Get Connected!

It looks like the New York Times is eager to replay its role in putting forth bad information in the service of getting the United States involved in another war.

A long article by Peter Baker, Mark Landler, David Sanger, and Anne Barnard today reports that President Obama’s comments on redlines and game-changers were “off the cuff.” The article then goes on to press the idea of chemical weapons use, even though the reporters leave out some important facts.

That article is complemented by Tom Friedman’s attempt at a thoughtful comparison of Iraq with what might be done in Syria. Friedman can’t let go of the analogy to Eastern Europe, although he has learned a fragment of history: the people there had experience with representative government. A little less than that; Friedman sees only “aspirations to democracy.” He argues that we’ve done such a good job in Iraq that it serves as a model for Syria:

He’s leaving out securing the chemical weapons and hasn’t estimated the total numbers of troops or how one forms an international force in the face of Russian and Chinese opposition.

The Baker article is more dangerous, however, because it provides the kind of misinformation that feeds fantasies like Friedman’s.

Chain of custody is important, but the article trashes it.

Chain of custody is a concept used in law enforcement, environmental evaluations, and other areas where it is important to know where a sample to be analyzed has come from and whether it has been tampered with on the way to being analyzed. If you don’t know where it came from, you don’t know anything. Samples may be faked in any number of ways.

Syria is currently so chaotic that a formal chain of custody is probably not possible, but the fact that the White House has called this out as a problem indicates significant uncertainty about the samples’ provenance.

I’m repeating myself here, but it seems important in the light of the persistant lean of mainstream reporters toward advocating that chemical weapons have been used in Syria.

The article doesn’t identify the "chemical weapons" used and doesn’t mention the possibility of crowd control agents.

The article says nothing about the handling issue, which I consider to be one of the most important relative to whether the agent was sarin. People who have been exposed to sarin will have a thin film of it on their skin and clothes, which will be absorbed into the skin of those handling and treating them without full protective clothing. This does not seem to have happened in any of the cases reported.

The symptoms reported are the usual mixed bag – some that may be indicative of nerve agents, some that are more likely from crowd control agents, and some that may result from emotional reactions to an attack.

The biggest imbalance in the symptoms reported, however, is the numbers of dead. An attack with nerve agent will kill most of those exposed. The agent is absorbed through the skin and an amount as small as a pinhead is fatal. In all the attacks, there have been many more injured than killed.

The story reported by Baker, Landler, Sanger, and Barnard makes use of a narrative that seems to be gelling in the MSM: unpleasant symptoms shown on YouTube equal chemical attacks, fear equals chemical attacks, and therefore we know that there were chemical attacks, no matter where the samples came from or what was found in them. And that’s in an article that says

• If it was a plutonium device, that could mean that their uranium enrichment wasn’t going well. They have a limited stock of plutonium, and one more test would deplete that stock further. On the other hand, it would give them additional information about their design(s), which didn’t seem to work so well in earlier tests.
• Nations keep their nuclear weapons information secret. Everyone else with nuclear weapons is just as secretive.
• It is to North Korea’s advantage in negotiations to keep this information secret.
• Allowing radioactive isotopes to escape from their test, or testing in the atmosphere, might irritate China and Russia further than current North Korean rhetoric.
• There is a norm for containing nuclear tests that even North Korea follows.