Brown Moses is under attack for having failed to reveal a
conversation with Matthew Van Dyke. In
this conversation,
Van Dyke says the following (verbatim extracts):
don't rule out the possibility that
the rebels do have a small quantity of chemical weapons. I've had information for a few months on this
....................
I have a source that has been
reliable in the past, who gave me information about the rebels having acquired
a small quantity a few months ago, and I know what building they came out
of. and I know some things about the
building, having been to the site, that give the information some additional
credibility.
...................
I think it was a small quantity,
judging by where they were stored but by small quantity, I mean possibly
hundreds of shells of some type. I do
not know. The source didn't have that level
of detail.
It is said that the failure to report this conversation
damages Brown Moses' credibility. It
does not. Whether or not Brown Moses
should have reported the conversation for some other reason, his credibility is
not at issue.
What is Brown Moses credible about? He is not a
reporter. He is not a witness. He looks at thousands of reports, and
analyses them. His credibility stems
from the caution with which he comes to conclusions and the meticulous care
with which he evaluates the testimony - in a number of media - of others.
What is involved in the process of evaluation? It involves discarding many hundreds of
reports as unreliable or irrelevant. In
his analyses, of course, he does not repeat the vast majority of these
unreliable reports: only in rare cases,
where a report is thought by others to have credibility, might he report them,
to offer reasons why this is not the case.
Where chemical weapons are involved, most of the reports
discarded by Brown Moses, and most of the reports he discredits, have attributed
the use of chemical weapons to the Assad
regime. In some cases it now seems
that these reports may have been correct: subsequent information has made them
more plausible. So it is hardly the case
that his sorting of reports has exhibited anti-Assad bias.
The conversation with Matt Van Dyke fits into this
pattern. I myself have seen many reports
- a tiny fraction of what Brown Moses has examined - where all sorts of things
are called chemical weapons which are anything but. There are, for example, kits which test for
chemical weapons. There are also cases
where riot gas, phosphorous shells and other munitions have been called
chemical weapons, but which are not considered chemical weapons by specialists,
and which could not be implicated in the notorious Sarin attacks whose
examination is associated with Brown Moses' work. ('Chemical weapons' is typical of the broad, inaccurate
descriptions ubiquitous in Syria reports.
Any fighter plane may be called a 'MIG'; armored personal carriers and
self-propelled guns are called 'tanks'; any large surface-to-surface missile
becomes a SCUD.)
Consider, in this context, the conversation with Matt Van
Dyke. First, he has not seen any
chemical weapons, nor does he claim to have seen them. He claims to have been 'given information'
that the rebels have them. The
information is said to come from 'a source that has been reliable in the
past'. But about what? Presumably this someone is not a chemical
weapons specialist, but simply someone who has talked to Van Dyke in the past,
about other events. Considering that the
mis-characterization of munitions as 'chemical weapons' has been more the rule
than the exception, this matters.
But wait! Van Dyke
does not say that his source claims to have seen any weapons. He has been 'given information'. This could mean that his source has seen
them, but also that he talked to someone who has seen them or, for all we know,
talked to someone who talked to someone who has seen them. All we know for sure is that someone is said
to have seen them - possibly the reliable source, possibly not.
Now what of Van Dyke himself? Is he a credible, authoritative source? I personally might trust him, but the answer
is that he can't be judged either credible nor not credible. He has made short documentary films and also
characterizes himself as a freelance journalist. But his reporting experience is very limited
and he has never been subject to the sort of professional scrutiny that career
journalists normally undergo. So
despite my own tendency to believe him, he cannot be considered an established
credible source in journalistic terms.
He's not, let's say, Ben Wedeman of CNN. (I won't even consider the question of how Brown_Moses was supposed to know he really was speaking to Matt Van Dyke, not a malicious impostor.)
What's the upshot? We
have one of hundreds of reports of 'chemical weapons', an expression we know is
habitually used to describe munitions that are not, in fact, chemical
weapons. The source of this report is
an un-named party who quite possibly is recounting what he heard from another
un-named party. The person who reports
this report is Matthew Van Dyke, a nice guy but whose credibility has not been
established. We might also wonder how
the munitions were identified as munitions actually loaded with a chemical
agent, as opposed to munitions capable of containing such an agent, or its precursors.
Did someone have a sniff?
That's not all. In
the conversation, Brown Moses undertakes not to reveal that this report comes
from Matthew Van Dyke. So Brown Moses
would have to report that an un-named and not authoritative source claimed that
an unnamed source, claimed to be credible, either claimed that he had seen
chemical weapons, or claimed that someone else claimed to have seen them - in
some undefined sense of 'chemical weapons' and even of 'seen'.
What sort of weight would Brown Moses' report itself
carry? Would this take its place among
the eyewitness testimony, the on-the-ground reports of UN chemical weapons
specialists, the videos minutely analysed by munitions and by many media
specialists? To answer yes would not, I
think, be credible.
Nope, his credibility is SHOT. Yet another western propaganda fishing for a job. Brown moses has zero qualifications to report on what he is reporting. NONE WHATSOEVER. Not a degree, no experience, nothing. He culls his evidence from unsourced people in videos. That is laughable. Sy Hersh went to an actual MIT expert in CW. That's what a real reporter does.
ReplyDeleteClearly you haven't read his blog and have no idea what he actually does, including who he consults.
ReplyDeleteActually I have panned Kaszeta as well. Called him out, questioned him and he ran off. He is a fraud. An ex-vet who took a few courses at military school too concerned to not to ruffle his business associates who are of course all UK Govt related.
DeleteMy evidence is irreproachable to anyone wanting to question it. The fact he that he lays so much weight on a completely botched preposterous UN report that would not see the light of day in any court underlines he is winging it. And he is too confident that most YouTube sheeple with no attention span will NOT take the time to R E A D the UN report and see the awful mish mash of glaring discrepancies and substituted suppositions.
You are all lemmings and I am enjoying watching you run around following eachother :)
I read two sentences and that was enough. Total partisan garbage. You dont even get a cigar.
ReplyDeleteHe has been a sometimes collaborative, sometimes an obstacle to the http://whoghouta.blogspot.co.il/ effort to get to the truth. For months he stood by the flawed HRW report until he now grudgingly and almost imperceptibly concedes the whoghouta premise of the 2.5km trajectory flight.
But the revelations of this leak proves he suppressed information that ran counter to the narrative he promoted. To argue about the veracity of it is nonsensical and just emphasises the shallow water you are wading in. Charles Shoebridge so eloquently put it Intelligence Officers may censor but not those in the business of dragnetting the news. All information may constitute a lead or correlate with some other info not considered important or reported as much. This whole war is a swamp of disinformation and that is why all available information should be made available to account for all possibilities.
But instead of that he has religiously pursued the no-possibility-of-rebel-chemical-weapon narrative so adopted by the media that were giving him a platform. A mutually beneficial proposition. He gets the limelight and MSM gets varying degrees of editorial that on the surface frame their narrative.
Muppets like you are not even an appetiser for me ..
I see Syricide continues to attack my substantial 23 year career in CBRN defense without ever having read my CV. If he thinks I'm a fraud, perhaps he should call the police, as fraud is a criminal offense.
ReplyDelete