7am on 4 April, 2017.

 Referring to the photo above,

His analysis of the shell suggests that it could not have been dropped from an airplane as the damage of the casing is inconsistent from an aerial explosion. Instead, Postol said it was more likely that an explosive charge was laid upon the shell containing sarin, before being detonated.

Read the whole article. Postol is a former science adviser to the defense department.

Among the credentials of my military career was that of nuclear and chemical target analysis. I was trained and qualified to determine the manner of attacking a target with chemical weapons, including sarin, attack calculations that would include amount of agent and technical attack profile.

Sarin is heavier than air. It has been many years since I worked such a problem, but I cannot recollect solving an attack profile with a ground burst. Lay persons simply do not know that enormous quantities of gas are required. Some of the problems we worked to attack Soviet formations actually required more nerve agent for one attack than the US had in its entire inventory.

Actually, sarin is not a gas, but a liquid. The warhead's charge is designed to explode the liquid sarin into basically a mist that is borne by prevailing winds over the target area, where the mist settles. Sarin can evaporate into a vapor, but doing so lessens it lethality by lowering the concentration in the air.

The linked article implies that a sarin delivery warhead explodes the way a high-explosive projectile would. That is not the case. Such an explosion would destroy much of the sarin content. Instead, a shell or bomblet would be designed to basically disassemble, releasing the interior container to dispel the sarin liquid in mist form.

However, the pieces  of the projectile simply drop to the earth. The article's photo shows what appears to be an intact casing, deformed in a crater in a concrete or asphalt street.

Um, no. First, while some delivery systems did retain an intact projectile (such as the US 155mm artillery projectile), cratering would be most unlikely in impact. There would be no HE to explode. Furthermore, having also been trained in crater analysis at the US Army Artillery Center and School, I absolutely guarantee that no such casing causing such a crater would conveniently remain nearly intact in the middle of the crater.

So I think that MIT Prof. Postol is correct. And sane heads within the defense department probably have been heard at the White House (I am guessing here) so that Trump has backed off his initial outrage.

Maybe they need to remember the old adage: "First reports are always wrong."