With all due respect, Neven, the "other explanations" involves a LOT of people all conspiring flawlessly :
1) Somebody placing a cylinder in a hole on the roof of the house in question, and
That's easy.
I've also been wondering how it works exactly with a canister dropped from a certain height, punching a hole in a concrete roof (but not falling through), ending up perfectly above the hole with the valve pointing down. Was the gas released immediately or did it seep out, making its way through the building?
It is pretty plausible that the cylinder knocked a hole in the concrete, but did not go through.
In this picture, you can see that at least one piece of rebar did not break :
and you can get a good view from inside the house up into that hole from this video by Swedish channel 4 :
https://www.tv4play.se/program/nyheterna/3967012which seems to show that two pieces of rebar prevent the cylinder from sliding down.
In that same segment, TV4 also interviews an eye witness.
However, my Swedish is not what it should be, so I don't know what he is saying.
Something about gas coming out of the house ?
Regarding the cylinder "ending up perfectly above the hole with the valve pointing down. " that may very well be a simple case of being very unfortunate. There may be other cylinders thrown but they did not get the attention because they did not cause any deaths. (The cylinder on the bed comes to mind).
2) Somebody to place 34 bodies (where did they get the bodies?) in that house, without anyone noticing, and
That's more difficult, but not impossible to do. It's a war zone, not like thousands of people are living in that street.
3) put foam on their mouths to make it look like a chemical attack, and
If you've brought the bodies in from elsewhere, you might have poisoned them elsewhere as well.
Wow. So you don't have a problem with the conspiracy theory that some people in the opposition will actually gas 34 people, then bring them to a house, where they display them, all the time coordinating with all the other groups in a monumental staging event, but you DO have a problem with the straightforward theory that Assad military tossed that cylinder out of a helicopter. Even though Assad did that many, many times before.
Have the bodies already been identified? I think it was Terry who said that certain ethnic groups have been used by jihadists as hostages/shields.
I don't think they have been identified yet.
In fact, it is unclear where the victims from this house are right now.
Here is one report by the Telegraph that the bodies were buried to preserve them for later chemical analysis.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/04/21/bodies-douma-gas-victims-secretly-buried-desperate-bid-preserve/Either way, I hope that the OPCW can have access to these bodies.
Not to mention the next of kin.
4) aircraft spotters to post on Sentry Syria to record 30 minutes ahead of time to report Hip helicopters to head towards Douma, and
It's enough to just say 'aircraft spotters saw this and that'. Why in this day and age, when people film BUK transporters from their apartments, isn't there any footage of said helicopters? Or is there and I haven't seen it?
Any footage of any aircraft would be a dead give-away of the location of the spotters. Or do you think Syrian/Russian intelligence cannot do geo-location like Bellingcat does ?
And if they would only show the helicopter without surrounding, nobody could do geo-location, so it does not add any information to simply reporting the helicopters left and in which direction they headed.
The crucial part is of course that reported this 30 min BEFORE the attack, so if they were not telling the truth they must have been part of the conspiracy that you seem to promote.
5) doctors from the WHO conspiring to report that 500 people showed “signs and symptoms consistent with exposure to toxic chemicals”
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-ghouta-who/who-500-syrian-patients-show-symptoms-pointing-to-toxic-weapons-exposure-idUSKBN1HI18D
and also neighbors were involved :
The number of victims vary wildly. How reliable is this? The Fisk article
Something seems to be cut-off here in your response.
Point is, that is 500 people reported to WHO medical facilities with “signs and symptoms consistent with exposure to toxic chemicals”, then 500 people must be part of your conspiracy theory, or WHO itself is lying, so WHO must be part of the conspiracy.
6) "All of a sudden some gas spread around us," one neighbor recounted. "We couldn't breathe, it smelled like chlorine."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/syria-inside-douma-the-site-of-apparent-chemical-attack-2018-04-16/
If the neighbour had said the opposite, would it have been reported by CBS? What do other neighbours say?
There is no reason to assume that CBS would not report it if the neighbors they interviewed would have said anything else than what they did.
Or is CBS now also part of your conspiracy theory ?
Back in the Bush days, I was working for a Dutch news agency. At some point one of those terrorist leaders in the deck of cards had allegedly been bombed by a US stealth fighter. The Pentagon showed footage of the bombing and of the house that was destroyed, and so everybody dutifully reported. But there was footage of the neighbours as well, who said American soldiers had come at night and detonated the empty building. I said to the editor: Why don't you put this in the segment, sounds very newsworthy to me. The editor replied: No time, and besides, what do those guys know that the Pentagon and CNN don't?
I don't know the specifics here, but it seems rather unlikely to me that American soldiers would be on the ground blowing up a building when they can simple do that from the air.
And they even showed the footage of them doing just that.
So the eye witness account does not make sense in this case.
There is something called "war crimes denial" and you and several other posters here are borderline there.
You do the exact same thing in the US intervention thread.
That is a low-blow. And not true.
In the US intervention thread some posted statements without any evidence. And I called them out.
In this thread there is evidence, but you don't want to accept the statements that come with it.
So it is the OPPOSITE here, not "the exact same" thing, as to what happened in the US intervention thread.
I am very easily convinced by evidence, and I am always highly skeptical if there is no evidence.
I guess it's the scientist in me.
I know you as being respectful of facts and evidence and logic reasoning when it comes to AGW and Arctic Sea Ice, but your posts here ignoring the evidence and ignoring the reasoning, and instead following some conspiracy theory is not doing you any good.
AGW and Arctic sea ice loss are based on science, I can look at data myself, look at satellite imagery, read papers, attend conferences, interview scientists. This stuff is much more murky and prone to bias distortion due to massive propaganda from all directions.
It can be interesting to treat this as some murder mystery that needs be solved, but in the end, the details don't matter that much (even though they're horrific). What this is all about, is about groups of people doing whatever they can to increase their piece of the pie of concentrated wealth, either because they own some part of it, or because they get rewarded for making it bigger. We are not part of these groups (although we are unwittingly and unwantingly complicit in their actions), but they will make us think we are by dividing us.
So, how do we not get caught up in the false choice between monsters like Putin/Assad and US Empire?
To know who the monsters are, follow the evidence. Not some far-out conspiracy theory. Please.